The Hallowed Hunt

thorns, breaking the boundaries of Bloodfield.

Outside the gate he’d made, a multiple Presence waited, impatiently as supplicants on a king’s feast day. How did one admit Them? It seemed to call for hymns and hosannas, chants and invocations of great beauty and complexity, poets and musicians and scholars and soldiers and divines. Instead, They must make do with me. So be it.

'Come in,' Ingrey whispered, his voice cracking, and then, I can do better than that, 'Come in!'

The reverberation seemed to split the night in half, and a shiver of anticipation ran through the four thousand like a great wave crashing upon a disintegrating shore. Ingrey set himself again to endure, for all that he felt his strength pouring out in a cataract. The ghostly jostling settled, no less starveling, but with its desperation stemmed by astonished new hope.

IT SEEMED FOREVER BEFORE A HUMAN SOUND PENETRATED THE dark woods, and a faint orange light drew near. A crackle and crash of brush; a thump and a muttered oath; some rolling argument cut short by Learned Hallana’s crisp cry: 'There, over there! Oswin, go left!'

What was to Ingrey’s eye the most unexpected cavalcade imaginable blundered into the clearing. Learned Oswin rode a stumbling horse, with his wife riding pillion, clutching him around the waist with one arm and waving directions with the other. Prince Biast, a staggered look upon his face as he gawked at the milling ghosts, rode behind on another worn horse, and Learned Lewko and Prince Jokol brought up the rear on foot, Jokol holding a torch aloft. Lewko’s once-white robes were mired to the thigh on one side, and all were sweat-stained, disheveled, and peppered with road dirt.

'Hallana!' Ijada waved thankfully, as if all was now well. 'Come over here, quickly!'

'You were expecting them?' Ingrey asked her.

'We all came together, pell-mell down the road for the past two days. Five gods, what a journey. The prince-marshal commanded everything. I galloped ahead at the last—my heart was calling me to hasten, and I was desperately afraid.'

Learned Lewko limped up to Ingrey and signed a hasty blessing. Jokol trod behind with the sort of breathless, maniacal grin upon his face that Ingrey imagined he’d have worn while facing a storm at sea, his boat climbing mountainous waves while all the sane men clung to the ropes and screamed.

'Ho! Ingorry!' he cried happily, saluting ghostly warriors right and left as though they were long-lost cousins. 'This night will make some song!'

'Are you the mortal vessels for the gods, then?' Ingrey asked Lewko. 'Are you all made saints?'

'I have been a saint,' wheezed Lewko, 'and it isn’t this. If I had to guess... ' His glare around the densely haunted clearing ended on a narrow-eyed look at Ingrey.

Oswin and Hallana abandoned their blown mount and came up, clutching each other by the arm over the uneven ground, staring at the ghostly warriors in wonder tinged with trepidation and, Ingrey would swear, a blazing scholarly curiosity not far removed, in its own way, from Jokol’s appalling enthusiasm.

'If I had to guess, Oswin,' Lewko continued to his colleague—Ingrey sensed the tail of a hot debate —'I think we are all made sacred funeral animals.'

Oswin looked at first faintly offended, then thoughtful. Hallana giggled. The sound was overwrought but queerly joyous.

'Ingrey must cleanse my ghosts,' Ijada said firmly. 'I told you it would be so.'

Two days of debate, Ingrey guessed, but in a company, however odd, fearsomely well equipped for it. The gods have no hands in this world but ours. Hand to hand to hand...

Biast spied his sister, now sitting slumped on the long mound not far from Wencel’s body, and hurried to her, going to his knees and gathering her in his arms. Their heads bent together; they spoke hastily in low tones. He held her as she shuddered. She did not, yet, weep.

'Ijada,' murmured Ingrey, 'I don’t think we had best delay, if this is to work.' He looked around at the revenants, who had stopped milling and jostling and now stared back at him in yearning silence. As if I were their last hope of heaven. 'How do I... what do I... ' What do I do?

She grasped the wolf’s head standard in both hands and set her shoulders. 'You’re the shaman-king. Do what seems right to you, and it will be.' Beside her, the gold-belted marshal made a gesture of assent.

Four thousand, so many! It matters less where I begin, as that I begin.

Ingrey turned slowly around and caught sight of the tall warrior with the wolf cloak he’d seen earlier. He motioned the revenant forward and stared into his pale features. The ghost smiled and nodded kindly, as if to reassure him, fell to one knee before Ingrey, captured his left hand, and bowed his head. Fascinated, Ingrey extended his right index finger, down which a trickle of blood flowed from the soaked rag wrapping his reopened wound, and smeared a drop across the warrior’s forehead. It disturbed Ingrey more than a little that the ghost felt solid to him now, not liquid as before, and he wondered what it bespoke of his own changed state.

'Come,' Ingrey whispered, and the warrior’s spirit wolf, so ancient and worn as to be hardly more than a dark smear, passed out through his fingers. The warrior rose and lifted his face to the watching divines, then extended his hand toward Learned Oswin in a gesture half greeting, half plea. Oswin, with an anxious side glance at Hallana, who nodded vigorously at him, held out his hand to grasp the revenant’s. The wolf warrior clasped it, smiled beatifically, and melted away.

'Oh,' said Oswin, and his voice shook, tears starting in his eyes. 'Oh, Hallana, I did not know... '

'Shh,' she said. 'It will be very well now, I think.' She moistened her lips and gazed at Ingrey as though he were a cross between some famous work of Temple art she’d traveled days to see, and her favorite child.

Ingrey glanced around again, his eyes crammed with choices, and motioned another warrior to him. The man knelt and awkwardly, hopefully, presented his head held up between his two hands. Ingrey repeated the crimson unction upon the forehead, for whatever this last libation from the world of matter was worth, and released a dark hawk-spirit to fly into the night and vanish. The warrior reached for Oswin again, and this time Ingrey could see, just before he melted away, that the man was made whole. The Father speed you on your journey, then.

A woman revenant came forward, young-looking, carrying a banner that unfolded to display the ancient spitting-cat sigil of the Lynxlakes, a kin that had dwindled to extinction in the male line two centuries past. When Ingrey took her hand, he was startled to feel two other tattered souls clinging to her through her banner. Her lynx was sad and shabby, and the other two creatures so ragged as to be unidentifiable, in passing away. He signed her forehead in three parallel carmine strokes, which seemed to suffice, for she rose and strode to Jokol, who brightened and stood very straight, taking her hand to kiss it and murmuring something in her ear before she vanished. Ingrey swore he heard a faint low laugh, suddenly merry, linger for a moment in the air behind her. Jokol for the Daughter, aye. The Lady of Spring gives notoriously abundant blessings.

The next was a thin old man who went to Lewko, who stood looking very reflective as the revenant passed through. Lewko for the Bastard, naturally.

'Prince Biast,' called Ingrey softly. 'I’m afraid I need you here.' Biast for the Son. Of course.

'I suspect I will be least used, this night,' murmured Hallana. She cast a shrewd glance toward the mound. 'I will sit with poor Fara till you need me. I would guess she’s had a time of it.'

'Thank you, Learned, yes,' said Ingrey. 'She was treated most miserably from first to last. But in the end she remembered she was a princess.'

Biast came forward to Ingrey’s side, studying him warily. The entranced expression upon his face when he looked at Ingrey was laced with a thread of defiance. In an attempt at irony that faltered, he murmured, 'Should I call you sire, here?'

'You need not call me anything, so long as you turn your hand to the task. Will Fara be all right?' Ingrey nodded across the clearing to where the princess sat huddled, watching grimly, as Hallana lowered herself beside