The Blood Knight

by Greg Keyes

  “That’s exactly what I meant,” Anne said. “I don’t think I will ever be able to read such stories again.”

  “Perhaps not,” Elyoner replied. “But however things go, it shall be some time before you are even afforded the chance. Though I hope for your sake, my dear, that you are eventually gifted with enough boredom to consider it.”

  Anne smiled. “Yes, I hope that, too, Aunt Elyoner. So tell me, has anything terrible happened while I slept?”

  “Terrible? No. Your young knight had some questions for your young swordsman concerning his dueling apparel.”

  “I suppose he was next door with Austra,” Anne murmured. She glanced warily at her friend, but her steady breathing continued.

  “I suppose he was,” Elyoner replied. “Does that trouble you?”

  Anne considered that for a moment, her head cocked to one side. “Not at all,” she replied. “She’s welcome to him.”

  “Is she really?” Elyoner said, an odd lilt to her voice. “How liberal of you.”

  Anne gave her aunt a look that she hoped would bring an end to the subject. In point of fact, she wasn’t that happy about it. That Austra and Cazio had been naked, almost certainly doing that, just a wall away from her, felt—well, disrespectful.

  Still, Cazio’s presence had been fortunate. Again. It was good to know she had someone who would throw himself naked at an enemy to defend her, especially when his heart seemed to be occupied elsewhere. She had profoundly misjudged Cazio when first they had met; she had thought him a braggart, a blowhard, and an incorrigible flirt. The latter was still true, and her chief concern for Austra was that he might prove himself fickle, as well.

  But he had been so constant as their protector, so steadfast, that she was starting to believe that he might be less feckless in matters of the heart than he at first appeared. If she had suspected that when first they met…

  She realized Elyoner was studying her now, and not the cards. Her aunt’s grin had broadened.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing, dove.” She looked back at her cards. “In any event, Austra is distraught. She stayed awake all night watching you; she only agreed to sleep when I arrived. Sir Neil is outside.”

  “Will you tell me what happened between him and Fastia?” Anne asked.

  Elyoner shook her head slightly. “Nothing unnatural. Nothing so bad, and not nearly as much as either deserved. Let it stay at that, won’t you? It would be far better that way.”

  “I saw her,” Anne said.

  “Saw who?”

  “Fastia. In my dream. She warned me of the assassin.”

  “She would,” Elyoner said without a trace of skepticism. “She always loved you.”

  “I know. I wish I had been nicer to her the last time I saw her.”

  “The only way to never have that regret is to be unfailingly nice all the time,” Elyoner said. “I cannot imagine how terrible life would be if I had to live it like that.”

  “But you are nice all the time, Aunt Elyoner.”

  “Pish,” she said. Then her eyes widened. “Why, look at that! The cards are predicting good news today.”

  Anne heard boots in the hall, and the hair on her arms suddenly prickled.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “A beloved relation is coming and bringing gifts.”

  A rap sounded at the door.

  “Are we ready to receive visitors?” Elyoner asked.

  “Who is it?” Anne asked, hesitation in her voice.

  Elyoner clucked and switched her finger about. “The cards aren’t that specific, I’m afraid,” she said.

  Anne pulled the folds of her dressing gown tighter.

  “Come in,” she called.

  The door creaked, and a tall male form stood there. It was several heartbeats before Anne recognized him.

  “Cousin Artwair!” she cried.

  “Hello, little saddle burr,” Artwair replied, stepping to her bedside and reaching down for her hand. His gray eyes were stern, as they usually were, but she could tell he was happy enough to see her.

  She hadn’t been called “saddle burr” in a long time, and she remembered that it was Artwair who had coined that nickname for her. He’d found her in the stables hidden behind a heap of saddles when she was eight. She couldn’t remember what she had been avoiding at the time, only Cousin Artwair lifting her up with his strong hands…

  Something snapped into focus then, and she gasped.

  Artwair had only one hand now. Where his right hand ought to be, there was only a bandaged stump.

  “What happened to your—Oh, Artwair, I’m so sorry.”

  He lifted the stump, looked at it, and shrugged. “Don’t be. That’s the life of a warrior. I’m lucky that’s all I lost. How can I complain when I still have another, and eyes to see you with? So many of my men lost everything.”

  “I-I don’t even know where to begin,” Anne said. “So much has happened…”

  “I know a lot of it,” Artwair said. “I know about your father and your sisters. Elyoner has been catching me up on the rest.”

  “But what about you? Where have you been?”

  “On the eastern marches of the King’s Forest, fighting—” He paused. “Things. It seemed important at first, but then we realized they never really come out of the forest. Then I got word of what Robert’s been up to in Eslen, and I thought I ought to check into it.”

  “My uncle Robert’s gone mad, I think,” Anne said. “He’s imprisoned my mother. Did you know that?”

  “Auy.”

  “I’ve determined to do what I can to free her and take back the throne.”

  “Well,” Artwair said, “I might be of some help there.”

  “Yes,” Anne said. “I hoped you would say that. I don’t know much about waging war, really, nor do any of my companions. I need a general, Cousin.”

  “I would be honored to serve you in that regard,” Artwair replied. “Even one man can make a difference.”

  Then he smiled a little more broadly and fondly mussed her hair.

  “Of course, I’ve also brought my army.”

  GRAY DAWN spilled into the valley as Stephen and Ehan raced toward the river. The horses proved unrideable, bucking and rearing uncontrollably, so they had to lead them.

  The earth shivered beneath Stephen’s boots, and sick unreasoning fear threatened to overwhelm him. It felt as if everything was too loud and too bright, and he wanted to tell everyone he just needed a rest, a day or so to himself.

  Ehan, too, was flushed and wide-eyed. Stephen wondered if this was how field mice felt when they heard the screech of a hawk, knowing the terror in their bones even when they hadn’t seen the predator itself.

  He kept turning back, and just as they reached the base of the orchard, he saw it.

  The monastery was raised up on a hill, its graceful, exuberant line etched against a lead sky faintly patinaed with amber. A peculiar violet light flickered in one of the highest windows of the bell tower; Stephen felt his face warming, as if he were looking at the sun.

  An eldritch fog rose around the base of the structure, and at first Stephen thought what he saw was smoke rising up, until his saint-sharpened eyes picked out the details: the beetle-green lamps of its eyes, the teeth it showed as it opened its mouth, the long sinew of its body twining up the tower.

  Everything else faded away: Ehan urging him on, the men at the bottom of the hill calling frantically, the distant tolling of the clock. Only the monster existed.

  But “monster” wasn’t nearly the right word. The greffyn was a monster. The utin, the nicwer—those were monsters, creatures from an elder time somehow restored to a world that had believed itself sane. But everything in Stephen screamed that this—this was a difference not only of degree but of kind. Not a monster but a god, a Damned Saint.

  His knees trembled, and he dropped onto them, and as he did so, its eyes turned toward him. Across the distance of a quarter of a league their
gazes met, and Stephen felt something so far beyond human emotion that his body could not contain it much less understand it.

  “Saints,” Ehan said. “Saints, it sees us. Stephen—”

  Whatever Ehan meant to say was cut short as the violet light flared again. This time it didn’t confine itself to the single window. Instead, it spewed from every part of the great monastery. It brightened unbearably, and d’Ef suddenly was gone, replaced by a sphere of intolerable radiance.

  “Fratrex Pell!” Stephen heard Ehan gasp.

  OBSERVATIONS ON THE VITELLIAN VERB, SONITUM

  Having a very specific definition, “to deafen by thunder.” It seems peculiar that the Hegemony would have had such a particular word; a verb “to make deaf” exists (ehesurdum), as does the word “thunder” (tonarus). It suggests that being deafened by thunder happened often enough to warrant its own verb. Was there more thunder in the past? Probably not of a natural sort. But when the saints and the old gods were at war, it was likely to have been rather noisy…

  The first crest of sound brought tears of pain and horror to his eyes. Then he didn’t hear anything at all, though he felt the blast against his face. When his other senses returned, Stephen grabbed Ehan and pushed him to the ground just as the second shock swept past, a horizontal sleet of stone and heat that sheared the upper branches of the trees and sent cascades of burning twigs down upon them.

  Ehan’s mouth was moving, but there was no sound except a long drawn-out tolling like the largest bell in the world.

  Sonitum: “to deafen with thunder.” Sonifed som: “I have by thunder been deafened”…

  Stephen lifted himself gingerly, his gaze drawing toward where he had last seen the monastery. Now he saw only a cloud of dark smoke.

  His first grief was for the books, the precious, irreplaceable books. Then he thought about the men who had sacrificed themselves, and a shiver of guilt ran through him.

  He reached up to touch his ears, wondering if the drums had been burst, if his loss of hearing would be temporary or permanent. The ringing in his head was so loud, it made him dizzy, and the world his eyes saw seemed unreal. He was reminded of when he walked the faneway of Saint Decmanus; his senses had been stripped from him one by one, until he had been nothing more than a presence moving though space. Another time he apparently had been dead, and though he could see nothing of the quick world, he could feel and hear it. Here he was again, pushed a little beyond the bounds of the world, as if that was where he belonged.

  He frowned, then remembered the time when his friends had thought him dead. There had been a face, a woman’s face, with red hair but with features too terrible to gaze upon.

  How could he have forgotten that?

  Why did he remember it now?

  Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he fell to his knees again and began to vomit. He felt Ehan’s hand on his back and was ashamed at being down on all fours like a beast, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  As his breath slowed and he felt a little better, he noticed that the vibration had returned, a quivering of the earth beneath his palms and knees. His mind, usually so quick, took a moment to grasp what his body was trying to tell him.

  He came shakily back to standing and looked again toward d’Ef.

  He still couldn’t see anything but smoke, but it didn’t matter. He could feel it coming. Whatever dread force the fratrex had released, it hadn’t been enough to slay the woorm.

  Shakily, he grasped Ehan by the arm and pulled him toward the horses. There were two other men there. One was a young fellow in burnt orange clerical robes. He had a large bulbous nose, green eyes, and ears that might have looked better on a larger head. The other man, Stephen recognized, a huntsman named Henne. He was a little older, maybe thirty, with a sun-browned face and broken teeth. Stephen remembered him as competent, uncomplicated, and friendly in a rough fashion.

  At the moment they were all distracted by the discovery that they couldn’t hear.

  Stephen got their attention by waving his hands. Then he mimed feeling the ground, pointing back toward where d’Ef had stood; he shook his head no, then pointed to the horses. The other monk already understood; Henne suddenly nodded and mounted up, gesturing for them all to follow.

  Probably also bereft of hearing, the horses actually seemed less skittish than before, though much inclined to depart. Mounted, Stephen couldn’t feel the woorm through the earth anymore, but he had no doubt it was coming. It must follow scent, he mused, like a hound, or perhaps it uses some faculty that has never been documented. He wished he’d had a better look at it.

  As they rode through a forest rendered eerily silent, he thought through what legend said of such creatures, but what he mostly remembered were tales of knights who fought and defeated them with sword or lance. Now that he had seen the woorm at a distance, that seemed so impossible that Stephen had to assume that if there was any reality at all in such tales, they spoke of some smaller cousin of the thing he had just seen.

  What else could he recall?

  They lived in caverns or deep water; they hoarded gold; their blood was venom but paradoxically could convey supernatural power under the right circumstances. They were much like dragons, but dragons were supposed to have wings.

  And woorms weren’t dumb beasts. Woorms were supposed to have the power of speech and terrible, crafty minds always devising evil. They were said to be sorcerers, and the very oldest texts he could remember suggested that they had enjoyed some special relationship with the Skasloi.

  He also remembered an engraving of the Briar King gripping a horned serpent. The caption had read—

  Had read—

  He closed his eyes and saw the page.

  Vincatur Ambiom. “Subduer of woorms.”

  So all he had to do was find the Briar King, and he would save them.

  Stephen laughed at that, but no one heard him. Ehan might have thought he was in pain, though, for he looked more concerned than ever; at the moment that was quite a feat.

  A bell later they descended into a lowland of white birches and crossed the worn track of the King’s Road. The day had dawned crisp and clear. Away from the woorm, the horses had calmed enough to be ridden.

  Stephen reckoned they were riding north more or less, paralleling the Ef River, which ought to be off to their right. The land got lower and wetter until the horses were slogging through standing water. The trees thinned, but fern and cattail rose head-high, obscuring vision beyond the narrow path they followed, which to Stephen’s eye looked like no more than an animal path of some sort.

  Finally Henne led them to slightly higher ground and a trail that had a well-traveled look. He took the horses to a trot, and they varied between that pace and a fast walk for perhaps two bells before they came quite suddenly upon a small cluster of houses.

  Stephen didn’t imagine it was a village, more likely a sort of extended family steading. It also was clearly abandoned. The pigpen had fallen into a ruin of rough wooden fence poles; the largest house had holes in its cedar-shake roof. Dead weeds had poked up through hard dirt, and there were hints of snow around the yard.

  Henne rode past all of that, down a slight rise to a flowing stream that seemed too small to be the Ef. He dismounted and went over to something suspended between two trees, covered with a tarp. For a moment Stephen feared that he would reveal a corpse when he drew away the cloth, that it was a burial such as he had heard some of the mountain tribes performed.

  In fact he had gotten the scale wrong; it was a boat hung by rope above the highest watermark on the witaecs. It looked in fair shape and was large enough to accommodate them.

  But not their horses.

  Henne set them to the task of removing the harnesses and saddles, and those they placed in the boat. That made sense: the Ef flowed north, which was the direction they wanted to go, but at the city of Wherthen it would join the White Warlock and turn west toward Eslen. They might go upriver from Wherthen if they could find the right
sort of vessel, but at some point they would have to find new horses and continue north and east to reach the Bairghs. Better that they didn’t have to buy new tack, as well.

  Their task completed, they climbed into the craft. Henne went to the tiller, and Ehan and the other monk took the oars. Stephen watched the horses, which regarded them curiously as they started downstream. He hoped they had enough sense to scatter before the woorm reached them.

  He tapped Ehan and made a rowing motion, but the little man shook his head, pointing instead to the packages of scrifti and books. Stephen nodded and set about securing them with twine in case the boat should capsize. When he was done with that, he dipped his hand in the icy-cold water, not long from the mountains.

  He thought he felt the faint vibration of the woorm, but he couldn’t be certain. As he watched the prow of the boat cut the river, a few flakes of snow began to fall, vanishing without a ripple as they struck the quicksilver surface.

  There seemed a world of meaning in that, but he was too tired, far too tired to search for it.

  He wondered how Winna was. And Aspar, and poor Ehawk.

  His limbs were made of stone; he couldn’t move and was able to open his eyes only with terrific effort.

  He was in his own bed, at home in Cape Chavel, but the familiar mattress was draped in soft black sheets, and the curtains hung about it were also black, though diaphanous enough for him to make out the suffused glow of candlelight in the room beyond.

  He felt as if he were sinking into himself, growing heavier. He knew he must be dreaming, but he couldn’t make it stop any more than he could move his limbs or scream.

  Beyond the curtain but between his eyes and the light, something moved: a darkness cast upon the cloth, walking around his bed, a shape sometimes human and sometimes something else. Something no more large than small, something that was whatever it wanted to be. His eyes—the only things he could move—followed it until it was behind him.

  He couldn’t shift his head to follow it there, but he could hear its heavy step, smell the air thickening as the curtains rustled ever so softly and the shadow fell across his face.