by S. A. Swann
“I do not—” Bolesław was interrupted by a shout from one of his men. Reinhart turned to look at the commotion. One of the Poles held up an empty boot.
The trail grew more obvious as they followed: broken branches, bloody bits of torn clothing. As soon as it was clear to Reinhart that they had found the trail of their quarry, he asked Bolesław to order the party’s return so that Reinhart’s brothers could rearm and come out to finish the thing.
“For a boot and a few rags? My Duke would require something more substantial, Brother Reinhart.”
It was only a couple miles deeper into the woods that Reinhart saw Bolesław regret those words.
They followed a game trail into a dense thicket, then up to a rise that appeared to end in a twisted mass of undergrowth and deadfalls. They might have turned back if not for one man who saw something in the undergrowth. The Pole ran up and retrieved a dirty brown object.
He lifted it to reveal a severed human head as ill-used by scavengers and as maggot-ridden as the hare Bolesław had kicked upon Reinhart’s boot. The grotesque sight was met with a number of gasps, and the whole character of the expedition changed.
Bolesław took a step forward and stared at the dead, eyeless face. “Lukasz,” he whispered.
“Do we have substance enough for your Duke?” Reinhart asked. “If we return now, we can—”
He was interrupted by another Pole, who had taken a position at the highest point on the rise. He was shouting something as he looked down, crossing himself, then making gestures Reinhart thought were purely pagan.
Bolesław turned and charged up the rise with more speed than Reinhart would have credited him for. As Reinhart followed, he saw the color leach from the massive Pole’s face so quickly that, when he reached his side, the large man had taken on the aspect of a wraith.
Reinhart looked down and shuddered.
“Jesus wept.”
He prayed as he gazed into the bowl-like ravine before a cave mouth. The ground was black with tarlike mud, covered with flies and the prints of a massive wolf. Scattered evenly around the small clearing were the remains of men, horses, and animals less identifiable. No body had been left intact, and some of the men still wore bits of armor.
Reinhart saw the Devil’s hand. The dead had been taken here, placed here, carefully arranged so the fiend could revel in its handiwork.
“You are right,” Bolesław told him. “We must return and arm your fellows—” Bolesław was interrupted by a wolf’s howl. And when the woods swallowed the last echo, the only sound left was that of Reinhart’s breathing and the creak of the other men’s armor.
Without any prompting, Bolesław pulled his sword from its scabbard, and Reinhart saw the glint of silver on its edge.
“God help us,” Reinhart said. “It is here.”
Darien followed the men from the fortress, silently and beyond their sight, breathing in the scent of eight men. One scent was familiar, even if he hadn’t seen the black cross on his surcote.
Darien allowed the men to walk far from the paths and the walls of the fortress. They marched, loud and unconcerned, into Darien’s domain. If the loud ones had been alone, he might have ignored them. But in their midst was a member of the Order, and Darien could not turn away from the opportunity to reduce the Order’s ranks. He recognized where they were when one of the men found a boot that had once graced the foot of the oaf who had attacked Maria. The men followed Darien’s trail, picking up cast-off rags, until they found themselves at the edge of Darien’s lair.
When they stopped, he padded to just within sight of them. Three looked down upon his cave, and another held the head of Maria’s oafish attacker up by the hair.
Now was the time, while they were distracted and had no weapons in hand.
He sat on his haunches and concentrated. His forelegs creaked as they lengthened, and his forepaws became clawed hands. His back and chest broadened, his shoulders twisting painfully, bringing forth a howl.
The howl reduced his element of surprise, but it brought him the smell of fear, which was worth more. He dove into their midst as the men scrambled to draw their swords. He landed on the back of the rearmost, slamming him to the ground as he clamped his jaws around the back of his neck.
The words were barely out of Reinhart’s mouth when yells of alarm rose from the Poles. He turned around to see a massive golden-furred monster taking down one of Bolesław’s men. He saw slavering jaws crush the man’s neck and shake his head like a rag doll’s, independent of the body.
The monster straddled the corpse on doglike legs, balanced on huge splayed paws that dug claws into the forest floor. Its forearms were long and ended in clawed imitations of human hands. When it raised its massive wolf’s head, its muzzle was stained with gore and its lips were pulled back into something between a snarl and a demonic grin. One pale blue eye seemed to stare directly into Reinhart’s soul.
The two Poles near the fallen man drew their swords and raised them against the creature.
Reinhart yelled at them: “The head! Sever the head or pierce the brain!” Next to him, Bolesław shouted in his own language as he stepped between the creature and Reinhart, holding one of the Order’s silvered swords.
Bolesław’s words must have been a reprise of Reinhart’s instruction, because both swords came down toward the wolf’s head. But the creature moved blindingly fast. One forearm rose to deflect the flat of one incoming blade, and as the other blade swung toward its throat, the beast snapped at it, catching the blade in its jaws and tearing the sword out of its wielder’s hands with a shake of its head.
The other swordsman tried again, but the beast leapt on him as he raised his sword, slamming him into a tree. That man’s sword went flying, along with part of his arm. A third man ignored the admonishment to attack the thing’s head and drove a plain steel sword into the creature’s side as it eviscerated its victim against the tree.
In response, the beast whipped its head around. It still had a sword clenched in its jaws, and the point of it pierced its attacker’s face. The man fell at the beast’s feet as it turned to face the three armed Poles converging on it.
Reinhart ran to the first fallen man, who had not had the time to draw his weapon. He had to roll the body to get the sword out. As he struggled to free the weapon from the dead man’s belt, he heard screams, and growls, and the sound of rending flesh. His heart thudded in his throat as he finally pulled the sword free.
Not silver, but through the palate into the brain …
He whipped around to face the monster.
But it wasn’t there.
The headless corpse of Wojewoda Bolesław, lord of Gród Narew, had fallen across his disemboweled countryman, his leather-gauntleted hand still clutching the pommel of a now-broken sword. The other half of Bolesław’s silver sword was embedded in the heart of a tree. Of his head, Reinhart saw no sign.
Two other attackers lay on either side of the tree, throats torn open in awful symmetry as they stared sightlessly up at the sky.
Reinhart spun around, looking for the beast, but the closeness of the trees limited his visibility even in broad daylight. He backed toward a tree to gain some cover behind himself. Something rustled to his right, and he spun to face in that direction, keeping the tree at his back. He thought he saw a shadow move between the trees.
Then he heard a scream.
The last man, Reinhart thought. The man who had swung his sword into the beast’s mouth only to be disarmed. That man had fled into the woods.
Not far enough, or quick enough. His scream was cut short with a horribly liquid sound, followed by a soft crunch.
Reinhart tightened his grip on the sword in his hand. He wanted to pursue this fiend, do his best to finish it, even as poorly armed as he was, but discipline made him hold his ground. Running—either after this thing or away from it—would be suicide. The creature was faster and could attack from any angle. If he showed his back, even in pursuit, he would suffer the same
fate as the Poles.
“Face me, demon!” he yelled at the woods.
Even without a silvered weapon, it was still possible to kill it, if he could strike before it inflicted a mortal blow. He prayed for the strength to do what was required of him.
A morning breeze carried the sound of a soft growl from the surrounding woods, wrapped in the nauseating scent of blood. He edged around the tree, stepping over the outflung arm of a corpse, carefully minding his footing as he stared at the trees for any hint of motion, any signal of attack.
It would rush him, he decided. It would wait for a break in his attention and rely on its speed and strength to overwhelm him before he could bring a blow to bear. Expecting that, he braced his sword in both hands. He could use the creature’s momentum to pierce its skull.
“Do you fear God’s judgment?” he called. “Face me!”
Something low spoke from the woods, a growling sepulchral voice that could have belonged to Satan himself: “Why would I concern myself with your God?”
A creaking growl filled the air, coming from just beyond the trees in front of Reinhart. It was as if the woods were hungry.
“Show yourself,” he called, willing his voice not to tremble.
“Speak more,” it said. “Yell, scream, call on your God. Let me hear it.”
A bead of sweat dripped out from under Reinhart’s helmet, stinging his eyes.
“You may mask your fear from other men, knight, but to me you reek of it. I taste your terror in the air around you, and it tastes as sweet as your flesh.”
“I am ready for you, Devil.”
“I am no devil,” the trees whispered at him. “And you are far from ready.”
Something exploded out of the underbrush at him, and Reinhart swung his sword, aiming head-high. As he had hoped, the momentum carried the onrushing body onto his sword, impaling it through its open jaw and through the back of its skull.
But it wasn’t the wolf whose deadweight pulled his sword arm down. It was the Pole who had tried to run, his face torn away so that only a blood-soaked skull looked up at Reinhart. He put his boot on the corpse’s chest to pull his sword free.
A gold-furred shadow leapt over the corpse as Reinhart pulled. He felt its breath against his cheek, followed by a wrenching pain in his neck that sent the world away into a blood-soaked darkness.
XVII
Do not concern yourself,” Josef muttered to himself as he limped through Gród Narew. “Do not concern yourself.”
The thoughts he had for Komtur Heinrich were not those of a probationary member of the German Order. They had more in common with the black thoughts that had filled his head when he had seen Nürnberg decimated around him. But this was worse: this pestilence had a snarling face and could be seen coming.
In his mind he kept picturing innocents falling victim to the gold-furred demon, the life torn free of their bodies while Heinrich played diplomatic games with the Masovian nobility. He saw body upon body, and above them all his Komtur’s unmoved face.
Obedience before all.
Worse, perhaps, was the unease he felt about Maria. Everything about her drew feelings from him he thought had died with Sarah—her quiet strength, her voice, the gentle touch of her hand, the curve of her lower lip … At some point his thoughts had abandoned their pretense of propriety and he had accepted that he cared for her much more than Komtur Heinrich would find proper.
So, as his thoughts descended their dark spiral, the victims of the demon’s attack most often bore Maria’s face.
Though, at their darkest points, his thoughts also cast Maria into other roles. The suspicions raised by her healing face and her silver cross refused to go away.
Why do I keep thinking this? She bore the wound on her face for days before it healed. She was right; it had simply appeared worse than it was.
But the silver on her neck would impede such healing.
The thoughts were insane. There was no logic to them. What he hunted would not bind itself so.
So why does she lie about the source of the wound?
Yet if some man had struck her, how many women would admit such to a near stranger?
Whatever his suspicions, they were outweighed by his sense of the woman he had seen during her visits. The woman who’d lifted his heart, and showed him a gentle strength that seemed to bear much more than she was able to show. And he knew that she needed help. He felt, somehow, that she was more at risk from Komtur Heinrich’s demon than he was.
His gut tied itself into painful knots, and only partly because of the wound in his belly. But until he entered the great hall where the members of the szlachta took their meals, he was only guilty of sinful thoughts.
He stood in the doorway and looked at the Poles eating and talking and singing. To Josef, the sight bordered on unreal when compared to the Order’s tradition of taking meals silently as scriptures were read.
He stared at the chattering mass of Slavic nobility and began to have second thoughts. Who was he to place his fears and concerns above those of the Church and the Order?
He clutched at his stomach with his fist and turned to leave, but a man placed a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “Are you looking for someone?” the man asked in comprehensible German. “You’ve wandered far from your brothers.”
Josef turned to face a man taller than he was and twice as broad. For an instant he thought he faced the lord of Gród Narew, Wojewoda Bolesław himself. But this man was younger than that and had a beard darker and more closly trimmed.
“I apologize for intruding.”
“No need. You are guests of our house.” Somehow he managed to say it with no trace of irony. “Perhaps there is something you need?”
Josef straightened. There was a reason he was here. “I wished to ask if my weapons might be returned to me.”
The man smiled. “Your master has talked to the Duke of this, I am sure. The Order’s weapons will be—”
“I talk only of my own,” Josef said.
“You are a member of the Order.”
“But I speak for myself.”
“Do you?” The man led him out of the hall and down a long corridor. As they walked, the man said, “I am curious why you might think anyone would return your weapons, in particular.”
“Perhaps Komtur Heinrich has not said everything about what it is we hunt in your lands.”
The man stopped and turned to face him, a questioning expression on his face. “Who are you, Brother?”
“Josef.”
“I am Telek. You sleep in my uncle’s bed.” He placed a hand on Josef’s shoulder and said, with a dire earnestness, “Do you know what you are offering to do?”
“Yes.”
Telek squeezed Josef’s shoulder and said, “Then perhaps some accommodation can be reached.”
He led Josef to a series of storerooms deep in the stronghold. No one challenged Telek’s presence, or asked about the pale German who accompanied him. He stopped Josef before a large door, banded with iron, and said, “Should anyone care to ask, say I dragged you down here to identify some inscriptions upon these weapons.”
“Do you not have men who read German?”
Telek muttered something in Polish that may have been a curse. “It’s a pretext, of course. It would be suspicious for us to be alone without some claim that I attempted to gain information from you. Better for you if I requested your presence with a transparent ploy.”
“I see.”
“I hope you do. Otherwise you would be a very short-lived spy.”
Josef’s gut clenched, trying to deny the truth of what Telek said. But was there any other word for it, whatever his motivations? He was betraying the Order. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t being traitorous; Heinrich himself had said that the Poles would work with them on this. If they were allies, could it be traitorous to inform them of exactly what they faced?
Telek opened the door, the thick slab of oak swinging past Josef on creaking hinges. Th
e interior was dark, dotted with fragments of light—reflections from the lantern in the hallway. Telek retrieved a lantern and led Josef inside.
The room smelled of oiled steel and dry wood. Every wall was crowded with wooden racks holding as many implements of death as Josef could imagine. In the middle of the room sat several large wooden chests, a sheet of canvas draped across the top of them. On the canvas rested the Order’s weapons. The reflections from their blades had a different, softer character than those of the blades racked against the walls. Josef looked over the small arsenal of swords, daggers, and crossbows.
Telek picked up a dagger and held it up before him, the inscriptions bold in the reflection of the lamplight. “Ornate weapons for an Order that has taken vows of poverty.”
“They are necessary.”
“Then perhaps you can explain why.”
Telek stood and quietly listened to the German, and gradually he realized that, for whatever reason, this Josef was genuine. At first he’d thought this man was some feint by Heinrich, to get some weapons out of the stores; or perhaps Heinrich suspected Telek’s visit to his quarters and wanted to confirm it.
But this man went beyond anything Telek had expected. Not only did he confirm the nature of the beast the Order hunted, but he conveyed an urgency that Heinrich’s tome could not. Telek listened to the man and asked the questions he would have if he had not known much of this beforehand.
One thing he noted: there were gaps in Josef’s knowledge. He couldn’t answer some questions Telek asked that would be apparent to anyone who had read Heinrich’s tome. He never mentioned the name Semyon, and he didn’t know how long these creatures had been hunted by the Order. To Josef, these things were demonic and always had been.
He gave Telek a few new elements, though. A description of the beast: the golden fur, the ruthlessness. It was quite a different sense hearing about such a thing from a man who had seen it than reading a sterile description on the page. Hearing about how this beast had savaged a heavily armed and mounted contingent of the Order, armed precisely against such a creature …
