Obeying seemed easier than arguing. His sword arm Was useless. Even in the dim light of the Bloodhall, its color was appalling. With his off hand he picked up a drinking horn from the table; it was a fancy one, spiraled, with hunting scenes etched into it. He dipped it into the blood, and no sooner had he lifted it than a dozen others were plunged in.
His cup was heavy with warm blood, his fingertips red and wet with it. Whatever had been mixed with the blood made swirls of silver through the redness. He looked into it, felt he was falling into its depths. Halikira jogged him again.
'Drink it before the blood cakes,' she advised him, and when he looked vaguely reluctant, she reminded him, 'Hells, man, you're dying anyway! Look at your arm!' This evoked another chorus of panting laughter, and Vandien found himself joining in it. And when it ended with the lifting of drinking horns, his rose with the rest. And he drank.
He drank fire and sandstorms and curling whiplashes. The drink ignored his throat and belly and cut its own scorching passage through his guts. He couldn't even get the breath to gasp, and the Brurjans howled admiringly at what they judged his impassivity to their drink. His breath burned out through his nostrils and mouth. He forgot all pain from his hip, all coldness. He suddenly tasted the bull's blood in his mouth and nostrils, and it was hot and wet and alive, like sparks leaping on his tongue. His darkening arm on the table before him was suddenly funny, almost as funny as the Duke's eyeball. It didn't matter. None of it mattered. Being alive was all that mattered, and using life up to the very last instant. Blood was life and life was in him. He swayed slightly as he turned to Halikira.
'What the hell are we drinking?' he managed to ask.
'Bull's blood,' she said simply.
He ripped the Duke's purse free of its strings, smashed it down on the table. 'Blood man! Kill another bull!' he roared, and Halikira crushed him in a hug.
'I like this Human,' she announced to the assembled folk. 'I think he should live!'
Someone near him began a panting laugh, and others took it up. Vandien laughed with them, unsure of the joke but having a wonderful time nonetheless. More blood was brought, and he drank another hornful, and it burned its way down his scalded throat in an agonizingly delightful way. It seemed to him that the Brurjans began to get silly after that. One of them wanted the Duke's helm for a piss-pot, and Vandien gladly traded it away for a Brurjan one twice the size of his skull. It hung over his eyes most of the time so that he frequently was unsure who he was talking to, but after a while that didn't seem to matter either.
Someone else bought another bull sometime later, and it was later still that Halikira sat down beside him again. He was a little surprised to find she had been gone. He was in the middle of trying to learn a newsong, made trickier by the fact that it was all in Brurjan and he wasn't sure what he was singing about. She had a leaf laden with an ugly, tarry substance, and she wanted him to eat it. He explained to her several times, amid much panting laughter from the rest of the table, that he never ate anything that particular shade of brown. Someone offered to bet a bull against the Duke's sword that he couldn't keep it down if he did eat it. Vandien won the bet and had a horn of the bull's blood. It seemed much later that he traded the Duke's sword for another bull, and later still when a swaying Korioko convinced him that it was bad luck to ever let a coward's mark remain on one's body. Korioko yelled for a LastFriend to be brought to him, and when it arrived, he heated the snake's-tongue blade over the table's candles. Vandien willingly pushed his darkened arm out onto the table, sat still as the searing blade was laid over the mark of Kellich's rip. He smelled scorching flesh, and then a far-off pain itched at his arm. Before he could respond to it, Korioko was lifting the blade away and exclaiming with pleasure at how cleanly outlined the scar from the pronged blade would be. Everyone joined in congratulating him on the new scar, and the master of the Bloodhall donated a bull to the table in a rare display of Brurjan fellowship.
He wasn't sure when or why they went outside. It wasn't dawn yet, but a strange light suffused the streets. Halikira was leaning on him and he was struggling valiantly to support her.
'Keklokito. Black or white?' Someone demanded.
'Take white. The black won't face a pikeman,' Halikira hissed.
'White,' Vandien answered.
Someone gave him a leg up, and when he pushed the helmet from his eyes, he was atop a large white horse trapped out with the Duke's black and silver harness. It felt strange to be up so high, but good. 'Everything feels good,' he observed to Halikira.
'It always does,' she answered, 'after a Great Kill. Ride well and may your fangs taste blood often.'
He couldn't think of a reply to that, and when he lifted a hand and leaned forward to speak to her, the horse interpreted it as a signal to charge. He left Tekum at a gallop, noticing in passing that half of the town was ablaze. It seemed an odd way to end a festival, but then, he had never really understood what they were celebrating in the first place.
He tried to remember where he was supposed to be going. Home. That was it. That was fine. It was time he paid a visit home. When dawn began to break before him, he realized the horse had slowed to a nagging trot. He pulled it in to a walk, lifted his eyes to the sunrise. Ki came suddenly to his mind, and then the remembrance that he was dying. He had only moments for his grief. The physical pain hit him first, knocking him from the saddle before the first convulsion lashed him. When the fit finally passed, his vision seemed extraordinarily clear. His body gave him one last moment of stillness, a final glimpse of sunrise breaking over the green hills of his father's keep. The great cold uncurled inside him. 'I've come home, Father,' he said to the one waiting for him, and fell into the darkness.
NINETEEN
It wasn't a stone in his hoof; she could feel no heat or swelling. Damn and damn and damn. She'd haveto hope it was only a bruise. She patted Sigurd's filthy shoulder and got back up on the box. So, they'd walk, then. Just when she needed speed, this had to happen. She stirred the team up, sat back and tried to calm herself. It didn't work. There was a marked hitch to Sigurd's stride that filled her with fury. She'd like to kill Willow and Vintner. And if that was dawn breaking over Tekum, then Goat and Dellin would be expecting her anytime now, and she wouldn't be there.
Dawn meant another thing as well, something she pushed to the back of her mind. Dawn meant Vandien was dead, from Kellich's poison or the Duke's sword. It didn't much matter which had killed him. Either way he was just as dead. As dead as everything they had shared. She found she could think of him calmly. Much of the anger and tears had been worked out with a double-bitted axe and the wall of Vintner's barn. A numbness had replaced it. He was dead by now. How could it matter whether he had died for the rebellion or thinking of her? He was still as dead. She was still as numb.
She rubbed her eyes with dirty hands, looked again. Yes, dawn was breaking, but not over Tekum. The rosy glow over the town had to be something else. Fire? Maybe, but who'd set half the town ablaze?
Actually, more than half the town was ablaze, and the flames were spreading. The long hot days had made anything burnable tinder-dry. Sparks leaped the narrow streets in the winds of the fire's breath. She picked her way through the town, turning often to avoid the fires. Even avoiding the streets where the buildings still blazed, Ki choked in the smoke and blowing ash. No one seemed to be doing much about the fires. The fires must have been the final culmination to an earlier uproar. She saw only one body, but the signs of earlier violence were everywhere. Broken furniture was strewn through the streets, and door leathers dangled and flapped in the fire's wind. She saw very few folk, and the ones she did see were either salvaging or looting; Ki wasn't sure which.