A nod.
“You’ll be safe…” The goliard looked around anxiously. “You’ll be safe with Dzierżka. Afterwards, when everything quietens down, I’ll take you to Poland. If you desire it so much, you’ll become a Poor Clare nun, but in Stary Sącz or Zawichost. Poland isn’t Silesia, but, well, it’s nice there, too. You’ll grow accustomed to it. And now farewell. May God keep you, girl.”
“And you,” she whispered in answer.
“Remember: don’t go home. Set off at once.”
“I’ll remember.”
The goliard vanished into the gloom as suddenly as he had appeared. Elencza of Stietencron slowly unfastened her apron. She looked through the window where the dark of the night was softening, had almost erased the outlines of the forested hills.
She took a cape from the cloakroom, wound a scarf around her head. And ran. But not to the moat beyond the laundry. She ran in the opposite direction.
In the tiny room over the hospital where she lived, there was nothing she wanted to take with her. Nothing she could call her own. Nothing she would have missed.
Apart from a cat.
She treated the goliard’s warning seriously. She knew what danger meant.
She understood its source, remembered the iron-grey eyes of the priest who had questioned her, recalled the fear he evoked in her. But it’s only a moment, she thought as she ran, only a moment, I’ll just take the cat, nothing more, what could happen to me, it’s only a second…
“Here kitty… Here kitty…”
The window was slightly open. He’s gone, she thought with growing terror, he’s vanished into the night in his usual feline way… How will I ever find him…?
“Here kitty-kitty…” She ran out onto the landing, getting tangled up in the sheets hanging there. “Kitty… Kitty!” She ran down the stairs. And realised at once that something was wrong. The cold night air had suddenly become even colder, choking her as she breathed in. The cold wasn’t fresh and invigorating now; it had become heavy, as dense as phlegm, as mucus, as clotted blood. It was suddenly full of coagulated, concentrated evil.
A bird alighted three paces in front of her. A large wallcreeper.
It appeared to Elencza as if it had taken root in the earth. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even tremble. Not even when the wallcreeper began to grow in front of her eyes. And change shape. Change into a man.
And then two things occurred at once. A cat mewed loudly. And a huge wolf ran out of the black of the night.
It speeded up, suddenly lengthening its steps into great bounds and then leaped. But the wallcreeper had become a bird once more, grown blurred, shrunk rapidly, flapped its wings and flown up. It croaked triumphantly when the white fangs of the leaping wolf snapped shut just beyond its tail feathers, missing the target. After it leaped, the wolf landed softly and took off at once into the darkness, in pursuit of the fleeing bird.
Elencza seized the cat and ran. The tears drying on her cheeks.
The Iron Wolf gave chase like every normal wolf does, loping along at a steady, fast, relentless pace. Its nose, lifted from time to time, unerringly caught the magically imbued draught of the soaring wallcreeper. The wolf’s eyes glowed in the darkness.
The chase—a pursuit to the death—was on. Through the Niemcza Hills. Along the Oława, Ślęża and Bystrzyca valleys.
Children in their cradles awoke, cried and choked on their tears. Horses in stables fidgeted anxiously. Cattle banged against one another in cowsheds.
A knight in a stone watchtower sat up, awoken by a nightmare. A breviary fell from the trembling hands of a village priest as he recited the Nunc dimittis. Soldiers in guardhouses rubbed their eyes.
The chase went on. Before it—announcing it like an outrider—sped Horror. And Terror settled behind it like dust.
There was an ancient place of worship nearby, a flat hummock with a magical solar circle marked out by a ring of polished stones inside which, in days gone by, people prayed to gods older than humankind. It was also a burial ground, a cemetery, a necropolis of folk—and also non-folk—the names of whom were long forgotten. In 1150, as part of the fight against heathenism and superstition, the stones were scattered and in their place Bishop Walter of Malonne had built a small wooden church—or rather an oratory, for the surrounding area was a wilderness. The oratory barely lasted a year—it burned down after being struck by lightning, and fire consumed all the subsequent churches built on the site of the ancient necropolis. The fight lasted twenty years until the death of Bishop Walter himself. People began to whisper that it was better not to fall foul of the Old Gods, and the new bishop, Żyrosław, took the only sensible decision: he chose a completely new, distant, prettier and more favourably situated place for the location of the next church. No one prevented the new church from standing there and attracting large congregations, while invisible hands returned the ancient stones to their former positions in the old cemetery. With time, the place was ringed by a circle of stunted, skeletal trees and, in places, a tangled hedge of blackthorn armed with murderous thorns.
The place was bathed in moonlight.
Trotting over to the first stones and the blackthorn hedge, the Wolf suddenly stopped and its hackles rose as though before fladry lines. It sniffed out the stench of the funereal decay which still hung over the hummock, although the dead hadn’t been buried there for centuries. It registered the lodes of ancient magic gathered over the centuries and preventing the enchanted creature from entering. The Wolf shimmered and changed shape. And became a human being. A tall man with eyes the colour of iron.
The cold night air appeared to have set hard. Not a single dry leaf or a single blade of sedge trembled. The silence was deafening.
The sound of steps, a soft grating on the gravel, disturbed the silence. The Wallcreeper passed between the standing stones.
The Iron Wolf moved forward and also entered the circle. The circle came alive at once. Beyond the stones, under them, among them, from the thicket of entangled grass and brushwood, dozens—hundreds—of eyes suddenly flashed like lanterns, lively, twitching and nervous as fireflies. The quiet of the night was filled with a disturbing melody of whispers, a vague murmur of high-pitched, non-human voices.
“They’ve come.” The Wallcreeper gestured with his head. “To see you and me. Two of perhaps the last polymorphs in this part of the world. They saw us shape-shifting. Now they want to watch us kill each other.”
He moved his forearm and hand and a knife slid into his fingers. The nine-inch Toledo blade gleamed in the moonlight.
“Let us serve them up a decent spectacle, then,” the Iron Wolf replied huskily, “something worth telling tales about.”
He brandished the knife which had shot straight into his hand from his sleeve.
“Prepare to die, O Wolf.”
“Prepare to die, O Bird.”
They began to circle the ring, slowly, treading cautiously, eyes never leaving each other. They moved around the circle twice. And then sprang at each other, aiming lightning-fast blows. The Wallcreeper stabbed from above, aiming for the face; the Wolf moved his head a quarter of an inch as he stabbed from below towards his enemy’s belly. The Wallcreeper avoided the blow by twisting his hips, then slashed diagonally from the left. Again, the Wolf saved his throat with a faint dodge and jumped clear. He turned the knife in his hand, feinting, slashing upwards from below, the blade clanging against the Wallcreeper’s similarly positioned edge. They traded several rapid strokes and jumped aside.