It was like seeing a distant flicker, visible for one second, gone the next, only to show again. This did not register in her eyes, rather in her mind. Whatever creature skulked here was far removed from man or animal. She heard Alon draw a deep breath, a fraction later his whisper reached her again.
“Think of light—of good…” His words trailed away, leaving Tirtha for a second uncomprehending. Then she understood. Fear was so often the first weapon of Dark Ones. Perhaps the three of them could indeed draw a curtain between themselves and this thing by bringing to the fore of their minds all that was right and natural, good and clean, within their own world.
She strove to build up a mind picture of the fields of Estcarp where she had labored only last harvest-time, swinging a sickle with the skill she had learned, gathering to her armloads of sun-warmed, fragrant grain. Here were the brilliant eyes of the field flowers making splotches of color—scarlet, yellow, against the gold. Sun lay warm on her shoulders, and there was still the taste upon her lips of apple squeezings which a serving maid had brought in leathern bottles to satisfy the thirst of the reapers.
Sun, color, the gold of grain ripe and ready for the harvest. There was the piper who sat cross-legged on the wall toward which the harvesters were working their way, and the trilling of his instrument roused hearty voices into song. She could feel the sun, taste the apple juice, hear the pipe song even here in the dark. Nor dared she break the web she so strove to weave, though the temptation to do so pressed ever on her.
The trail that had been so narrow at the entrance widened out. Now and then a hoofbeat raised an echo of sound, as if, under the blanket of last season’s leaves, there lay an ancient pavement.
So they came into what was a clearing, though ragged-walled, with an outgrowth of brush seeking to reclaim it. Those unhealthy stones were hereabouts in thick company, a number of them set on end to the north to form a rude barrier. But it was what lay in the very center of that way which held them where they were on the edge of this opening.
Lying crosswise on a patch of bared stone were two staffs or wands—wood that had been stripped of bark and shone bone white. Between them, positioned with care to form two sides of four squares, were skulls. These were old, greenish, as if overgrown in part by some vile lichen, and each had been braced to lie face up, the eyepits, the gaping jaws turned toward the sky.
Skulls, yes, but of no normal living thing Tirtha knew. The general shape was human in part, save there were heavy ridges of bone above the eye sockets. It was the jaws and lower sections that were the strangest—long cruel teeth sprouted still from the bone there, teeth that must have protruded far out and down from the flesh that had once lipped the mouths. Also there was a forethrust of the jaw line itself which hinted at a muzzle.
Like the thing on the mountain. Tirtha’s memory flashed the picture of it as she looked upon this carefully wrought warning, if warning it was.
She was aware of movement to her right. The Falconer was no longer sitting quiet in his saddle. A flash of light through the air… Into that display of wood and bone whirled something that came to life in the night with a flare like that of a torch hurled into dry brush.
Point down it struck, straight into the crossing of the staffs, metal biting into the wood. From that point of contact there burst a true flame which ran out along the lengths of the staffs, bringing light to bathe them all.
Was it only a sorcerous illusion, or did those greened skulls open yet wider their fanged jaws as the flames reached out eagerly to lick across each they passed? Had she heard a wailing afar in the distance, or if not in earthly distance in another place? Had that fire, which looked to be here and now, touched also into a world that lay beyond one of the fabled gates? Tirtha only knew that she felt—heard, sensed, she was not sure which—a moment of torment, and then a wink out of a life or lives which had no being in this time and place.
The skulls took fire, each exploding with a burst of sound that she heard. Already the staffs were but lines of ash laid upon the ground. The Falconer urged his pony on, leaned from the saddle to hook his claw about the hilt of the dagger knife which he had so thrown, drawing it out of the ashes that the hooves of his mount had stirred into nothingness.
“Well done.” Alon’s voice came, not in the faint whisper he had used since they had entered the wood, hut as if there was nothing to fear now.
“How”—Tirtha ran her tongue across her lower lip—“how did you know?”
This was witchery, and he had always turned from it, shunned it as she would a manifestation of the Dark.
Yet she had seen him now take on the practice of a Warlock.
Alon came to sudden life in her arms, plunging against her lax hold and so leaping forward to the ground.
“Ware!” The alarm came out of him in a child’s voice. Still there was a man’s urgency in that cry.
Tirtha swept back the folds of her cloak. The Torgian had moved up beside the Falconer’s pony, and the mare crowded in against the two of them. Alon reached up and caught a handful of the coarse mane of that smaller beast, drew himself up on the riding pad. The falcon mantled, screamed a challenge.
She drew her worn sword. They had somehow gotten into a defense position, the three of them facing outward, the rumps of their mounts pressed together, each fronting a separate portion of the wood about them. Was the destruction of the warning—or the spell—leading to outright attack?
They came out from the strange stones afoot, shadows flitting from shadows. Smaller than men, yes, and carrying with them a stench that Tirtha had come to associate with creatures of the Dark. She saw flames of eyes turned toward her, yet it would appear that, though they now ringed in the three, they were not ready for an outright attack. Instead they fell into a shuffling circle around about the riders, staying out of range of steel.
The Falconer had his dart gun. Tirtha wondered why he did not put it to use, pick off some of those moving creatures. The targets they provided were not so difficult that his aim could not have removed them as they passed him in that circling.
Her sword was little enough defense, yet she slipped from her belt sheath her hunting knife, reached out to press it into Alon’s hand. It was all she had in the way of an extra weapon.
From her left there was a glow. The weapon of power which the Falconer had retrieved before the emergence of these night crawlers was ablaze. She could not see that he had armed himself otherwise. Perhaps he had come to depend upon this strange arm more than he did on the weapons he had always known.
Their shaggy attackers—if attackers these were indeed—made no sound save by the shuffling of their feet as they kept their circle moving. Though they stood upright and had only four limbs, they were certainly not of her race, nor of any that approached the human blood. They wore no clothing. The glow from the weapon revealed, as they passed, squat bodies covered with a thick growth of such coarse hair or bristles that they might have had fine roots instead of natural strands sprouting forth. The round heads were marked by no visible features, save eyes that were pits of red fire, and were set directly on their wide shoulders. Their overlong upper limbs dangled so that their claws nearly brushed the ground, though they held themselves upright as they scuttled about.
The circle which they wove was not an even one. They pressed closer toward Tirtha and Alon, kept a farther distance from the Falconer. In him they might believe that they had a more formidable opponent. Why they did not launch their attack puzzled Tirtha. She began to believe they were only a delaying device, and the real strength of those who held the wood as their domain had yet to show itself.
For the second time, the falcon screamed. Those of the haired things nearest it at the time wavered. It would appear that they liked that sound no better than the sight of the sword-knife which blazed ever higher with its own light.