"If the damn things get the better of us, I'll want you to ride for more help. Karel and the others will be somewhere behind us. Find them, then go after the Kalkara with them. Track those beasts down and kill them." Will had said nothing to that. The fact that Arald even contemplated failure, when he and Rodney were the two foremost knights within a two hundred kilometer radius, spoke volumes of his concern about the Kalkara. For the first time, Will realized that in this contest, the odds were heavily against them.
The sun was trembling on the brink of the world, the shadows at their longest, and they still had several kilometers to go. Baron Arald raised a hand and brought the party to a stop. He glanced at Rodney and jerked a thumb at the bundle of pitch-soaked torches each man carried behind his saddle. "Torches, Rodney," he said briefly. The Battlemaster demurred for a moment.
"Are you sure, my lord? They'll give away our position if the Kalkara are watching." Arald shrugged. "They'll hear us coming anyway. And among the trees, we'll move too slowly without the light. Let's take the chance." He was already striking his flint and steel together, igniting a spark that set his small pile of tinder smoking, then flaring into flame. He held the torch in the flame and the thick, sticky pine pitch with which it was impregnated suddenly caught and burst into yellow flame. Rodney leaned toward him with another torch and lit it in the Baron's flame. Then, holding the torches high, their lances held in place by leather thongs looped around their right wrists, they resumed their gallop, thundering into the darkness beneath the trees as they finally left the broad road they had been following since noon.
It was another ten minutes before they heard the screaming.
It was an unearthly sound that twisted the stomach into knots of fear and turned the blood cold. Involuntarily, the Baron and Sir Rodney reined in as they heard it. Their horses plunged wildly against the reins. It came from straight ahead of them and rose and fell, until the night air quaked with the horror of it.
"Good God in heaven!" the Baron exclaimed. "What is that?" His face was ashen as the hellish sound soared through the night toward them, to be answered immediately by another, identical howl.
But Will had heard the terrible noise before. He felt the blood leave his face now as he realized his fears were being proven correct.
"It's the Kalkara," he said. "They're hunting."
And he knew there was only one person out there that they could be after. They had turned back and were hunting Halt. "Look, my lord!" Rodney said, pointing to the rapidly darkening night sky. Through a break in the tree cover, they saw it, a sudden flare of light reflecting in the sky, evidence of a fire in the near distance. "That's Halt!" the Baron said. "Bound to be. And he'll need help!" He rammed his spurs into the tired battlehorse's flanks, urging the beast forward into a lumbering gallop, the torch in his hand streaming flame and sparks behind him as Sir Rodney and Will galloped in his tracks.
It was an eerie sensation, following those flaming, spitting torches through the trees, their elongated tongues of flame blowing back behind the two riders, casting weird and terrifying shadows among the trees, while ahead of them, the glow of the large fire, presumably lit by Halt, grew stronger and nearer with each stride.
They broke out of the trees with virtually no warning, and before them was a scene from nightmares.
There was a short space of open grass, then the ground beyond was a litter of tumbled rocks and boulders. Giant pieces of masonry, still held together by mortar, lay scattered on their sides and edges, sometimes half buried in the soft grassy earth. The ruined walls of Castle Gorlan surrounded the scene on three sides, nowhere rising to more than five meters in height, destroyed and cast down by a vengeful kingdom after Morgarath had been driven out of his keep and back into the Mountains of Rain and Night. The resulting chaos of rocks and sections of tumbled wall was like the playground of a giant child-scattered in all directions, piled carelessly on top of one another, leaving virtually no clear ground at all.
The whole scene was illuminated by the leaping, twisting flames of a bonfire some forty meters in front of them. And beside it, a horrific figure crouched, screaming hatred and fury, plucking uselessly at the mortal wound in its chest that had finally brought it down.
Over two and a half meters tall, with shaggy, matted, scale-like hair covering its entire body, the Kalkara had long, talon-clad arms that reached to beneath its knees. Relatively short, powerful hind legs gave it the ability to cover the ground at a deceptive speed in a series of leaps and bounds. All of this the three riders took in as they emerged from the trees. But what they noticed most was the face – savage and apelike, with huge, yellowed canine teeth and red, glowing eyes filled with hatred and the blind desire to kill. The face turned toward them now and the beast screamed a challenge, tried to rise, and stumbled back into a half crouch again. "What's wrong with it?" Rodney asked, reining in his horse. Will pointed to the cluster of arrows that protruded from its chest. There must have been eight of them, all placed within a hand's breadth of each other. "Look!" he cried. "Look at the arrows!" Halt, with his uncanny ability to aim and fire in a blur of movement, must have sent a volley of arrows, one after the other, to smash into the armor-like matted hair, each one widening a gap in the monster's defenses until the final arrow had penetrated deep into its flesh. Its black blood ran in sheets down its torso and again it screamed its hatred at them. "Rodney!" yelled Baron Arald. "With me! Now!" Dropping the lead rein to his spare horse, he tossed the flaming torch to one side, couched his lance and charged. Rodney was a half second behind him, the two battlehorses thundering across the open space. The Kalkara, its lifeblood saturating the ground at its feet, rose to meet them, in time to take the two lance points, one after the other, in the chest.
It was all but dead. Even so, the weight and strength of the monster checked the onward rush of the battlehorses. They reared back on their haunches as both knights leaned forward in the stirrups to drive the lance points home. The sharp iron penetrated, smashing through the matted hair. The force of the charge drove the Kalkara from its feet and hurled it backward, into the flames of the fire behind it.
For an instant nothing happened. Then there was a blinding flash, and a pillar of red flame that reached ten meters into the night sky. And quite simply, the Kalkara disappeared.
The two battlehorses reared in terror, Rodney and the Baron only just managing to retain their seats. They backed away from the fire. There was a terrible reek of charred hair and flesh filling the air. Vaguely, Will remembered Halt discussing the way to deal with a Kalkara. He had said that they were rumored to be particularly susceptible to fire. Some rumor, he thought heavily, trotting Tug forward to join the two knights.
Rodney was rubbing his eyes, still dazzled by the enormous flash. "What the devil caused that?" he asked. The Baron gingerly retrieved his lance from the fire. The wood was charred and the point blackened. "It must be the waxy substance that mats their hair together into that hard shell," he replied, in a wondering tone of voice. "It must be highly flammable."
"Well, whatever it was, we did it," Rodney replied, a note of satisfaction in his voice. The Baron shook his head. "Halt did it," he corrected his Battlemaster. "We merely finished him off." Rodney nodded, accepting the correction. The Baron glanced at the fire, still pouring a torrent of sparks into the air, but settling back now from the huge explosion of red flame. "He must have lit this fire when he sensed they were circling back on him. It lit up the area so he had light to shoot by."
"He shot all right," Sir Rodney put in. "Those arrows must have all struck within a few square centimeters. " They looked around, searching for some sign of the Ranger. Then, below the ruined walls of the castle, Will caught sight of a familiar object. He dismounted and ran to retrieve it and his heart sank as he picked up Halt's powerful longbow, smashed and splintered into two pieces.
"He must have fired from over here," he said, indicating the point below the ruined wall where he had found the bow. They looked up, imagin
ing the scene, trying to recreate it. The Baron took the shattered weapon from Will as he remounted Tug. "And the second Kalkara reached him as he killed its brother," he said. "The question is, where is Halt now? And where is the other Kalkara?" That was when they heard the screaming start again.
Chapter 30
INSIDE THE RUINED, OVERGROWN COURTYARD, HALT CROUCHED among the tumbled masonry that had once been Morgarath's stronghold. His leg, numb where the Kalkara had clawed him, was beginning to throb painfully and he could feel the blood seeping past the rough bandage he had thrown around it.
Somewhere close by, he knew the second Kalkara was searching for him. He heard its shuffling movements from time to time and once even its rasping breath as it moved close to his hiding place between two fallen sections of wall. It was only a matter of time before it found him, he knew. And when that happened, he was finished.
He was wounded and unarmed. His bow was gone, smashed in that first terrifying charge when he had fired arrow after arrow into the first of the two monsters. He knew the power of his bow and the penetrative qualities of his razor-sharp, heavy arrowheads. He couldn't believe that the monster had continued to absorb that hail of arrows and still come on, seemingly undaunted. By the time it faltered, it was already too late for Halt to turn his attention to its companion. The second Kalkara was almost upon him, its massive, taloned paw smashing the bow from his grasp, so that he barely had time to scramble for safety onto the ruined wall.
As it clawed its way after him, he had drawn his saxe knife and tried to strike at the terrible head. But the beast had been too fast for him and the heavy knife merely glanced off one of its armored forearms. At the same time, he had found himself confronted by its red, hate-filled eyes and felt his mind leaving him, his muscles freezing in terror as he was drawn to the horrific beast before him. It took an immense effort to wrench his eyes away from the creature's gaze, and he staggered back, losing the saxe knife as the bearlike claws swiped at him and ripped down the length of his thigh.
Then he had run, unarmed and bleeding, trusting to the maze-like confusion of the ruins to evade the monster behind him.
He had sensed the change in the Kalkara's movements around late afternoon. Their steady and previously undeviating path to the northeast suddenly changed as the two beasts abruptly separated, each turning through ninety degrees and moving in different directions into the forest that surrounded them. Their trails, up until then so easy to follow, also showed signs of concealment, so that only a tracker as skilled as a Ranger would have been able to follow them. For the first time in years, Halt felt a cold stone of fear in his belly as he realized that the Kalkara were now hunting him.
The Ruins were close by and he elected to make a stand there, rather than in the woods. He knew the Kalkara would come after him once night fell, so he prepared as best he could, gathering deadfall wood to form the bonfire. He even found half ajar of cooking oil in the ruins of the kitchen. It was rancid and foul smelling, but it would still burn. He poured it over the pile of wood and moved back to a spot where he could place the wall at his back. He had fashioned a supply of torches and kept them burning as darkness fell and he waited for the implacable killers to come for him.
He sensed them before he saw them. Then he made out the two shambling forms, darker patches against the darkness of the trees. They saw him immediately, of course. The flickering torch jammed into the wall behind him made sure of that. But they missed the pile of oil-soaked wood – and that was what he had been counting on. As they screamed their hunting cries, he tossed the burning torch into the pile and the flames leaped up instantly, flaring yellow in the darkness.
For a moment, the beasts hesitated. Fire was their one fear. But they saw the Ranger was nowhere near the flames and they came on-straight into the hail of arrows that Halt met them with.
If they'd had another hundred meters to cover, he might have managed to stop them both. He still had over a dozen arrows in his quiver. But time and distance were against him and he had barely escaped with his life. Now, he huddled beneath two pieces of masonry that formed an A-shaped refuge, hidden in a shallow indentation in the ground, his cloak concealing him, as it had for years. His only hope now was that Will would arrive with Arald and Rodney. If he could evade the creature until help came, he might have a chance.
He tried not to think of the other possibility – that Gilan would arrive before them, alone and armed only with his bow and sword. Now that he had seen the Kalkara close-up, Halt knew that one man had little chance of standing against it. If Gilan arrived before the knights, he and Halt would both die here.
The creature was quartering the old courtyard now like a hunting dog in search of game, adopting a methodical search pattern, back and forth, examining every space, every cranny, every possible hiding place. This time, he knew, it would find him. His hand touched the hilt of his small throwing knife, the only weapon left to him. It would be a puny, almost useless defense, but it was all he had left.
Then he heard it: the unmistakable heavy drumming of battle horses' hooves. He looked up, watching the Kalkara through a small gap between the rocks that concealed him. It had heard them too. It was standing erect, its face turned toward the sound outside the ruined walls.
The horses stopped, and he heard the ringing scream of the mortally wounded Kalkara outside as it challenged these new enemies. The hoofbeats rose again, gaining speed and momentum. Then there was a scream and a gigantic red flash that towered for a moment into the sky. Dimly, Halt reasoned that the first Kalkara must have been thrust into the fire. He began to inch back, wriggling out of his hiding place. Perhaps he could outflank the remaining Kalkara, moving to the side and scaling the wall before it noticed him. The chances seemed good. Its attention was drawn now to whatever was happening outside. But even as he had the thought, he realized it was no option. Though the Kalkara had apparently forgotten him for the moment, it was moving stealthily toward the tumbled masonry that formed a rough stairway to the top of the wall.
In a few more minutes, it would be in position to drop on his unsuspecting friends on the other side, taking them by surprise. He had to stop it.
Halt was clear of the hiding place now, the small knife sliding free of the sheath almost of its own volition as he ran across the courtyard, dodging and weaving among the scattered rubble. The Kalkara heard him before he had gone half a dozen paces and it turned back on him, terrifying in its silence as it loped, apelike, to cut him off before he could warn his friends.
Halt stopped suddenly, stock-still, eyes locked on the shambling figure coming at him.
In another few meters, its hypnotic gaze would seize control of his mind. He felt the irresistible urge to look into those red eyes growing stronger. Then he closed his own eyes, his brow furrowed in fierce concentration, and brought his knife hand up, back and forward in one smooth, instinctive memory throw, seeing the target moving in his mind's eye, mentally aligning the throw and the spin of the knife to the point in space where knife and target would arrive simultaneously.
Only a Ranger could have made that throw – and only one of a handful of them. It took the Kalkara in its right eye and the beast screamed in pain and fury as it stopped to clutch at the sudden lance of agony that began in its eye and seared all the way to the pain sensors in its brain. Then Halt was running past it for the wall, scrambling up the rocks.
Will saw him as a shadowy figure as he scrambled onto the top of the ruined wall. But shadowy or not, there was something unmistakable about it. "Halt!" he cried, pointing so that the two knights saw him as well. All three of them saw the Ranger pause, look back and hesitate. Then a huge shape began to appear a few meters behind him as the Kalkara, whose wound was painful but nowhere near mortal, came after him.
Baron Arald went to remount. Then, realizing that no horse could pick its way through the tumble of rocks and masonry beside the wall, he dragged his huge broadsword from its saddle scabbard and ran toward the ruins. "Get back,
Will!" he shouted as he advanced and Will nervously edged Tug back to the fringe of the trees.
On the wall, Halt heard the shout and saw Arald running forward. Sir Rodney was close behind him, a huge battle-ax whirring in circles around his head.
"Jump, Halt! Jump!" the Baron shouted, and Halt needed no further invitation. He leaped the three meters from the wall, rolling to break his fall as he landed. Then he was up on his feet, running awkwardly to meet the two knights as the wound in his leg reopened.
Will watched, his heart in his mouth, as Halt ran toward the two knights. The Kalkara hesitated a moment, then, screaming a bloodcurdling challenge, it leaped after him. But, whereas Halt had rolled to recover, the Kalkara simply transformed the three-meter drop into a huge, bounding leap, its unbelievably powerful rear legs driving it up and forward, covering the ground between it and Halt in that one movement. The massive arm swung, catching Halt a glancing blow and sending him rolling forward, unconscious. But the beast had no time to finish him off, as Baron Arald stepped up to meet it, the broadsword humming in a deadly arc for its neck.
The Kalkara was wickedly fast and it ducked the killing blow, then slammed its talons into Arald's exposed back before he could recover from the stroke. They slashed the chain mail as if it were wool and Arald grunted in pain and surprise as the force of the blow drove him to his knees, the broadsword falling from his hands, blood streaming from half a dozen deep slashes in his back.
He would have died then and there had it not been for Sir Rodney. The Battlemaster whirled the heavy war ax as if it were a toy, and crashed it into the Kalkara's side.
The armor of wax-matted hair protected the beast, but the sheer force of the blow staggered it so that it reeled back from the knight, screaming in fury and frustration. Sir Rodney advanced, placing himself protectively between the Kalkara and the prone figures of Halt and the Baron, his feet set, the ax drawing back for another crushing blow.
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