The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  “Yah. That’s what I saw when they killed Sir Oneu. This bunch, they’re different. This is all different.”

  “Did you see what happened to Aspar and the rest?” Stephen asked.

  “I think all the slinders attacking the tree came with us,” Ehawk said. “They didn’t keep after the others.”

  “But why would they only want the two of us?” Stephen wondered.

  “They didn’t,” Ehawk said. “They only wanted you. It was only after I grabbed on to you that they started carrying me along, as well.”

  Then why would they want me? Stephen wondered. What could the Briar King want with me?

  He tried to turn more toward Ehawk, but their conversation seemed to have upset the slinders, and one of them struck Ehawk’s wrist so hard that the boy gasped and let go. They began carrying the lad away from Stephen.

  “Ehawk!” Stephen shouted, trying to summon the energy to fight again. “You leave him alone, you hear me? Or by the saints…Ehawk!”

  But fighting just made his bearers tighten their grip again, and Ehawk didn’t answer. Eventually Stephen’s voice grew hoarse, and he sank glumly into his own thoughts.

  He’d made many odd journeys in the past year, and though this wasn’t the strangest of them, it certainly earned a place in his Observations Quaint & Curious.

  He’d never traveled anywhere looking mostly up, for instance. Without the occasional glance at the ground, lacking the feel of his feet against it or the mass of a horse between his thighs, he felt disconnected, like a zephyr wafting along. The passing branches and dark gray sky were his landscape, and when it began to snow, the entire universe constricted to a tunnel of gyring flakes. Then he was no longer wind but white smoke drifting through the wold.

  Finally, when night took all sight from him, he felt like a wave borne along by the deep. He dozed, possibly, and when his perception sharpened again, there was a hollowness to the clatter of their passage, as if the sea that swept him along had poured down a crevice and become an underground river.

  A faintly orange sky appeared. At first he thought it was already sunrise, but then he realized the clouds weren’t clouds at all but a ceiling of irregular stone, and the light born of a huge fire was punching great fists of flame toward the cavern roof. The cave itself was large enough that the light faded before striking any limits except the immediate roof and floor.

  Crowded about the great hollow were countless slinders, stretched asleep or sitting awake, walking or standing, staring seemingly into nothing. So thick were their numbers that it hardly seemed as if there was a floor at all. Besides the omnipresent astringent smoke, the air was filthy with the stink of ammonia, the sour musk of sweat, and the sweet pungent rot of human feces. He’d believed the sewers of Ralegh stank as much of human waste as any place could, but he was here proved wrong. The damp, clammy air seemed to coat his skin with the stench so thoroughly, he reckoned it would take days of bathing to feel clean again.

  Without warning, the slinders carrying Stephen suddenly set him unceremoniously on his feet. His weakened knees collapsed, and he fell where they dropped him.

  Propping himself up, he looked around but saw no sign of Ehawk. Had they eaten the boy, after all? Had they killed him? Or merely ejected him from the procession, ignoring him as they had Aspar, Winna, and the knights?

  The aroma of food suddenly broke through the smell of the slinders and struck him like a physical blow. He couldn’t quite identify the scent, but it was like meat. When he understood what it probably was, his stomach knotted, and if he had had a meal to vomit, he certainly would have. Had Ehawk been right? Had the slinders refined their culinary tastes? Was he to be braised, roasted, or boiled?

  Whatever their ultimate intentions, at the moment the slinders appeared to be ignoring him, so he studied the scene around him, trying to arrange sense from it.

  At first he had seen only the huge flame in the center of the chamber and an undifferentiated mass of bodies, but now he noticed dozens of smaller fires, with slinders grouped about them as if in clans or cadres. Most of the hearths bore kettles, the sort of copper or black iron kettles he might find at any farmstead or small village. A few of the slinders actually were tending the pots; that struck him somehow as the strangest thing he had seen yet. How could they be so senseless yet still be capable of domestic tasks?

  Using his hands, he managed to climb unsteadily to his feet, and then he turned, trying to remember which way they had come from. He found himself looking squarely into a pair of vivid blue eyes.

  Startled, he stepped back, and the face came into perspective. It belonged to a man, probably around thirty years of age. His face was streaked with red pigment and his body was as naked and tattooed as the others, but his eyes seemed—sane.

  Stephen recognized him as the magician who had been calling down the branches.

  He held a bowl in his hands, which he proffered to Stephen.

  Stephen examined it; it was full of some sort of stew. It smelled good.

  “No,” he said softly.

  “It isn’t manflesh,” the man said in king’s tongue with an up-country Oostish burr. “It’s venison.”

  “You can talk?” Stephen asked.

  The man nodded. “Sometimes,” he said, “when the madness lifts. Eat. I’m sure you have questions for me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The man’s brow knotted. “It seems like a long time since I had a name that mattered,” he said. “I’m a dreodh. Just call me Dreodh.”

  “What is a dreodh?”

  “Ah, a leader, a sort of priest. We were the ones who believed, who kept the old ways.”

  “Oh,” Stephen said. “I understand now. Vadhiian dhravhydh meant a kind of spirit of the forest. Middle Lierish dreufied was a word for a sort of wild man who lived in the woods, a pagan creature.”

  “I am not so learned in the ways our name has been misused,” Dreodh said, “but I know what I am. What we are. We keep the ways of the Briar King. For that, our name has been maligned by others.”

  “The Briar King is your god?”

  “God? Saint? These are words. They are of no value. But we waited for him, and we were proved right,” he said bitterly.

  “You don’t sound glad of that,” Stephen noted.

  Dreodh shrugged. “The world is what it is. We do what needs being done. Eat, and we can talk some more.”

  “What happened to my friend?”

  “I know of no friend. You were the object of their quest, no other.”

  “He was with us.”

  “If it will ease your mind, I will search for him. Now eat.”

  Stephen poked at the stew. It smelled like venison, but then, how did human meat smell? He seemed to remember that it was supposed to be something like pork. And what if it was human?

  If he ate it, would he become like the slinders?

  He set the bowl down, trying to ignore the pain in his belly. It wasn’t worth the risk on any level he could think of. A man could go a long time without food. He was sure of it.

  Dreodh returned, looked at the bowl, and shook his head. He left again, returned with a small leather purse, and tossed it to Stephen. Opening it, Stephen found some dried and slightly molded cheese and hard, stale bread.

  “Will you trust that?” Dreodh asked.

  “I don’t want to,” Stephen replied.

  He did, though, scraping off the mold and devouring the ripe stuff in a few hard bolts.

  “The ones that brought you, they don’t remember your friend,” Dreodh told him as he ate. “You must understand, when the calling is on us, we don’t perceive things the way you do. We don’t remember.”

  “The calling?”

  “The calling of the Briar King.”

  “Do you think they killed him?”

  Dreodh shook his head. “This calling was simply to locate you and bring you here, not to kill or feed.”

  Stephen decided to let the particulars of that go fo
r a moment. He had a more pressing question.

  “You say that the slinders came after me. Why?”

  Dreodh shrugged. “I am not certain. You have the stink of the sedhmhari about you, and so our instincts tell us that you should be destroyed. But the lord of the forest thinks otherwise, and we can but obey.”

  “Sedhmhari—I know that word. The Sefry use it to refer to monsters like greffyns and utins.”

  “Just so. You might add to your list the black briars that devour the forest. All the creatures of evil.”

  “But the Briar King is not sedhmhari?”

  To Stephen’s surprise, Dreodh looked shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “He is their greatest enemy.”

  Stephen nodded. “And he speaks to you?”

  “Not as you understand it,” Dreodh said. “He is the dream we all share. He feels things, we feel them. Needs. Desires. Hatreds. Pain. Like any living thing, if we feel a thirst, we try to quench it. He put a thirst for you in us, and so we found you. I do not know why, but I know where I am to take you.”

  “Where?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, waving the question away with the back of his hand.

  “May I walk, or must I be carried again?”

  “You may walk. If you struggle, you will be carried.”

  Stephen nodded. “Where are we?”

  Dreodh gestured. “Under the earth, as you can see. An old rewn abandoned by the Halafolk.”

  “Really?” That raised interest in him. Aspar had told him of the Halafolk rewns, the secret caverns where most of the strange race called Sefry dwelled.

  The Sefry most people knew of were the traders, the entertainers, those who traveled about on the face of the earth. But those were the minority. The rest had lived in recondite caverns in the King’s Forest until just recently. Then they had left the homes they had lived in for countless millennia, fleeing the coming of the Briar King.

  Aspar and Winna had entered one such abandoned rewn. Now, it seemed, he was in another.

  “Where is their town?”

  “Not far from here, what remains of it. We have begun to raze it.”

  “Why?”

  “All the works of man and Sefry, throughout the King’s Forest, will be destroyed.”

  “Again, why?”

  “Because they should not be here,” Dreodh said. “Because men and Sefry broke the sacred law.”

  “The Briar King’s law.”

  “Yes.”

  Stephen shook his head. “I don’t understand. These people—you—you must have been villagers, tribesmen at one time. Living in the King’s Forest or near it.”

  “Yes,” Dreodh said softly. “That was our sin. Now we pay for it.”

  “By what sorcery does he compel you? Not everyone comes under his spell. I’ve seen the Briar King, and I didn’t become a slinder.”

  “Of course not. You do not drink from the cauldron. You do not swear the oaths.”

  Stephen felt his throat go dry as once again the world seemed to leave him, spin around a few times, and return distorted.

  “Let me understand this,” he said, trying to keep his voice from revealing his outrage. “You chose this? All of these people serve the Briar King of their own volition?”

  “I don’t know what choice is anymore,” Dreodh said.

  “Well, let me be plain,” Stephen said. “By ‘chose,’ I mean the act of consciously making a decision. By ‘chose,’ I mean, did you scratch your chin one day and say, ‘By my beard! I believe I’ll run naked like a beast, eat the flesh of my neighbors, and live underground in caves’? By ‘chose,’ I mean could you have, let’s say, not done this?”

  Dreodh lowered his head and nodded.

  “Then why?” Stephen exploded. “Why, by the saints, would you choose to become base animals?”

  “There is nothing base about the animals,” Dreodh said. “They are sacred. The trees are sacred. It is the saints who are corruption.”

  Stephen started to protest, but Dreodh waved him off. “There were those of us who always kept to the old ways—his ways. We made the ancient sacrifices. But what we remembered, we did not remember truly. Our understanding wasn’t complete. We believed that because we honored him, we would be spared when he returned. But the Briar King knows nothing of honor, or truth, or deceit, or any human virtue. His understanding is the understanding of the hunter and the hunted, the earth and the rotting, the seed and springtime. Only one agreement was ever made with him by our race, and we broke it. And so now we must serve him.”

  “Must you?” Stephen said. “But you just said you had a choice.”

  “And this is what we have chosen. You would have done the same, had you been one of us.”

  “No.” Stephen sneered. “I rather think not.”

  Dreodh stood abruptly. “Follow me. I will show you a thing.”

  Stephen followed, stepping gingerly around the slinders. In sleep, they seemed normal men and women save for their general state of undress. He reflected that until now he rarely had glimpsed the nakedness of a woman. Once, when he was twelve, he and some friends had watched through a crack in a wall while a girl changed her frock. More recently, he’d accidentally caught a glimpse of Winna as she was bathing. Both times the sight seemed to have seared through his eyes, straight through his belly to where his lust dwelled. Other times the act of merely imagining what a woman might look like beneath her clothes was a powerful distraction.

  Now he saw scores of women, some quite beautiful, all as naked as the saints had made them, and he felt nothing but a general sort of revulsion.

  They waded through a shallow stream and were soon out of the light.

  “Keep your hand on my shoulder,” Dreodh instructed.

  Stephen did so, following him through the darkness. Though the saints had blessed his senses, he could not see without any light. He could almost hear the shape of the cavern by the echo from their footfalls, however, and he made a conscious effort to remember the turnings and how many steps came before each.

  Presently, a pale new light shone ahead, and they reached the stony shores of an underground lake where a small boat waited for them, tied at a polished limestone quay. Dreodh gestured him in, and in moments they had started across the obsidian waters.

  The illumination came from dancing motes like fireflies, and in their tiny lamps the shadow of a city took shape, dreamlike and delicate. Here a spire suddenly glinted like a trace of rainbow; there the hollow eyes of windows gazed out like watchful giants.

  “You’re going to destroy that?” Stephen breathed. “But it’s so beautiful.”

  Dreodh didn’t reply. Stephen noticed that a few of the floating lights had begun drifting toward them.

  “Witchlights,” Dreodh explained. “They are not dangerous.”

  “Aspar told me about these,” Stephen said, reaching toward one of them. They were like little glowing wisps of smoke, flames with no substance or heat.

  More arrived, escorting them to the farther shore.

  Stephen already heard a hushed chatter beyond. Human voices or Sefry, he could not say, but they were high in pitch.

  When he saw their low forms on the bank, illumined faintly by the ephemeral lights, Stephen suddenly understood. “Children,” he breathed.

  “Our children,” Dreodh clarified.

  They came ashore, and a few of the youngsters wandered up to them. Stephen recognized one as the other singer back at the tree, the girl. She leveled her gaze at Dreodh.

  “Why have you brought him here?” she asked.

  “He has been called. I am to take him to the Revesturi.”

  “Still,” she said, sounding extraordinarily adult, “why bring him here?”

  “I wanted him to see the jungen.”

  “Well, here we are,” the girl said.

  “Ehawk said he never saw any signs of children in the abandoned villages,” Stephen said. “Now I think I understand. He’s holding your children hostage, isn’t he? I
f you don’t serve the Briar King as slinders, your children are forfeit.”

  “They serve the Briar King,” the girl said, “because we told them to.”

  THE WET SLOG of hooves through snow grew nearer, accompanied by snatches of conversation. The language sounded like the king’s tongue, but sounds in the forest were deceptive.

  For that and many other reasons, Neil was sick of this forest. The island of Skern, where he’d been born, was a place of mountains and sea, but one could walk the length and breadth of it, from the highest, rockiest asher to the lowest gleinn, and never see more than three scraggly bushes in any one place.

  These trees blinded and deafened him; they made him misjudge distance.

  More than that, Neil was convinced, forests were places of death where rot was always around and the oldest, sickest things in the world seemed to dwell. Give him the clean, open sea or wind-scrubbed heath, and thank Saint Loy.

  But the forest is where I am, he thought, and by the sound of it, it’s where I’ll die.

  He crouched a bit deeper in the brush. His company’s horses were scattered, if not eaten by the slinders, and on foot against horsemen none of them stood a chance, with the probable exception of Aspar White. But Neil couldn’t imagine the holter leaving Winna to her fate.

  So if this was a new foe—or more of the old—they would stay concealed or die.

  Then, as the frontriders of the company came into view, Neil saw a flash of short red hair and the face of Anne Dare. The riders with her bore a standard familiar to him: the crest of Loiyes.

  Relief flooded through him. He was sheathing his sword and preparing to step out to greet them, when a thought occurred and held him back. What if their attackers had been sent from Loiyes? What if the fickle Elyoner had joined her brother, the usurper?

  But Anne did not seem a captive; she sat confidently on her horse, the hood of her weather cloak thrown back, her expression searching but not fearful. When she and her new companions saw the carnage, they reined to a stop.

  “What has happened here?” he heard Anne ask.

  “I cannot say, Majesty,” a male voice replied. “But you should not look upon such unseemly butchery.”