Rob Scott - Lessek_s Key

‘At least one.’

‘Get us out of here, quick!’

‘We can’t outrun them, believe me. I’ve tried – and on my Renna, who’s twice as fast as this old carthorse.’

‘What do you propose we do?’

‘Get ready to shoot. Draw several arrows, tuck them in my belt. Put four or five in there, no more. If you can’t stop them with those, we’ll be dead anyway.’ The growl came again, closer this time but still off to the west. ‘Hurry!’

They had covered another hundred paces before Mark caught sight of the creature, coming at them through the trees, its great hindquarters propelling it forward at high speed.

Mark’s stomach felt as though it had been filled with concrete; his arms went numb with fear. Coming towards them was something out of a nightmare, a beast unlike anything he had ever seen. He had only glimpsed the grettan Nerak had sent against them in the Blackstone forest, but that animal had been fleeing into the trees, one leg severed, shrieking in pain. This grettan was in rude good health, and coming for them full pelt, crashing through the undergrowth as if there was nothing there. It had small black eyes, set wide apart over a short snout and a snarling mouth of spiked canines. Its fur was dense and black, covering the corded muscles propelling the beast towards them.

It was coming too fast; he wouldn’t get a shot off, there was no way – and even if he did, it would be a token gesture, nothing good enough to stop or even slow the grettan. Garec’s voice woke him from his stupor.

‘Shoot the rutter!’ he screamed, ‘can’t you see it?’ Garec was fighting to keep the horse under control as the scent and sounds of charging grettan drove it wild.

Mark’s hand shook as he tried to nock an arrow but it finally gripped and he drew, took aim and felt the shaft slip off the bowstring. ‘Hell,’ he barked, lowering the bow and starting again, ‘I can’t ride a horse! I can’t shoot a bow! Sonofabitch!’

Garec shouted back at him, ‘Breathe. Take your time. Aim, breathe and release. You’ve practised, Mark, now make the shot.’ Garec soothed the horse, urging the animal on. ‘Make it count, Mark. You won’t have many chances.’

The grettan broke from the trees some hundred paces behind them, turned up the hillside and began closing the gap. Mark turned as far as he could in the saddle, ignoring the pain as the hole in his knee broke open and began bleeding again. Watching the monster come up behind them was like watching a train coming down the track: he needed a rifle, a hand grenade, an RPG to stop this thing, not an arrow.

‘This isn’t going to work, Garec,’ he said despairingly.

‘Just breathe, aim and fire. You can do it.’

Mark wished he was back in Idaho Springs teaching history, telling his students about the Parthian shot: the great bowmen were famous for the feat of turning in their saddles while retreating and shooting surprisingly accurate parting shots at their enemies. Instead, here he was in a fantasy land, about to try the same trick himself. He drew a deep breath and, timing his shot to the creature’s rhythmic stride, released the arrow.

The shaft took the snarling monster in the right shoulder, sinking deep into the muscle and slowing the grettan for a moment as it reared back and howled into the treetops. But the injury stopped it for only a moment, long enough for the roan to make up fifteen or twenty paces, then it was after them again.

Emboldened by his success, Mark drew and fired a second time, screaming obscenities at the beast. This arrow tore through the thin flesh between the grettan’s eyes and flopped up and down in time to its leaps, a grisly metronome. Mark shouted a victory cry, but it choked in his throat when he realised the direct hit had done nothing to slow the creature down.

His hands trembling again, he struggled to prepare his third shaft, aiming and releasing a scant moment before the grettan, its face stained with blood, leaped onto the roan’s hindquarters, spilling him and Garec into the snow.

Mark rolled head over heels, crashing through the rotten wood of a fallen tree trunk. His injured knee was bleeding badly now as he slipped and slid down the hillside, bouncing off trees and through brambles before coming to rest against a rock protruding out of the frozen ground. From above, he heard the roan wail several times like a frightened child and then fall silent. The horse was dead.

Trying to regain his composure, Mark cleared the snow from his face. His knee was a mess; the bandages Raskin had applied that morning had disappeared during his precipitous descent. He had a sharp pain in his shoulder, the damaged knee was throbbing badly and there was a steady, dull pain in his lower back, but he felt as if he could manage to walk. He could hear the grettan, snarling and tearing at the carcase of the horse, and he looked around for a tree he might climb to elude the creature long enough for it to lose interest or wander away. The nearest looked to be fifteen yards or so up the hillside, one he had slammed into moments earlier.

He searched around for Garec, but there was no sign of him. He shook himself and began trudging back up the slope, calling out, ‘Garec!’ – and immediately realising how stupid he’d been. Instead of Garec’s voice, Mark heard the snarling and growling come to an abrupt halt; a palpable stillness fell over the forested hillside.

Mark took another few steps, just far enough to see that instead of feeding on the horse’s carcase, the grettan had lifted its head and was staring down at him.

‘Ah, hell,’ Mark groaned, unsure whether to run, freeze or pray for a massive heart attack. He measured the distance to the nearest branches. ‘There’s no way.’ He glanced around, hoping someone had passed through the forest earlier that morning and accidentally forgotten their machine-gun. Apart from a stocky length of rotten oak, there was nothing. He bent down to pick up the stick, hoping that, like Steven, he might choose the one branch in the entire forest imbued with enough mystical energy to blast this grettan into pixie dust, but the branch just crumbled in his hand.

The grettan moved down the hill, like a jungle cat stalking its prey. Mark thought for a second about running, but he didn’t much fancy the idea of being hamstrung, so instead, he froze.

His legs buried calf-deep in the snow, Mark Jenkins stood his ground, trembling, and waiting for the monster – that’s what the grettan was, a monster from a child’s nightmare – to pounce on him and tear out his throat. He waited for his life to flash before his eyes, but nothing happened; all he could think about was when the creature would leap, and how quickly it would tear him apart. He started to cry. This was not how he had ever imagined he would die.

‘Come on, then,’ he sobbed. ‘Come and get me.’

The grettan moved down the hill, low to the ground, sliding like mercury between the rocks and trees, the consummate hunter.

‘I’m right here!’ Mark looked for a stick, a rock, anything he might use to land one decent blow. Maybe he could blind the creature, or crack its skull… but there was nothing nearby but snow and the rotten branch lying in a crumble beside his feet.

Mark decided to go out in a flurry of noise and anger, to leave Eldarn a raving wild man. He started bellowing, whatever came into his mind, his last testament a loose collection of words and phrases, the stream-of-consciousness farewell of a condemned man.

Pffft! The arrow took the grettan in the throat. Pffft! Another sank deep, inches from the first, until only the fletching protruded. The grettan shrieked, rose up on its hind legs and growled. Pffft! Thud! Another hit. Pffft! Thud! Yet another, and this one was a miracle shot, into the soft flesh behind the animal’s ear and below the curve of its skull; there weren’t a handful of people in the world, any world, Eldarn included, who could have made that shot.