Gregory Keyes - The Blood Knight

She wondered the same thing.

The landscape was rather drab. Farmsteads and fields crowded to the road, but beyond them were flat plains with little relief or sights of interest.

She wondered again if any of her friends were alive, if the road to Glenchest was the right course, whether she ought to go back toward where she had been abducted. But if they were dead, there was nothing she could do. If they were fighting for their lives, she couldn’t do much about that, either, not with only one very untrustworthy companion.

No, she needed to reach Aunt Elyoner and the knights she commanded.

Assuming they still existed or were at Glenchest. What if they already had gone to Eslen to fight the usurper? Or worse, what if Elyoner had thrown in with Robert? Anne didn’t think that was likely, but then, she didn’t really know what was going on.

In truth, she had always rather liked her uncle Robert. It seemed strange that he had taken the throne while her mother and brother yet lived, but that was the news that had come to Dunmrogh.

Perhaps Robert knew something she didn’t. .

She sighed and tried to push that thought away.

“Keep still,” Wist said suddenly. Anne noticed that he had a knife in his hand now and that he was near enough to use it on her without any trouble. He was glancing around. They had passed into a small grove of trees full of lowing cattle, and visibility wasn’t good.

But Anne felt and heard the horses coming. A lot of them.

“Slinders,” Stephen said.

Aspar had his gaze fixed across the valley, watching for one of their newly arrived opponents to show themselves.

“Coming from the east,” Stephen clarified. “Moving quickly—and, for them, quietly.”

Aspar strained his hearing to catch what Stephens ears had heard. After a moment he had it, a sound like a low, hard wind sweeping through the forest, the sound of so many feet that he couldn’t discriminate the individual steps, and with it, a faint humming in the ground.

“Sceat.”

“Slinder” was the name the Oostish had given the servants of the Briar King. Once they had been human, but the ones Aspar had seen did not seem to have retained much Mannish about them.

They wore little or no clothing and ran howling like beasts. He had seen them tear men limb from limb and eat the raw, bloody flesh, watched them throw themselves on spears and pull their dying bodies up the shafts to reach their enemies. They couldn’t be talked to, much less reasoned with.

And they were close already. How could he not have heard them? How had Stephen not, with his saint-sharpened senses? The boy seemed to be losing his knack.

He glanced quickly around. The nearest trees were mostly slender and straight-boled, but some fifty kingsyards away he saw a broad-shouldered ironoak reaching toward the sky.

“To that tree,” he commanded. “Now.”

“But Neil and Cazio—”

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Aspar snapped. “We can’t reach them in time.”

“We can warn them,” Winna said.

“They’re already over there,” Stephen said. “See?”

He pointed. Across the narrow valley, bodies were pouring over the rim and down the steep slope. It looked as if a flood were carrying an entire village of people down a gorge, except that there was no water.

“Mother of Saint Tarn,” one of the Dunmrogh soldiers gasped. “What—”

“ Run !” Aspar barked.

They ran. Aspar’s muscles ached to bolt him ahead, but he had to let Winna and Stephen start climbing first. He heard the forest floor churning behind him and was reminded of a cloud of locusts that once had whirred through the northern uplands for days, chewing away every green thing.

They were halfway to the oak when Aspar caught a motion in the corner of his eye. He shifted his head to look.

At first glance the thing was all limbs, like a huge spider, but familiarity quickly brought it into focus. The monster had only four long limbs, not eight, and they ended in what resembled clawed human hands. The torso was thick, muscular, and short compared to its legs but more or less human in its cut if one ignored the scales and the thick black hairs.

The face had little of humanity about it; its yellow carbuncle eyes were set above two slits where a nose might be, and its cavernous, black-toothed mouth owed more to the frog or snake than to man. It was loping toward them on all fours.

“Utin,” Aspar gasped under his breath. He’d met one before and killed it, but it had taken a miracle.

He had one miracle left, but looking past the shoulder of the thing, he saw that he needed two, for another identical creature was running scarcely thirty kingsyards behind it.

Aspar raised his bow, fired, and made one of the luckiest shots in his life; he hit the foremost monster in its right eye, sending it tumbling to the ground. Even as Aspar continued his flight to the tree, however, the thing rolled back to its feet and came on. The other, almost caught up now, seemed to grin at Aspar.

Then the slinders were there, pouring from between the trees. The utins wailed their peculiar high-pitched screams as wild-eyed men and women leapt upon them, first in twos, then in threes, then by the dozens.

The slinders and utins were not friendly, it seemed. Or perhaps they disagreed on who should eat Aspar White.

They finally reached the oak, and Aspar made a cradle of his hands to vault Winna to the lowest branches.

“Climb,” he shouted. “Keep going until you can’t climb anymore.”

Stephen went up next, but before he had a firm foothold, Aspar was forced to meet the fastest of their attackers.

The slinder was a big man with lean muscles and bristling black hair. His face was so feral, Aspar was reminded of the legends of the wairwulf and wondered if this was where they had come from. Every other silly phay story seemed to be coming true. If ever there was a man who had become a wolf, this was it.

Like all of its kind, the slinder attacked without regard for its own life, snarling and reaching bloody, broken nails toward Aspar. The holter cut with the ax in his left hand as a feint. The slinder ignored the false attack and came on, allowing the ax to slice through its cheek. Aspar rammed his dirk in just below the lowest rib and quickly pumped the blade, shearing into the lung and up toward the heart even as the man-beast rammed into him, smashing him into the tree.

That hurt, but it saved him from being knocked to the ground. He shoved the dying slinder away from him just in time to meet the next two. They hit him together, and as he lifted his ax arm to fend them off, one sank its teeth into his forearm. Bellowing, Aspar stabbed into its groin and felt hot blood spurt on his hand. He cut again, opening the belly. The slinder let go of his arm, and he buried his ax in the throat of the second.

Hundreds more were only steps away.

The ax was stuck, so he left it, leaping for the lowest branch and catching it with blood-slicked fingers. He fought to keep the dirk, but when one of the slinders grasped his ankle, he let it drop to secure his tenuous hold, trying to wrap both arms around the huge bough.

An arrow whirred down from above, and then another, and his antagonist’s grip loosened. Aspar swung his legs up, then levered himself quickly onto the limb.

A quick glance down showed the slinders crashing into the tree trunk like waves breaking against a rock. Their bodies began to form a pile, enabling the newer arrivals to drag themselves up.

“ Sceat ,” Aspar breathed. He wanted to vomit.

He fought it down and looked above him. Winna was about five kingsyards higher than the rest, with her bow out, shooting into the press. Stephen and the two soldiers were at about the same height.