in his vat, yes.'
See to it, then, he told her. Tend the beast first, while I lie here and think, and consider... oh, a great many things.
But hurry, Bonnie Jean, for you have awakened me and my time is nigh. And I hunger like a helpless child stirring in his crib, but the faithful little mother is at hand to bare her breast...
B.J. went out onto the bald, domed roof of Radu's redoubt and followed a south-westerly route that she'd known for the better part of two centuries. Indeed to her keen eyes and senses there was now a clearly discernible track between scattered boulders, across gaping fissures, and through the treacherous scree jumbles of the high, narrow passes.
Her camouflaged denim suit was crag-grey and lichen-green, matching her surroundings. Over her left shoulder, tied across her back, she carried a rope; also on the left, two small grappling irons dangled from her wide leather belt. A crossbow hung on her right thigh, and was strapped-just above the knee so as not to swing with her movements.
These things, plus a knife in a leather sheath, were all that Bonnie Jean carried.
To her relief, the sun was hidden behind bank upon bank of clouds sweeping in from the west, across the Monadhliath Mountains and the Spey. It was mid-afternoon, creeping towards evening; the shadows of the crags beginning to creep, too, but that meant nothing to B.J. Her eyes were feral as the wilds she traversed; they saw the wildcats sporting in the heather before the cats saw her. Only the eagles, circling on high, had any great advantage.
But she wasn't interested in cats and eagles. Both were difficult, and both dangerous until stone dead.
But on the penultimate, false-plateau of a series of mighty terraces east of Loch Insh, B.J. knew there were near-inaccessible woodlands and copses in the lee of the upper heights. Knew, too, that she'd find deer there - indeed, a small herd of deer. Her kill would not be missed; these were creatures of the wild; she was the only one who had ever culled them. And she required just one, a faun; not for sweetness but size. It must be easily portable, back to the lair.
She came to the rim. The forest-belt sprawled a dark, misted green all of seven hundred feet below, and the chimney of a teetering stack was her route down.
At the top of the last stage of her descent, B.J. used her rope to form a hoist and lowered the grapples, and without further pause went hand over hand to the bottom. Her prey had long since sensed her and fled, of course; in this place, there were no sounds extraneous to nature. Any sound that was strange was also dangerous.
So she tracked them through the woods. And from then on, never a snapped twig or the swishing recoil of a brushed-aside branch to give her away ... until the last moment, when the gut of her crossbow thrummed and the lethal bolt hissed unerringly to its target...
* * *
Paralysed, with its spine almost severed at a point one inch forward of the flanges of its shoulders, the buck merely trembled as B.J. used the rope and grapples to hoist it by stages up the cliff. The animal had voided itself in the woods and so didn't foul her. Then the four-mile trek back to the lair, with the shuddering buck on her shoulders, and B.J. hoping against hope that it wouldn't die along the way. No, for at the vat of Radu's beast she would require the engine of its pounding heart to beat to the very last.
At the lair, she lowered the animal into the vent closest to the great vat, folowed it into darkness. Shortly, she ascended the ramp to the rim of the vat and tossed the buck down onto the yelow, semi-solid surface. Then back down and around to the rear of the vat, where a copper implement was stored in oiled wrappings. It was a holow tube three feet long, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, with a trumpet-like funnel at one end. The pointed end had been cut through diagonaly, like the tip of a hypodermic needle.
Back up the ramp to the buck, where B.J. moved the paralysed animal aside in order to drive the sharp end of the funnel down into the resin ... at which the obscure outline or silhouete of Radu's creature stirred visibly, however sluggishly, in the gelatinous soup of its vat