Mark Chadbourn - The Hounds of Avalon

‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘I’m no good with heights.’

‘You’re no good with getting torn apart by monsters, either,’ Hal urged. ‘You’ve got to, Samantha. Hold my hand — we’ll do it together.’

Reluctantly, Samantha took his hand. Hal was surprised she’d obeyed him. Her limbs were taut and Hal was afraid she’d freeze up at the jump and drag them both over the edge. At the last moment he gave her a hard yank that propelled her into the air. They sprawled together on the flat roof, winded.

In a second, Hal was up, his heart thundering so loudly that it almost drowned out the noise of terrible damage being done that was emanating from the mansion house. From the flat roof they could climb on to a pitched roof at the end of the wing. It was slick with snow and ice and after only a few feet Hal found himself slithering with increasing speed towards the drop. Samantha screamed. Hal spread his hands out in a bid to create some traction and grabbed the edge of a broken tile that cut deeply into his fingers. The pain as the blood bubbled out helped him to clear the fear from his mind. Cautiously, he spread-eagled his body and edged along the roof, stopping every time he felt himself begin to slip. Above him, Samantha followed suit.

It seemed to take an age to reach the end of the roof. His muscles burning, Hal located a drainpipe and with some difficulty slithered down it. When he reached the bottom he looked up; Samantha was hesitating.

‘Hal, I don’t think I can…’ she began.

‘You made the jump, you can do this,’ Hal hissed.

‘I can’t.’ She looked around nervously as the noise from the house grew even more intense; it sounded as if the place was being wrecked.

‘You have to.’ Hal thought for a moment, then said, ‘What would Hunter say if he saw you dithering up there? He wouldn’t let you live it down.’

Samantha teetered on the brink before determination crept into her face. Hesitantly, she lowered herself on to the drainpipe and began to climb down. Hal’s relief was short-lived: halfway down the drainpipe she began to lose her grip, and a second later she was falling. Hal threw himself forward just in time. The impact knocked him to the ground and stunned him for a second. But then Samantha was helping him to his feet and thanking him profusely between sobs.

The wide-open plain stretched away from the house to the trees and the lane leading out of the estate. The thick snow would make it hard going, but Hal guessed they would probably be able to move faster than their pursuers.

‘Let me go on ahead to check there’s nothing waiting for us. Then get set to run,’ Hal whispered. Before Samantha could reply, he was running low across the thick snow. He reached a fence at the side of a now-buried road and scanned in all directions, but saw nothing. Large snowflakes began to drift down: a new storm was on its way.

Just as Hal had decided that the way was clear, Samantha cried out. Scrambling back towards the house, he found her kicking and screaming in the grip of the Lord of Birds, who had just emerged from around the side of the mansion house. Thoughts burst through Hal’s confusion and desperation: why hadn’t he checked that they were all inside the building? And what was he going to do now?

The Lord of Birds effortlessly pulled Samantha in closer. She shrieked in pain as pecking beaks erupted from the confusion of the Lord’s form to tear her flesh. Blood splattered on the virginal snow beneath where she struggled.

It was that final sight that cleared Hal’s mind to a dull white noise. Acting purely on instinct, he threw himself against the Lord’s bulk in an attempt to unbalance it. The sensation of the feathers and beaks roiling against him was sickening, but he managed to grab hold of Samantha’s wrist and pull her hand free of the Lord’s grip.

A second later, Samantha dropped to the snow, and it was only when the Lord of Birds grabbed him with its feathery hands that Hal realised that Samantha was superfluous: Hal had been the real target.

Hal craned his neck around as the Lord of Birds pulled him in. Samantha was sprawled in the snow, dazed and trying to catch her breath. ‘Run!’ he yelled. ‘Get back to the village! Don’t wait for me!’ Samantha began to argue, but Hal yelled so furiously that she jumped to her feet and set off across the snow as fast as she could go.

Pain burst all over Hal’s body as the birds pecked at him with a terrifying savagery. As the Lord wrapped its arms around Hal, its aim became apparent: Hal would be pulled into the seething morass and consumed.

Blood splashed into his eyes from the beak of a ferocious thrush that was tearing at his cheek. His midriff was growing wet and warm, now numb from repeated attacks. He attempted to get some leverage so that he could prise himself free, but the Lord of Birds was too strong and its form too shifting for Hal to get a foothold. There was nothing he could do.

As he forced his head back to protect his eyes, a single thought came into his head like a clarion call. With difficulty, he wriggled one bloody hand through flapping wings and into his pocket. The Bloodeye met his fingers like an old friend, all the hidden memories of its usefulness revealed once more.

The words came to him like a dream: ‘Far and away and here,’ almost lost beneath the wild bird calls and frantic flapping.

Hal didn’t know what happened next. He found himself flying through the air, knocked free from the grip of the Lord of Birds by a tremendous impact that stunned him. As he lay in the freezing snow, head spinning, the smell of wet fur filled his nostrils. The deafening roar of a tremendous beast echoed all around.

From the corner of his eye, Hal saw a frenzied shape attack the Lord of Birds. Feathers flew everywhere; dismembered bird heads plopped into the snow, beady eyes still rolling. Shocked alert, Hal drove himself backwards with his heels until he was far enough away to see properly what was occurring.

The Lord of Birds was being torn apart by an oversized man. Hal got glimpses through the wall of feathers — furs, a wide-brimmed hat, a string of dead conies swinging wildly — and realised it was Bearskin, the sharp-toothed drinker from the mysterious inn who had given Hal the Bloodeye.

Hal got to his feet, but he was transfixed by the inhuman fury of the attack. The Lord of Birds was being driven back, falling apart, becoming less human in form with each passing moment. But when Bearskin glanced back in Hal’s direction, Hal immediately saw why: his rescuer’s face was partially transformed; fur sprouted from the cheeks and forehead, the nose and mouth protruding in the first stage of a snout, the eyes big and black, his hands now covered with fur and tipped with long, jagged talons.

Hal was horrified by the ferocity he saw there, and he feared that once Bearskin had disposed of the Lord of Birds, the shape-shifter would turn on him.

‘Leave!’ Bearskin roared at him, the word barely distinguishable from the incoherent snarl of an animal. Hal could see from Bearskin’s eyes that he also thought he might not be able to control himself.

Hal scrambled to his feet and ran just as the other Lords began to emerge from the front of the mansion house. Foaming at the mouth, Bearskin descended on the Lord of Birds in a renewed frenzy of tearing and rending. By the time Hal had reached the line of Samantha’s footprints there remained only a wide arc of twitching bodies and torn wings and a faint purple mist where the Lord of Birds had stood, slowly breaking up in the snowy wind.

Bearskin turned on the other Lords, but it was clear that he wouldn’t stand a chance against the three of them. Instead, he awkwardly manoeuvred the blunderbuss that hung at his side and fired a tremendous volley that rang off the hall’s white walls. Hal didn’t wait to see if it had any impact on the fast-approaching Lords.