The Sea of Time (32 page)

CHAPTER XVII

Wolver Hunt

Winter 95

I

“YOU DON’T LOOK as if you got much sleep last night,” said the wolver Grimly as Torisen descended from his tower apartment into the Council chamber’s early morning light.

The Highlord wore neat black hunting leathers reinforced with braided rhi-sar inserts, high boots, and gauntlets, but his hair was ruffled and his eyes deeply shadowed.

“This makes it—what? Five days in a row?”

Torisen rubbed his bearded face, feeling as if he had either slept too little or too much. Certainly, his wits felt as tarnished as old silver. In the past he had stayed awake much longer to avoid certain dreams, but this time the cause was different.

“I’ve been through their names over and over again,” he said. “Every one of them from Harn down to Cron and Merry’s new baby. Who else is bound to me that I’ve forgotten?”

The last time it had been the Kendar Mullen, who had flayed himself alive in the death banner hall so that he would never be forgotten again. Trinity knew, Torisen remembered the dying man’s blood soaking through his clothes as he had knelt beside him.

“Mullen. Welcome home.”

Five nights ago Torisen had woken with that same terrible, hollow feeling that someone was missing. Whom had he failed this time?

Can’t hold them, can you?
sneered his father behind the locked door in his soul-image.
I always said that you were weak.

Above, Yce threw herself at his closed door, yipping with distress and agitation. Her claws raked the wood, then rudimentary fingers fumbled unsuccessfully with the lock.

“She’ll tear your bedroom apart,” Grimly warned.

“That can’t be helped. She mustn’t go with us today. Has the hunt master reported yet?”

“He’s waiting for you below.”

Burr appeared with a covered tray. “First, my lord, your breakfast.”

“Burr, I haven’t time . . .”

“Sit. Eat.”

Torisen sank into a chair and glowered at the porridge set before him. “Well, then, send him up.”

The hunt master duly appeared, a middle-aged Kendar with grizzled hair still touched with fox-red, wearing russet leathers.

“The lymers have been out since before dawn,” he reported. “They haven’t picked up a fresh scent yet, but we did come across some odd pawprints. The toes looked wolfish, complete with claws, but elongated.”

“Like this?” Grimly stood on one hairy foot and obligingly held up the other, shaped half between lupine and human.

“Well, yes, but much larger. Whatever this beast is, it’s huge.”

Torisen and Grimly exchanged glances.

“That certainly sounds like the Gnasher,” said the latter.

Since that howl had answered them out of the winter night, they had been on their guard, not that that had helped herdsmen out with the black, irascible cows that preferred to calve in the snow rather than sensibly in the safety of a stall. Several Kendar had been found torn literally to pieces and half devoured among their scattered charges. Torisen had felt each passing like a cold wind through his soul. At least those names he remembered. The attack against Kencyr rather than cattle seemed calculated to draw a response, as had the baleful howl that followed each kill. They hadn’t really known, however, if they were dealing with some monstrous dire wolf out of the hills or with Yce’s homicidal sire.

Now Torisen put down his spoon, the porridge half eaten and, in any event, untasted. “We have to assume that it’s the Gnasher.”

“Ancestors know,” said the hunt master, resting his elbows earnestly on the table, “we’ve tried to pursue it as a mere wolf. The traps we’ve set, the woods we’ve baited . . . but it’s too clever to fall for such tricks.” A howl from Yce made him start and look over his shoulder.

“Perhaps we haven’t offered him the right bait,” said Grimly.

“Don’t even think it,” Torisen said.

“Well, she can’t stay mewed up here for the rest of her life.”

That much was true, thought Torisen, making their current hunt all the more essential. Why, though, did he feel that they were going about it all wrong—or was that just his general uncertainty this morning? He had apparently already failed one Kendar. What if he failed Yce as well? Then too, Storm had an abscess in his hoof so Torisen would be riding his secondary mount, a gray gelding named Rain. Everything seemed subtly out of kilter.

The faint sound of a horn blowing reached them.

“At last!” said the hunt master, springing to his feet.

They clattered down the spiral stair, out into the inner ward where grooms held their horses. Torisen swung up onto Rain, who danced nervously sideways under him. He set his spur to the gray’s right flank to correct him and the horse lashed out at the mount behind him. Torisen had forgotten that instinctive response to a sore rib. Oh, for Storm, who had the sense not to make such a fuss. Some twenty Kencyr were riding to the hunt, not counting the dog handlers already in the field, on the scent. The horn sounded again, to the north. Direhounds were loosed, then the massive Molocar. Grimly stayed by Torisen’s side although he had dropped to all fours and ran on shaggy paws. The whole party swept out the gate, down the steep incline, and through the apple orchard. Ahead loomed the forest.

It was a bright, late winter day with snow still lying in the shadows and along branches in ridges from a brief flurry the previous night. Melting, it dripped from tightly rolled buds in diamond drops as the riders plunged underneath. Torisen pulled back on Rain to keep from crowding the hunt master. The direhounds coursed ahead of him, black tails whipping, on the track of the lymers.

The whole party plunged among the trees. Few paths ran here. Close as it was to the fortress, this area was tricky. Here Ganth’s hunt had gone astray, losing him and his followers, the night that the shadow assassins had come for the Knorth ladies. Some said that he had heard their screams but couldn’t find his way back to them until too late.

The horses no longer ran together but swerved back and forth between thickets, stands of trees, and the occasional boulder rolled down from the heights, following the cry of the hounds. Torisen lost sight of Grimly when they split to pass on either side of a small grove. He could hear the others but caught only flickers of movement between the bare branches. There went the hunt master’s russet jacket. Rain gathered himself and jumped a fallen tree, landing with a surprised snort in a tangle of brush. By the time he had fought free, the flash of red was gone although hunters’ cries still filtered back through the trees. They seemed to be moving away.

Torisen slowed Rain to a trot.

Except for the distant hunt, now no more than a rumor, the wood was silent. No bird song, no wind, only the crunch of snow underfoot. The trees thinned and the land dipped toward a shallow stream running between ice-fretted banks. Flakes drifted down from the cloudless sky. It was as if he had ridden into a pocket of winter.

The low-slung sun dazzled and confused him. Had he somehow gotten turned around, heading south rather than north? The land here was fully capable of playing such a trick.

Rain hesitated on the bank, ears flicking nervously back and forth. He snorted plumes of steam and tried to back up. Torisen patted him on the neck.

“Now what, you? Go on.”

Gingerly, the horse crab-stepped down into the hock-deep water, onto slick stones, then stopped again, trembling.

The opposite bank seemed to erupt.

Rain tried to spin away, but slipped. As he floundered, something huge, white, and shaggy rose over the bank’s crest. A claw raked across the gray’s neck, followed by a crimson spray on the snow. Rain squealed and fell. It all happened too quickly for thought. Torisen found himself in the creek bed, water rushing over his face, his left leg pinned by the horse’s weight against the rocky bottom. The shock of the fall and of the cold made him gasp, then choke on icy water. He struggled up on an elbow. Rain’s thick blood swirled past him, borne on the current. Although a chunk of his neck had been ripped away, the horse still struggled to rise, in the process grinding Torisen’s leg against the stones. He tried to drag himself free, and almost fainted from the pain. As he lay back in the stream, panting, something came between him and the sun.

“So,” said a thick, familiar voice overhead. “We meet again, lordling.”

Torisen held up a hand to shield his eyes. Below the red halo of his fingers, he saw that the Gnasher stood on the bank, his hind legs bent backward at the knees. The rest of his bulk, half lupine, half human, hunched against the sun. He was much bigger than Torisen remembered, and if his soul cast either light or shadow, it was swallowed by that greater glare.

“Where is that little bitch, my darling daughter?”

“Safe from you.”

The Gnasher laughed. Even against the sun, his teeth were very white. “For how long, eh? Who will protect her once you are dead? Might she even try to avenge you? Oh, that would be perfect.”

Squinting, Torisen could now make out the wolver’s stomach and chest. Both were thickly matted with whorls of white fur that suggested the smashed heads of pups, silently howling. Trinity, how many litters of his progeny had he slaughtered?

“Hasn’t there been blood enough?”

The Gnasher’s laughter turned to a snarl. “The young always consume the old—unless the old strike first. Kruin taught me that, even if he didn’t have the guts to succeed himself. How else could I have become the King of the Wood if I hadn’t killed my father? No pup of mine will survive to do the same to me and so I will live forever.”

Icy water found its way through the seams and inserts of Torisen’s leathers. More poured down his collar. His teeth began to rattle together with the cold and shock.

Mortality, immortality . . . which was the trap? The Gnasher, King Kruin, and the Master all had traded the souls of their followers for life and yet more life, but how fulfilling had they found it? Dying was easy, to avoid such entrapment. However, Torisen’s people depended on him. What, here and now, was he willing to risk against imminent death, assuming he had anything left with which to barter?

Not rocks but the wooden door in his soul-image pressed against Torisen’s back. His hand fumbled behind him as if with a will of its own at the bolt that secured the door.

That’s right, boy,
came the hoarse, eager whisper from shriveled lips through the keyhole.
Let me out. Remember how this cur turned into a shivering pup at the mere sound of my foot upon the stair?

So long ago, in Kothifir, before Ganth was even dead . . .

That last had never struck Torisen before.

Trinity, how long had his father haunted him? How had it started, and what sustained that possession now?

The image formed in Torisen’s mind of a drop of blood trembling on a knife’s tip, falling into a cup of wine:

Here, son. Drink to my health
.

Back in the Haunted Lands keep, had his father tried to blood-bind him as Greshan had the young Ganth? Was that why he was haunted by his father now, with that drop of blood still sunk into his soul, poisoning it? But surely only a Shanir could do such a thing.

Words rose in Torisen’s mind, spoken by his father through his mouth to the Jaran Matriarch, forgotten until now:
Do you wonder that I could never entirely throw Greshan off? That I should come to hate all Shanir?

Argh. What good did it do to think of such things now?

But some day he would have to open that door. His hand was on the latch. Would it be today?

Remember, son, anger is strength
.

The Gnasher stopped pacing. “What are you doing? Stop it!”

The sun had cast Torisen’s shadow behind him. Now he felt the chill of it gathering around him. His voice came out rough-edged, more his father’s than his own.

“Would you cross souls with me, cub-killer? Come closer, if you dare.”

With a snarl, the wolver dropped to all fours and sprang into the stream. Simultaneously, Torisen drove his spur into the right flank of the dying horse. A steel-shod hoof lashed out in a rainbow of spray. The Gnasher yelped and fell with a mighty splash.