Free The Sight by David Clement-Davies Page A

Khaz approached the she-cub, she suddenly looked up at him.
    ‘Khaz?’ asked Larka softly.  ‘Wolfbane and this Man Varg.  Are they coming to gobble us up?’
    Khaz smiled and shook his head reassuringly.  He was looking at Kipcha and, as he saw her holding Fell, he suddenly wondered why he had never told the beautiful she-wolf how much he cared for her.
    ‘No, Larka.  No one’s going to gobble you up.  And if anything tries they’ll have to get through us first.  For we will all give our lives to protect you.  You are the future.’
    Next to Huttser, Khaz had the strongest jaws in the pack, but as he bent to pick up Larka, so carefully did his teeth grasp her fur that the cub hardly felt a thing.
But suddenly Skop stopped and put down Kar again.
    ‘I’ve just thought,’ he cried, ‘this legend can’t have anything to do with your pack.’
    ‘Why not, Skop?’ growled Palla hopefully.
    ‘Because I remember now.  The story always went that it could only happen in a place where some great crime or injustice had been committed.’
    The pack seemed reassured, but Brassa suddenly looked away.  There was a terror stirring in her eyes.  And a secret too.
    The pack had been travelling all day but, frightened of the humans now and their hunting dogs, had threaded slowly east through the forest, stopping often to rest the cubs, and now and then letting them walk along on their own.  But at last the wolves had left the cover of the trees and begun to double back.
    Though he knew the best spot for a den and a Meeting Place was by the river, Huttser didn’t want to take them anywhere near the cave until he was sure the dogs had gone, so they had taken a path towards the hills, as he had suggested.  Evening found the wolves and their cubs high in the mountains.  A mist had come down as the night thickened and they were padding along a winding mountain path.  It climbed above a ravine, almost parallel with the castle.  The ravine plunged towards the river below, and as they walked they heard the distant growl of thunder in the heavens.  The storm seemed to be returning.  As they thought of this legend and Morgra’s threat to return, their pace got quicker and quicker.
    The river had swollen greatly in places as the snows in the high mountains melted, and it rumbled angrily far below.  All around the wolf pack the air was sharp with rock and stone and the full moon had risen.  They all thought of Morgra as they looked into its sallow face, and in the distance storm clouds began to gather.  As the storm began to swell above them, flashes of electricity rippled through the sky, forking and branching through the heavy air and suddenly illuminating the valley in flashes of hard blue light.  The wolves’ fur began to tingle with the energy pulsing about them.
    The lightning suddenly lit up the castle ahead of them and Bran shuddered as he thought of the stories of Wolfbane living up there in the shape of a Grasht.  This news of a Man Varg was already mingling in his mind with tales of Wolfbane and as he remembered Morgra’s blessing to them, and thought of the theft of a human cub, he felt a sickening churning in his stomach.
    Around them jagged cliffs and craggy promontories butted from the mountain, among a welter of stranded trees and clinging scrub.  In the night they began to take on strange and mysterious shapes.  Here they would suddenly seem to see the shape of a wolf or a lynx, there the form of a bird in flight.
    The wolves knew this country well.  Lying in the Carpathian foothills, it was only an impression of the giant ravines and thunderous, pine-strewn gorges that rucked through Transylvania, growing into towering precipices as the Carpathians curled like a sleeping dragon across the country’s wide, flat plains.  Normally the pack would have felt safe here, but they grew more and more nervous as the night and the mist and the coming storm fed their imaginations.
    Huttser was leading them