was or what it did. Was there anything weird about the animals around Penambra before the Dark came?"
"Not that I ever heard." Ingold was turning his head as he spoke, listening as much as watching. He'd put back the hood of his heavy brown mantle, and his white hair, long and tatty from weeks of journeying, flickered in the gray air. He'd trimmed his beard with his knife a couple of nights ago, and resembled St. Anthony after ten rounds with demons in the wilderness.
Not, thought Gil, that anyone in this universe but herself and Ingold, because she'd told him- knew who St. Anthony was. Maia of Thran, Bishop of Renweth, erstwhile Bishop of Penambra and owner of the palace they sought, had told her tales of analogous holy hermits who'd had similar problems.
Unprepossessing, she thought, to anyone who hadn't seen him in action. Almost invisible, unless he wished to be seen. "And in any case we might as easily be dealing with a factor of time rather than distance." Ingold held up his six-foot walking staff in his blue- mittened left hand, but his right never strayed far from the hilt of the sword at his side. "It's been... Behind you!"
He was turning as he yelled, and his cry was the only reason the thing didn't take Gil full in the back like a bobcat fastening onto a deer. She was drawing her own sword, still on her knees but cutting as she whirled, and aware at the same moment of Ingold drawing, stepping in, slashing. Ripping weight collided with Gil's upper arm and she had a terrible impression of a short-snouted animal face, of teeth thrusting out of a lifted mass of wrinkles, of something very wrong with the eyes...
Pain and cold sliced her right cheek low on the jawbone. She'd already dropped the sword, pulled her dagger; she slit and ripped and felt blood and intestines gush hotly over her hand. The thing didn't flinch. Long arms like an ape's wrapped around her shoulders, claws cutting through her sheepskin coat. It bit again at her face, going for her eyes, its own back and spine wide open. Gil cut hard and straight across them with seven-inch steel that could shave the hair off a man's arm. The teeth spasmed and snapped, the smell of blood clogging her nostrils. Buzzing dizziness filled her. She thought she'd been submerged miles deep in dry, living gray sand.
"Gil!" The voice was familiar but far-off, a fly on a ceiling miles above her head. She'd heard it in dreams, maybe...
Her face hurt. The lips of the wound in her cheek were freezing now against the heat of her blood. For some reason she had the impression she was waking up in her own bed in the fortress Keep of Dare, far away in the Vale of Renweth. "What time is it?" she asked. The pain redoubled and she remembered. Her head ached.
"Lie still." He bent over her, lined face pallid with shock. There was blood on the sleeves of his mantle, on the blackish bison fur of the surcoat he wore over that. She felt his fingers probe gently at her cheek and jaw. He'd taken off his mittens, and his flesh was startlingly warm. The smell of the blood almost made her faint again. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah." Her lips felt puffy, the side of her face a balloon of air. She put up her hand and remembered, tore off her sodden glove, brushed her lips, then the corner of her right eye with her fingertips. The wounds were along her cheekbone and jaw, sticky with blood and slobber. "What was that thing?"
"Lie still a little more." Ingold unslung the pack from his shoulders and dug in it with swift hands. "Then you can have a look."
All the while he was daubing a dressing of herb and willow bark on the wounds, stitching them and applying linen and plaster-braiding in the spells of healing, of resistance to infection and shock-Gil was conscious of him listening, watching, casting again the unseen net of his awareness over the landscape that lay beyond the courtyard wall.
Once he stood up, quickly, catching up the sword that lay drawn on the muddy marble at his side, but whatever it was that had stirred the slunch was still then and made no further move.
He knelt again. "Do you think you can sit up?" "Depends on what kind of reward you offer me."