‘Skart.’ Larka trembled. ‘It’s just as I saw. But there are even more of them now.’
Skart flew on, and in no time at all they came to a wide valley, well shielded by the trees. There were beech and elm and sycamores and an unusually large expanse of rowan trees, still bright with red berries. As Skart flew lower Larka began to see a shifting lake of grey wolves.
‘The rebels,’ whispered Larka, and as she said it her heart began to beat faster. Larka felt a strange longing as she saw so many wild wolves settled together, a longing to be among her own kind again. The eagle was dropping lower still and Larka saw a band of wolves lying in a circle. Her heart almost stopped as she gazed down. She would have recognized those faces anywhere.
‘Mother,’ gasped Larka, ‘Father.’
But some of the wolves guarding Huttser and Palla saw the bird come. They had been ordered to keep everything away and they jumped up and began to snarl and leap in the air. Skart lifted again, and as he did so they noticed a lone shape on the hilltop. Evening was coming down and, even as Skart’s eyes looked towards the sentinel wolf, far away the hackles rose on Larka’s neck. Around the powerful Dragga’s body Larka could suddenly see an angry red aura, fringed with a grey. She shivered as she saw it and thought of what Skart had said of the powers of the Sight bending in some strange way, but she remembered too her vision of Wolfbane.
‘Balkar,’ she whispered. ‘The Night Hunters have already reached the Gathering Place.’
The scout had disappeared into the trees again, but on Skart flew, and Larka’s heart began to pound even more furiously as they soared over the forest. Among the boughs, padding through the darkness, Larka saw them even beneath the canopy of leaves. They were moving silently, in straight lines towards the Gathering Place, the Balkar’s prowling auras. Then behind them came another aura, blacker than the rest. It seemed to swallow light itself. Again Larka felt anguish and desire, that same desire to be close to this creature. It was the presence she had seen before. Wolfbane.
‘Hurry, Skart,’ she cried, ‘we must return.’
As Larka cried out a strange sound came up through the trees. A sound neither of them would have expected to hear in that place. It was a bellow. Deep and dark and powerful. It was the bellowing of a mountain bear.
Below them, Brak snarled as he stood in the shadows and saw the eagle circling high above. Then, again, he looked down on the rebels in the fabled valley of Kosov. There was something in the vision of this giant pack that unsettled him deeply, for though the Night Hunters were all fighting males, all his life they had been trained to travel in small groups, like the ordinary wolf, and strike at speed. He was proud of his own power and skill, and the strength of his night eyes, and he knew that in single combat there were few living wolves that could beat him. But a Greater Pack he had never seen before and the sheer number of wolves set doubt tumbling through his brain. Only Man fought like this, not the Varg.
‘No,’ he whispered to himself fearfully, ‘I must show no weakness.’
Brak had failed Morgra in not bringing back the child and he couldn’t afford to fail his mistress again. He began to run through the forest, his great paws springing through the undergrowth, but so swiftly did the wolf move that he seemed to leave hardly an impression on the ground as he went.
Around him the scents of summer set the wild wolf’s nerve endings quivering and as evening came down, the fading light turning the pine trees to strips of black, the Night Hunter felt a fury rising in him. His ears were cocked forward and, at every sound, the movement of a bird in the branches or the scurry of a squirrel, the wolf’s running body would flex so subtly, here changing pace, there swerving left or right, that he seemed to merge with the currents of air swirling through the forest. His instincts were perfectly in tune with all around him and ready at any moment to show the truest skill of the wolf, to fight or to flee at the turning of a feather.
Brak heard a sound as he went and on the slopes above him he saw a shadow, trailing him silently through the twilight. He recognized the grey wolf from another of the Balkar packs, but he gave no howl of recognition, for they had been told to travel towards the rebels in secret.
Together they ran and now a third wolf joined them and then a fourth. The wolves were moving together, perfectly in tune, delighting for a time in their true nature as they ran free through the wood. But as they came closer and closer to Morgra’s camp a change came into their eyes. A look both of fear and of need. That same mesmerized intensity that they had shown at the sacrifices and outside Morgra’s cave.
The wolf fell silent. Ahead of them they could see a clearing and the Balkar Draggas ranged about Morgra. Kraar was perched on her back as she addressed them and her voice sang coldly through the warm air. Kraar kept opening and closing his wings as though he were orchestrating her words as she spoke. Some of the Balkar wolves looked at him with hatred, for he was always mocking them, but they wouldn’t have dared touch a feather on his back.
‘Very well, then,’ Morgra was saying, as Brak and the others joined their ranks, ‘we attack in five nights’ time. Brak, what of the count?’
‘I counted two hundred and ten wolves,’ he answered, stepping forward warily.
There was a growling among the Balkar, and some of the
Draggas began to shake their heads doubtfully.
‘Morgra,’ said one, ‘not even the Balkar can test such odds. There are only fifty of us.’
The old she-wolf’s eyes were amused as she surveyed the males.
‘No Siklas here, no breath of fear? Aren’t you used to looking into the darkness?’
The Balkar dropped their muzzles in shame before the she-wolf.
‘But don’t be frightened,’ said Morgra coldly. ‘Fear is our friend now and it shall destroy this Greater Pack. For Wolfbane is with us.’
‘But fifty against over two hundred.’
‘Others shall come to help us,’ hissed Morgra. ‘We shall split their forces and drive half into the trees to die on the Balkar’s jaws. The night shall aid us too, and the spirit of the wood.’
‘And the rest, Mistress?’
Morgra lifted her muzzle. There was something coldly brilliant in her gaze.
‘Slavka hates and fears Man,’ said Morgra delightedly.
‘And now she shall have true cause. For we shall drive the others towards the human camp beyond, to die on their swords.’
‘But, Mistress,’gasped the Night Hunter. ‘It is impossible.’
‘Silence, fool,’ snarled Morgra. ‘Are you forgetting the Searchers? Slavka has summoned her Greater Pack. Well, I...’ Morgra paused. ‘Wolfbane shall summon those who no longer have need of boundaries. Who shall tear their claws through all boundaries.’
The Balkar looked at Morgra wonderingly, but there was little understanding in them.
‘Now be gone,’ cried Morgra. ‘Prepare. But when the killing begins, keep a keen eye for the two I told you of – Huttser and Palla. In five nights’ time, they must perish. The family must be finally destroyed.’
As the wolves slunk away, they were muttering among themselves. Kraar had hopped up on Morgra’s back again, careful not to let his little talons bite into his mistress’s fur. As he neared her neck, his beak whispered into her torn ear.
‘Can it be done?’
‘Oh yes, Kraar, for everything is in place. The greater part of the legend is about to come true. And our strength has grown, Kraar. When the Searchers come, scenting the promise of your feast, whoever they touch shall be mine and I shall wield the third power. But before we attempt it I must sleep and then make a kill.’
The raven crawed delightedly and fluttered upwards into the night.
‘So the rebels have no future, Mistress?’
‘No, Kraar. They never did have a future. All along, the past has been snapping at their heels. Driving them on to this place. And soon they shall really see how hopeless is their fate, for the Pathways of Death will open, the true pathwa
ys of the past, and then they shall be consumed.’
‘But what do these others look like, Mistress?’ cried Kraar above her.
‘The Searchers?’ called the she-wolf, as the darkness seemed to hiss about her and Kraar turned in the sky to seek out the scavengers again. ‘You shall see soon enough, my friend.’
On the plain at the southern edge where the human Draggas had made their camp, the darkness came down like beating wings. The glow of fires began to fleck through the night and everywhere shapes were stirring as the soldiers settled about the little islands of crackling warmth. Some lay on the ground, others crouched in the shadows. Here a human was sharpening a sword, polishing its violence. There another was cleaning his armour, or attaching new flights to his bow, sharing his meagre food with the others, lifting a flagon of rough wine to his lips.
The same murmur went about the camp, for there was news from the south of more raids by the Turk, and soon it would be time to do battle once more. So, although each of the humans was wrapped in his own thoughts, thinking of his pay or his loved ones back at home, dreaming of freedom or friendship or glory, these people had drawn closer to each other again, united by the returning breath of fear and the most basic instinct of all, the will to survive.
In their tents, shielded from the night and the firelight by their thin walls of cloth, many of the soldiers were asleep, exhausted by their days of hard training. They slumbered now as their dreams carried them to strange, far-off places. An old veteran, lying on his simple bunk, was dreaming of his past and the days when, as a youth, he had fought so boldly. A young soldier was thinking of the future and what the journey towards the Turk might bring, his mind shuffling with the pictures of changing possibilities, of hopes and fears and anxieties made into scenes and faces by the living patterns of his own memory.
Near one of the tents, a soldier was telling a story. His voice calmed the others, for there was laughter in it, but as the darkness grew so his tone began to change too, and his tale turned down blacker avenues. The man was, for the most part anyway, making it up as he went along and, even as he did so, he wondered himself where the strange voice in him that sang with invention, came from and to what end it was leading him.
Sometimes, it was as if he was in charge of his story and he knew exactly to what conclusion he was coming. At others, though, it felt as if that voice was not his at all, but his father’s voice, or his father’s before him, or the voice out of all the many stories he had heard as a child. When that happened, he wanted to change the story, to make it new and fresh and different. Sometimes, it was even as if the leaders gathered eagerly, and he was simply telling them what they wanted to hear, and at others as if he was dreaming like his fellows in their tents. But as he spoke a memory came to the storyteller that hurt him to his heart and, in that moment, it was as if all he was saying was nothing more than the image of a man and a woman standing together in a room long before, and accusing each other bitterly of not showing enough love.
Suddenly his voice fell silent. A note came through the darkness, truer, stronger, more insistent than all the tales he had been weaving. A voice out of nature itself, carried on the black air. A call out of wildness that made him shiver to his bones. As soon as they heard the wolf’s cry the soldiers looked up and many touched their swords, for they had heard the cries before and they knew that wolves were near. Yet only the storyteller noticed something different in this howl. Something strange and unearthly.
The rebel wolves heard it, too, in their valley and they started up in fear. Huttser and Palla heard it, and Palla licked her mate and whined as she listened. The Balkar heard it as the Night Hunters prowled towards the Greater Pack through the trees. Not five miles away, Larka and the others heard it also and Skart opened his wings in horror.
‘The howl,’ he screeched, ‘Morgra is attempting the ancient howl.’
On it went, and on, searching through the Transylvanian darkness, trying to touch something with its lonely anger. The Greater Pack was up and beginning to move about, and Slavka was issuing orders. But even now there was little urgency in the rebels’ tread, for they were confident of their strength.
If they had known how close the Balkar were perhaps they would have thought again, yet they were many and the Balkar comparatively few. The Night Hunters’ savage eyes glittered now around the trees on the edges of Kosov, as they waited and peered hungrily through the dark. Their commanders had divided them into pairs and the Draggas’ breaths smoked gently as they licked their lips and pressed their muzzles through the branches. Everywhere in the branches around them perched the waiting scavengers.
‘Do you think they will come?’ whispered one Balkan.
‘Wait,’ answered Brak at his side, ‘wait and see.’
But even as he said it the howl rose higher and higher. Suddenly Brak let out a hissing growl. He feared to believe his own eyes.
There in front of him on the edge of the valley. Like a shadow it came and seemed to split the darkness. It sprang out of nothingness itself, its paws scything through the air, dragging behind them its huge wolf-like body. It was a ghastly silver and its eyes were bright red and, as it materialized, others came too, leaping from the night on to the silent grass.
The Night Hunters began to tremble as they looked on and more and more of the spectral wolves leapt into the darkness. There must have been sixty, seventy spectres before them now, their shimmering silver shapes quivering with violence, their blood-red eyes turning this way and that. But most ghastly of all was their appearance and the terrible recognition that awoke in the onlookers. As each of the Balkar looked they seemed to recognize dead friends amongst them, wolves they had forgotten long ago, and it sent an anguish and a guilt racing through their hearts.
‘Wolfbane,’ shuddered Brak. ‘The friend of the dead has done this. Whatever you do, don’t let them touch you.’
Around them the howl went on and it seemed to be calling to the dead. The spectres had heard it and, as one, they turned and sprang towards the Greater Pack.
It was sheer terror that achieved the thing. As soon as they saw the spectres advancing like a sea mist, such a panic went up among the Greater Pack that it spread like a fire. They too had seen the image of their dead friends, of enemies and lost loved ones, in the forms of the Searchers. But there was nothing in their appearance that drew the wolves towards them. All they inspired was horror.
Some of the rebel wolves began to run blindly into the night. Others turned to face their spectral attackers but gasped in terror as they lashed out with their paws and teeth only to find themselves slashing through thin air. The silver shadows seemed to pass straight through the rebels’ bodies as they sprang at them and, as they did so, such terror and cold fear filtered into them that a madness entered their brains.
‘No,’ snarled Slavka in horror as she watched them come. ’It can’t be...’
Gart was beside her.
‘Slavka,’ he cried. ‘We must get out of here. We can’t fight this.’
‘Silence, Gart. It’s impossible. It’s a trick.’
‘Slavka,’ growled Gart angrily, ‘won’t you even believe the evidence of your own eyes?’
All around her the rebels were fleeing and now Gart turned too.
‘Loyalty,’ cried Slavka furiously as she saw the ranks break, ‘loyalty always.’
But suddenly Slavka turned in the darkness herself to see one of the spectres leaping straight for her. She was horrified. The spectre had the shape of her dead mate. Its silver jaws opened as it sprang but, as Slavka snarled and lifted her muzzle, the spectre’s shimmering form melded with her own. For a moment it seemed as if she and the ghastly apparition had become one, and then it passed on to spread horror further into the camp. But as it scythed through her Slavka felt a terrible chill down her spine, like the touch of ice, and a bitter doubt crept into her brain. It was as though she could hear a wind, whispering to her.
Many of the rebel wolves were fleeing
now, fleeing towards the trees. They had no inkling of the trap that was waiting to spring and, as they reached the wood, their minds were so consumed by fright that they hardly saw the Balkar. But as they came they were welcomed by a forest of teeth and by the red flash of yawning gullets, fringed with grey fur, as the killing began.
But now something else happened that sent despair racing through the rebels’ ranks. A rebel Dragga felt it first as he ran towards the trees. He was one of the wolves that had been touched by the spectres and he was calling to four of his comrades to stand firm when suddenly he heard a voice in his head.
‘Die,’ it snarled, ‘for I have come to lead the dead. Wolfbane has come.’
The rebel Varg froze. Fear had overcome him, like a great darkness.
‘See your own destruction,’ came a voice.
Suddenly, as the grey wolf faced the trees, the darkness was real. The wolf could no longer see. He was blind. Elsewhere along the rebels’ ranks others among their number had stopped moving, too. They whimpered with fear, as they dropped their heads and tails, and confronted the sudden blackness.
‘Palla!’ cried Huttser, as they saw the apparitions from their guard ring, ‘the Searchers are here. Remember what Tsinga said. Don’t let them touch you.’
Huttser had seen one of the rebels that had been brushed by the spectres and now the wolf was scything blindly left and right, whimpering pitifully in his sightless misery.
‘What are they, Huttser?’ Palla’s voice trembled.
Huttser was snarling furiously, but the Dragga hardly knew what to do. Around them, the rebel guards had been thrown into confusion. Suddenly, one of the spectres came leaping towards them and, as it sprang, the guard ring broke.
The spectre pounced at Huttser and he froze. It had the form of his own mother. Just in time the Dragga dropped his body. The spectre’s paws almost brushed his fur and, as they came close, Huttser’s mind quivered with fear and, he suddenly saw an image of Fell before his mind’s eye, seized under the ice.