The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  Mery blinked. “Me?”

  “Don’t let it go to your head.”

  “My head is too large for my shoulders, anyhow, Mother says.” She frowned. “Do you suppose I could ever compose, as you do? That would be the very best thing.”

  Leoff rose, blinking a bit in surprise. “A female composer? I’ve never heard of that. But I see no reason…” He trailed off.

  How would such a creature be treated, a woman composer? Would she reap commissions? Would it bring gold to her pocket?

  Probably not. Nor would it increase her chances of a good marriage; in fact, it probably would decrease them.

  “Well, let’s talk about that when the time comes, eh? For now, why don’t you play me something—anything you want, something for fun—and then we’ll have a lesson, yes?”

  She nodded happily and took her seat at the instrument, placing her tiny fingers on the yellow-and-red keys. She hit one experimentally and held it down, giving it a delicate tremble with her finger. The note sang so sweetly in the stone room that Leoff thought his heart would flow like warm wax.

  Mery gave a little cough and began to play.

  She began plainly enough with what he recognized as a Lierish nursery tune, a simple melody played quite naturally in etrama, the mode known also as the Lamp of Night, lilting, plaintive, soothing. Mery fingered the melody with the right hand, and with the left she added a very simple accompaniment of sustained triads. It was altogether charming, and his astonishment grew as he realized that he hadn’t taught her this—it had to be her own arrangement. He waited to see how it would continue.

  As he suspected, the last chord hung unsustained, drawing him into the next phrase, and now the humming chords became a moving set of counterpoints. The harmonies were flawless, sentimental but not overly so. It was a mother, holding her infant close, singing a song she’d sung a hundred times before. Leoff could almost feel the blanket against his skin, the hand stroking his head, the slight breeze blowing into the nursery from the night meadow beyond.

  The final chord was again unsustained, and very odd. The harmonies suddenly loosened, opened up, as if the melody had flown out the window, leaving infant and mother behind. Leoff realized that the mode had changed from the gentle second mode to the haunting seventh, sefta, but even for that mode the accompaniment was strange. And it got stranger, as Leoff realized that Mery had moved from lullaby to dream and now—quite quickly—to nightmare.

  The base line was a Black Mary crawling under his bed, the tune had shifted to some nearly forgotten middle line, and the high notes were all spiders and the scent of burning hair. Mery’s face was perfectly blank with concentration, white and smooth as only a child’s could be, unmarred by the march of years, the stamp of terror and worry, disappointment and hatred. But it wasn’t her face he was hearing now but rather something that had come out of her soul and that clearly was not unmarred.

  Before he knew it, the melody had suddenly broken: fragmented, searching to put itself back together but unable to, as if it had forgotten itself. The hush-a-bye had become a whervel in three-time, calling up images of a mad masked ball in which the faces beneath were more terrible than the masks—monsters disguised as people disguised as monsters.

  Then, slowly, beneath the madness, the melody came back together and strengthened, but now it was in the low end of the scale, played with the left hand. It gathered the rest of the notes to itself and calmed them down until the counterpoint was nearly hymnlike, then simple triads again. Mery had brought them back to the nursery, back to where it was safe, but the voice had changed. It was no longer a mother singing but a father, and this time, at last, the final chord resolved.

  Leoff found himself blinking tears when it was over. Technically, it would be surprising from a student of many years, but Mery had studied with him only for a couple of months. Yet the sheer intuitive power of it—the soul it hinted at—was nothing short of astonishing.

  “The saints are working here,” he murmured.

  During his torture, he’d almost stopped believing in the saints, or at least stopped believing that they cared about him at all. With a few strokes of her hands, Mery had changed all that.

  “You didn’t like it?” she asked timidly.

  “I loved it, Mery,” he breathed. He fought to keep his voice from trembling. “It’s—can you play it like that again? Just like that?”

  She frowned. “I think so. That’s the first time I’ve played it. But it’s in my head.”

  “Yes,” Leoff said. “I know what you mean. That’s how it is with me. But I’ve never met—Can you start again, Mery?”

  She nodded, put her hands to the keyboard, and played it again note for note.

  “You must learn to write your music down,” he said. “Would you like to learn that?”

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  “Very good. You’ll have to do it yourself. My hands are…” He held them up helplessly.

  “What happened to them?” Mery asked again.

  “Some bad men did it,” he admitted. “But they aren’t here anymore.”

  “I should like to see the men who did that,” Mery said. “I should like to see them die.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” he said softly. “There’s no sense in hatred, Mery. There’s no sense in it all, and it only hurts you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being hurt if I could hurt them,” Mery insisted.

  “Perhaps,” Leoff told her. “But I would mind. Now, let’s learn to write, shall we? What’s the name of this song?”

  She looked suddenly shy.

  “It’s for you,” she said. “‘Leoff’s Song.’”

  Leoff stirred from sleep, thinking he had heard something but not certain what it was. He sat up and rubbed at his eyes, then winced as he was reminded that even so simple a task had become complicated and somewhat dangerous.

  Still, he felt better than he had for some time. The visit from Mery had helped him more than he cared to admit to himself, certainly more than he would ever admit to his captors. If this was some new form of torture—to show him Mery again and then take her away—his tormentors would fail. Whatever the usurper had said to him, whatever he had said back, he knew his days were numbered.

  Even if he never saw the girl again, his life was already better than it would have been.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” a voice whispered.

  Leoff had begun to lie back down on his simple bed. Now he froze in the act, uncertain whether he had really heard the voice. It had been very faint and raspy. Could it be his ears, turning the movement of a guard in the corridor beyond into an indictment of his thoughts?

  “Who’s there?” he asked quietly.

  “Hatred is well worth the effort,” the voice continued, much more clearly this time. “In fact, hatred is the only wood some furnaces will burn.”

  Leoff couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. Not from inside the room and not from the door. Then where?

  He got up, clumsily lighting a candle and searching the walls as he stumbled about.

  “Who speaks to me?” he asked.

  “Hatred,” the reply came. “Lo Husuro. I have become eternal, I think.”

  “Where are you?”

  “It is always night,” the voice replied. “And once it was quiet. But now I hear so much beauty. Tell me what the little girl looks like.”

  Leoff’s eyes settled to one corner of the room. Finally he understood and felt stupid for not guessing earlier. There was only one opening in the room besides the door, and that was a small vent about the length of a kingsfoot on each side, too small for even an infant to crawl through—but not too small for a voice.

  “You’re a prisoner, too?”

  “Prisoner?” the voice murmured. “Yes, yes, that is one way to say it. I am prevented, that is, prevented from the thing that means the most to me.”

  “And what is that?” Leoff asked.

  “Revenge.” The voice was softer
than ever, but now that Leoff was closer to the vent, it was very clear. “In my language we call it Lo Videicha. It is more than a word in my language—it is an entire philosophy. Tell me about the girl.”

  “Her name is Mery. She is seven years of age. She has nut-brown hair and bright blue eyes. She was wearing a dark green gown today.”

  “She is your daughter? Your niece?”

  “No. She is my student.”

  “But you love her,” the voice insisted.

  “That is not your business,” Leoff said.

  “Yes,” the man replied. “That would be a knife to give me, yes, if I were your enemy. But I think we are not enemies.”

  “Who are you?”

  “No, that is too familiar, don’t you see? Because it is a very long answer and is all in my heart.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  A harsh laugh followed, a small silence, then a confession. “I do not know,” he admitted. “Much of what I remember is suspect. So much pain, and without moon or sun or stars to keep the world below me. I have drifted very far, but the music brings me back. Do you have a lute, perhaps, or a chithara?”

  “There is a lute in my cell, yes,” Leoff replied.

  “Could you play something for me, then? Something to remind me of orange groves and water trickling from a clay pipe?”

  “I can’t play anything,” Leoff said. “My hands have been destroyed.”

  “Of course,” Hatred said. “That is your soul, your music, that is. So they struck at that. They missed, I think.”

  “They missed,” Leoff agreed.

  “They give you the instruments to taunt you. But why do they let the girl see you, do you think? Why do they give you a way to make music?”

  “The prince wants me to do something,” Leoff replied. “He wants me to compose for him.”

  “Will you?”

  Leoff stepped back from the hole in the floor, suddenly suspicious. The voice could be anyone: Prince Robert, one of his agents, anyone. The usurper certainly knew how he had tricked Praifec Hespero. He wasn’t going to let such a thing happen again, was he?

  “The wrongs done me were done by others,” he said finally. “The prince has commissioned music from me, and I will write it as best I can.”

  There was a pause, then a dark chuckle from the other. “I see. You are a man of intelligence. Smart. I must think of a way to win your confidence, I think.”

  “Why do you want my confidence?” Leoff asked.

  “There is a song, a very old song from my country,” the fellow said. “I can try to make it into your language if you like.”

  “If it pleases you.”

  There was a bit of a pause, then the man began. The sound was jarring, and Leoff understood immediately what he was hearing: the voice of a man who had forgotten how to sing.

  The words came haltingly but plain.

  The seed in winter lies dreaming

  Of the tree it will grow into

  The Cat-Furred Worm

  Longs for the butterfly it will become

  The Tadpole twitches its tail

  But desires tomorrow’s legs

  I am hatred

  But dream of being vengeance

  After the last line he chuckled. “We will speak again, Leffo,” he said. “For I am your malasono.”

  “I don’t know that word,” Leoff said.

  “I don’t know if your language has such a word,” the man said. “It is a conscience, the sort that leads you to do evil things to evil people. It is the spirit of Lo Videicha.”

  “I have no word for that concept,” Leoff confirmed. “Nor do I wish one.”

  But in the darkness, later, as his fingers longed for the hammarharp, he began to wonder.

  Sighing, unable to sleep, he took up the strange book he’d been studying earlier and puzzled at it again. He fell asleep on it, and when he woke, something had fit together, and in a burst of epiphany he suddenly understood how he might be able to slay Prince Robert. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  But he would certainly do it, if he got the chance.

  A SPAR TURNED at Winna’s scream, just in time to watch as Stephen was pulled from the branch.

  It seemed familiar somehow, and it happened slowly enough for Aspar to understand why. It was like a Sefry puppet play, a miniature of the world, unreal. At this distance Stephen’s face was no more expressive than that of a marionette carved of wood, and when he looked up at Aspar one last time, there was nothing there, only the dark spaces of his eyes, the round circle of his mouth.

  Then he was gone.

  Then another figure plunged through the frame, caricatured by distance as Stephen, a knife gleaming in his hand as he swung purposefully from the branch into the grove of raised arms and their five-petaled blooms.

  Ehawk.

  From somewhere near Aspar heard a raw scream of rage. Part of him wondered vaguely who it was, and it was only later, when he felt the soreness of his throat, that he realized it had been his own.

  He started forward on his branch, but there was nothing he could do. Winna shrieked again, a sound that somewhat resembled the boy’s name. Aspar watched, his heart frozen, as Stephen’s face appeared once, streaked with blood, and then went back down in the mass.

  Ehawk he didn’t see again. He aimed the bow, wondering what target to hit, what miracle shot could save his friends.

  But the cold lump in his chest knew the truth: They were already dead.

  Fury welled up in him. He shot, anyway, wanting to kill another of them, wishing he had enough arrows to slaughter them all. He didn’t care what they had been before the world went mad. Farmers, hunters, fathers, brothers, sisters—he didn’t care.

  He looked at Winna, saw the tear-brimmed eyes, the utter helplessness that was mirror to his own. Her gaze pleaded for him to do something.

  His survival instinct made him turn to use his last few arrows on those slinders who still would be climbing up after them, but to his surprise he realized that they were gone. As he watched, the last of their attackers leapt from the tree, and like a wave retreating after it runs up a shingle, the mass of grotesque bodies flowed away into the twilight.

  In but a few heartbeats, there was only the hushed sound of them retreating through the forest.

  Aspar continued to crouch, staring after them. He felt incredibly tired, old, and lost.

  “It’s snowing again,” Winna said sometime later.

  Aspar acknowledged the truth of that with a little shrug.

  “Aspar.”

  “Yah.” He sighed. “Come on.”

  He stood on his perch and helped her down. She wrapped her arms around him, and they clutched there for a few moments. He was aware of the two men-at-arms watching them, but for the moment he didn’t care. The warmth and the smell of her felt good. He remembered the first time she had kissed him, the confusion and the exhilaration, and he wanted to go back to that moment, back before things had become so confusing.

  Before Stephen and Ehawk had died.

  “Hello!” a voice called up from below.

  Looking past Winna’s curling snow-damped locks, Aspar saw the knight Neil MeqVren. The Vitellian swordsman was standing with him and the girl Austra. An oblique black anger stirred. These three and the men-at-arms—they were almost strangers. Why should they be allowed to live when Stephen was torn limb from limb?

  Sceat on it. There were things to be done.

  “Let me go,” Aspar muttered gruffly, pulling at Winna’s arms. “I need to talk to them.”

  “Aspar, that was Stephen and Ehawk.”

  “Yah. I need to talk to these men.”

  She let him go, and, avoiding her eyes, he helped her the rest of the way down the tree, jumping to avoid the bodies piled up on the spreading roots, wary that one or more of them might still be alive. But none moved.

  “You’re all all right?” he asked Neil.

  The knight nodded. “Only by the mercy of t
he saints. Those things had no interest in us.”

  “What do you mean?” Winna demanded.

  Neil lifted his hands. “We were just attacking Austra’s captors when they came pouring out from the woods. I cut three or four of them down before I realized they were just trying to run around us. We sheltered against a tree to keep from getting trampled. When they were passed, we fought Austra’s kidnappers. I’m afraid we had to kill them all.”

  Austra nodded as if in agreement but seemed too shaken to speak, clinging tightly to Cazio.

  “They ran past you,” Aspar repeated, trying to understand. “Then they were after us?”

  “No,” Winna said thoughtfully. “Not us. They were after Stephen. And as soon as they got him, they left. Ehawk…” Her eyes widened with hope. “Aspar, what if they’re still alive? We didn’t actually see—”

  “Yah,” he said, turning it this way and that in his head. After all, they had thought Stephen dead once before, and then they actually had had his body.

  Winna was right.

  “Well, we have to go after him, then,” Winna said.

  “A moment, please,” Neil said, still studying the landscape of bodies. “There’s a lot here I don’t understand. These things that attacked us—these are the slinders you described to the queen on our first day of riding?”

  “That they are,” Aspar admitted, impatience beginning to grow in him.

  “And these serve the Briar King?”

  “Same answer,” Aspar replied.

  “And what is that?” Neil pointed to the half-chewed carcass of an utin.

  Aspar looked at the thing, thinking that Stephen would probably like to see it dissected like this so he could study it.

  Instead of skin, the utin was covered in horny plates, not unlike the scuts of a tortoise. From the joints of those plates, black hairs bristled. In Aspar’s experience, that natural armor was good enough to turn arrows, dirks, and axes, but somehow the slinders had pried some of the horn up and dug into the flesh, exposing the wet organs within the thickly boned rib cage. The creature’s eyes had been clawed out, the bottom jaw broken and half torn off. A human arm, severed at the shoulder, was jammed in its throat.