A command from the shadows took the creatures reluctantly into deeper darkness beneath twisted trees. Their conversation went on, mumbles and mutters, silences broken by grunts of agreement. They came into the firelight once more, this time grouped around a taller one, one with a head borne forward, the neck extended somewhat like a beast’s, but with joints which were smoother and more ordinarily human. This one came first to Jasmine, and she tingled with apprehension. If dogs had a king, she thought, it should look like this, smile like this with sharp muzzle, let its tongue loll like this through long jaws. It grasped her hand and smelt of it, then the other, then knelt to sniff her feet as the others had done.
It turned away to Thewson, then to each of the others, repeating the sniffing of hands and feet. It hunkered, finally, at the fireside, ears tilting forward toward the assembled warty ones, grunting, ‘These have not been with it.’
Jasmine understood this muttered speech. Lain-achor and Daingol stopped struggling in their astonishment. Thewson turned his head fractionally within his bonds. The dog king repeated, ‘Not these. No smell of the things. No smell of the muldrek.’
Heads cocked, ears swivelled, eyes peered at them. Hands patted at them nervously, taking away the ropes and gags, leaping away as though fearing retaliation. Thewson plucked his spear from the fireside where it had been dropped by the warty ones, drew Jasmine toward the others, uncertain whether to stand fast or flee.
‘What – who are they?’ Jasmine asked.
The dog king regarded her sneeringly, then nodded toward Daingol. ‘He knows,’ muttered the dog king. ‘I see he knows.’
It was true. Daingol drew the travellers into a group around him, stood resolutely facing the creatures. ‘You are the creatures of the Lone Man. The Hermit of Tinok Ochor.’
The creatures gargled and mumbled, giggled a little with a quick, feminine titter. Jasmine wondered if there were women among them. Girls? Was some femaleness caught in these warped and rough-hided forms? The dog king nodded. ‘No more his creatures, man. He made us, but he is gone, and we go on living.’
‘I thought you were a myth,’ Daingol said. ‘I thought you were vanished in history, something to tell the children.’
‘No. Not vanished. Not a myth. Real. Alive. We go on living and living. It is wearisome, but we do it. Sometimes we laugh. When we are killed, we are angry. The things are killing us, eating us, eating our God Horse, our God Mare….’
‘The thing….whatever it is that smells so strange? We smelt it on the trail, but it has nothing to do with us.’
‘Not true. You come from a place, a place Gerenhodh, we hear you say it. Those muldrek things go to Gerenhodh, and to Orena. We hear them say it.’
‘Powers,’ breathed Dhariat. ‘What manner of things are they?’
‘Crawling things, hard as iron, slithering and strong, slow and hard, with feet that tear, with mouths that burn.’
In imagination they pictured some hard, horrible thing moving through the stone halls toward Old Aunt and the Sisters. ‘Where they are trapped, there below…’ breathed Jasmine.
‘If there is a crack, the worm will go there. There is no place it cannot go.’ The dog king intoned this as though relishing their horror.
Sowsie interrupted. ‘I know what he’s talking about. We know them as Tharnel worms, from the far north somewhere. But the Sisters aren’t children. They won’t be easy prey, even for that.’
‘They take them, those muldrek, to your place. You are the cause of it!’ The dog king was accusative and insistent, posturing before his followers as he began shouting at them. They became sharply aware of their position, backed against a rock wall, re-armed, but surrounded by hundreds of shifting bodies who were beginning to murmur restlessly.
‘We are not the cause of it,’ said Sowsie carefully. ‘We are not the cause of it.’
‘If you-ones did not live there, the muldrek would not come,’ the dog went on.
‘If you-ones did not live here,’ Thewson shouted, ‘then the muldrek would not go through your place.’
This confused the dog king, and he cocked his head in irritation before turning to gargle a command at several of those in the mob which surged forward once more bearing ropes, crouching and circling.
‘No,’ thundered Thewson. ‘Did you not see what burden we are bearing? Horse child. Child of God Horse is in our care. Do not offend your God.’
Dhariat caught at Jasmine’s sleeve. ‘Play up to him,’ she urged. ‘Demand that they bring you the foal.’
Jasmine stamped on the stones, spoke shrilly at the circling faces. ‘Bring me the Horse child which was in my care before God Mare is offended with you!’
The warty men quailed under her voice, muttered and drew aside to let others pass through leading the foal. ‘The goat,’ Jasmine cried. ‘To nurse this little one.’
There were expressions of dismay, eyes rolling toward the dog king where he crouched, tongue lolling, against the wall.
‘Ammmm,’ he said foolishly. ‘It is gone. We would eat it.’
‘Then you must find another,’ Thewson demanded. ‘From the fields, from the herdsmen, from the villages. Find one full of milk and bring it here or the God Mare will grow angry.’
Instructed thus, the confusion among the warty men grew even more frantic with small groups going this way and that, aimlessly, like a scattered ant hill. One group broke away to run wildly through the rocky chasm of the entrance. The dog king watched them go saying bleakly, ‘Fools, fools. See them run. Oh, if these were
