The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold [130]
“Cazaril, for the gods’ sake let him breathe.” Dy Maroc’s distressed cry broke through Cazaril’s red fog.
Cazaril reduced the pressure of his grip, and dy Joal inhaled, shuddering. Keeping his knee in place, Cazaril drew back his bloodied left hand in a fist, and placed, very precisely, a hard blow to the bravo’s stomach that shook the air again; dy Joal’s knees jerked up with it. Only then did Cazaril step back and release the man.
Dy Joal fell to the floor and bent over himself, gasping and choking, weeping, not even trying to get up. After a moment, he vomited.
Cazaril stepped across the mess of food and wine and bile toward Urrac, who lurched backward until stopped by the far wall. Cazaril leaned into his face and repeated softly, “I don’t duel. But if you seek to die like a bludgeoned steer, cross me again.”
He turned on his heel; dy Maroc’s face, drained white, wavered past his vision, hissing, “Cazaril, have you gone mad?”
“Try me.” Cazaril grinned fiercely at him. Dy Maroc fell back. Cazaril strode down the corridor past a blur of men, blood drops still spattering off his fingers as he swung his arms, and out into the chill shock of the night. The closing door cut off a rising babble of voices.
He almost ran across the icy cobbles of the courtyard toward the main block and refuge, both his steps and his breath growing faster and less even as something—sanity, delayed terror?—-seeped back into his mind. His belly cramped violently as he mounted the stone stairs. His fingers shook so badly as he fumbled out his key to let himself into his bedchamber that he dropped it twice and had to use both hands, braced against the door, to finally guide it into the lock. He locked the door again behind him, and fell, wheezing and groaning, across his bed. His attendant ghosts had fled into hiding during the confrontation, their desertion unnoticed by him at the time. He rolled onto his side, and curled around his aching stomach. Now, at last, his cut wrist began to throb. So did his head.
He’d seen men go berserk a few times, in the madness of battle. He’d just never imagined what it must feel like from the inside, before. No one had mentioned the floating exhilaration, intoxicating as wine or sex. An unusual, but natural, result of nerves, mortality, and fright, jammed together in too small a space, too short a time. Not unnatural. Not…the thing in his belly reaching out to twist and taunt and trick him into death, and its own release….
Oh.
You know what you did to Dondo. Now you know what Dondo is doing to you.
17
It was by chance, late the following morning, that Cazaril spied Orico ambling out the Zangre gates toward the menagerie with only a page at his heels. Cazaril tucked the letters he’d been carrying to the Chancellery office into the inner pocket of his vest-cloak, turned from the door of Ias’s Tower, and followed. The roya’s master of the chamber had earlier refused to disturb his lord’s after-breakfast nap; clearly, Orico had finally roused himself and now sought comfort and solace among his animals. Cazaril wondered if the roya had awoken with as bad a headache as he had.
As he strode across the cobbles, Cazaril marshaled his arguments. If the roya feared action, Cazaril would point out that inaction was equally likely to be bent to ill by the curse’s malign influence. If the roya insisted that the children were too young, he would note that they should not then have been ordered to Cardegoss in the first place. But now that they were here, if Orico could not protect them then he had an obligation to both Chalion and