“How can I? I don’t understand it myself.”
“It’s not a thing to understand. It’s a thing to be. Like this, my dear master. Like this.” Lance got the string undone. This time he found a rich and ready cock-stand awaiting his touch, and Art arched up with a groan, pressing into his hand. Lance kissed the warm mouth seeking his. “There you are. There.”
“I won’t last long. Sorry.”
“Didn’t I say we’d have to work fast?”
“But what about you?”
“Just take hold of me over my clothes. Ah, yes—let me ride your strong hand.”
“Ah, Lance, will you always do this—break my bloody ice, bring me back to life?”
“As long as there’s life in me.” Lance leaned down, kissed and gently bit the side of Art’s neck. The hot shaft leapt in his hand, and he heard with the deepest delight of flesh and spirit the grinding moan of his lover’s release. Enough for him—too much, and he thrust into Art’s hard grasp, pleasure thudding into him like arrows. “Art! Ah, holy goddess, yes!”
Chapter Twelve
“We should start home. I don’t fancy meeting your sheep-eating raiders in the dark.”
Art yawned hugely. His head was comfortably pillowed on Lance’s shoulder. Even though frost was beginning to crackle in the moss and fallen leaves around them, their tangle of entwined limbs remained warm. “No more talk of worms and dragons, then, Lance?”
“Hardly. Coel must have got to me with his phantasms. I should never be surprised, when men invent some novel way of slaying one another. Come on, before we go to sleep here and freeze to…” He fell silent. “Wait. Do you hear that?”
Art listened. “Hoofbeats. Damn. We’d better take cover.”
“No, it’s…”
The sounds intensified. Not the ordinary, blood-stirring rhythm of flying hooves, which to Lance was a sound of life even when it meant his enemy bearing down on him, the prelude to a good fight or a chase. This slowed his heart to a crawl of cold fear. And he’d heard it before—only last night, or in the small hours of this very morning, shaking the foundations of Din Guardi.
Art was scrambling to his feet, wide-eyed. “What in hell’s name is that?”
“I don’t know, but we need to get away from it. Grab your horse before he bolts.”
Art made a dive for the stallion, closing a hand on the beast’s bridle before he could uproot the sapling he’d been hitched to. Lance untied Balana and made ready to spring onto her back.
Too late. The rumble escalated to a roar. Off to the east, between earth and sky, somehow bigger than either, a shape stirred, so vast his mind refused to take it in. “Get down!” he yelled. “Art, get down!” He began a move to tackle him, drag him to the ground. Then there was no need—the earth heaved, knocking them both flat among the ruins.
On instinct Lance held fast to Balana’s rein, though she almost tore his arm off in her struggle to escape. Distantly he saw that Art had done the same, that the stallion was snorting and rearing, eyes rolling in terror. Then he couldn’t look anywhere but at the thing bearing down on them across the fields.
The worm. His mind tried to slip its moorings. His vision felt twisted, forced into a place where nothing made sense, where the angles were wrong and the veil had been torn between his familiar world and a dimension of shrieking insanity. The moon hadn’t risen, yet everything was bathed in a pale sickly light. Through it moved—or coiled, or slithered; Lance didn’t have a name inside himself for the way it covered the ground—a gleaming tube, tall as a horse, and God knew how long. It reached the foot of the hill where he and Art had taken refuge, and something—perhaps the rise of the ground—made it divert, begin a thunderous slide past, length after length with no end in sight. The earth shuddered beneath it, and a rank smell of rotten flesh and dying vegetation filled the air.
White, it was white. It had a luminescence of its own, a faint firefly green. In flashes, Lance saw that its body was segmented, marked here and there with things like giant scales, with flaps of skin like a bat’s unfurled wings. No end in sight… Then it narrowed, and the last few yards of it rushed past, and it was gone as fast as it had come.
It left a trail of dead grass across the moor. Lance sat up. Art was picking himself up off the ground. They looked at one another in utter consternation. Then Lance, who had never seen anyone’s face quite such a picture as Art’s, began to laugh. After an astonished moment, Art joined in.
“My God,” Lance said when he could. “What are we going to do?”
“Follow it, of course. Why didn’t it eat us?”
“It was moving too fast. Don’t think it noticed us.” He coughed, and tried to catch his breath. “Followit? What the hell would we do if we caught it up?”
“Kill the damn thing, before it gets to the villages. That’s what’s been causing all this slaughter and havoc. Come on!”
Lance felt no fear: didn’t pause for an instant to question his king’s command. They were two scraps of flesh and bone in pursuit of a fifty-foot nightmare, but he sprang onto Balana’s back, and it felt like the beginning of a ride after a deer or a hare. He and Art set off to slay the worm.
The trail was easy to follow. The places where slime remained were faintly glowing, like phosphorescence on the inside of a cave. Where flat ground gave way to trees and gorse, the creature hadn’t turned but smashed its way through, leaving a gap large enough for Art and Lance to gallop through abreast. Jagged branches stood out against the sky as if startled by their sudden maiming. Everywhere the birds were silent, a quiet deeper than sunset. The horses flew, catching their riders’ intent, their fear suspended by it. “It’s making for Spindlestone, that same poor hamlet where we started this morning,” Art called, pointing ahead, and Lance saw the thing like a ghostly snake on the horizon. “Take its left flank. I’ll take the right.”
