The Sacred Hunt Duology (126 page)

There
was
a link between the God and the arch. And it was not so tenuous as all that; it was a part of him, a tentacle, an extension. A fierce smile touched her lips, a vicious one; it was the first and the only smile she would offer this battle. They
had
arrived in time. He was not truly free. Bredan—Lord of the Covenant—had more control over the shape of the land than he.

Her eyes glanced over Kallandras, flitting past him as if he were a wound that she could not bear to acknowledge. The wind, the wind was necessary. The Lord of the Covenant was necessary.

And Evayne a'Nolan, god-born, mage-trained, adept of the Summer and the Winter roads, was also necessary. She knew why the path had brought her here, and with a quick step, a terrible, sudden hope, she darted across the arena, the hem of her robe skirting a half-inch above the bloodied dead.

She raised her hands in a high arc, mirroring in the movement the shape of the arch itself, and ending with a clap where the keystone was. Many were the spells she might have called, but none were so devastating as the light that flared in a single, fist-sized ball, blinding in its radiance, painful in its intensity. Everything that she was, that she had been, she put into it; there was no reserve of power left in the line of her shaking, quivering arms. Her knees gave messily beneath her, and her hands, clasped as if in tremulous prayer, fell to her lap. Let it be enough; let the combined weight of the wild wind and the Lord of the Covenant pry between them a crack for her meager power to slide through.

The God roared; she heard the screams of the multitude—anger, despair, fury, hatred—and better than that, much better, the sound of cracking stone. Oh, the wind raged, whipping at her hair, her face; beating at her back. Sand stung her eyes, and tears coursed down the sides of her cheeks as the wind grew wilder and wilder still.

She had no power left to deal with Kallandras; none left to deal with the kin. But if she died here, if somehow she died having changed history, it would be enough, more than enough.

The shadows were weakening and faltering; the God's strength, split so evenly between two forces, buckled. She raised her head as an odd light began to gather to either side of her exhausted body.

No
, she thought, although she hadn't the strength to utter the word.
Not yet! Not yet!

The arena dissolved into rolling, silver-gray mists, and Evayne a'Nolan covered her face with dusty, bloodied hands.

• • •

It was hard to see in the sudden storm; Gilliam was close enough to the pull of the wind that he forced himself to ground. But sight or no, he could hear the muffled growl of the Hunter God give way to something louder: a triumphant roar. He had heard echoes of savagery before, but until this moment he had never realized how weak the viscerality of his experience had been.

That thought would have humbled Stephen; it didn't slow Gilliam down at all. Because if that had been weak, this was his one chance to prove that he was not. He could not fail; to fail was death.

It will he as if the Hunt hasn't been called in years.

Stephen's voice. He gripped the Spear in both hands and stood, leaning forward into the gale, testing it. For the Lord of the Hunt was now winning the contest.

• • •

Meralonne bowed his head a moment as the wind moved round him, pressing tightly to the sides of his body without picking him up and tossing him, so much flotsam and jetsam, into the cyclone. That much, he could still prevent. He heard the roar of the darkness as the Gate to the Hells began to crumble.

Only kill it
, he thought. The God's half-formed and ill-prepared avatar would be no pure vessel for its divinity; crippled, it
could
be dispatched.

Wind roared, gaining speed; the eyes stung at its passage. He turned away as he heard the Lord of the Hells speak in the voice of the multitude in a language that only Bredan could understand. It was still a battle that the Gods would decide; he had his duty now, to the Crowns and to the Order, although neither would know it.

For the wind was too wild, and its call too strong. Just a moment, he thought, as he tested its currents, its lovely eddies. Just a moment. As if it could hear him, a cool breeze, gentle in the face of the growing cyclone's brutality, slid across his upturned cheek.

Gritting his teeth, he shouted a single word.

“Kallandras!”

• • •

Singing with the voice of elemental air, he paused, lifting his head. Golden curls bobbed on the eddies of a warm up-draft, tugging at his face; his arms felt like wings as they floated at his sides. There was darkness beyond him, and light—but they were distant.

The voice was not.

And whose voice was it? Who called him in the gale, who interrupted his song? His eyes narrowed as a fine layer of silt brushed his cheek in caress, pulling his attention from a sound as significant as the bump of tree against roof in the night.

Kallandras.

It was a thin voice, a reedy one; the wind almost swept it away. Was it imagination? He glanced around again, and this time gold obscured his vision, the breeze in his eyes becoming a stronger force, but still a gentle one. There was no ground beneath his feet; he noticed it as if for the first time, thinking it odd.

Or right.

The standing arch was dust now; it alone defied him, and it had paid the price. He gazed up into the darkness of earth's hollow in distaste; there was no reason to remain trapped here when beyond this fragile layer of dirt, stone, and wood the open skies were beckoning.

Kallandras.

But the voice—he thought he should know it. Answer it before his ascension into the world above. His lips were soft and dry as they opened around words, a phrase of breeze and wind, a hint of gale.

He asked his question.

• • •

Meralonne heard it; the fluting of woodwind, air through instrument. There were words to its peaks and valleys, but even he could barely discern them from the element. Curiosity, yes. Confusion. A desire for the sky. The air had the strength to rip the dirt from the cavern's magical roof.

Upon that roof, the oldest parts of the city of Averalaan rested. And within them, the heart of the city: its people. Meralonne spoke urgently of them. And then his lips turned up in a bitter smile as the gale grew; who was he to speak of the sanctity of life to one whose life had been dedicated to ending it?

He cursed Myrddion in the silence of thought and will, gesturing himself onto the banks of the wind as if they were solid steps, feeling air trace his ankles, his soles, his thighs. Oh, it would be good to feel the open plain again—to see it as it was truly meant to be, windswept and empty.

But it would not be windswept and empty; it would be littered with refuse—tracked stone, splintered timbers, broken bodies. Again he spoke, and again there was no answer, although it was clear to him that the bard heard his words.

You cannot reach him
, he thought, steeling hands into fists. His sword came as he called it for the final time in this battle. The ground beneath his feet was already a swirl of dirt and debris; if he listened hard, if he directed the course of the wind's passage, he could hear the wailing of the Kings' men, the cursing of his brethren.

And louder than that, carried by nothing but the force of its own wildness, another sound: the triumphant howling of the beast.

• • •

Until he heard the roar, Gilliam had been afraid that he would somehow miss his moment; that the Lord of the Hunt's victory cry, obscured by unnatural storm and the cries of the men of Averalaan, would never reach his ears. An odd confidence buoyed him. He
was
Hunter-born. The God was his God, in all its primal fury. They were linked; they understood each other in some measure.

Breodanir, Lord of the Hunt, had been called to the Sacred Hunt by the Master of the Game and his peers; to the Hunt he now came in frenzy.

• • •

The Terafin's manse.

The gardens, green and still, as if the air itself had been robbed of the movement of breath. No one spoke; prayer, if there was prayer, was silent.

But Jewel ATerafin's dark eyes widened and she raised a hand. “Wait,” she said softly, gazing into the darkness that seemed to claim the bay. “Look.”

There, in the cloud cover above, a glimmer of sunlight.

Meralonne's hair streamed out behind him like shining, white liquid; his eyes were shining silver as he held the flat of his blade against his palm. He wore no cape, no armor, bore no shield; he was not broad of chest or large in build. But majesty was there for those who cared to see it. Or those who could.

They met in air, the bard and the mage.

Kallandras offered no resistance as Meralonne brought his weapon to bear; indeed, he hardly seemed aware of the mage at all. The sword rose, and it fell, but it fell slowly and without striking.

For Kallandras was not merely a vessel, although a vessel he had indeed become; he was not slave, if he was not master. His arms were lifted to either side, and his clothing billowed like raised sails, but the song he was singing was his
own
. For the moment.

It should not have been possible, but Myrddion's rings were crafted by a man with a talent and a glimmer of madness; who among even the Wise could predict the full force of their effect? There, upon the binding finger of Kallandras' left hand, the ring glowed a brilliant white; it was hard to look upon.

“Kallandras!” he cried.

There was no answer. The air shook with a voice that was neither bard's song nor mage's cry; Bredan's frenzy. Meralonne clutched the haft of his sword tightly, deciding. He brought it up, and as he did, it dissipated. Quietly, he reached out to touch Kallandras' outstretched hand—the right one; the one which bore no ring.

There were spells of elemental force, and spells of vision; spells for gathering ancient lore and spells for travel; there were the forbidden arts, whose scions—kin and corpse—they had fought this very day, and there were spells of illusion, of misdirection, of negation.

But there were other magics, deeply personal, prying, intrusive; they were arts that touched a soul the way a thief's fingers pry into pockets, lifting bits and pieces of things valued but not tied down. There were edicts against the use of such spells, and the penalties for breaking these edicts harsher than any offered save those for murder by magic.

Meralonne APhaniel was one of the wise, the most learned of their number. He hesitated, but only a moment, before he began to speak the binding words. He touched Kallandras' life, and he was not gentle—but he was not thorough either; he had not the time for it, even if he had the curiosity.

Beneath the song and the yearning it held, burning like a beacon that the wind could not—quite—douse, was a single word that held all hope and all desire. Releasing his hand as if it burned, Meralonne trod back on air, eyes slightly wide, lips pale.

And then he lifted his head, his expression unreadable. Twice he started to speak, and twice he stopped, but the third time he spoke a single word.

“BROTHER!”

Kallandras turned his pale face.

• • •

Gilliam was not closest to the beast when it turned from its task; the kin were. Thankful for it, grateful for it, Gilliam bowed his head into wind and began to
struggle against it. The Lord of the Hunt, he thought, would need no such effort. His hands shook, part gale, part excitement, and part tension; he was Hunter-born, the trance was on him—he felt no fear. Either he would kill here, or be killed. That was the rule of the Hunt, and no coward, no man afraid of either the first or the second, became a Breodani Lord.

His only regret was that his pack was not at his side. It had been wrong to attempt to protect them by leaving them behind; wrong to deny them their chase and their hunt—to deny them the law that creatures who hunt live by: kill or be killed. He vowed as he struggled that he would not make that mistake again; the sentiment had been Stephen's, the fear a weakness brought on by the madness of the Hunter's loss.

Something struck him in the forearm; he grunted as the blunt curve of a metal helmet disappeared into the storm.

• • •

Meralonne knew that the word would draw Kallandras' attention; he did not know what his reaction would be when he realized who—or more importantly, who had not—called. Lifting his arms, he mirrored Kallandras' stance; the wind sung through his hair, his robes.

The bard's eyes were blue-white, a frosted, unnatural color. His lips were turning in wonderment, in joy; they froze as his face became still.

A wise man, Meralonne thought, as he waited in a silence that rose above roaring wind and primal growling, would not tempt the pain of an assassin. Yet he felt no fear; for the first time since he had passed through the chambers of the Sleepers, he was calm. “Kallandras,” he said, neither raising his voice nor muting it.

• • •

The golden-haired man did not reply, but he lifted a hand in denial of the words that Meralonne might speak. His flickering eyelids closed, his lashes forming crescents against his white, white face. And then, of all things, he smiled, and if the smile was bitter, if it was embroidered with loss and longing and hunger, it held joy in part, no matter how fragile.

The mage was no member of the brotherhood, to call him or to hold his attention; he knew it almost before he turned, but he could not ignore such a cry, in such a tone. The wind song died on his lips, although around him the gale grew stronger.

As the Lady commanded, he had done: the Allasakari were dead and scattered about the grand cavern for carrion. But their names had not been spoken, and only in the speaking would the Kovaschaii know. How could he have forgotten? Why had he delayed? They would know that he served, that he served still.

The ground was far beneath his feet; the bodies of the dead were not in sight. He listened, but the wind carried no sound to him; looked, but the dirt and
pebbles, the fine dust of stone and broken wood, were a swirling, dancing veil. He could not pierce it.