Foster ascended the broad stairs, feeling, as he had since the door of his home had closed behind him, the weight of unseen eyes upon him, feeling some sentience marking his progress from within the brooding pile he was reluctantly approaching.
The doors, when he got up to them, proved to be fabricated in some dark, dense-grained wood and liberally studded with nailheads each an inch or more in diameter. Nor was a knob or handle of any sort hi evidence. The doors yielded as much to the shove of his shoulder as would have the high stone walls, so he made for the nearer row of windows. But only a cursory glance was necessary to dash his hopes of a quick and easy entry. The small, diamond-shaped panes were set in lead and could have been easily removed; however, a few inches behind them were heavy shutters, appearing to be of the same dense wood as the doors and looking every bit as resistant to penetration.
“Well,” he muttered to himself, “we’ve only seen one side of this place, so far. Maybe . . .” Slowly, he set off to his right, walking well away from the house walls, but going nearer to examine each set of windows, only to find that all were as thoroughly secured as the first. The flagstones under his feet were, he noticed, fancifully carved, though rather worn-down in places. But no plant of any description sprouted between them, and this fact, added to that of the well-kept formal garden below, reinforced the feeling that, for all its lack of apparent life, this fine house was no deserted one.
As he turned the corner and started down the side he began to realize just how big this house was. “House, hell,” he mumbled, “this is the size of a palace!”
But it was not until Foster had rounded to the rear that the awesome size of the structure became truly apparent. The paving of the side terrace blended into the plainer paving of a wide, deep courtyard stretching away from where he stood to lap about the base of that brooding tower, nearly a hundred feet away. Off to his right was a cluster of smaller buildings, most of stone but one or two of timber, the larger ones with roofs of slate, the smaller looking to be thatch or turf. The nearest of these buildings was pierced, just under the eave line, with rows of small, round holes, and Foster tried vainly to recall just where he had once seen a similar building.
It was then, however, that he noticed several birds fluttering and hopping about a darkish bundle lying near the foot of that grim tower. Resisting an impulse to cross the open courtyard, he set himself back to his original task, but every rear window as well as the two smaller doors he found were shuttered or tightly bolted from within.
The tower was certainly very much older than the mansion and outbuildings; its base was fabricated of massive, cy-clopean stones, but the stonework was crude, primitive, and the only window he could see on this side—if “window” the foot-wide aperture could truly be called—was a good thirty feet above his head. Before he examined it in more detail, he decided to check out that object about which the birds stiH were congregating.
Foster gagged, his stomach heaving, as the interrupted crows and starlings circled, cawing vehement protests, above and around him. He stood over the huddled body of a man. The eyes of the corpse were both gone, the lips and tongue and most of the flesh of the face shredded away from white bone by the sharp beaks of the carrion birds.
The means of the man’s death was obvious—standing out from the bridge of what was left of the nose was the leather-fletched butt end of the shortest, thickest arrow Foster had ever seen. When he was once again master of his stomach, he was able to take note of the singularly strange clothing and equipment of the body.
The close-fitting steel helmet had certainly been of no protection this time, though old nicks and dents evidenced that it had served its function in times past Nicked and dented too was the steel breastplate. Heavy, clumsy-looking leather boots encased most of both legs, their tops being tightly buckled high on the thighs, well under the skirts of a stiff jerkin of dun-colored leather. The hands were hidden in gloves reaching almost to the elbows, patterns of tiny steel rings sewn to the backs and cuffs. The stretch of shirtsleeves visible between those cuffs and the areas just below the shoulders seemed to Foster of the consistency of tent canvas, horizontally striped off-white and faded red-brown.
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