Gregory Keyes - The Blood Knight

“Keep climbing!” Aspar shouted. “Up that way. The narrower the branches, the fewer can come after us at a time.”

He kicked at the head of the nearest slinder, a rangy woman with matted red hair. She snarled and slipped from the branch, landing amid her squirming comrades.

The utins, he noticed, were still alive. There were three of them now that he could see, thrashing in the slinder horde. Aspar was reminded of a pack of dogs taking down a lion. Blood sprayed all around the slinders as they fell, dismembered and opened from sternum to crotch by the vicious claws and teeth of the monsters, but they were winning by sheer numbers. Even as he watched, one of the utins went down, hamstrung, and within seconds the slinders were dark crimson with its oily blood.

There would be plenty of slinders left when the utins were dead. Aspar gave up the vague hope that their enemies might cancel one another out.

Winna, Stephen, and the two Hornladhers had done as Aspar directed, and now he followed them until at last they reached a perch above a long, nearly vertical ascent. Aspar took his bow back off his shoulder and waited for the creatures to follow.

“They’re different,” he muttered under his breath, sighting down a shaft and impaling the first one to reach the base of the branch.

“Different how?” Stephen shouted down from above.

Aspar’s neck hairs pricked up—now Stephen’s uncanny senses seemed to be fine.

“They’re leaner, stronger,” he said. “The old ones are gone.”

“I only saw the dead ones at the fane by the naubagm,” Winna said, “but I don’t remember them being tattooed like that, either.”

Aspar nodded. “Yah. That’s what I couldn’t put my finger on. That’s new, too.”

“The mountain tribes tattoo,” Ehawk said.

“Yah,” Aspar agreed. “But the slinders we saw before came from a mixture of tribes and villages.” He shot the next climber in the eye. “These all have the same tattoos.”

They did. Each had a ram-headed snake wound around one forearm and a greffyn on the biceps of the same arm.

“Maybe they’re all from the same tribe,” Ehawk offered.

“Do you know any tribe with that tattoo?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

“The ram-headed serpent and the greffyn are both symbols associated with the Briar King,” Stephen said. “We’ve been assuming that the Briar King drove these people mad somehow, took away their human intelligence. But what if…”

“What?” Winna said. “You think they chose this? They can’t even speak!”

“I’ll need you to start passing down arrows soon,” Aspar said, shooting again. “I’ve only six left. The rest are on Ogre.”

“The horses!” Winna exclaimed.

“They can take care of themselves,” Aspar said. “Or they can’t. Nothing we can do about it.”

“But Ogre—”

“Yah.” He thrust away the pain. Ogre and Angel had been with him a long time.

But everything died eventually.

Slinders continued to arrive from the forest, with no end of them in sight. So many teemed below, he couldn’t see the forest floor for a hundred kingsyards.

“What do we do when we run out of arrows?” Winna asked.

“I’ll kick ’em down,” Aspar said.

“I thought you were on friendly terms with the Briar King and his friends,” Stephen said. “Last time they let you live.”

“Last time I had the king at the tip of an arrow,” Aspar said. “The one the Church gave us.”

“You still have it?”

“Yah. But unless the king himself shows his face, I don’t reckon to use it until it’s the only one I have left.”

It also occurred to him that the Sefry woman Leshya had been with him then. Maybe that had been the difference; Leshya’s true allegiance was—had always been—something of a mystery.

“That won’t be too long,” Winna said.

Aspar nodded and cast his gaze about. Maybe they could get to another tree, one with a straighter, higher bole, then cut the branch that got them there.

He was looking for such an escape route when he heard the singing. It was a weird rising and falling melody that caught at something in his bones. He was sure he had heard the song before, could almost imagine its singer, but the true memory eluded him.

The source of this song was visible, however.

“Saints,” Stephen said, for he had seen it, too.

The singing came from a short, bandy-legged man and a slender, pale-skinned girl whose green eyes blazed even at this distance, which was about fifty kingsyards. The girl looked to be only about ten or eleven, the youngest slinder Aspar had ever seen. She held a snake in each hand—from this distance they looked to be rattling vipers—and the man held a crooked staff with a single drooping pinecone attached to it.

Both had the tattoos. Otherwise, they were as naked as the day they were born. They directed their song upward, but it took only an instant to understand that they weren’t singing to the sky.

Ironoaks, the very ancient ones, had boughs so huge and heavy that they often sagged to the ground. The one Aspar and his companions were perched in wasn’t that old; only two branches were low enough even to jump up and grab. But as the holter watched, the tips of the farthest branches quivered earthward, then began to bend, as if they were the fingers of a giant reaching down to pick something from the ground.

“Raver,” Aspar swore.

Ignoring the next slinder clambering up the tree, he took aim at the singing man and sent his shaft flying. His aim was true, but another slinder somehow danced in the way of the arrow, taking the point in the shoulder. The same happened with his next shot.

“This is bad,” Stephen said.

The whole tree shuddered now as the thicker boughs began straining toward the pair. The slinders around them were beginning to leap at the descending branches, and though the branches weren’t low enough to catch yet, they soon would be. Then the entire tree would swarm with them.

Aspar looked up at the men-at-arms. “You two,” he said. “Start cutting branches. Anything that leads here. Move out to where they’re thinner so they’ll be easier to cut.”

“This is our doom,” one of the men said. “Our lord was evil, and now we pay the price of serving him.”

“You don’t serve him now,” Winna snapped. “You serve Anne, the rightful queen of Crotheny. Gather your manhood and do as Aspar says. Or give me your sword and let me do it.”

“I heard what she did,” the man replied, tracing the sign against evil on his forehead. “This woman you call queen. Killed men without touching them, using shinecraft. It’s all done. The world is ending.”

Stephen, who was nearest the man, reached his hand out. “Give me your sword,” he said. “Give it to me now.”

“Give it, Ional,” the other solider snapped. He looked at Stephen. “I’m not ready to die. I’ll go up this way. You’ll take the other?”

“Yes,” Stephen agreed.

Aspar gave Stephen and the Hornladher a quick glance as they moved out farther. If they could isolate the main branch they were on, they might have a chance.

Winna was looking at him, though, and he felt something sink down through his guts. Winna was the best and the most unexpected thing that had come into his life in a long time. She was young, yes, so young that sometimes she seemed as if she might be from a different country across some distant sea. But most of the time she seemed to know him, know him in a way that was unlikely—and sometimes was more unsettling than comfortable. He’d been alone for a long time.

The past few days she hadn’t talked to him much, not since she’d found him keeping watch by the wounded Leshya. In that, at least, she didn’t know him as well as she might. What he felt for Leshya wasn’t love or even lust. It was something else, something even he had a hard time naming. But it resembled, he imagined, kinship. The Sefry woman was like him in a way that Winna could never be.