The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [65]
But now he suddenly realized how deep the water was, and he wasn’t sure if he could swim in it.
Without meaning to, he recalled Leshya. The Sefry woman was tough and wise and kept what feelings she had close, very close. There wouldn’t be any confusion with her; with her it would be honest and simple—
He suddenly felt the tree tremble. Not from the wind; the cadence was all wrong, and it came up from the roots.
Winna must have seen him frown.
“What?”
He held a finger to his lips and shook his head, then returned his gaze to the ground. The vibration in the tree continued, but he couldn’t imagine what it was. It might be a few hundred horsemen, so many of them that the percussive thutter of hooves melted together. It might be slinders again, though it didn’t feel like that, either. There was a sustained quality to the vibration that was like nothing he’d ever experienced before, but it was getting stronger.
He shallowed his breathing, waiting for the sound.
A hundred heartbeats later he heard the start of a scraping, a grinding sort of noise. A few dead leaves gave up their desperate hold on their branches and drifted down. Aspar still couldn’t see anything, but he noticed that the woodpecker had stopped, as had all bird noises.
The sound was clearer now, and the shivering of the tree even more pronounced, so that at last he felt a heavy rhythm, a dull whump-whump-whump-whump almost below hearing. That said to Aspar that something very large and very heavy was running through the forest, faster than a horse could gallop.
And it was dragging something huge.
He noticed Winna’s breath quicken as he reached carefully for his bow and arrows, so he found her hand again and squeezed it. He glanced at the sky; it was still gray, but the clouds were high and on the bright side. It didn’t look like there would be more snow.
Whatever it was, it was coming from the same direction they had: north and west. The branches of the trees in that direction swayed visibly. He deepened and slowed his breath, trying to relax, focusing on the Old King’s Road below them and slightly to the north.
He caught only glimpses at first of something huge, black, and gray-green winding through the trees, but his senses couldn’t focus it into reality. He concentrated on two gigantic tyrants arching over a long clearing on the Old King’s Road, reckoning that that would be where he would get his first good look at it.
A mist poured through the trees, and then something dark and sinuous, moving so quickly that Aspar first thought he was seeing some strange flood, a river flowing above ground. But then it stopped as suddenly, as did the sound of its passage and the shaking in the tree.
The mist coiled, and something like a viridian lamp burned through it.
Instantly, Aspar felt his skin prickle and ache like the onset of a fever, and he clapped a hand over Winna’s face to stop her vision. For as the mist cleared, he saw that the green light was an eye, seen as just a sliver, above it as they were. But that might be enough.
Its head, he reckoned, was as long as a decent-sized man was tall. It had a long tapering snout with fleshy nostrils, something like that of a horse, but toward the neck its skull flared and thickened to resemble an adder’s. Two black horny ridges jutted up just behind the eyes, which bulged out of round, bony sockets. It had no ears that he could see, but it had a ruff of spikes that started at the bass of the skull and ran down its thorny spine.
It wasn’t a snake, for he could see that after four kingsyards or so of very broad neck it was drawn up on immensely thick legs terminating in what resembled a huge hoof cloven five times. However, like a snake, it dragged its belly, and its body twisted behind it, so long that he couldn’t tell whether it had rear legs, and he could see what he reckoned to be ten or