Wolf's Cross (2 page)

T
hey followed the demon for three days, through the Prussian wilderness. Josef thanked God that they didn’t run into another spectacular atrocity, but that in itself was troubling. It meant that their foe—this
wolfbreed
—didn’t act randomly or in haste. It had planned the death of that village, and had methodically carried out that plan.

And, as they followed its trail, Josef was disturbed by the thought that the trail they followed was younger than the scene of carnage at the village, as if what they hunted had waited for them to catch up.

Even so, their tracking wasn’t perfect, and right now they stood in the woods, waiting to decide on the direction of their hunt.

The woods are dark here
, Josef thought.

He sat astride a horse with the other probationary brothers of the Order—a line of ten men with incomplete crosses on their tabards. Ahead of them, dismounted, stood three of the knights with Komtur Heinrich, holding a low discussion about their course.

The tracks they followed had led down a path in the woods that was now little more than a game trail. The woods here were not dense, and their horses could navigate through the trees, but it had reached the point where their movement was restricted. Just turning his mount around would be an ordeal, weaving past trunks and over deadfalls, and the whole party had slowed to no faster than a man could walk.

Now they had stopped.

Above them, the sun had nearly left the sky, and the trees had already wrapped them in twilit darkness.

Where are we?
Josef thought, unwilling to voice the question in the unnatural silence. Around them, the woods were as quiet as a sepulchre waiting for a corpse. The only sounds were the low voices near Komtur Heinrich and the muffled scrape of horses’
hooves against the dead leaves covering the forest floor. While they waited for word from Heinrich, Josef held a loaded crossbow in front of him. It had been close to half an hour since they had stopped, and his arms were fatigued from the weight in his hands.

After everything, have we actually lost its trail?

Even as a neophyte to the Wolfjägers of the Order, he had seen enough of what they hunted to question that such a trail could be easily lost.

The creature they hunted cared little for stealth or subtlety. Its path was marked with scraps of blood, hair, and bone. Its evil was written in the corpses of man and beast alike. It had not made itself difficult to follow.

We haven’t lost it
, he thought.

We aren’t following it
.

It’s leading us
.

Josef looked back and forth, but the woods around them had become impenetrable with the evening shadows. He called out, “Brother Heinrich!”

His mount pinned its ears back and let out a cry of pure terror. Suddenly all the hoses were spooking, and Josef’s mount reared up. With both hands on his crossbow, Josef couldn’t grab the reins or the saddle to keep himself and the crossbow from tumbling backward. Before he fell, his horse whipped its head to the side, showing a foaming mouth and one huge eye, white with terror.

Josef slammed into the ground, momentarily stunned. He heard a growl that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and he realized,
It’s here
.

He fumbled for his fallen crossbow as, off to his right, he heard a man scream. Around him, the knights gained control of their horses, doing their best to turn outward in the confined space. Josef’s own horse was lost past Heinrich on the narrow game trail.

On Heinrich’s face was a look of surprise that even his normally
stony expression could not hide.
He hadn’t expected the thing to attack
.

Josef found his crossbow and brought it up to face the greatest sound of chaos, but one of his brothers’ mounts was in the way. He saw the hint of something large moving impossibly fast; then the rider in front of Josef tumbled off his mount to fall at Josef’s feet, a large part of his throat gone.

The horse reared at something, and that something howled—a hellish noise followed by a ripping sound that left the horse collapsing to its knees. Josef backed up, looking for a target as the horse fell dead in a pool of spreading gore.

It had moved behind him. Josef spun around at the sound of growling in time to have the body of another rider slam down on top of him. Josef fell under his groaning comrade and screamed at the heavens, “Where is it?
Where is it?
”

He rolled out from under his brother and came face-to-face with the answer.

A head taller than any of Heinrich’s men, it bore a head twice the size any wolf’s had a right to be. Its muscles rippled under gore-stained blond fur, and it stood on legs crooked like a wolf’s. But it had hands—demonic clawed hands that flexed and reached for Josef as it leapt at him.

With a brief plea to God, he brought the crossbow to bear on the approaching monster. He exhaled and took the extra second to aim, even though every muscle in his body screamed at him to fire
now
!

He pulled the trigger after aiming square at one of the creature’s glaring blue eyes, knowing he only had the one chance to save himself and his comrades. A bolt though the brain would finish this thing once and for all.

But nothing happened.

He only had a fraction of a second to realize that the bowstring
had snapped in the fall from his horse. The bolt rested against the block, inert and useless.

Then the monster was on him, slamming him to the ground, tearing at his armor. The weight of it slammed into his lower body, pressing down on his legs as it buried its muzzle in his stomach. He screamed as if the beast had already torn into his entrails, even though a part of his brain knew that it was still tearing through his mail and the padding underneath.

That cleared his head of panic for a moment. He had to find a weapon, an attack, anything. He whipped his head around, looking at a world blurred by pain and tears. Praying to God for—

The crossbow bolt
.

The dead crossbow had fallen next to him, the unfired silver-tipped bolt still nocked. He reached a gauntleted hand toward it as the monster found his flesh under the mail, and Josef screamed as he felt its teeth sink into skin and muscle. Every fiber of his being tried to pull away, his body ripping itself away from the insult as the creature lifted him, raising him partway off the ground. The beast’s muzzle wrinkled as blood flowed, darkening its fur. Even through the pain, Josef felt the heat of its fetid breath against his skin.

I am dead
, Josef thought in a moment of pain-sharpened lucidity. The burst of calm must have been divine in nature—the same grace that allowed the saints to face their own martyrdom.

It was with that sudden clarity that he grabbed the crossbow bolt, brought it up, and jammed the point into the creature’s left eye with all the force he could muster.

The beast howled, letting loose its grip on his stomach. Josef fell back into the mud, feeling his life spilling out of the hole in his belly. Before he lost his grip on the world, he saw the monster retreat, the bolt sticking awkwardly out of its face.

Josef lost consciousness praying he had finished the beast.

M
aria sang to herself during the two-mile-long walk from her family’s farm to Gród Narew. Sometimes she would sing small snippets of hymns, but right now she was having a more daring moment. The song was one of the bawdier ballads she had heard the knights of the szlachta singing when she served them in the large dining hall at Gród Narew.

She started singing low, but as she walked through the dense woods, she unconsciously raised her voice with every verse. When she reached the lightning-blasted oak that marked the midpoint between her farm and the fortress, she completed the song, singing at full volume of the conquest of the virile knight over the reluctant maiden. When the words of their consummate act echoed back from the woods around her, she paused a moment with burning cheeks and an embarrassed smile.

Her father would definitely not approve. He was very strict and ever wary of the Devil and his attempts to intrude into their lives. Song was one of those avenues he saw as allowing the Devil in. Maria’s hand unconsciously lifted between her breasts to feel the small silver cross she wore under her chemise. It was still there, still protecting her from the Devil.

She glanced up at the sky, gauging the advance of dawn. The sky above shone a light pink through the trees. She couldn’t see the horizon, but a glow around some of the tallest branches showed that the sun had just peeked above the ground. Just as she started thinking that she had taken too long in her trek through the woods, she heard the clanging of the bell at the fortress, marking the first hour of the day.

She sighed. She should be
leaving
the dense woods crowding Gród Narew, and here she was barely at the halfway point. She had spent too long with her chores at the farm. Now she was going to reach the fortress just as the stable hands would start working the horses. She clutched her cross more tightly and said a short prayer that God would keep her safe not only from the Devil himself, but also from one of the Devil’s more petty minions.

T
he sun had fully risen by the time she left the woods and walked the path up the conical hillside toward the looming timber walls of Gród Narew. She walked up past wide stonewalled fields where sheep and goats grazed. The best pasture, though, was closest to the fortress walls, and reserved for the horses of the szlachta.

She hurried past the mounts of the nobility, hoping to make the gate before anyone saw her. But she knew that she had failed to escape as soon as the smells of manure and rotten cheese advanced upon her. Her daily nemesis, Lukasz, came from whatever chores he was in the midst of and vaulted the stone fence, landing on the path directly in front of her.

“You wound me, my fair Maria.” He gave her a gap-toothed smile and reached for her with a filth-crusted hand. She backed up so that he pawed air rather than her chemise.

“Wound you? You seem quite hale.” Maria stepped to the side
to go around the man. She hated being a target for this brute, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. He was the personal servant to one of Bolesław’s knights, while she was only here to ease the burden of her family’s debts to the lord of Gród Narew. While he supposedly held no more status or rights than she did, as a practical matter he was almost noble himself. He was also the type of man who didn’t let anyone forget it.

Today, Lukasz seemed particularly amorous, and he reached out again, grabbing her arm as she passed. “In my heart, fair maiden. You wound my heart, passing without so much as a glance toward poor lonely Lukasz.”

The sweetness of his words did not reach his eyes. They never did. He would recite them to any maid or widow unfortunate enough to cross his path, and all the time his gaze would traverse his victim, leaving stains worse than those made by his hands, and harder to wash off. She shook her arm free of his grasp and said, “I have work to attend to, as do you.”

“No work so important that it cannot spare our efforts for a time. Wouldn’t you care to share some of your charms?”

She actually tasted bile in the back of her throat, thinking of the petty troll Lukasz playing the role of the knight in her ballad. “Those are for my betrothed,” she snapped at him in a low whisper.

“A lucky man, indeed. You should grant me an introduction.” Lukasz laughed at her, and she felt a sick sense of despair that she was so plain and common at nineteen years that this brute was the only man to show such an interest in her.

In the dark parts of her soul, she thought that her desire for solitude at times led those more discriminating than Lukasz to question her chastity. She didn’t know, but she suspected what the other women in the kitchen chattered about when she left to serve the knights.

She blinked back her tears and started walking away from him, promising herself that she wouldn’t turn around.

“Someday, Maria, I will be a knight. You could be the betrothed of
Rycerz
Lukasz.”

Maria balled her hands into fists and spun around. “A knight?” she shouted back. “On that day I will be far too old and feeble to hold your interest, and you’ll be too senile to remember any favors I granted you!”

Her outburst was greeted by laughter from the other side of the stone fence. A trio of stable hands, all younger than Lukasz, were standing in the pasture and doing nothing to hide their amusement at Lukasz’s expense. Lukasz’s face lost all trace of the false humor he’d been showing her and his skin rapidly changed color, becoming a blotchy red. “You shall not make light of my service, woman!”

“We both have duties to attend to,” she said. It took a supreme effort of will not to add, “Don’t you have manure to shovel?”

She turned to walk to the gate.

“You will not walk away from me like—”

She tensed, waiting for him to grab for her, but he was interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats. She felt the approaching horses in the packed earth of the path beneath her feet before she saw them. First she looked back the way she had come, but her path just led back into the dark woods that stretched south of the fortress.