Chapter 58 - The Children of the Moon, part 4

The sound of fighting became clearer. Wolves howled and war cries sounded. Melicent opened the door at the top of the stairs, and they met again in the middle of the mansion's corridors. The place was deserted, and it seemed all the guards had been drawn in by the noise of battle. A row of doors flanked the corridor, and at one end was a stairway leading up, while the other end was topped by a door; that's where the noises of the fray came from. Elysia wrinkled her nose as she thought she caught the smell of burning, and somewhere far away the horses whinnied in terror.

Her prudence advised her to head for the stairs and away from the battle, as she was not part of either faction and her discovery could prove fatal. The more the others fought each other, the more her odds against her would decrease and the easier it would be for her to escape from her.

Melicent, however, thought differently, for he moved toward the door at the other end, the one that led into the battle. Elysia took hold of her chains and yanked on them, but the girl did not stop. Even though Elysia was taller, she possessed amazing strength, superior to hers.

"Where are you going?"

"Where do you think I'm going?"

"Do not be stupid; there you can do nothing."

"What do you know?"

"Let's take a look around here. Maybe upstairs we can find a way to get our chains off."

For a moment, she seemed undecided. The last sentence, however, convinced her, and together they went up the stairs. Behind him, the howls and war cries rose to a crescendo, then abruptly stopped. For a moment, Elysia wondered what had happened. Had the wolves defeated the defenders of the square?

She then heard soldiers beginning to shout at each other again and noble voices ordering the men to carry the wounded inside, and she realized that the men had won…so far.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the bottom of the stairs, there was a window that looked out onto the fortified house's courtyard, and from it the catgirl saw that there were dozens of dead wolves outside, and perhaps five injured humans. The blood dyed the snow red.

"How the hell did that door open?" she heard Earl Rothgar ask, and asked himself the same question as he realized that all the doors were wide open; the wolves had entered through them. Then he saw that thing, and he didn't need any more explanation.

On the roof of the stables lay a gray figure, half man and half wolf, which made Elysia's tail stand on end. The werewolf got up and jumped off the roof to disappear from sight, while Elysia considered if it was an imagination. She offered a prayer to implore it to be so, but somehow, deep in her heart, she doubted it. She was under the impression that The Children of Hydria had arrived.

"Let's continue," she murmured, then turned and walked down the corridor.

♦ ♦ ♦

They entered a library with bookshelves so tall that a ladder was necessary to reach the volumes on the tallest shelves lining the walls. Elysia was surprised by the size of the room, as Earl Rothgar had not struck her as a learned man. She guessed, then, that she belonged to the wizard.

She glanced over the titles, seeing that most of them were written in the arcane language, the language of magic. The ones she could see dealt mainly with voyages of exploration, ancient myths and legends, and there were Books of Lore compiled in Dwarven and Elven languages.

There was an open book on the desk in front of her, and Elysia reached over and picked it up. The tome was leather-bound, with no title stamped on the spine, and the parchment pages were thick, rough, and obviously ancient. For how thick the book was, the few pages it had was amazing. It was an old book, copied by hand and illuminated in the margins. Looking at it, she Elysia began to read it, trying to understand the words, and she soon wished she hadn't. Melicent saw it in the expression on her face.

"What's happening? Something bad? What does it say?"

"It's a kind of grimoire... It's about a certain kind of magic."

And so it was. She laboriously translated from the arcanum and a shiver of horror made her shudder. From what she could see, it was the spell of soul transmutation, an invocation designed to allow one man to exchange his very essence with another's in order to steal his body and appearance. If what the book claimed was true, it would allow the wizard to take possession of anyone's body.

In another time and in another place, all this would have seemed absurd to her, but in this secluded place she thought it quite likely. The madness of it did not seem out of place.

None of that reassured her. She was locked in an isolated fortress, with a group of insane worshipers and her soldiers. The keep was surrounded by hungry wolves and communications cut off by a winter blizzard, and, as if all that weren't enough, if his suspicions were true, there were not one, but two human wolves within the walls of the house, and one of them. They were behind her. Elysia's skin prickled.

They walked through the second floor of the castle through corridors lit by flickering torches, echoing with the howls of wolves. A faint, unpleasant odor, like wet hair and blood, reached Elysia's nose just before she turned a corner. She cautiously peered around the other side and saw that the corpse of a soldier lay on the ground. His eyes were wide open, and his chest ripped apart by huge claws. His face was as white as a vampire's, and blood oozed from where huge jaws had ripped out part of his jugular.

Near the corpse, which had a dagger attached to its belt, lay a sword. Elysia turned to look at the girl, and seeing that she smiled malevolently she wanted to take the sword and kill her; but she didn't. It occurred to her that she might be able to use her as a hostage to make a deal with the werewolf; perhaps she, being half beastman, would be able to reach an agreement, but after giving that idea some thought, she dismissed it as impractical and dishonorable.

Instead, she leaned over the man and removed the dagger that had a long, razor-sharp blade almost as thin as a stiletto, and then she studied the lock on the shackles. It was large and heavy and crudely made, so she took the dagger in her right hand and slipped it into the lock on her left wrist. She felt the mechanism move as the point clicked into the correct socket. For long, tense moments, she probed and turned the dagger, and then there was a click, and the shackle was unlocked. A great weight was lifted from Elysia's shoulders as she saw the shackle slip from her wrist, and tried to repeat the process with her right; but her left hand was clumsier and she needed more time to get it.

Seconds stretched into minutes, and as she struggled she kept imagining that hideous wolf-headed figure creeping up on her. Finally, she heard another snap, and her other hand was free. She turned, smiling triumphantly, and her smile faded from her lips: the girl was gone.

♦ ♦ ♦

Elysia moved cautiously through the manor house. The wolves had fallen silent once more, and her sword felt like death in her hands. On her way, she had found two other dead bodies of soldiers, both with their throats torn out and expressions of horror on their faces. A strange musky smell filled the air.

She considered the options she had. She could run across the yard, but she didn't seem sensible. Outside, snow covered the ground, and wolves infested the woods; even without that malevolent presence, she doubted she could get very far without food and proper winter gear.

Inside the mansion were the mage who wanted to kill her and the children of Hydria, as well as a small army of terrified soldiers to whom she was a stranger. That didn't look too promising either.

Her instincts whispered to her to find a place to hide and wait for one side to finish off the other. Maybe she at the top she could find a loft to hide in, or maybe there was some quiet room where...

She heard voices approaching, and the door at the end of the corridor began to move. With all speed, she opened the door next to her, slipped through it and closed it. She then realized that she must be in Earl Rothgar's study because there was a solid desk under a window and family portraits glared at him from the walls. Burnished armor stood silent guard in a niche, and draped curtains covered the windows.