Jim was still trying to fit this double view of the knight into a pattern with the other things, like intelligent dragons, talking watchbeetles and the existence of Dark Powers, which he had so far discovered in this world, when the daylight began to wane and Brian suggested they look about for a place to camp overnight.
They had left the fens well behind by this time, and had spent several hours striking at an angle northeast through the rather unpleasant wood Jim had flown over the day before and congratulated himself on not having to traverse at ground level. Happily, now, they had left it behind for a much less forbidding forest, still mainly populated by oaks and elms, but in the shape of larger specimens of these, which had killed off the more tangled undergrowth underneath them, so that the going was easier. They came at last to a small clearing by a brook, which in the last rays of the afternoon sun, filtering through the high branches of the trees, looked almost as inviting as Carolinus' property by the Tinkling Water.
"Should do us quite well, I'd think," Brian observed, cheerfully.
He dismounted, unsaddled his horse, rubbed it down with some handfuls of grass he pulled up, and left it tied on a long tether to crop its dinner from the clearing. For himself, Brian produced from his saddlebags something dark which was evidently smoked meat. For Jim, there was nothing; and, although his stomach twinged reproachfully at him, Jim could not really blame the knight for not offering to share the food. What had made a rather adequate meal for the man would have made a single, unsatisfyingly small gulp for the dragon. Tomorrow, Jim promised himself, he would find some excuse to leave Brian for a while and find a cow… or something.
He became aware that Brian was lighting a fire, something he viewed with only academic interest at first, out of his own newly discovered indifference to external temperatures. But, as the sun went lower behind the trees, its light reddened to the color of bright blood and deep shadows started forming between the surrounding tree trunks; and the fire, now blazing away heartily on the dry, fallen branches that Brian had accumulated, began to take on the appearance of the only mark of cheerfulness in the growing darkness.
"Getting chilly," observed Brian, hunching his shoulders and standing close above the fire.
He had divested himself of helmet, gloves and the plate armor from his legs, leaving only his upper body metal-covered. His hair, recovered from the pressure of the helmet, had expanded to show itself as quite a mane. It gleamed with ruddy highlights from the fire, as he stood facing the flames.
Jim drew close on the fire's other side. It would not have occurred to him to think of the night as growing chilly, but he was conscious of a sort of depression of the spirit which had come on him with the disappearance of the sun. The forest about them, which had seemed so friendly in the daylight, now began to acquire an ominous and threatening appearance as night closed in. Looking around, Jim could almost swear that the surrounding darkness was a physical entity trying to push inward upon them, only held back by the dancing light of the fire.
"Where are we?" he asked Brian.
"Lynham Woods," said Brian. He, too, looked about at the wall of night surrounding the circle of firelight. "Not such a bad place, ordinarily. But there's a difference about this night, wouldn't you say, Sir James? One gets the feeling there's something afoot out there in the dark, somewhere."
"Yes," Jim agreed, feeling a small, involuntary shudder inside him.
To his dragon-senses Brian's description was unpleasantly accurate—it did indeed feel exactly as if something was prowling out there in the woods, somewhere beyond the firelight, circling their camp and waiting for an opportunity to pounce.
"Stars," Brian commented, pointing upward.
Jim looked up between the treetops. Now that the sun was completely down, some stars were visible. No moon, but some stars. However, even as he watched, they began to disappear one by one, as if an invisible curtain was being drawn across the sky.
"Clouds," said Brian. "Well, there's one comfort. With a cloudy sky, it shouldn't get as cold here before morning as it might if the sky were clear. A clear sky and I'd have ventured to guess at a touch of frost before dawn. It's cool for this time of year."
The clouds to which Brian had referred had by this time covered all portions of the sky visible beyond the treetops. The clearing now seemed englobed in unrelenting lightlessness.
Slowly, the knight sat down by the fire and began to replace the cuisses and greaves he had earlier removed from his legs.
"What is it?" asked Jim. "What're you doing that for?"
"I don't like it," Brian said shortly. "There's something amiss this night. Whatever it is, it'll find me armed and ready for it."
He finished getting his body armor back on and went to get his helmet and lance from where he had placed them with his saddle and other gear. He drove the butt of the lance into the ground beside the fire, so that it stood point upward by his right hand, and put the helmet on, leaving the visor up.
"Let us keep facing each other with the fire between us, Sir James," he said. "That way we can watch all about us, as far as the firelight shows."
"Right," Jim replied.
They stood facing each other. After a little while a sound began, very faint and faraway at first.
"A wind," Brian remarked.
It was indeed the sound of a wind. They could hear it far off, almost as if it was hunting among the bushes and the limbs of the trees. The sound of it rose, fell, and moved from quarter to quarter, but always off in the distance. Then, gradually, it began to come closer, as if it had been quartering the forest for them and was now closing in.
Still, in the clearing, not a breath of air stirred, except that drawn in by the updraft from the dancing flames of the fire. Brian threw more of the dried branches upon the blaze.
"My special thanks to St. Giles, whose day this is," muttered the knight, "and who moved me to gather wood enough to last until dawn."
The wind drew closer. They could hear the sound of its passage, now loud in the near-distance. It breathed closer and closer to them, leaving a sighing and groaning of branches where it passed. It was loud now, loud enough so that they had to raise their voices above its sound to speak to one another. Then, suddenly, it was on them.
It blew directly into the clearing with an abrupt force that threatened for a second to push them off their feet. The fire shot up a long trail of sparks into the darkness and its flames guttered nearly to extinction, so that the gloom all around suddenly flooded in on them, and they were peppered in the face by a shower of dried twigs and dead leaves.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the wind was gone. The fire flamed up again and the darkness was pushed back once more. Without warning, there was silence.
The wind had gone.
Brian sighed softly within the open visor of his helmet.
"Stand to watch, Sir James," he said softly. "Now, it comes."
Jim stared at the knight.
"It comes—" he started to echo.
And then he heard it.
It was so small and distant at first, he thought it was only a singing in his eardrums. Then it grew ever so slightly in volume and he identified it for what it actually was: a continuous, high-pitched chittering—like the wind, now off at a distance, but gradually growing closer. He sensed something mindless about that cluttering, something that made the skin crawl on the back of his dragon-neck, instinctively.
This body reaction stirred Jim almost more than the sound itself had done. What could there be out in woods like this, at night, of which even a dragon would be afraid? He opened his mouth to ask Brian what was making the noise; and found the question stuck in his throat. An almost superstitious fear checked him. If he asked Brian, and Brian told him, then whatever was moving in on them would become undeniably real. As long as he still did not know, it could be that it could all turn out to be an illusion, a bad dream from which he would awaken to a sunlit morning.
But as they stood, the chittering grew
slowly louder and closer—and there was no awakening from a nightmare.
"Sir Brian," he said, at last. "What is it?"
The knight's eyes, within the firelit gloom of his visor, burned strangely on Jim.
"You don't know? Sandmirks, Sir James."
The moment Brian spoke the identifying word, something in the very blood and bones of Gorbash passed knowledge on to the mind of Jim—and he knew without further asking what they looked like, those hunters out in the night, circling ever closer and closer to this campfire and the two of them who waited here.
In his mind's eye Jim saw them, something of a cross between a rat and a ferret in shape and the size of small dogs. Their eyes would shine red, reflecting the light of the flames when they came close enough, but their black, coarse-haired bodies would remain invisible in the darkness as they passed around and around the clearing, just beyond the reach of the firelight. And from their mouths would continue to come this same mindless cluttering that was like the claws of spiders running up and down Jim's spine and into his brain.
"What they do here," said Brian, "this far from the sea, only the devil that helped them knows. Their proper runs are the cold salt beaches. Little shore animals and the poor castaways who have the ill luck to wash ashore at night are their proper prey. Here is an enemy against which my sword and your claws, Sir James, will be small help."
"If they come close enough—"
"They will not, while the minds are in our bodies. These are craven creatures, whose weapon is madness."
"Madness?" Jim echoed. The word had slid along all his nerves like an icy knife.
"What else did you think their noise meant?" Brian said. "The story is that they're possessed of the souls of other animals who have died insane, or in great torment, and so they are full of the stuff of madness, which they pour out on the night air to infect the minds of such as you and I. I know not how it is with you, Sir James, but Saint Giles has always been a good friend to me and he did not advise me to gather this huge pile of firewood for nothing. It's my counsel that we turn to that good saint, and to God with all his angels, for none else can aid us, here."
The knight drew his sword, rested it point down on the earth before him, and taking the hilt of it in both his hands, bowed his head above it in prayer. Jim stood still, watching the armored man, the fire and the surrounding darkness, hearing the steadily growing sound of the chittering. He was not at all religious himself; and somehow, in this particular moment, something in him rebelled at the thought of turning, or even pretending to turn, to religion for help. On the other hand, he could not help envying Brian for being able to find such a backup available and waiting.
For, whatever the truth was about the souls of animals who had died insane or in torment, there was no denying the fact that some quality in the chittering went clear through the conscious, logical, upper part of Jim's mind into the old, primitive levels behind it, and plucked the chords of atavistic fears he had not known he possessed. Deep within him, from the very first moment in which he recognized the chittering as something more than a singing in his ears, was the impulse to turn and run from it. To run and run, until either he could hear it no more, or his heart would burst from the effort of running.
In the end, that must be what all victims of the sandmirks did—run until they could run no more. And then, at last, with their prey exhausted and helpless, the black, fiery-eyed, humping shapes would close in, chittering, to kill and feed. While his conscious mind still worked, Jim recognized the fact that if he ran, he was lost. Like Brian he must stand here and fight back against the noise that was gnawing away at his sanity.
He could not bring himself to follow Brian's example; but there had to be other things he could do to set up a defense against the calling of the sandmirks. The multiplication tables?
He tried them. For a while, he was able to concentrate on them; and he congratulated himself on finding a weapon. But after he had run through all those that he knew readily and had started again on them, he found that the second time through they did not shut out the chittering as well as they had the first time. The third time he went through them, they were hardly any help at all, not much more than meaningless sounds muttered under the breath.
He searched his mind as best he could under the effect of the sandmirk voices—which were now clearly circling the camp at a distance of no more than fifty yards away or so-—for something stronger than the multiplication tables with which to oppose them. In desperation, he began to recite the argument of his doctorate thesis on the changes in social custom deriving from the rise of the cities in France during the Hundred Years' War. Night after weary night, after all other work had been done, he had sat in the single light of his desk lamp, hammering out that thesis. If there was protective magic in anything he knew, it would be in that.
"… Examination of the direct effects of the English military incursion into western France in the two decades immediately following the thirteen-fifties," he muttered, "show a remarkable process of change at work unrecognized by the very people caught up in it. Particularly the port of Bordeaux ..."
Suddenly, to his joy, he realized it was working. All those midnight hours of effort he had put into the thesis had created a piece of mental machinery with a momentum that was too powerful for the cluttering of the sandmirks to clog and stop. As long as he could keep the words of it running through his head, he could hold them off. It was as if the chittering was blocked now by a barrier that allowed only the harmless noise of it wash over the barrier's top. The thesis had been two hundred and twenty double-spaced pages of typescript when finished. He would not reach the end of his material too soon, as he had with the multiplication tables. He glanced across the fire at Brian, and found the other still praying. Neither one of them dared take time off to speak with each other, but Jim tried to signal with his eyes that he was holding his own and he thought that Brian understood and returned a like message.
The sandmirks were close now—just outside the circle of firelight; and the sound of their voices was so shrill and encompassing that Jim could hardly hear the sound of his own voice in his ears. Nonetheless, he and Brian were holding their own and the predators in the darkness would not dare attack while their prey still had the will and the strength to defend themselves. As Jim watched, Brian reached down to throw a couple more of the dead branches on the fire.
Flames spurted up on the new fuel; and for a second, straining his eyes, Jim thought he had a glimpse of shadowy shapes slipping back out of sight into the further darkness. He and Brian continued their watch, and their own private litanies.
The night wore on.
The fire blazed. The sandmirks continued to circle, never stopping for one moment their invitation to terror. Croaking, with voices gone hoarse from steady, long use, Jim and the knight faced each other above the fire. Sir Brian swayed a little with weariness; and Jim felt himself also growing light-headed with exhaustion. The dark continued unbroken around them. The raw, damp scent of dawn was in the air, but daybreak was yet some time off.
And now, for the first time since he had begun to recite his thesis, Jim felt the pressure of the sandmirk voices beginning to crumble away the barrier he had erected against them. His exhausted memory fumbled, lost its place on the remembered page it was quoting, and found it again. But in that second of weakness the effect of the chittering had gained ground. It pierced through the words Jim painfully uttered; and its power was growing steadily.
Jim became conscious that Brian had stopped speaking. Jim also stopped and they stared at each other across the fire while the sound of the chittering soared in volume all around them, lifting triumphantly into the night.
The knight reversed his sword, picking it up to hold blade upward in both hands.
"In God's name," said Brian, in such a torn and ragged voice that Jim could hardly understand him, "let's go to them, while we still have the strength to do so."
Jim nodded. In the final accountin
g, to charge death was preferable to fleeing from it in sick fear. He stepped around the fire to stand beside Brian.
"Now!" said the knight in his husk of a voice, raising his sword overhead—
But before they could charge the almost invisible foe that encircled them, a scream almost worse than the chittering split the darkness to their right. At once, the sound that had driven them to the edge of madness ceased utterly, to be followed by the noise of many small bodies crashing away in flight through the woods.
Another scream sounded, this time straight ahead and farther out. A moment of waiting followed, during which the sounds of flight had all but died in the distance; and then came a third scream, farther off yet.
"By Saint Giles!" whispered the knight in the stillness. "Something's killing them…"
He had hardly finished before a fourth scream came, this time a long distance off. After that, utter silence.
Numbly, Brian moved to build up the fire. It crackled, blazed afresh and the shadows drew back a long distance. Jim glanced upward.
"Look," he said. "I think…"
Brian looked. An edge of cloud was pulling back from a few stars that were still visible; and the sky behind the stars was paling.
"Yes. Dawn," said Brian.
They stood watching as the sky turned toward light and the remaining stars faded to invisibility.