‘Treacherous dog!’ I kicked at him. ‘Here, amuse yourself with this.’
He fell upon the woman where she lay moaning. ‘You’ve forgiven me!’ he cried.
‘Not now, not ever!’ I answered. ‘I leave her here because she’s one too many. Enjoy yourself while you may.’ As I barred the door he had already begun to rip his filthy clothes off, hers too.
Now, climbing the spiralling steps, I heard the wolves again. Their song had a triumphant note to it. What now?
Like a madman I raced through the castle. The massive door in the foot of the tower was secure, and the causeway burned down — where would Faethor attempt his next assault? I went to the battlements — only just in time!
The air over the castle was full of tiny bats. I saw them against the moon, flitting in their myriads, their concerted voices shrill and piercing. Was that how the Ferenczy would come: flitting like a great bat, a stretchy blanket of flesh falling out of the night to smother me? I shrank down, gazed fearfully up into the vault of the night sky. But no, surely not; his fall had injured him and he would not yet be ready to tax himself so greatly; there must be some other route with which I was not familiar.
Ignoring the bats, which came down at me in waves, but not so close as to strike or interfere with me, I went to the perimeter wall and looked over. Why I did this I can’t say, for it would take more than any mere man to climb walls as sheer as these. Fool that I was — the Ferenczy was no mere man!
And there he was: flat to the wall, making his way agonisingly slowly, like a great lizard, up the stonework. A lizard, aye, for his hands and feet were huge as banquet platters and sucked where they slapped the walls! Horrified to my roots, I stared harder in the dark. He had not yet seen me. He grunted quietly and his huge disc of a hand made a quagmire sound where it left the wall and groped upward. His fingers were long as daggers and webbed between. Hands like that would pull a man’s flesh from his bones as if they were plucking a chicken!
I looked wildly about. The bubbling cauldrons of oil were positioned at the ends of the span, where the great hall joined the towers. Rightly so, for who would suppose that a man could crawl under the flying buttresses and come up that way, with nothing but the gorge and certain death beneath him?
I flew to the closest cauldron, laid my hands on its rim. Agony! The metal was hot as hell.
I took my sword belt and passed it through the metal framework of the tilting engine, then dragged device and cauldron and all back the way I had come. Oil splashed and drenched my boot; one foot of the tilting bench went through a rotten plank and I must pause to free it; the entire contraption jerked and shuddered through friction with the planking, so that I knew Faethor must hear me and guess what I was about. But finally I had the cauldron above the spot where I had seen him.
I glanced fearfully over the parapet — and a great groping sucker hand came up over the rim, missed my face by inches, slapped down and gripped the coping of the wall!
How I gibbered then! I threw myself on to the tilting device, turned the handle furiously, and saw the cauldron bearing over towards the wall. Oil spilled and ran down the cauldron’s side. It met the hot brazier and caught fire; my boot went up in flames. The Ferenczy’s face came up over the rim of the parapet. His eyes reflected the leaping flames. His teeth, whole again, were gleaming white slivers of bone in his gaping jaws, with that flickering abomination of a tongue slithering over them.
Shrieking, I worked at the handle. The cauldron tilted, slopped a sea of blazing oil towards him.
‘NO!’ he croaked, his voice a broken bell. ‘NO — NO —NOOOOOO!’