The door into Lavastine’s chamber was latched from the inside, and servants already crowded there. Several bore torches aloft to light the others, who were slamming their shoulders into the heavy door to force it open. Alain stumbled onto the landing, slipping on the litter of pine needles that had been strewn on the floor to drive away evil. Even through the heavy wooded door the noise of the hounds was deafening.
“Let me through!” The men parted before him, but he grabbed two of the stoutest and all together they hit the door with their full weight, hit it again as inside hounds went wild. One of them yipped in pain, a high yelp, followed by a furious crescendo of barking.
“Terror!” It was Lavastine’s voice.
“Father!” cried Alain. With servants on either side, he slammed against the door again. It shuddered, creaking. A ligatura had been laced above this door as well, fastened more tightly, but now its component parts began to drizzle down on them: sage, withered dill, oak twigs, and linen strips written with signs, smelling faintly of cypress.
“Alain, don’t come in!” shouted Lavastine. “It’s in here.”
“Again!” His shoulder was numb, so he turned to use the other. They hit the door, and it creaked again, but did not budge.
“My lord!” A soldier came panting up the stairs, carrying two axes. He was followed by another soldier carrying a torch.
Alain grabbed one and set to work with a will, out of his mind with fear, hacking madly as the hounds scrabbled and barked on the other side; so close, so impossibly far. He could not hear the count, except for a string of curses. Ai, God, if the thing had gotten into the room, then his father could not risk a dash across the floor to open the door. He was alone in the dark, helpless except for the hounds.
Wood shattered under the blade. Beside him, the soldier wielded the other ax with the trained strokes of a man who has seen battle many times, and indeed the torchlight gave enough clarity for Alain to glimpse the man’s face: one of the veterans of the Gent expedition.
“Is it an assassin?” a servant wailed.
“Nay, an evil curse!” shouted another. “The dead hand of the Eika, avenging hisself on the count for his victory at Gent!”
Haze made the landing yellow as Alain chopped. Wood splintered, and his blade cracked through, hung up in the wood. The hounds fell silent except for a whimper coming from one of them.
“Hold!” Lavastine’s voice came abruptly, from the other side of the door. “Stand back.”
They all obeyed without thinking. The latch moved. The door creaked, shifted, grated.
“It’s stuck,” said the soldier, and he and Alain got their shoulders behind it and shoved. It gave way all at once, and Alain fell into the room, staggered, and caught himself, blinking. The shutter lay wide and the thinnest gray streak of light blurred the horizon. Servants crowded in behind him, but the silence was frightening, and intense.
Lavastine stood barefoot, in a shift, on the stone floor. In his right hand he held his unsheathed sword, in his left a knife. Sorrow and Rage growled at the men until Alain bade them hush. They were so tense that even then they growled, but they sat. Terror lay on the floor licking one of his hind legs, and Fear crowded directly behind Lavastine, a headless bulk.
The torchlight made shadows dance crazily in the room as the servants moved forward, muttering, afraid.
“Father!” Alain found his voice and stumbled forward to grasp Lavastine’s wrist. His skin was terribly cold, but his face was flushed. “Ai, God! What happened?”
Lavastine opened his hand and the knife fell to the floor with a thud. Fear growled, a rumbling in his throat. He moved around Lavastine, and Alain had a brief glimpse of something white dangling from his jaws before the hound opened his mouth to drop a sickly white ratlike creature at Lavastine’s feet like an offering. It looked quite dead.
But it was too late anyway.
Alain’s gaze, drawn down, stopped at the count’s bare feet, pale, well-groomed, and clean… except for two spots of blood on his ankle, set close together. Lavastine said nothing, only set a hand on Alain’s shoulder for support and with Alain beside him limped back to the bed, where he sat down.
But his expression was perfectly calm. “Call the deacon,” he said. “I have been bitten.” The servants wailed aloud, all clamoring at once, but he raised a hand for silence. “Nay, God is merciful.”
“Merciful!” cried Alain, aghast. He did not want to look at the creature that lay exposed on the plank floor, but one of the soldiers poked it with the haft of its ax, and it did not stir, made no movement. It was completely lifeless.
