They broke out of the trees with virtually no warning, and before them was a scene from nightmares.

There was a short space of open grass, then the ground beyond was a litter of tumbled rocks and boulders. Giant pieces of masonry, still held together by mortar, lay scattered on their sides and edges, sometimes half buried in the soft grassy earth. The ruined walls of Castle Gorlan surrounded the scene on three sides, nowhere rising to more than five meters in height, destroyed and cast down by a vengeful kingdom after Morgarath had been driven out of his keep and back into the Mountains of Rain and Night. The resulting chaos of rocks and sections of tumbled wall was like the playground of a giant child-scattered in all directions, piled carelessly on top of one another, leaving virtually no clear ground at all.

The whole scene was illuminated by the leaping, twisting flames of a bonfire some forty meters in front of them. And beside it, a horrific figure crouched, screaming hatred and fury, plucking uselessly at the mortal wound in its chest that had finally brought it down.

Over two and a half meters tall, with shaggy, matted, scale-like hair covering its entire body, the Kalkara had long, talon-clad arms that reached to beneath its knees. Relatively short, powerful hind legs gave it the ability to cover the ground at a deceptive speed in a series of leaps and bounds. All of this the three riders took in as they emerged from the trees. But what they noticed most was the face – savage and apelike, with huge, yellowed canine teeth and red, glowing eyes filled with hatred and the blind desire to kill. The face turned toward them now and the beast screamed a challenge, tried to rise, and stumbled back into a half crouch again. "What's wrong with it?" Rodney asked, reining in his horse. Will pointed to the cluster of arrows that protruded from its chest. There must have been eight of them, all placed within a hand's breadth of each other. "Look!" he cried. "Look at the arrows!" Halt, with his uncanny ability to aim and fire in a blur of movement, must have sent a volley of arrows, one after the other, to smash into the armor-like matted hair, each one widening a gap in the monster's defenses until the final arrow had penetrated deep into its flesh. Its black blood ran in sheets down its torso and again it screamed its hatred at them. "Rodney!" yelled Baron Arald. "With me! Now!" Dropping the lead rein to his spare horse, he tossed the flaming torch to one side, couched his lance and charged. Rodney was a half second behind him, the two battlehorses thundering across the open space. The Kalkara, its lifeblood saturating the ground at its feet, rose to meet them, in time to take the two lance points, one after the other, in the chest.

It was all but dead. Even so, the weight and strength of the monster checked the onward rush of the battlehorses. They reared back on their haunches as both knights leaned forward in the stirrups to drive the lance points home. The sharp iron penetrated, smashing through the matted hair. The force of the charge drove the Kalkara from its feet and hurled it backward, into the flames of the fire behind it.

For an instant nothing happened. Then there was a blinding flash, and a pillar of red flame that reached ten meters into the night sky. And quite simply, the Kalkara disappeared.

The two battlehorses reared in terror, Rodney and the Baron only just managing to retain their seats. They backed away from the fire. There was a terrible reek of charred hair and flesh filling the air. Vaguely, Will remembered Halt discussing the way to deal with a Kalkara. He had said that they were rumored to be particularly susceptible to fire. Some rumor, he thought heavily, trotting Tug forward to join the two knights.

Rodney was rubbing his eyes, still dazzled by the enormous flash. "What the devil caused that?" he asked. The Baron gingerly retrieved his lance from the fire. The wood was charred and the point blackened. "It must be the waxy substance that mats their hair together into that hard shell," he replied, in a wondering tone of voice. "It must be highly flammable."

"Well, whatever it was, we did it," Rodney replied, a note of satisfaction in his voice. The Baron shook his head. "Halt did it," he corrected his Battlemaster. "We merely finished him off." Rodney nodded, accepting the correction. The Baron glanced at the fire, still pouring a torrent of sparks into the air, but settling back now from the huge explosion of red flame. "He must have lit this fire when he sensed they were circling back on him. It lit up the area so he had light to shoot by."

"He shot all right," Sir Rodney put in. "Those arrows must have all struck within a few square centimeters. " They looked around, searching for some sign of the Ranger. Then, below the ruined walls of the castle, Will caught sight of a familiar object. He dismounted and ran to retrieve it and his heart sank as he picked up Halt's powerful longbow, smashed and splintered into two pieces.

"He must have fired from over here," he said, indicating the point below the ruined wall where he had found the bow. They looked up, imagining the scene, trying to recreate it. The Baron took the shattered weapon from Will as he remounted Tug. "And the second Kalkara reached him as he killed its brother," he said. "The question is, where is Halt now? And where is the other Kalkara?" That was when they heard the screaming start again.

Chapter 30

INSIDE THE RUINED, OVERGROWN COURTYARD, HALT CROUCHED among the tumbled masonry that had once been Morgarath's stronghold. His leg, numb where the Kalkara had clawed him, was beginning to throb painfully and he could feel the blood seeping past the rough bandage he had thrown around it.

Somewhere close by, he knew the second Kalkara was searching for him. He heard its shuffling movements from time to time and once even its rasping breath as it moved close to his hiding place between two fallen sections of wall. It was only a matter of time before it found him, he knew. And when that happened, he was finished.

He was wounded and unarmed. His bow was gone, smashed in that first terrifying charge when he had fired arrow after arrow into the first of the two monsters. He knew the power of his bow and the penetrative qualities of his razor-sharp, heavy arrowheads. He couldn't believe that the monster had continued to absorb that hail of arrows and still come on, seemingly undaunted. By the time it faltered, it was already too late for Halt to turn his attention to its companion. The second Kalkara was almost upon him, its massive, taloned paw smashing the bow from his grasp, so that he barely had time to scramble for safety onto the ruined wall.

As it clawed its way after him, he had drawn his saxe knife and tried to strike at the terrible head. But the beast had been too fast for him and the heavy knife merely glanced off one of its armored forearms. At the same time, he had found himself confronted by its red, hate-filled eyes and felt his mind leaving him, his muscles freezing in terror as he was drawn to the horrific beast before him. It took an immense effort to wrench his eyes away from the creature's gaze, and he staggered back, losing the saxe knife as the bearlike claws swiped at him and ripped down the length of his thigh.

Then he had run, unarmed and bleeding, trusting to the maze-like confusion of the ruins to evade the monster behind him.

He had sensed the change in the Kalkara's movements around late afternoon. Their steady and previously undeviating path to the northeast suddenly changed as the two beasts abruptly separated, each turning through ninety degrees and moving in different directions into the forest that surrounded them. Their trails, up until then so easy to follow, also showed signs of concealment, so that only a tracker as skilled as a Ranger would have been able to follow them. For the first time in years, Halt felt a cold stone of fear in his belly as he realized that the Kalkara were now hunting him.