A Different Kingdom(110)

His keys.

His free hand scrabbled for them, digging through the wet dirt and rotten twigs. Then they were hard and cold in his palm. With absurd familiarity, the key to his front door was in his fingers. An old key, for an ageing Victorian red-brick. The locks had never been changed.

An iron key.

He stabbed it into one of the green-glowing eyes and saw the light sputter out.

The grip on his arm slackened, the teeth pulling free from his flesh. The wolf fell to one side with a sound like the splintering of sap-heavy wood. The weight was off his chest and he was breathing more easily.

When he looked again there was no trace of the beast, but only a framework, hard to see in the neardark, like a skeleton of twigs, the flesh mere shards of rotting bark and something like dark fungus within the woody rib cage. Then it sank into the forest soil and was gone.

He lay back. His body was a massive labouring wound, and the blood was pulsing out of him to clot in ropy strings on the leaves. There was no feeling in the arm the wolf had bitten. Peering fearfully at it, he saw his flesh hanging in streamers and tendrils from the bare bone. His hand flopped like a dead spider at the end of his wrist. No movement. The bone was not bitten through, but the sinews and nerves had gone. He recorded the fact with an odd detachment. It did not matter. He was going to die here—that much was plain.

But there was something else to do first, He had seen Cat. (Or had it been Rose?) That was a reason to get up, to knot together the remains of his shirt and tuck his mangled arm within them.

It was hard even to stagger. Moonlight ahead, a brighter shade beyond the trees.

And behind him the howls of other beasts. A pack of them now, on his trail.

If only he had the Ulfberht. And the strength to wield it, he added to himself.

Sense and consciousness were coming and going like a blossoming red balloon in his mind. He was wandering, the pain tearing his mind free of panic and fear.

I'm dying.

But that did not matter either. If nothing else, he wanted to sate his curiosity before the end. And to see Cat again. Maybe he would have a fairy-tale ending after all and die in her arms.

He fell, cursing feebly, and then he was on his feet again. Had someone helped him? Was there an arm supporting him?

Never mind. It was easier to walk now. He came through the trees and then there was a brightness, a flood of silver light. The wood ended as though it were a carpet with clear-cut edges. And there was open country before him, rising into hills. Looming directly to his front, one hill reared up above its brothers and became a steep-sided crag, the rock faces on it black in the moonlight. There was a building at its summit, built 80 cleverly that it was impossible to say where rock ended and man-made wall began. A castle.

He smiled. Of course. It all fits.

He stepped out of the wood, leaving it behind just as the murderous shadows lunged at his back. They stopped at the eaves of the trees, snapping and snarling their frustration, but came no further. Michael grinned at them.

Fuck you.

Then he began stumbling and staggering south across the moon-bright hills, towards the Castle of the Horseman.





TWENTY-TWO

IT WAS COLD up in the hills. The moon sparkled off frost-coated grass that thickened as he limped onwards until it had become a covering of brittle snow. Soon the powdery stuff was above his ankles, soaking and numbing his feet. He stuffed handfuls of it into his mouth, trying to assuage a raging thirst. Its chill made his teeth ache and his head throb. His eyes were like two hot globes of glass set in a freezing skull, but he felt little pain from his injuries. Dimly he thought he might be in shock.



He accepted without question the burning need in him to approach the castle ahead, and battled uphill grimly, slipping and sliding on the snowy ground— and once falling on his face with an impact that tore a shriek out of him. Back in the wood the wolves were still howling as though mocking his pain.

But I beat them, he thought. I got past them, somehow. Made it so far.

His breath plumed; a moonlit feather. As the rises became ever steeper he began scrabbling upwards on hand and knees. His passage left the snow scuffed and tom, speckled with blood. He was carving a brutal path southwards through the white, pristine covering, leaving a trail that would be visible for miles. The woodsman part of him was bothered by that, but the rest knew it did not matter. He had survived the Wolfweald, had seen the end of it after so many years. There would be no more pursuit.

The castle loomed slowly closer, bulking as black as pitch against a star-filled sky. There were no lights within, no sign of life. It might have been a ruin set at the edge of the world, a grim monument.

He worked his way higher. The hills began to level off after a while. He was walking across their crests now, with the occasional loss of altitude as they dipped. He was higher up than he had ever been in this world before, and looking round he could see the whole vast panorama of the earth filling every horizon. To the north the forest rolled for league after uncounted league under the moon, the treetops glistening with frost. To east and west there were the hills he was stumbling across. They were higher around him, and he realized that he was walking up a drumlin-filled valley with the real, stony heights of the others extending in higher tors and ridges to west and east. It seemed to be a pass extending through them to the far south, and dominating it all was the castle.