Before he could say anything the wind retracted and Niamh began to drift away, her face still cold and hard. "Our agreement is broken." Church followed her pointing finger towards the dark horizon; there, golden light flashed ominously. "The Good Son will soon be paying you a visit."
And with that, the clouds folded around her so she was completely lost to him, and the whole mass moved quickly back over the landscape until it disappeared beyond the summit of the tor.
Church scrambled back. When he was lying on solid ground, he gulped in mouthfuls of air and felt his pumping heart slowly return to normal. As he dragged himself to his feet, Laura ran from the house.
"You really know how to fuck women up, don't you?" she said breathlessly.
He could barely hear her. His attention was drawn to the occasional bursts of light in the distance and the engulfing darkness closer to home.
"I've done it again," he said quietly.
"What?"
"Screwed everything up." He couldn't even bring himself to tell her that a near-hopeless situation had suddenly become much worse. With his head bowed, he turned and trudged back to the house.
Veitch spent the first two days roaming through the heavily wooded slopes which enclosed the loch. It was a place like none he had experienced before, enveloped in its own strange, eerie atmosphere; purple hillsides cloaked in mist just beyond the tree boundary, outcroppings of orange, brown and black rocks, ancient trees, gnarled and twisted and scarred with green lichen that showed their great age, and over all the constant, soothing sound of the waves lapping against the pink shale and pebbles at the water's edge. The way the pines clustered so deeply to the shore on the south bank made him feel penned in, and there was an unshakeable sense that he was being watched from somewhere in their depths. But there was also a deep serenity, almost mystical in its intensity, with the birdsong hanging melodically in the air. At times the water was as still as glass, reflecting the verdant landscape and clear blue skies so perfectly he felt he could dive in and walk among the cool glades. At other times storms sprang from nowhere, sweeping up odd, eddying waves that crashed against the steep banks. Fog came and went among the trees, like ghosts, and at night, beneath a shimmering moon and diamond stars the valley was filled with the pregnant hush that came before a conversation.
He saw no traffic at all along the sinuous road that ran along the banks of the loch, and he didn't know if that was down to the Questing Beast or if everyone had simply fled to the cities. In Drumnadrochit, the quiet village that lay where Glen Urquhart intersected the Great Glen, the houses were still and locked, although a wisp of smoke rose from the occasional chimney. At the loch's southern tip, Fort Augustus was near empty too, and the occasional resident who saw him coming quickly ran for cover.
He made camp on both nights in a tree-lined gorge not far from Fort Augustus. Without even the slightest sign of the Questing Beast, he had started to wonder if it was another of the Queen's incomprehensible machinations, perhaps to separate him from Tom.
On the third day, he realised his hunt was true. In the early morning, he travelled alongside the tumbling river at the bottom of Glen Urquhart. The valley was blanketed beneath the drifting white mist that seemed to come and go with a mind of its own, muffling and distorting the splashing of the water and the clipped echoes of the horse's hooves. In a lonely spot surrounded by acres of sheep-clipped grass he came across an old stone cairn. There was a fading majesty to it, and even he, who was usually insensitive to the blue fire, felt a hint of its power there. But among the standing stones beyond the cairn he came across the remains of a man, half-strung over a barbed-wire fence. From his clothes, he looked like a farmer or an agricultural labourer. He was partially disembowelled as if he had been gored by a bull or a boar, but he had been out there long enough for the carrion birds to have been at his eyes and genitals, so it was impossible to tell if the Beast had consumed any of him as well. Veitch inspected the corpse and the surrounding area for anything that might help him, but there was no spoor or other discernible sign. The only thing that troubled him was that the poor man's blood had splattered randomly on the ground in a shape that resembled a screaming face. After spending time with Shavi he had grown reasonably adept at reading meaning in things that appeared to have none, and that image began to eat away at his subconscious. As he moved away his mind's eye had already begun to paint a picture of the true appearance of the Questing Beast.
That night he made camp among the trees high up on the hillside where he had a clear view of the loch and the bleak southern slopes. The setting sun painted the water red and purple; it was once again so still the water gave the illusion of glass. The air was sweet with the aroma of pine and wild flowers, and an abiding peace lay over the landscape. Yet it was hard for him to rest knowing that the thing could come at him from any direction at any time; he had even started to think of it as invisible or as something that flew on silent wings. All he wanted was something solid to latch on to, something he could stab or shoot or hack at, and then he would be fine.
As he had done the other nights, he dined on chocolate, biscuits and crisps he'd taken from a mysteriously deserted garage in Fort Augustus; the sugar and the processed taste sickened him, but he would have felt ridiculous striding into a supermarket for something more sustaining in the armour bequeathed him by the Tuatha De Danann. He was almost too distracted to think of food. Whenever he rested, Ruth loomed heavy in his thoughts, her face, darkened by fear after her discovery of what she carried with her, a frequent, troubling image he never seemed able to shake. Spurred by Church's right-thinking motivations, he had set out to help in the fight, but he knew his own motivation had been a quest for redemption for his past crimes. The chance to become a better person still weighed on him, but now, more than anything, he was doing it for her; to find some solution to heal her in the short term, to save her in the long term, whatever the cost to himself. Being driven by love was a strange experience for him and he was surprised how much he liked it.
As darkness fell, he stoked up the campfire for warmth during the cold night ahead, before taking time to groom the horse of which he had grown increasingly fond. When he had asked Melliflor for its name, the reply had been something indecipherable, so he had secretly decided to call it Thunder after the horse of some cowboy hero in an American comic he had read as a child. He would never tell the others something like that, but it gave him a deep, personal comfort. He got pleasure from treating it with affection, although he privately wished it were a little more responsive. It seemed unduly wary of him, almost as if it were scared, which he guessed must have come from whatever treatment had been meted out in the strange stables of the Court of the Yearning Heart. I can't even get a horse to like nze, he thought as he stroked its flank; the notion was so ridiculous it made him laugh out loud.
It was Thunder who alerted him to danger as he settled down to sleep next to the fire under the fragrant canopy of a pine. It whinnied and stamped its hooves long before Veitch heard any sign, and he was up on his feet with the sword in his hands as the howl of fear came from somewhere near the road on his side of the loch. The cry was suddenly infused with pain, before being snapped off.
Veitch jumped on to Thunder and spurred him through the trees on the steep slopes down to the road. The horse was uneasy, but it responded to his heels and it didn't take him long to find the mangled remains of a motorbike. There was a pool of blood on the tarmac, but no sign of any body. He dismounted and examined the road surface. It was difficult to tell in the dark, but the splatters of blood appeared to point in the direction of the inlet overlooked by the ruins of Castle Urquhart. Briefly, he stopped and listened, but the night was as quiet as ever. He wondered how swiftly the Beast could move; perhaps it was already miles away. Cautiously he climbed back on Thunder and headed in the direction indicated by the blood.