The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [44]
“I don’t want to,” Stephen replied.
He did, though, scraping off the mold and devouring the ripe stuff in a few hard bolts.
“The ones that brought you, they don’t remember your friend,” Dreodh told him as he ate. “You must understand, when the calling is on us, we don’t perceive things the way you do. We don’t remember.”
“The calling?”
“The calling of the Briar King.”
“Do you think they killed him?”
Dreodh shook his head. “This calling was simply to locate you and bring you here, not to kill or feed.”
Stephen decided to let the particulars of that go for a moment. He had a more pressing question.
“You say that the slinders came after me. Why?”
Dreodh shrugged. “I am not certain. You have the stink of the sedhmhari about you, and so our instincts tell us that you should be destroyed. But the lord of the forest thinks otherwise, and we can but obey.”
“Sedhmhari—I know that word. The Sefry use it to refer to monsters like greffyns and utins.”
“Just so. You might add to your list the black briars that devour the forest. All the creatures of evil.”
“But the Briar King is not sedhmhari?”
To Stephen’s surprise, Dreodh looked shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “He is their greatest enemy.”
Stephen nodded. “And he speaks to you?”
“Not as you understand it,” Dreodh said. “He is the dream we all share. He feels things, we feel them. Needs. Desires. Hatreds. Pain. Like any living thing, if we feel a thirst, we try to quench it. He put a thirst for you in us, and so we found you. I do not know why, but I know where I am to take you.”
“Where?”
“Tomorrow,” he said, waving the question away with the back of his hand.
“May I walk, or must I be carried again?”
“You may walk. If you struggle, you will be carried.”
Stephen nodded. “Where are we?”
Dreodh gestured. “Under the earth, as you can see. An old rewn abandoned by the Halafolk.”
“Really?” That raised interest in him. Aspar had told him of the Halafolk rewns, the secret caverns where most of the strange race called Sefry dwelled.
The Sefry most people knew of were the traders, the entertainers, those who traveled about on the face of the earth. But those were the minority. The rest had lived in recondite caverns in the King’s Forest until just recently. Then they had left the homes they had lived in for countless millennia, fleeing the coming of the Briar King.
Aspar and Winna had entered one such abandoned rewn. Now, it seemed, he was in another.
“Where is their town?”
“Not far from here, what remains of it. We have begun to raze it.”
“Why?”
“All the works of man and Sefry, throughout the King’s Forest, will be destroyed.”
“Again, why?”
“Because they should not be here,” Dreodh said. “Because men and Sefry broke the sacred law.”
“The Briar King’s law.”
“Yes.”
Stephen shook his head. “I don’t understand. These people—you—you must have been villagers, tribesmen at one time. Living in the King’s Forest or near it.”
“Yes,” Dreodh said softly. “That was our sin. Now we pay for it.”
“By what sorcery does he compel you? Not everyone comes under his spell. I’ve seen the Briar King, and I didn’t become a slinder.”
“Of course not. You do not drink from the cauldron. You do not swear the oaths.”
Stephen felt his throat go dry as once again the world seemed to leave him, spin around a few times, and return distorted.
“Let me understand this,” he said, trying to keep his voice from revealing his outrage. “You chose this? All of these people serve the Briar King of their own volition?”
“I don’t know what choice is anymore,” Dreodh said.
“Well, let me be plain,” Stephen said. “By ‘chose,’ I mean the act of consciously making a decision. By ‘chose,’ I mean, did you scratch your chin one day and say, ‘By my beard! I believe I’ll run naked like a beast, eat the flesh of my neighbors, and live underground in caves’? By ‘chose,’ I mean could you have, let’s say, not done this?”
Dreodh lowered his head and nodded.
“Then why?” Stephen exploded. “Why, by the saints, would you choose to become base animals?”
“There is nothing base about the animals,” Dreodh said.