The Endless Knot (31 page)

We ran for what seemed like an eon. I could hear the demon dogs tearing through the brush behind me. From the noise they were making, I judged that they were gaining on us and that there were more of them than before.

Chancing another backward look, I saw that the hellhounds were indeed very much closer now. Three or four more had joined the pack with the others, no doubt, on the way. The sound of their baying blood call cut through me, raising the hair on my scalp.

When I turned back, Scatha had disappeared.

“Scatha!” I cried. What if she had fallen?

I ran to the place where I had last glimpsed her, but she was not there, and nowhere to be seen. I could not stay and look for her, nor could I leave her.

“Scatha! Where are you?”

“Here, Llew!” came the answer—close at hand, but I could not see her.

A howl broke into a snarl as the foremost hellhound closed on me.

I turned to meet the beast, putting my back to the nearest tree and holding my makeshift weapon before me, ready to strike. I could reckon to get in at least two good blows before the other hounds arrived. What I would do after that, I did not know.

The creature attacked with breathtaking speed. I braced myself to receive the weight as it sprang . . .

The butt end of a spear shaft descended directly before my face. “Take hold!” a voice cried from above.

I dropped the club, seized the spear with my flesh hand, and jumped, swinging my legs up toward the boughs above. Hooking a branch with one knee, I caught another with my metal hand. A hair's breadth beneath me the hound's jaws closed with the force of a sprung trap. Clutching for dear life to the shaft of the spear, I felt myself lifted higher. “Let go the spear, Llew,” my savior told me. “There is a branch beside you.”

But I could not release my grip on the spear—the instant I did so, I would plummet to the ground. Another hound had joined the first and both were leaping at me, jaws snapping, teeth cracking.

“Let go, Llew.”

I looked to the right and left. If I released the spear I would fall and be torn apart by the hounds.

“Llew! I cannot help you if you do not let go.”

I hesitated, dangling dangerously close to the snarling creatures below. A third hound bounded over the backs of the other two and snagged my cloak in its teeth, almost tearing my grip from the spear, and dragging me down with its weight.

“I cannot hold you!”

Clinging to my cloak, the hellhound tugged furiously, trying to pull me from my precarious roost. The fabric of my cloak began to give way. A second hound caught a corner of the cloak and began to yank, its forelegs lifted off the ground. My grip on the spear began to slip as I was dragged down yet further. More hounds had reached the tree and were leaping at me, trying to snag a piece of my dangling cloak.

“Llew! Let go!”

Grip failing, slipping backward bit by bit, cloak pulled tight against my neck to choke me, there was nothing for it but to let go of the spear and try for a more secure handhold on the unseen branch.

“I cannot hold you!”

I released the spear and flung my hand out. The weight of the hounds jerked me down. But my hand closed securely on a branch and I quickly wrapped my arm around its sturdy length and held fast.

Scatha was there beside me, trembling with the effort of supporting my weight on the end of her spear. “I might have dropped you,” she said.

“I could not see the branch,” I replied through clenched teeth.

Kneeling on the branch beside me, Scatha leaned low and thrust down with the spear. A rabid snarl became a squalling yelp and the weight on my cloak decreased by half. Another quick thrust of her spear brought another bawl of pain and I was free. I fumbled with the brooch pin and somehow managed to unfasten the brooch and let the cloak fall free.

I pulled myself upright and climbed higher into the tree. Below were no fewer than eight hellhounds—some leaping frantically in the air, others running insanely around the tree, and at least two trying to scale the trunk by their claws. One of these managed to reach a fair height but, gripping the branch with one hand, Scatha leaned down and stabbed the creature in the throat. It fell yelping to the ground, landed on its spine and thrashed around, furiously biting itself as the black blood gushed from its wounded throat.

The beast died and, like the spiders, simply dissolved into a shapeless mass that quickly evaporated leaving nothing but a glutinous residue behind. But there were a dozen or more dogs running beneath the tree now. They sprang at us, clashing their teeth and snarling. Often one would try to climb the tree, whereupon Scatha would spear it, and it would fall back either wounded or dead. The dead quickly dissolved and disappeared, but were just as swiftly replaced by others.

We were trapped, clearly, and I began to think that by sheer strength of numbers the hounds would bring down the tree. Just watching the swirling, vicious chaos of their frenzy made me fearful and weary. Scatha, too, felt the futility of fighting them; for, although she still gave good account of herself with her spear when opportunity presented, I noticed that she seemed to be losing heart. Gradually, her features lost all expression, and her head drooped.

I tried to encourage her. “We are safe here,” I told her. “The camp is near. The warriors will hear the hounds and come in force to rescue us.”

“If they are not themselves under attack,” she replied bleakly.

“They will find us,” I said, doubt undercutting my words. “They will rescue us.”

“We cannot escape,” she murmured.

“They will find us,” I insisted. “Just hold on.”

Nevertheless, it soon began to look as if Scatha was right. The monstrous hounds did not tire, and their numbers, so far as I could tell, continued to increase. Scatha eventually ceased striking at them with her spear. Instead, we edged higher into the tree and sat staring hollow-eyed at the frenzy, growing gradually numb from the cold and the continual shock of the baying, snarling, howling cacophony below.

Watching the moonglint on teeth and claws, and the dizzy tracery of red-glowing eyes, my mind began to drift. The gyrating black bodies seemed to merge into one savage torrent like a raging cataract, fearful in its wrath. And I wondered what it would be like to join that swirling maelstrom, to become part of that horrific turbulence. No intent but chaos, no desire but destruction. What defiance, what strength, what abandon—to give myself over to such fury.

What would happen to me? Would I die? Or would I simply become one of them, primal and free? Knowing no limits, no restraint, a creature of naked appetites, feral, possessed of a savage and terrible beauty—what would it be like to act and not think, to simply be— beyond thought, beyond reason, beyond emotion, alive to sensation only . . .

I was startled from my dire reverie by the sudden shaking of the branch beside me. Scatha, eyes fastened on the tumult raging around the trunk of the tree, was standing on the limb, teetering back and forth, her arms outflung to keep her balance. She had dropped her spear.

“Scatha,” I called. “Do not look at them, Scatha! Take your eyes off them.”

I continued speaking as I cautiously crept closer along the branch until I was sitting beside her. Standing slowly, I put my arm around her shoulders to steady her. “Let us sit down again, Pen-y-Cat,” I said. She yielded to this suggestion and allowed herself to be guided to a sitting position on the branch. “That is better,” I told her. “You had me worried, Scatha. You might have fallen.”

She turned blank, unseeing eyes on me and said, “I wanted to fall.”

“Scatha, hear me now:What you feel is the sluagh—they are doing this to us. I feel it too. But we must resist. Someone will find us.”

But Scatha had turned her gaze once more toward the howling, boiling mass beneath us. Desperate for some way to distract her, I fought the urge to return to my own contemplation of the turmoil below and scanned the surrounding wood for some hopeful sign.

To my astonishment, I saw the faint glow of a torch moving down the slope.

“Look! Someone is coming. Scatha, see—help is on the way!”

I said this mostly to divert Scatha's attention, but I took heart myself. There was no logical reason to believe that rescue had come, but a multitude of reasons to assume that some fresh horror had found us instead.

Indeed, my hopes were all but extinguished when Scatha said, “I see nothing. There is no torch.”

It was true—the glow was not a torch. What I had seen, burnished by hope into bright-gleaming flame, appeared now to be nothing more than a dull, moonstruck yellow glow. It moved steadily through the wood toward us, however, and I gradually became aware that it moved to a sound of its own—difficult to hear above the snarling, growling, hellhound yowl, but distinct from it all the same.

“Listen . . . can you hear it?”

Scatha listened for a moment, turning her eyes away from the maelstrom below. “I . . . um, I hear . . . barking,” she concluded.

“That is it,” I assured her. “Barking, exactly—the same as we heard before the siabur appeared.”

Scatha regarded me skeptically, as well she might, considering how we had fled in terror of the sound upon hearing it. Odd to find comfort in it now. And yet, I did take comfort in it. I peered intently through the closegrown wood as the strange yellow glow wafted through the trees. The barking sound grew as the glow drifted, and there could be no doubt that it was the same that we had heard earlier.

My silver hand, which had long since become a chunk of ice on the end of my arm, began to tingle. A moment later, I glimpsed several smooth white shapes racing through the underbrush toward us.

“Something is coming!” I gasped.

The warming tingle quivered up into my arm as three sleek, white dogs broke through the undergrowth and drove straight into the impossible turmoil of hounds beneath our tree. White as new snow from snout to tail except for their ears which were bright, blood-red— the dogs were smaller and leaner than the black hellhounds, but swifter of foot and just as fierce.

I expected them to be torn apart in an instant, but to my amazement the hellhounds reacted as if they were being scalded alive. They reared on hind legs, leapt in the air, and scrambled over one another in a desperate struggle to escape the onslaught of the newcomers. And, as soon became apparent, with good reason.

The red-eared dogs charged in a frenzy of bared teeth, each seizing a hound by the throat, ripping furiously, and then lunging to another kill. The stricken hounds whined and crumpled, decaying into shapeless jelly and vanishing within moments.

Like lightning shattering the storm cloud, the three white dogs routed our assailants, killing with keen efficiency and striking again. Within moments of their arrival, dozens of their opponents were dead and hellhounds were fleeing for cover, clawing one another to get away. Soon the wood rang to the sound of the dogs' triumphant howls as they pursued the retreating hounds into the wood.

“They are gone,” Scatha said, releasing her breath in a rush.

I opened my mouth to agree, and then I saw him: standing almost directly below us and looking in the direction the dogs had gone. He was wearing a long yellow coat with sleeves and a belt. It was this coat I had seen moving through the trees like a will-o'-the-wisp.

He stood for a moment without moving, and then he raised his face to look into the branches where Scatha and I were hiding. I almost fell from my perch. Peering up at me was easily the ugliest man I had ever seen: big-faced, gross in every feature, his long nose ending in a fleshy hook, and his mouth the wide thick-lipped cleft of a frog. Ears like jug handles protruded from under a thick pelt of wild black hair, and large wide-spaced eyes bulged balefully from beneath a single heavy ridge of black brow.

He held my gaze for the briefest instant, but long enough for me to know that he saw me. Indeed, he lifted his hand in farewell just before he stepped from beneath the branch and disappeared into the wood once more.

Only after he had gone could I speak. “I have seen that face before,” I murmured. Once, long ago . . . in another world.

I felt a hesitant touch on my arm. “Llew?”

“It is over,” I told her. “The dogs belonged to him.”

“Who?”

“The man in the yellow coat. He was just there. I saw him; he—” I broke off. It was no good insisting. Clearly, Scatha had not seen him. Somehow that did not surprise me.

“We can go now,” I told her and began easing my weight from the branch.

I lowered myself to the lowest branch and prepared to drop to the ground. Just as I released my hold, Scatha called me from above, “Wait! Listen!”

But her warning came too late. I landed awkwardly and fell rolling on my back. As I did so, I heard something big and heavy crashing through the wood. I jumped to my feet, searching wildly for Scatha's fallen spear, wishing I had saved the club.

“Llew!” Scatha called. “There—behind you!” The spear lay a few steps behind me. I ran to it, picked it up, and whirled to meet . . . Bran and Alun Tringad, swords drawn, along with twenty or more torch-bearing warriors.

“Over here!” I cried. “Scatha! It is Bran! We are saved!”

Bran and Alun advanced warily, as if I might be an apparition.

“Here I am!” I shouted again, lowering the spear and hurrying to meet them. “Scatha is with me.”

“Llew?” the Chief Raven wondered, lowering his sword slowly. He glanced at Alun, who said, “I told you we would find them.”

“We were returning to camp and lost our way,” I explained quickly. I hurried back to the tree and called to Scatha. “You can come down now. It is safe.”

Scatha dropped from the branch and landed catlike on her feet.

“Are Cynan and Tegid with you too?” Alun asked, peering up into the branches.

“We became separated,” I replied. “I do not know where they went.”