The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  There would be plenty of slinders left when the utins were dead. Aspar gave up the vague hope that their enemies might cancel one another out.

  Winna, Stephen, and the two Hornladhers had done as Aspar directed, and now he followed them until at last they reached a perch above a long, nearly vertical ascent. Aspar took his bow back off his shoulder and waited for the creatures to follow.

  “They’re different,” he muttered under his breath, sighting down a shaft and impaling the first one to reach the base of the branch.

  “Different how?” Stephen shouted down from above.

  Aspar’s neck hairs pricked up—now Stephen’s uncanny senses seemed to be fine.

  “They’re leaner, stronger,” he said. “The old ones are gone.”

  “I only saw the dead ones at the fane by the naubagm,” Winna said, “but I don’t remember them being tattooed like that, either.”

  Aspar nodded. “Yah. That’s what I couldn’t put my finger on. That’s new, too.”

  “The mountain tribes tattoo,” Ehawk said.

  “Yah,” Aspar agreed. “But the slinders we saw before came from a mixture of tribes and villages.” He shot the next climber in the eye. “These all have the same tattoos.”

  They did. Each had a ram-headed snake wound around one forearm and a greffyn on the biceps of the same arm.

  “Maybe they’re all from the same tribe,” Ehawk offered.

  “Do you know any tribe with that tattoo?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “The ram-headed serpent and the greffyn are both symbols associated with the Briar King,” Stephen said. “We’ve been assuming that the Briar King drove these people mad somehow, took away their human intelligence. But what if…”

  “What?” Winna said. “You think they chose this? They can’t even speak!”

  “I’ll need you to start passing down arrows soon,” Aspar said, shooting again. “I’ve only six left. The rest are on Ogre.”

  “The horses!” Winna exclaimed.

  “They can take care of themselves,” Aspar said. “Or they can’t. Nothing we can do about it.”

  “But Ogre—”

  “Yah.” He thrust away the pain. Ogre and Angel had been with him a long time.

  But everything died eventually.

  Slinders continued to arrive from the forest, with no end of them in sight. So many teemed below, he couldn’t see the forest floor for a hundred kingsyards.

  “What do we do when we run out of arrows?” Winna asked.

  “I’ll kick ’em down,” Aspar said.

  “I thought you were on friendly terms with the Briar King and his friends,” Stephen said. “Last time they let you live.”

  “Last time I had the king at the tip of an arrow,” Aspar said. “The one the Church gave us.”

  “You still have it?”

  “Yah. But unless the king himself shows his face, I don’t reckon to use it until it’s the only one I have left.”

  It also occurred to him that the Sefry woman Leshya had been with him then. Maybe that had been the difference; Leshya’s true allegiance was—had always been—something of a mystery.

  “That won’t be too long,” Winna said.

  Aspar nodded and cast his gaze about. Maybe they could get to another tree, one with a straighter, higher bole, then cut the branch that got them there.

  He was looking for such an escape route when he heard the singing. It was a weird rising and falling melody that caught at something in his bones. He was sure he had heard the song before, could almost imagine its singer, but the true memory eluded him.

  The source of this song was visible, however.

  “Saints,” Stephen said, for he had seen it, too.

  The singing came from a short, bandy-legged man and a slender, pale-skinned girl whose green eyes blazed even at this distance, which was about fifty kingsyards. The girl looked to be only about ten or eleven, the youngest slinder Aspar had ever seen. She held a snake in each hand—from this distance they looked to be rattling vipers—and the man held a crooked staff with a single drooping pinecone attached to it.

  Both had the tattoos. Otherwise, they were as naked as the day they were born. They directed their song upward, but it took only an instant to understand that they weren’t singing to the sky.

  Ironoaks, the very ancient ones, had boughs so huge and heavy that they often sagged to the ground. The one Aspar and his companions were perched in wasn’t that old; only two branches were low enough even to jump up and grab. But as the holter watched, the tips of the farthest branches quivered earthward, then began to bend, as if they were the fingers of a giant reaching down to pick something from the ground.

  “Raver,” Aspar swore.

  Ignoring the next slinder clambering up the tree, he took aim at the singing man and sent his shaft flying. His aim was true, but another slinder somehow danced in the way of the arrow, taking the point in the shoulder. The same happened with his next shot.

  “This is bad,” Stephen said.

  The whole tree shuddered now as the thicker boughs began straining toward the pair. The slinders around them were beginning to leap at the descending branches, and though the branches weren’t low enough to catch yet, they soon would be. Then the entire tree would swarm with them.

  Aspar looked up at the men-at-arms. “You two,” he said. “Start cutting branches. Anything that leads here. Move out to where they’re thinner so they’ll be easier to cut.”

  “This is our doom,” one of the men said. “Our lord was evil, and now we pay the price of serving him.”

  “You don’t serve him now,” Winna snapped. “You serve Anne, the rightful queen of Crotheny. Gather your manhood and do as Aspar says. Or give me your sword and let me do it.”

  “I heard what she did,” the man replied, tracing the sign against evil on his forehead. “This woman you call queen. Killed men without touching them, using shinecraft. It’s all done. The world is ending.”

  Stephen, who was nearest the man, reached his hand out. “Give me your sword,” he said. “Give it to me now.”

  “Give it, Ional,” the other solider snapped. He looked at Stephen. “I’m not ready to die. I’ll go up this way. You’ll take the other?”

  “Yes,” Stephen agreed.

  Aspar gave Stephen and the Hornladher a quick glance as they moved out farther. If they could isolate the main branch they were on, they might have a chance.

  Winna was looking at him, though, and he felt something sink down through his guts. Winna was the best and the most unexpected thing that had come into his life in a long time. She was young, yes, so young that sometimes she seemed as if she might be from a different country across some distant sea. But most of the time she seemed to know him, know him in a way that was unlikely—and sometimes was more unsettling than comfortable. He’d been alone for a long time.

  The past few days she hadn’t talked to him much, not since she’d found him keeping watch by the wounded Leshya. In that, at least, she didn’t know him as well as she might. What he felt for Leshya wasn’t love or even lust. It was something else, something even he had a hard time naming. But it resembled, he imagined, kinship. The Sefry woman was like him in a way that Winna could never be.

  But maybe Winna did understand that. Maybe that was the problem.

  It’s all moot if the slinders get us, he reckoned, and he nearly chuckled. It sounded like one of those sayings. As well stretch your neck for the Raver as marry. A good day is the one you live through. It’s all moot if the slinders come…

  Sceat, he was starting to think like Stephen.

  He shot another slinder.

  Three arrows left.

  It wasn’t as easy cutting through branches as Stephen might have wished or imagined. The sword had an edge, but it wasn’t that sharp, and he’d never really done much wood chopping, so he wasn’t certain about the best way to go about the task.

  A glance showed him t
hat the outer branches were nearly low enough for the slinders to reach; that meant he had to hurry.

  He reared back for a more powerful swing and nearly fell. He was straddling a limb, clutching it with his inner thighs the way one did a horse. But like a horse, the branch refused to be still, and it seemed a dizzying long way to the ground.

  He renewed his balance and made a more modest cut, feeling the living wood shiver under the blow and watching a smallish chip fly. Maybe if he cut straight, then at an angle…

  He did, and that worked better.

  He couldn’t stop paying attention to the slinder song. There was a language there; he felt the cadence, the flow of meaning. But he couldn’t understand it, not a single word, and given his saint-blessed memory and knowledge of languages, that was astonishing. In his mind he compared it to everything from Old Vadhiian to what little he knew of the language of Hadam, but nothing fit. Nevertheless, he felt as if the meaning was incredibly close, resting on his nose, too near to his eyes to quite see.

  Aspar thought the slinders had changed. What did that mean?

  “Slinder” was an Oostish word that just meant “eater” or “devouring one.” But what were they really? The short answer was that they had once been people who lived near or in the King’s Forest, before the Briar King awoke. Since his awakening, entire tribes had abandoned their villages to follow the king, whatever he was.

  There were legends of such things, of course. There was a detail in the Tale of Galas, the only remaining text from the ancient vanished kingdom of Tirz Eqqon. The great bull of the Ferigolz had been stolen by Vhomar giants, and Galas had been sent to retrieve it. In his quest he had met a giant named Koerwidz who had a magic cauldron, a drink from which transformed men into beasts of various kinds.

  Saint Fufluns was said to possess a pipe whose music filled men with madness and turned them cannibal. Grim, the Raver—the dark and terrible Ingorn spirit that Aspar swore by—also was said to inspire battle madness in his worshippers, making birsirks of them.

  The limb gave way with a snap, hung for a moment by its bark, then fell. The portion Stephen was on sprang up like the arm of a catapult, and he suddenly found himself airborne and feeling stupid.

  On the Sundry Follies of the Thinks-Too-Much, he began, a new essay he’d just decided to write in his head. He reckoned he had time for another line or so as he flailed wildly for purchase. His thigh hit a branch, and he scrabbled for it, losing the sword, of course, in the process and not securing a hold, either.

  Looking up, he saw Winna’s face far above, tiny but beautiful. Did she know he loved her? He was sorry he hadn’t told her even though it might mean the end of their friendship—and of his friendship with Aspar.

  His hand caught a branch, and fire seemed to shoot up his arm, but he held it, nevertheless. Gasping, he glanced down. The slinders were there, leaping for him, missing his dangling feet by a yard or so.

  The chief virtue of the Thinks-Too-Much is that it isn’t likely to reproduce its kind, for its lack of attention to matters at hand oft leads to an untimely demise. Its only virtue is its love of friends and sorrow that it could not help them more.

  He saw that the sorcelled tree limbs had reached the ground, and the man-beasts were swarming up into the branches. He looked up in time to see a leering face just before another body grappled his and pulled him into the salivating mob below.

  “I’m sorry, Aspar!” he managed to shout before he was smothered in greedy hands.

  LEOFF GAGGED at the pain as his fingers were stretched toward what had once been a natural angle for them. “The device is my own invention,” the leic explained proudly. “I’ve had great success with it.”

  Leoff blinked through his tears and peered at the thing. It was essentially a gauntlet of supple leather with small metal hooks at the end of each finger. His hand had been inserted into the glove and placed on a metal plate with various holes drilled for the hooks to catch in. The doctor had stretched his fingers out in the directions they ought to lie and fixed them there with the hooks.

  Then—the most painful part—a second plate was fitted above his hand and tightened down with screws. The tendons of his arm ran with fire, and he wondered if this was just a more subtle form of torture devised by the usurper and his physicians.

  “Let’s go back to the heat and the herbs.” Leoff winced. “That part felt good.”

  “That was just to loosen things up,” the leic explained, “and to invoke the healing humors. This is the important part. Your hands were mending all wrong, but fortunately they had not been allowed to progress for too long. We must now guide them into the proper shape; after that, I can build rigid splints that will hold them in place until the true healing can occur.”

  “This comes up often, then?” Leoff gasped as the fellow further tightened the screws. His palm was still far from flat, but already he could feel multiplied tiny snaps within his bruised flesh. “Hands done up like this.”

  “Not like this,” the leic admitted. “I’ve never worked on hands damaged quite in this way. But hands crushed by blow from mace or sword are common enough. Before I was leic to His Majesty, I was physician to the court of the Greft of Ofthen. He held tournaments every month, you see, and he had five sons and thirteen nephews of jousting age.”

  “So you’ve only recently come to Eslen?” Leoff asked, glad for the distraction.

  “I came about a year ago, though at the time I was attendant to the leic who served His Majesty King William. After the king’s death, I served Her Majesty the queen briefly before becoming attendant to King Robert’s physician.”

  “I am recently come here as well,” Leoff said.

  The physician tightened the screws.

  “I know who you are, of course. You gained a reputation rather quickly, I should say.” He smiled thinly. “You might have exercised a bit more prudence.”

  “I might have,” Leoff assented. “But then we wouldn’t have the fun of seeing exactly how effective your device will be.”

  “I will not deceive you,” the leic said. “Your hands can be made better, but they cannot be made as new.”

  “I never imagined they could be.” Leoff sighed, blinking away tears of pain as another half-healed bone snapped and went groaning into a new position.

  The next day he clumsily pawed through one of the books the usurper had supplied him, using hands encased in rigid gloves of iron and heavy leather, as the physician had promised. They were splayed out, fully stretched, and looked altogether too much like the comically exaggerated hands of a puppet. He couldn’t decide whether he appeared droll or horrible as he tried to turn the pages with his cumbersome mittens.

  He soon forgot that, however, as he was lost in puzzlement.

  The book was an older one, printed in antique Almannish characters. It was entitled Luthes sa Felthan ya sa Birmen—“Songs of Field and Birm”—and those were the only intelligible words in the book. The rest of it was inked in characters Leoff had never seen before. They resembled the alphabet he knew in some regards, but he couldn’t be certain of any single letter.

  There were some pages with odd poetic-looking configurations that also seemed somewhat familiar, but all in all it appeared that the book’s cover and its contents did not go together. Even the paper inside didn’t seem to match; it looked much older than the binding.

  He’d found an intriguing page of diagrams that didn’t make any more sense than the text, when he heard someone rattling at the door again. He sighed, steeling himself for yet another round with the prince or his doctor.

  But it was neither, and Leoff felt a rush of pure joy as a young girl walked in through the portal, which promptly slammed and locked behind her.

  “Mery!” he cried.

  She hesitated a moment, then rushed into his arms. He lifted her, his ridiculous hands crossing behind her back.

  “Urf!” Mery grunted as he squeezed.

  “It’s so good to see you,” he said as he set h
er down.

  “Mother said you were probably awfully dead,” Mery said, looking terribly serious. “I so hoped she was wrong.”

  He reached to tousle her hair, but her eyes grew wide at the sight of his claws.

  “Ah,” he said, clapping them together. “This is nothing. Something to make my hands feel better. How is your mother, then, the lady Gramme?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, really,” Mery replied. “I haven’t seen her for days.”

  He knelt, feeling things pop and pull in his legs.

  “Where are they keeping you, Mery?”

  She shrugged, staring at his hands but never directly into his face. “They put a blindfold on me.” She brightened a bit. “But it’s seventy-eight steps. My steps, anyway.”

  He smiled at her cleverness. “I hope your room is nicer than this.”

  She looked around. “It is. I have a window, at least.”

  A window. Were they no longer in the dungeons?

  “Did you go up or down stairs to get here?” he asked.

  “Yes, down, twenty.” She had never stopped staring at his hands. “What happened to them?” she asked, pointing.

  “I hurt them,” he said softly.

  “I’m sorry,” Mery said. “I wish I could make them better.” Her frown deepened. “You can’t play the hammarharp like that, can you?”

  He felt a sudden clotting in his throat. “No,” he said, “I can’t. But you can play for me. Would you mind doing that?”

  “No,” she said. “Though you know I’m not very good.”

  He peered into her eyes and placed his hands gently on her shoulders. “I never told you this before,” he said, “not in so many words. But you have it in you to be a great musician. Perhaps the best.”