by Greg Keyes
“I never said I hadn’t taken sides, my dove,” she replied. “It’s just I find the question of my allegiance tedious, like the rest of this business. War does not suit me well. As I said earlier, I mostly want to be left alone, to do as I please. My brother assures me that this can be the case so long as I follow his instructions.”
Now, at last, Neil began to hear the warning bell ringing in his head.
“And those instructions were…?” he asked.
“They were rather specific,” she said. “If Anne comes across my stoop, I am to make certain that she vanishes, immediately and permanently, along with anyone who accompanies her.”
STEPHEN GLANCED at Dreodh, but the man didn’t challenge the girl’s assertion.
“You told your parents to become slinders?” Stephen asked, trying to find some way the pronouncement made sense. “Why would you do that?”
Stephen studied the girl for some sign that she was something else, perhaps an old soul transposed to a young body or a creature that resembled a human being only so much as a hummingbird resembled a bee.
All he saw, however, was that odd, long moment that suspended between child and woman. The children, unlike the adults, were not naked; the girl wore a simple yellow shift that hung on her like a narrow bell. A bit of faded embroidery at the cuffs showed that someone—mother, grandmother, sister, perhaps even the girl herself—had tried to pretty it up at some point.
She was slim, but her hands, head, and cowskin-slippered feet looked too large. Her nose was a small dipping slope—a girl’s nose still—but her cheekbones were beginning to lift her face into a woman’s. In the pale light, her eyes appeared hazel. Her brown hair was lighter on the crown and at the ends. And he could easily imagine her in a meadow, wearing a necklace of clover, playing Rickety Rock Bridge or Queen o’ the Grove. He could see her twirling so that the hem of her dress puffed out like a ball gown.
“The forest is ill,” the girl said. “The sickness is spreading. If the forest dies, so does the world. Our parents broke the ancient law and helped bring this sickness upon the trees. We’ve asked them to set things right.”
“When you blew the horn, you summoned the Briar King to his work in the world,” Dreodh explained. “But his way has been prepared for generations. Twelve years ago, we dreothen sang the elder rites and made the seven sacrifices. Twelve years—the heartbeat of an oak—that’s how long it has taken for the earth to give him up at last.
“And in that twelve years, every child born on the ground hallowed of the forest was born of wombs stroked by hemlock and oak, ash and mistletoe. Born his. When he awoke, they awoke.”
“We knew what we had to do, all of us at once,” the girl took up. “We left our homes, our towns and villages. Those who were too young to walk, we carried. And when our parents came after us, we told them how things would be. Some resisted; they wouldn’t drink the mead or eat the flesh. But most did as we asked. They are his army now, his host to sweep the forest clean of the corruption that invades it.”
“Mead?” Stephen asked. “Is that what’s in the cauldrons? It’s mead that robs them of their senses?”
“Mead is a convenient word,” Dreodh said, “but it’s not the get of honey. It is Oascef, the Water of Life, it is Oasciaodh, the Water of Poetry. And it does not rob us of our senses—it restores them. It returns us to the forest and to health.”
“My mistake,” Stephen said. “The slinders that brought me here seemed rather…insane. This Oascef isn’t made from a mushroom that resembles a man’s member, by any chance?”
“What you call madness is divine,” the girl replied, ignoring his question. “Him in us. There is no fear or doubt, no pain or desire. In such a state we can hear his words and know his will. And only he can save this world from the fever that crawls up from its roots.”
“I’m at a loss, then,” Stephen said. “You say you have chosen to become what you are, that the unspeakable acts you commit are justified because the world is ill. Very well, then: What is this illness? What are you fighting, exactly?”
Dreodh smiled. “Now you’ve begun to ask the right questions. Now you begin to understand why he called for you and commanded that you be brought to us.”
“No, I do not,” Stephen said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand at all.”
Dreodh paused, then nodded sympathetically. “Nor are we the ones to explain it to you. But we will take you to the one who will. Tomorrow.”
“And until then?”
Dreodh shrugged. “This is what remains of the Halafolk settlement. It will be destroyed in time, but if you wish to explore it, feel free. Sleep where you want; we will find you when the time comes.”
“May I have a torch or—”
“The witchlights will accompany you,” Dreodh said. “And the houses have their own illumination.”
Stephen walked through the dark, narrow streets, trying to sort out his priorities, but found himself captivated by the city itself. The street was bounded on both sides by buildings two, three, sometimes four stories tall. They were fantastically slender, many joined side to side, others separated by narrow alleys. Although built of stone, they had a gossamer quality, and where the witchlights drifted close, they gleamed like polished onyx.
The first few structures were occupied by more of the children. He could hear laughter, song, and the soft lisps of them sleeping. If he extended his senses, he could make out the murmur of at least a thousand of them, if not more. A few of the very young ones were crying, but other than that he heard nothing that he would characterize as fear, anguish, or despair.
He couldn’t be certain how much of what the girl and Dreodh had told him was true, but one thing seemed certain: These children were not captives, at least not captives of anything they feared.
He pushed farther into the ancient city, seeking solitude. He knew he should be looking for a way out, but it seemed unlikely that his captors would let him wander freely if there was any chance of escape. Besides, at the moment he was too curious to really want to escape.
If Dreodh was telling the truth, Aspar and Winna were safe enough, at least from the slinders. If he was lying, his friends were almost certainly dead already. He didn’t—wouldn’t—believe that or even think too much about it until he had some evidence of it. But the chance to find out more of what was going on, what the Briar King wanted—well, that was what they were all looking for, wasn’t it?
What good would he have been trying to help a princess regain her throne? He wasn’t a warrior or a strategist. He was, he mused, a scholar with an interest in the past and in languages common and obscure. Surely I can do more good here than marching to Eslen.
Following his curiosity, he tried one of the doors. It was wooden and not too old. The Halafolk, he reasoned, must have traded constantly with their aboveground neighbors. They had to eat, after all, and while subterranean lakes might produce some fish and some sort of crops might be grown without sunlight, surely most of their sustenance had come from the surface.
Stephen wondered briefly how that trade had been accomplished while keeping the location of the rewns secret, but the answer was so obvious, he felt stupid for the three heartbeats he had wondered at it.
The Sefry. Those who traveled above, in the caravans—they were the suppliers.
The door pushed easily inward, revealing an apartment of stone. The place smelled faintly peppery. The hard floor was softened by a carpet woven of what appeared to be wool. Could sheep live underground? He doubted it. The pattern was vaguely familiar, a little like the colorfully abstract swirls painted on Sefry tents and wagons. Four cushions formed a loose ring around a low round table. In one corner a loom waited patiently for a weaver. Had the carpet been woven on it? Nearby wicker baskets overflowed with skeins of yarn and wooden tools he didn’t recognize.
The room seemed rather lived in, as if the Halafolk hadn’t taken much with them when they left. Perhaps they hadn’t.
Where had they gone? Had they fl
ed the Briar King or the mysterious illness of which the Dreodh spoke?
Not long after they had met, Aspar had said something about the forest “feeling sick” to him. Aspar had lived his whole life in the pulse of the woodlands, so he should know.
Then they had encountered the greffyn, a beast so poisonous that its mere footprint could kill, and soon afterward the black thorns that sprang up in the footprints of the Briar King and grew to smother every living thing they crept over. Then even more monsters from Black Marys had appeared: utins, the nicwer—sedhmhari, Dreodh had called them. The best translation Stephen could make of that was “sedos demon.”
Did the monsters, like human priests, walk the faneways and gain gifts from them?
Something about the utins in particular troubled him. He had almost been killed by one, but by now he had been almost killed by several things. No, there was something more…
Then he realized what was bothering him.
The utin that had attacked him was the only one he had ever encountered, yet for some reason he was thinking of them in the plural. There had been only one greffyn, though Aspar had seen another after slaying the first. But no one he knew had seen more than one of these new monsters at a time.
So why was he thinking “utins” instead of “utin”?
He closed his eyes, calling upon the memory Saint Decmanus had given him, thinking back to the moment when the slinders had first attacked. In the chaos, there had been something else…
There. He could see it clearly now, as if some meticulous artist had painted the scene for him. He was glancing over his shoulder as he pushed Winna up into the tree. There was Aspar, turning with his knife in hand. Beyond were the slinders, breaking from the forest. But what was Aspar looking at?
Not the slinders…
It had been at the corner of Stephen’s vision; he saw only its limbs and part of its head, but there was no mistaking it. There had been an utin back there, just ahead of the slinders. Perhaps more than one.
Then what had happened to them? Had the slinders killed them, or were they working with the slinders?
The latter didn’t seem likely. The greffyn, the first utin, the nicwer they had encountered in the river at Whitraff, the black thorns—
The black thorns grew in the Briar King’s footsteps, yet they clung to him viciously, as if they sought to cover him, drag him down into the earth. According to Aspar, he once had been imprisoned by them, in a valley hidden in the Mountains of the Hare.
Slinders had attacked and killed the men performing human sacrifices on the sedos mounds throughout the forest, and those men seemed allied to the greffyn; they were the only creatures who could stand to be near it without becoming deathly sick.
No, he silently corrected. The renegade monks weren’t the only ones immune to the greffyn’s poison. He himself had caught the greffyn’s gaze and had suffered no ill effect. Aspar, too, seemed to have at least a raised tolerance, since the Briar King had healed him from the monster’s touch. So what did that mean?
Was it because he had walked a faneway? Were all ordained priests immune to sedhmhari?
It is the saints who are corruption, Dreodh had claimed.
If the slinders were the army of the Briar King, the monsters they had met were a part of some army, too: the army of the Briar King’s foe. But who could that be?
The most natural answer was the Church. He knew that the corrupt monks had friends as high as the praifec of Crotheny, Marché Hespero. Their influence might well go higher.
But even if Fratrex Prismo himself was involved, did that mean he was the master of the greffyn? Or was he just another monster, serving an even greater power?
He thought back through all the lore he had read concerning the Briar King, trying to remember who his adversaries were supposed to be, but few sources had mentioned enemies of any sort. The king was from the time before the saints, before humanity, perhaps even before the Skasloi who had enslaved the Mannish and Sefry races in ancient times. He appeared as a harbinger of the end of times.
If the king had any enemies, it would have to be, as Dreodh had seemed to suggest, the saints themselves.
And that brought him back to the Church, didn’t it?
Well, he’d been promised answers tomorrow. He wasn’t naïve enough to imagine that all his questions would be answered, but if he learned anything more than he knew, that would be something.
He pressed on through the Halafolk house and, finding nothing to hold his attention, left it and ambled farther into the doomed city, crossing slender stone arches over quiet canals, all sketched half-visible in the witchlight. The distant chatter of children had been augmented by an atonal chanting farther away, probably coming from the first chamber he’d been brought to.
Were the slinders preparing for another sortie aboveground, drinking their mead and working up their bloodlust?
The street angled down, and he followed it, vaguely hoping to discover some sort of scriftorium, a cache of Sefry writings. Their race was ancient and had been among the first to be enslaved by the Skasloi. They might well have recorded things the other peoples had forgotten.
As he wondered just what a Sefry scriftorium might look like, it occurred to Stephen that he had never seen Sefry writing of any sort or ever heard of a separate Sefry language. They tended to speak the local tongue wherever they lived. They had a sort of cant of their own but rarely used it. Aspar once had spoken some for Stephen, and Stephen had discerned words from some fifteen different languages but not a single word that seemed uniquely Sefry.
The assumption was that they had been enslaved so far back in the past that they had lost whatever language they might once have had, speaking instead the pidgin that the Skasloi had devised for their slaves. So hateful was that language that they had abandoned it as soon as the masters were all dead, adopting instead the tongues of their human companions.
It seemed entirely plausible. He’d read in several sources that the native language of the Skasloi could not be spoken by a human throat and tongue, so they had devised an idiom that could be used by both themselves and their slaves. Human slaves must have all spoken that language, but many had retained their own speech to use among themselves.
Yet almost no word of that slave tongue was retained in any modern dialect. Virginia Dare and her followers had put every Skasloi creation to the torch and forbade the speech of slavery. They never taught it to their children, and so it died.
“Skaslos” might be the only word of their language that remained, Stephen mused, and even that exhibited the singular form “-os” and the plural “-oi” inherent to elder Cavari, a human language.
Perhaps even the name of that demon race had been forgotten.
He paused, finding himself at a canal wider than those he had crossed before, and his skin prickled as he had an unholy thought.
What if the Skasloi hadn’t all died? What if they, like the greffyns, utins, and nicwers, had merely gone somewhere else for a very long nap? What if this illness, this enemy, was the most ancient enemy of all?
Hours later he took that unsettling thought to sleep with him, resting on a mattress spiced with the Sefry scent.
He awoke to a sharp poke in his ribs and found the girl staring down at him.
“What’s your name?” he murmured.
“Starqin,” she replied. “Starqin Walsdootr.”
“Starqin, do you understand that your parents are dying?”
“My parents are dead,” she said softly. “Killed in the east, fighting a greffyn.”
“Yet you feel no sorrow.”
Her lips pursed.
“You don’t understand,” she said at last. “They had no choice. I had no choice. Now, come along, please.”
He followed her back to the boat he’d arrived on. She motioned for him to get in.
“Just the two of us?” he asked. “Where’s Dreodh?”
“Preparing our people to fight,” she said.
“F
ight what?”
She shrugged. “Something is coming,” she replied. “Something very bad.”
“Aren’t you afraid I might try to overpower you and escape?”
“Why would you do that?” Starqin asked. In the faint light her eyes seemed as black and liquid as tar. Her face and hair, in contrast, made her seem ghostlike.
“Maybe because I don’t like being held captive.”
Starqin settled next to the tiller. “Would you row?” she asked.
Stephen took his seat and placed his hands on the oars. They felt cool and light.
“You’ll want to talk to him, the one we’re going to see,” Starqin said.
“And I don’t think you’ll murder me.”
Stephen pulled on the oars, and the boat glided almost soundlessly away from the stone quay.
“It’s interesting to hear you talk about murder,” Stephen said. “The slinders don’t just attack greffyns, you know. They kill people, too.”
“Yah,” Starqin said, almost absently. “So have you.”
“Evil people.”
She laughed at that, and Stephen felt suddenly stupid, as if he had been lecturing a sacritor on holy writ. But after a moment she grew more serious.
“Don’t call them slinders,” she said. “It demeans their sacrifice.”
“What do you call them?” he asked.
“Wothen,” she said. “We call ourselves the wothen.”
“That just means ‘mad,’ doesn’t it?”
“Divinely mad, actually, or inspired. We are a storm blowing the forest clean.”
“Will you really help the Briar King destroy the world?”
“If it’s the only way to save it.”
“Does that really make sense to you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know he’s right, the Briar King? How do you know he isn’t lying to you?”
“He isn’t,” she said. “And you know it, too.”
She steered them along the dark waters, and soon they were in a tunnel so low-roofed that Stephen had to duck his head to keep from striking it. The sound of the oars chuckled off into the distance and back to them.