Fellowship of the Talisman Read online

  And just beyond the embattled dog, Beauty was struggling frantically to tug free of one of the beasts that had caught her by a foreleg, with two other wolves rushing in upon her.

  Duncan lunged to Beauty’s aid, but he had taken no more than a step or two when a raging fury, brandishing two burning brands, streaked toward the burro’s attackers. One of the brands went spinning through the air, turning end for end, and the two charging beasts sheered off.

  “Meg!” Duncan shouted. “Meg, for the love of God, watch out!” But she paid him no attention, running like the wind, her ancient body wobbling on her shaky legs that seemed to twinkle with her speed even as she wobbled. She lifted the one remaining brand and brought it down on the wolf that had Beauty by the leg. The wolf yelped and spun away, went whimpering out into the darkness.

  From the darkness came again the loud, clear voice speaking in the unknown tongue, and as the words rang across the clearing, all the wolves turned about and ran.

  Duncan came to a halt and turned slowly to his left. Daniel stood beside the fire, and a short distance from him Andrew had one foot on a dead wolf to hold it down while he tugged desperately to free the staff rammed deep into its throat.

  Conrad and Meg were walking toward the fire, with Tiny trailing, while behind Tiny came the limping Beauty. Here and there lay the bodies of the wolves. One of them, possibly the one that Daniel had struck, was trying to pull itself along with frantically working forelegs, its hind quarters dragging.

  As Duncan walked toward the fire, Andrew suddenly screamed, let go of the staff on which he had been tugging, and backed away from the dead wolf, his hands lifted to his face.

  “No! No!” he screamed. “No, not that!”

  Duncan ran toward him and then stopped short, staring at the dead wolf in shocked amazement and disbelief.

  The body of the wolf was slowly changing and as he watched in horror, it became the body of a naked woman, with the hermit’s staff still protruding from her mouth.

  Beside Duncan, Meg chirped at him in a high and squeaky voice. “I could have told you, but I never had a chance.

  It happened all too fast.”

  Conrad stepped past Duncan, grasped the hermit’s staff in one hamlike hand, and jerked it free.

  The body of the wolf beyond the woman had turned into a man, and out beyond the two of them, the thing with the broken back that had been dragging itself away wailed suddenly in a human voice, a cry of pain and terror.

  “I’ll take care of him,” said Conrad grimly.

  “No,” said Duncan. “For the moment, leave him be.”

  “Werewolves,” spat Conrad. “They’re only good for killing.”

  “There is something I have to find out,” said Duncan. “There were a lot of them. Only a few of them attacked. The others hung back. If they had all come in…”

  “Someone called them back,” said Conrad.

  “No, it wasn’t that. Not that alone. There was something else.”

  “Here,” said Conrad, holding out the staff to Andrew.

  The hermit shrank away. “No, no,” he wailed. “I do not want to touch it. I killed a woman with it.”

  “Not a woman. A werewolf. Here, take it. Hold fast to it. You’ll never have another staff quite like it.”

  He thrust it out forcefully at Andrew and the hermit took it. He thumped it on the ground.

  “I shall always remember,” he pleaded.

  “Good thing to remember,” Conrad said. “A blow struck for our Lord.”

  Duncan walked out to the edge of the firelight, stood over the wailing man with the broken back, then slowly knelt beside him. The man was old. His arms and legs were thin as straws, his knees and elbows knobs. His ribs showed through his skin. His snow-white hair hung down to curl up at his neck and was plastered with sweat across his forehead. He looked at Duncan with fear and hatred in his shining eyes.

  “Tell me,” said Duncan, “who spoke out of the dark.”

  The man’s lips pulled back to reveal his yellowed teeth. He snarled and spat.

  Duncan reached out to grab him by the shoulder and he flinched away. He opened his mouth and screamed, his head arched high, the cords in his neck standing out like ropes. White, foamy spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth and he screamed and moaned and clawed feebly at the ground to pull himself away. He writhed in agony.

  A hand came down and grasped Duncan by the shoulder, hauled him to his feet.

  “Here, let me,” said Conrad.

  His club came down and there was the sickening sound of a crunching skull. The man crumpled and lay still.

  Duncan turned to Conrad angrily. “You shouldn’t have done that. I told you not to.”

  “When you kill snakes,” said Conrad, “you kill them. You do not coddle them.”

  “But there was a question.”

  “You asked the question and you got no answer.”

  “But he might have answered.”

  Conrad shook his head. “Not that one. He was too afraid of you.” And that was true, thought Duncan. The werewolf had been beside itself with fear. It had screamed and tried to claw itself away. It had writhed in agony.

  Conrad touched him on the arm. “Let’s go back to the fire. I have to see how Beauty is.”

  “She was limping. That was all. Meg saved her.”

  “Yes, I saw,” said Conrad.

  “How is Tiny?”

  “A slit ear. A tooth mark here and there. He’ll be all right. Just a little sore.”

  By the time they got back to the fire Andrew had piled on more wood, and the flames were leaping high. Andrew and Meg were standing side by side. Conrad went off to see about Beauty.

  “That was a brave thing you did,” Duncan told Meg. “Running out there to help Beauty.”

  “I had fire. Werewolves are afraid of fire.”

  She bridled at him. “I suppose you wonder why I helped. My being a witch and all. Well, I’ll tell you. A little magic and some mild enchantments, those are all right with me. In my day I’ve done a lot of that. There is nothing wrong with it. Many times it helps. But I told you I had no real evil and I meant that. Werewolves are evil and I cannot abide them.

  Mean, downright vicious evil. There’s no call for anyone to be that evil.”

  “There was a pack of them,” said Duncan. “A lot of them. I never knew that werewolves ran in packs, although perhaps they do. You were telling me about the camp followers who trailed in the wake of the Harriers. Could that be what accounted for so large a pack?”

  “It must be that. They must have come swarming in from all over Britain.”

  “And you heard the voice?”

  She put her arms around herself, hugging tight and shivering.

  “You knew the words? You recognized the language?”

  “Not the words,” she said, “but the language, yes. A word here and there. It’s a very ancient tongue.”

  “How ancient?”

  “That I cannot tell you, sir. Not in years or centuries. It goes deep back. Spoken before any human spoke, perhaps before there were such things as humans.”

  “Primordial,” he said. “The words of primordial evil.”

  “I do not know.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how she recognized the language, but he did not ask the question. There was no need to distress her further. She had been honest in her answers, he was sure, and that was good enough.

  Conrad came back. “Beauty is all right,” he said. “Her leg’s a little sore. We came out lucky.”

  The clearing was quiet. The humped bodies of the dead werewolves lay at the edge of the outer darkness.

  “Perhaps,” said Andrew, “we should bury them.”

  “You do not bury werewolves,” Conrad said. “A stake through the heart, perhaps. Besides, we haven’t any shovel.”

  “We’ll do nothing,” Duncan said. “We’ll leave them where they are.”

  The chapel stood white in the flickering
firelight. Duncan looked at the open door. The firelight did not reach deep enough into the interior to show the reversed crucifix and he was glad of that.

  “I’ll not sleep a wink this night,” said Andrew.

  “You had best,” said Conrad roughly. “Come morning light, we have a long, hard day ahead. Do you think you can find that trail?”

  Andrew shook his head in perplexity. “I am not sure. I seem all turned around. Nothing has looked right.”

  A wailing scream cut through the night, seeming to come from directly overhead, as if the screamer hung in the darkness over them.

  “My God,” yelped Andrew. “Not more. Not any more tonight.” The scream came again, a moan and whimper in it. It was the sort of sound that squeezed the heart and made the blood run cold.

  A calm voice spoke to them from just inside the firelit zone. “You have no reason to fear,” it said. “That is only Nan, the banshee.”

  Duncan spun around to face the one who spoke. For a moment he did not recognize him. A little man with a cap that drooped, a pair of spindly legs, ears that were oversized.

  “Snoopy,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hunting you,” said Snoopy. “We’ve been hunting you for hours. Ever since Ghost told us he had lost track of you.”

  Ghost came fluttering down and beside him another figure, its darkness in contrast to the white of Ghost.

  “It was pure happenstance,” said Ghost, “that I ran into them.”

  “It was much more than happenstance,” said Snoopy, “and you wouldn’t understand. We have no time to explain.”

  Ghost floated lower until his white robe swept the ground. Nan, the banshee, settled down, hunched herself along the ground toward the fire. She was repulsive. Her deep-set eyes glittered at them from beneath her shaggy brows.

  Thick black hair flowed down her back almost to her waist. Her face was thin and hard.

  “Faith,” she said, “and you were hidden well. It took us long to find you.”

  “Madam,” said Duncan, “we were in no wise hiding. We simply reached here and camped the night.”

  “And a fine place you picked,” said Snoopy, walking up to them. “You know you cannot stay here.”

  “We intend to,” Conrad told him. “We fought off a pack of werewolves. We can handle whatever else comes.”

  “We have been looking for you, goblin,” said Andrew. “Why were you not at the church, where you said you’d be?”

  “I’ve been out spreading word that you’ll need some help. And the way you’ve been fumbling around, you will need all the help that we can give.”

  “You found little help,” Andrew said snappishly. “One beaten-up old banshee.”

  “I’ll have you know, you twerp,” said Nan, the banshee, “that I can give you ace and spades and beat you at hands-down.”

  “There’ll be others later on,” said Snoopy calmly. “They’ll be there when you need them most. And you know you can’t stay here. No matter what you say, in your ignorance and arrogance, we have to get you somewhere else.”

  “We know,” said Duncan, “that this is a pagan shrine.”

  “More than that,” Snoopy told him. “Much more than that. A place that was sacred to Evil before there were any pagans who might worship Evil. Here, in the days of the first beginning, gathered beings that would shrivel up your tiny souls were you to catch even the smallest glimpse of them. You desecrate the ground. You befoul the place. They will not suffer that you stay here. The werewolves were the first. There will be others, not so easily beaten off as werewolves.”

  “But there is the chapel…”

  “They suffered the chapel to be built. They watched it being built by arrogant and misunderstanding men, by stupid churchmen who should have known far better. They lurked in the shades and watched it going up and they bided their time and when that time came …”

  “You can’t frighten us,” said Conrad.

  “Perhaps we should be frightened,” said Duncan. “Perhaps if we had good sense we would be.”

  “That is right,” said Meg. “You should be.”

  “But you came along with us. You did not protest when we…”

  “Where else is an old and crippled witch to go?”

  “You could have flown off on your broomstick,” said Conrad.

  “I never had a broomstick. Nor did any other witch. That is only one of the many stupid stories…”

  “We can’t move until we get some rest,” said Duncan. “Conrad and I could go on, but the witch is feeble and Andrew has walked the livelong day. He is worn out.”

  “I had the strength to kill a werewolf,” the hermit pointed out.

  “You mean it, don’t you?” Conrad said to Snoopy. “You’re not just shoving us around.”

  “He means it,” said Nan, the banshee.

  “We could put Andrew up on Daniel,” Conrad said. “Let Beauty carry Meg. She weighs no more than a feather.

  The packs we could carry. Beauty, even with a sore leg, could carry Meg.”

  “Then,” said Snoopy, “let us be about it.”

  “I plead with you,” said Ghost. “Please do. If you stay here you’ll join me in death by morning. And you might not have the good fortune that I had to become a ghost.”

  13

  After a time Duncan’s eyes became acclimated to the darkness and he found that, after a fashion, he could see.

  That is, he could distinguish trees sufficiently not to run head-on into them. But there was no way to know the character of the ground underfoot. Time after time he tripped over a fallen branch or fell when he stepped into a hole.

  Rather than walking, it was like floundering. By keeping his eyes on Conrad’s broad back and the whiteness of the pack that Conrad carried, he did not wander off. Had it not been for Conrad and the pack, he was sure he would have.

  Snoopy led the way, with Ghost sailing along just above him, serving as a sort of beacon they could follow. Daniel followed Snoopy and Ghost, and Beauty trailed along behind her comrade, Daniel. Conrad and Duncan brought up the rear. Nan flew about somewhere above them, but she wasn’t too much help. The rags she wore were either black or drab and could not be seen, and she had the disconcerting habit of letting loose upon occasion with dolorous wails.

  Andrew had objected to riding Daniel, but when Conrad picked him up and heaved him into the saddle, he did not try to get off. He rode slumped over, his head nodding. Half the time, thought Duncan, the man’s asleep. Meg lay lengthwise on the little burro, clinging like a leech, her arms around Beauty’s neck. There was no saddle for Beauty, and her rotund little barrel of a body was not ridden easily.

  Time stretched out. The moon slid slowly down the western sky. Occasionally night birds cried out, probably in answer to Nan’s wailing. Duncan wished she would shut up, but there was, he knew, no way to make her do it, and besides, he didn’t have the breath to shout at her. The walking was punishment. It was all up and down hills. Duncan had the impression that they were going in the same direction from which they had come, but he couldn’t be sure about it.

  He was all mixed up. Thinking of it, it seemed to him that they had been mixed up for some time now.

  If it had not been for the enchantment, they could have continued to the fen and down the strand. By this time, more than likely, they would be getting close to the fair and open land Snoopy had told them of, free at last of these tortured hills.

  It was strange, he thought. The Harriers had made three attempts to stop them or turn them aside: the encounter in the garden near the church, the enchantment of the day before, the attack of the werewolves. But each attack had been feebler than he would have expected. The hairless ones had broken off the encounter in the garden without making too great an effort. The enchantment had failed — or maybe it had succeeded. Maybe all it had been intended to do was to get them off the trail they had been following. And back at the chapel, undoubtedly if all the werewolves had made a concerted a
ttack, they could have wiped out the little band of humans. Before that could happen, however, they had turned tail and run, called off by the voice that cried out of the darkness.

  There was something wrong, he told himself. None of it made sense. The Harriers had swept through this land, killing off the inhabitants, burning villages and farmsteads, making the area into a desolated land. Surely a band as small as theirs should not have been able to stand before them.

  Except for the frog-mouth full of teeth that had stared out of the darkness at them, there had been no sign of the Harriers. He had no way of knowing, he admitted to himself, that frog-face had been a Harrier, although, since it resembled nothing else he had ever heard of, he supposed it was.

  Did he and his band, he wondered, travel under some powerful protection? Perhaps the hand of God extended over them, although even as he thought it, he knew it to be a foolish thought. It was not often that God operated in such a manner.

  It must be, he told himself, only half believing it, the amulet he had taken from Wulfert’s tomb — a bauble, Conrad had called it. But it might be more than a bauble. It might be a powerful instrument of magic. Andrew had called it an infernal machine. Thinking of it as a machine, he had naturally thought that there must be some way to turn it on and make it operate. But if it were magic, as it might be, it would need no turning on. It would be operative whenever the occasion demanded that it should be. He had dropped it into the pouch in which he carried the manuscript and had scarcely thought of it since. But he could recognize the possibility that it was the magic that had protected them from the full wrath of the Harriers.

  No Harriers, he had told himself. And yet, might not the hairless ones be Harriers, or at least one arm of the Harriers? Harold, the Reaver, had mentioned them as among those that had attacked the manor. It was entirely possible, Duncan told himself, that they were the fighting arm of the Harriers — the shock troops designed to protect the true Harriers while they gathered to participate in those mysterious rites of rejuvenation. If that, in fact, was what they were doing. He could not even be sure of that, he told himself. It was one of the theories that His Grace had mentioned.