Scatha halted when I did. “I thought I saw something,” I explained. “It is gone now.”
A moment later, it was back.
We had hardly put one foot in front of the other when I saw the strange flittering shimmer once again—just on the edge of sight. And as before, I stopped and turned to look.
“There is something out there,” I told Scatha.
“I do not see anything.”
“Nor do I. But it was there.”
And again, as soon as we began walking, the glimmering image returned. This time, I did not stop, nor did I look directly at it. Rather, I let the subtle shifting glow play on the periphery of my vision while I tried to observe it to learn what it might be.
All I could perceive, however, was a fickle gleam in the air—as if the chill moonlight itself had thickened and congealed into elongated strands and diaphanous filaments that streamed through the night-dark air, rippling and waving like seaweed underwater.
Yet, each time I turned my head, thinking to catch a glimpse, the phantoms vanished. There was, I decided, a phenomenon at work similar to the erratic light of certain stars which are clearly discernible when the eye is looking elsewhere, but which disappear completely when an attempt is made to view them directly.
We walked along, and I soon observed that the amorphous shapes were not confined to the plain; they swarmed the air above and on every side. Whichever way I turned my head, I glimpsed, as if on the very edge of sight, the floating, curling shapes, merging, blending, wafting all around us.
“Scatha,” I said, softly. She halted. “No—keep walking. Do not stop.” We resumed, and I said, “It is just that the shapes—the phantoms seem to be gathering. There are more of them now, and they are all around us. Can you see them?”
“No,” she said. “I see nothing, Llew.” She paused for a moment and then said, “What do they look like?”
Bless you, Pen-y-Cat, I thought, for not thinking me mad. “They look like . . . like shreds of mist, or spiders’ webs drifting on the breeze.”
“Do they move?”
“Constantly. Like smoke, they are always blending and changing shape. I find that if I do not look at them directly, I can see them.”
We walked on and after a while I began to discern that the phantom shapes were coalescing into more substantial forms, thicker, more dense. They still merged and melted into one another, but they seemed to be amassing substance. With this change, I also felt my silver hand begin to tingle with the cold—not the hand itself, but the place where the metal met flesh.
I thought this an effect of the cold night air, then reflected that cold weather had never affected me in that way before. Indeed, my metallic hand had always seemed impervious to either heat or cold. Always, that is, except once: the day I discovered the beacon.
I puzzled over this as we ran along. Could it be that my metallic appendage, whatever other properties it possessed, functioned as some sort of warning device? Given the fantastic nature of the hand itself and how it had come to attach itself to me, that seemed the least implausible of its wonders. Indeed, everything about the silver hand suggested a more than passing affinity with mystery and strange powers.
If my silver hand possessed the ability to alert its owner of impending danger, what, I wondered, did its warning now portend?
So absorbed had I become in these thoughts, that I ceased attending to the shifting shapes on the edge of my vision. When I again observed them, I froze in midstep. The phantoms had solidified and were now of an almost uniform size, though still without recognizable form; they appeared as huge filmy blobs of congealed mist and air, roughly the size of ale vats. Something else about them had changed too. And it was this, I think, that stopped me: there was a distinct awareness about them, almost a sentience. Indeed, it was as if the phantom shapes seemed eager, or excited—impatient, perhaps.
For, as I hastened to rejoin Scatha, I sensed an agitation in the eerie shapes—as if my movement somehow frustrated the phantoms and threw them into turmoil. A strange and unsettled feeling overcame me then, for it seemed that the wraiths were aware of my presence and capable of responding to it.
Meanwhile, the frosty tingling in my silver hand had become a definite throbbing chill, striking up into my arm. I quickened my stride and drew even with Scatha. “Keep moving,” I told her. “The phantoms know we are here. They seem to be following us.”
Following was not the precise word I wanted. The things were all around us—in the air above and on the ground on every side. It was more that we were traversing a dense and hostile wood where every leaf was an enemy and every branch a foe.
Without slackening her pace, she raised her spear and indicated a patch of darkness to the right. “I see the glow of a fire ahead.”
A dull yellow glow winked low on the horizon. “It must be the camp,” I said, and an icy realization washed over me. That explains their agitation, I thought. The phantoms do not want us to reach camp. “Hurry! We can make it.”
The words were hardly out of my mouth when Scatha threw her arm across my chest to stop me. In the same instant, a sweetly gangrenous stink reached my nostrils—the same as I had smelled coming from the dead horses. The gorge rose in my throat.
Scatha recognized the odor too. “Siabur,” she cursed, all but gagging on the word.
I heard a soft, plopping sound and saw a bulbous shape fall onto the ground a few paces ahead of us. The sickly-sweet stink intensified, bringing tears to my eyes. The round blue-black blob lay quivering for a moment, and then gathered itself like a bead of water on a hot surface. At the same time, it seemed to harden, for it stopped trembling and began to unfold its legs from around a bulging stomach. Its head emerged, beaded, with eyes on top and a crude pincer mouth below.
I understood then what I had been seeing. The wraiths were those creatures Tegid called the sluagh. And now, by means of whatever power they possessed, the things had gathered sufficient strength to take on material form as a siabur. The immaterial had solidified, and the form it took was that of a grotesquely bloated spider. But a spider unlike any I had ever seen: green black as a bruise in the moonlight, with a hairy, distended belly and long, spindly legs ending with a single claw for a foot, and freakishly large—easily the size and girth of a toddling child.
The immense body glistened with a liquid ooze. The siabur made a slobbering sound as it dragged its repulsive bulk over the grass.
“It is ghastly!” breathed Scatha, and with two quick strides she was over it, her spear poised. Up went her arm, and then down. The spear pierced the creature behind its grotesque head, pinning it neatly to the ground. The siabur squirmed, emitting a bloodless shriek; its legs twitched and its mouth parts clashed.
Scatha twisted the spear; the fragile legs folded and the thing collapsed in a palpitating heap. She raised the spear and drove it into the creature’s swelling middle. A noxious gas sputtered out and the loathsome thing seemed to melt, its body losing solid form and liquefying once more into a blob that simply dissolved, leaving a foul-smelling blotch glistening on the grass.
My feet were already moving as the siabur evaporated. I caught Scatha by the arm and pulled her away. I heard the sound of another soft body fall just to the right, and another where we had been standing a moment before. Scatha twisted toward the sound. “Leave it!” I shouted. “Run for the camp.”
We ran. All around us the night quivered with the sound of those hideous bloated bodies plopping onto the ground. There were scores, hundreds of the odious things. And still they kept coming, dropping out of the air like the obscene precipitation of a putrid rain.
The stench fouled the air. My breath came in ragged gasps that burned my throat and lungs. Tears flowed down my cheeks. My nose ran freely.
The long grass tugged at our feet as if to hinder us. The plain was alive with crawling siabur heaving their gross shapes over the ground, scrabbling, struggling, straining to get at us. Their thin legs churned and their drooling mouth
s sucked. They would swarm us the moment we halted or hesitated. And then we would become like the horses we had seen that morning: dry husks with the lifeblood sucked from our bodies.
Our path grew difficult and running became hazardous as we were forced to dodge this way and that to avoid the scuttling spiders. My silver hand burned with the cold.
A siabur appeared directly in my path and I vaulted over it. As my feet left the ground, I felt a cold weight between my shoulder blades— long legs groped for my neck. Its touch was the stiff cold touch of a dead thing. I flailed with my arms, dislodged the creature, and flung it to the ground where it squirmed and shrieked.
Another took its place. The dead cold weight clasped my shoulder, and I felt a sharp, icy bite at the base of my neck. An exquisite chill spread through me from the neck and shoulders down my back and sides and into my thighs and legs. I stopped running. The darkness became close, suffocating. My face grew numb; I could not feel my arms or legs. My eyelids drooped; I longed for sleep . . . sleep and forgetting . . . oblivion . . . I would sleep—but for a small voice crying out very far away. Soon that voice would be stilled . . .
Hearing my shout, Scatha whirled around me and, with a well-placed kick, detached the siabur from my neck. A quick jab of her spear pierced the spider through its swollen sac. The wicked thing wriggled, then dissolved into jellied slime and melted away.
My vision cleared and my limbs began to shake. I felt Scatha’s hands lifting me. I tried to get my feet under me, but could not feel my legs. “Llew, Llew,” Scatha crooned softly. “I have you. I will carry you.” She helped me stand. I took two wobbly steps and pitched onto my face. The siabur rushed in at once—they could move with startling speed. I kicked out and struck one. It squealed and scurried out of the way, but two more charged me. Their claw-tipped legs snagged the cloth of my breecs as I thrashed on the ground.
Scatha stabbed the first one as it clawed at me and, with a quick backward chop, sliced the second one in half. Then, planting her foot, she pivoted to the side and skewered two more as they scuttled nearer. A third tried to evade her, but she pierced the swell-bellied thing, lifted it on the point of her spear and flung it hissing into the air.
Using all her strength, Scatha hauled me upright and drove me forward once more. Tottering like an old man, I stumbled ahead. Moving helped; I regained the use of my limbs and was soon covering ground quickly again. We bolted for the edge of the plain and the wooded slopes below, where I hoped we might more easily elude them. A cluster of siabur tried to cut off our escape, but Scatha’s inspired spear-work cleared the way and we reached the slope to a chorus of sharp angry squeals.
We gained the edge and plunged down the slope. The air was clean and I gulped it down greedily. My vision cleared, and my nose and lungs stopped burning. Upon reaching the first fringe of the wood, I glanced back to see the siabur boiling over the brim of the plain in a vile, throbbing flood. Although I had expected pursuit, my heart sank when I saw their number: the scores and hundreds had become thousands and tens of thousands.
They flowed down the slope in an enormous pulsating avalanche, shrieking as they came. There was no stopping them, and no escape.
22
YELLOW COAT
My heart sank. The hideous cascade of siabur inundated the wooded slope. We could not long evade them; there were just too many.
Scatha appeared at my shoulder. “Take this,” she said, thrusting a stout branch into my hand. Ever resourceful, Pen-y-Cat had found me a weapon—suitable for spiders at least.
Taking the branch, I glanced back toward the hillside. The spiders were not coming as fast as before. Their movements were sluggish and they clumped together in an awkward press. “I think they are stopping.”
“They are tiring,” observed Scatha. “We can outrun them. This way! Hurry!” Scatha began pushing deeper into the brushy tangle.
I took two steps and screamed as pain shot up through my arm, stabbing into my shoulder. “Aghh!”
Scatha’s hands were on me. “Are you hurt, Llew?”
“My hand—my silver hand . . . ahh, oh, it is so cold.” I stretched my hand toward her. “Do you feel it?”
Scatha touched the metal gingerly at first, then grasped it firmly. “It is not cold at all. Indeed, it is warm as any living hand.”
“It feels like ice to me. It is freezing.”
Turning back to the hillside above us, the siabur had halted their advance and were drawing together into heaving, throbbing piles.
The stench reached our nostrils as a gush of fetid air. Though the moonlight was not strong, I could see their misshapen bodies glistening in lumpen knots as they writhed and wriggled with a sound like the mewing and sucking of kittens at the pap.
And then, rising up out of one writhing heap: the head and forelegs of a hound—a monstrous, flat-headed cur with huge pointed ears and long, tooth-filled jaws. Its coat was a sodden mess of pitch-black hair—and its eyes were red. The ugly head thrashed from side to side as if struggling to free itself from the spider mass, which had become an oozy quagmire of quivering bellies and twitching legs.
I watched in sick fascination as the beast clawed its way free, pulling its short back and hindquarters up and out of the stinking, squirming muck. But the hellhound was not escaping, it was being born of the abhorrent couplings of the siabur. Even as this thought took form in my mind, I saw another head emerging and beside it a third and, a short distance away, the snout and ears of a fourth.
“Run!” Scatha shouted.
The first hound had almost freed itself from its odious womb, but I could not tear my eyes from the loathsome birthing.
Scatha yanked on my arm, pulling me away, her voice loud in my ear. “Llew! Now!”
From higher up the slope I heard a slavering growl and the rush of swift feet. Grasping my club and without looking back, I lowered my head and darted after Scatha. She led a difficult race, lunging, bounding, ducking, springing over fallen branches, and swerving around tall standing trunks. I followed, marveling at the grace and speed with which she moved—flowing through the tangled thickets and trees with the effortless ease of a flame.
The unnerving sound of their weird spectral baying assured me that the first hound had been joined by the other three. They had raised the blood call—cruelly fierce, baleful, unrelenting—a sound to make the knees weak and the courage flow away like water. I risked a fleeting backward glance and saw the swarthy shapes of the beasts gliding through the undergrowth, their eyes like live coals burning in the moon glow. We could not outrun them, and with but one spear between us, neither could we fight them. Our only hope was to keep ahead of them.
We ran for what seemed like an eon. I could hear the demon dogs tearing through the brush behind me. From the noise they were making, I judged that they were gaining on us and that there were more of them than before.
Chancing another backward look, I saw that the hellhounds were indeed very much closer now. Three or four more had joined the pack with the others, no doubt, on the way. The sound of their baying blood call cut through me, raising the hair on my scalp.
When I turned back, Scatha had disappeared.
“Scatha!” I cried. What if she had fallen?
I ran to the place where I had last glimpsed her, but she was not there, and nowhere to be seen. I could not stay and look for her, nor could I leave her.
“Scatha! Where are you?”
“Here, Llew!” came the answer—close at hand, but I could not see her.
A howl broke into a snarl as the foremost hellhound closed on me.
I turned to meet the beast, putting my back to the nearest tree and holding my makeshift weapon before me, ready to strike. I could reckon to get in at least two good blows before the other hounds arrived. What I would do after that, I did not know.
The creature attacked with breathtaking speed. I braced myself to receive the weight as it sprang . . .
The butt end of a spear shaft descended directl
y before my face. “Take hold!” a voice cried from above.
I dropped the club, seized the spear with my flesh hand, and jumped, swinging my legs up toward the boughs above. Hooking a branch with one knee, I caught another with my metal hand. A hair’s breadth beneath me the hound’s jaws closed with the force of a sprung trap. Clutching for dear life to the shaft of the spear, I felt myself lifted higher. “Let go the spear, Llew,” my savior told me. “There is a branch beside you.”
But I could not release my grip on the spear—the instant I did so, I would plummet to the ground. Another hound had joined the first and both were leaping at me, jaws snapping, teeth cracking.
“Let go, Llew.”
I looked to the right and left. If I released the spear I would fall and be torn apart by the hounds.
“Llew! I cannot help you if you do not let go.”
I hesitated, dangling dangerously close to the snarling creatures below. A third hound bounded over the backs of the other two and snagged my cloak in its teeth, almost tearing my grip from the spear, and dragging me down with its weight.
“I cannot hold you!”
Clinging to my cloak, the hellhound tugged furiously, trying to pull me from my precarious roost. The fabric of my cloak began to give way. A second hound caught a corner of the cloak and began to yank, its forelegs lifted off the ground. My grip on the spear began to slip as I was dragged down yet further. More hounds had reached the tree and were leaping at me, trying to snag a piece of my dangling cloak.
“Llew! Let go!”
Grip failing, slipping backward bit by bit, cloak pulled tight against my neck to choke me, there was nothing for it but to let go of the spear and try for a more secure handhold on the unseen branch.
“I cannot hold you!”
I released the spear and flung my hand out. The weight of the hounds jerked me down. But my hand closed securely on a branch and I quickly wrapped my arm around its sturdy length and held fast.
Scatha was there beside me, trembling with the effort of supporting my weight on the end of her spear. “I might have dropped you,” she said.