Page 3

She'd told me the tale, haltingly, breaking off at intervals to sing snatches of that song. It was a familiar enough story, of a girl from the poorest of the poor forced to work as a servant for a family slightly higher up the social ladder. There was a master who was overly familiar, and a mistress who became first suspicious, then jealous, and blamed her for leading the man on. Finally, the woman had confronted her husband, who had blamed it all on the girl, of course.

"The two of them pulled me outside..." she'd said, staring up at me with her fearless eyes. "Then he held me down, and she started whipping me – and whipping...I knew they were going to kill me. I heard them talking about it. The rest of the village – they were watching, but nobody said anything. And then –"

She'd broken off to sing, and would not talk to me again; but I'd been able to fill in the next bit for myself. The beast had come then, and devoured the man and woman. It had spared her, though, and moved on to deal with the rest of the village.

I'd left her still sitting on her log, and walked away. The last I'd heard was her voice, still raised in that strange, compelling song.

I'd come awake, shaking my head. What had brought this buried memory up, after so many years? I'd found others afterwards that the beast seemed to have spared, for reasons unfathomable. I could only guess at its motivations, and that made not the slightest difference to my quest.

When I'd got up and stepped out of the hut, I'd stopped in my tracks, my face growing cold with shock. Just outside the door was the mark of an immense foot, sickle-shaped slashes of claws digging into the dirt. The beast had been here, just as I'd imagined. And it had been silent – so silent that not even the village dogs had got to know it was there.

For a moment I'd wondered why it hadn't simply broken down the wall and entered. It was big and strong enough, and the hut was flimsy enough. I'd shrugged. It only meant that the beast hadn't used the hours of darkness to run, and that only brought me closer to tracking it down.

Now, crouched on the trail next to the guide, I looked up the pass. "Are there caves in the walls of the pass?"

"No, but there are...ledges. It's not easy to see what's on top, from below." The guide hesitated. "Maybe we make camp here tonight and go on in the morning?"

"No!" It wasn't just the fact that I knew he'd use the darkness to try and sneak away, back to the village. I could taste the nearness of the beast, could almost feel the tingling in the hairs on my arms. "We're going on."

He looked at me with an expression filled with such fear that I realised he wasn't scared of the monster as much as he was of me. "All right. We go on."

The sun had set behind the top of the hills by the time we entered the pass, the shadows falling over us like a thick purple blanket. The sky above was still porcelain-blue, though, and there was enough light to see. I knew we'd better locate the creature before darkness fell, or we'd be helpless in these narrow confines. It could decapitate us from above in an instant, with one swipe of its claws – or impale us on the tip of its stinging tail.

I suppressed a shudder at the thought of the tail. That was the one thing about the beast which had never ceased to unnerve me.

"We must find it before dark, sir," the guide said, echoing my thoughts so exactly that I was filled with sudden fury. I was about to round on him when something caught at the corner of my eye.

In itself it wasn't much – a deeper shadow, a flicker in the deepening dusk, as of something which had just turned round a far corner of the path. Instinctively, I paused, staring. "Did you see that?"

"Yes..." His voice had sunk to a whisper. "What is it?"

"The flap of the beast's wings – got to be. It's just gone around the turning. Come quickly."

Without waiting for him, I began to run, tugging the crossbow off my shoulder. The pass was narrow, so narrow that I knew the beast couldn't spread its wings to fly properly. Not that its wings could carry it far, of course; for all their great size, they weren't big enough to do more than lift the great weight of the monster's body a little off the ground.

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