by Greg Keyes
“The Kept promised to kill Robert’s men,” she said.
“I’m thinking he lied to you about that,” Alis replied.
“We’ll see,” Anne replied.
“Someone give me a weapon,” Prince Cheiso said weakly but with determination. “I need a weapon.”
Cazio caught Anne’s eye, and she nodded. He proffered the Safnian a dagger. He glanced at the other three men, remembering vaguely there once had been four of them. What had happened to the fourth?
But after the soul bending he’d just experienced, nothing would surprise him.
“What are your names?” he asked the warriors.
“Sir Ansgar,” one of them said. Cazio could just make out a small beard. “These are my bondsmen, Preston Viccars and Cuelm MeqVorst.”
“The passage is narrow,” Cazio said. “We’ll take turns. I’m first; work out the rest of the order among you.”
“I pledged an oath to Sir Leafton that I would face her foes first,” Ansgar replied. “I hope you will allow me to honor that oath.”
Cazio started to object, but Ansgar, after all, was wearing armor. He was probably more suited, so to speak, to the situation.
“I yield the priority,” he said. “But please do not kill them all. Leave some for me.”
The man nodded, and Cazio stepped back, hoping his head would clear a bit more. At least their foe hadn’t made it through a few moments earlier, when they were all still weak. Maybe Robert’s men had been affected, as well.
He’d have to ask Anne exactly what had happened once this was over.
“Maybe they won’t make it through—” Austra began, but suddenly a wand of flickering light appeared in the stone, carving through it. An instant later, not only was the hidden doorway gone, so was a large lump of the passage.
“Saints,” Anne breathed. “He’s got a feysword.”
And indeed, Robert Dare stepped through the gap. Sir Ansgar started forward but paused when the usurper held up his hand.
“Wait a moment,” he said.
“Majesty?” Ansgar asked, glancing at Anne.
“Do as he says,” Anne said. “What do you want, Robert?”
Robert was shaking his head.
“Amazing. He’s gone, isn’t he? You let him go.”
“I did.”
“Why? What could he possibly have promised you? But I can guess, can’t I? He told you he would help you defeat me. And yet here I stand, unvanquished.”
“We haven’t begun fighting yet,” Cazio said.
“Did someone ask you to speak?” Robert snapped. “I’ve no idea who you are, but I’m certain neither Her Majesty nor I gave you leave to speak. Stab me if you wish, but please don’t sully my language with that ridiculous accent.”
“Cazio has my leave to speak,” Anne snapped, “and you do not, unless it is to beg forgiveness for your treachery.”
“My treachery? Dear Anne, you’ve just loosed the last Skasloi upon the world. Do you know how long he’s been planning this? He was the one who taught your mother to curse me, who made me what I have become and broke the law of death. You have fallen into his design and betrayed our entire race. Your treachery outshines mine as the sun does, ah, some small star.”
“You left me no choice,” Anne replied.
“Oh, well, if that’s the case—No, wait, you had at least two other choices. You might have told him no and surrendered to me. Or you might have fought me and died.”
“Or we could fight you and live,” Cazio said.
“You are becoming annoying,” Robert said, poking the shining blade toward him. “Surrender, Anne, and all of you will live, I promise you.”
Cazio would never know what Anne might have said to that, because Cheiso suddenly rushed forward, howling in anguish, and launched himself at Robert.
The usurper raised his eldritch weapon, but not quickly enough. Cheiso plunged his borrowed dagger into the prince’s chest. Robert promptly thumped him on the head with the hilt of his weapon, but the momentary truce had ended, and the flood had come.
Robert’s men surged into the chamber. Cazio leapt toward the prince, but Ansgar was already there, swinging a blow that might have decapitated Robert had he not ducked it, then thrust his feysword into Ansgar’s belly. The weapon went through him as if he were butter, and Robert carved up and out his shoulder, splitting the knight’s upper body into two pieces.
“Now you,” Robert said, turning toward Cazio.
But it wasn’t the first time Cazio had faced a man who couldn’t die or, for that matter, a sword he couldn’t parry. As Robert cocked for the cut, he lunged long and stop-hit the prince in the wrist. Robert snarled and slashed at Acredo’s blade, but Cazio disengaged and stabbed him in the wrist a second time. Then, avoiding the next, even wilder blow, Cazio made a draw-cut to the top of Robert’s hand.
“Not much of a swordsman, are you?” he said, grinning, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Even with a sword like that.”
Robert rushed him then, but again Cazio avoided the beat at his blade and sidestepped the charge as one might a bull, leaving his blade in a high line for Robert to run into. The usurper did, the blade taking him in the forehead so that his skull stopped and his feet went flying out from under him. Cazio had the great pleasure of seeing the bastard land flat on his back.
“Zo dessrator, nip zo chiado,” he pointed out.
He had to say it quickly, however, for Robert’s men—and women—were swarming all around. He placed himself as best he could in front of Anne, engaging two, then three, and finally and impossibly four. He saw Preston and Cuelm fall, and then it was just he, standing between the three woman and the mob.
Worse, he saw Robert in the background, dabbing a cloth at his pierced head.
“Kill them all,” he heard Robert shout. “I’ve lost all patience with this business.”
Aspar threw his arms around the trunk of the fir and gritted his teeth as his body stripped the topmost branches. The scent of resin exploded in his nostrils as the treetop bent earthward under his weight, and for a moment he felt like the jungen who once had ridden saplings to the ground for fun.
This one wasn’t going all the way to the ground, though, so he let go before it could snap him back up. That left him falling another five kingsyards into shallow water that was still draining off from the woorm’s eruption.
He was lucky. The water didn’t hide a boulder or a stump, but it still felt as if a palm the size of a boy had slapped him with all its might.
The pain galvanized him rather than slowing him down, and he managed to slosh to his feet and take stock of the situation.
Aspar couldn’t see the woorm just now, but he could hear it crashing through the forest. He spun and ran toward the base of the cliff, hoping against hope that he would find his bow and the precious arrow. But though the water was receding, it left in its wake a jumbled mess of sticks, leaves, and needles. It could take him a bell—or ten—to find his gear.
He still didn’t see the woorm, but he drew his dirk and, reaching for his ax, encountered the horn where he’d tucked it in his belt. He plucked it out, staring at it for a moment.
Why not? He didn’t have much to lose at this point.
He raised the horn to his lips, took the deepest breath he could manage, and blew a shrill high note that he remembered very well from a day not long gone. Even after he ran out of breath, the peal hung in the air, reluctant to fade.
But fade it did, and the woorm was still coming.
He’d reached the cliff now, and fortune favored him a bit; his bow-stave was caught in the lowest branches of an everic. But he didn’t see the arrow anyplace, and the woorm—
—was suddenly turning away from him, moving out of the canyon.
But something was still coming, something man-sized and moving far too quickly for a man.
“Sceat,” he groaned. “Not a another one of these bloody—”
But then the monk was on him, his sword
a barely visible gleam in the dusk.
Stephen stiffened as the high clear note of a horn sounded in the evening air.
Zemlé noticed. “What is it?”
“I recognize that horn,” he said. “That’s the Briar King’s horn. The one I blew, the one that summoned him.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” Stephen replied absently.
Below, the khriim had been doing unusual things. Instead of moving straight toward the praifec and his men, it had gone off through the trees, in the direction of the cliffside. Just after the horn blew, however, it resumed its course, moving toward the approaching war band.
Stephen felt a tingle as a line of eight horsemen formed and charged the creature. He wondered if they stood a chance. A knight, a horse, armor, and barding at a dead gallop all concentrated on the steel tip of a lance was a formidable force.
He saw the Sefry warriors now, as well: twelve small figures approaching the praifec’s men at a trot. He caught an actinic glitter and realized that they had feyswords, like the knight he and his companions had fought in Dunmrogh.
The riders broke against the khriim like waves against a rock, except that a broken wave flowed back out to sea. The horsemen and their horses lay where they fell.
So much for that.
Stephen felt something move across his skin, and all the hairs on his arm stood up. He wasn’t cold, but he shivered.
“The horn…” he murmured.
“What’s that?” Zemlé gasped. She pointed, and Stephen saw a dark cloud approaching, or so it appeared to be at first glance.
But it wasn’t a cloud; rather, it was a collection of thousands of smaller things, flying close together.
“Birds,” he said.
They were of all sorts—corbies, martins, swans, hawks, curlews—and all were crying or singing, making whatever noise they made and raising the strangest cacophony Stephen had ever heard. When they reached the valley, they began spiraling down into the forest, forming an avian tornado.
The forest itself was behaving in an equally peculiar manner. An acre of it was moving; the trees were bending toward one another, knitting their limbs together. Stephen was reminded of the effect of the dreodh song on the tree they’d fled the slinders into, but if it was the same magic, it was far stronger.
“Saints,” Zemlé breathed.
“I don’t think the saints have much to do with this,” Stephen murmured as he watched the birds descend into the quickening forest and vanish as if swallowed.
A shape was forming now, a shape Stephen recognized, albeit larger than he had ever seen it before, maybe thirty kingsyards high.
Moments later, antlers spreading from his head, the Briar King tore his roots from the earth and began to stride purposefully toward the khriim.
Aspar waited until the last second and hurled his ax. The monk tried to turn, but that was the thing about moving fast: it made it harder to change direction. His attempt only spoiled the cut meant to take Aspar’s head off. It soughed over the holter’s head instead as the attacker hurled past.
Aspar turned to find the fellow already coming back, but he was delighted to see that his ax had found its mark and savaged the man’s weapon arm, the right one. The sword lay discarded on the waterlogged moss, and blood was pumping from his biceps.
He was a little slower, but not much. His left fist arced out in a blur; Aspar felt as if he were moving underwater as the knuckles connected with his chin. He smelled blood, and his head rang like a bell as he stumbled back.
The next blow dug into his flank and broke ribs.
With an inarticulate cry, Aspar threw his left arm around the man, stabbing at the monk’s kidney with his dirk, but the blade never made contact. Instead the fellow twisted oddly, and Aspar found himself somehow hurled into a tree.
His vision flashed black and red, but he knew he couldn’t stop moving, so he rolled to the side and tried to get to his feet, spitting out fragments of his teeth. He grabbed a sapling and used it to pull himself up.
It was only when he tried to put weight on his leg that he realized it was broken.
“Well, sceat,” he said.
The man retrieved his sword and was returning with it gripped in his left hand.
“My name is Ashern,” he said. “Brother Ashern. I’d like you to know there’s nothing personal in this. You fought well.”
Aspar lifted his dirk and shouted, hoping it would drown out the approaching hoofbeats, but Ashern heard them in the last instant and turned. Aspar launched himself, and everything went red.
Ogre reared from a full gallop, his hooves striking down at the monk. Brother Ashern’s swing cut right through the lower part of the great beast’s neck, and the churchman continued turning, deftly blocking Aspar’s desperate knife thrust.
Then Ogre’s hoof, still descending, hit him in the back of the head and crushed his skull.
Aspar fell, and Ogre collapsed just next to him, blood pumping from his neck in great gouts. Gasping, Aspar crawled over, thinking he might somehow close the bay’s wound, but when he saw it, he knew it was no use. Instead he cradled the stallion’s head in one arm and stroked his muzzle. Ogre seemed more puzzled than anything.
“Old boy.” Aspar sighed. “You never could stay out of a fight, could you?”
Red foam blew from Ogre’s nose as if he were trying to whinny an answer.
“Thank you, old friend,” Aspar said. “You rest now, yah? Just rest.”
He continued stroking Ogre until his breath stopped and his terrible eyes went dull.
And for a while after.
When Aspar finally lifted his head again, he saw, four kingsyards away, the case of the black arrow.
Nodding grimly to himself, he strung his bow and crawled until he found a branch the right size and shape to use as a crutch. His leg was pulsing with awful pain now, but he ignored it as best he could. He retrieved the arrow and began hobbling toward the sounds of combat.
CAZIO LUNGED deep, driving Acredo through a swordsman’s eye. A blade cut at him from the right, but with his rapier busy killing, the only thing he had to deflect it with was his left arm. He got lucky and caught the flat, but the pain was terrific.
Withdrawing Acredo’s bloody tip, he parried another blow, retreating all the while, wondering how much farther back the chamber went. Robert’s men were taking advantage of the space to spread out, forcing Cazio to retreat more quickly or be surrounded. He reckoned he would kill one, maybe two more of them before one of their cleavers cut off enough of him to end the fight. After that, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do.
No. He couldn’t let them have Austra or Anne. He couldn’t think that way.
He deepened and slowed his breathing, willed the muscles he wasn’t using to relax.
Z’Acatto had spoken once or twice of something called chiado sivo, or “entirely sword,” a state of oneness that a true dessrator could enter in which he might accomplish fantastic things. There had been times when Cazio had felt he was almost in that state. He had to let go of winning and losing, of life and death, of fear, and become nothing but motion.
Parry, attack, parry, disengage, breathe, feel the sword as part of his arm, his spine, his heart, his mind…
They can’t hurt me, he thought. There’s nothing here to hurt, just a sword.
And for long, beautiful moment he had it. Perfection. Every move correct, every motion the best. Two more men went down, then another two, and he wasn’t retreating anymore. He controlled the rhythm, the footwork, the floor itself.
For a moment. But recognizing that moment, he lost the detachment he needed to prolong it, and his assault faltered as two men arrived to replace every one he put down. He retreated again, ever more desperate as Robert’s forces began to encircle him.
He realized he’d lost track of the women and hoped against hope that his instant of chiado sivo had given them a chance to escape.
Even you might have been proud o
f me, z’Acatto, he thought as the corner of his eye warned him of a new fighter, flanking him.
No, not flanking him, flanking Robert’s men.
And not just one man but a horde.
The newcomers were unarmored but fighting with long, wicked knives and firing short, powerful-looking bows. Cazio’s antagonists were all down within a few heartbeats, leaving him gasping, still on guard, wondering if he would be next. Just because they were Robert’s enemies, that didn’t make them Anne’s friends.
But those who were closest merely smiled at him, nodded, and finished their butchery. He reckoned there were at least fifty of them.
He also realized belatedly that they weren’t human but Sefry.
The folk of Gobelin Court had finally weighed in on a side, it seemed.
Aspar paused, gaping, wondering how long it had been since anyone had witnessed anything remotely like what he was seeing. He’d thought he was numb, but now he understood he wasn’t so much numb as insane.
He could see them because they had flattened the forest for half a league in every direction. The Briar King was a hulking mass roughly sembling human shape, albeit with the antlers of a buck, but all and all he was less human in appearance than he had been before.
The apparition was locked in combat with the woorm, which coiled about him like a blacksnake around a mouse. The king, in turn, had both titanic hands gripped about the monster’s neck.
As Aspar watched, a stream of green venom spewed from the great serpent’s mouth, not just vapor but a viscous liquor that spattered upon the forest lord and began to smoke, burning great holes in him. The stuff of the king shifted to fill those gaps.
He didn’t see Fend. The saddle was empty, and a quick scan of the forest showed nothing, though a little farther off a battle was raging between the praifec’s men and some other force. He couldn’t make out much of that.
A rush of pain and fever from his leg reminded Aspar that he might lose consciousness at any time. If he had anything to do here, he’d better do it now.