The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [82]
“It’s killed this tree,” he whispered. “All of these trees.”
“And us?”
“I don’t think so. The touch of it, the fog that it breaths—that’s down there. The roots are dead.”
Just like that. Alive for three thousand years…
“What was it?” Winna wanted to know.
Aspar lifted his hands futilely. “Don’t matter what we call it, does it? But I reckon it’s a woorm.”
“Or a dragon, maybe?”
“Dragons are supposed to have wings, as I remember it.”
“So are greffyns.”
“Yah. True. So like I said, it doesn’t matter what we call it. Only what it is, what it does. And Fend—”
“Fend?”
Raiht, he’d had her eyes covered.
“Yah, Fend was riding the damned thing.”
She frowned a little, as if he’d just told her a riddle and she was trying to reckon it out.
“Fend is riding the woorm,” she said at last. “That’s just, just so…” Her hands grasped at her sides, as if whatever word she was looking for might be caught there.
“Where did Fend find a woorm?” she finally settled on.
Aspar considered what he regarded as an essentially insane question.
For most of his forty-two years he had lived and breathed in the King’s Forest, seen the darkest, most tangled corners of it, from the Mountains of the Hare to the wild cliffs and weevlwood swamps of the eastern coast. He knew the habits and sign of every living thing in all of that vast territory, and never—until a few months ago, anyway—had he ever seen so much as the droppings of a greffyn, or an utin, or a woorm.
Where had Fend found a woorm? Where had the woorm found itself? Sleeping in some deep cave, waiting in the depths of the sea?
Grim knew.
And Fend seemed to know. He’d found a greffyn; now he’d found something worse. But why? Fend’s motives were usually simple, profit and revenge being chief among them. Was the Church paying him now?
“I don’t know,” he said at last. Then he peered over the edge. The mist the woorm had left seemed to have dissipated.
“Should we get down?” Winna asked.
“I think we ought to wait. And when we do go, we’ll go down over there, farther from its path, to avoid the poison.”
“What then?”
“It’s following the slinders, I think, and the slinders have Stephen. So now I guess we’re following the woorm.”
What seemed like a safe amount of time passed, and Aspar was ready to suggest that they start climbing down, when he heard the muffled chatter of voices. He put a finger to his lips, but Winna already had heard them, too. She nodded to let him know she understood.
A few moments later six horsemen came riding along in the very furrow created by the woorm.
Three of them were narrow of shoulder and slim of body and wore the characteristic broad-brimmed hats that protected Sefry from the light of the sun. The other three were larger and uncapped, probably human. The horses were all smallish and had the scruffy look of northern breeds.
Aspar wondered where his own horses were. They might all three be dead if they had been near the woorm’s exhalations, but horses, and Ogre especially, seemed to have good sense about things like that.
Anyway, the riders below weren’t dead. Nor was Fend, and he was riding the thing. Maybe the woorm wasn’t as poisonous as the greffyn. The utin, after all, hadn’t been. On the other hand, the monks at the hill of the naubagm had seemed immune to the greffyn’s influence, and a Sefry witch who called herself Mother Gastya had once provided Aspar with a medicine that neutralized the effect of the poison.
Aspar patted the branch and mouthed the words “wait here.” Winna looked concerned but nodded.
He padded across the broad branch carefully. It was so thick here it wouldn’t rattle smaller branches and give him away, like some gigantic squirrel. Working to a lower branch, he continued until he was just behind the riders and still comfortably above them. They had stopped talking now, and that presented him with something of a dilemma.
He’d been hoping they would say something to give away their purpose, something like “Don’t forget, fellows, that we work for