Blood Knight by Greg Keyes

Author:Greg Keyes [Keyes, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780345493620
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2005-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Singing brought her back, a rough, raspy canting in a language she did not know. Her face was pressed against a damp, tacky floor. When she lifted it, pain shot across her skull and down her spine.

“Oh!” she gasped.

The singing stopped.

“Alis?” A voice asked.

“Who is that?” she answered, feeling her head. It was sticky, and she found a cut at the hairline. None of her bones seemed to be broken.

“It is I, Lo Videicho,” the voice replied.

The darkness was absolute, and the walls made strange the sound, but Alis guessed the speaker was no more than four or five kingsyards away. She reached down to her girdle and the dagger she kept there.

“That sounds Vitellian,” she said, trying to keep him talking so she would know where he was.

“Ah, no, my dulcha,” he said. “Vitellian is vinegar, lemon juice, salt. I speak honey, wine, figs. Safnian, midulcha.”

“Safnian.” She had the knife now, and securing her grip on it, she sat up. “You’re a prisoner?”

“I was,” Lo Videicho said. “Now, I do not know. They bricked in the way out. I told them they should kill me, but they did not.”

“How do you know my name?”

“You told it to my friend the music man, before they took him away.”

Leoff.

“They took him away?”

“Oh, yes. Your visit was quite upsetting, I think. They took him off.”

“Where to?”

“Oh, I know. You think I did not know? I know.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Alis said. “But I would like to know, as well.”

“I have lost my mind, you understand,” Lo Videicho confided.

“You sound fine to me,” Alis lied.

“No, no, it’s quite true. I am mad. But I think I should wait until we are out of these dungeons before I tell you where our friend was taken.”

Alis began feeling around for a wall. She found one and put her back to it.

“I don’t know the way out,” she said.

“No, but you know the way in.”

“The way in is—you mean the way into here, don’t you?”

“Yes, sly one,” Lo Videicho said. “You fell down it.”

“Then if you know that, why don’t you just leave? Why do you need me?”

“I would never leave a lady,” the man said. “But more than that…” She heard a metallic rattling.

“Oh. You can’t leave. You’re in a cell.” She must have fallen into an anteroom rather than the cell itself.

“It’s a palace, my palace,” Lo Videicho said. “But the doors are all locked. Do you have a key?”

“I might be able to get you out. We might come to some agreement. But first you must tell me why you are here.”

“Why am I here? Because the saints are filthy bastards, every one. Because they favor the wicked and bring grief to the kind.”

“That’s probably true,” Alis acknowledged, “but I’d still like a more specific answer.”

“I am here because I loved a woman,” he said. “I am here because my heart was torn out, and this is the grave they put me in.”

“What woman?”

His voice changed. “Beautiful, gentle, kind. She is dead. I saw her finger.

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