Born of Darkness (William King) - William King Page 0,24

Gerd had been as a boy. The smell of the old classrooms, and the way the light fell through the stained glass windows came back to him. He shook his head. It was the pain-killing potion. It was making him dreamy even as it numbed his wounds.

Gerd tilted his head to one side and studied the Guardian. “You all right? You look a bit sickly.”

Kormak wondered about that. If he was not at all right, he was putting their lives at risk. The Old One had almost killed him last night and he had been in better shape then.

Still, there were four of them and the hounds. Gerd and Rodric were better prepared than any royal guardsman, and Rhiana had strange powers of her own. If he left things much longer the trail might vanish and they would lose this chance to find the creature from the sarcophagus.

He hesitated for a heartbeat. Was he afraid? He remembered what his teachers on Aethelas had taught him.

Fear was just his body’s way of telling him to be prepared for danger. There was something large and predatory waiting for him out there in the darkness, and he was not sure he could deal with it. He turned that thought over and over in his mind.

“Let’s go,” he said. The others followed him with hesitant steps, as if they sensed his reluctance to go on.

***

The Old One heard the cries of hunting beasts seeking prey. They echoed down the damp-walled tunnels of the catacombs like the calls of restless ghosts.

They were still a long way off. For a moment, he ignored them. What could those noises have to do with him? He was a hunter, not prey. Only the stupidest of animals would fail to recognise that truth, and hounds were far from the dullest of creatures.

He squatted on his haunches and tried to remember how he had got into that damned coffin. He shifted his form, expanding his cranial area, increasing the processing power of his brain. His limbs became weaker, his senses duller but his thoughts raced faster and his memory became keener.

Recollections danced through his mind and were gone too quickly to grasp. Beings of metal and glass and beings of light. Great towers of spun starlight. Cities buried deep beneath the mountains. The feel of the wind on his wings as he flew in the moonlight. He could not make any sense of the riot of images. He could put no names to any of it. These things might as well be the memories of dreams. Perhaps they were.

What had been done to him? He felt certain he had once owned a great deal of knowledge but all of it had somehow drained out of him.

The howling came closer. He smelled dogs and other things, things he did not like. One of those scents belonged to the mortal that had wounded him. The other scents were equally unpleasant. They made his nose twitch and brought tears to his eyes. His hackles rose.

How long had he been squatting in the dark before the noise of the dogs roused him? He did not know. He had lost track of time.

While he had been trapped in the coffin, time had not mattered. Its passage had been just another torture, like the hunger for flesh and for other things that had gnawed at his core.

Hounds. The human was leading a pack through the dungeons. The human who had wounded him was out there, with dogs and other mortals. It had brought weapons and allergens and sorcery.

Be calm. It was not certain that the human was hunting him. But who else could the human be looking for? Best be prepared.

He needed to adapt to meet the potential threat. This form, whilst excellent for cogitation, was not suitable for survival in the face of the threat represented by the human’s armaments.

It was however excellent for sifting through the memories of memories. It could, perhaps, grasp those butterfly ideas that had flickered through his mind earlier. He stood on the brink of a breakthrough, a realisation about why he was here, what he had done and what had been done to him. All it would take would be a little time and then . . .

The howls were much closer. How much time had he lost in examining his own thought processes in this mentally splendid but physically flabby form? Once he had possessed an intrinsic sense of time’s passage, of exactly where he was. But now