Something Red (31 page)

After a while of this tense promenade, another memory came to Hob: Molly saying, “You men.” And then the thought:
This will be revenge for Margery.
And between the one and the other, he straightened up, and he was almost unafraid.

There came a burst of high-pitched screaming, echoing down one of the spiral stairwells. Molly went quickly to the archway that led to the steps. She peered upward a moment, then muttered, “She is at her mischief, and ’tis somewhere up these stairs.” And turning to the others: “Away on!”

At the top of the winding turret stair there was a heavy hanging, there to foil the drafts from the upper passageway, which was a sort of unheated gallery, with narrow unglazed arrow-slit windows, open to the air. Molly swept this curtain aside and led them through the doorless archway; they found themselves at one end of the gallery corridor that ran along the south side of the keep on this high level.

Here there was a torch on either side of the stone arch; the four stood in a pool of wavering yellow light. If there had been torches lit anywhere down the length of the gallery, they had gone out; certainly now there was only a near-black tunnel, pierced by narrow shafts of bright moonshine from the open window slits. The window slits were cut in a cross shape, both for piety and to allow an archer to traverse his shots, and the bars of moonlight fell against the inner wall in crosses of pearly light, receding and diminishing down the gallery.

But the corridor’s other end, away at the southeast corner of the castle keep, was also illuminated: there another pair of torches showed them the body of a woman, supine, her arms flung wide and her clothes bloodied, and by her another body, a child—no, it was also a woman, but small. Above them crouched the Fox, its muzzle dripping dark gore.

CHAPTER 21

T
HE SHOCK OF IT FROZE MOL
ly’s party in place for a moment, and in that moment the Fox became aware of them, and with a rippling movement surged up and past the bodies, ears and eyes straining toward them, all eager attention. The cold airs and breezes that played along the gallery brought their scent to the Fox, and it halted suddenly, ears up straight and slightly forward, one graceful black foreleg bent up in midstep. Its nose lifted slightly, and it sampled the air. It cocked its head to one side. Plainly there was something about Molly, or her people, that troubled it.

Then its lips writhed back from long ranks of white, white teeth. The Fox was like a fox in form: deadly but elegantly, almost delicately, deadly. Yet it was so huge that it struck Hob, through his rekindled fear, that this must be what a vole might feel when facing
a real fox. It was looking from one to another of them, and Hob could feel its amber eyes fix on him a moment, and a wave of sick terror began in his belly and washed up through his chest; yet he stood his ground beside Molly and kept the flagon steady and level. “You men,” she had said; he held to that.

In the next instant Nemain twitched the cloak from Jack’s body, and Molly deftly snatched the cord with the leather bag from Jack’s neck. Molly and Nemain now cried out in unison: a long rhythmic phrase in Irish, the two voices in high-and-low harmony, piercing, urgent.

Jack started at the sound; he sprang forward a yard, as though a whip had been laid across his shoulders, and stopped. Then he began to walk down the corridor toward the Fox. In the torchlight Hob could see the muscles rippling in Jack’s broad and naked back; yet before the five hundred pounds of the Fox, he no longer seemed large and powerful. In a moment the darkness swallowed him; two heartbeats later he reemerged, gleaming palely as he passed through a shaft of moonlight. Still the Fox made no move toward them, and Jack sank into the next band of shadow.

He passed through the next strip of moonlight. Hob thought that perhaps Jack was not so small in comparison to the Fox as first he had feared; certainly Jack was broad enough of shoulder. The silent man passed into shadow again; and now the Fox put down its paw and took one pace forward, and a low snarl came to Hob’s ears, rasping, vicious: Hob felt an involuntary shiver that centered itself between his shoulder blades. He realized that he was baring his own teeth, in some faint echo of the Fox’s dagger-mouthed threat.

Jack reappeared, and Hob was alarmed to see that Jack was having some difficulty in walking: certainly he was shuffling more, and he seemed bent forward, but his figure had not diminished with distance, and indeed seemed if anything broader than usual.

In its pool of torchlight down at the end of the corridor, the Fox
put its ears flat back and crouched, its lips retracting still farther from those glinting fangs.

Hob squinted as Jack passed again into shadow. The next time he emerged he seemed to trip; he pitched forward, arms outstretched, falling through the band of gray light that stretched from the window slit across the floor to the inner wall, and disappearing into the gloom beyond.

When again he came out into the light Hob gasped. Jack’s form had darkened with a thick pelt of black fur, and increased tremendously. Across his back the fur had a silvery sheen, and his skull seemed misshapen: it rose to a bony crest, so that it seemed he wore a casque helmet beneath the coarse black hairs. His legs had become bowed and short and immensely thick; his long arms were as burly as a strong man’s thighs, with huge wrists and swollen elbow joints and powerful forearms; and he moved on all fours, his hands balled into fists, the knuckles pounding along the floor, serving as feet. His speed increased, and then he was bounding down the hallway in a rapid rocking charge, flicking in and out of the shafts of moonlight. From his throat came a bellowing roar that Hob could feel in the planks beneath the soles of his feet, and if the snarl of the Fox had made Hob shiver, the roar of this new Beast destroyed all thought, and left Hob unable to move while it persisted.

The speed of the Beast’s charge was astonishing, given its bulk. It was like the white king bull: much of its mass was muscle, which carries itself. The broad stiff back rocked from side to side, and the Beast flew down the hallway. The Fox sank into a crouch, and then leaped, forward and to the side, so that the Beast went partway past it. The Fox flashed in from the side, fangs glinting, but the whirl of the Beast as it changed direction took its side away from the jaws; they whipped by, and tore a small slit along the bulge of the Beast’s shoulder.

Roaring, snarling, the combatants spun about one another, probing
for an avenue of attack, feinting, striking, leaping back. The floorboards shuddered; the impact of the giant beasts as they struck heavily against the corridor walls, maneuvering frantically in the narrow space, could be felt down at Hob’s end of the gallery. To Hob came the odor of wild things: musk, salt—the pungent scent of two great animals in extreme exertion.

The Fox went up on two legs as it had in the hall, seeking to strike down at the back of the Beast’s neck, but the thing that had been Jack stood up itself, jaws wide and lips retracted from its huge teeth, its paws slapping and grabbing at the Fox’s head, seeking a handhold, seeking to hold the Fox still that it might bite. For a moment Hob thought that the struggle looked like a battle of snakes: the Fox’s head weaving from side to side, the Beast’s arms—for it was so manlike that Hob must think in terms of arms and legs—held high, seeking to seize the Fox’s head or throat. Whenever a hand sought to close upon its throat, the Fox snapped at it and drove it back.

The Beast dropped down again to three limbs; its right arm flashed up and it struck the Fox such a tremendous blow in the belly that the giant canid was driven back several feet along the polished wooden floor.

The Fox slid backward, scrabbling at the floorboards for traction, and its back leg struck the two bodies lying there. The corpses were dashed back against the wall, fetching up with a thump. It was as though they had no more substance than the straw dolls that little girls had played with in Hob’s old village; he had a sudden sense of the bodily weight, the appalling power, of the two beings who strove there at the corridor’s end.

The Fox bunched its hindquarters under it and leaped at its foe. Its back paws ripped deep scratches in the planks of the floor, splinters spraying behind it. Its head turned to one side as it ran past the Beast, the long, long canines catching the torchlight for an instant. But
the Beast was as brute-quick as the Fox, and turned just enough to avoid being disemboweled, and the Fox succeeded only in ripping a long score along the ribs, that began to drip carmine at once.

Even as it turned to avoid the slashing fangs, the Beast threw a curving fist at its tormentor; the Fox was thrown again against the wall, and was as quickly up on its feet again, and again hurled itself at the thing that had been Jack. There followed a whirl of chaos that Hob could barely grasp, his eye running so far ahead of his comprehension of what he saw, his mind numbed with the deafening roars, pierced by the malevolent snarls of the Fox, a sound of distilled bestial hatred.

The constriction of the corridor forced the antagonists into surges toward and away from Molly’s group. Hob and Nemain moved back as far as they were able. Only Molly stood immobile, as the mayhem advanced and retreated like the tides.

Suddenly the Fox broke free and ran toward Molly’s end of the corridor; Hob’s heart seemed to freeze as it bore down on them, huge and implacable. But it only sought a space to spin about, set itself, and charge with blinding speed at the manlike Beast. It raced a few paces, gathered itself, and sprang on that which had been Jack.

The Beast threw up a great arm, punching the doglike chest, checking the Fox’s leap in midair, and the gleaming teeth clacked shut on emptiness. A moment later, so quickly that Hob could not see the movement, one huge hand closed about the blood-drenched muzzle, and the other about its foreleg. Hob could hear small bones in the leg breaking under the pressure of that monstrous hand, a sound like a bunch of twigs crackling in a campfire.

There was a yelping shriek, and the Fox sought frantically to back away with its three good legs, but the Beast had it fast, by leg and snout, and it could neither bite nor flee. The power in all toothed killers is in closing the jaws; to open them requires no great strength and the muscles that do so are small. The grip of that black-furred leathery hand
was easily sufficient to muzzle the Fox and then, slowly, to bend its head upward, exposing the bib of white fur on its chest. All the while the Beast backed the Fox up against the stone of the corridor’s outside wall, and all the while the Fox’s claws were rasping and slipping on the wide planking as it sought to resist.

What had been Jack now dipped its head, hampered somewhat by the stiff muscularity of its short neck, and drove at the Fox’s underthroat. The Beast’s mouth opened in a parody of a human yawn; indeed its yellow teeth, though huge, seemed much like those of a man, except for the four great fangs, inches long, two above and two below, that now clenched themselves in the Fox’s throat, and locked tight.

There followed a period of near-stasis, a strangled wheezing from the Fox; then a frantic scrabbling and clawing; but the Beast was inexorable. Blood poured from the Fox’s torn throat, and the clamp of the Beast’s jaws cut off breath; slowly the Fox’s life drained away. Its forelimbs straightened and stretched out before it, quivered, and went still. The Beast released its hold, and the body of the Fox slid to the floor.

The Beast, on all fours, contemplated its fallen enemy with tilted head. After a moment it reached out a huge hand—it looked to Hob as though the thing wore black leather gloves, with hair on the back—and prodded the Fox. There was no movement. The Beast sat back on its haunches, turned its head to one side, and slapped itself on the breast a few times with alternating hands, not very hard, producing a series of hollow popping sounds. Then it rocked forward, seized one of the Fox’s forelimbs by the paw, and prepared to bite into the shoulder, but something about the Fox repelled it. It dropped the lifeless paw—Hob could hear the claws rattle as they hit the floor—and, to Hob’s horror, turned its attention to the dead women lying where they had been flung against the wall.

The Beast was pawing at the corpses, plainly preparing to eat of them, and Molly was stirring beside Hob, reaching for the flagon that
Hob held, to reassert control over Jack the Beast, when they heard a sharp hiss of indrawn breath behind them.

Framed in the doorway, holding aside the heavy tapestry, stood Doctor Vytautas, gazing in anguish at the dead Fox. In a moment or two, rage had replaced mourning, and he stepped through into the corridor, letting the thick cloth fall to behind him. He began to stalk toward their little group.

Vytautas had lost his fussy gait. Now he paced forward like a cat mousing, surefooted and ominous. Hob watched him, aghast. How could he ever have thought this man kindly; how could he have thought him weak? The once-benevolent eyes were half-hidden beneath lowering brows, ridges of muscle bracketed a down-turned cruel mouth, and his tall frame seemed to be filled with a sinewy power beneath the fine robe. His attention was all for the Beast at the end of the corridor, and he passed Hob as though the lad were not there.

Vytautas spoke, his voice a harsh grumble, his brow dark as a thundercloud, his upraised hand twisted into a complex clawlike symbol. Hob could not understand a word, but the voice seemed to echo from the walls and each echo seemed further to dim the torchlight. The macabre droning set up a throbbing in Hob’s bones, and a sickening weakness seeped through his flesh.

Hob felt he had to do something: the Lietuvan was chanting them to their deaths. He put the flagon down against the wall; as he straightened the corridor seemed to whirl about him, and then steady again. He shook his head to clear it, with limited success.

Hob was a few paces behind Vytautas and a pace to the side, and now he drew his belt knife and stepped forward, intending to plant it in the middle of the wizard’s back: anything to stop that hideous travesty of prayer.