down he saw his jacket and shirt lay in ribbons and there were three deep gashes cut into his flesh. The blood was pumping out through his ruptured armour. Desperately he tried to staunch it with a torn-off piece of his shirt, but as he tended to himself there was another blur of movement. His head snapped round so sharply he thought his neck had broken. Stars flashed across his vision; then the pain came, thundering out in a wave across his temples. By the time he had caught himself, his eyes were filling with liquid. He wiped them clear with the back of his hand, glanced down, saw the dark smear, dripping on his trousers.
The blow had dazed him; everything seemed to be moving too slowly, fractured, as if a strobe had been activated. The terrible hunting cry rose up all around him, different this time, triumphant.
No, he thought. I had it.
A shimmer of activity, so quick he barely saw it. Somehow he managed to fire off a bolt. The Questing Beast avoided it with ease.
As it could have done before, he realised. How stupid was he? He searched for a path back to Thunder, the images coming in broken, stinging form; he had to get away, recover. But the blur of movement was going around too fast, circling, forcing him back. It had cut off all escape routes. He was trapped, his back coming up against a stone wall. Then he stumbled through the gap of the Water Gate and rolled over and over down a steep bank, coming up hard against more stone blocks beyond which was a small, pebbled beach and the dark, lapping water.
As his thoughts started to come free from his daze, he realised: the Questing Beast had shown a ferocious intelligence and cunning, recognising the danger from him, probably over the days he thought he had been stalking it. He had been treating it like a stupid beast; it had been waiting for the opportunity to neutralise him.
It lashed forward from the dark and retreated in the blink of an eye. A gout of blood erupted from his forearm.
The pain was lost in the wild reel of his thoughts. He tumbled over the stone blocks on to the beach; now there was only water at his back.
The Questing Beast knew he was wounded; fatally, he realised, the same time the word entered his head. He could feel his clothes heavy with blood. How much longer did he have? The fragility of his thoughts gave him an answer. He'd failed: himself, Ruth, all the others. His stupidity had come through as it always did.
The Beast no longer seemed to be hiding from him. Through the haze he could pick it out more clearly than he had before. Its shape was not fixed and did not settle down like the Tuatha De Danann did once his mind had formed an analog; it was as if it preceded form, shouting across the aeons from a time when there was only intelligence and emotion. He glimpsed writhing, serpentine coils, something hard and bony, something that moved like gelatin and lashed with the spike of a scorpion's tail; felt, in one terrible moment, the cold, hard fury of its mind, as if it could reach out physically and strike him. This was bigger than him, better than him.
And then he realised, with some primal instinct, that it was gearing up for the final blow. He had little sense left through the pain; most of it was leaking out with his life's blood. But he asked himself this question: how cunning was he?
How cunning?
Blackness formed a tunnel around the periphery of his vision. He dropped the crossbow, went down to his knees, blood pooling in his eyes; he only had his instinct to go on. He bowed his head, prepared himself for the final blow.
The Questing Beast came forward in a wave of night; it was as if the wind had teeth and was roaring at him.
Veitch threw himself down on his stomach. At the same time he somehow managed to pull the sword free and raised it above his head. He held it firm when he felt it bite deep, and even when the sheer force of the Questing Beast's attack threatened to knock it from his grasp, he dug in and angled. The stink of charred batteries filled the air. The liquid swamped him in one awful deluge. The Questing Beast's momentum carried it over his head, screaming so loudly his eardrums burst.
And then he was in a syrupy world of silence, didn't hear the splash as the creature plummeted into the water. He turned on his back, saw stars and the moon; knew, in a damp, sad way, it would be the last time he would see them. He'd lost feeling in every part of his body. There were just his thoughts now, bursting like fireworks, slowly winding down.
The play of light on the lapping water was hypnotic. It was a good sight to see as the last sight. But it wasn't the end, it wasn't the end. The Beast wasn't dead; not yet. The black shape was moving through the water like a stalking shark. Thoughts triggered, stumbled into each other and then ran away obliquely; and he wondered how many times in the past it had broken through before Otherworld sucked it back, slinking through the waves, creating ripples of mythology on flickering black and white frames.
And as he thought this, it suddenly spurred into life, sending a V-shaped ripple breaking out on either side as it hurtled towards him. He had only a second to force himself up on his elbows before it erupted out of the water in front of him. He had a brief impression of a blackness as deep as space, of sharp, clacking teeth, and things that could have been tendrils or tentacles or arms, and then he closed his eyes and waited for pain that never came.
Somehow his lids flickered open again, and this time he wondered if he was already dead, for the scene around him had changed dramatically. There was a flurry of activity. Melliflor was there with the rest of the Queen's guard, oddly twisted spears catching the moonlight, and nets that billowed like the sails of a ship. And there was Tom looming over him, looking like Veitch had never seen him before; not stern nor angry, but caring and frightened, and in that instant he knew he was dead; or dreaming; or both.
The tunnel around his vision closed in tightly. And as everything faded into oblivion, his mind flashed back to that brief contact with the alien mind of the Questing Beast. It was a moment of sublime mystery, but there were some human reference points he could grasp: loneliness, a terrible yearning for another of its kind, long, long gone, lost in those early days when the world was new. That was why it was questing. Pain and hurt as brittle as glass; not a beast at all.
How awful, he thought. To be hunting it in that way. For it to be imprisoned by the Tuatha De Danann in the stinking bowels of their court. How awful and stupid and meaningless.
'You'll be okay now.'
The voice: in his head, or somewhere outside? Then, like treacle flowing into his mind, the realisation that he was hearing; how could that be? When Witch's eyes finally responded he saw through a haze the stables in the Court of the Yearning Heart. His blood stained the dirty straw. Thunder stood nearby, stamping its hooves.
With the return of consciousness, agony exploded throughout his body. He was slumped against the wall in the mangled remnants of his armour, now coloured browny-purple with his dried blood. The deep gash across his chest was still ragged, but it didn't look quite as deep; even so, Veitch couldn't understand how he was still alive. From the way he had started to shiver, his death still seemed a definite possibility. But he could hear again, although he knew his drums had burst at the lochside.
Tom hove into view, dropping down on to his haunches; it was his familiar Scottish brogue Veitch had heard earlier. 'What happened?' Witch's voice a feeble croak.
'The Queen saw-'
'I saw your tremendous victory.' Tom stood up and walked over to the other side of the stables as the Queen knelt down next to Veitch. She was wearing flowing, diaphanous white robes that were startlingly out of place in the bloody grime of the stables. 'You proved yourself a great champion. My champion.' There was great pride in her voice. 'I had you brought here, for in my court nothing truly dies if I so wish it. Here your wounds will have time to heal. You will be well again, Ryan Veitch.' Melliflor laid a crystal bowl of water next to her. She took a white cloth from him, dipped it in the water and began to dab gently at his forehead, slowly wiping away the splatters of his blood.
'I can't believe it,' he muttered deliriously. 'A Queen… tending to me..
'Even Queens must recognise great bravery. Your name will be exalted, even among the Tuatha De Danann. And that bravery was carried out in my name, a fitting tribute to the Queen of the Yearning Heart. The Questing Beast is back in its chamber-'
'It survived?'
'It exists, as always.'
Witch had the sudden feeling the Beast had been released merely for him to hunt it down, a perverse sport
