The Hallowed Hunt

He gathered himself on his haunches and launched himself at the horse’s belly, twisting his open jaws at an awkward angle. He scored the skinless surface in a long slash, and barely made it away from a retaliating stamping. The—not blood—uncanny ichor, ink-black fluid, burned his mouth as the red snakes had, before. Worse. His jaws foamed madly in pained response.

The ghosts crowded around in a ring for all the world as though they were watching a boar-baiting. Which beast were they betting on, whom did they cheer? Not their lives but their souls had been wagered, and not by them. That Horseriver rode himself to oblivion, to sundering from the gods, was regrettable, but not even the gods could override a person’s will in that matter. That his will overrode all these other wills seemed a blacker sin. Ijada would surely weep, Ingrey thought bleakly as he dodged the stallion’s snapping teeth, swung round at the end of a suddenly snaky neck, ears back flat. And, Five weapons. I have to watch five weapons.

This is going badly. He was too small; the stallion was too large. Real wolves hunted prey this size in packs, not alone. Where can I get more me? Nothing of spirit could exist in the world of matter without... He eyed his standing human self, shivering mindlessly on his feet at the edge of the clearing. Dolt. Dupe. Useless son. All or nothing, then. All.

He pulled strength from his body, all he could. The emptied form swayed and collapsed onto a drift of leaves. Everything in the clearing slowed, and Ingrey’s already-searing perceptions came ablaze. His wolf-body felt at once both dense as the past and weightless as the future. Yes. I know this state. I have traveled this path before.

He was, abruptly, half the size of the horse, and it shied back. But slowly, so slowly, as though it swam in oil. His mind sketched his strike at his leisure, measuring the arc of his leap. This looted strength could not last. No time. Now.

He plunged forward and sank his teeth into the horse’s neck, shaking his head wildly. He could not flip it back and forth as a dog shook a rabbit, but it went down under his twisting weight, and something snapped and something spurted. Around them, the ghosts dodged back as though to avoid a splash from some tainted puddle.

The thing in his jaws stilled. Then melted away and ran down his lips like a bite from an icicle in winter. He spat and backed up. Horse-shape became shapeless, a mound, a puddle, a blackness soaking into the ground like a spilled barrel of ink. Gone.

Wencel stood up, freed from his dark mount. On two bowed legs. His shape was restored to humanity, but his face...

'I’m glad I didn’t use that stag,' he remarked from one of his mouths. 'It would not have had the strength for this.' Another mouth grinned. 'Good dog, Ingrey.'

Ingrey backed away, growling. Across Horseriver’s skull, faces rippled, rising and sinking like corpses in a river. One succeeded another haphazardly, all the Earls Horseriver for four centuries and more. Young men, old men, angry men, sad; shaven, bearded, scarred. Mad. Young Wencel passed like a bewildered waif, his dumb gaze alighting on Ingrey in recognition and plea, though plea for what, Ingrey could not tell.

The body was worse. Cuts, scars, dreadful gaping wounds rose and fell from the surface of the skin, every death wound Horseriver had ever received. The burns were the most frightening, wide patches of red and weeping blisters, cooked and charred flesh. The stink of them wafted across Ingrey’s sensitive wolf-nose, and he sneezed and backed away, whimpering for a moment and pawing his muzzle like a dog. This was Horseriver, turned inside out. This was what being Horseriver had been like, behind that smooth ironic mask, the brittle wit, the jerky rage, the apparent indifference. Every hour, every day, sunsets falling like trip-hammers, time without end.

The eyes were worst of all.

Ingrey stalked warily around the edge of the clearing, keeping his distance from the mound and the Horseriver-aggregate, until he came to his own collapsed body. It looked disturbingly more pale and dead than the headless ghosts gathered about looking on. He nosed it, pawed at it, and whined anxiously, but it did not stir. Did he even breathe? He could not tell. In this wolf-state, he realized, he had no voice—and, therefore, no weirding voice. A critical aspect of his powers seemed severed from him. Could he even get back in? Five gods, what if I can’t?

Had Horseriver planned this? With his wolf and most of his own soul removed, Ingrey’s silent husk was empty as an abandoned house, and as available for squatters to move into. If the undoing of his spell went awry, Horseriver might still have a body-heir, and now without the complications that had worried him earlier. Ingrey glanced up at the agonized thing that was Horseriver. No, that was not an end Horseriver desired, but if he indeed found himself with it all to do over again, well, he could. And judging by his level silence, watching Ingrey, he knew it. Ingrey shivered and pawed his unresponsive body again.

Hoofbeats and a frightened equine squeal sounded from the woods, and Ingrey whirled around. Could the haunt-horse have reanimated... ? No, this was a real horse; he could feel the thudding of its gait through the solid ground as he had not the fiery footfalls of the other. The hoofbeats stopped, shuffled about in the leaf drifts; then lighter footsteps rustled, running flat out.

The ghosts spun aside, opening an aisle, and many lifted their hands in clumsy salutes. And blessings, or troubled supplications; the fivefold sign wandered awkwardly, when forehead and lips were hung at a belt, and the hand moved only aside to navel and groin before rising to the unbeating heart. Wolf-Ingrey’s head lifted and he sniffed in wild surmise. I know that blissful smell, like sunlight in dry grass...

Running through the gap between the ghosts, Ijada appeared. She wore her dark brown riding dress, the jacket sweat-stained, her split skirts splashed with mud, and all of it scored with little rips as though she’d galloped through a thorn hedge. Wisps of dark hair clung to her flushed face. She stopped short, and her gasping became a cry; then she staggered more slowly to where Ingrey’s body lay and dropped to her knees beside it, her face draining white.

'No, oh, no... ' She rolled his body over and gathered his head into her lap, and stared down in dismay at the lifeless features and pale lips. 'Too late!'

She cannot see me, wolf-Ingrey realized. She cannot see any of us. Except for the very material Fara, still collapsed beside the throat-slashed body of Wencel. Ijada spared the couple a brief, appalled glance, clenching her teeth in distress, then turned back to Ingrey.

'Oh, love... ' She lifted his face to her own teary one, and pressed her lips to his. Wolf-Ingrey danced around her in frustration, for he could not feel those warm lips or taste that wasted honeyed breath at all. Frantic, he pawed her sleeve, then licked her face.

Her breath drew in sharply, and she lifted her hand to her cheek and stared around. Had she felt some disturbing liquid chill, as he had from the ghost’s hand? He licked her ear, and her breath huffed out in what might have been a laugh, under other circumstances; she scrubbed at the ear as though it had been tickled. She laid Ingrey’s body out on his back, felt along it—oh, if I might feel that touch–and frowned. 'Ingrey, what have they done to you... ?' His body bore no visible wounds, no crookedness of broken bones, but his rag-wrapped right hand, he saw, was soaked with blood, and his leather jerkin was smeared slippery with it. Ijada’s frown deepened as she clutched the gory hand to her breast. If I might only move those fingers... 'Or you to yourself?' she added more shrewdly. 'You tried something brave and foolish, didn’t you?' Her gaze rose once more to Wencel’s corpse and Fara.

Horseriver snorted, and Ingrey spun around, growling. The face of the moment stared across at Ijada with a mixture of astonishment and revulsion. 'You do keep turning up where you are not wanted, don’t you, girl?' he remarked to the air, or perhaps to Ingrey. Ijada, in any case, did not seem to hear him. 'Always in ignorance, but does that slow you? Taste the betrayal of the gods, then; I have dined on it for ages.'

He turned away and looked across at the gathering of ghosts. 'All here now,' he breathed. Now the terrible eyes were distant, removed, implacably calmed. 'But not for much longer, I swear to you, beloved ones.'

The looks the revenants gave him in return were not loving, Ingrey thought, but wary and dismayed. A faint translucence hung about them, and Ingrey realized that they were already starting to fade. The ghost of a man fresh-killed, if he did not go at once to the gods through the gates of his death, might yet be redeemed from