‘How long is this damned path, anyway?’ Thibor snarled at the Gypsy, after maybe half a mile of slow, careful climbing.
‘The same distance again,’ Arvos at once replied, ‘but steeper from now on. Once they brought carts up here, I’m told, but that was a hundred years or more ago and the way has not been well kept.’
“Huh!” Thibor’s apish aide snorted. ‘Carts? I wouldn’t bring goats up here!’
At that the other Wallach, the hunched one, gave a start and pressed more closely to the cliff. ‘I wouldn’t know about goats,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘but if I’m not mistaken we have company of sorts: the Ferenczy’s “dogs”!’
Thibor looked ahead to where the path vanished round the curve of the cliff. Silhouetted against the starry void of space, hump-shouldered wolf-shapes stood with muzzles lifted, ears pointed and eyes ferally agleam. But there were only two of them. Gasping his shock, then a harsh curse, Thibor looked back into the deepest shadows – and saw the other two; or rather, he saw their triangular
moon-silvered eyes. ‘Arvos!’ he growled, gathering his wits, reaching for the old gypsy. ‘Arvos!’
The sudden rumbling might well have been thunder, except the air was crisp and dry and what few clouds there were scudded rather than boiled; and thunder seldom makes the ground shudder beneath a man’s feet.
Thibor’s thin, hunched friend was hindmost, bringing up the rear at a point where the path was the merest ledge. It required but a step to bring him to safety. ‘Rock fall!’ he cried hoarsely, making to leap forward. But as he sprang, so the boulders rained down and swept him away. It was as quick as that: he was there – arms straining forward, face gaping white in the light of the moon – and he was gone. He did not cry out: clubbed by boulders, doubtless he’d been unconscious or dead even as he fell.
When the last pebble and plume of dust had fallen and the rumbling was an echo, Thibor stepped to the rim and looked down. There was nothing to see, just darkness and the glint of the moon on distant rocks. Up and down the trail, of wolves there was no sign.
Thibor turned to where the old gypsy shivered and clung to the face of the cliff.
‘A rock fall!’ The old man saw the look on his face. ‘You can’t blame me for a rock fall. If he’d jumped instead of shouting his warning . . .’
Thibor nodded. ‘No,’ he agreed, brows black as the night itself, ‘I can’t blame you for a rock fall. But from now on blame doesn’t come into it. From now on if there’s any problem at all – from whatever cause or quarter – I’ll just toss you off the cliff. That way, if I’m to die, I’ll know that you died first. For let’s have something clearly understood, old man. I don’t trust the Ferenczy, I don’t trust his “dogs”, and I trust you least of all. There’ll be no further warnings.’ He jerked his thumb up the path. ‘Lead on, Arvos of the Szgany – and nimble about it!’
Thibor did not think that his warning would carry much weight; even if it weighed on the gypsy, it certainly wouldn’t weigh on his master in the mountain. But neither was the Wallach a man to issue idle threats. Arvos the Szgany belonged to the Ferenczy, no doubt of that. And so, if more trouble was on the way from that quarter (Thibor was sure that the avalanche had been arranged) then he would see that it came to Arvos first. And trouble was coming: it waited in the defile where the cliff was split by a deep chasm, at the back of which sat the castle of the Ferenczy.
This was the sight they saw, Thibor and his simian Wallach friend, and the now sinister gypsy Arvos, when they reached the cleft. Back in the dim mists of time the mountains had convulsed, split apart. Passes had been formed through the ranges, of which this might have been one. Except that in this case the opening had not gone all the way through. The cliff whose face they’d traversed had led finally to a high crest which reared now a half mile away. The crest was split into twin peaks – like the ears of a bat or a wolf. And there, straddling the defile where it narrowed to a fissure – clinging to both opposing faces and meeting centrally in a massive arch of masonry – there sat the manse of the Ferenczy. As before, two windows were lighted, like eyes under the sharp black ears, and the fissure below seemed to form a gaping mouth.