Sky Wolves (16 page)

She had jumped at the mirror, closing both eyes as a sensible precaution against further fright. She was now waiting a reasonable length of time before opening them again, sure that at any moment she would collide with something hard and probably dangerous, like, say, the ground.

This didn’t happen.

Flo was familiar with the unpleasant, lurching feeling of descent, when the earth rushed up to meet you and smacked you hard for attempting to leave. She was even familiar with the laws of gravity, since Myrtle had once taken a diploma
in advanced physics with the Open University. But the unpleasant, sinking feeling wasn’t happening either. It had been replaced by an even more unpleasant,
soaring
feeling.

Not alone among her kind, Flo had never wanted to fly. But even she knew she should open her eyes, since, as every bird learns in its first flying lesson, it is very unwise to fly with them closed. But Flo really didn’t want to open her eyes. Surely, any minute now, her feet would touch something solid and secure.

They didn’t.

In a further attempt to delay the dreadful moment of opening her eyes and seeing what was happening to her, Flo ran through the facts in her mind.

To begin with, in an uncharacteristically reckless moment, she had jumped at the mirror. The mirror should have been hard, but wasn’t, and Flo appeared to have passed right through it. This was abnormal fact one.

Seconds later, something large and hairy had attempted to stuff itself down her throat. This had to be abnormal fact two, since even in Flo’s limited experience of hunting, small furry creatures did not just stuff themselves down your throat. Flo had gagged and almost thrown up in midair, eventually coughing up what seemed like a giant hairball. This in itself could be abnormal fact three, since poodles don’t have the kind of hair that comes off and forms itself into balls. But now the thing, whatever it was, was stuck between her teeth and though Flo had tried to shake it out of her mouth, she couldn’t. Was this abnormal fact four? Or three? Flo was getting confused now, as the general abnormality of the situation overwhelmed her. There was the mirror, which perversely reflected a bizarre scene unrelated to the room it
was in; there was the house, which refused to resemble itself and had kept sprouting further corridors and doors;
and
there were the three horrible hags.

So numerous were the abnormal occurrences Flo had experienced in the course of just one afternoon that she had lost count. It might almost be said that she had lost all sense of normal. Apparently she had leapt through a smoking mirror over the heads of three grotesque old women and simultaneously learned to fly.

It was this last factor, of course, that was troubling her most of all. Not landing just wasn’t normal, not by anyone’s definition of the term. Her paws craved solid ground and her eyes itched to open, so that her brain could relay them some kind of message that would hopefully make sense. After all, how much worse could things get?

Flo opened her eyes.

And immediately everything got much worse.

Now look what you’ve done,
said her brain, and quietly but firmly shut down most of its circuits in protest.

Flo was in the sky. She wasn’t just hovering above the ground at the sort of distance she might comfortably have leapt to; she was several kilometres above the earth. Waves of horror rushed over her as she realized that the tiny specks and lines far below were buildings and rivers and roads. Wreaths of mist passed over the scene and Flo understood, with mind-numbing shock, that she was looking at clouds
from the other side.
Worse, she was still ascending.

In terrible dismay, Flo tried to shut her eyes again, but despite her efforts they went on looking. The sun seemed huge without its helpful screen of clouds and atmosphere, pulsating with light. And there, in her direct
line of vision, was an enormous wolf galloping towards it.

Even without Flo’s optical condition that made frightening objects appear five times larger than they actually were, the wolf was enormous. Its ravening jaws were open wide and its eyes glared fire. Behind it was a pack of lesser wolves, though they didn’t look lesser to Flo. They all seemed hideous and terrifying. And she was hurtling towards them at an incomprehensible speed.

With what was left of her brain, Flo tried to jam the brakes on in midair. She thrust all her paws out before her in an attempt to skid to a halt and wriggled frantically, but succeeded only in turning a sickening somersault, then continuing to fly upside down.

This is it,
she thought sadly.
This is the end.
And she just had time to reflect that, of all the many ways in which she had anticipated her final moments, crashing airborne into a pack of flying wolves seemed the least likely, before the rest of her brain closed down.

Meanwhile, the pack of flying wolves had noticed something unusual.

‘What’s that, Boss?’ said one of them who was near the front.

But their leader, Skoll, was too intent on opening his jaws wide enough to swallow the sun to hear.

‘Looks like a flying pink poodle,’ the wolf went on, and this time Skoll did hear.

‘A flying pink poodle?’ he said, with vast contempt. ‘Leave it out, Garm.’

‘No, Boss, look,’ Garm protested. ‘It
is
a flying pink poodle.’

‘And I’m a cuddly toy,’ Skoll said, still intent on the sun.

‘I told you what would happen if you didn’t take your altitude tablets.’

But by now the other wolves were joining in.

‘He’s right, Boss. Look!’

‘It
is
a flying pink poodle!’

‘Why’s it upside down?’

‘What’s a poodle?’

And so on.

Skoll heaved a sigh of absolute exasperation. He’d told his mistress, Hel, the Queen of Darkness, that he’d be better off on his own, but she’d insisted that the other wolves needed the exercise. More skilfully than Flo, he managed to turn round in midair to glare at them all.

‘First of all,’ he said, ‘poodles can’t fly. And they ain’t pink. And – oh –’

For now that he had turned, he could see Flo careering erratically towards them upside down, with her eyes firmly shut.

Skoll had seen many things in his time: the flight of the valkyries, the march of the frost giants of Ymir, the birth of the world-tree, Yggdrasil, from the cosmic egg. He had become, over the millennia, almost jaded. But now he was genuinely astonished.

‘Wow,’ he said.

It was all he had time to say before Flo crashed into the heart of the pack, scattering them to left and right.

In the resulting cacophony, Flo’s brain, much to her distress, started working again. Her eyes, despite every instruction she gave them, opened.

‘Oh dear,’ she gasped, and ordered herself to faint. But against her will, she remained conscious.

She was in the middle of a howling, snarling pack of wolves, each many times larger than Flo. Drool dripped from their ravening jaws and their eyes were blood red. Several of them lunged towards her, snarling. Flo tried hard to remember how to pray.

But then a strange thing happened.

As she scrambled away from first one, then another, the cord she was carrying in her mouth wound itself around them – a paw here, a throat there, a muzzle somewhere else. Their blood-curdling howls changed to baffled roars and barks of frustration.

‘’Ere, you!’ bellowed their leader. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘I wish I knew,’ moaned poor Flo, as the cord looped itself around another wolf’s tail.

‘Stop it this minute!’ Skoll howled, lunging towards her. ‘Cut it out!’

‘Believe me, I’m trying,’ cried Flo, ducking under another wolf and tangling his feet in the cord. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she added, as another one practically choked. ‘Do excuse me,’ she said to a third as she looped his ears together. ‘I hope it’s not too tight.’

Soon, all the wolves apart from Skoll were roped together in the cord that kept unravelling itself from Flo’s mouth. They struggled and kicked and writhed, but they were joined together in a howling mass, and no matter how much they tried to bite the cord, it merely cut into their mouths. Then there was only Skoll left facing Flo.

Skoll’s ears flattened, his fur lifted and his teeth were bared in a terrible grin. He had faced many enemies before, and while this one, a very polite pink poodle who had
somehow learned to fly, was not in his handbook of supernatural foes and demons, he was not about to be tied up by a mere dog who looked as though she was suffering from a very bad perm.

‘Right,’ he snarled. ‘I don’t know who or what you are, but I do know this. I am Skoll the Terrible. No living creature has ever defeated me in single combat and I have never been chained. Not even by the Queen of Darkness herself. You might’ve tied up these jokers here,’ he said, jerking his head at the struggling pack, ‘but if you think for one moment that you’re going to rope me up with the rest of them, you’ve got another think coming.’ He grinned evilly. ‘However, you’re welcome to try. All you have to do,’ he said, drawing an imaginary line in the air in front of him, ‘is to step over this line here.’

Flo looked at the enormous wolf. Single combat really wasn’t her thing, and if forced to try it she would pick someone more her size. Like Pico. She wondered briefly whether the great wolf would follow her if she set off now, dragging all the other wolves behind her, but somehow she doubted it. He would carry on relentlessly until he had fulfilled his mission of swallowing the sun.

Flo’s heart quailed as she looked at the monster before her. She wondered how far she would get if she simply ran away. She hadn’t asked for this task, she reminded herself. It wasn’t fair. She, the least brave of poodles, was being forced to fight a supernaturally evil wolf who was also supernaturally big and strong. The others had chosen their tasks, or at least picked ones that suited their personalities. Pico had always wanted to travel. Checkers loved a good fight. All Flo wanted was to go home and lie down.

Then, as if from far away, she heard Jenny’s voice.
‘It is jour wisdom and perception that we need,’
she had said.

‘I’m waiting,’ said the wolf.

Flo swallowed.

‘Skoll the Terrible,’ she said, as if thinking aloud.

‘Yes?’

‘That’s a funny name, isn’t it?’

The wolf looked distracted by this different tactic, as she had hoped he would be.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ he said.

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Flo carelessly. ‘It’s a lovely name. I just wonder what your mother was thinking of when she called you “the Terrible”, that’s all.’

The great wolf’s blood-red eyes kindled. ‘You leave my mother out of it,’ he growled.

‘I mean, she
could
have called you Skoll the Handsome,’ Flo went on, as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Or Skoll the Wise. But no,’ she added smoothly, ‘I can see why she wouldn’t call you that.’

The great wolf’s growl changed to a rumbling roar and behind Flo one of the captive wolves tittered. ‘She’s got you there, Skoll,’ he said.

‘At least she didn’t dress me up as a cake decoration,’ he snarled, and more of the wolves yelped with laughter.

‘Nice one, nice one,’ they said.

‘Hmmm,’ said Flo. ‘Looks like she didn’t dress you up at all. Never thought,
Poor Skoll, a dog with a face like that could do with a bit of grooming.
No. Just left you till you looked like a badly trampled goat.’

Now the wolves behind Flo howled with laughter, while Skoll prowled up and down in midair, growling
but still keeping to one side of the imaginary line.

‘I mean, Skoll the Terrible what?’ Flo went on, now actually enjoying herself. ‘The terrible hair-do? The terrible body odour? Or just the terrible excuse for a dog?’

Flo had gone too far. Skoll’s growl rose several notches in pitch and he crouched back on his haunches in classic spring pose. The next moment he was leaping through the air and Flo just had time to step neatly to one side, so that he landed in the thick of the howling wolves. Flo acted swiftly, tossing the cord towards him. Impelled by its own magic, it looped itself around him several times.

Skoll’s rage was terrible to see. He writhed and howled and bit several of the wolves nearest to him, so that they howled too. Flo watched with interest as he struggled and kicked, only tying himself up tighter. Once she was sure that he couldn’t free himself she felt much calmer, and almost brave, and even a tiny bit proud of herself.

Eventually the great wolf stopped struggling. He looked at Flo with an evil glare. Under normal circumstances this glare would have been enough to reduce Flo to a quivering mass, but now she couldn’t help feeling that she had the upper hand.

‘You won’t get away with this,’ he said.

‘Looks like I just did,’ said Flo pertly.

The great wolf’s breathing was heavy and hoarse. ‘All right, then, Miss Hair Crime,’ he said. ‘You’ve got us all here. Now what are you going to do?’

Flo hadn’t a clue. Skoll saw the fleeting expression of doubt on her face and his glare changed to an evil grin.

‘You needn’t think you can stop Ragnarok, you know,’ he said. ‘You might’ve stopped me swallowing the sun – for now – but you’ve still got Hati to deal with.’

Flo glanced nervously over her shoulder.

‘Hati?’ she said, and all the wolves began making appreciative noises.

‘Hati!’

‘She’s the most evillest wolf of all!’

‘No one’s ever defeated Hati!’

‘Hati’ll have her for breakfast!’

‘All right, then,’ Flo said, with a bravado she did not feel. ‘Who is this Hati?’

‘Why, the third great wolf of Ragnarok, of course,’ said Skoll, affecting surprise. ‘She’s on her way to devour the moon. She’ll be getting there round about now, I should think.’

Flo turned. There on the far horizon, where the sky was darkening, the moon hung round and full and clear. The shadow of a great wolf was rapidly approaching it. Flo couldn’t help it; her heart sank. She was in midair, with a pack of bound wolves, and her task wasn’t over yet. She didn’t know what to do with the pack and the moon seemed a long way off. But while she was waiting, another great wolf was drawing ever closer to it.