"Get that damned-forever drawbridge down!"
Dermott's roar could be heard from two miles up the winding road from Wolfen Castle.
His rage was cataclysmic. The fur on his collar bristled like hackles as he stormed back and forth before the heavy gate, lashing his long black whip so that it sang in the air and cracked like hammer-blows. Above him a gang of men were working on the winder-ropes.
"They've all been cut, my Lord," one called down. "And the wheel's been broken."
"Saddle the horses," Dermott ordered. "Muster every man."
Another man came running round from the stables and stopped ten feet from Dermott. He didn't want to get within striking distance, not while bringing more bad news.
"It's the horses, lord," he said, breathless. "There's two of them stolen."
"We'll get them back, don't worry on that score. Those reivers will pay me with interest. I'll tear them to pieces. I'll gouge their eyes. I'll crush their very bones."
The man backed away in alarm.
"It's the other horses," he said quickly. "They're all lying down in the stalls. Asleep. They must have been given a motion."
"A potion? My horses? They poisoned my horses?"
Dermott let out a great snarling bellow. His sword was suddenly in his hand, a huge double edged blade. He swung it about him, spinning on both feet, needing to hurt somebody, cut something."
The man dodged back. Dermott was blind with fury. The sword barely missed the man and he heard it sing as it lanced past his ear and clove a wooden mounting block in two. The man turned to run, but Dermott's whip lashed him round the legs and he sprawled flat. Dermott have an incoherent roar and sliced the unfortunate messenger's head from his neck with one vicious blow.
Fainn had discovered the theft. And he had found the headless snake in the passageway.
His rage was as searing as the heat from the smoking pit.
"Thrice," he cursed. "Three times defied!"
He stood in his dungeon room, quivering with such intensity he looked as if he had a fever. His face had gone pale and the tattoos stood out stark on his skin.
He picked up the headless snake and laid it on the long table where he had cast his dark spells over Eirinn. The second snake coiled up his arm, flicking a black tongue. The scent of its venom was sharp on the air.
"Gone," Fainn hissed. "Stolen! Thieves and vagabonds. Oh, such a curse I will weave on them. They will wish they had never drawn breath."
He picked up the torn head and pressed it hard against the end of the cold coils, muttering in his strange language all the time until the snake quivered. The bloody ends seemed to knit together as he chanted. Leaving only a thin seam that melded the two halves together became whole again. Glassy eyes stared brightly and its tongue wavered in the air. Its twin spiralled around it, head to head, and then both went suddenly rigid. Fainn had his staff back again.
He held it out over the map of Eirinn.
"Thunder and hail, ice and rain," he chanted. "Strip every blade and leaf. Storm and gale, curse and bane, find for me the thief."
His long thin hands spread out across the long carved map. Far out beyond the castle walls, the clouds suddenly darkened and lightning flickered in a roiling sky.
Fainn spun on a heel and swept from the room towards the great hall where Dermott was still roistering with his men, a dark bearer of darker news. There would be no more roistering tonight, nor in the morning.
His long legs carried him along the passage wondering just how to tell Dermott the Wolf that the thing he coveted the most in all this world had been stolen by a band of freaks and strangelings.
And he had to tell him the red-haired fighting woman was gone.
* * *
They were five miles from Wolfen Castle, on the edge of the dark forest that crowded the valley. Far behind them they could still make out the squat shape of the great keep, but still there was no sign of pursuit.
Brand drew up the wagons and stepped down from the buckboard.
"A fine show," he said blithely. "Maybe they will invite us back for the coronation."
Score laughed. "If we ever go back in there, then we'll never come out again."
"Perhaps not. Dermott and his spellbinder will sleep none tonight, for all their drinking."
Jack and Kerry stood shoulder to shoulder with Corriwen and the raggedy boy.
Jack looked ahead of them to where the road disappeared into the trees.
"Shouldn't we get a move on?"
Brand shrugged. "No hurry Jack. You and Kerry here put on a good act, and if things were different, maybe I'd apprentice you both and make real troupers of you."
"No hurry? Once they get that bridge down, they'll be after us like an avalanche."
"Well, whatever an avalanche is, that won't be happening tonight, to be sure. Didn't Thin Doolan feed the horses a bag of oats? Special oats they were. By now every one of them will be down and out, and they won't wake up until dawn."
"It was a big risk to take, just for a few pieces of jewellery," Jack said. "If you'd have been caught…"
"Ah, now isn't the fun in the risk? And anyhow, didn't you just save the young lady and this poor young feller from a death worse than fate?"
Corriwen smiled. Her face was smudged and she seemed thinner than Jack remembered, but the smile was the same. It lit up the day.
"I knew they would come for me. I just didn't expect them to put on such a show."
"I still think we should put some distance between us and that big guy," Jack said. "He's going to be awfully mad."
"Mad before and mad now. Makes no difference. Anyhow, you remember the way we came, on the by-way. That's the way we go back, but not at night. The low road hides many secrets in the dark, and not any that I'd like to meet."
He reached up and clapped Jack on the shoulder. "Settle down and take some rest. They'll still be trying to pull their swords from where Score stuck them. And none of them's going to come on foot. I'd say in all it was a job well done."
Brand climbed back inside the wagon and came back again with his mysterious bag.
"Oh, Thin Doolan and Natterjack found some of your property amongst the baubles they lifted. He reached in and drew out Corriwen's knife-belt where her two blades sat side by side in their matching sheaths, then hefted the sword that Connor had picked up.
"You'll be needing these, take my word for it. There's a long road to travel before any of us see the dawn."
Corriwen looked at Jack, wondering what the little man meant, but Jack shrugged. He didn't know either. She drew Jack and Kerry close to her again, still hardly able to comprehend that she was free and that they had managed to get her out of the cage and out of the castle.
"My heroes both," she said, hugging them tight again. "We both have tales to tell."
* * *
Thunder woke Jack well before dawn, woke him with such a start he was sitting up before he even knew it. The crash was so loud it crackled in his ears and the lightning sent purple after-images dancing behind his eyelids.
Corriwen was already awake, hunched down beside a tree, eyes reflecting the embers.
"Not a good sign," she said. "It reminds me of Mandrake's work."
"That Fainn, I think he's every bit as bad as Mandrake was." Jack shivered, remembering the cold, poisonous stare of the tall cloaked figure. "But more powerful, I think. I felt it when he looked at me."
They had spent the early night close together round the fire, catching up, swapping tales of the adventures they'd had since they'd stumbled through the stone gate and into this world. Kerry fell asleep in the heat of the campfire and Connor soon dozed off, leaving Jack and Corriwen together.
"I thought I'd lost you," he told her. "You could have been anywhere. Then Kerry found your tracks, where you'd fallen and we came after you. We knew where, but we didn't know when."
"She hit me hard, that foul creature. Rattled my teeth and all my bones."
"And she got Kerry a couple of swipes, but he got the heartstone key to me. Slung it while she was chasing him. He was amazing."
"It all seems like a bad dream," she whispered.
"And this one's the same, but it's looking up now we're back together."
"I thought I'd lost you in the brimstone. I don't know how you lived."
Jack closed his eyes, but the memory of his plunge into the molten rock had been scoured away, just like the red-hand on the skin of his chest.
"All I know is I felt the power of the heartstone all through me. Like I'd grabbed a high tension wire."
She looked at him, puzzled, and he smiled.
"I'll try to explain that another time," he said.
Connor was snoring lightly, but Kerry was curled into a tight ball, not moving. Jack felt his own eyes begin to close.
"In the morning, we'll go with Brand and the gang and then try for the Homeward Gate. The book will tell us how."
Before he knew it he was asleep and he didn't wake up until the great peal of thunder that shook the earth.
"Time to move," he said. The thunderhead was moving up the valley from Wolfen Castle, spitting lightning as it came. Down there, a stand of trees bent under its power and over the roaring of the wind, they could hear trunks split and crack.
"That doesn't look natural to me."
"Fainn sends a storm," Corriwen said, gathering her meagre pack together. Jack slung his own pack over his shoulder and grabbed his amberhorn bow. The storm was coming fast.
Score and Brand were already busy with the troupe. Ahead of them, where the forest trees crowded together at the narrow valley neck, the dawn mist was like a wall, thick and white. It swallowed the narrow road in the space of a couple of paces.
"Somebody's woken angry," Brand said. Connor snapped awake in mid-snore and looked about him, still dopy from sleep.
"Rise and sparkle," Brand ordered, nudging him with a foot. "The By-way won't wait for sleepyheads."
Already the first of the wagons was rolling towards the mist.
"And where's your partner?" Brand wanted to know.
For a second Jack thought he meant Corriwen. But when he turned towards her, his eye saw the flattened grass where Kerry had curled next to the fire. He spun around. Kerry's sword was still dug into a dead log, close to where he'd slept. But of Kerry himself, there was no sign.
"Where's he gone?"
"A call of nature, maybe?" Brand suggested. "He'd better be quick."
Connor rolled over and put a hand on the slight hollow.
"Must have been really bursting a bladder," he said. "For this patch is cold. Hasn't been slept in for hours."
"You better find him, young friends. Once we're in the mist, there's no turning back, and the time to move is now."
Jack pushed out beyond the edge of the road where the trees overshadowed the path. Behind him, the storm was stoking up. Another crack of thunder shivered the valley. Lightning stabbed down and blasted a sapling to smoke and cinders. Corriwen touched Jack's sleeve.
"He can't have gone far."
"He'd better not have," Jack snorted, impatient to be as far away from Dermott's anger as they could get. He cupped his hands to his mouth and called out Kerry's name. The gathering wind snatched the words away.
"He was cold last night," Connor said. "He told me he couldn't get warm."
"Let's just spread out and find him. He'll probably still be asleep."
They split up and moved into the trees and in seconds they were hidden from the road. Jack called Kerry's name again. Somewhere to the left, Connor was beating down thick ferns. He heard Corriwen call for Kerry, but there was no response.
Jack pushed on, deeper, agitated now and getting more annoyed at Kerry for being so stupid as to leave the camp without a word, but then he remembered the sword, dug point-first into a log. Kerry had gripped it like a talisman since he found it on the slaughterfield on the day they'd fallen into Temair. Jack couldn't think of anything that would make him leave it.
He made his way down a slope towards a deep tarn when he heard Corriwen's voice somewhere on the right.
"Jack! I found him. Over here."
There was something in her voice that told Jack something was wrong. He and Connor barged through the ferns until they reached her. Jack stopped dead.
Kerry was curled up on the ground, his eyes wide open and staring blindly. His whole body shivered as if he was freezing.
"He's sick," Corriwen said. "A fever."
Jack touched Kerry's brow, but his skin was cold and dry, not even clammy. Kerry let out a long hiss of breath and seemed to rouse, very slowly.
"I think he got bit," Connor said. "In the castle, when I killed the snake."
"We'd have seen it before now," Jack said. "Snake bite works fast. I've seen it on television."
He took a hold of Kerry's cold hand and heaved him to his feet. Kerry moved, as if he was walking in cold water, every action slowed down.
"Come on man," Jack urged him. "Brand says we have to hurry."
Kerry looked at him blankly, as if it took a while for Jack's words to register, and rather than wait for a response, Jack put an arm round his shoulders, feeling the tremor run through his whole body, and led him back to the edge of the trees where the two horses Natterjack had stolen from the stables were hitched to a sapling.
The while mist still crowded the lip of the valley, maybe half a mile away uphill. Downslope, where the road meandered towards the dark castle, the big drawbridge slowly cranked down and as soon as it hit the blocks, a whole cavalcade came charging out in an explosion of horses and harsh cries.
Jack gauged the distance. They could be here in fifteen minutes, not much more. He glanced back to where the edge of the mist showed faint shapes of trees in its veils and his heart leapt into his throat.
The last of Brand's wagons was slowly trundling towards it. He could barely make out Score Four-arm on the buckboard.
Brand had told them he couldn't wait.
Score's wagon slowly entered the white mist and disappeared from view as if heavy curtains had closed behind it.
"Come on," Jack cried. "We can make it if we hurry."
He hustled Kerry across to the horses and they all helped get him into the saddle.
Down the hill, the thunder of hooves got much louder. They could hear the clash of shields and armour. The way in to the strange By-way was still half a mile distant. Corriwen leapt astride one horse and Connor clambered behind her. Jack sat behind Kerry who swayed in the saddle, took the rains and dug in his heels. The horse took off and they all raced for the mist.
Behind them, Dermott roared. It echoed from hill to hill. Above them the storm wheeled and the lightning hissed and sparked. It was as if the whole of this world was snarling at them.
Jack urged the horse uphill, almost pleading with it to run faster. Corriwen kept pace. She glanced back then called to Jack.
"We'll make it and time to spare."
"I really hope so."
Side by side they galloped along the hard track. The wind wheeled and blew in their faces, slowing them just a fraction. Lightning stabbed down and shattered a small tree only yards away and Jack's horse reared in fright, but he managed to keep both of them on its back, while smoking splinters whizzed about their heads.
"Faster," Jack yelled. The horses were going full out, manes whipped back. A quarter of a mile, a furlong. A hundred yards. Dermott and his men were still a good way behind. Jack felt his heart leap in hope.
They raced straight for the lip of the valley and the concealing mist. He urged the horse onwards.
But even as the hope soared inside Jack, a clench of dismay smothered it flat.
For the fog-wall, where Score's wagon had vanished, seemed further away. He fixed his eye on the place where the mist crossed the road, clenching the reins in both hands.
The edge of the fog-bank drew back. A yard, two. Then ten.
It was as if the mist was rolling away from them as they approached, rolling away faster than they could ride.
"Do you see what I see?" Corriwen cried.
"It's going. Brand said there was only one chance."
The horses gasped for breath, but held steady. The mist did not. It seemed to be sucked into the valley, diminishing with distance every second. It receded from them, rolling away faster than the horses could gallop.
They could see the edge of the trees as the fog scraped back beneath the trunks leaving them dark and distinct.
Then in a sudden whoosh, the mist was sucked away into the depths of the forest, leaving them exposed on the open road. Brand and his troupe had gone through the By-way.
Jack and Corriwen had missed their chance.
The By-way was gone.
Dermott's cavalcade was closing fast behind them.
"We're too late," Jack almost sobbed with frustration. "They've gone."
The narrow road disappeared into the dark of the forest.
For the fugitives, there was nothing for it but to follow the road and flee for their very lives.