“Come, son,” he said, relishing the sound of the word on his tongue.
“Where are we going?” asked Alain. Beyond, through the glass windows of the chapel, he saw now the enclosed garden, its flowers and hedges rising from the gloom into the light of a new and fine day. Distantly, he heard a woman’s voice intoning the mass for the dead.
Lavastine smiled. “We’re riding home.”
EPILOGUE
AT first he did not realize he was still alive. Caught in the middle of a waking sleep, his mind awake but his limbs as leaden as a corpse’s, he became aware he rested half on cold flagstone and half on another body. His spine was aflame with agonizing pain, but even as it flared through him it began to dull down into a throbbing ache.
He could not quite manage to open his eyes. But he knew he was surrounded by bodies, strewn about him like so much refuse. Some few were still alive. He heard the muffled thunder of their heartbeats, felt their shallow breathing on the air, though he did not touch them. The body he lay on was, certainly, dead, but only recently so. Warmth pooled out from it, turning cold as he fought into full wakefulness.
It was so hard to wake up. And perhaps better not to.
No. Never let it be said that he did not fight until his last breath.
He heard the snuffling of the dogs. He began, then, to be consumed by dread: that the dogs would reach him before he could move and defend himself against them. There were few worse fates than being torn to pieces by dogs, like some dumb passive beast caught outside the stable.
He heard their growls and the way they shoved their muzzles against cloth and skin and metal, smelling for the ones who still lived. He heard the low rumble of voices, farther away, speaking words he did not know but in a guttural language he recognized—that of the Eika savages. Now and again these unseen speakers laughed. Now and again the dogs barked in triumph, and then he would hear a man’s grunt or a scream, cut off, and then he would hear—and now he cursed his keen hearing—the flow of blood and the rending of flesh from bone. Once he recognized, however briefly, the voice of one of his own men.
Still he could not move.
A nose nudged his slack left hand and a hard fang traced up the sleeve of his mail shirt. The dog growled. Its hot breath, rank with fresh blood, touched his cheek.
He struck.
Miraculously, he twitched. His right hand moved. And then, throwing himself on his side, he slammed his mailed glove into the dog’s muzzle. It staggered back, and he shoved himself up. He had gotten to his knees when two more dogs hit him, snarling and bitting, from behind. He threw one of them bodily over his head and jabbed his elbow into the ribs of the other, groped at his belt for his knife but found no weapon.
His left hand had lost its glove. One of the dogs caught it and sank teeth into flesh. He hammered the creature’s jaw down onto the stone floor. Stabs of pain lanced up his left arm, but he pried the beast’s mouth off his hand, heaved up its stunned body, and threw it at the other two.
Now more came and more yet. They closed in, circling. He waited, panting, and licked the blood from his mangled hand.
One jumped in and snapped at his mail shirt. He swung and struck it, and it leaped back, but now behind him another broke in and nipped at his heel. He kicked. It yelped and bolted back.
He spun, staring them down. But they were only waiting, only testing him, to see how quick, how strong, how determined he was.
Beyond the dogs he caught sight of other shapes, but this fight—with the dogs—was to the death, and he did not have time to look. He had no helmet, no tabard, no protection on his bleeding and torn left hand, but he still had a mail glove on his right hand and the good mail shirt covering his torso and upper arms. He still had the dogs themselves, and though they were terrible to look upon—eyes sparking fire and tongues hanging out, saliva dripping from their fangs—they were yet mindless rage-filled beasts and he was smarter than they were.
He backed up, stepping and stumbling over the dead, found a wall at last, and with this at his back he stared them down. A few sat down on their haunches and growled, unsure now. He singled out the biggest and ugliest one and darted out before any of the dogs could leap in upon him, grabbed the beast with a hand on each side of its thick neck, and with every ounce of strength he possessed swung it round and smashed it against the wall. It fell, limp, to the ground.
They erupted into a deafening chorus of howls and swarmed him, all leaping in at once. Their weight carried him down until he was trapped under their bodies, his arms and legs pinned. He was helpless. He was, at last, going to die.
One—the biggest yet—fought through the pack to stand over his chest. Its head loomed over his face, its great muzzle yawning wide as it howled its triumph before the death strike.
And he saw his chance.
It bit down—he slammed his head up under its jaw and lunged for the creature’s throat. Clamped down.
Ai, Lady. He could not rip its throat out, but, by the Lord, he could crush its windpipe until it suffocated. The big dog thrashed above him as he bit down. Its iron-gray hide tasted like metal. Blood leaked down his own throat. Its paws scrabbled at him, slowed, and then went lax. He felt the windpipe crack and, finally, jaw aching, he dared let go.
The beast collapsed on top of him.
The other dogs, worrying at his arms and legs, backed away. They snarled at him as he struggled to his feet. He spit out hair from his mouth and wiped his teeth. He ached everywhere. But he had killed it.
Movement coursed through the lofty space, and just before the Eika came, he finally realized that he stood in the great cathedral of Gent. Had they dragged every one of his Dragons in here? He did not even know how much time had passed since the fall of Gent. It could have been an hour or a day, or perhaps the enchanter had other spells surpassing even his illusions by which he could change the course of the stars.
“What have we here?” A huge Eika moved into his line of sight, shoving dogs aside, striking them back with clawed hands.
“Bloodheart,” he whispered, because he had long since learned to mark his enemy by name.