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CHAPTER EIGHT

The Nicwer

Stephen FIRST THOUGHT T H E water itself had drawn up in a fist to smite at Aspar, but then the fist resolved itself into a wide, flat head with yellow-green eyes that glared like huge round lanterns, all arranged on a thick, long neck. It was a shade between olive and black, and looked weirdly horselike, somehow.

Horselike. That struck a bell instantly in his saint-blessed memory. He jammed his palms up to his ears.

'Winna, cover',' he began, but it was too late, as the beast started to sing.

The note cut through his hands like a hot knife through lard; sliced straight into his skull and began slashing about. It was beautiful, just as the old legends told, but to his oversensitive awareness it was a terrible beauty that stung like hornets and wouldn't let him think. Through a red shroud, he saw Aspar calmly put down his bow and begin walking toward the creature. Winna was starting toward it, too, tears streaming down her face.

He dropped his useless hands and picked up Ehawk's bow. It was only seconds before Aspar walked into the creatures gaping jaws.

He screamed as his shaking hands raised the weapon, trying to The Nicwer

cancel the noise in his head, trying to remember the clean motion Aspar used when firing. He drew and released. The arrow skittered harmlessly off the monsters skull.

The note it sang changed in tenor, and he felt his taut muscles loosen and a strange joy surge through him, like being drunk, happy and warm. He dropped the bow and felt a silly grin spread across his face, then laughed as the nicwer'that's what it was, a nicwer'curved its muzzle down toward Aspar.

The neck suddenly snapped back like a whip, the wonderful song cut off by an anguished bellow. Something whispered by his ear, and his eyes caught the blur of an arrow in motion. It struck the nicwer beneath the jaw, and he saw there was already an arrow there, buried in a sort of sack or wattle he hadn't noticed before.

He turned in the direction the arrow had come from and saw Leshya running down the street toward them, still fifty yards away.

She was supposed to still be up on the hill, but he was glad she wasn't. He picked up the bow and ran toward Winna.

Aspar felt as if everything good in him had been ripped out' mornings waking in the ironoaks, the quiet of the deep forest, the feel of Winna's skin'everything wonderful was gone. All that was left was the ugliest beast he had ever seen about to take a bite out of him with sharp, gleaming, serrated black teeth. With a hoarse cry, he threw himself aside, suddenly noticing a stench like the bloated belly of a long-dead horse or the breath of a vulture.

He came back up with his dirk and ax out, feeling silly. He saw it better now, as it heaved itself up on the dock. Its head was otterlike, as wedge-shaped as a viper, and twice the size of the biggest horse skull he had ever seen. Like the greffyn and the utin, it was covered in scales, but also with oily green-black fur. At first he thought its body was that of a huge snake, but even as he reckoned that, it suddenly heaved up onto the dock with short thick forepaws.

The feet were webbed and had talons the length of his arm. Silent now save for a sort of gurgling whistle, it lurched toward him, dragging the rest of its mass up from the river. He backed away, unsure what to do. If he let it sing again, then he would surely walk stupidly back into its jaws, as he had almost just done.

At least he knew what had happened to the people of Whitraff. They had walked smiling down to the river and been eaten. He remembered an Ingorn story about something like this, but he couldn't remember what it was called. He'd never much cared for stories about nonexistent creatures.

Another arrow appeared in the sack below its throat, but aside from being unable to croon its damning call, the beast seemed relatively untroubled. It was all out of the water now, except for its tail. Its rear legs were as squat as the front, and as far from them as the length of two horses, so that its belly dragged along the wooden planks. Although it looked clumsy, once on land it moved with a sudden speed Aspar wouldn't have guessed at. It lunged at him and he dodged aside, cleaving his ax at the back of its neck. To his surprise, the blade sheared a notch in the scales, albeit not a deep one.

He was still surprised when the head swung violently into him, knocking him off his feet. He rolled, feeling as if his ribs had been cracked, and came up to find the head darting toward him once more. From his crouch Aspar twisted away, cutting at the exposed throat with his knife and feeling the tissue part in a long, ragged slash. Blood sprayed his arm, and this time he dodged the counterattack and came to his feet running.

As soon as he was clear, arrows began pelting the beast. Most were bouncing off; for now it was tucking its head down to protect its vulnerable throat. Aspar saw that Leshya and Stephen were doing the shooting.

The monster was bleeding, but not as much as Aspar had hoped. Still, after a brief hesitation, it seemed to decide it had had enough. It sprinted back to the river, slid in, and vanished beneath the surface, leaving him panting and wondering if the thing was poisonous, like the greffyn. But though he felt a mild burning where the blood had touched his skin, it was nothing like the sick and immediate fever he'd felt confronting the other beast.

Leshya and Winna were a different story. Winna was on her hands The Nicwer

and knees vomiting and Leshya was leaning on her bow, the blue veins of her face prominent beneath her skin.

Stephen seemed fine.

Aspar went to Winna and knelt by her. 'Did it touch you?' he asked.

She shook her head. 'No.'

'It'll be fine, then,' he murmured. He reached out to stroke her head.

'Don't,' Leshya snapped. 'The blood.'

Aspar stopped inches short of touching Winna, then pulled his hand back and walked away. 'Werlic,' he acceded.

Leshya nodded. 'The gaze of the equudscioh isn't fatal, not like some sedhmhari, but its blood would infect us.' She cocked her head. 'I wonder why it hasn't infected you. Or why our priest here wasn't as affected by its song as you two.'

'You know what it is?' Aspar said.

'Only from stories,' the Sefry replied.

'Do the stories explain how it could do that to us just by'by braying?' Aspar demanded. He still missed it, that sound, that perfect feeling. If he heard it again'

'There are certain musical notes and harmonies that can affect men so,' Stephen said. 'It's said the Black Jester created songs so powerful that entire armies ran on their own blades upon hearing them. He was inspired, they say, by a creature known as the ekhukh. In Almmanish the same beast is called a nicwer, in Lierish eq odche. I think in the king's tongue it's nix, if I remember my phay stories.'

'Fine, I know what it's called in five languages now,' Aspar grouched. 'What is it?'

Leshya closed her eyes and swayed unsteadily. 'It's one of the sedhmhari, as I told you. It isn't dead, you know, or likely even dying. We should retreat to the hill if we're to discuss this. And you need to clean the blood off you, for our sakes. Even if you have some sort of immunity, we do not.'

'Werlic,' Aspar said. 'Let's do that.'

They found that despite his injury, Ehawk had crawled halfway down the hill.

'The song,' the boy gasped. 'What was that?'

Aspar left the others to explain while he went to wash.

He found a small brooh trickling down the hillside. He stripped off his leather cuirass and shirt and soaked them while he wiped his arm and face with a rag.

By the time he was done cleaning up, Winna and Leshya seemed to be feeling better.

When he approached, Leshya pointed down toward the river. 'I saw it from up here, moving beneath the water. We should be able to see it if it emerges again.'

'Yah,' Aspar grunted. 'That's why you left your post.'

'I couldn't shoot it from up here,' she argued. 'Besides, Ehawk was still watching.'

'I'm not chastising,' Aspar said. 'The three of us would be in its belly now if you hadn't come along.'

'Why didn't its song affect you?' Winna asked, a bit sharply.

'I'm Sefry,' Leshya rejoined. 'Our ears are made differently.' She quirked an amused smile at Stephen. 'I don't care for Mannish music that much, either.'

Winna raised an eyebrow at that, but didn't pursue the matter.

Stephen did, however. 'Still,' he remarked, 'how could you have known it wouldn't lure you as it did us?'

'I didn't,' she said, 'but it's a good thing to know, isn't it?'

Winna regarded the Sefry. 'Thank you,' she said. 'Thanks for saving our lives.'

Leshya shrugged. 'I told you we were in this together.'

'So how do we kill it?' Aspar asked impatiently.

'I don't think we do,' Stephen replied.

'How's that?'

'We might be able to prick it to death, given time, but time is what we don't have. This faneway must be nearly complete. Aspar, we have to stop them from finishing it.'

'But we have the instructions for the last fane,' Winna said.

'Yes,' Stephen said, 'which only means they need to send a rider The Nicwer

to Eslen to see the praifec. That gives us a little more time, but not until next month. The nicwer has lost its voice, and that's its most dangerous weapon.

We'll have to leave it to the riverboaters to kill it.' He turned to Leshya.

'You called it a sedhmhari. What did you mean by that? It's a Sefry word?'

'Mother Gastya called the greffyn that,' Winna supplied.

Leshya's eyes went round. 'You spoke to Mother Gastya?' she said, clearly surprised. 'I thought she was dead.'

Aspar remembered his last sight of the old woman, how she seemed to be nothing but bone. 'Maybe she was,' Aspar said. 'But that's not far nor near.'

Leshya acquiesced to that with a twist of her mouth. 'There is no true Sefry language,' she clarified. 'We abandoned it long ago. Now we speak whatever the Mannish around us do, but we keep old words, too. Sedhmhari is an old word. It means 'demon of the sedos.' The greffyn, utin, and nicwer are all sedhmhari.'

'They're connected to the sedoi?' Stephen asked.

'Surely you knew that,' Leshya said. 'The greffyn was walking the sedoi when you first saw it.'

'Yah,' Aspar said. 'It's how the churchmen were finding them.'

'But you're implying a deeper connection,' Stephen persisted.

'Yes,' Leshya said. 'They are spawned by the power of the sedoi, nourished by them. In a sense, they are distillations of the sedos power.'

Stephen shook his head. 'That doesn't make sense. That would make them distillations of the saints themselves.'

'No,' Leshya said carefully, 'that would make the saints distillations of the sedos power, just as the sedhmhari are.'

Aspar almost laughed at the way Stephen's jaw dropped. For an instant he seemed the same naiVe boy he had met on the King's Road, months ago.

'That's heresy,' he finally said.

'Yes,' Leshya said dryly. 'And wouldn't it be terrible to contradict a church that's sacrificing children to feed the dark saints? I'm very ashamed.'

'Yet'' Stephen didn't finish his thought, but his expression grew ever more furiously thoughtful.

'It seems to me most of this is moot, at the moment,' Winna interrupted. 'What matters is finding that last sedos, that Bent Hill.'

'She's right,' Aspar concurred. 'If we don't have time to kill the nicwer, we don't have time for you two to stand here and go all bookish for a nineday.'

Stephen reluctantly conceded that with a nod. 'I've looked on my maps,' he said, 'but I don't see anything marked that looks at all like Khrwbh Khrwkh. Logic dictates that it has to be to the east.' He knelt and flattened the map on the ground so they could all view it.

'Why?' Aspar asked.

'We know the order of the faneways from the invocation, and we know where the first one was. These others have been leading steadily east. Most faneways fall in lines or arcs that tend to be regular.'

'Wait,' Winna said. 'What about the faneway they meant to sacrifice me at? That was near Cal Azroth, and so would be north.'

Stephen shook his head. 'They did a different ritual there, not the same thing at all. That wasn't part of this faneway, but a sedos used for the single purpose of possessing the queen's guards. No, this faneway goes east.'

Aspar watched as Stephen's index finger traced a shallow curve, across what must be the Daw River and into the plains near where Dunmrogh was located now.

'That's the Daw there, and the Saint Sefodh River there?' Aspar asked.

'Yes,' Stephen replied.

'The forest extended that far'all the way into Hornladh? It's no wonder the Briar King is angry. The forest is half the size it was.'

'A lot of it was destroyed in the Warlock Wars,' Stephen said. 'The Briar King can hardly hold that against us.'

Leshya snorted. 'Of course he can. He doesn't care which particular Mannishen destroyed his forest, only that it was destroyed.'

'There's still a stand of ironoaks in Hornladh,' Aspar said. 'I The Nicwer

passed through there on my way to Paldh once. Had a funny name' Prethsorucaldh.'

'Prethsorucaldh,' Stephen repeated. 'That is a strange name.'

'I don't speak much Hornish,' Aspar admitted.

'The ending, caldh, just means 'forest,' ' Stephen said. 'Preth means a 'copse,'

like a copse of trees. Soru, I think, means a 'louse' or 'worm' or something like that.'

'Copse-Worm-Wood?' Leshya said. 'That doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would they call it a copse and a forest in the same name?'

Stephen nodded. 'Doesn't make a lot of sense, which means it probably wasn't originally a Hornish name. It was something that sounded like Prethsoru, so over time they substituted words that made sense to them.'

'What do you mean?' Leshya asked, sounding as lost as Aspar felt.

'Like this place, Whitraff,' Stephen explained. 'In Oostish, it means 'White Town,' but we know from this map that the original name was Vhydhrabh, which meant 'Huskwood,' corrupted through Vitellian to 'Vitraf.' When Oostish speakers settled here, they heard the name and thought it meant White Town, and so it stuck. You see?'

'This is hurting my head,' Aspar said. 'Is there any point to this?'

'Preth-whatever doesn't sound anything like Khrwbh Khrwkh,' Winna tentatively pointed out. 'At least not to me it doesn't.'

'No, nothing like it at all,' Stephen mused. 'But it reminds me'' He paused.

'The map is Vitellian, made just as the Hegemony was taking control of this territory. Most of the names on it were originally Allotersian or Vadh'an. But later on, there must have been Vitellian names for towns and landmarks.'

'Do you have another map from later on?' Leshya asked.

'No, not of that region,' Stephen told her. 'And I still don't see how Khrwbh''

He stopped again and seemed to stare off into the weird. It worried Aspar, sometimes, how quickly and oddly Stephen's mind worked, ever since he walked the faneway of Decmanis. Not that it hadn't worked strangely to start with.

'That's it,' Stephen murmured. 'It has to be.'

'What's what?' Aspar asked.

'They translated it.'

'Translated what?'

'Names of places are funny,' Stephen said, his voice growing more excited'as it always did when he'd figured something out. 'Sometimes, when a new people with a new language come along, they just keep the old name, not knowing what it means.

Sometimes they bend it so it does mean something, as with Whitraff. And sometimes, when they do know what the old name means, they translate it into their own tongue. Ehawk, what do your people call the King's Forest?'

'Yonilhoamalho,' the boy replied.

'Which means?' Stephen pressed.

'The King's Forest,' Ehawk responded.

'Exactly. In the language of the Warlock kings, it was named Khadath Rekhuz. The Hegemony called it Lovs Regatureis, and during the Lierish Regency it was Cheldet de Rey. In Oostish it's Holt af sa Kongh, and when Virgenyan became the king's tongue we started calling it the King's Forest. But the meaning remains unbroken after a thousand years, you see?'

'All that to spell what?' Aspar asked, a little put off that he still didn't see where this was going, and knowing he was going to feel stupid when Stephen reached his conclusion.

'I think Prethsoru came from Vitellian Persos Urus,' Stephen replied triumphantly.

'Hurrah,' Aspar said. 'What the sceat does that mean?'

'Bent Hill,' Stephen rejoined, too smugly. 'Do you follow me now?'

'Sceat, no, I didn't follow any of that,' Aspar shot back. 'It's a bridge made of mist.'

'Probably,' Stephen admitted.

'And if I take your meaning, you're saying we should ride hellbent for a forest in Hornladh based on nothing more than this silly wordplay?'

'Exactly,' Stephen promptly replied.

The Nicwer

'And'let's get this clear'even you don't think you're right about this?'

'A blind shot in the dark,' Stephen allowed.

Aspar scratched his chin. 'Let's get going, then,' he said. 'That's twenty leagues if it's a yard.'

'Wait!' Leshya protested. 'If he's wrong''

'He's not wrong,' Aspar said.

'What about the nicwer?' Ehawk asked. 'We still have to cross the river.'

'There's a ford a league downstream,' Aspar told him. 'If it follows us there, at least we'll be able to see it. After that we can double back to the Old King's Road. It goes straight to Dunmrogh.' He nodded at Stephen and Winna. 'You two help Ehawk get mounted. Leshya, you come with me and we'll get some supplies from the tavern.'

He saw Winna's frown, and felt a flash of exasperation. Leshya was the only one of them immune to the song of the nicwer. Didn't Winna know it made more sense for the Sefry to go back to town with him? After all, there might be more than one of the beasts in the river.

He didn't say anything, though. He wasn't going to embarrass himself by explaining something that ought to be understood. Winna still had a lot of learning to do.

'Keep a close watch on the river,' he said instead. 'Yell if you see anything.

And put something in your ears.'

'You should do the same,' Winna shot back.

'Then I couldn't hear you yell, could I?' he countered, starting off toward town, Leshya a pace behind him.