The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  “Most unfortunately,” Stephen agreed. He straightened and put his hands his knees. “Brothers, if my time is really so limited, I should go to the scriftorium now.”

  “By all means,” the fratrex said. “Meanwhile, we’ll see to other preparations.”

  Death was following close behind the woorm.

  The Oostish called the cold season winter, but the thing about winter was that it gave farmers and villagers plenty of time to think, shut up in their houses, waiting for the soil to grow food again. When people had too much time to think, Aspar noted, it usually resulted in too many words, Stephen being the perfect case in point.

  So the Oostish called winter winter, but they also called it Bearnight and Sundim and Death’s Three Moons. Aspar had never found any reason to give it more than one name, but the last had seemed particularly uninformed. The forest wasn’t dead in winter; it was just licking its wounds. Healing. Gathering its strength to survive the battle known as spring.

  Some of the ironoaks the woorm had brushed against had been seedlings when the Skasloi still ruled the world. They had watched in their sturdy, slow way as uncounted tribes of Mannish and Sefry folk passed beneath their boughs and vanished into the distance of years.

  They would not see another leaf-bringing. Foul-smelling sap already had begun to seep from cracks in their ancient bark, like pus from a gangrenous wound. The woorm’s venin worked even faster in wood, it seemed, than it did in flesh. The lichens, moss, and ferns that fleeced the trees were already black.

  His hand dropped to touch the arrow case at his belt. The weapon inside had come from Caillo Vallaimo, the temple that was the very heart, center, and soul of the Church. He’d been told it could be used only twice, and he had used it once to slay an utin. He’s been ordered to kill the Briar King with it.

  But the Briar King wasn’t killing the forest Aspar loved. If anything, the lord of the slinders was fighting to save it. Yes, he was slaughtering men and women, but place their lives against the ironoaks…

  Aspar glanced at Winna, but she was staring ahead, intent on the path. Winna understood a lot about him, but these feelings he could never share. Though more comfortable than most in the wild, she still came from the world of hearth and home, the world inside the fences of men. Her heart was tender when it came to other people. But though Aspar loved a few people well, most made little impression on him. Most folk were shadows to him, but the forest was real.

  And if the life of the forest could be bought only by the extinction of Mannish kind…

  And if he, Aspar, held that choice in his hands…

  Well, he’d already had his shot not so long ago, hadn’t he? It was Leshya who had convinced him not to do it, Leshya and the Briar King himself. How many villagers had died since he’d made that decision?

  Would the woorm be here now if the Briar King had already perished by his hand?

  He didn’t know, of course, and he had no way of knowing. So when he saw the woorm again, should he use the arrow on it or not?

  Grim, yes. The monster was killing everything it touched. And if that wasn’t enough, Fend was riding it. If he’d had time to think a little more, he’d have killed it when he first saw it.

  The horses slowed as they grew too weak to carry them, so Aspar and Winna dismounted and led them, trying to stay off the poisoned ground. Ogre’s eyes were rheumy, and Aspar was afraid for him, but he knew he couldn’t spare any of the potion, not with Winna at risk. He could only hope that the beasts hadn’t been exposed directly to the woorm’s breath, that they were suffering from a lesser, perhaps survivable, poisoning.

  The trail ended at a hole in a hillside. With a faint shock, Aspar recognized the place.

  “This used to be Rewn Rhoidhal,” he told Winna.

  “I wondered,” Winna replied. She was familiar with the Halafolk dwellings, having been with Aspar in another such place: Rewn Aluth. That one had been abandoned. All of them had.

  “Is this—is this where Fend was from?”

  Aspar shook his head. “So far as I know, Fend never lived in a rewn. He was one of the wanderers.”

  “Like them that raised you.”

  “Yah,” Aspar said.

  Winna pointed at the gaping entrance. “I thought the Halafolk concealed their dwellings a little better than this.”

  “They do. This one used to be pretty small, but it looks like the woorm has burrowed a hole big enough for itself.”

  “Burrowed through rock?” Winna asked.

  Aspar reached and snapped off a chunk of the reddish stone.

  “Claystone,” he said. “Not very hard. Still, it would take a lot of men a long time with picks and shovels to widen the hole this much.”

  Winna nodded. “What now?”

  “I reckon the only way to follow it is to go in,” Aspar said, dismounting and starting to work the saddle off Ogre.

  “Have we any oil left?”

  They left the horses again and picked their way down a talus slope. The debris was recent, most likely from the woorm’s entry.

  Their torchlight billowed as uncertain air wagged its flame, and Aspar was able to make out that they were descending into a large cyst in the earth. Even underground, the woorm’s trail wasn’t difficult to follow. They soon moved from the claystone antechamber down a sloping hall to ancient, sturdier rock, and even there the drag of the beast’s belly had snapped stalagmites at their bases. In one place where the damp ceiling stooped low, the creature’s back had shattered the downward-seeking stalactites, as well.

  The rewn was silent except for the crunch of rock as they descended and the sound of their breath. Aspar stopped to look for any sign that Fend had dismounted there—he must have, after all—but what sign hadn’t been obliterated by the woorm was confused by evidence of the passage of hundreds of slinders.

  They pressed on and soon heard a stir of voices, muffled by the enclosing stone. Ahead, Aspar could see that the passage was opening into something much larger.

  “Carefully,” he whispered.

  “That noise,” Winna said. ”It must be the slinders.”

  “Yah.”

  “What if they’re allies with the woorm?”

  “They aren’t,” Aspar said, his foot slipping a bit on something slick.

  “Can you be certain?”

  “Pretty certain,” he replied gently. “Mind your feet.”

  But it was a useless comment. The last few yards of the tunnel were smeared with blood and offal. It looked as if fifty bodies had been pounded fine in a mortar and then spread on the cave floor like butter on bread. Here and there he could make out an eye, a hand, a foot.

  It smelled utterly foul.

  “Oh, saints,” Winna gasped when she realized what it was. She went double and began gagging. Aspar didn’t blame her; his own stomach was heaving, and he had seen a lot in his day. He knelt by her and put his hand on her back.

  “Careful, lubulih,” he said. “You’ll make me sick doing that.”

  She chuckled ruefully and shot him a look, then went back to it for a while.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed when she was done. “The whole cave knows we’re here now, I guess.”

  “I don’t think anyone cares,” Aspar said.

  The scriftorium had to be entered through a door so low that it forced him to crawl, to “come to knowledge on his knees.” But it was in rising that Stephen felt humbled as he confronted the wonder of the scriftorium.

  Stephen hadn’t been born a poor man. His family, as he had once been wont to proclaim, were the Cape Chavel Dariges. His father’s estate was an old one, situated on rambling sea-chewed bluffs above the Bay of Ringmere and built of the same tawny stone. The oldest rooms had been part of a keep, though only a few of the original curving walls remained. The main house boasted fifteen rooms, with several attached cottages, barns, and outbuildings. The family raised horses, but most of the income came from owning farmland, waterfront, and boats.

  His fa
ther’s scriftorium was considered a good one for a private collection. He had nine books; Stephen knew them all by heart. Morris Top, a league away and the most sizable town in the attish, had a scriftorium with fifteen books, and that was held by the Church.

  The college at Ralegh, by far the largest university in Virgenya, possessed a grand total of fifty-eight scrolls, tablets, and bound books.

  Here, Stephen stood inside a round tower containing thousands of books. It rose in four levels, with only the narrowest walkspaces at each story. Ladders bridged the vertical distances; books were moved up and down by means of baskets, rope, and winches.

  Things had changed since the last time he’d been there. Before, it had bustled with monks copying, reading, annotating, studying. Now, besides himself, there was one lone monk who was frantically packing scrolls into oiled leather cases. The fellow waved but went quickly back to his work.

  Stephen didn’t recognize him, anyway.

  His natural awe faded as the situation reasserted itself. Where to start? He felt overwhelmed.

  Well, the Casti Noibhi was an obvious choice. He found it on the second tier and, leaning against the rail, thumbed through its pressed linen pages. He quickly found the epistle fragments written in what was supposed to be the original encrypted form. He saw right away that the symbols, as he had suspected, were mostly from the old Virgenyan script with admixtures of Thiuda and early Vitellian. That was more by way of confirming his guess than anything else.

  Nodding, he made his way to another section and selected a scroll of funeral inscriptions and elegiac formulae from Virgenya. The scroll itself was quite new, but the inscriptions had been copied from carved stones up to two thousand years old.

  The epistle’s cipher likely was built around one of the languages from the time of the insurrection. The major ones were ancient Vitellian, Thiuda, Old Cavari, and Old Virgenyan. From those four languages were descended most of the tongues spoken in the world Stephen knew.

  But there were other languages with different lineages. Most were far away; the Skasloi had ruled lands beyond the seas, and their slaves had spoken languages very different from those in Crotheny. Those wouldn’t have figured into the revolt here. There was also the slave cant, of which later scholarship knew almost nothing. Stephen rather doubted that his ancestors would have used that as their secret language, since the Skasloi themselves had had a hand in inventing it.

  There were also Yeszik, Vhilatautan, and Yaohan. Yeszik and Vhilatautan had descendants spoken in Vestrana and the Iutin and Bairgh mountains, and a few tribes, like that of Ehawk, spoke Yaohan languages.

  He stopped. Ehawk.

  Stephen realized with a flash of guilt that he had forgotten him. What had happened to the boy? One moment he had been there, gripping his arm, and the next…

  He would ask the fratrex to inquire with the slinders. It was all he could do. He should have done it already, but there was so much to do, so little time.

  Right.

  The more obscure the language, the better code it made, all on its own. So he needed what lexicons he could find concerning all the mother tongues. Indeed, his intended destination was supposed to be in the Bairghs; that meant some knowledge of the Vhilatautan daughter languages might also be useful.

  Immediately he set about finding those tomes. When he had lowered them by basket to the floor, he had another, much more interesting thought and rushed to the geographies and maps. The Bairgh Mountains were very large indeed. Even after he had translated the epistle—if he translated it—he would need to plot the quickest route to Vhelnoryganuz Mountain or all his efforts would be moot.

  Stephen wasn’t certain how many hours had passed when Ehan found him, but the glass dome above had long since gone dark, and he was working by lamplight at one of the large wooden tables on the lowest floor.

  “The new day is upon us,” Ehan said. “Have you no need of sleep?”

  “I’ve no time for it,” Stephen said. “If I really must be away from here by sunrise—”

  “It might be sooner,” Ehan said. “Something’s happening down in the rewn. We’ve got a watch, but we’re not certain what it is. What are you about?”

  “Trying to find our mountain,” Stephen said.

  “I don’t suppose it’s simple enough as to be on the map?” Ehan asked.

  Stephen shook his head wearily and smiled. He realized that despite everything, this was the happiest he had been in a long time. He wished it didn’t have to end.

  “No,” he said. He put his finger on a large-scale modern map that showed the Midenlands and the Bairghs. “I’ve made a guess how far someone could ride in eighteen days from Wherthen,” he said. “The fratrex is right; the Bairghs are the only mountains that our ‘fastness’ could be in. But as you said, if there’s such a mountain as Vhelnoryganuz, it’s not marked here.”

  “Maybe the name has changed over time,” Ehan suggested.

  “Of course it has,” Stephen said, then realized he’d sounded a bit pompous.

  “What I mean, is,“ he explained, “that Vhelnoryganuz is old Vadhiian, the language of the Black Jester’s kingdom. It means ‘Traitorous Queen.’ Vadhiian isn’t spoken anymore, so the name would have been corrupted.”

  “But it’s just a name; you don’t have to know what it means to keep repeating it or teach it to your children. Why would it change? I mean, I can understand if it was renamed…”

  “I’ll give you a for instance,” Stephen said. “The Hegemony built a bridge across a river in the King’s Forest and called it the Pontro Oltiumo, which means ‘the farthest bridge’ because at the time it was on the frontier, the bridge most distant from z’Irbina. After a while, the name got transferred to the river itself but was shortened to Oltiumo. When new people settled there, speaking Old Oostish, they started calling it the Ald Thiub, ‘old thief’—because oltiumo sounded sort of like that the way they pronounced it—which the Virgenyan settlers in turn corrupted into Owl Tomb, which is what it’s called to this day.

  “So a mouthful like Vhelnoryganuz easily could have ended up as, I don’t know, Fell Norrick, or something like that. But I can’t find anything on the map that looks like a simple corruption.”

  “I see,” Ehan said. But he seemed distracted.

  “So the next thing I thought of is that maybe the mountain is still called ‘Traitorous Queen,’ but in the current language of the area; that happens sometimes, though that’s a weird name for a mountain.”

  “Not really,” Ehan said. “In the north we often refer to mountains as kings or queens, and one that claimed the lives of many travelers might be referred to as traitorous. What’s spoken in the Bairghs?”

  “Dialects related to Hanzish, Almannish, and Vhilatautan. But to make matters more difficult, this map is based on one made during the Lierish regency.”

  “So you’re stuck.”

  Stephen smiled wickedly.

  “Oh, then you’ve figured it out,” Ehan amended, starting to sound impatient.

  “Well,” Stephen said, “it occurred to me that Vadhiian was never spoken in the Bairghs, so the name we have for the mountain is already a Vadhiian interpretation of a probably Vhilatautan name. Once I started thinking that way, I pulled out the lexicon of Tautish and started comparing.

  “Vhelnoryganuz in this case might be a mistranslation of Velnoiraganas, which in old Vhilatautish would mean something like ‘Witchhorn.’”

  “And is there a Witchhorn in the Bairghs?”

  Stephen put his finger on the map next to the drawing of a mountain with an odd shape, a bit like that of a cow’s horn. Next to it, in a tiny Lierish hand, was lettered ‘eslief vendve.’

  “Witch’s Mountain,” he translated for Ehan’s sake.

  “Well,” Ehan considered, “that was easy.”

  “And probably still wrong,” Stephen said. “But it’s the best guess I have until I’ve translated the epistle. I think I may have a start on that.”

  Off in
the distance a clarion note soared.

  “You’ll have to finish it on horseback,” Ehan said hurridly. “That’s the alarm. Come on, quickly now.”

  He gestured, and two other monks hurried over, packed the scrifti and scrolls Stephen had selected into weather-sound bags, and stooped their way out of the scriftorium. Stephen followed, grabbing a few stray items. He didn’t even have time for one last glance.

  Outside, three horses stood stamping, their eyes rolling as the monks loaded them with the precious books. Stephen strained to hear what was upsetting them, but at first even his blessed senses found nothing.

  The valley seemed quiet, in fact, beneath a cold, clear sky. The stars shone so large and bright that they seemed unreal, like those seen in a dream, and for a moment Stephen wondered if he was dreaming—or dead. There were some who said that ghosts were deluded spirits who did not understand their fate and tried desperately to continue in the world they knew.

  Perhaps all his companions were dead. Anne and her army of shades would batter insubstantially at the walls of Eslen, while its defenders felt little more than a vague chill at their presence. Aspar would slip off to fight for the forest he loved, a specter more terrifying than even Grim the Raver. And Stephen—he would continue to quest after mysteries at the behest of the dead fratrex and the dead Ehan.

  When had he died, then? At Cal Azroth? At Khrwbh Khrwkh? Either seemed likely.

  He heard it then, the rush of a breath through lungs so long that it sounded a note far below the lowest that could be stroked from a bass croth. It groaned just above the pitch sung by rocks and stones and had at first been hidden in those sounds. Now he felt, more than heard, sand rubbing from stone, limbs snapping, and a vast weight in motion.

  The horn stopped blowing.