Kellen raised his head and looked around, blinking at the brightness that confronted him.
He was facing a sheer wall of white granite. It reflected the midday sun with a bright eye-hurting intensity. A gentle slope of gravel and granite chips led up to a shallow opening in the rock, as if two blocks of granite had been eased a few feet apart by some master hand. The trail they'd been following led on around the edge of the cliff, and the path Shalkan stood on was only a few feet wide. The ground dropped off into a steep, brush-filled gully on the far side of the path, and beyond, the ground sloped sharply away in a tangle of granite outcroppings and barren sloping hills, all bathed in harsh, cloudless spring sunlight.
'We're running out of time, and this is the best we've got. They can't get behind us there, and we'll have room to fight. But you'll need a weapon.' The unicorn raised his head and sniffed the air, and added, 'Quickly. We probably won't hear them coming until it's too late.'
Kellen slid from Shalkan's back, his hand automatically going to his belt. But his penknife was a tiny thing, suitable for sharpening quills and cutting paper, not to doing battle with monstrous stone dogs.
He cast a frantic look around. At the end of the path was a conifer tree, its trunk gnarled and twisted by years of exposure to the elements in this hostile place. The branches should have been covered with green needles, but instead, they were bare and stark. Dead. Maybe dry enough to break off a piece, but not so brittle the piece would be useless. Kellen ran toward it.
When he reached it, he saw that it had been struck by lightning, shearing away most of the trunk and burning the core to charcoal. One thick smooth branch, solid and heavy as iron, the bark long polished away by the wind, came away easily in his hands. He returned, panting, with his makeshift club.
'Good,' Shalkan said brusquely. The unicorn turned and lunged up the slope. Kellen scrambled after him, slipping and sliding on the loose rock that covered the ground. The uncertain footing would be another advantage for them when the Hounds came for them.
Once Kellen had armed himself, the two of them climbed to the cleft in the granite wall. It was shallow and narrow—only four feet deep, narrowing to a point at the back, and a bit over a yard wide at the opening. No room for a Hound to get around them and come at them from behind. Though the mountain air had a cool bite to it, the pale walls of the pocket canyon radiated heat, as warm as living flesh to the touch.
Kellen clutched at his wooden club tightly, aware in the sudden stillness that he could hear a scrabbling sound, like rats in a rockfall, disturbing pebbles as they ran, only much louder.
It was the sound of rock on rock. The Hounds.
The next thing he saw was the bright flash of sun as it struck a polished surface, and then Kellen saw his first Hound, surging up over the edge of the gully.
It charged up the gravel slope at a dead run, as unnervingly silent as Shalkan had warned. It looked exactly like the ones outside his front door, aside from being carved from a different color of granite, and that somehow added an element of horror to the whole situation, as if this were a strange waking nightmare. It made him feel as if he and Shalkan were being attacked by the City itself.
The Hound was the shape and size of a regular mastiff, carved all out of mirror-polished red granite, lovingly detailed by its maker-Mage down to the studded collar about its neck. Its red, blank eyes, like featureless marbles, glared unseeing in their direction; its red tongue lolled between its red teeth; its red lips were drawn back in a red snarl; and it lunged up the treacherous slope with those polished granite eyes fixed unblinkingly on Kellen's face.
Behind it came more—a dozen, twenty, too many to count. All identical to the first save for the color of the granite from which they'd been carved: red, white, black, grey. All silent, save for the thud of their stone feet against the ground, the clatter of stone paws on more stone, the clicking of dislodged gravel rolling downslope, or the smack of their granite flanks against each other as they jostled for position. How many were there? Two dozen? More?
Kellen had a moment for one pang of terror—when Shalkan had first described the Hunt, he'd thought there'd be only a few Hounds, six, perhaps, or eight—before the first one reached him. Then there was no more time for thought at all, as the Hounds surged up the graveled slope, the red one in the lead, fangs bared for his throat.
He swung his club, aiming low at the first Hound's brittle and vulnerable legs. Once, when he was a child, he'd seen a stone golem slip and break. He knew that even though they were enchanted, the Hound golems were still as fragile as the carved stone they really were, and for all its bulk, a Hound's legs were comparatively slender in proportion to its size.
His club connected with a dull impact of wood against stone. With a pang of savage delight, Kellen saw the Hound's foreleg break off with a crack, and the three-legged Hound lost its balance and rolled backward down the slope, bowling over several of the Hounds behind it with dull tombstone thuds. They milled and snapped at each other just as if they were dogs of flesh, making a sound like boulders tumbling together.
But a moment later, they seemed to recall their task, and surged in a body up the hill—and they just kept coming.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flicker of magick. One of the Hounds had reached Shalkan. The unicorn had reached out and touched it with his horn, and the Hound had stiffened, becoming a nonmagickal stone statue once more. It tumbled down, just like any other boulder, away from the canyon opening. Bits of it cracked off and went flying in all directions as it fell.
