The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [117]
But then she remembered a trip to the dungeons with Muriele and knew that the voice she heard was that of the Kept.
The Kept was called that to avoid naming what it really was: the last of the demon race that had enslaved both Men and Sefry—the last of the Skasloi.
As she drew nearer to his domain, the whispering grew louder, and images brightened, scents sharpened. Her fingers felt like claws, and when she put her hand against the wall, she felt a rough scraping, as if her hands were made of stone or metal. She smelled something like rotting pears and sulphur, saw in bright flashes a landscape of scaly trees without leaves, a strange and huge sun, a black fortress by the sea so ancient that its walls and spires were weathered like a mountain. Her body felt at turns small and enormous.
I am me, she insisted soundlessly. Alis Berrye. My father was Walis Berrye; my mother was born Wenefred Vicars…
But her childhood seemed impossibly far away. With effort she remembered the house, a rambling mansion so poorly kept that some rooms had floors that had rotted through. When she tried to picture it, however, she envisioned a stone labyrinth instead.
Her mother’s face was a blur surrounded by flaxen hair. Her father was even dimmer, though she had seen him only a year ago. Her elder sister, Rowyne, had blue eyes, like her, and rough hands that stroked her hair.
She’d been five when the lady in the dark dress came and took her away, and after that it was ten years before she saw her parents again, and then they had just been bringing her to Eslen.
Even then they hadn’t known the truth of the matter, that the reason she had been returned to them was so that the king would notice her and take her for his mistress.
Her mother died the next year, and her father came to visit two years later, hoping Alis could persuade the king to grant him funds to drain the festering swamp that had crept over most of the canton’s once-arable land. William had given him the money and an engineer, and that was the last she had seen of anyone in her family.
Sister Margery with her crooked smile and curly red hair; Sister Grene with her big nose and wide eyes; Elder Mestra Cathmay, iron-haired and whip-thin, with eyes that saw into everything—they had been her family.
All now dead, the voice taunted. So very dead. And yet death is no longer very distant…
Suddenly there was a sense of floating, and it took Alis a moment to understand that she was falling, so many and strange were the sensations that came with the voice.
She put out her arms and legs in a flailing attempt to find something to grab. Incredibly, she succeeded as her palms struck flat against walls before they were half-extended. Pain shot up her arms as if they were trying to yank from her shoulders, and the agony of her wound wrenched a scream out of her. Then she fell again, her knees and elbows scraping against the walls of the shaft until white light blossomed in the soles of her feet and struck up through her, knocking her cleanly out of her body and into the black winds high above.
Singing brought her back, a rough, raspy canting in a language she did not know. Her face was pressed against a damp, tacky floor. When she lifted it, pain shot across her skull and down her spine.
“Oh!” she gasped.
The singing stopped.
“Alis?” A voice asked.
“Who is that?” she answered, feeling her head. It was sticky, and she found a cut at the hairline. None of her bones seemed to be broken.
“It is I, Lo Videicho,” the voice replied.
The darkness was absolute, and the walls made strange the sound, but Alis guessed the speaker was no more than four or five kingsyards away. She reached down to her girdle and the dagger she kept there.
“That sounds Vitellian,” she said, trying to keep him talking so she would know where he was.
“Ah, no, my dulcha,” he said. “Vitellian is vinegar, lemon juice,