The Briar King

by Greg Keyes

  “I do not know. Coincidences happen, and your race is fond of murder. It's what made you such entertaining slaves. But she will die, and your daughters, too.”

  “You do not know that,” William said. “You cannot. You speak only to deceive me.”

  “As you wish it, so it is,” Qexqaneh said.

  “Enough of this. I was mistaken to come here.”

  “Yes,” Qexqaneh agreed. “Yes, you were. You do not have the iron in you that your ancestors did. They would not have hesitated. Good-bye, mayfly.”

  William left then, returning to the halls above, but laughter walked behind him like a thousand-legged worm. He did not sleep that night, but went to Alis Berrye.

  He had her room lit with tapers, and she played on the lute and sang lighthearted songs until the sun rose.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LOST

  ASPAR WHITE OPENED HIS EYES to a vaulted stone ceiling and a distant, singsong litany. Fever crawled like centipedes beneath his skin, and when he tried to move, his limbs felt like rotting fern fronds.

  He lay still, listening to the strange song and to his old-man breath, rasping, puzzling at the air above him, interrogating his mute memories.

  He was better than he had been, he remembered that. He'd been fevered, his mind fettered with pain.

  What had happened? Where was he now?

  With an effort, he turned his head from side to side. He lay on a hard wooden bed with stone walls around him on three sides, a low curved ceiling above. It was almost like a tomb, except a slit of a window in the wall above his head let in air from the outside. It smelled like late spring. Looking over his feet, he saw the niche opened into a much larger space—the hall of a castle or, judging by the weird language of the singing, a church.

  By inches he tried to sit up. His legs throbbed with agony, but an inspection showed them both still there, to his relief. But by the time he had lifted his head halfway to sitting, it was spinning so badly he surrendered to a supine position. He fought down his gorge, and sweat broke out thickly on his brow.

  It was a while before he could continue his inspection. When he did, he found that beneath the sheet he was naked except for bandages. His weapons, armor, and clothes were nowhere to be seen. The bandages suggested someone was well disposed toward him, but that was anything but certain.

  Where was he? He tracked along his memory like a hound on a faint trail, pausing at landmarks. He'd come down from the mountains that he knew, clinging to Ogre's back. He remembered half falling his way down a talus slope and a plummet into a ravine. At some point, he'd fallen off the beast and couldn't find him again. He had flashes of days clinging to a tree trunk floating down a river, then endless stumbling through hill country that grew steadily flatter. And he remembered something following him, always just behind, making a game of it.

  After that, memory failed completely.

  He walked backwards up the trail in his mind, back into the mountains, climbing a black tangle of boughs, a song repeating endlessly in his head.

  Nittering, nattering

  Farthing go …

  The Briar King. He remembered with sickening suddenness the thing in the living barrow. He is waking. It's all true.

  “Winna!” he croaked. The Briar King be damned. The world be damned. Fend had Winna. First Qerla, now Winna.

  He heaved his legs over the side of the cot, ignoring the great waves of agony. Something in his head whirled like a child's top, but he nevertheless managed to stand. Two steps brought him to the upward-curving wall, and he used it for support to make his way out of the niche.

  A black flash passed behind his eyes, and then he was in the larger space, an enormous cave, like a Sefry rewn, but regular, curving high, high above.

  No, not a cave. That was stupid. He was inside a building …

  His legs weren't under him anymore. The stone floor abruptly explained to him how foolish he had been to try to walk. Cursing it, he settled for crawling.

  A bell tolled somewhere, and the singing stopped. A few moments later, he heard a gasp nearby.

  “Gentle saints!” a man's voice exclaimed. “Sir, you should still be abed.”

  Aspar squinted up to see a man in the black habit of a churchman.

  “Winna,” Aspar explained, through gritted teeth. Then he fainted.

  When he came around the next time, it was to a familiar face.

  “Huh,” Aspar grunted.

  “I spent a lot of time and effort dragging you here,” Stephen Darige said. The young man was sitting on a stool a few feet away. “I'd appreciate it if you'd not make that labor wasted by killing yourself now.”

  “Where am I?” Aspar asked.

  “The monastery d'Ef, of course.”

  “D'Ef ?” Aspar grunted. “More than sixty leagues?”

  “Sixty leagues from where? What happened to you, Holter White?”

  “And you found me?” Aspar grunted skeptically.

  “Yes.”

  He tried to sit up again. “Darige,” he said, “I have to go.”

  “You can't,” Stephen said, placing a hand on his arm. “You're better than you were, but you're still badly wounded. You'll die before you get half a league, and whatever it is you need so badly to do will no more get done than if you rest here a while.”

  “That's sceat. I'm hurt, but not that bad.”

  “Holter, if I hadn't found you, you would be dead, right now. If I hadn't found you near a monastery where the healing sacaum are known, you would still be dead or at the very least you would have lost your legs. There are three sorts of poison still trying to kill you, and the only thing keeping them down are the treatments you get here.”

  Aspar stared into the young man's eyes, considering. “How long, then,” he snarled, “before I can leave?”

  “Fifteen, twenty days.”

  “That's too long.”

  Stephen's face went grim and he leaned forward. “What did you find out there?” he asked in a low voice. “What did this to you?” He paused. “When I discovered you, there was some sort of beast with glowing eyes following you.”

  It's not what I found, Aspar thought bleakly. It's what I lost. But he looked Stephen in the eye again. He had to tell someone, didn't he?

  “That was the greffyn,” he grunted. “It was as Sir Symon told us. I saw it all. The dead, the sacrifices at the sedos. The greffyn. The Briar King. I saw it all.”

  “The Briar King?”

  “I saw him. I don't think he's fully awake yet, but he was stirring. I felt that.”

  “But who … what is he?”

  “I don't know,” Aspar said. “Grim take me, I don't know. But I wish I had never seen him.”

  “But he did this to you?”

  “A man named Fend did some of it. His men shot me up with arrows. The greffyn did more.” He rubbed his head. “Darige, at the very least I must get word to the other holters, as soon as possible. And to the king. Can you arrange that?”

  “Yes,” Stephen said, but Aspar thought he detected a hesitation.

  “This man that wounded me—Fend. He took captive a friend of mine. I need to find Fend.”

  “You will,” Stephen said softly. “But not now. Even if you found him—in this state, could you fight him?”

  “No,” Aspar said reluctantly. If Fend was going to kill Winna, she was dead. If he had some reason to keep her alive, she was likely to remain that way for a while. He winced at an image of her, spiked to a tree, her entrails pulled out and—

  No. She's still alive. She must be.

  The boy was right. He was letting his feelings get in the way of his sense.

  Suddenly, something occurred to him.

  “You saw the greffyn,” Aspar said. “Up close.”

  Stephen nodded. “If that's what it was. It was dark, but it had luminescent eyes and a beak like a bird's.”

  “Werlic. Yah. But you didn't get sick? It didn't attack you?”

  “No, that was strange
. It acted cross, sort of, and then left. I don't know why. It could have killed me with a single blow, I'm sure.”

  “It could have killed you with its breath,” Aspar corrected. “I fell down from merely meeting its gaze. I know one boy died just of touching a corpse that died of touching the monster. And yet you never even got a stomachache?”

  Stephen frowned. “I'd just walked the faneway of Dec-manus. Perhaps the saint protected me.”

  Aspar nodded. There was more than one thing he didn't understand about the greffyn, anyway. It could have killed Aspar any number of times, but it hadn't. “Can you take that letter for me?”

  “I can find someone to do it,” Stephen said. “Right now I have duties.”

  “Take it when you can, then. I don't trust anyone else here.”

  “You trust me?”

  “Yah. Don't take it too close to heart. I don't know anyone else here. You I know a little.” He paused. “Don't take this for much either—but, ah … thanks.”

  The young priest tried not to smile. “I owed you that,” he replied. His face grew more serious. “I've something else to ask you. When I found you, you had this.”

  Stephen reached into a leather pouch and produced the engraved horn. A shudder ran through Aspar's limbs when he saw it.

  “Yah,” he allowed.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “I don't know. There's a space I don't remember, after I saw the Briar King. After, I had it with me. You know what it is?”

  “No. But the language on it is very old.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I don't know.” The priest sounded troubled. “But I intend to find out. May I borrow it for a while?”

  “Yah. I've no use for the damned thing.”

  Stephen nodded and started to rise. “Oh, another thing,” he said. “Your horses showed up a day after I brought you here. No one can get near them, of course, but they have plenty of pasture. They'll be left alone until you recover.”

  Aspar's throat caught, and for an instant he had a terrible fear he might cry in front of the boy. At least he hadn't lost Ogre and Angel. They'd followed him, the damned stupid, loyal beasts, even with a greffyn behind them.

  “I'll be back when my duties are done,” Stephen assured him.

  “Don't trouble yourself,” Aspar said gruffly. “I don't need a nursemaid.”

  “Actually, you do,” Stephen replied.

  Aspar grunted and closed his eyes. He heard Stephen's footsteps recede.

  I'll find you, Winna. Or I'll avenge you, he promised.

  Fratrex Pell smiled at Stephen as he entered his spare chamber.

  “I am most pleased,” he said, tapping the newest sheaf of translations. “No one else has managed even a phrase of this lamina. The saints must have blessed you well.”

  “They did, Fratrex,” Stephen replied. “The language itself was not difficult—a dialect of the elder Cavarum.”

  “Then why the difficulty?”

  “It was written backwards.”

  The fratrex blinked, then laughed. “Backwards?”

  “Each word, front to back.”

  “What scribe would do such a thing?”

  Stephen remembered the disturbing content of the lamina. “A scribe who did not want his work widely read, I should say.” He struggled for his next words. “Fratrex, I know we've discussed this before, but I feel I must say again that my heart tells me these things are best left encrypted.”

  “Knowledge belongs to the church,” the fratrex said gently. “All knowledge. Let's have an end to your questioning, Brother Stephen, once and for all. I admire your persistence, but it is ill placed.”

  Stephen nodded. “Yes, Fratrex.”

  “Now, this other thing.” He held up a vellum scroll. “I'm puzzled. I didn't ask you to translate this.”

  “No, Fratrex, but in light of what the holter told us, I thought it pertinent to see what the scriftorium might hold concerning the Briar King and greffyns.”

  “I see. I assume you're doing this in spare time?”

  “At night, Fratrex, in the meditation hour.”

  “The hour is called that for a reason, Brother Stephen. You should meditate.”

  “Yes, Fratrex. But I think this might be important.”

  The fratrex sighed and pushed the scrifti back. “The holter was mad with fever when you brought him here, at the quay awaiting Saint Farsinth's boat. Whatever hallucinations he may have had aren't likely to be relevant to anything.”

  “He was badly hurt,” Stephen admitted. “And yet I know this man, somewhat. He is deeply pragmatic and not given to flights of fancy. When last I saw him, he thought greffyns and Briar Kings no more than children's fantasy. Now he is convinced he has seen them both.”

  “We often mock those things we believe most deeply,” the fratrex said, “especially those things we do not wish to believe. There is much separation between the waking mind and the mind of madness.”

  “Yes, Fratrex. But as you see, in the Tafles Taceis, the Book of Murmurs, there is a passage copied from an unnamed source in old high Cavari. In it, mention is made of the gorgos gripon, the ‘bent-nosed terror.’ They are described as the ‘hounds of the horned lord,’ and it is further said that their glance is fatal.”

  “I can read, you know,” the fratrex said. “The Tafles Taceis is an enumeration of pagan follies. It goes on to say in the annotation that this was most likely a term used to describe the personal guard of the witch-king Bhragnos, yes? Vicious killers known for their beaked helms?”

  “It does say that,” Stephen allowed. “And yet that annotation was written five hundred years after the original passage.”

  “By a learned member of the church.”

  “But, Fratrex, I saw the beast.”

  “You saw a beast, certainly. Lions have been known to come out of the hills, on occasion.”

  “I do not think this was a lion, Fratrex.”

  “Have you ever seen a lion, in the dead of night?”

  “I have never seen a lion at all, Eminence.”

  “Just so. If what you saw was one of these beasts, why did

  it not slay you? Why were you not poisoned by its mere presence? You should have been, if we take the holter's ravings seriously.”

  “I cannot answer that, Fratrex.”

  “I feel this inquiry of yours is a waste of our time.”

  “Is it your wish I no longer pursue the matter?”

  The fratrex shrugged. “So long as it does not interfere with the tasks expected of you, you may pursue whatever you wish. But to my mind, you're chasing phantasms.”

  “Thank you for your opinion, Fratrex,” Stephen said, bowing.

  Why didn't I mention the horn? Stephen wondered, as he left the fratrex's presence. The horn was something of a problem. The script on it was one he had seen only twice. It was a secret script used during the reign of the Black Jester. It was decipherable only because of a single scrift—written on human skin—which was accompanied by a parallel inscription in the Vadhiian script.

  The letters were unlike any other writing known to the church, and heretofore Stephen had always assumed that it had been invented by the scribes who used it. And yet here it was again, this time recording something in a language so strange Stephen hadn't the faintest inkling what it might say. The language resembled no tongue he had ever seen or heard.

  No human tongue, rather. But the way the words were formed resembled the tiny fragments of the Skasloi language he had seen glossed in elder Cavarum texts.

  What had the holter found?

  Pursing his lips, Stephen returned to the scriftorium.

  A closer inspection of the Book of Murmurs proved frustrating. In the back of his mind, he'd thought that perhaps horned lord might be better translated as lord with horns, but the word in question quite plainly referred to something like antlers, not a sounding instrument made of horn. He sat for a while, staring glumly at the text, wishing he had t
he original sources the unknown author had drawn upon.

  His mind whirred up various roads that went nowhere. He thumbed through the Tome of Relics, hoping to find some religious icon that matched the horn's description, though without much hope. If the language was really a Skasloi dialect, it probably predated the triumph of the saints over the old gods.

  As he was putting the book away, memory intruded, of an evening not long past, when Aspar White had frightened him with the threat of Haergrim the Raver. He remembered his own fanciful connection to his grandfather's mention of Saint Horn the Damned, and on impulse he tracked down a volume of obscure and false saints peculiar to eastern Crotheny. It didn't take him long to find it. Since walking the fanes, Stephen found that the scriftorium had become almost like an extension of his own mind and fingers; simply thinking of a subject led him quickly to the appropriate shelves.

  The book was a recent one, written by a scholar from the Midenlands, and though its organization was somewhat archaic, he soon found the reference he was seeking. He thumbed to the page and began to read.

  The Oostish folk speak in whispers of Haergrim Raver, a bloodthirsty spirit of madness who rides in hunt of the dead. It cannot be doubted that this is none other than a manifestation of Saint Wrath, or as he is called in Hanzish, Ansi Woth, a saint with a strange history. Originally one of the old gods, he was of fickle nature, and at the beginning of the age of Everon did alter his allegiance and become a saint, though a dubious one. He presides over the hanging of criminals, and his blessing is to be avoided, for it unfailingly leads to madness and ruin. The sound of his horn, like that of the Wicker Lord, is said to awaken doom.

  Stephen paused at that, but read on. What followed, however, was mostly a recitation of other names for the Raver, one of which was indeed Saint Horn the Damned, for it was said he had drawn the curse of the old gods upon himself by betraying them.

  But Stephen kept returning to the reference to the Wicker Lord, and when he was done, searched for an entry concerning him. To his disappointment, the entry was slim.

  The Wicker Lord is a false saint, doubtless an invention of the country folk, condensed from their fear of the dark and unfathomable forest that surrounds them. He is found most often in children's songs, where he is an object of terror. His awakening is said to break the sky and is connected with a horn that accompanies him in his thorny barrow. He is perhaps connected with the tales of Baron Greenleaf and may be a confused version of Saint Selvans, for similar tales are told of them. In some songs he is known as the Briar King.