The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [15]
He was just turning to meet another attacker when the forest exploded.
He had a sudden sense of darkness, the scent of unbathed bodies, and something else: a smell like the sweet alcohol perfume of grapes rotting on the vine, the odor of black dirt. Then it seemed a hundred limbs were clutching at him, clenching him, and he was borne down into chaos.
ANNE’S MOUNT snuffled in fear as they approached yet another wall of black thorns wound so thickly through the trees as to deny entrance to anything larger than a vole.
“Hush,” Anne said, patting the beast’s neck. It flinched and shied from her touch.
“Be nice.” Anne sighed. “I’ll give you a name, all right? What’s a good name?”
Mercenjoy, a little voice in her seemed to titter, and for an instant she felt so dizzy, she feared she might fall off.
“No, then, not Mercenjoy,” she said, more to herself than to the horse. That was the name of the Dark Knight’s mount in the phay stories, she remembered, and it meant “Murder-Steed.”
“You belonged to a bad man,” she said as reassuringly as possible, “but you aren’t a bad horse. Let’s see, I think I’ll call you Prespine, for the saint of the labyrinth. She found her way out of her maze—now you’ll help me find our way out of this one.”
Even as she said it, Anne remembered a day that now seemed long ago, a day when her cares had been relatively simple ones and she’d been at her sister’s birthday party. There had been a labyrinth there, grown of flowers and vines, but in a moment she’d found herself in another maze, in a strange place with no shadows, and since then nothing had been simple.
Anne hadn’t wanted to get up, to catch the horse and ride. She’d wanted to stay huddled in the roots of the tree until someone came to help her or until it didn’t matter anymore.
But fear had driven her up—fear that if she stayed in one place for long, something worse than death would catch up with her.
She shuddered as a change in the wind brought a stench from the black briars, a smell that reminded her of spiders, though she couldn’t recall ever having actually smelled a spider. The strange growth was somehow like spiders, too. The vines and leaves glistened with the promise of venom.
She turned Prespine, following the thorns but keeping a respectable distance from them. Far off to her left, she thought she heard a sort of howling for a time, but as quickly as it began, it was gone.
The sun passed noon, then continued on toward its night home in the wood beyond the world. Anne imagined that the country where the sun slept couldn’t be any stranger or more terrible than this place. The thorns seemed almost to be guiding her, herding her toward some destination she almost certainly did not desire to visit.
As the sky darkened, she also began to feel something behind her, and she knew she had been right back at the tree. Something was coming for her. It began as small as an insect, but it grew, with its many eyes fastened greedily on her back.
When she turned, however, no matter how quickly, it was gone.
She’d played this game as a child, as most children do. She and Austra had pretended the dread Scaos was after them, a monster so terrible that they could not look at it without being turned to stone. Alone, she had imagined a ghost walking behind her, sometimes at the corner of her vision but never there when she turned to confront it. Sometimes it frightened her, sometimes it delighted her, and usually both. Fear that one had under control had a certain delicate flavor.
This fear was not under her control. It did not taste good at all.
And it only grew more substantial. The unseen fingers clutched ever closer to her shoulder, and when she spun about, there was something, like the stain the bright sun leaves beneath the eyelids. The air seemed to clot thickly around her, the trees to bend wearily earthward.
Something had followed