‘Then . . . Ah – I’ Fess gave a small start as he spied a miniature albino bat hovering near, under the overhang of the dead flyer’s side. In a lightning swipe he scythed it in two parts in mid-air. And: ‘Ah, yes!’ he said. ‘And perhaps I should mention: Volse and I, we had companions all along the way. These damned bats! They get everywhere.’
‘Why treat them so harshly?’ Shaithis cut in. ‘On Starside they were our small familiars.’
‘These aren’t the same.’ Fess shook his great head. ‘They lack obedience.’
Shaithis frowned. They’d obeyed him – hadn’t they?
Arkis growled: ‘Never mind the bats but finish your story. It interests me.’
Partially replenished, invigorated from his feeding, the Ferenc began to don his clothes, generating body heat to complete the job of drying them out. He was adept at this as he was at mist-making. And while he dressed so he continued with his story: ‘Volse went first, then, into the heart of the riddled rock; and I’ll be honest, we thought there was nothing there. Nothing to alarm or threaten us, anyway. And yet I sensed that the picture we had of that place, of its suspected dweller or dwellers, was probably a false one. It seemed to me that my mind was watched, even though I’d failed to detect the watcher. But the deeper we proceeded into the mountain, the more the conviction grew in me that our progress was monitored, even minutely; as if each step led us closer to some terrific confrontation, some contrived and monstrous conclusion. In short, an ambush!’
Arkis grunted and nodded his head. ‘The very way I felt,’ he remarked, in a low, dark mutter, ‘on those several occasions when I’d approach Volse’s flyer for a bite to eat.’
‘Just so.’ Fess nodded, without taking offence, and perhaps deliberately failing to find anything of accusation in Arkis’s statement. ‘And I knew . . . fear? Well no, not fear, for we’re none of us bred that way. Shall we simply say then that I experienced a new sensation, which was not pleasant? Nor was this presentiment without foundation, as will be seen. And all the while those damned albinos tracking our course, until their fluttering and chittering had grown to be such an annoyance that I stayed back a little to strike out at them where they swooped overhead. Which probably saved my life.
‘Ahead of me, Volse had gone striding on. But he sensed it coming in the same instant that I sensed it, and he said one word before it struck. The word he said was: “What?” Yes, he questioned it, and even questioning it never knew what hit him.’
‘Explain!’ Arkis was breathless. And Shaithis was intent, rapt upon the Ferenc’s story.
Fess shrugged. Fully dressed again, he sliced gobbets of flesh from the flyer’s alveolate ribs, sliding them one by one down his throat. ‘Hard to explain,’ he said, after a while. ‘Fast, it was. Huge. Mindless. Terrible! But I saw what it did to Volse, and I determined that it would not do the same to me. I never fled from anything in my life before – well, except The Dweller and the awesome destruction he wrought in the battle for his garden – but I fled from this.
‘It was white, but not a healthy white. The white of hiding in places too dark, like some cavern fungus. It had legs – a great many, I think – with clawed, webbed feet. Its body was fishlike, its head too, with jaws ferocious! But the weapon it bore – ‘
‘A weapon?’ Arkis thrust his face forward. ‘But you said the thing was mindless. And now . . . mind enough to carry a weapon?’
The Ferenc glanced at him scornfully, then held up his own talon hands. ‘And are these not weapons? This thing’s weapon was part of it, fool, just as your own boar’s tusks are part of you!’
‘Yes, yes, understood,’ said Shaithis impatiently. ‘Say on.’
Fess settled down again, but his eyes were uneasy, wide in his massive, malformed face. ‘Its weapon was a knife, a sword, a lance. But with tines like thorns all down its length, from tip to snout. A barbed rod for stabbing, and once stabbed the victim’s hooked, with no way to free himself except tear his own flesh wide open! And at the tip of that bone-plated ram, twin holes like nostrils. But not for breathing . . .’He paused.