The Sacred Hunt Duology (77 page)

“We are the servants of the Lady. We do not kill unless she blesses the killing: she chooses those deaths that she will accept.” He closed his eyes and he did pull away, covering his face. “She chose yours.”

“And perhaps one day you will give it to her.”

He laughed bitterly, aware that in doing so he told her more than he usually
did. “I will not kill you, Evayne; the time has passed.” Swallowing, he forced himself to touch and speak again.

“We join the brotherhood when we complete our first mission in the Lady's name. She accepts us and anoints us, and we are suddenly linked or bound or woven into the very heart of the Kovaschaii; it is as if we become part of a single spirit. We know who our brothers are; we know them by more than sight.

“I'm sorry. What was I saying? Ah. That the Lady accepts us and anoints us and binds us. But the bonds are stronger than life or death, and when our bodies fail, or if we are killed on her mission, our souls do not leave.

“The threads she has woven with, only she can break. We
know
when a brother dies. We feel it, or see it, if we are close enough. And we go to the fallen, and about the fallen we perform her rituals.

“And then we dance the death. And when we dance it well enough, the Lady hears us and she comes. Only when she comes is the brother finally free.”

For the first time since he had started his halting speech, Evayne spoke. “And you are still a part of the Kovaschaii.”

“Yes.”

“And when you die?”

He did not answer, but it was answer enough.

She stared at him, and her eyes were slightly rounded; she was shocked or surprised; he had achieved at least that much.

But it was not to do either that he had asked for her aid. He swallowed. “I can hear them, Evayne; I do not know how long it has been since their fall—but I did not
feel
the death. They have been trapped, and isolated; they are not part of us, but not free. They have been betrayed by the Kovaschaii—and that is not possible.”

“You said you can hear them?”

“I—can.”

“Then listen to them, Kallandras; listen, but do not lift your hands.”

He did as she asked; he found it almost easy to follow orders. It was the drug, he told himself. But the crystal was warm beneath his hands, and as he opened himself up to the cries of the betrayed, he held the round surface as if he had never known warmth until he touched it.

They were crying now, with the wild anger that comes only from the deepest of wounds. He listened, trying to reach them; trying to find a voice with which to make himself heard.
Where are you? Where are you, my brothers? We are coming! We are searching!

He opened his eyes and the light streamed in, hurting him. Tears ran down his cheeks as he stared at the seeress. She stared back, and he saw his own tears shining along her cheeks. “I'm sorry, Kallandras,” she said, and her voice was shaky. “But I—I cannot see them.”

The hope fled; his mouth became suddenly dry. “What do you mean?”

“ I—I don't understand it. I should be able to find something—the connection between you is strong—but there's only darkness. There's nothing at all that I can see.”

She rose and pulled the ball back to her chest as if to absorb it. Her face was pale. The neutrality was gone, and in its wake were guilt and confusion. She smoothed these from her expression, but it took time, and Kallandras still saw the traces of it in her eyes.

And then he, too, rose. Nausea pulled him floorward, but he held himself steady, fighting it. When the sensation had dimmed, Evayne was gone.

He did not know how he felt, and that was curious. A day ago, he would have been happy, because he knew that she was suffering for her failure.

And he knew that she had not failed. He wondered if he would have explained it had she lingered—if he would have attempted to ease her of her guilt. He did not wonder long. Instead, he began to make plans; he had to visit the court of the Twin Kings and seek out Lord Elseth and his huntbrother.

Which was the only thing that would be easy; his services had already been requested by the younger of the Queens—Queen Siodonay the Fair—at any time of his convenience; she was a bright and sunny woman with a hint of the bardic about her, and he was one of the few youthful things with which she surrounded herself.

Hands shaking, he rose; if he wished to attend court, he must send word, for even if one was favored, one did not presume overmuch upon the grace of a monarch.

4th Corvil, 410 A.A.
Breodanir, King's City

The glass shards were magicked, although they did not shine under the first of the three spells he chose to sweep over the remnants of Krysanthos' chambers. He might never have known their nature, except that the young men that Sela sent—juniors in every sense of the word, were overzealous in their attempts to categorize everything they stumbled over with their cloddish feet. One boy, Zepharim, cut his palm upon a long and slender sliver.

It had been a fight to preserve his life.

Vivienne, the much called and underappreciated Priestess of the Mother, came at once, and worked long into the night. Her hair had silvered with the events of the last year, but her face was fine and strong, and her eyes, golden, shone brighter than they ever had as she pursued her life's work. The Order's doctor had suggested amputation as a recourse; it was not done, much to the Priestess' relief.

“This is not glass,” she told Zareth Kahn darkly, standing in front of the pile of splinters and shards that he now kept under magical confinement.

“What is it?”

“I would say—although I know it to be impossible—that it is very much alive. Dormant, as you see it now. I don't know what it was.”

“I do,” Sela said, her voice muted. “Vivienne—will you keep these events to yourself?”

“I have always,” was the wry reply, “been a trusted confidante. And I have no great desire to see panic or fear among the people of my city.”

“It was his mirror. He traveled with it almost everywhere. I thought him vain, but it was a fine, perfect surface.”

“Oh?”

She blushed. “I remember thinking it maker-made because there was absolutely no distortion in the image it reflected. I assume he kept it with him because he could not—on his stipend—ever afford to replace it if it were broken or stolen.” She grimaced. “That, and he was not averse to his reflection.”

• • •

He would have waited for the mages from Averalaan. In truth, he looked forward to their arrival—for Breodanir had become his territory, and he felt, although he would have been loath to admit it, much at home there.

But
she
came, although it would be the last time for many a year that he would see her shadowed face. He lay in the shadows, and she stood wreathed in them. But it did not seem strange to him that she should arrive so.

“You are not sleeping,” she said softly.

“No.” He paused. “Nor you.”

Her hood was low; he thought he saw the flicker of a smile across her lips, but he could not be certain. A smile was often a thing the eyes did, and her eyes, violet and strange, were well hidden. “I was not sent from Averalaan in such short order, at such a late hour.”

“It wasn't my magic.”

“No.”

Silence. He was not certain if he dealt with the older or the younger woman; her voice was inflectionless and gave little away. Almost, he thought, as if she had no memory of their travels together—as if he were a stranger, or a near stranger. He did not ask. Instead, he said, “Why have you come?”

“To tell you—to ask you—to leave the Order. You will be wanted in Averalaan Aramarelas when the year is out.”

He rose, casting just enough light to see by. “Why?”

“If I could tell you that, mage, I would, and be done. But I cannot. I ask it as a favor; there will be no earth-shattering consequences should you choose to deny the request. But I offer you information in return for this service.”

“Information?”

She said nothing, waiting.

And he knew that he had responsibilities that should keep him in the King's City for months to come yet. But he thought he heard something beneath the smooth words that troubled him.

“Evayne,” he said, calling her by name for the first time, as if she, like a demon or the First-born of old, could somehow be bound by the word.

“Yes?”

“Does this have something to do with Lord Elseth and his huntbrother?”

Her silence was long. When at last she broke it, she did not answer his question. Not directly. Instead, she said, “When you walk the road to Averalaan, please stop a moment at the eastern borders of Breodanir. Speak with Lady Elseth. Tell her of your travels, and the fate of her two sons.”

It surprised him, although later he would realize it for the answer that it was. “All of it?”

“All of it. She is not a fool, and not a girl; let her understand that her sons have left her for no small reason.”

“She knows it now,” he said dryly, touching his shoulder as if the wound still stung.

“She knows it,” was the quiet reply. “But time and fear erode the certainty of the feeling—and will erode it further ere the end. Tell her; you are good with words, and you have fought for your lives together. She will listen.”

He nodded, then, thinking it wise for the Order's sake. Lady Elseth, of the Breodani, had been the noble wronged by the actions of the renegade mage. He took a breath, and silently began to enumerate the items that he would require in his travels.

“Zareth Kahn, your part in this game is at an end. What the mages seek here, they will find with or without your aid.”

“Or they will not find, as the case may be.”

She said nothing.

“I will travel as you request. But the information—I will require it as proof that this journey was undertaken as a method of barter, and not dereliction of duty.”

“As you will. The shards of glass and splinters of wood that you have so carefully gathered are the physical body of one of the demon-kin. Blood will wake it, and the correct spell; nothing else.” She turned from him. “It was a mirror, but more; it could speak directly to its master, no matter the intervening distance.”

4th Corvil, 410 A.A.

Averalaan, Terafin

T
HE NIGHT WAS DARK,
and the walls of The Terafin's manse were far enough away that they receded into shadow. Jewel sat up in bed, staring blindly ahead as she swallowed air and waited for her heart to stop hammering.

It was the nightmare again.

Ever since she'd made it out of the twenty-fifth with her den, all her dead came to haunt her. They walked, wounded and desecrated corpses, circling her in a silence heavy with accusation. They rose from the ground, pushing themselves toward her with unnatural strength through the tiled floors of the halls that she ran in. The grim relief of stone men, with their forbidding weapons raised and readied were her only companions as she fled. She could speak, but her dead kin did not answer, and if they had, she was certain she wouldn't like what they said.

She covered her face with her hands, and then reached down and used a corner of a sheet to wipe her forehead. She was sweating.

She didn't share her room with anyone—and that had seemed a luxury and a privilege when she'd first learned of it. But now, with only the sound of her breathing—breath too quick and too harsh—for company, she regretted it. She'd always had nightmares, and they'd always been bad. But when she'd been crammed into two-and-a-half rooms with the rest of her den, she'd always woken to the safety of their sleeping numbers. To the certainty that they were still alive, still there.

It's only a dream
, she told herself, swallowing.
It doesn't mean anything.

Yet.

She knew she wasn't going to sleep, although she tried for a while anyway before she gave up and slid out of bed. She needed space to stretch her legs, time to think, some company to help her escape Duster, Lander, Lefty, and Fisher. Ellerson was, thankfully, nowhere in evidence. She skirted the walls, keeping her touch light and sure; she knew the wing well enough by now that she could navigate it in the dark without tripping over every little table, chair, or stool. She only stopped once, outside of Arann's door, to whisper a little prayer to the Mother for
his safety. The healer had said he'd recover, and she trusted him—but her den-kin wasn't the Arann she knew. Not yet.

It was strange. This big, old building was like a holding unto itself, with its multiple stories and half-levels. As far as she could tell, every wing that was like hers—and there were six in total—had its own kitchen, its own servants, and its own small courtyard. Ellerson told her that she had one of four “proper” baths; he was quite proud of it, although she didn't understand why.

Tonight, with the ghosts of the dead slow to fade, she didn't really care. She wandered the halls, seeing the occasional servant and the occasional pair of guards; she walked between pillars that were taller than any building she had ever lived in save this one; listened to the echo of her steps across wide courtyards; dropped the odd flat stone into the elaborate fountains that appeared in small alcoves throughout the first and second stories of the mansion.

Then, unsatisfied, she made her way outside, tracing the intricately tiled path to the four shrines that quartered the gardens. Each of the shrines was similar; small, with four pillars and a flat roof. There were glyphs carved beneath the edges of each ceiling, and in the stead of the statue that was often in the center of such a shrine was a brass plaque with a symbol.

The path from the manse followed a direction; it led the traveller, like a silent and dedicated pilgrim, to each shrine in its proper order. Jewel didn't usually like to have her way chosen for her, but the path had a hypnotic quality to it—she barely lifted her eyes from its surface to notice the trees or the vines, the flowers or the bushes, that colored the rest of the landscape.

She came to the first shrine in silence, and knelt a moment before leaving the path to stand in front of the brass plaque at its center. There, in a relief so good it must have been maker-made, was a sheaf of wheat held in two open palms: The Mother. “
Mother,
” Jewel whispered into the silence, “
save your son. Do not take Arann from me yet.
” She searched her pockets and left a coin at the base of the plaque; there was no altar, and no offering bowl. If it were her shrine, there'd be both.

The path took her again; she did not think of returning to the house, but rather continued her solitary quest into darkness. Night noises dogged her steps, but they were quiet and rhythmic; they held not the dead, but the peace the dead should have known.

The second shrine held a plaque with the sun rising over the horizon of a long sword. She didn't know whose this was, but she assumed it to be Reymaris: Justice. Here, she prayed, although she made no offering; Reymaris listened to the pleas of the wronged, and seldom needed another type of coin. “
Let me kill those who killed my kin.
” Duster. The prayer brought them back, but instead of guilt, there was sorrow and anger. She straightened out her shoulders, and changed her prayer into a vow. “
I will kill those who kill my kin. This is the law of Jewel Markess.
”

The third of the shrines was not made of marble, or at least not the smoky dark
stone which graced the previous two shrines. No, this one was pale; in the rays of the garden's many lamps, tiny sparkles could be seen across the smooth surface of the pillars. There was a bowl here, and a plaque, besides; there was a small rail, which was obviously meant to help the kneeling rise. Of these three shrines, it was clear which was most important to The Terafin. Jewel knelt a moment before the brass relief of an eagle clutching a rod in its claws, and holding a servant's band in its beak. Cormaris, Lord of Wisdom, ruled here.

She gave him a coin, but not a prayer.

There was one last shrine, and Jewel visited it with some curiosity. All of the patriciate paid its respects to the three Gods that ruled the Isle. But there were more than three Gods; Jewel most often prayed to Kalliaris, and she occasionally whispered her guilty apologies to Mandaros as well. She wondered who The Terafin would worship on the side.

The fourth shrine, as she approached it, was better lit than the rest; it had torches on each of the four pillars, and a lamp that flickered beneath the roof, suspended by a brass chain. The roof itself was domed, rather than flat; as Jewel approached, she saw that the shrine was not square, but circular. The steps that led up to the dais were concentric marble circles. There were four.

She felt the air shift; a breeze blew through the pillars, testing the torches. She approached this last shrine as if it were a secret she was not meant to hear.

There was an altar at its center, albeit a small one; there was no plaque and no emblem. She searched the domed ceiling, but it was simple and smooth; there were no carvings and no painting across it. Almost disappointed, she reached out to touch the altar itself.

“Do not touch it unless you have something to offer.”

She jumped and turned in the same movement.

In the darkness, torch in hand, stood Torvan ATerafin. His brow was shadowed, for he held his torch high enough that his helm shielded his face from the light. His face was almost impassive as he stared at her; she could not understand how she had not heard his approach, for he wore armor, bore arms.

But she relaxed nonetheless. Torvan was not a ghost, and not a man she feared. “If I had something to offer, who would I be offering it to?”

At that, Torvan smiled, and his smile was wry. He lowered his torch as he approached the shrine, and then set it into an empty ring meant for that purpose. “You would,” he said mock-gravely, “be offering it to the spirit that guards Terafin.”

She snorted, but when there was no answering laugh, she realized he was serious. “What spirit?”

“Well, rumor has it that the founder of Terafin watches over it still.”

“Bet that's news to Mandaros.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. What we know of the Gods and the life beyond it is not perfect, Jewel.” He walked to the altar and stood beside it. “Every guard who is
Chosen places his arms and armor here; they offer their service and possibly their lives to protect Terafin. If the spirit exists, he grants them his blessing in return.”

“Why would he?”

“Why would he what?”

“Why would he want to stay here and watch?”

Torvan smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I don't know. If you died, would you not want to watch over your den?”

It wasn't the question she wanted to hear; she retreated into shadow, only to find that there wasn't any. “I don't know,” she said gruffly. “I haven't done that good a job so far.”

“You brought them here to safety, and you protect them while they are here. What more could you do?”

She shrugged. “I didn't bring them all,” she said at last. “I lost Duster. And before that—before I knew what was going on—I lost Lefty and Fisher. Even when I had suspicions, I still lost Lander.” She reached out and touched the altar, and this time, Torvan did not stop her, although he frowned slightly.

“Do you think that people in your service shouldn't die?”

“They don't
serve
me.”

“They do,” he replied. “They follow you, they obey you, and they trust you.”

“All right! Yes, I think they shouldn't die. If I deserved their trust, they wouldn't have.” She turned away from him, angry at everything. “I hate it,” she added, for no particular reason. “I hate that they trust me and I hate that I failed.”

“Then let them go.”

“What?”

“Send them away. Refuse to take their service. Cast them off.”

“I can't do that—what would they do?”

“What did they do without you? They survived, and I imagine that they will survive again.”

She snorted, but this time the anger was gone. “I know what you're trying to do,” she said softly. “And you don't have to do it.” Rath used to play this sort of game—provoke her one way and then turn it around, just to get her attention and make her
think.
But Rath was dead as well.

“No? Jewel, do you think they hold you responsible for the deaths of their den mates?”

“No.”

“Good. But you hold yourself responsible.”

Weary, she sighed. “Yes.”

He surprised her. “Good.” He smiled at her expression. “You aren't,” he added, “and you are. You did not kill them, but had you not chosen them from the streets—and chosen, I think, well—they would not have died at the hands of demon-kin.”

“Thanks.” The word was sour.

Torvan didn't stop. “Remember this feeling. Because to The Terafin, the House
is
her den. You don't understand her—or so you think—but you have more in common than you know.”

She was silent; he had complimented her, but she wasn't certain why—or even why he had mentioned The Terafin. In the light, his face was an odd color.

“Why did you come here tonight?”

This, she could answer. “I'm having nightmares. I've been having them a lot recently. All of my dead kin come back to me; they surround me and try to take me with them.” It wasn't all of the truth, but as close as she wanted to come.

“Ghosts?”

“No—walking corpses. Ghosts, I think I could live with.”

“Corpses?”

“Yes.”

“You are certain that they are dead?”

“Look—they're
my
dreams.”

“Interesting. Do you always have such morbid nightmares?”

“Only when I've lost over a third of my kin,” she snapped back. Then she sighed. “I'm sorry, Torvan. I know you're trying to help, and I know what you've told me is true—but it—it makes it harder.”

“I know,” he replied, and his voice was gentle. “Stay at the shrine, if you will. Don't let me disturb you. But, Jewel: Trust your instincts.”

5th Corvil, 410 A.A.
Averalaan, The Common

Jewel was nervous, and not a little angry.

She wasn't used to being out on the streets alone; hadn't been used to it since she'd gathered her den so carefully a couple of years back. Carver was her shadow, and Arann her shield; Duster was her dagger, and Teller her voice; Finch was her hidden self, her little joy, Jester her ability to laugh. And Angel? She grimaced. Angel was his own.

Duster's gone
, she told herself grimly. And, truthfully, Arann still hadn't recovered from the healer's touch. But he was speaking and eating properly and Jester could coax a smile from him sometimes. It was better than she'd hoped for when they'd first arrived at The Terafin's, but worse than she wanted now. That was the way of things.

She started to fidget with her belt, which was fine and heavy and not at all the customary wear of the Essalieyanese. Gold-plated chains hung from her lowest rib to just below her hips, and across these were hooked small pouches and a wineskin.

Devon ATerafin frowned at her with his eyes and the lines in his forehead. She'd been subject to that frown for the better part of two days, and was heartily sick of it. Unfortunately, she was paid in part to endure it, and she had no intention of giving up the fortune of her den by refusing to cooperate with a member of the House. But the moment this was all over, she was going to deck him. Or push him into the bay. She wasn't sure which.

“Jasmine, dear, do pay attention.”

She smiled with what she hoped was the right amount of simpering stupidity and narrowly avoided the flap of a wagon which had just been lowered for business. This was a farmers' market, but it was also the foreign market, and the streets were crowded with bodies, wagons, horses, and the occasional ring of trees.

The trees were old and grand, and they were Jewel's favorite landmark in the twelfth holding. She wasn't certain what kind of trees they were, as she seldom ventured this far into the quarter at a time of day when the leaves and bark were clearly visible, but they were four times her width at the base, their leaves were shaped like flat, white hands with green borders, and they towered over most of the buildings in the web of old streets that met at the common, providing a bower of sorts that could be seen at a great distance.