Briar King

by Keyes, Greg

  The tone was not mocking, nor were the words, quite. Nevertheless, William felt mocked.

  “I am emperor,” he said, with forced confidence. “Speak to me accordingly.”

  “A mayfly emperor, who will live hardly more than two beats of my heart,” the Kept replied.

  “Not if I have your heart stopped,” William said.

  Motion then, a sound like scales scraping against stone, and more airy laughter. “Can you, could you? I would weep black garnet tears for you, Prince of Least. I would bleed white gold and shit you diamonds.” A rasping cough followed. “No, little king,” the Kept continued. “No, no. Those are not the rules of our game. Your bitch ancestress saw to that. Go back to your sunlit halls and cuddle ‘round your fear. Forget me and dream away your life.”

  “Qexqaneh,” the Keeper said firmly. “You are commanded.”

  The Kept snarled, and sultry rage infused his voice. “My name. Older than your race, my name, and you use it like a rag to wipe up the run from your bowels.”

  William tightened his lips. “Qexqaneh,” he said. “By your name, answer me.”

  The Kept’s anger vanished as quickly as it came, and now he whispered. “Oh, little king, gladly. The answers shall give me joy,” he said.

  “And answer truthfully.”

  “I must, ever since that red-tressed whore that began your line shackled me. Surely you know that.”

  “It is so, Sire,” the Keeper agreed. “But he may answer elusively. You must sift his words.”

  William nodded. “Qexqaneh, can you see the future?”

  “Could I see the future, I would not be in this place, foolish manling. But I can see the inevitable, which is something else again.”

  “Is my kingdom bound for war?”

  “Hmm? A tide of blood is coming. A thousand seasons of woe. Swords will lap their fill and more.”

  Dread gripped William, but not surprise.

  “Can I prevent it?” he asked, not really hoping. “Can it be stopped?”

  “You can own death or it can own you,” the Kept said. “There are no other choices.”

  “Do you mean by that that I should prosecute this war? Attack Saltmark, or Hansa itself ?”

  “Little does that matter. Would you own death, little king? Would you keep it near your heart and be its friend? Will you feed it your family, your nation, your pitiful human soul? I can tell you how. You can be immortal, King. You can be like me, the last of your kind. Eternal. But unlike me, there will be none to prison you.”

  “The last of my kind?” This was confusing talk. “The last Dare?”

  “Oh, yes. And the last Reiksbaurg, and the last de Liery— the last of your pitiful race, manling. Your first queen killed you all. It has been a slow death, a sleepy death, but it is awake now. You cannot stop it. But you can be it.”

  “I don’t understand. No war can kill everyone. That’s what you are saying, is it, Qexqaneh? That only one man will survive the slaughter? What nonsense is this?” He looked at the Keeper. “You are certain he cannot lie?”

  “He cannot knowingly lie, no. But he can twist the truth into rings,” the Keeper replied.

  “I can tell you,” Qexqaneh murmured silkily. “You can be the one. You can put out the lights of this world and start a new one.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “Someone will do it, little king. The Nettle-man is already arising, you know. The rot has spread deep, and maggots crawl up. Even here I smell the putrescence. You can be the one. You can wear the night raiment and wave the scepter of corruption.”

  “Be clear. Do you really imply the end of the world is at hand?”

  “Of course not. But the end of your house, your kingdom, your foul little race and all its issue—that is indeed on time’s nearest horizon.”

  “And one man shall cause this?”

  “No, no. What are those things on the side of your head? Does nothing you hear reach your brain? One shall benefit from it.”

  “At what cost?” William asked skeptically. “Other than the cost of being like you?”

  “The cost is light. Your wife. Your daughters.”

  “What?”

  “They will die anyway. You might as well profit from their slaughter.”

  “Enough!” William roared. He turned to leave, then suddenly spun on his heel.

  “Someone attempted to murder my wife. Was this why? This tainted prophecy of a future even you admit you cannot truly see?”

  “Did I admit that?”

  “You did. Answer me, Qexqaneh. This prophecy of yours. Do others know it?”

  The Kept panted for a few moments, and the air seemed to warm. “When you wretched slave beasts stood on the bones of my kin,” he grated at last, “when you burned every beautiful thing and believed that you—you lowly worms—finally owned the world, I told you then what would happen. My words began the new era, this age you name Everon. They are remembered in many places.”

  “So the attempt on my wife?”

  “I do not know. Coincidences happen, and your race is fond of murder. It’s what made you such entertaining slaves. But she will die, and your daughters, too.”

  “You do not know that,” William said. “You cannot. You speak only to deceive me.”

  “As you wish it, so it is,” Qexqaneh said.

  “Enough of this. I was mistaken to come here.”

  “Yes,” Qexqaneh agreed. “Yes, you were. You do not have the iron in you that your ancestors did. They would not have hesitated. Good-bye, mayfly.”

  William left then, returning to the halls above, but laughter walked behind him like a thousand-legged worm. He did not sleep that night, but went to Alis Berrye.

  He had her room lit with tapers, and she played on the lute and sang lighthearted songs until the sun rose.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LOST

  ASPAR WHITE OPENED HIS EYES to a vaulted stone ceiling and a distant, singsong litany. Fever crawled like centipedes beneath his skin, and when he tried to move, his limbs felt like rotting fern fronds.

  He lay still, listening to the strange song and to his old-man breath, rasping, puzzling at the air above him, interrogating his mute memories.

  He was better than he had been, he remembered that. He’d been fevered, his mind fettered with pain.

  What had happened? Where was he now?

  With an effort, he turned his head from side to side. He lay on a hard wooden bed with stone walls around him on three sides, a low curved ceiling above. It was almost like a tomb, except a slit of a window in the wall above his head let in air from the outside. It smelled like late spring. Looking over his feet, he saw the niche opened into a much larger space—the hall of a castle or, judging by the weird language of the singing, a church.

  By inches he tried to sit up. His legs throbbed with agony, but an inspection showed them both still there, to his relief. But by the time he had lifted his head halfway to sitting, it was spinning so badly he surrendered to a supine position. He fought down his gorge, and sweat broke out thickly on his brow.

  It was a while before he could continue his inspection. When he did, he found that beneath the sheet he was naked except for bandages. His weapons, armor, and clothes were nowhere to be seen. The bandages suggested someone was well disposed toward him, but that was anything but certain.

  Where was he? He tracked along his memory like a hound on a faint trail, pausing at landmarks. He’d come down from the mountains that he knew, clinging to Ogre’s back. He remembered half falling his way down a talus slope and a plummet into a ravine. At some point, he’d fallen off the beast and couldn’t find him again. He had flashes of days clinging to a tree trunk floating down a river, then endless stumbling through hill country that grew steadily flatter. And he remembered something following him, always just behind, making a game of it.

  After that, memory failed completely.

  He walked backwards up the trail in his mind, back into the mountains, climbing
a black tangle of boughs, a song repeating endlessly in his head.

  Nittering, nattering

  Farthing go …

  The Briar King. He remembered with sickening suddenness the thing in the living barrow. He is waking. It’s all true.

  “Winna!” he croaked. The Briar King be damned. The world be damned. Fend had Winna. First Qerla, now Winna.

  He heaved his legs over the side of the cot, ignoring the great waves of agony. Something in his head whirled like a child’s top, but he nevertheless managed to stand. Two steps brought him to the upward-curving wall, and he used it for support to make his way out of the niche.

  A black flash passed behind his eyes, and then he was in the larger space, an enormous cave, like a Sefry rewn, but regular, curving high, high above.

  No, not a cave. That was stupid. He was inside a building …

  His legs weren’t under him anymore. The stone floor abruptly explained to him how foolish he had been to try to walk. Cursing it, he settled for crawling.

  A bell tolled somewhere, and the singing stopped. A few moments later, he heard a gasp nearby.

  “Gentle saints!” a man’s voice exclaimed. “Sir, you should still be abed.”

  Aspar squinted up to see a man in the black habit of a churchman.

  “Winna,” Aspar explained, through gritted teeth. Then he fainted.

  When he came around the next time, it was to a familiar face.

  “Huh,” Aspar grunted.

  “I spent a lot of time and effort dragging you here,” Stephen Darige said. The young man was sitting on a stool a few feet away. “I’d appreciate it if you’d not make that labor wasted by killing yourself now.”

  “Where am I?” Aspar asked.

  “The monastery d’Ef, of course.”

  “D’Ef ?” Aspar grunted. “More than sixty leagues?”

  “Sixty leagues from where? What happened to you, Holter White?”

  “And you found me?” Aspar grunted skeptically.

  “Yes.”

  He tried to sit up again. “Darige,” he said, “I have to go.”

  “You can’t,” Stephen said, placing a hand on his arm. “You’re better than you were, but you’re still badly wounded. You’ll die before you get half a league, and whatever it is you need so badly to do will no more get done than if you rest here a while.”

  “That’s sceat. I’m hurt, but not that bad.”

  “Holter, if I hadn’t found you, you would be dead, right now. If I hadn’t found you near a monastery where the healing sacaum are known, you would still be dead or at the very least you would have lost your legs. There are three sorts of poison still trying to kill you, and the only thing keeping them down are the treatments you get here.”

  Aspar stared into the young man’s eyes, considering. “How long, then,” he snarled, “before I can leave?”

  “Fifteen, twenty days.”

  “That’s too long.”

  Stephen’s face went grim and he leaned forward. “What did you find out there?” he asked in a low voice. “What did this to you?” He paused. “When I discovered you, there was some sort of beast with glowing eyes following you.”

  It’s not what I found, Aspar thought bleakly. It’s what I lost. But he looked Stephen in the eye again. He had to tell someone, didn’t he?

  “That was the greffyn,” he grunted. “It was as Sir Symon told us. I saw it all. The dead, the sacrifices at the sedos. The greffyn. The Briar King. I saw it all.”

  “The Briar King?”

  “I saw him. I don’t think he’s fully awake yet, but he was stirring. I felt that.”

  “But who … what is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Aspar said. “Grim take me, I don’t know. But I wish I had never seen him.”

  “But he did this to you?”

  “A man named Fend did some of it. His men shot me up with arrows. The greffyn did more.” He rubbed his head. “Darige, at the very least I must get word to the other holters, as soon as possible. And to the king. Can you arrange that?”

  “Yes,” Stephen said, but Aspar thought he detected a hesitation.

  “This man that wounded me—Fend. He took captive a friend of mine. I need to find Fend.”

  “You will,” Stephen said softly. “But not now. Even if you found him—in this state, could you fight him?”

  “No,” Aspar said reluctantly. If Fend was going to kill Winna, she was dead. If he had some reason to keep her alive, she was likely to remain that way for a while. He winced at an image of her, spiked to a tree, her entrails pulled out and—

  No. She’s still alive. She must be.

  The boy was right. He was letting his feelings get in the way of his sense.

  Suddenly, something occurred to him.

  “You saw the greffyn,” Aspar said. “Up close.”

  Stephen nodded. “If that’s what it was. It was dark, but it had luminescent eyes and a beak like a bird’s.”

  “Werlic. Yah. But you didn’t get sick? It didn’t attack you?”

  “No, that was strange. It acted cross, sort of, and then left. I don’t know why. It could have killed me with a single blow, I’m sure.”

  “It could have killed you with its breath,” Aspar corrected. “I fell down from merely meeting its gaze. I know one boy died just of touching a corpse that died of touching the monster. And yet you never even got a stomachache?”

  Stephen frowned. “I’d just walked the faneway of Dec-manus. Perhaps the saint protected me.”

  Aspar nodded. There was more than one thing he didn’t understand about the greffyn, anyway. It could have killed Aspar any number of times, but it hadn’t. “Can you take that letter for me?”

  “I can find someone to do it,” Stephen said. “Right now I have duties.”

  “Take it when you can, then. I don’t trust anyone else here.”

  “You trust me?”

  “Yah. Don’t take it too close to heart. I don’t know anyone else here. You I know a little.” He paused. “Don’t take this for much either—but, ah … thanks.”

  The young priest tried not to smile. “I owed you that,” he replied. His face grew more serious. “I’ve something else to ask you. When I found you, you had this.”

  Stephen reached into a leather pouch and produced the engraved horn. A shudder ran through Aspar’s limbs when he saw it.

  “Yah,” he allowed.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a space I don’t remember, after I saw the Briar King. After, I had it with me. You know what it is?”

  “No. But the language on it is very old.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know.” The priest sounded troubled. “But I intend to find out. May I borrow it for a while?”

  “Yah. I’ve no use for the damned thing.”

  Stephen nodded and started to rise. “Oh, another thing,” he said. “Your horses showed up a day after I brought you here. No one can get near them, of course, but they have plenty of pasture. They’ll be left alone until you recover.”

  Aspar’s throat caught, and for an instant he had a terrible fear he might cry in front of the boy. At least he hadn’t lost Ogre and Angel. They’d followed him, the damned stupid, loyal beasts, even with a greffyn behind them.

  “I’ll be back when my duties are done,” Stephen assured him.

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Aspar said gruffly. “I don’t need a nursemaid.”

  “Actually, you do,” Stephen replied.

  Aspar grunted and closed his eyes. He heard Stephen’s footsteps recede.

  I’ll find you, Winna. Or I’ll avenge you, he promised.

  Fratrex Pell smiled at Stephen as he entered his spare chamber.

  “I am most pleased,” he said, tapping the newest sheaf of translations. “No one else has managed even a phrase of this lamina. The saints must have blessed you well.”

  “They did, Fratrex,” Stephen replied. “The
language itself was not difficult—a dialect of the elder Cavarum.”

  “Then why the difficulty?”

  “It was written backwards.”

  The fratrex blinked, then laughed. “Backwards?”

  “Each word, front to back.”

  “What scribe would do such a thing?”

  Stephen remembered the disturbing content of the lamina. “A scribe who did not want his work widely read, I should say.” He struggled for his next words. “Fratrex, I know we’ve discussed this before, but I feel I must say again that my heart tells me these things are best left encrypted.”

  “Knowledge belongs to the church,” the fratrex said gently. “All knowledge. Let’s have an end to your questioning, Brother Stephen, once and for all. I admire your persistence, but it is ill placed.”

  Stephen nodded. “Yes, Fratrex.”

  “Now, this other thing.” He held up a vellum scroll. “I’m puzzled. I didn’t ask you to translate this.”

  “No, Fratrex, but in light of what the holter told us, I thought it pertinent to see what the scriftorium might hold concerning the Briar King and greffyns.”

  “I see. I assume you’re doing this in spare time?”

  “At night, Fratrex, in the meditation hour.”

  “The hour is called that for a reason, Brother Stephen. You should meditate.”

  “Yes, Fratrex. But I think this might be important.”

  The fratrex sighed and pushed the scrifti back. “The holter was mad with fever when you brought him here, at the quay awaiting Saint Farsinth’s boat. Whatever hallucinations he may have had aren’t likely to be relevant to anything.”

  “He was badly hurt,” Stephen admitted. “And yet I know this man, somewhat. He is deeply pragmatic and not given to flights of fancy. When last I saw him, he thought greffyns and Briar Kings no more than children’s fantasy. Now he is convinced he has seen them both.”

  “We often mock those things we believe most deeply,” the fratrex said, “especially those things we do not wish to believe. There is much separation between the waking mind and the mind of madness.”

  “Yes, Fratrex. But as you see, in the Tafles Taceis, the Book of Murmurs, there is a passage copied from an unnamed source in old high Cavari. In it, mention is made of the gorgos gripon, the ‘bent-nosed terror.’ They are described as the ‘hounds of the horned lord,’ and it is further said that their glance is fatal.”