Slowly, inch after pain-wracked inch, Daryth reached upward with his left hand. Scraping his blistered fingertips across the rock, he found another of the tiny cracks that had helped him climb this far.
Then he discovered another problem. Allowing his injured foot to dangle loosely, he tried to hold the scimitar in his right hand while lifting his other foot higher on the rock. But the tiny handhold, gripped only with his fingertips, didn't afford him enough purchase for the move.
Grimacing, he slid Cat's-Claw back into the scimitar's sheath, reluctantly realizing that he now needed both hands for climbing. Gaining a hold with his right hand, he pulled himself up until he could wedge his left boot into another crack. Once again he repeated the process.
This time his right foot crashed into a jagged spur of rock, and he cried out from the pain. Instantly biting his tongue, he clung to the sheer rock face while the world closed in around him. Fiery gouts of pain erupted along his leg, and tears flowed freely from his eyes.
Daryth's fingers began to slip from their precarious holds, and he sensed the certainty of death below him. "If I let go, I die." He whispered the words aloud, over and over, and
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from somewhere he found the strength to hold on. But even as his grip strengthed, a great well of blackness opened up in his mind as his pain threatened to swell up and swallow him.
"Don't faint . don't... faint!" He chanted the words desperately to himself, struggling to retain consciousness, and finally the haze in his mind began to dissipate. Nevertheless, he held tightly to the rock for several minutes until he finally felt ready to proceed.
In this way, he worked himself up the cliff, moving with great deliberation, taking care not to strike his wound on anything. Occasionally he wouldn't be able to find purchase for his good foot, and at such times Daryth lifted himself solely by the strength of his arms and shoulders, holding his position with one hand until he reached through the darkness to find another hold.
As he climbed, he felt the horror that had cloaked him dissipate. The prickling of his scalp lessened, and finally he was left with a sense of being alone in the night. Not a friendly night, to be sure, but only the night.
Did he spend minutes, or hours, finishing his climb on the wall? The Calishite had no idea, though the time seemed to drag on for a half a lifetime. He could have climbed fifty feet or five hundred. The whole nightmarish ascent blurred together in a collage of pain, endurance, despair, and determination.
But at last he reached the top. He sensed immediately, as he crawled onto the flat surface above a sheer face of granite, that no more cliff lay before him. He felt the wind on his face, and it carried the strong odor of forest rot. Gasping in relief, he pulled himself away from the brink and found the stump of an old tree to lean against.
He sat facing outward, toward the cliff. It took him several minutes to convince himself that even a monster of supernatural ability would not be able to scramble up that face. Only something equipped with hands, or wings, could make such a climb.
He looked toward the sky and saw nothing but vast and inky blackness. How much longer could this night last? Wea-
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rily he pulled Cat's-Claw from its sheath, using the faint illumination of the blade to look around.
Isolated trunks of the dead forest stood arrayed around him, as if the wood had crept toward the precipice to look over the edge. Large broken pieces of rock lay upon the ground, and these were covered with a phosphoresence that caught the light of his weapon and amplified it. The patches of reflective fungus gave the tiny clearing a friendly, welcoming aura.
And then, between two of the tree trunks, at the limits of his vision but unquestionably atop the precipice with him, he saw the two yellow eyes, still unblinking, and coming closer.
"Where's Daryth?"
Tristan, standing lonely guard duty over the little camp, spun in surprise as Robyn emerged from the darkness. He had assumed she slept.
The Sword of Cymrych Hugh still leaned against the rock, casting its light around their small camp. Tristan worried about the possibility of the dim light giving their position away, but somehow this night had seemed too dark, too black to face without some form of illumination. He wondered if it was cowardice that caused him to leave the sword out as a light.
"He... went off into the night." Tristan didnt want to confess that he had sent his companion away. "We had an argument. He got angry,"
Robyn didn't look surprised, just concerned. Tristan felt a need to talk to her, but he didn't know what to say. How could he make her understand?
"We fought about you," he blurted suddenly.
"Oh?"
"He can't forgive the way I hurt you. I understand that?believe me, I can't forgive myself." Tristan groped for words to continue, to keep her looking at him, talking to him. "Daryth ..." But he couldnt bring himself to tell her of the Calishite's love.
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"You fought, and then you sent him away?" The words were cool and accusing.
"No!" The denial was instinctive, and he immediately regretted it. "\es ... I did."
"What's become of the man I loved?" Robyn seemed honestly puzzled. "Why do you do such things? You have friends, followers, people who love you and wish to help you! And one by one you drive us away!"
"I didn't wish that! I was bewitched by something, some force I don't understand. I only know that I feared for you when you were gone. If harm had come to you, I could not have lived with myself!"
"Rest assured, sire, that if harm comes to me it will not be your responsibility to bear! I have control of my own destiny; I have chosen this mission for myself. If I suffer because of that, so be it. The responsibility is mine."
"Very well," said the king quietly. "But will you let me help you?"
"tes," replied the druid, equally softly. She turned and looked into the night surrounding their camp. "I wonder where Daryth is. .. ."
Taggar, shaman of Norland, threw down his ash-streaked deerskin and paced angrily around the smoky lodge. The signs, he was forced to admit to himself, were all bad.
First, the king should have returned by now. Grunnarch the Red, of course, always pressed his raids late into the season, but winter was about to begin and there were still no signs of the Red King's longships.
Second, the storms had roared into Norland from the Trackless Sea every other day for a fortnight. Every shaman Anew that seven storms in fourteen days bespoke great ill.
And thirdly, most awful of all, was the news brought by the abject farmer who even now stood outside the leather-bound shaman's lodge. The wretch had lost nine sheep in one night!
Each of these omens, in its own right, would have forced Taggar to call a prophecy of ill will for the coming winter.
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Buf all three together . . . it was too much to conceive!
Indeed, Tempus was mightily displeased. And Taggar thought that he knew why. Tempus, brawny god of war and the deity worshiped by most of the northmen, relished the clash of battle, the shedding of blood, and the triumph of routing the enemy from the field. In normal circumstances, the northmen were the perfect tools for furthering the aims of Tempus. They had chosen him as their god, and he favored them with his blessing.
But during the last war, the northmen had crusaded under the auspices of a different god, though the warriors themselves had been ignorant of that fact. Tempus must have been angered by the slight, and the men of the north had done nothing since to gain his favor.
Taggar was now convinced, in the absence of his king and of any plunder of battle, that Tempus would call down his anger upon his people when they were most vulnerable, during the cruel months of winter.
For the god of war was not a patient deity.
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For a long lime, Daryth did nothing except meet the cold gaze of the predator with his own unblinking stare. Neither the monster nor the man moved a muscle, though the Calishite strained to keep his eyes open. He felt it would be disastrous to blink.
He wondered how the creature had climbed to the top of the cliff. It had appeared off to one side, not directly behind him, so he deduced that it had gone up or down the gorge for a distance until it found a place where the sides were not so steep. Then it must have climbed the slope and come along the crest to find him.
Suddenly the creature moved. Daryth saw the eyes disappear behind the bole of a tree, then appear again, still boring into him. The thing slipped sideways through the woods, marking a semicircle around him but not moving any closer.
"Why don't you attack, beast?" hissed Daryth, feeling a bit giddy from the strain. "Are you afraid? Yes, you know my cat's-tooth has a sharp bite!"
The creature did slink a little closer at his words, and Daryth found himself wishing it would leap at him or do anything but this patient stalk. The beast was, he sensed, playing games with him, the way a cat plays with a wounded mouse. The analogy struck him as decidedly unpleasant, if accurate.
Gradually the man became aware of a duD grayness diffusing through the air. It could not yet be called light. It seemed more a slight lifting of the total darkness that had
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blinded him for so long. A smoky haze drifted among the gaunt tree trunks, reminding him of the scene after a devastating fire.
As the light gradually increased, Daryth witnessed the advent of a heavily overcast, foggy day. Even the minimal illumination was far preferable to the inky darkness. And he decided something else, changing a decision he had made in the depths of the night: It was no longer enough to simply live until the dawn.
He saw the creature take form against the forest, a nightmare thing of purest black. He saw the great shoulders and massive, soundless paws. The gleaming teeth, clearly visible in a widely gaping maw, seemed to hunger for his flesh. And he saw the long, sickening tentacles that coiled and twisted from the thing's shoulders, clearly dispelling any suspicions he might have had that this was simply a great panther.
And now, with the coming of daylight, he formed a ndw goal for himself: He would slay this nightmare creature. He didn't know exactly how, for the monster's physical tools far superseded his own. But that left him a battle of wits, and the Calishite had always been proud of his wits. Indeed, he resolved to outsmart the creature and bring it to its well-deserved death!
But how? Obviously, he told himself, with a trap. The designing of a trap was a thing well taught at the Academy of Stealth, and a tactic at which Daryth excelled. Of course, he had never tried to trap anything like this before, but that was no deterrent. A basic rule of trap design states that no good trap is identical in purpose or execution to any other trap. The very concept of repetition, in a trap, becomes a weakness.
He looked again at the monster. The yellow eyes stared back into his own, but the beast had not moved. It crouched between a tree and a rock, poised as if to spring. The tentacles, which he could see more clearly as dawn progressed, writhed and twitched like disfigured snakes along the cat's back or over its head.
His first decision to make was, should it be a killing trap
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or a capturing trap? Killing, obviously. Or if the trap could not be ultimately fatal, it must at least smash the creature hard enough to allow Daryth to administer the coup de grace.
Next he must take stock of the tools at hand. He had Cat's-Ciaw, of course, and the dagger, and rope . . . fire-starting tools, and trees, lots of trees. And there was the precipice, he reminded himself.
He thought about his selection for a moment and realized that the precipice seemed to offer the greatest chance of doing the cat harm, though, of course, if he could lure it under a large, leaning tree trunk, he could also hope to give it a sound thump.
The third consideration, the approach to the trap, did not offer ready inspiration. The woods here were open, and the little existing underbrush had withered and rotted away. The cat-creature could go between the trees wherever it pleased.
Neither did the cliff seem to offer an auspicious location for his trap. Though the rocky lip was sharp, nowhere did the ground slope down toward the precipice. Instead, it marched straight and level, right up to the very edge, which meant it would be difficult to get the monster to slide toward the drop.
He looked again at the creature, which still held that unblinking gaze. The monster watched the Calishite almost curiously now and seemed to be in no hurry to attack. Slowly Daryth climbed to his feet. He had to determine how mobile he could be.
A terrible aching throb exploded from his right foot when he tried to rest even a fraction of his weight on it. Wearily he leaned against the tree and slumped back to the ground. He would need a crutch for any movement at all.
He stretched to his right and reached the end of a stout stick that had fallen from a tree. Pulling it across his lap, he began hacking at it with his dagger, all the while watching the creature as it watched him. Soon he had cut off a short piece of branch, which he lashed across the end of the longer piece for an armrest.
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Switching Cat's-Claw to his left hand, he climbed slowly to his feet, leaning his weight on the crutch. With an awkward hobble, he started moving away from the creature, determined to find a location that would provide him with his trap.
His foot continued to throb, but the pain had become a fact of life, and he no longer took special note of it. He hopped for several steps, then leaned against a tree as he suddenly grew dizzy.
And then the monster made its first audible footfall, directly behind the Calishite. Daryth whirled in shock, dropping his crutch and transferring Cat's-Claw into his right hand. The creature had bounded a hundred feet or more in mere seconds! Now it snarled savagely, only a few paces away.
Daryth firmly anchored his back against the tree, feeling the rotten bark peel away under his weight. He hefted the scimitar in both of his hands and stared the creature full in the face. He felt no fear of the thing, just a cold anger that, like his pain, seemed more a fact of life than a raging emotion.
The cat-beast came closer, creeping a pace at a time. The shiny black body crouched as if it prepared to spring after each slithering step. With repugnance, Daryth saw the suction cups lining the leathery tentacles. The moist lips of each flexed and pursed as if seeking contact with the flesh of their victim.
