The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [194]
Maybe they weren’t even there anymore. For all he knew, up north they’d been having greffyns and woorms and whatnot venoming the earth for years. He knew where they were coming from now, but he didn’t know why or how. Maybe Stephen could reckon that out, if Stephen was still alive. Was it a sickness, a rot, something that happened in the world now and then? Were their seasons longer than centuries, spells of quickening and dying? Or was someone—or something—doing this?
Was Hespero behind it all? Was Fend? Surely there was someone he could kill to make it stop. Or maybe the Briar King was right. Maybe the sickness was humanity itself, and it was everyone that needed killing.
Well, that was all tinder and no spark, and he wasn’t going to get the fire going just by thinking about it. He knew killing the woorm would put a stop to some of it, and maybe killing Hespero and Fend would help, too. He was certainly ready to give that a go.
Ogre picked his way over a collection of stones that looked suspiciously like a fallen wall, and Aspar noticed other such jumbles that weren’t natural to the terrain. Men and women had lived here once, built houses. Now the forest fed on their bones.
It was the way of things: Nothing was constant. Trees burned and produced meadow, meadows grew into thickets, and eventually the great trees came back and shaded out the grass and brush and smaller trees. Men made pastures and fields, used them for a few lifetimes, then the wood took them back. So it had always been until now. Now things had gone wrong.
He’d fix that or die. He saw no other choices.
Not much later he came to a broad clearing where he could make out the full loom of the mountain ahead. He realized he was already on its slopes, and from this angle he could see the woorm’s trail as a narrow but obvious line wiggling up the peak.
He could even see the front end of the trail, though the distance was too great to discern the beast itself. It was headed to the north face.
He could also hear Hespero’s men again, off to his right. Probably they were all on the same slope now, ridge and valley having evened out. He reckoned by the racket that they were probably almost a league away, though, and unless they had some shinecrafting, they’d have difficulty picking up his trail without backtracking along the cliff.
He patted Ogre’s neck. “You ready to run, old boy?” he asked. “We need to beat ’em to it.”
Ogre lifted his head eagerly, and together they hurled themselves at the mountain.
As Anne fled, Robert’s taunting laugh echoed in her ears.
How had he escaped Sir Neil? How had he known where to ambush her or about the secret passages at all?
But Robert wasn’t really a man anymore. She knew that. Probably he was like the Hansan knights and couldn’t die.
Had he and Sir Neil fought? Had he killed her knight? Or had the armies of Hansa already arrived, crushing Artwair and her army?
She wouldn’t think like that. She couldn’t. All that mattered now was to escape him long enough to think, to find safety for her and her companions. One of her men had died already, too confused by the glamour of the passage to run when she had commanded it, speared in the back by one of Robert’s soldiers. That left Anne five companions: three Craftsmen, Cazio, and Austra.
He’d been waiting for them with twenty men and a handful of his black-clad women to guide them.
Cazio, thank the saints, was still with her.
She tried to sweep away her fears and frustrations and concentrate. The passage should begin dividing up ahead, shouldn’t it? She’d never been here before, but she knew the place, could feel where it was going. If she could get them into the castle, into the passages there, they might be able to hide.
In the meantime, her men in Gobelin Court would all die, because even if Artwair succeeded in taking Thornrath in time to