The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [42]
“They haven’t eaten us,” he heard a voice observe.
It was only then that he realized that one of the hands clutching him belonged to Ehawk. He remembered the Watau boy’s face in the first moments of confusion, when he’d been dragged roughly across the forest floor. Now he was being carried faceup, cradled in interlocked arms and held at the wrists by eight of the slinders. Ehawk was being carried similarly, but his right hand had latched firmly onto Stephen’s.
“No, they haven’t,” Stephen agreed. He raised his voice. “Can’t any of you speak?”
None of his bearers answered.
“Maybe they’re going to cook us first,” Ehawk said.
“Maybe. If so, they’ve changed their habits since Aspar saw them last. He said they ate their prey alive and raw.”
“Yah. That’s what I saw when they killed Sir Oneu. This bunch, they’re different. This is all different.”
“Did you see what happened to Aspar and the rest?” Stephen asked.
“I think all the slinders attacking the tree came with us,” Ehawk said. “They didn’t keep after the others.”
“But why would they only want the two of us?” Stephen wondered.
“They didn’t,” Ehawk said. “They only wanted you. It was only after I grabbed on to you that they started carrying me along, as well.”
Then why would they want me? Stephen wondered. What could the Briar King want with me?
He tried to turn more toward Ehawk, but their conversation seemed to have upset the slinders, and one of them struck Ehawk’s wrist so hard that the boy gasped and let go. They began carrying the lad away from Stephen.
“Ehawk!” Stephen shouted, trying to summon the energy to fight again. “You leave him alone, you hear me? Or by the saints…Ehawk!”
But fighting just made his bearers tighten their grip again, and Ehawk didn’t answer. Eventually Stephen’s voice grew hoarse, and he sank glumly into his own thoughts.
He’d made many odd journeys in the past year, and though this wasn’t the strangest of them, it certainly earned a place in his Observations Quaint & Curious.
He’d never traveled anywhere looking mostly up, for instance. Without the occasional glance at the ground, lacking the feel of his feet against it or the mass of a horse between his thighs, he felt disconnected, like a zephyr wafting along. The passing branches and dark gray sky were his landscape, and when it began to snow, the entire universe constricted to a tunnel of gyring flakes. Then he was no longer wind but white smoke drifting through the wold.
Finally, when night took all sight from him, he felt like a wave borne along by the deep. He dozed, possibly, and when his perception sharpened again, there was a hollowness to the clatter of their passage, as if the sea that swept him along had poured down a crevice and become an underground river.
A faintly orange sky appeared. At first he thought it was already sunrise, but then he realized the clouds weren’t clouds at all but a ceiling of irregular stone, and the light born of a huge fire was punching great fists of flame toward the cavern roof. The cave itself was large enough that the light faded before striking any limits except the immediate roof and floor.
Crowded about the great hollow were countless slinders, stretched asleep or sitting awake, walking or standing, staring seemingly into nothing. So thick were their numbers that it hardly seemed as if there was a floor at all. Besides the omnipresent astringent smoke, the air was filthy with the stink of ammonia, the sour musk of sweat, and the sweet pungent rot of human feces. He’d believed the sewers of Ralegh stank as much of human waste as any place could, but he was here proved wrong. The damp, clammy air seemed to coat his skin with the stench so thoroughly, he reckoned it would take days of bathing to feel clean again.
Without warning, the slinders carrying Stephen suddenly set him unceremoniously on his feet. His weakened