Wolfbreed (5 page)

Not meant to take this kind of punishment, the wrecked door sagged. The third plank, near the center, creaked and tilted out a hand’s breadth at the top of the doorway, pivoting on the oak bar. One of the men, Cawald, reached up to push it back into place.

Cawald suddenly fell to his knee, screaming, his right leg disappearing into the gap the tilting board had made in the bottom of the door. His neighbors reached for him as he thrashed to the ground.

He screamed and kicked at the door with his left leg, his right one vanishing through the door, all the way to his hip. His comrades grabbed him under the arms, braced their feet against the wreckage of the door, and strained to pull him back.

The two men fell backward as Cawald disappeared through the gap. His piercing scream came to an abrupt stop and the tilted plank slowly rocked back the way it had come.

Then it kept going, falling into the chamber beyond the doorway, leaving a dead column of darkness in the body of the door.

Oytim took aim at the gap, certain he would see something move in the darkness, a glint of tooth or eye—

“No, you idiots!” Oytim screamed at the men by the door. Two had closed on the breach from either side. Using the remains of the door for cover, they bared their swords to strike at anything that might reach from the gap. But they blocked any shot Oytim had at the chamber beyond.

Something moved in the darkness and the soldier to the right of the gap lunged at it. His sword arm lost itself in the darkness, and then his body froze, as if his blade had just hit a stone wall. A look of almost comical surprise crossed his face. Then his body lurched forward, as something pulled his sword arm and slammed his torso against the door. He turned toward the man next to him, as if about to call for help. Then his whole body twisted sideways, his feet leaving the ground as his body was yanked completely through the breach.

“Gods preserve us,” Tulne said, voice cracking.

The other men were closing in on the door, but of the original six men who had been holding the door, there were now only two. And one of them was staring at the darkness that had swallowed his comrade rather than holding the door.

Something slammed the door again, and the brackets holding the oak bar in place gave way with a scream of twisted metal and a cloud of masonry dust. The heavy oak bar fell as the remaining splintered planks of the door collapsed outward.

ünter ran after the creature, armed only with the silver dagger. It was suicidal, but the carnage had pushed him beyond reason. He did not want to survive to see his men slaughtered.

Dagger in one hand, lantern in the other, he ran up the five dark levels toward the main door. The stairway was close, and
turned tightly, so that any step might bring him face-to-face with the creature. The stone steps were slick and uneven, and he nearly twisted his ankle several times in his haste.

There were doors at each level of the stores, though only the uppermost one had been barred. Even so, the creature had thrown open each one with enough force to crack the timbers and wrench iron hinges from stone. One door had been so damaged it took several minutes to pull it open enough to allow him through.

Once Günter was past it, his gaze fell on a bloody hand print marring the stone wall. No human hand had made it. The palm was padded, like a wolf’s paw, and the fingers were longer and thicker than a man’s. Above the print, the creature’s claws had been strong enough to leave four parallel scratches on the worked face of the stone.

Somewhere above him he heard a powerful impact. He looked up, and a fine dust filtered through the cracks in the stonework above him, stinging his eyes.

She’s reached the main door …

He shouldn’t have felt the fear as deeply as he did. Even if she could force open the oak bar on the door—something that should require a battering ram—beyond it were thirteen Prûsan warriors, and he had ensured that they would at least have the silver bolts to use on the creature. Thirteen trained battle-hardened men, armed with silver.

It should be enough.

He feared it wasn’t.

Redoubling his efforts, he ran. But he wasn’t surprised when the screaming began.

He shuttered the lantern and cast it aside, hoping that if he came up behind the monster, he might have a clear attack on its back. He ascended the darkened stairway, listening to screams, the sounds of sword against stone, and a low growling that tried to turn his guts to water.

He took the last turn in the stairway to face a corridor filled with light that shouldn’t have been there. The light spilled in from the granary beyond the now-open doorway. Shadowed against the light of the granary, he saw a chaos of bodies moving in the hallway. The air was thick with the sound of Prûsan cursing and the smell of blood. Even if he could make no sense of the chaos in front of him, he saw enough to understand that they fought more than a bloodthirsty monster.

It was a beast that knew enough of tactics to fall back into the corridor after smashing the door. The greater part of the Prûsan guards had fallen in after it, into a space too enclosed and dark to fight effectively against even a normal enemy.

Günter gripped the useless dagger, ordering his men to fall back into the granary, where the open floor might give them a chance. But his shouts were nearly inaudible for the sound of clashing metal and screaming men.

From beyond the melee, a crossbow bolt struck the stone near Günter’s head, striking sparks.

No, wait until you see a target
.

A man fell near Günter, anonymous in the dark. The man groaned briefly before he stopped moving. Günter reached for him, to drag him to the safety of the stairwell, but as he grabbed the man’s shoulder and pulled, he had the sickening realization that the weight only amounted to half a body.

He fought his gorge and stepped out of the stairwell, past the dead man, toward the rapidly disintegrating melee. He saw the silhouettes of two more bodies strike the walls to either side of the corridor, and he saw the clear, hunched form of the monster standing unobstructed in front of the doorway.

Günter charged, too late, at the creature’s back. As he moved forward, he heard a crossbow fire and a howl filled the chamber unlike any sound Günter had heard from the throat of man or beast. The wolf-thing in front of him charged out of the doorway
just as Günter struck. The blow that should have sunk the silver dagger into a vital part of its neck instead had Günter tearing at the air, losing his balance, and tumbling onto the splintered wreckage of the door.

He looked up and saw the lupine demon clearly in the light of the granary; rippling muscle, blood-red fur, claws, and gore-drenched muzzle all closing on the two men still standing, Oytim and Tulne. Both were at the far side of the granary, holding crossbows. Oytim still had a bolt nocked. It had been Tulne who had fired the bolt buried in the beast’s shoulder, and he was desperately trying to reload the crossbow as the creature charged.

As Günter scrambled to his feet, the creature descended on Tulne. The massive red-furred back hid Tulne from Günter’s view, but the man’s scream was cut short before he hit the ground.

Günter ran, jumping over broken timbers and broken bodies while, in front of him, the beast turned its snarling, gory muzzle toward Oytim.

Oytim fired the crossbow up, into the creature’s face. Less than two paces away, the bolt tore into the creature’s head. The beast screamed as it clutched its face, the howl torn free from the throat of Hell.

Günter was halfway to them when the creature grabbed Oytim by the throat with its free hand and tossed the man aside like a rag doll. He hit the side of one of the grain bins with enough force to crack the wood. He fell to the ground and did not move.

Günter stopped because the creature was whipping around wildly and howling, one hand clutching the side of its face, the other thrashing blindly around. It was frenzied, lashing out with a reach half again as long as Günter’s.

All he had was a single silver dagger.

He stood just out of reach, praying that Oytim’s shot was true and had pierced its eye, putting a killing shot into its brain.

But Günter’s gods were deaf.

The creature slowly stopped howling, and stopped its wild thrashing. To Günter’s horror, the creature lowered its hand and looked at him with
two
green eyes. Oytim’s shot had been too high, too far to the right, and at too steep an angle. The shot had cracked the bone, but had been deflected by the curve of the monster’s skull and didn’t penetrate. Blood streamed down the creature’s face from the gory wound, but it was neither dead nor dying.

It stared at Günter, an evil snarl on its lips. Hopeless, Günter raised his dagger, closed his eyes, and prepared to die.

After several moments, when the attack didn’t happen, he opened his eyes again.

The beast was gone.

ldolf wasn’t having a good morning.

He had already checked five of his snares, and he hadn’t caught anything. One would think that if he was going to risk his freedom trapping game on the Order’s land, he might, just once, capture
something
. However, it had been a hard winter, and it seemed that the game had been picked thin even on the land directly under the Germans’ keep.

So when, in the early dawn hours, he approached his sixth snare, hidden in the underbrush by a lightning-uprooted hemlock, and saw a hint of fur, he almost cried out in triumph, despite the risk of being caught.

Instead, he just allowed himself a smile.

His breath came out in a puff of fog as he knelt down next to the snare. He had a hare—a thin beast with patchy fur, but still a hare. His sister was recovering from a fever. She needed the meat and Uldolf wasn’t about to be choosy.

He glanced around the woods on the off chance someone else might be around. This was the most dangerous part of his crime. Even if he was found on this land with a hare in his bag, he could
probably protest effectively that it came from elsewhere. Unlike elk or bear or any other large animal, there wouldn’t be the automatic assumption that he was stealing from the Order. At least, as long as no one saw him setting these snares in the woods below the Johannisburg castle wall.

Uldolf didn’t see anyone, but that was unlikely in the sliver of time before sunrise and Prime. The maze of thickets, steep hills, and ravines that rolled out from the eastern edge of Johannisburg was not inviting to casual foot traffic. It was thick and treacherous enough to be part of the town defenses from the time before the town had a Christian name or a stone keep lording over it. If he wished, he could have easily come within a hundred paces of the castle itself without being observed—all the way to the narrow frontier where the woods were cleared before the lower wall.

Because of the steep character of the land there, there was no village between the east side of the castle and the lower wall—just the mound of earth shrugging up from the hillside to support the smooth gray walls of the castle. The town itself unfolded west of the castle, where the slope of the land was more gentle and even.