"Your… ? Oh, yes sir, yes. I'm on your side."
"Thought so. Struck me you had the look of a fighter about you the moment I noticed you there. Lean, hard-muscled, deadly—not like most of the other local dragons I've seen."
"Oh yes, your knighthood. Lean—"
Secoh, who had half spread his wings as if he was about to try leaving once more, broke off, checking himself in midmotion to stare at the knight. Brian, however, had turned back to speak to Jim.
"Others'll be here in a minute—" he had begun.
"Wrong," said a sour voice. "I've been here since before you rode in. But I was busy tracking our enemies. They went off into a swamp by the causeway. I could have tracked them there, too, but decided to come back and see how Gorbash was. Are you all right, Gorbash?"
"Fine, Aragh," said Jim, for the wolf had stepped into the clearing as he was talking.
Aragh looked at Secoh and grinned evilly.
" 'Hard-muscled' and 'deadly'?" he said.
"Never mind all that now, Sir wolf," said Brian. "Important thing is we're all together again, and the next step calls for a bit of planning. As soon as—Ah, here they are, now."
Dafydd, Giles and Danielle, together with the rest of the outlaws, had in fact been coming into the clearing from the moment Aragh had appeared. The outlaws were already moving around the fallen forms of the crossbowmen, retrieving their arrows. Dafydd paused in the center of the clearing and looked about.
"Carried my shaft off, he must have," the bowman said to Jim. "Was he wounded, then?"
"That was your arrow that hit Hugh de Bois? I should have known it," said Jim. "It went through part of his armor but not through the rest."
"It was a blind loose," said Dafydd, "with a dropping shaft because of the trees between us. Yet I am not happy hearing that I put point in him but did him no harm."
"Peace!" Danielle said to him. "With the intercession of Saint Sebastian, you couldn't have done more from that distance on such a shot. Why do you keep pretending you can do the impossible?"
"I am not pretending, whatever. As for 'impossible,' there is no such a thing as an impossible, but only a thing the doing of which has not yet been learned."
"Never mind that now, I say," Brian interrupted. "We're back together with Sir James and there's a decision to be made. Sir Hugh and his crossbowmen, having escaped us here, have taken refuge in a swamp. Should we follow them, post a force to hold them from returning, or press on to the tower, leaving them behind us? For myself, I would not willingly leave enemies free to follow upon my rear guard."
"And they aren't just in the swamp," said Secoh loudly and unexpectedly. "By this time they're back on the causeway."
Everyone turned to look at the mere-dragon; who wavered and seemed on the verge of cringing under so much attention, but ended by straightening his spine and staring back at them.
"What's this?" said Giles.
"Hugh de Bois and his men are righting under the orders of the Dark Powers in the tower," said Jim. "Secoh here tells me the Dark Ones told Hugh how to get through the swamp safely and back on the causeway. That means they're on firm ground somewhere between us and the mainland."
"No argument, then," said Brian. "The Tower before and those crossbowmen behind are no situation to wish for. Let's turn and go back to meet them."
"I don't know…" said Jim. There was an uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. "The rest of you go meet them, if you think that's best. I've got to get on to the Loathly Tower. Somehow, I've got the feeling time's running out."
"Ha?" said Brian, and became suddenly thoughtful. "That was the feeling that came on me when I found you gone yesterday. In some sort, I've got it with me even now. Perhaps best you and I together go on toward the tower, James, and to whatever awaits us there. The rest can hold here and deal with Sir Hugh and his men if they try to pass."
"I'm going with Gorbash," said Aragh.
"And I, too," said Dafydd, unexpectedly. He met the eyes of Danielle. "Do not look at me so. I said the taking of castles was not my work—nor was it, at all. But when, in Castle Malvern, the flames all bent and there was no wind, a coldness came into me. That coldness is still there, and my mind is that it will never leave me until I seek out and help to slay its source."
"Why, you are a knight," said Danielle.
"Mock me not," said the Welshman.
"Mock? I'm not mocking you. In fact, I'm going with you."
"No!" Dafydd looked over her head at Giles. "Make her stay."
Giles grunted.
"You make her stay," said the older man.
Danielle put her hand on the knife at her belt.
"No one makes me stay—or go—or anything else," she said. "In this hap, I'm going."
"Giles," Brian put in, ignoring her, "can you hold Sir Hugh and his men, alone?"
"I'm not quite alone…" Giles said, dryly. "I have my lads here. And the Malvern Castle stalwarts! Sir Hugh and his troop will pass into Heaven before they pass us by."
"Then let's go on, in God's name!"
Brian remounted his horse and started down the causeway. Jim fell in beside the large white charger.
"… Any more objections?" Danielle was challenging Dafydd.
"No," the bowman answered, sadly. "Indeed, a part of the cold feeling was that you would be with me when the final time came. As the shadows point, the day will wend. Let us go, then."
The two of them fell in behind Jim and Brian, and their voices dropped to confidential tones, not so low but that Jim could not have used his dragon-ears to overhear what they were telling each other, but low enough so that he could give them the privacy of ignoring them. Aragh came trotting up on the other side of him from Blanchard.
"Why so glum, Sir knight, and Gorbash?" he said. "It's a fine day for slaying."
"In the matter of this tower and those within it," said Brian, shortly, "we go against something that touches our souls."
"The more fool you, for having such useless, clogging things," Aragh growled.
"Sir wolf," said Brian, grimly, "you understand nothing of this, and I'm in no mind to instruct you."
They continued to travel in silence. The air stayed windless and the day seemed hardly to alter with the ordinary movement of time. Gradually the horizon, where land met sea, began to be visible as a gray-blue line ahead of them, still some miles distant. Jim looked up at the sky, puzzled.
"What time is it, do you think?" he asked the knight.
"Shortly before prime, I should say," responded Brian. "Why?"
"Prime…?" Jim had to pause to remember that prime was noon. "Look how dark it's getting!"
Brian glanced around and also raised his gaze skyward before looking back down to Jim. To the west, above them, although the sun still floated in an apparently cloudless sky, a sort of darkness of the air itself seemed to dull the colors of heavens and landscape. Brian looked sharply to his front.
"Hullo!" he said. "See ahead, there!"
He pointed. Jim looked. Before them the causeway now held only an occasional tree or clump of bushes intermixed with the tall fenland grass. Somewhere up there—it was impossible for the eye to measure exactly how distant—the grass was being pressed down along what seemed to be a sharp line extending across the causeway and out into the fen on either side. Beyond that line everything looked coldly gray, as if seen under a chill and winter sky.
"It's moving this way," said Aragh.
It was.
It took a moment or two of watching for Jim to make it out, but by watching the grass bend and rise again it was possible to discover that the line, whatever it might be, was creeping slowly forward. It was as if some heavy, invisible fluid slowly and heavily flooded outward along the causeway, overwhelming the meres and islands of the fens. Jim felt a slow chill mounting his spine as he watched.
Instinctively, Jim and the knight came to a halt as they watched; and Aragh, seeing them stop, also halted. He sat down now and grinned at them.
They looked. For a second Jim's hopes bounded upward at seeing what he thought was a dragon shape about four hundred feet above the causeway, soaring in their direction. But then a difference gradually registered upon him. This was no dragon, or anything near the size of a dragon, although it was too large to be any soaring bird. It looked to be half again the wing-spread of an eagle, but it had an odd, heavy-headed silhouette that gave it a vulturous look. Jim squinted hard into the sky, but the strange darkness of the air baffled him in his efforts to make out the flying shape's detail.
It was coming straight for them, gliding. All at once, as the flying shape grew closer, Jim began to resolve the features of that odd, bulky head. He soon saw it clearly—and his vision blurred, refusing to accept what his mind recorded. It was a huge, dun bird—all but the head. Its head was the head of a woman, her pale face staring forward and down at Brian and himself, her lips parted, showing pointed white teeth.
"Harpy!" said Brian beside him, on a slow intake of breath.
It came on.
Surely, thought Jim, it would veer aside at the last moment; but it continued to swoop directly toward the two. Now he saw why his eyes had refused to focus on that white face. It was not merely that it was human and female. More terrible than that, it was completely mad. The frozen features of insanity rode above the pinions of the huge, winged creature swooping toward them—
Abruptly it was on them, driving at Jim's throat; and everything seemed to happen in a single moment.
A dark shape shot into the air toward the harpy just before it reached him. Long jaws clicked on emptiness where a fraction of a second before the white face had been, and the harpy screamed hideously, jerking aside into Brian, half tumbling the knight from Blanchard's back before it's long wings caught on the air and beat upward once more to safety.
On the ground, Aragh was snarling softly to himself. Brian pulled his body upright again in the saddle. The harpy, its strike missed, was now winging away from them through the air, back toward the tower.
"It's well for you the wolf turned it away," said Brian, somberly. "Its bite is poison. I own that hell-face had me spellbound and frozen."
"Let it try again," said Aragh, viciously. "I don't miss twice."
A voice broke in on them, wailing from out over the still fenwater to their left.
"No! No! Turn back, your worships! Turn back! It's no use. It's death for you all, up there!"
They turned their heads.
"Why, dammit!" Brian exclaimed. "Its' that mere-dragon of yours."
"No," said Aragh, testing the air with his nose. "Another. Different scent."
A mere-dragon, looking enough like Secoh to be a twin, was perched precariously on a small tussock of half-drowned soil and marsh grass about forty feet out from the causeway.
"Oh, please!" it cried, stretching out its wings and fanning them to maintain its balance on the tussock. "You won't be able to do any good; and we'll all suffer for it. They're woken up now in the tower, and you'll just make Them angry if you go there!"
"Them?" called Jim. "You mean the Dark Powers?"
"Them—Them!" wailed the mere-dragon, despairingly. "Them that built and live in the Loathly Tower, that sent the blight on us five hundred years ago. Can't you feel Them, waiting for you there? Can't you smell Them? They that never die, they who hate us all. They who draw to Them all terrible, evil things…"
"Come here," said Jim. "Come onto the causeway here. I want to talk to you."
"No… no!" whined the mere-dragon. He threw a terrified glance at the line approaching over the grass and water. "I have to fly—get away!" He flapped his wings, rising slowly into the air. "They've broken loose again and now we're all lost—lost—!"
A breeze out of the chill wintriness beyond the moving line seemed to, catch the mere-dragon and whirl him away into the sky. He went, flying heavily, back toward the mainland, crying in a thin, despairing voice.
"Lost…lost… lost…!"
"There, now," said Brian. "What was I telling you about mere-dragons? How can a gentleman gain honor or worship by slaying a beast like that—"
In midsentence, the words died on his tongue. While they had been talking to the mere-dragon, the line had come upon them; and as Brian spoke, it passed beneath them. The cold winter colors beyond it enclosed them, and the knight and Jim looked at each other with faces gone ash-colored and pinched.
"In manus tuas, Domine," said the knight, softly, and crossed himself.
All about and around them, the serest gray of winter light lay on all things. The waters of the fens stretched thick, oily and still between the patches of dull-green grass. A small, cold breeze wandered through the tops of the bullrushes, making them rattle together with dry and distant sounds, like old bones cast out into some forgotten churchyard. The trees stood helpless and quiet, their leaves now dried and faded like people aged before their time; while all about, a heaviness—as of hope gone dead—pressed down on all living things.
"Sir James," said the knight in an odd, formal tone and with words Jim had never before heard him use, "wit thee well that we have in this hour set our hands to no small task. Wherefore, I pray thee that, should it be thou alone who return and I am slain, thou shalt not leave my lady nor those who are of my kindred live on in ignorance of mine end."
"I—I'll be most honored to inform them—" Jim answered, awkwardly, from a dry throat.
"I thank thee for thy most gentle courtesy," said Brian, "and will do in like event for thee, so soon as I may find ship to take me beyond the western seas."
"Just—tell Angie. My lady, Angela, I mean," said Jim. "You needn't worry about anybody else."
He had a sudden mental picture of the strange, brave, honest character beside him actually leaving home and family to head out over nearly three thousand miles of unknown ocean in obedience to a promise given a near-stranger. The image made him wince inside, in its comparison to the picture he had of himself.
"I shall do so," said Brian—and at once reverted to his ordinary self, swinging down out of his saddle onto the ground. "Blanchard won't go another inch, damn him! I'll have to lead him—"
He broke off, looking back past Jim.
"Where'd the bowman and Mistress Danielle go?" he asked.
Jim turned. Brian was correct. As far as the eye could see, there was no sign of the two who, they had assumed, were following them.
"Aragh?" Jim asked. "Where did they go?"
"They fell behind, sometime since," said the wolf. "Perhaps they changed their minds about coming with us. They're back there somewhere. If it weren't for the trees and bushes, you might still see them."
A moment's silence followed.
"Then, let's on without them," said Brian.
He tugged at the bridle of Blanchard. The white horse reluctantly took one step, then another. They moved off. Jim and Aragh fell into step alongside.
As they traveled onward, the dreariness all around and pressing down upon them had the effect of stifling conversation. Even existing seemed to be an effort under its influence, and each movement of their bodies required a conscious exertion of will; their arms and legs were like lead weights swung heavily and reluctantly into each slow, necessary step. But the effect of their silence was worse, for it left them isolated, each set off alone in the dark pool of his own thoughts. They moved as if in some pale dream, speaking now and then for a moment, then falling silent.
As they progressed, the causeway narrowed. From forty yards across, it dwindled until it became as many feet. The trees, too, shortened and became more stunted—more twisted and gnarled—and under their feet the thinning grass revealed a different soil, an earth lacking in the rich blackness of the fenland toward the main shore. Here it was sandy, with a sterile, flinty hardness. It crunched under their weight and under the hooves of Blanchard, and was at once unyielding and treacherous.
The white warhorse checked himself suddenly. He to
ssed his head and tried to back up instead of going forward.
"What the hell!" exploded Brian, tugging on the reins. "What devil's into him now—"
"Listen," said Jim, who had also stopped.
For a moment, Jim could almost make himself believe he had imagined what he had just heard. But then it sounded again and began to grow in volume. It was just ahead of them and getting closer. It was the chittering of sandmirks.
The volume soared upward. Clearly, the sandmirks were not just in front of them, but all around. The dark predators had simply not all given voice, to start with; but now they were in full chorus. Jim felt the sound they made reaching through, once more, to the old primitive areas of his midbrain. He looked at Brian and saw the knight's face beneath the open visor of his helmet; it looked drained of blood, its skin fallen in to the bones like the face of a man ten days dead. The chittering was rising to a crescendo and Jim felt the ability to think slipping from him.
Beside him, Aragh laughed his silent laugh.
The wolf threw back his head, opened his long jaws, and howled—a long howl that cut like a razor slash across the sound of the sandmirks. It was not merely lupine night music from some moonlit hilltop that Aragh uttered, but a call that began on a low note and climbed in tone and volume to a pitch greater than all the chittering; then it fell again, dropping… dropping into nothingness. It was a hunting howl.
When it ceased, there was silence. Only silence. Aragh laughed again.
"Shall we go on?" he said.
Brian stirred like someone coming out of a dream, and tugged on the reins. Blanchard stepped forward. Jim, too, moved; and they once more took up their journey.
The sandmirks did not begin their cluttering again. But as the knight, the dragon and the wolf moved on, Jim could hear innumerable small ripplings in the water and rustlings behind the trees, bushes and bull-rushes that surrounded them—a noise that paralleled their path and kept up with them, as if a small army of heavy-bodied rats was providing them with escort. He did his best to put that sound from his mind. An instinctive terror was inspired by the noise of those feet and bodies alone; and he had other terrors to watch for.
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