The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  More words came, and still he couldn’t understand them, but then he landed. He walked to the north side of the mountain, where moss ruled, to a stone face and through a clever door, and then he was in the rewn.

  Beginning to understand. Joy filling his heart.

  He woke to a gentle pat on his face and found Zemlé there, her eyebrows drawn in concern, her face—her lips—only a motion away.

  But when she saw that he was awake, she straightened, and the look of apprehension vanished.

  “Bad dreams?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” he replied, and related his vision.

  Zemlé didn’t seem surprised.

  “We’ll eat,” she said. “Then we’ll go and hope we find this mythical town of yours.”

  He smiled and rubbed the sleep grit from his eyes, feeling much more rested than he ought to.

  Choron, he wondered to the heavens, have you become a saint? Is it you guiding me?

  The descent was considerably more trouble than it had been in his dream, and his confidence in the vision faded as they made their way down the broken slopes into a deep, resin-scented evergreen forest.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Zemlé asked doubtfully.

  For an instant he didn’t understand her question, but then he understood that their roles had changed. Since entering the valley, she had been looking to him as the guide.

  “I think so,” he replied.

  “Because there is a quicker way to the mountain.”

  He nodded. “Perhaps, but I want to see something.”

  A bell later, the signs began to appear. They were subtle at first: odd mounds in the forest floor, depressions that resembled dry streambeds but were too regular. Eventually he made out bits of wall, though rarely higher than the knee. He continued on foot, leading his mount, and between footfalls he had flashes of narrow, fanciful buildings and figures in bright clothing.

  “Hadivaisel,” he said, motioning all around him. “Or what’s left of it.”

  “That’s good, then?” she asked.

  “Well, at least it means I do know where I’m going.”

  And so they pressed on, east toward the mountain, to the traces of the trail there. The tree house of his vision was gone, but he recognized the tree, though it was older and thicker. From there he began to lead them north and steadily higher, to Bezlaw, where the mountain’s shadow never lifted and the moss grew thick and deep white forest pipes stood from rotting logs.

  It was already nearing dusk when they reached the ancient shade line, and Zemlé suggested a halt. Stephen agreed, and they set about situating the animals.

  The hounds wouldn’t be situated, though; the hair bristled on the backs of their necks, and they growled constantly at the congealing darkness. Stephen’s own hackles were up. His hearing had improved over the last few days, and he heard at least some of what the beasts heard.

  And he didn’t like it.

  There were things coming on two feet, certain in the darkness.

  And some were singing.

  DEATH TOLD Aspar where to go. Dead trees in the forest, dead grass and gorse and heather on the heath, dead fish in the rivers and streams it preferred.

  Following death, he followed the woorm, and with each day its trail grew plainer, as if its poisonous nature was waxing as it went.

  The Welph River was clogged with carcasses, its backwaters become abattoirs. Spring buds drooled noisome pus, and the only things growing with a semblance of health were the fresh heads of all-too-familiar black thorns.

  Strangely, Aspar felt stronger every day. If the poison of the woorm was multiplying in power, so was the efficacy of the witch’s cure. Ogre, too, seemed more filled with energy than he had been in years, as if he were a colt again. And each setting sun brought them closer to the beast—and Fend.

  Beyond the Welph, Aspar no longer knew the names of places, and the mountains rose about him. The woorm preferred valleys, but on occasion it crossed low passes. Once it followed a stream beneath a mountain, and Aspar spent a day in the dark tracking it by torchlight. The second time it did that, he didn’t follow it far, because the tunnel filled with water. Instead, cursing, he reentered the light and worked his way up the mountainside until he found a ridge that gave him a good view of the next valley. He promised the Raver a sacrifice if the thing didn’t escape.

  Straining his eyes in the dusk, he finally saw its head cutting waves in a river two leagues away and began finding his way down.

  After that it was simple, and he was riding so close on its trail that he found animals and birds that were still dying.

  Of course, another big mountain loomed at the end of the dale, and that could present problems if the monster found a way under it, too. He planned to catch it before the mountain, though.

  He hadn’t by the next morning, but he knew he was close. He knew it by the smell. He checked the arrow then as he did every morning, doused the remaining embers of his fire, and returned to the chase.

  The valley gained altitude, filling with spruce, hemlock, and burr-wood. He rode on the southern side of it, at the base of a cliff of tired yellow rock that rose some twenty yards, above which he could make out what looked to be a trail winding through rocky, shrubby ground. He was watching the long line of the rock face, considering that if he could find a way up there, he might gain a higher vantage. He didn’t see much hope of that, though. He had a feel for the way land lay, and it didn’t look as if the cliff was going to offer a slope any time soon.

  Above the cliff more mountains rose, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden by the angle.

  He thought he heard something and stopped to listen. It came again, clearer: a human voice shouting.

  A moment later he located its source. There was a line of perhaps sixty horsemen on the upper path; maybe they had just joined it from a trail he couldn’t see. The cliff was about thirty kingsyards high here, and they were a bit upslope from the precipice. The shouting man was pointing down toward him.

  “Good eyes,” Aspar murmured sourly.

  The sun was behind them, so he couldn’t make out their faces, but the leader looked to be in some sort of Churchish garb, which put Aspar on guard immediately. He noted that three of them had bows drawn and ready.

  “Hail, down there,” the leader shouted. Aspar was startled at how familiar his voice was, though he couldn’t place it right away.

  “Hail, up on the ridge,” he responded loudly.

  “I’d heard you were dead, Aspar White,” the man returned. “I really believe it’s no longer possible to trust anyone.”

  “Hespero?”

  “You will call him ‘your grace,’” the knight at Hespero’s side demanded.

  “Now, Sir Elden,” Hespero replied, “this is my holter. Didn’t you know that?” Judging from the volume, he had said it entirely for Aspar’s benefit.

  Aspar thought about playing along but quickly discarded the idea. He’d been alone in the forest for enough days to have lost any taste for dissembling.

  “Not anymore, your grace!” he shouted. “I’ve seen enough of your work.”

  “That’s fair,” Hespero replied. “I’ve heard enough of yours. Fare you well, then, holter.”

  Aspar turned his head and made as if to ride away but kept his eyes up. He saw Sir Elden draw his bow.

  “Yah, that’s all the excuse I need,” he muttered under his breath.

  He’d been wondering if he even required that, but Hespero had solved that problem for him with a word too low to hear. He leapt off Ogre as the first shaft missed him by more than a yard. As he found the ground, he calmly took aim and put one in the archer, right up through the bottom of his chin. He slipped another arrow to string and sent it after Hespero, but another mounted man surged into the path of the shot, catching it in his armored side.

  The remaining ready archers scrambled off their mounts, and he noticed at least six more stringing their bows. He fired again, then whirled at a crash
into the underbrush. He found himself looking down his shaft at the first man he’d shot, who had fallen from the cliff and lay broken on a boulder at its base.

  Aspar stepped that way and ducked under an overhang just as arrows appeared to sprout from the earth like red-topped wheat. He caught the dead man and dragged him in, giving his body a quick search, taking his arrows and provisions, then finding a bit more than he had bargained for. Because in the man’s haversack was a horn—and not only that, a horn Aspar recognized, made of white bone and incised with strange figures.

  It was the horn he’d found in the Mountains of the Hare, the horn Stephen had blown to summon the Briar King.

  The horn they had given to Hespero for study.

  Aspar put the horn back in its bag, looped it around his neck, took a deep breath, and bolted.

  Most of the barrage missed him; one missile struck his cuirass and glanced away, and then he was well in cover of the trees, back on Ogre, and off at a gallop.

  As it became clear he had outdistanced anyone who might be following, he slowed his pace and had time to wonder what it meant that Hespero was here. Coincidences happened, but he was sure this wasn’t one.

  He thought about it as he rode, still at a reasonably brisk pace, checking behind him every thirty beats or so at first, less often later. Coming down a cliff was easier than going up one, especially if one had rope, and he was betting Hespero’s party had rope. Lowering horses down the cliff would take time, if they were able to manage it at all, so he should be able to keep his distance from any pursuers if he stayed away from the crags.

  Of course, there was always the chance they knew the lay of the land better than he did. The cliff might become a gentle slope or sprout a ravine leading down. But there was nothing he could do about that.

  Aspar wondered if Hespero was following the woorm, too, though given the direction he’d come from, that didn’t make a lot of sense. Perhaps, instead, he was following what the woorm was after, which, if he could believe Fend, was Stephen.

  So what was Stephen doing up here in the mountains? And why was everyone so interested?

  That he couldn’t know, but he guessed he would soon, because all the trails seemed to be converging. It ought to be interesting when they did, he reckoned.

  The forest here wasn’t dead yet, although the track he was following was probably a mortal wound. It was too bad, because he found himself liking the conifer-rich landscape. Aspar had been in evergreen forests before, but only in the heights of the Hare. He liked the novelty of finding one on relatively flat ground.

  What were the forests of Vestrana and Nahzgave like? They were even farther north. He’d heard tales of vast cold swamps and great boreal trees that dug their roots into ground frozen for more than half the year. He would like to see such places. Why had he waited so long?

  Maybe they weren’t even there anymore. For all he knew, up north they’d been having greffyns and woorms and whatnot venoming the earth for years. He knew where they were coming from now, but he didn’t know why or how. Maybe Stephen could reckon that out, if Stephen was still alive. Was it a sickness, a rot, something that happened in the world now and then? Were their seasons longer than centuries, spells of quickening and dying? Or was someone—or something—doing this?

  Was Hespero behind it all? Was Fend? Surely there was someone he could kill to make it stop. Or maybe the Briar King was right. Maybe the sickness was humanity itself, and it was everyone that needed killing.

  Well, that was all tinder and no spark, and he wasn’t going to get the fire going just by thinking about it. He knew killing the woorm would put a stop to some of it, and maybe killing Hespero and Fend would help, too. He was certainly ready to give that a go.

  Ogre picked his way over a collection of stones that looked suspiciously like a fallen wall, and Aspar noticed other such jumbles that weren’t natural to the terrain. Men and women had lived here once, built houses. Now the forest fed on their bones.

  It was the way of things: Nothing was constant. Trees burned and produced meadow, meadows grew into thickets, and eventually the great trees came back and shaded out the grass and brush and smaller trees. Men made pastures and fields, used them for a few lifetimes, then the wood took them back. So it had always been until now. Now things had gone wrong.

  He’d fix that or die. He saw no other choices.

  Not much later he came to a broad clearing where he could make out the full loom of the mountain ahead. He realized he was already on its slopes, and from this angle he could see the woorm’s trail as a narrow but obvious line wiggling up the peak.

  He could even see the front end of the trail, though the distance was too great to discern the beast itself. It was headed to the north face.

  He could also hear Hespero’s men again, off to his right. Probably they were all on the same slope now, ridge and valley having evened out. He reckoned by the racket that they were probably almost a league away, though, and unless they had some shinecrafting, they’d have difficulty picking up his trail without backtracking along the cliff.

  He patted Ogre’s neck. “You ready to run, old boy?” he asked. “We need to beat ’em to it.”

  Ogre lifted his head eagerly, and together they hurled themselves at the mountain.

  As Anne fled, Robert’s taunting laugh echoed in her ears.

  How had he escaped Sir Neil? How had he known where to ambush her or about the secret passages at all?

  But Robert wasn’t really a man anymore. She knew that. Probably he was like the Hansan knights and couldn’t die.

  Had he and Sir Neil fought? Had he killed her knight? Or had the armies of Hansa already arrived, crushing Artwair and her army?

  She wouldn’t think like that. She couldn’t. All that mattered now was to escape him long enough to think, to find safety for her and her companions. One of her men had died already, too confused by the glamour of the passage to run when she had commanded it, speared in the back by one of Robert’s soldiers. That left Anne five companions: three Craftsmen, Cazio, and Austra.

  He’d been waiting for them with twenty men and a handful of his black-clad women to guide them.

  Cazio, thank the saints, was still with her.

  She tried to sweep away her fears and frustrations and concentrate. The passage should begin dividing up ahead, shouldn’t it? She’d never been here before, but she knew the place, could feel where it was going. If she could get them into the castle, into the passages there, they might be able to hide.

  In the meantime, her men in Gobelin Court would all die, because even if Artwair succeeded in taking Thornrath in time to let Grand-uncle Fail’s fleet in, it would still take too long to win a siege now that her stupid little plan had begun to fall apart.

  She felt helpless, but being dead or a captive would make her even more so.

  “Hands!” she shouted. “Everyone keep holding hands!”

  Anne searched back over her shoulder but saw no telltale lantern light behind them. Of course, the passage twisted and twined often enough that their pursuit needn’t be far to remain unseen.

  Austra, with her in the front, held their only working lamp, and it now showed them two possibilities.

  “The right branch,” she decided. They turned right, but after only sixteen paces they reached a dead end so freshly made that she could smell the mortar.

  She hadn’t foreseen this. In her mind’s eye, the right passage wound its way through the outer wall of the castle and eventually, after a few more turnings, directly into her mother’s old solar.

  “He’s blocked it up,” she murmured bitterly. “Of course he would.”

  It was exactly what she had planned to do.

  “The other one?” Austra asked hopefully.

  “It goes under the castle, into the dungeons.”

  “That’s better than being caught, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Anne agreed. “And there are ways into the castle from the dungeon. Just pray he hasn’t b
locked this one off, as well.”

  Sounds of pursuit seemed near as they moved back into the left passage.

  “Where are we going?” Cazio asked.

  “Don’t ask questions,” Anne said. “It’ll only make things worse.”

  “Worse,” Cazio muttered. “It’s already worse. At least let me fight.”

  “No. Not yet. I’ll tell you when to fight.”

  Cazio didn’t answer. He might have forgotten already that they’d been talking.

  The tunnel branched again, but as she suspected, the one she wanted was blocked off, this time a lot less neatly; its ceiling had been collapsed. It looked as if it had been done in haste, but it was every bit as efficient.

  “He can’t know all of them,” she told Austra. “He can’t.”

  “What if he has a map of some sort? Maybe your mother or Erren had one.”

  “Maybe,” Anne said. “If so, we’re done for.” She stopped, a little chill working up her spine.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked Austra.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” her friend replied.

  But Anne heard it again, a distant whispering of her name. And she remembered.

  “There is one passage,” she murmured. “I saw the opening, but even I couldn’t see where it went. There’s a sort of fog there, and something else…”

  “Something worse than Robert?”

  An image flashed then, painfully bright, of the red-tressed demon. But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t who was whispering to her.

  “You know what it is,” she replied. They reached a small chamber with two passages leading out of it. Both were blocked.

  “You mean him?” Austra hissed. “The last of the…?” She didn’t finish the thought. Her breath was coming hard.

  “Yes.”

  Anne made her decision and reached for the place she knew instinctively was there, a small depression in the stone.

  She found the catch and pressed it. Something inside clicked, and a portion of the wall eased open. Anne saw that the stone had been cut very thin and somehow fixed to a thick wooden panel.