Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/34

 perils that encompass us, we promise to amend our ways as far as in our sinful nature lies. Grant, therefore, that we may come safely through this danger—or if it be that we must perish, let us take such toll of those who came against us that their children and their children's children shall turn pale and tremble when our names are spoken. Amen.

"Now let what is to come come quickly," he looked up smilingly from his devotions. "Sweet mistress, no man dies more times than one, and who would wish to live alway?"

They had ridden out into a little clearing and the stars were twinkling infinitely remote and chill above them. Far off, but belling nearer, even as it sounded, came the howling of a wolf, and its quavering wail was answered by another, and another—and another. On every side, completely circling them, rose the hunting-cry, and suddenly a gray form glided from the shadows, followed by two more, three, a score, and they found themselves the center of a ring of greenly gleaming eyes, white teeth and hairy breasts. The howling had ceased now, but the silence that enfolded them was infinitely more frightening. Standing head and shoulders above others in the pack, a gigantic wolf wove through the hairy circle, seeming to give orders and plan strategy.

De Grandin slipped down from his saddle, for his horse was mad with terror and unmanageable. He held his hand to Basta, helping her alight, and as she dropped beside him dipped her to his breast. "One kiss before we meet them steel to tusk, querida," he whispered as they took their stand against a lightning-blasted pine. "If so be we must die and the Lord wills I must rot in hell for ever, the memory of thy kisses will console me in the midst of fire and brimstone everlasting."

"Again!" she pleaded. "Again!" She wound her arms about him and strained herself so tight against his armor that it seemed their two forms would be merged in one. "Oh, beloved, why must we stop to breathe?"

But need to stop was urgent, for even as they embraced the pack charged. A leaping chaos of red mouths and flashing teeth surged on them, and into it he plunged his sword with lightning strokes, stabbing, slashing, hacking till his arm grew numb with killing.

He saw Basta fighting like a tiling possessed; then suddenly he heard her give a cry and fall down writhing as two wolves leaped on her.

But it did not seem as if they bore her down. Rather, it appeared she went down voluntarily, and while she stabbed and slashed at her assailants with her dagger her right hand dropped the sword and readied out for an odd-shaped fungus growing like a mushroom between two brandies of the dead tree's rotting roots. Her fingers closed upon it and she thrust it in her mouth.

"Perhaps that way is best," he murmured as he wrenched his sword-blade from a cloven skull and thrust it through the brisket of a leaping wolf. "Death cannot be far off, and if the poison fungus kills her quickly she will not feel the agony of being torn to pieces—ha, would'st thou, by the sandals of Saint Bride?"—this to a wolf which clamped its teeth upon his sword arm and sought to drag him down. "Taste this and see how well it likes thy belly!" He drove his dagger in the creature's throat and turned the blade so that the red blood spurted out like wine from a burst cask.

Basta had rolled upon her back and four shaggy beasts were on her, tearing at her gorget and breast armor.

De Grandin started toward her, hewing out a lane for passage with his sword, but the mighty leader of the pack leaped