The Briar King (66 page)

“You knew?” Anne blurted.

Sister Secula's only answer was a soft laugh.

She let them down quickly, and no sooner had they touched the stone floor than came from above a chorus of howls, like damned souls, and the faint smell of sulfur.

Then silence.

In the darkness, Anne suddenly felt stronger. “Austra, take my hand,” she said.

“It's too dark,” Austra protested. “We'll fall in a chasm, or trip.”

“Just trust me and take my hand. You heard the mestra. I know the way.”

Men's voices floated down from above.

“You hear that? They know we're here.”

“Yes,” Austra said. “Yes, let's go.”

Fingers gripped together, the two girls started out into the dark.

CHAPTER TEN
THE SOUNDING

LONG BEFORE STEPHEN ENTERED THE CLEARING, Desmond saw him, of course. Stephen had known he would. The monk stopped his incantation, and a sardonic smile spread across his face.

“Lewes, Owlic,” he said. “On your guard. The holter will be near. He's a dangerous man, if he killed Topan and Aligern.” He smiled a little more broadly. “You couldn't have had much of a hand in killing them, could you, Brother Stephen?”

“No, you're right there,” Stephen said cheerfully. He crossed his arms and tried to look nonchalant.

Desmond cocked his head at the tone, then shrugged. “You've gone mad, I take it. That's to your advantage, considering what I'm going to do to you.”

“You're wrong about the holter, though,” Stephen went on. “He killed Topan and Aligern, but Topan gave him a mortal wound. I'm going to have to kill you by myself.”

“That's fine,” Spendlove said. “You can do that in a moment. In the meantime, make yourself comfortable—sit if you wish. I've a small task to finish before I take up your case.” He looked at Lewes and Owlic. “He's probably lying about the holter. Stay alert.” He turned back to the girl.

“You don't have to repeat all of that rigmarole, you know,” Stephen confided. “The sedos doesn't care if you say anything or not.”

Desmond scowled. “Perhaps not. The dark saints, however, care a great deal.”

“The dark saints are dead,” Stephen said. “You're showing your ignorance, chanting like some Watau wonderman. The sedoi are the remains of their puissance, their old tracks of power. The potence is there, but it's insentient.” He switched his tone to one he might use with a small child. “That means it can't hear you,” he said.

Desmond tried on another smile, but it seemed strained. “You're talking about things of which you know nothing,” he said.

Stephen laughed. “That's good, coming from a thickwit like you. What don't I understand? You're making changelings. You just sent Brother Seigeriek's soul off to steal a body, and now you're sending Ashern to do the same. Knights in the queen's guard, perhaps? Is that a lock of hair I see around Brother Ashern's neck? A personal item is needed to find the body, yes?”

“Lewes, shut him up until I'm done,” Desmond grunted. He held up an admonishing finger. “Don't kill him, though.”

The hulking monk started toward Stephen.

“You're the ones who don't understand what you're doing,” Stephen said. “Your knowledge is less than complete, and more superstition than anything else. That's why you needed me. You still do.”

“Oh, and you're ready to help us now?” Spendlove said. “I doubt that, somehow.”

“Call off Lewes,” Stephen said. “Call him off, or I'll use this.” He brought the horn from his haversack, the one the holter had carried from the Mountains of the Hare to d'Ef.

Desmond's eyes pinched to slits.

“Hold off, Lewes,” Spendlove said. He stepped a little away from the girl, holding his empty hands out so as to make clear he was not threatening her. “Where did you get that?”

“You should have spent a little more time in the scriftorium and a little less time buggering corpses,” Stephen told him. “Do you know what this is? I think you do.”

“Something you ought not to have. Something you won't have for long.”

“I don't need it for long. Only for an instant.”

Desmond shook his head. “You can't think I'm that stupid. The ritual involved—”

“Is as meaningless as the one you're gibbering now. Any sedos can unlock the power in the horn. Any lips can blow it. And look here, we have both.”

“If you really know what you have, you know better than to use it,” Desmond said. “Calling
him
won't help you.”

“You're afraid to name him? I'm not. The Briar King. The horned lord. The Nettle-man. And the thing about calling him, you know, is that I really
don't
know what will happen, and neither do you. He might kill us all, though the
Codex Khwrn
claims that the holder of the horn won't be harmed. A chance I'm willing to take, that, considering how by your own admission, you've some nasty things planned for me.” He raised the horn, wondering if there really was any such scrift as the
Codex Khwrn
.

“Stop,” Desmond said, a note of desperation in his voice. “Wait a moment.”

“You're so partial to the dark saints, yet you don't want to meet one?”

“Not
him
. Not yet.” He cocked his head. “You don't know everything, Brother Stephen. Not by half. If you wake him now—if you call him out of his wood before we've finished the preparations—you'll have more blood on your hands than I ever dreamed of.”

Stephen shrugged. “Let's not wake him, then.”

Desmond's voice took on a bargaining tone. “What do you want?” he asked.

“The girl. Let her go.”

“You know this slut?”

“I've never laid eyes on her before. But I won't watch you kill her. Let her go, and let the two of us walk away.”

“Where's the holter?”

“I told you. He's dead.”

Spendlove shook his head. “He probably went after Fend. They're old friends, those two.”

Lewes was only a few yards away, tensing as if to spring.

Stephen raised the horn almost to his lips and waggled a warning finger at the giant.

Brother Ashern, standing bare-chested on the sedos, cleared his throat.

“Seigereik has probably opened the gate by now,” he said. “There may be no need for me to go.”

Desmond laughed bitterly. “You always were a coward at heart, Brother Ashern. You've the most important task of all. You're to kill the queen, if the others fail. She'll trust you.”

“If he blows that horn, I won't be killing any queen,” Brother Ashern said defensively. “Seigereik has the gates open by now, and Fend and his men will be inside soon. It's a ride of less than half a bell, even in the dark. They'll get the queen, sure enough.”

“We don't even know it's the real thing,” Lewes growled. “It could be a cow horn he picked up someplace.”

“Or it could be I've been traveling with the holter who saw the Briar King, who went into his very demesne. Surely Fend told you about that. That was what Fend was after in the first place—the horn. Do you think he found it?” This was all guesswork, of course, but Stephen saw from their faces he had caught the sparrow.

Lewes was edging closer.

“No, Lewes,” Spendlove said. “He's right, and so is Brother Ashern. Soon the queen and all of her daughters will be dead; the holter can't kill Fend and all of his men by himself. The deed is accomplished. We've no need to kill this little whore.” He produced a knife from his belt, one that glittered with actinic light. “I'm going to cut her loose.”

Stephen pressed the horn to his lips, a tacit warning.

He hadn't counted on how fast Spendlove could move. The knife was suddenly a blur in the air, and then a shearing pain in Stephen's arm. He gasped.

He gasped, and the world filled with sound.

Stephen had never intended to blow the horn, of course, nor did he really believe it would do anything if he did. He'd been counting on Spendlove's superstitious belief in the dark saints.

He didn't even know
how
to blow a horn, though he had seen it done and knew that it wasn't like a hautboy or recorder; it involved buzzing the lips or somesuch. Just putting air in it shouldn't work.

But the clear note that soared into the dark air denied all that. And it wouldn't let him stop. Even as he sank to his knees, blood spraying from his arm, the horn blew louder, sucking the wind from him as the very rocks and trees seemed to take up the note, as the sky shivered from it. Even when Brother Lewes hit him and tore the instrument from his hands, the sound went on, gathering force like a thunderhead, building higher until it was deafening, until no other sound existed in the world.

Brother Lewes knocked Stephen roughly to the ground. Grinding his teeth, Stephen pulled the knife from his arm, nearly fainting from the redoubled pain that brought. He rolled onto his back, vaguely bringing the blade up in a gesture of defense.

But Brother Lewes was doing something odd. He seemed to have found a straight stick and driven it into his own right eye. Why would he do that?

When a second arrow struck the monk in the heart, it all suddenly made sense. He watched numbly as Lewes pawed at the shaft, gave a final mutter of consternation, and fell.

“Aspar,” Stephen said. He couldn't hear his own words for the sound of the horn.

Clutching the knife, he stumbled to his feet. He willed away the pain in his arm, and it went, just as the feeling had gone out of his body on the faneway. Grimly he started toward Desmond.

The monk watched him come. Stephen was peripherally aware that Aspar was attacking Owlic, now.

In the air around them, the note from the horn was finally beginning to fade, but slowly.

“You're the greatest fool in the world,” Spendlove screamed. “Idiot! What have you done?”

Stephen didn't answer. His first breath after blowing the horn felt like a winterful of icy draughts. He knew Spendlove
would kill him. He didn't care. Raising the knife he began to run straight toward the other monk, his wounded arm forgotten.

Desmond glanced down at the bound woman and then, fast as a cat, he grabbed Brother Ashern, positioned over the first still slightly twitching victim. He stabbed Ashern in the heart. At nearly the same moment, an arrow struck Desmond near the center of his chest, and he grunted and fell back.

That gave Stephen an instant to choose, and in that instant he felt a bright certainty. He shifted his charge, putting his shoulder into the dying, goggle-eyed Brother Ashern and knocking him from the mound. Then he knelt by the other man, the one still gaping at his own bowels.

“Forgive me,” he said, and drove the shining knife into one tortured blue eye, pushing it in as far as it would go.

“Once the blade is in,” he remembered reading in the
Physiognomy of Ulh
, “wiggle well to scramble the brains. Quick death will follow.”

He wiggled, and something in the earth beneath him seemed to groan.

He looked up just as Desmond hit him. He felt his nose collapse and tasted blood in the back of his throat, and when he bounced down the sedos, he barely felt anything. Desmond came grimly after him, snapping off the arrow in his chest. Stephen watched him sidestep another arrow, and then the monk had him by the collar, and Stephen was in the air again. He crashed to earth on the other side of the hill.

He'll have cover here,
Stephen thought.
Aspar won't be able to shoot him without moving. I'll be dead by the time he gets here.

Desmond came around the sedos and kicked him in the ribs. Stephen grunted; he couldn't breathe through his nose, and his mouth was full of blood.

“Enough of you, Stephen Darige,” Desmond said. “That's very much enough of you.”

Stephen felt something in his hand as he tried to flop back, and he realized he still had the knife. Not that he would ever have the chance to use it. Spendlove was too fast. He couldn't throw it, the way Spendlove had.

Or could he? He remembered Spendlove drawing his hand back and flipping it toward him. As lightning-quick as the throw had been, Stephen remembered it, every nuance of the motion. He thought of his own hand making the same motion.

Spendlove came, almost contemptuously. Stephen, not even half risen, cocked his hand and threw.

He was certain he had missed, until Spendlove, eyes wide and unbelieving, reached for his sternum, where the hilt stood, just below the arrow wound.

Stephen leapt up, fierce exultation finally moving his limbs. Spendlove hit him again, in the chest. It felt like a sledgehammer, but Stephen lurched forward, throwing his arms around the monk.

Spendlove put both of his hands around Stephen's neck and began to squeeze. The world went gray as the monk's fingers bit into his neck. Stephen, with winter in his belly, wondered how Spendlove could be so stupid. Was it a trick?

He decided it wasn't; Spendlove was just mad with rage. With both hands, Stephen grabbed the hilt of the knife and pulled down.

“Oh, shit me,” Spendlove said, watching his guts spill to the ground. He let go of Stephen, took three steps back, and sat down heavily on the mound. He wrapped his arms around his yawning belly.

“I wondered why you didn't think of that,” Stephen commented, dropping to his knees.