Solomon Kane (16 page)

She did not cry out. She twisted around to face the raider who had sneaked behind her, and at the same time she threw herself aside on the slippery earth. But there was no raider, only a weighty raindrop that a tree had let fall. For an instant she was overwhelmed by a surge of relief so fierce it drove away all thought, and then the rider shouted “Here! She’s here!”

She heard hooves galloping towards her and sprang to her feet. The rider was hauling viciously at the reins to send the horse around a fallen tree – the tangled branches reached too high to jump – while his fellows rode to head Meredith off. She dashed past the hollow and ran between the trees, slithering over drenched leaves, slipping on a muddy slope, almost sprawling headlong. For the moment she had no thought other than somehow to leave her pursuers behind, and then she heard a liquid sound that was more than rain. She was coming to a river.

It was the nearest to a hope she had. She put on a speed that she would never have believed she had in her. Her lungs were heaving and her breaths felt harsh as fire by the time she reached the line of trees that marked the river’s edge. She swept rain from her eyes with the back of her hand, and then she faltered. It was not just the prospect of plunging into the icy torrent that made her waver. She was not on the bank of a river. She was on top of a cliff.

At the foot of a sheer drop of perhaps a hundred feet, a river quite as wide rushed foaming over rocks. As Meredith retreated a step before dizziness could send her over the brink, she heard hoofbeats converging on her, and swung around to find the riders at her back. Every face bared yellowed teeth in the same bestial grin of triumph. “You’re going nowhere, girl,” the rider closest to her said.

“You belong to the Master,” said the horseman to his left.

“He has a special purpose for you,” their fellow exulted.

Their grins widened, and their blackened eyeballs glared at her without a blink, despite the gusts of rain that assailed their faces. They held the horses where they stood and waited for Meredith to try to dodge between them. She would never elude them that way, and so she turned her back on them. She took a breath that tasted tearful with the rain, and breathed a prayer, and then she paced forward and stepped off the edge of the cliff.

N
ight was falling when Kane found the lake. The clouds on the horizon were tinged red by the last of the sinking light; the sun was more apparent in its extinction than it had been all day. The raw sky lent its colour to the water as though the lake were stained with blood, and indeed it had been a day of bloodshed. After releasing the captives on the road Kane had chanced upon a second band of raiders, encamped in the ruins of a castle on a hill. They appeared to believe themselves invulnerable, unless they thought none would dare attack them, for they had not even troubled to set a guard. Kane had ridden into their midst and slain them without mercy, interrogating more than one as they lay dying. They told him nothing – they barely spoke, and he was sure that he saw the same eyes glaring out of every face at him. They had no prisoners, and so Kane stood among the dead as they resumed whatever humanity they had surrendered, and murmured a brief prayer for them. The prayer he uttered as he rode away was not on their behalf. While he had released them from the evil that held the land in thrall, he was no closer to rescuing Meredith.

The lake was some hundreds of yards from the road, across a meadow starved of life by the vicious winter and bedraggled by the day’s rain. A copse occupied the far bank, where the foremost trees fingered the depths
with their roots and with the reflections of their leafless branches. As Kane guided his horse through the dead grass, which was so tall it stooped, the glow dulled and drained out of the sky. He dismounted on the ragged border of the lake, and scarcely had time to examine the horse for cuts and scratches, finding none that would require treatment, before the land grew dark.

He led the horse to a gap in the reeds that fringed the lake and stroked its neck as it lowered its head to drink. A mist was seeping between the trees to drift across the lake, obscuring several rounded overgrown rocks that protruded just above the surface of the water. Kane squatted on the margin and cupped his hands as the horse dipped its muzzle in. Ripples spread through the water, slapping playfully against the rocks, uncovering a submerged inch of the nearest. Kane peered towards the rounded shape in the gloom, and then he narrowed his eyes and crouched over the water’s edge. Another ripple let him glimpse the topmost section of the object, where he distinguished two waterlogged tufts above a pair of bulging lumps. Those were staring although sightless, and now he discerned more beneath the surface of the water: dim arms outstretched on either side, a torso sunk too deep to be wholly visible, unless it ended above the waist. Kane sprang to his feet and tugged at the horse’s reins. “Don’t drink,” he cried. “It’s foul.”

The horse showed little inclination to obey. Kane might have wondered if it had been tainted by the evil that possessed the raiders, except that it had no soul to possess. “Can you not taste it, animal?” he raged, hauling at the reins until it lifted its reluctant head. In truth he was angry with himself, having made out that all the shapes he had taken for rocks belonged to bodies, drowned and rotting. He should never have allowed himself to be so
unwary, and he was coaxing the horse away from the polluted water when he stiffened. Something had moved somewhere near him.

The horse snorted and shook its head uneasily, so that Kane had to stroke its muzzle to quiet it. As it subsided with a final whinny he heard the other sound again – a surreptitious restlessness of the grass. He might have assumed it was a stray breeze, but the night was as stagnant as the lake. He turned to face the meadow, one hand on the hilt of his sword. The grass and weeds were a smudged mass of blackness, which appeared to be utterly still. Here and there the drooping tips of grass-blades or the downcast heads of weeds were dimly outlined against the night sky, but they betrayed no movement. Then a withered flower twitched to his left, and another one swayed yards away to his right. Without further warning, the creatures that must have been lying low in the meadow rushed at him.

They came on all fours, scuttling faster than a horse could gallop. They were naked as babies and smaller than a man. The pallor of their flesh suggested that they had never seen the sun and never should. The eyes were too large for the avid bony faces, and so pale that they appeared to glow with an unholy lurid light. The mouths were unnaturally huge, gaping to display the fangs of predators, and further enlarged by blood smeared like an infant’s food around the lips. So much Kane saw before the leader of the pack leapt at him.

He barely had the chance to draw a sword, and none to brace himself. He swung the blade up just in time to meet the creature in mid-air. The sword impaled it through the guts, but Kane had not judged the force of the leap. It sent him staggering backwards into the lake as a second creature sprang at the horse, jaws wide.

The horse gave a whinny that was close to a scream. As the creature seized its neck with all four scrawny limbs, it reared up and lost its footing on the slippery grass. Before the attacker could sink in its fangs, the horse crashed to the ground. As the thing at its throat tried to scrabble out of danger, it was crushed by the horse. Kane heard ribs snap like a bunch of twigs, and a dying snarl that sounded uncannily close to a word.

He was up to his thighs in the water. Another of the creatures was ranging back and forth along the margin, apparently uncertain whether to spring at Kane or to assail the horse. The creature that had attacked Kane was still skewered on the sword. Kane plunged the blade into the lake and trod on the thing’s chest while he pulled the sword free. Water surged away from him, and the nearest of the drowned bodies wallowed in response, waving its bloated arms and nodding its decayed head so vigorously that it seemed on the point of raising whatever remained of its face out of the lake. As Kane lifted the sword, the horse struggled to its knees before it succeeded in standing up. This might have been the signal for the third of the pack to spring on Kane. He brought the sword down with all his strength and hacked the monstrosity in half.

The severed halves continued to twitch as they sank to the bottom of the lake. The sword was deep in the water too, and a fourth creature was poised on the edge. Kane dragged at the sword – dragged harder, but it was entangled in a mass of weeds. As the thing on the margin of the lake prepared to leap at him, he snatched a pistol from his belt and pulled the trigger. The weapon was aimed straight at the monstrous head, but it was useless. Kane’s fall into the lake must have dampened the powder, and the pistol failed to go off.

He flung it at the creature, which dodged and
immediately sprang at him. As the pistol landed on the bank Kane let go of the trapped sword. Throwing out his hands, he seized the creature by the throat as it reached to fasten its clawed hands and feet on him. He twisted it around and bowed forward to hold the head underwater. The thing flailed the water with its limbs, struggling to find Kane with its lethal claws, but he pinned its arms between his knees and forced the head deeper. At last the body jerked into stillness, and a final unclean bubble swelled up from the water and burst. Kane lifted the limp body and peered at it, seeing what he feared he would. Despite its size, which suggested that its frame had withered around the evil it contained, it was clear that the creature had once been human.

Kane let it sink into the lake and retrieved his sword. He floundered to the bank and climbed out of the water to recover the pistol. For minutes he stood absolutely still, listening for any hint that more of the creatures were abroad. When he was sure there were none he stroked the horse’s neck until the animal ceased trembling. It shied when he attempted to mount it, and he had to murmur to it as though he were saying a prayer. Eventually it suffered him to remount, and he ventured to ride it across the meadow – there was no other way back to the road. Once they were clear of the grass he did not permit himself to imagine they were safe. He was painfully alert now, knowing that any part of the land could be the lair of some unimaginable evil. Worse, the thought made him wonder what might be happening to Meredith.

T
he fall from the cliff snatched away Meredith’s breath and the last of the muffled daylight as well. She might have thought that the abyss had already swallowed her, robbing her of every sense, if it had not been for a gust of rain that found her face. It kept her breathless and stung her blinded eyes throughout the endless fall. She had time to imagine being caught up by angels and borne back into the midst of her family, however vain and arrogant the hope was, before her plunge came to an end.

She had been most afraid that she would hit the rocks. Instead she struck open water, which was vicious enough. The thump it dealt her was hard enough for earth. Her left arm took most of the impact, but she had no chance to recover before the river closed over her head. A relentless current dragged her down, and she thought she was drowned. Thick weeds stretched out to entangle her, but the rocks where they were rooted slowed the torrent and turned it aside. For the moment it was tamed, and Meredith was able to struggle gasping to the surface.

Perhaps her prayer had been answered more thoroughly than she would have dared to hope. Even if you should not pray for salvation in this world, surely she had encountered so much evil that God would never leave her at its mercy. While the banks of the river were too steep to offer her a refuge, even supposing that she could
have reached one and held on, that meant the raiders had no way down to her that she could see. The torrent was rushing her onwards, deafening her with its roar and dashing foam into her face, but she might not be helpless for long. She was being swept towards a pair of jagged rocks, and a fallen sapling was wedged between them.

As the tree came within reach she clutched at the trunk. The impact bruised her right hand – the left was devoid of sensation – and shuddered through her arms. The current was so strong that it sent her cannoning against the trunk. The collision knocked the breath out of her and loosened her grasp on the slippery wood. It dislodged the sapling from between the rocks, and Meredith wrapped her arms around it as it raced downriver.