DragonStar dropped down beside Zenith and WolfStar, and took the plate of food that Zenith handed
him.
“I am not surprised to find you visit us,” WolfStar said around a mouthful of food. “It feels that half
this convoy has individually appeared and pleaded with Zenith to come to her senses and return
home to her mother and father like a good girl.”
His eyes watched DragonStar carefully as he wondered how it was he could use Zenith to
control this man. Perhaps he would wait until the man disposed of the Demons, and control of
Tencendor would be there for the taking. Perhaps … Ah! WolfStar let the problem slide from his mind
for the moment. The how would come to him eventually, and WolfStar did not mind the wait. The mere
fact that DragonStar was here showed the depth of his feeling for his sister … and revealed the extent of
his vulnerability. Zenith could be used, WolfStar had no doubt of that at all, and power
would eventually be his for the taking.
DragonStar looked at Zenith, and found that she met his eyes cleanly and honestly.
He sighed, and fiddled about with his food. “You can understand that most people find
your, ah, union to be somewhat surprising,” he said. “Perhaps even unexpected.”
WolfStar laughed softly. “Oh, aye, and I imagine that StarDrifter heads the brigade of the
righteously indignant,” he began, but stopped when Zenith put a hand on his arm.
“Don’t belittle StarDrifter,” she said. “I have loved and do love him, and will not sit here and listen to
you ridicule him.”
WolfStar’s face tightened, and he averted his gaze.
“Zenith,” DragonStar said, “you mean a great deal to me. When everyone else in Tencendor turned
their backs on me,” and DragonStar shot a hard glare at WolfStar, “you believed in me, and aided me,
even through your own distress.”
Another glare WolfStar’s way.
“If you now tell me,” DragonStar continued to his sister, “that you love — no, I do not
want to hear that… if you can look me in the eye and tell me truly that this is a course you have chosen of
your own free will, and that you stay at WolfStar’s side through your own choice, and with no coercion
on his part, and that this is what you want, then I will walk away and make no attempt to dissuade you.”
Zenith looked him in the eye, and her gaze did not falter. “I am here of my own free
will and of my own choice, DragonStar,” she said, “and I would that you respected that.”
DragonStar stared at her, searching into her soul, and then he sighed again, dropped his eyes, and
nodded.
“Then there is only one more thing I must say,” he said.
“Yes?” WolfStar said, and DragonStar raised his eyes and looked at him.
“StarLaughter is on her way,” he said, “and gods alone knows what she will do when she
finds you —”
DragonStar’s eyes shifted slightly, “— with Zenith.”
Chapter 47
The Door
The Lake of Life had once been a beautiful body of water nestled within the protective Urqhart Hills and
the bridge’s hazy blue mists. Now it was an undulating smear of disgusting sludge and stench,
pustules rising, ripening and then bursting in slow, horrid abandon across its entire surface.
Occasionally body parts of indeterminate species would rise to the surface, sometimes to slowly sink
again, other times to be snatched out of the sludge by loathsome flying creatures that had once been birds
but now … but which now were something else.
This was pestilence, and it was to this that Pestilence came home.
Raspu danced in glee on the side of the spreading sludge. This was his creation, and this was where
he felt at home. His naked body mirrored the surface of the lake: sores and running blisters besmirched
his skin, and his hands occasionally scrabbled thoughtlessly (but nevertheless mirthfully) at the spreading
rashes that scabbed across joints and face.
Raspu fell to his hands and knees and drank of the loathsome lake.
His skin roiled as the sludge slid down his throat.
Raspu tipped back his head and laughed. Nothing could outmanoeuvre him!
Two figures sat their mounts atop adjoining hilltops.
On one, Qeteb sat fully armoured and arrayed in spiked and bladed weaponry on his black beast.
The creature was mostly snake now, its massive body coiled beneath the Demon, resting on six
muscled legs and balancing by the four small wings that sprouted from behind its horse-like
skull. Qeteb gazed down on the scene below him, and smiled.
Millions of creatures clustered about the shores of the lake, parting only when Raspu began to move
slowly towards the line of hills where the witch Gwendylyr had made her stand. The creatures howled
and screeched, now grovelling on the ground when Raspu passed, or when they thought their Great
Master might look down on them from his hilltop.
Their blackened mass spread from the shores of the lake, past the pile of rubble that had once
been Sigholt, and up a gully which Qeteb supposed led to Gwendylyr.
At the head of the mass several Wing of the Strike Force — and Qeteb thought they looked very
pretty with their ethereal bodies and sparkling jewel-like wings — kept back the worst of the tide, but
Qeteb could also see that within hours of Gwendylyr failing, as fail she must, the pretty flying creatures
would be overwhelmed.
Qeteb laughed, and turned his head so he could see his opponent on the adjoining hilltop.
There DragonStar sat the Star Stallion, the Alaunt crouched about the stallion’s hooves, baying and
growling at the Demon who laughed at them.
“A wager, StarSon?” Qeteb called, but DragonStar ignored him.
He felt sick to the stomach. This would be the first test, the first confrontation.
Strangely enough, although of all the five witches Gwendylyr was the most unversed in matters of
power, DragonStar had the most confidence in her. But this meant, conversely, that if
Gwendylyr failed, then it was unlikely that any of the others would succeed.
DragonStar concentrated on the sight of Raspu moving through the crowd of demented
creatures.
“What is the trap, StarSon?” Qeteb called. “What will the poor girl try to frighten the Demon of
Pestilence with?”
A choice, thought DragonStar, but this is not what he told Qeteb.
He raised his head, and smiled sweetly, and he called across the gully between them: “She will offer
him the position of butler, Qeteb. How will he manage a household of fractious servants, do you think?”
Qeteb stared at DragonStar, then looked for Raspu. He had vanished.
One moment he had been passing through the ranks of the adoring, slavering creatures, the
Strike Force soaring and dipping prettily — and mostly uselessly — overhead, and the next he stood
alone before the door of a great house.
Raspu blinked, and scratched absently at a particularly virulent pustule that had just
appeared on his left cheek.
He looked up, and then around, very carefully.
A great moor stretched out to either side and behind him. It was a featureless sweep of
fog- and cloud-wrapped rolling hills, its only adornment low gorse bushes and struggling, spiky grass.
A wall of sleet was moving in from the south-west.
Raspu grunted. He would not let the distraction of such beauty affect his concentration.
He returned his stare before him. The door was very ordinary, set in a featureless wall of
grey stone that stretched as high and wide as the Demon could see. The door itself was some five
paces high and two wide, fitted into a great arch with a tree carved into the door frame
and a man and a woman similarly carved on either side of the door; the woman was holding
an apple.
Curved iron hinges — slightly rusted in this atmosphere — supported the considerable weight of the
door. An iron knocker, in the shape of an imp’s head with glowing red eyes, was centred on the wood.
Raspu stared at the door.
He waited.
The shower of sleet moved closer.
Raspu waited.
A gust of cold air struck him squarely in his naked back, and Raspu shifted impatiently.
“Ahem,” he said.
Nothing happened.
Raspu’s eyes narrowed in furious concentration. He threw all his power at the door.
It trembled, but did not budge.
Raspu screamed with impatience. “Let me in!”
The door remained quiet, and Raspu’s face tightened, malformed, then relaxed.
He sighed, leaned forward, and banged the doorknocker several times.
Instantly, the door swung open, and there stood Gwendylyr. She was dressed in a stiff black gown,
tightly buttoned from its high neckline down the whale-boned bodice to the starched and snowy apron
tied firmly about her waist. Sensible brown polished boots peeked out from beneath the
perfectly straight hem of the dress.
Gwendylyr’s hair was pulled back into a severe bun, and her face was scrubbed and earnest.