But most sinister of all, he could now see that a dozen or more warlocks—or were they manshaped fiends?—were borne upon the thrice-damned Beast’s back, all bearing blue-black Rods of Power.
Whimpering, Raibert Armstrong still set himself to do his sworn duty, despite his quite-justifiable horror. He presented the heavy shoulder gun and, taking dead aim downward into the thick of the knot of manlike creatures, he drew back the pan cover, his fingers so tremulous that they almost spilled out the priming powder. Once again, he checked his aim at the Beast lumbering below his position, shut his eyes tight, then drew back the lower arm of the serpentine, thrusting the match end clamped to the tip of the upper arm into the powder-filled priming pan. He braced himself for the powerful kick of the piece.
But that kick never came; the match had smoldered out And still the glaring, blaring Thing lumbered across the low saddle, leaving smoking heather wherever its demon feet had trod, excreting fire and roils of noxious gases from somewhere beneath its awful bulk.
Dropping the useless arquebus, Raibert sensed that his only chance now lay in escape—for who ever heard of a lone, common man trying to fight a Monster out of Hell with only a pistol and an old chlaidhimhl—and while he could go back the way he had come, the Monster seemed headed that way too … and Raibert felt that that was just what the hellish Thing wanted him to do.
There seemed but one thing for it, in Raibert Armstrong’s mind; he must try—with Christ’s help—to outfox the eldritch Beast. Reining about, he trotted the frightened, but still obedient, horse a few yards back along the ridge crest, as if he were blindly falling into the Monster’s coils. Then, suddenly, he drew his antique chlaidhimh—for, if die he must, far better to do so with a yard of steel in his freckled fist; and besides, touch of iron or steel was held by some to be inimical to the Auld Evil—wheeled that hot-bred hunter about and spurraked a full gallop, leaning low on the animal’s neck to lessen wind resistance.
Where the hill abruptly dropped away, the horse hesitated but the briefest instant, then launched itself in a long jump which sent ridden and rider soaring overtop the still-soaring six-eyed monster.
The horse alit on the slope below and to the right flank of the unheeding Hellspawn, then Raibert Armstrong was spurring northward, toward the ill-defined border, toward Scotland and his ancestral home. Forgot were the near two thousand reavers, forgot was the raid upon the interdicted Sassenachs, forgot was Sir David Scott and all. But Raibert Armstrong knew that never, until the very hour of his death, would he, could he forget the sight and the sound and the hot, oily, evil stench of the Devilspawn Horror he had faced on the Northumbrian Moors on that dark and windswept night.
CHAPTER 1
Bass Foster sat directly under the ceiling vent, bathed in the cool flow from the air conditioner, watching the Collier woman swill straight vodka and trying to think of a tactful way to cut her off—his modest supply of potables would not last long under her inroads; she had guzzled the last of the gin hours ago.
The professor, her husband, seemed to have barely touched his own weak highball, but he had used the last of the tobacco in his own pouch and now was stuffing his pipe out of one of Bass’s cans of Borkum Riff. Mid-fiftyish—which made him some ten years Bass’s senior—he seemed as quiet and courteous as his wife was loud and snotty. His liver-spotted hands moving slowly, he frowned in concentration over the pipe, his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows bunched into a single line.
Across the width of the oversized cocktail table from the couple, Krystal Kent sat with one long leg tucked beneath her, doing yeoman work on a half-gallon jug of Gallo burgundy, and taking hesitant drags at one of her last three cigarettes. Bass shifted his eyes to her; she was far nicer to look at, with the slunlight delineating bluish highlights in her long, lustrous black hair.
Bass and the other three carefully avoided looking out the big window at the impossiblity that commenced beyond the manicured lawn. Each time Bass’s thoughts even wandered in that direction he felt his mind reel, start to slip, and he as-