The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [104]
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