The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [164]
Other plants were a bit more natural. Pale, nearly white ferns and gigantic horsetails sedged the edges of the pool stretched out before him. Beyond and to his left and right, rocky walls rose up to place him and the mere in the bottom of a gorge. The entire grotto had been decorated with human skulls, which japed down at him from the trees, from the crannies in the rock, and along the ground bordering the pool.
Everything bent toward him.
“Well,” Aspar said. “Here I am.”
He felt the presence, but the silence stretched until, very quietly, the water started to mound, and something rose up out of the mere.
It wasn’t the Sefry woman but something larger, a mass of black fur mated with pond weed, dead leaves, and fish bones. It stood more like a bear than a man, but its face was froglike, with one bulging, blind white eye visible and the other occluded by a mane of oily strands that seemed almost to pour from the crown of its head. Its mouth was a downturned arc that took up most of the bottom of its face. Its arms dangled down to the water, depending from massive sloping shoulders. There was nothing feminine—or masculine, for that matter—about it.
Aspar faced the thing for a few moments, until he was certain it wasn’t going to attack, at least not yet.
“I’ve come to see the woman of the Sarnwood,” he finally said.
Silence followed for several long tens of heartbeats. Aspar was starting to feel a little foolish when something else stirred in the water just in front of the whatever it was.
A head emerged. At first Aspar thought it was just another, smaller version of the creature, but the resemblance was superficial. This once had been a man, though his eyes were now filmed and his flesh an ugly shade of bluish-gray. Aspar couldn’t see what had killed him, but aside from the fact that he was standing up, he was clearly long dead.
The corpse suddenly started jerking, and water spurted from his lips. As this continued, a sort of wet gasping sound emerged and grew louder.
Finally, after the last of the water, Aspar began to recognize speech, soft around all the edges but understandable if he concentrated.
“They bring blood who come to see me,” the corpse said. “Blood and someone to speak for me. This one has almost been dead too long.”
“I had no one to bring.”
“The old man would have done.”
“But I didn’t bring him. And you’re talking to me.”
The witch shifted her monstrous head, and even without human expression, he felt her anger.
“I wish to kill you,” she said.
Aspar lifted what he held in his hand: the arrow given him by Hespero, the treasure of the Church said to be capable of killing anything.
“This was meant to slay the Briar King,” he said. “I reckon it will murder you.”
The corpse started gasping, as if for air. It took a while for Aspar to recognize laughter.
“What will you slay?” the witch asked. “This?” The massive paw reached up to touch its breast. “You might kill this.”
The trees around him suddenly creaked and groaned, and he felt the presence that had followed him since he’d entered the forest press down with incredible weight, then push through him so that he fell roughly to his knees. He tried to bring the arrow to the bow, but both were suddenly too heavy to hold.
“Everything around you,” the corpse gurgled. “Everything you see that grows or creeps or crawls in the Sarnwood—that is me. Can you put an arrow in that?”
Aspar didn’t answer, concentrating his will in a fierce effort to stand, to at least not die on his knees. Muscles trembling, groaning, he lifted first one knee, then the other, and from a squat tried to come upright. He felt as if he had ten men standing on his shoulders.
It was too much, and he collapsed again.
To his vast surprise, the pressure suddenly eased.
“I see,” the witch said. “He has touched you.”
“He?”
“Him. The Horned Lord.”
“The Briar King.”
“Yes, him. What have you come here for?”
“You sent a woorm from here with a Sefry named Fend.”
“Yes, I did that. You’ve seen my child, haven’t you? Isn’t he beautiful?”
“You gave Fend an