“How have we come back here? I thought we were miles away.”
“Must’ve gone round in a circle.”
“How are we gaining on it?”
Arthur shot him an unfathomable glance. “Do youwantme to say I think it’s waiting for us?”
Lance absorbed this chilling idea. He couldn’t argue. The beast had effortlessly mounted the Spindlestone crags, and was coiling itself amongst the scrubby thorn trees that grew there, a constant movement like a dance, hard for his mind to grasp. Then a head the size of a horse emerged from the coils, and it was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen—a vast skull barely covered in glistening worm-skin, the bones contorted, spikes springing up and retreating all down the length and over the crown of it, rippling. “Art, pull up.”
“Why? We’re nearly on top of it.”
“We’re inside its striking range, is where we are.”
“How can it strike? I don’t even think it has a…”
A neck extended itself from nowhere. Two green eyes shone deep in ridged sockets. The thing seemed to scan them—one at a time, thoughtfully.
For the second time that day, Lance saw the pale mask of combat wipe out all trace of humanity from Arthur’s face. Beast, Saxon, invading army—nothing mattered but his blind need to meet his foe headlong. Before Lance could draw breath to shout a warning, he’d turned his stallion’s head and pointed him straight at the foot of the crags.
Lance had a blind need of his own. He’d felt it once before, up on the dragon’s-spine ridge near Vindolanda. He’d have gladly galloped Balana off the edge of a cliff that day, if Art had leapt first. He’d been a boy then. The childish impulse of that day had become the deep will of a man, a compulsion he would carry unto death. He crouched low along Balana’s neck and tore off after his king.
Too late to reach him, but he could give the beast a choice. Halfway up the crag, Balana slithering and jolting under him, he drew his sword and waved it wildly in the direction of one glowing eye. “Hoi!” he yelled, ignoring Art’s cry of warning. “Here, you brute! Over here!”
The worm chose him. Its movement—from a coiling stillness to a pounce—was horribly swift. Only the rush of its proximity saved Lance: he and Balana were knocked aside by the shock it produced in the air. The mare went down on her flank, but somehow struggled up again, Lance clinging to her neck and her mane.
The beast was intelligent. Lance, mind cold and clear as White Lawns snow now, saw it turning, reassessing its prey, lurching round on one huge coil to strike at him again. Its breath snatched his own from his lungs with its foul heat, underlain by a tang like scorching, like the tinder-dry moment before a forest fire. One great green eye brought its eerie light to bear on him. Lance drove his sword up, but the tip glanced off the socket’s bony ridge, striking sparks.
He had one more chance. The creature arching over him, he pulled his spear from its leather hoops. It was the same weapon he’d carried since he’d grown tall enough to lift it and hunt deer on the moors, Ban’s spare army lance, the source of his own name. Drawing back with all his strength, he thrust it at the place where the beast’s jugular ought to be.
The skin looked thin as silk. Beneath it he saw organs shifting, veins pulsing. His spear’s bronze head struck true—impacted with the impossible clang of metal on its own substance, and snapped in two.
Lance was finished. Time dilated unnaturally around him, as the worm reared back to strike again, and he found he could reflect on this, and even feel an instant of relief. He’d been in Art’s service for less than two days. Now, at least, he would never have a chance to fail him.No chance to betray him, something hissed inside his mind, and he cast around him, bewildered, for the source of the terrible voice, almost blind to the descent of the beast’s gaping mouth…
It swung away from him, grazing Balana’s ears, spattering the front of his chainmail with slime. The night cracked in half to a shriek which held a note of outrage and surprise, and he saw blood fly from a hole torn in the beast’s neck. Not his own doing… Shocked at the human scarlet of the wound, he spun Balana around.
Art was so close to the worm that he had almost disappeared within one coil. If the creature was immune to ordinary blades, Excalibur could hurt it still. Art lunged again and again, using his stallion’s terrified leaps for escape to carry him close and fast enough to strike. He wasn’t doing much damage, but the creature was distracted.
He hadn’t thought the matter through any further than that. His expression, when he threw a dismayed glance at Lance, was almost comical. The worm shot its great neck to its fullest extent, out of the reach of this small, biting nuisance, then arched like a hard-curbed charger and slowly, deliberately, brought its head down, down, to stare direct at Art. It pushed its nose forward until it was almost resting on the poor stallion’s muzzle, and whether out of terror or the sheer force of its rider’s will, the horse stayed motionless. Art gazed into the maw of the dragon, his face a blank of fascination, colourless in the beast’s moonlight gleam. Then, very slowly, step by step, he began to back the stallion up. “Lance,” he said, never taking his eyes off the beast. “Lance, what do I do?”
How should I know?But, inexplicably, Lance did. He looked to the top of the crag, where a single spire of rock was outlined against the sky. “Tell her to go to her stone.”
“Her?”
“Of course. Can’t you feel it?”
“All I can feel is her breath. She’s got flames in her gullet. I think she can spit fire. What stone, for God’s sake?”
“The spindle stone that gives this place its name—up there. You have to command her.”
“What? She’s about to devour us both.”
“If she could kill you, you’d be smoking bones by now. She’d love to, but something’s stopping her.”
“What—my kingly authority?”
“No. I think it’s the sword. Try!”
Art opened his mouth for another question, but it was too late. The worm was coiling herself up for a strike. Her horse-sized maw gaped wide, and Lance tensed to dodge a fireball, but what came forth was a shriek that shook the rooks from their roosts and sent surviving children in villages five miles around wailing to their parents’ beds. His eardrums tried to burst beneath the strain of it. Art was closer. Surely the sound would paralyse him, drop him where he and his stallion stood…
