The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [218]
This one wasn’t going all the way to the ground, though, so he let go before it could snap him back up. That left him falling another five kingsyards into shallow water that was still draining off from the woorm’s eruption.
He was lucky. The water didn’t hide a boulder or a stump, but it still felt as if a palm the size of a boy had slapped him with all its might.
The pain galvanized him rather than slowing him down, and he managed to slosh to his feet and take stock of the situation.
Aspar couldn’t see the woorm just now, but he could hear it crashing through the forest. He spun and ran toward the base of the cliff, hoping against hope that he would find his bow and the precious arrow. But though the water was receding, it left in its wake a jumbled mess of sticks, leaves, and needles. It could take him a bell—or ten—to find his gear.
He still didn’t see the woorm, but he drew his dirk and, reaching for his ax, encountered the horn where he’d tucked it in his belt. He plucked it out, staring at it for a moment.
Why not? He didn’t have much to lose at this point.
He raised the horn to his lips, took the deepest breath he could manage, and blew a shrill high note that he remembered very well from a day not long gone. Even after he ran out of breath, the peal hung in the air, reluctant to fade.
But fade it did, and the woorm was still coming.
He’d reached the cliff now, and fortune favored him a bit; his bow-stave was caught in the lowest branches of an everic. But he didn’t see the arrow anyplace, and the woorm—
—was suddenly turning away from him, moving out of the canyon.
But something was still coming, something man-sized and moving far too quickly for a man.
“Sceat,” he groaned. “Not a another one of these bloody—”
But then the monk was on him, his sword a barely visible gleam in the dusk.
Stephen stiffened as the high clear note of a horn sounded in the evening air.
Zemlé noticed. “What is it?”
“I recognize that horn,” he said. “That’s the Briar King’s horn. The one I blew, the one that summoned him.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” Stephen replied absently.
Below, the khriim had been doing unusual things. Instead of moving straight toward the praifec and his men, it had gone off through the trees, in the direction of the cliffside. Just after the horn blew, however, it resumed its course, moving toward the approaching war band.
Stephen felt a tingle as a line of eight horsemen formed and charged the creature. He wondered if they stood a chance. A knight, a horse, armor, and barding at a dead gallop all concentrated on the steel tip of a lance was a formidable force.
He saw the Sefry warriors now, as well: twelve small figures approaching the praifec’s men at a trot. He caught an actinic glitter and realized that they had feyswords, like the knight he and his companions had fought in Dunmrogh.
The riders broke against the khriim like waves against a rock, except that a broken wave flowed back out to sea. The horsemen and their horses lay where they fell.
So much for that.
Stephen felt something move across his skin, and all the hairs on his arm stood up. He wasn’t cold, but he shivered.
“The horn…” he murmured.
“What’s that?” Zemlé gasped. She pointed, and Stephen saw a dark cloud approaching, or so it appeared to be at first glance.
But it wasn’t a cloud; rather, it was a collection of thousands of smaller things, flying close together.
“Birds,” he said.
They were of all sorts—corbies, martins, swans, hawks, curlews—and all were crying or singing, making whatever noise they made and raising the strangest cacophony Stephen had ever heard. When they reached the valley, they began spiraling down into the forest, forming an avian tornado.
The forest itself was behaving in an equally peculiar manner. An acre of it was moving; the trees were bending toward one another, knitting their limbs together. Stephen was reminded of the effect of the dreodh song on the tree