Free Will Power by A. J. Hartley Page A

wall, I tried to stay the bleeding with a piece of my shirt. In truth, I also had to cover it up because I thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that I could see bone. Briefly my eyes misted over.
    When I looked again, the wolves which remained, four or five of them, had withdrawn a little and now hung back around the cave mouth. They watched us still, but more warily now, and the sounds they made to each other were different. One of them, a silver-gray beast with a white blaze on the fur of its throat, met my gaze and returned it with eyes like yellow moons floating in black oil. Orgos still stood beside Renthrette, but he was bleeding from his neck and leg. Drops of crimson trickled down Renthrette’s sword arm, and Mithos had backed up to the wall and leaned against it. His sword hung wearily from his hand, his face was pale, and there was a great wound in his side. His right hand was clasped across it, but blood seeped through his fingers and fell like rain to the cave floor.
    “I do not think we can hold off another assault,” said Renthrette.
    “But we will show them what human muscle and fine steel can do before we perish,” Orgos replied, darkly.
    There was a commotion at the cave mouth. The wolves parted on either side of it, as if by agreement, and their growls grew low and ominous. Something was coming in.
    The curtain was torn down and a great bear shambled into the cave. It was immense and brownish and it filled the corridor completely, squeezing into the cave with difficulty. Its head and paws were vast, the latter equipped with claws perhaps seven inches long. I’d seen bears back in the Cresdon baiting pits, but this was bigger than any ofthem. And then there was the way it looked to the wolves and growled strangely, and the light in its eyes.
    Renthrette blanched and Orgos’s dark skin seemed to cloud over. Mithos’s jaw dropped slightly and there was dread in his eyes. For once, I knew what he knew. The bear’s reach would tear out our hearts and crush our skulls before we could get close enough to stab at it.
    It took a step to the right of the fire and the wolves followed in its wake, grinning malevolently. We backed off still further, though there was clearly no escape. If we had bows or spears, we might have had a chance, but as it was, this was not going to be so much a battle as a kind of grotesque buffet.
    The bear roared, a vast and deafening bellow that made the walls tremble, and presented a gape that could have taken me head first and closed about my waist. Then it lowered its muzzle and advanced, its bulk blocking out the firelight as it loomed over us.
    Suddenly there was a flicker of light, a bluish flash that rippled around the cave’s uneven surfaces. With something like panic, the bear began a great, lumbering revolution, but before it could complete the turn, it shrieked with what could only be pain. The wolves whined and fled, the bear shook its great head from side to side, and blood fell from its terrible maw. Once more it began to turn toward the entrance, and once more it cried out in sudden pain.
    Then its nemesis appeared.
    In the cave mouth was a man clad in a hooded robe the color of new cream and armed with a long, two-handed spear whose tip flared with a dazzling light. It seemed like a flame, though it did not consume the spear and its light was hard and white and hurt my eyes when I looked directly at it. The bear, now facing him, bellowed and stooped to lunge, but the spear slid past its wild claws and found its chest. The beast lurched, but the spearman held on to the shaft with uncommon strength and determination. The pale light flared in the bear’s face and, with one last cry of pain and—so it seemed to me—horror or hatred, it tipped forward. The man wrested the spear from its breast and stepped sideways as the beast fell dead before him.
    A stillness fell and, for a moment, we looked in wonder at our timely savior. He, quite calm and still, looked back. His