It leapt.
Albrec was shoved out of the way and hit the floor face-first. Avila had thrown himself to one side, scrabbling for the mattock. But the beast was too fast. It caught him in midair, its claws ripping his robe to shreds. A twist of its powerful arms, and Avila was flung across the cave, to strike the wall with a sickening slap of flesh. The werewolf laughed, and turned on Albrec.
“It will be quick, my little colleague, my tireless bookworm.” It grasped Albrec by the neck and lifted him up as though he were made of straw. The vast jaws opened, bathing him in the stink of its breath.
But Avila was there again, his face a broken wound and something gleaming in his fist. He struck at the creature’s back, trying to pierce the thick fur and failing. The beast spun round, dropping Albrec.
The Antillian watched in a daze as the werewolf that was Commodius smashed his friend across the breadth of the chamber once more. His own lamp had been broken and extinguished, and only Avila’s light on the floor illuminated the struggle, making it seem a battle of shadowy titans amid the stalactites of the ceiling.
And kindling a glitter of something lying amid the detritus of the floor.
Albrec scrabbled over and grasped the pentagram dagger in his fist. He heard Avila give a last, despairing shout of defiance and hatred, and then he threw himself on the werewolf’s back.
The creature straightened and the claws came reaching over its shoulders, raking the side of Albrec’s neck. He felt no pain, no fear, only a clinical determination. He stabbed the pentagram dagger deep into the beast, the blade grating on the vertebrae as it shredded muscle and pierced the flesh up to its hilt.
The werewolf’s head snapped back, its skull cracking against Albrec’s own with a force to explode bloody lights in his head and make him release his hold and tumble to the floor like a stringless puppet.
The beast gave an odd, gargling moan. It was Commodius again, shrunken, naked, bewildered, the pentagram hilt of the dagger protruding obscenely from his back.
The Senior Librarian looked at Albrec in disbelief, shaking his head as though circumstances had baffled him, and then he crumpled on top of Albrec, a dead weight which crushed the air out of the little monk’s lungs. Albrec passed out.
EIGHTEEN
T HE blizzard struck as they were crossing the mountain divide. The pass disappeared in minutes and the world became a blank whiteness, featureless as a steamed-up window.
The column halted in confusion and the men fought to erect their crude canvas tents in the hammering wind. A numbing, aching time of struggle and pain, the fingers becoming blue and swollen as the blood inside them slowly crystallized, ice crackling in the nostrils and solidifying in men’s beards. But at last Abeleyn and the remnant of his bodyguard were under shelter of a sort, the canvas cracking thunderously about their ears, the most accomplished fire starters amongst them striving to set light to the damp faggots they had carried all the way up from the lowlands.
It was a diminished band which accompanied the excommunicate King up into the Hebros. They had left the sailors and the wounded and the weaker of the soldiers behind to be tended by villagers in the foothills, along with an escort of unhurt veterans to guard them, for the folk in this part of the world, though Hebrian, were a hard, rapacious people who could not be trusted to treat helpless men with any charity. So it was with less than fifty men that Abeleyn had started the climb into the mountains that formed the backbone of his kingdom. He was afoot, like his subordinates, for he had put the lady Jemilla on the only horse which survived, and the dozen mules they had commandeered from the lowland villages were burdened with firewood and what meagre supplies they had been able to glean from the sullen population.
They had been eight days on the road. It was the eleventh day of Forgist, the darkest month of the year, and they were still twenty leagues from Abrusio.
T HE lady Jemilla pulled her furs more closely about her and ordered her remaining maidservant to fetch her something to eat from one of the soldiers’ fires. “And none of that accursed salt pork, either, or I’ll have the hide flayed off you.”
She was cold despite the fact that she had the best tent in the company and there was a fire burning by its entrance. She was beginning to regret her insistence that she accompany Abeleyn back to Abrusio, but she had been afraid to let the King out of her sight. She wondered what awaited them in the bawdy old city, which was under the sway of the Knights Militant and the nobles.
She bore Abeleyn’s child—or so it would be believed. Were his attempt to reclaim his kingdom unsuccessful, her life would be forfeit. The present rulers of Hebrion could not allow a bastard heir of the former King to live. In carrying Abeleyn’s issue she harboured her own death warrant within her very flesh.
If he failed.
He would not talk to her! Did he think that she was some empty-headed, high-born courtesan with no thoughts worth thinking beyond the bedroom? She had tried to wheedle information out of him, but he had remained as closed as an oyster.
The tattered raptor which was always coming and going was the familiar of the wizard, Golophin—everyone knew that. He was keeping the King informed as to events in his capital. But what were those events? Abeleyn was such a boy in many things—in sex most of all, perhaps—but he could suddenly go still and give that stare of his, as though he were awaiting an explanation for some offence. That was when the man, the King, came out, and Jemilla was afraid of him then, though she used all her skill at dissembling to conceal it. She dared not press him further than she already had, and the knowledge galled her immeasurably. She was as ignorant of his intentions as the basest soldier of his bodyguard.
Her thoughts wandered from the groove they had worn for themselves. The blizzard roared beyond the frail walls of the tent, and she found herself thinking of Richard Hawkwood, the mariner who had once been her lover and who had sailed away such a long time ago, it seemed. Where was he now, upon the sea or under it? Did he think of her as he paced his quarterdeck, or faced whatever perils he had to face in the unknown regions his ships had borne him to?
His child, this little presence in her belly, his son. He would have loved that: a son to carry on his name, something that whining bitch of a wife had never given him. But Jemilla had larger plans for this offspring of hers. He would not be the son of a sea captain, but the heir to a throne. She would one day be a king’s mother.
If Abeleyn did not fail. If his betrothal to Astarac’s princess could somehow be foiled. If.
Jemilla plotted on to herself, constructing a world of interconnecting conspiracies in her mind whilst the blizzard raged unheeded outside and the Hebros passes deepened with snow.
F OR two days Abeleyn and his entourage cowered under canvas, waiting for the blizzard to abate. Finally the wind died and the snow stopped falling. They emerged from the half-buried shelters to find a transformed world, white and blinding, drifts in which the mules might disappear, mountain peaks glaring and powder-plumed against a brilliant cobalt blue sky.
They slogged onwards. The strongest men were put to the front to clear a way for the others, wading through the drifts and bludgeoning a path forward.
Two more days they travelled in this manner, the weather holding clear and bitterly cold. Four of the mules died on their feet in the freezing star-bright nights and one sentry was found hunched stiff and rime-brittle at his post in the early morning, his arquebus frosted to his grey hand and his eyes two dead, glazed windows into nothing. But at last it seemed that the mountains were receding on either side of them. The pass was opening out, the ground descending beneath their feet. They had crossed the backbone of Hebrion and were travelling steadily down into the settled lands, the fiefs of the nobles and the wide farmlands with their olive groves and vineyards, their orchards and pastures. A kindlier world, where the people would welcome the coming of their rightful king. At least, such was Abeleyn’s hope.