lois Bujold - The Hallowed Hunt

Though Horseriver did not move from his burial mound, he grew distanced, silenced at last, like a corpse seen underwater. Stripped of both his yoked powers-his great horse and his hallow kingship-he was reduced to one revenant among the many, except for his dire multiplicity, an extra denseness that lingered about him. Yes, thought Ingrey, he, too, is a ghost of Bloodfield, who died on this sacred and accursed ground; he is no longer more, but he cannot become less.

But what have I become?

He could feel the mystical kingship settle into place upon him, in him, through him. It did not make him feel as though he'd been stuffed with pride and power, replete and overflowing. It made him feel as though all his blood was being drawn out of him.

Ijada and Fara both, he realized, were staring at him with that same openmouthed awe tinged with physical desire that Horseriver had inspired. Such stares ought to make any man preen, surely. Instead, he felt as though they contemplated eating him alive.

No, not Ijada and Fara-well, yes, them, too-it was the ghosts that alarmed him now. They crowded up closer as if fascinated, reaching for him, touching him in chill liquid strokes that stole the warmth from his skin. They were growing unruly in their urgency, shouldering past and even climbing over one another, thicker and thicker about him. Famished beggars.

Nothing of spirit can exist in the world of matter without a being of matter to support it. The old catechism rang through his spinning head. Four thousand still-accursed spirits swarmed upon the ground of Bloodfield, upon it but no longer sustained by it. Instead, they were all now connected to…

“Ijada…” His voice came out a wail. “I cannot maintain them all, I cannot hold!”

He was growing colder and colder as the ghosts pawed him. He grabbed for Ijada's outstretched hand like a drowning man, and for a moment live warmth, her warmth, flooded him. But she gasped as she, too, felt the unholy pull of the ghosts' insatiable hunger. They will pull us both to shreds, drain us dry. And when there was no more warmth left to give, his and Ijada's frozen corpses would be left upon the ground, fog steaming off them in the night air. And all trapped here would dwindle to oblivion in a last, starveling cry of abandonment, betrayal, and despair.

“Ijada…! Let go!” He tried to draw his hand back from hers.

“No!” She gripped him tighter.

“You must let go! Take Fara and run, out of here, back through the marsh, quickly! The revenants will consume us both if you do not!”

“No, Ingrey! That's not what is meant! You must cleanse them as you cleansed Boleso, so that they may go to the gods! You can, that's what you were made for, I swear it!”

“I cannot! There are too many, I cannot hold, and there are no gods here!”

“They wait at the gate!”

“What?”

“They wait at the gate of thorns! For the master of the realm to admit them. Audar cursed and sealed this ground, and Horseriver held it against the gods ever after in his rage and black despair, but the old kings are gone, and the new king is acclaimed.”

“I am only a king of ghosts and shadows, a king of the dead.”

Soon to join my subjects. “Open your realm to the Five. Five mortals will bear Them across the ground, but you must admit Them-invite Them in.” Shivering now almost as badly as he was, she eyed the thronging ghosts, and her voice went quavering up: “Ingrrreyyy, hurry!”

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.

“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.”

“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.