“What do you mean?”
“I told you earlier.”
“You’ve told me nothing, nothing of importance. What have you been doing here for all these centuries? Playing God to the primitives, indulging in petty power plays amongst yourselves?”
Aruan came close to the sparkling phantom that was Bardolin’s presence.
“Let me show you what we have been doing over these lost years, Brother Mage, what tricks we have been learning out here in the western wilderness.”
There was a change, as swift as breath misting a cold pane of glass. Aruan had disappeared, and in his place there loomed the hulking figure of a full-blooded shifter, a werewolf with lemon-bright eyes and a long muzzle glimmering with fangs. Bardolin’s imp whimpered and hid behind his master’s translucent simulacrum.
“It’s not possible,” Bardolin whispered.
“Did I not tell you, Bardolin, that we had found new and powerful wisdom among the inhabitants of this continent?” Aruan’s voice said, the beast’s muzzle contorting around the words, dripping ropes of saliva which glistened in the moonlight.
“It’s an illusion,” Bardolin said.
“Touch the illusion then, Brother Illusion.”
Of course—Bardolin at this moment was no more than an apparition himself, a copy of his true self, conjured up by the incredible power of this man, this beast before him.
“I am no simulacrum, I assure you,” Aruan’s voice said.
“It is impossible. Sufferers of the black disease cannot learn any of the other six disciplines. It is against the very nature of things. Shifters cannot also be mages.”
The Aruan shifter drew close. “They can here. We all are, friend Bardolin. We all partake of the beast in this country; and now so do you.”
Something in Bardolin quailed before the werewolf’s calm certainty.
“Not I.”
“But you do. You have looked into the very heart and mind of a shifter at the moment of its transformation. More, you have loved one of our kind. I can read this in you as though it were inked across the parchment of your very soul.” The beast laughed horribly.
“Griella.”
“Yes—that was the name. The memory of that moment is burned within you. There is a part of you, deep in the black spaces of your heart, which would gladly have joined her in her suffering, could she but have loved you in return . . .
“Your imp is a poor sort of buffer against probing, Bardolin. Where you yourself might hold out against me, he is a free conduit to the heart of your fears and emotions. You are a book lying open to be read any time I have a desire to read.”
“You monster!” Bardolin snarled, but fear was edging an icicle of dread into his flesh.
The werewolf came closer until the heat and stink of it were all around him and the great head blotted out the stars. They stood on the pyramid once more: Bardolin’s image could feel the stone of it under its soles.
“Do you know how we make shifters in this country, Bardolin?”
“Tell me,” Bardolin croaked. Unable to help himself, he retreated a step.
“For a person to be infected with the black disease, he must do two things. Firstly, he, or she, must have physical relations with a full-blooded shape-shifter. Secondly, he or she must eat a portion of that shifter’s kill. It’s that simple. We have not yet divined why certain people become certain beasts—that is a complex field which would reward more study. A question of personal style, perhaps. But the basic process is well known to us. We are a race of shape-shifters, Bardolin, and now you are one of us as you once secretly wished to be.”
“No,” Bardolin whispered, aghast. He remembered a kind of lovemaking, a sweating half-dreamt battle in the night. And he remembered Kersik offering him the rib of meat to bite into. “Oh, lord God, no!”
He felt a grip on his shoulder as he stood there with his hands covering his face, and Aruan the man was back again, the beast gone. His face was both kindly and triumphant.
“You belong to us, my friend. We are brothers in truth, bound together by the Dweomer and by the malady which lurks in our very flesh.”
“To hell with you!” Bardolin cried. “My soul is my own.”
“Not any more,” Aruan said implacably. “You are mine, as much a creature in my keeping as Gosa or Kersik are. You will do my bidding even when you are unaware that the will which rules you is not your own. I have hundreds like you across the entire reach of the Old World. But you are special, Bardolin. You are a man who might in a former time have been a friend. For that reason I will leave you be for a while. Think on this at our parting: the race whose blood runs in you and me, in the veins of the herbalists and the hedge-witches and the petty cantrimers—it came from here, in the west. We are an ancient people, the oldest race in the world, and yet for centuries we have bled and died to satisfy the prejudices of lesser men. That will change. We will meet again, you and I, and when we do you will know me as your lord, and as your friend.”
The wraith that was Bardolin began to fade. The imp screamed thinly and tried to run towards the spectre of its vanishing master, but Aruan caught it in his arms. It writhed there pitiably, but could not get free.
“You have no further need of your familiar, Brother Mage. He is a weakness you can do without, and I have already mapped the road from his mind to yours. Say goodbye.”
With a flick of his powerful arms, Aruan wrenched round the imp’s head on its slim neck. There was a sharp crack, and the little creature flopped lifelessly.
Bardolin shrieked in grief and agony, and it seemed to him as though the jungle night dissolved in a sun- brightness, a scalding holocaust which seared the interstices of his mind and soul. The world funnelled past him like a plummeting star, and he saw the city, the mountain, the black jungle of the Western Continent swoop away as though he were riding the molten halo of a blasted cannonball into the sky.
His shriek became the tail of the comet he had become. He fell to earth again, a raging meteor intent on burying itself at the heart of the world.
And struck, passing through a terrible burning and light into utter darkness.
T HERE was at once too much and too little to take in. Hawkwood was absurdly reminded of a festival he had attended once in southern Torunna, when the effigies of the old gods had been displayed to public ridicule: huge constructions of wicker and cloth and wood in every grotesque shape and form dancing madly with the teams of men who lurked inside their colourful carcasses, until it was impossible to tell one warped form from another and they had dissolved into a whirling confusion of monstrous faces and limbs.
Here, it was dark. There were no colours, simply a monochrome nightmare. Shadows with blazing eyes which seemed to shoot up out of the very ground, the heat from their raging darknesses a palpable thing even in the depths of the night. Forms rather than bodies. A picture here of an animal’s head set upon a bipedal frame, the warm splash of blood, the screaming. It passed with the vivid unreality of a dream. A dark mirage. But it was real.
The men at the rear screamed horribly, the chest they bore torn out of their hands. A crash, and then a shower of tinkling gold across the roadway. Shadows lifted the two men high in the air and then something happened too quickly to make out, and they were in pieces, their viscera ribboning out like flung streamers, their bodies become meat and shattered bone which were flung away.
As the shadows closed in, the men at the front fired their arquebuses, flashes and plumes of smoke. There were howls of pain, despairing wails from the approaching shapes.
The rest of the soldiers had dropped the other chest, and also their sick comrade, Gerrera. They bunched together and levelled their own weapons. Gerrera screamed as the shadows came upon him and he was engulfed, torn apart. A volley of arquebus fire, the iron bullets tearing into the ranks of the half-glimpsed foe and the night was clawed apart by their screams. Huge bodies could be seen decorating the roadway, immobile but at the same time subtly changing in bulk and shape.
The attackers drew off for a moment, and Murad’s soldiers reloaded their firearms feverishly.
“We must make a run for it,” the nobleman said, his narrow chest heaving and the sweat standing out on his
