The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [53]
So why was he thinking “utins” instead of “utin”?
He closed his eyes, calling upon the memory Saint Decmanus had given him, thinking back to the moment when the slinders had first attacked. In the chaos, there had been something else…
There. He could see it clearly now, as if some meticulous artist had painted the scene for him. He was glancing over his shoulder as he pushed Winna up into the tree. There was Aspar, turning with his knife in hand. Beyond were the slinders, breaking from the forest. But what was Aspar looking at?
Not the slinders…
It had been at the corner of Stephen’s vision; he saw only its limbs and part of its head, but there was no mistaking it. There had been an utin back there, just ahead of the slinders. Perhaps more than one.
Then what had happened to them? Had the slinders killed them, or were they working with the slinders?
The latter didn’t seem likely. The greffyn, the first utin, the nicwer they had encountered in the river at Whitraff, the black thorns—
The black thorns grew in the Briar King’s footsteps, yet they clung to him viciously, as if they sought to cover him, drag him down into the earth. According to Aspar, he once had been imprisoned by them, in a valley hidden in the Mountains of the Hare.
Slinders had attacked and killed the men performing human sacrifices on the sedos mounds throughout the forest, and those men seemed allied to the greffyn; they were the only creatures who could stand to be near it without becoming deathly sick.
No, he silently corrected. The renegade monks weren’t the only ones immune to the greffyn’s poison. He himself had caught the greffyn’s gaze and had suffered no ill effect. Aspar, too, seemed to have at least a raised tolerance, since the Briar King had healed him from the monster’s touch. So what did that mean?
Was it because he had walked a faneway? Were all ordained priests immune to sedhmhari?
It is the saints who are corruption, Dreodh had claimed.
If the slinders were the army of the Briar King, the monsters they had met were a part of some army, too: the army of the Briar King’s foe. But who could that be?
The most natural answer was the Church. He knew that the corrupt monks had friends as high as the praifec of Crotheny, Marché Hespero. Their influence might well go higher.
But even if Fratrex Prismo himself was involved, did that mean he was the master of the greffyn? Or was he just another monster, serving an even greater power?
He thought back through all the lore he had read concerning the Briar King, trying to remember who his adversaries were supposed to be, but few sources had mentioned enemies of any sort. The king was from the time before the saints, before humanity, perhaps even before the Skasloi who had enslaved the Mannish and Sefry races in ancient times. He appeared as a harbinger of the end of times.
If the king had any enemies, it would have to be, as Dreodh had seemed to suggest, the saints themselves.
And that brought him back to the Church, didn’t it?
Well, he’d been promised answers tomorrow. He wasn’t naïve enough to imagine that all his questions would be answered, but if he learned anything more than he knew, that would be something.
He pressed on through the Halafolk house and, finding nothing to hold his attention, left it and ambled farther into the doomed city, crossing slender stone arches over quiet canals, all sketched half-visible in the witchlight. The distant chatter of children had been augmented by an atonal chanting farther away, probably coming from the first chamber he’d been brought to.
Were the slinders preparing for another sortie aboveground, drinking their mead and working up their bloodlust?
The street angled down, and he followed it, vaguely hoping to discover some sort of scriftorium, a cache of Sefry writings. Their race was ancient and had been among the first to be enslaved by the Skasloi. They might well have recorded things the other peoples had forgotten.
As he wondered just what a Sefry scriftorium