Behind the trio of desperate sailors the soldiers fought on with rammers and gunstocks and knives. But they had too many assailants. One by one they were enveloped, brought down and torn to pieces. The road was littered with gold coins and the fragments of bodies puddled with gore and entrails. Murad, Mensurado and a couple of others made a last effort, a combined charge. Hawkwood risked a glance back at them, but he could only see a crowd of monsters huddled together as if feeding at the same trough. They broke apart as Murad, his shirt torn from his back and his skin in strips, burst through them, wielding a shard of an arquebus’s wheel-lock. The nobleman sprinted away at unbelievable speed, a dozen shifters in pursuit, and disappeared into the night.
Hawkwood’s group shuffled onwards, turning and spinning to keep their assailants at bay with lunges of their dirks. The wall of the volcano towered above them now and they were surrounded by trees and vegetation; they had left the main part of the city. The cleft in the crater wall could be seen as a wedge of stars ahead.
Mihal was too slow. As his arm snaked out to stab at a shifter it caught his wrist. He was yanked off into a scrum of snarling shadows and could not even scream before they had finished him. One knocked Masudi down from behind. Bardolin went sprawling and Hawkwood staggered, his dagger flying out of his hand.
He scrabbled off on hands and knees into the bushes, rolling and shoving himself forward into the vegetation like a fox intent on going to earth. Then he lay, utterly spent, the jungle teeming with howls, leaves brushing his face. He tried to summon a prayer, a last thought, something coherent out of the terror which washed across his brain, but his mind was blank. He lay there as dumb and senseless as a cornered animal, waiting for death to come ravening out of the darkness.
It came. He heard the bushes crackling, and there was a sensation of heat beside him, the impression of a hulking presence.
Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes, his heartbeat a red light that went on and off in his head, soughing through his throat like the ebb and flow of an unquiet sea. And he saw the yellow eyes of the beast that lay beside him, its breath stirring his sweat-soaked forelock.
“Sweet God, get it over with,” he croaked, fear swamping him, robbing him of any last defiance.
The beast, an enormous werewolf, chuckled.
The sound was human, rational despite its author.
“Would I harm you, Captain, the navigator, the steerer of ships? I think not. I think not.”
It was gone. The night was silent, the utter silence of the unquiet forest. Looking up, Hawkwood could see the stars shining in between the limbs of the trees.
He waited for the beast to return and finish him, but it did not. The night had become as peaceful as if the carnage had been imagined, a fever dream vivid on waking. He sat up cautiously, heard a groan nearby and struggled drunkenly to his feet.
Nothing was working. His mind was immobilized in shock, barely able to instruct the body which harboured it. He staggered out on to the roadway and the first thing he saw was the mocking sight of Masudi’s head planted on the paving like a fallen fruit, dark and shining.
Hawkwood gagged and threw up a thin soup of scalding bile. Other things lay on the road, but he did not care to look at them. He heard the groan again and tottered over to its source.
Bardolin, moving feebly in a pool of Masudi’s blood.
Hawkwood bent down to the mage and slapped the old man’s face, hard. As if he were somehow to blame for the night’s slaughter.
Bardolin opened his eyes.
“Captain.”
Hawkwood could not speak, and he was shaking as though bitterly cold. He tried to help Bardolin up and slipped in the slick blood so that they were both lying in it like twins spat forth from some ruptured womb.
They lay there. Hawkwood felt that he had somehow lived through the end of the world. He could not be alive; he was in some manner of subtle hell.
Bardolin sat up rubbing his face, then fell back again. It took some minutes before finally they were both on their feet, looking like two intoxicated revellers who had splashed through a slaughterhouse. Bardolin saw Masudi’s severed head and gaped.
“What is happening?”
But still Hawkwood could not speak. He dragged Bardolin away from the scene of the fighting, up the roadway to where the confining wall of the volcano reared up into the night cleft by its wedge of stars.
A S he walked, Hawkwood’s strength returned and he was able to support the rubber-legged Bardolin. The mage was totally bewildered and did not seem to know where he was. He rambled on about pyramids and sea crossings and had philosophical arguments with himself about the Dweomer, reiterating its Seven Disciplines again and again until Hawkwood paused and shook him violently. That quietened him, but he seemed no less confused.
They reached the gorge which led outside the confining circle of the volcano’s crater. In the darkness it was like the entrance to a primitive tomb, a megalithic burial place. It was unguarded, deserted. In fact, the entire circle of the city was dead and lightless, as though everything they had seen there had been delusion, the hallucinations of tired minds.
The pair stumbled through the cleft like sleepwalkers, tripping and rebounding off stone. They did not speak to one another, not even when they had finally come through to the other side and found themselves outside the hollow cone of Undabane with the barren slopes of the volcano stretching away below them in the moonlight, and beyond them the midnight sea of the jungle.
A shade rose out of the rocks before them and crunched through the tufa and ash until it was close enough to touch.
Murad.
Raw flesh glimmered over his naked torso, and sluggish blood welled from his wounds, black as tar. He was half bald where something had ripped his scalp from forehead to ear.
“Murad?” Hawkwood managed to ask. He could not believe that this human flotsam was the man he knew and detested.
“The very same. So they let you loose, did they? The mariner and the mage.”
“We escaped,” Hawkwood said, but knew that was a lie as the words passed his lips. The three of them stood as if they had not a care in the world, as if there were not a kingdom of monsters within the hollow mountain thirsting after their blood.
“They let us go,” Murad said, his sneer still intact at least. “Or you, at any rate. Me I’m not so sure about. I may merely have been fortunate. How is the mage, anyway?”
“Alive.”
“Alive.” Suddenly Murad sagged. He had to squat down on his knees. “They killed them all,” he whispered, “every last one. And such gold! Such . . . blood.”
Hawkwood dragged him upright. “Come. We can’t stay here. We’ve a long road ahead of us.”
“We’re walking dead men, Captain.”
“No—we’re alive. We were meant to stay alive, I believe, and at some point I want to find out why. Now take Bardolin’s other arm. Take it, Murad.”
The nobleman did as he was told. Together, the three of them stumbled down the slopes of the mountain, the ash burning in their wounds like salt.
By the time the dawn came lightening the sky they were almost at its foot, and the unchanging jungle whooped and wailed with weary familiarity before them. They plunged into it once more, becoming lost to the world of the dreaming trees, the shadowed twilight of the forest.
The hidden beast watched them as they disappeared, three wrecked pilgrims pursuing some cracked vision known only to themselves. Then it rose up out of its hiding place and followed them, as silent as a breath of air.
PART THREE
THE WARS OF THE FAITH