A wyr-wolf howled, long and low-pitched. Another joined in, and another. Kyra risked a quick glance back across the valley. Were those wolf shapes in the distance?
Wolves often hunted at dawn. If she was being followed by a pack, Kyra would stand no chance. Akhtar was swift and strong, a true descendant of the golden stallion Shamsher himself, but this pace would soon exhaust him. The wolves would bring him down with ease. How many of them would she be able to kill with her katari? Two, maybe three. But the fourth would get her, and crush her neck between its massive jaws.
Another howl, louder than before. Answering howls to its left and right. They were closing in. Kyra fought down a wave of nausea. Had she escaped Tamsyn only to be devoured by wyr-wolves? She urged Akhtar on, but the horse needed no urging from her. He galloped as hard as he could, trembling with exertion and snorting in fear.
As abruptly as they’d sounded, the howls stopped. For several long minutes, there was silence. When the howls started again, they were much farther behind, to the southwest.
Kyra let out a long, deep breath. What had driven them off? The presence of the kataris? Perhaps they had sensed weaker prey elsewhere. Whatever the reason, she offered up a fervent prayer of thanks to the Goddess Kali.
“It’s all right, Akhtar, you can take it easy now,” she said, stroking the horse’s neck. “We’ll soon be there.”
But Akhtar did not slow down, and Kyra sensed his terror sharpen. Oh no. They were still being followed. Kyra almost fell from her saddle when she saw huge shapes unfold from the darkness behind the stunted trees on her left and right. Two blurry shapes with long snouts and powerful haunches, loping to keep pace with her.
Horror turned Kyra’s veins ice-cold. The wyr-wolves were here, right beside her.
The hills of Gonur loomed ahead, the uneven ridges like broken teeth against the blue sky. So close, and yet so far.
With all her strength, Kyra pushed aside her fear. She had two kataris. By the Goddess, she would go down fighting. She would not let these dogs smell her fear.
When they were almost at the feet of Gonur, Kyra commanded Akhtar to stop, pulling one rein to turn him around and face the beasts. Akhtar stamped and trembled, but he obeyed her. She withdrew both blades, heart hammering inside her chest.
The two wyr-wolves were huge, half the size of Akhtar himself. One had a thick gray mane and a white streak on its ridged forehead. The other was pure black, except for its yellow eyes.
The beasts stopped some distance away from her. The smaller one made a whuffing sound. The larger one yawned, displaying a cageful of deadly fangs. The kataris almost slipped from her sweaty palms at the sight.
And then, as if at some unspoken signal, the two wyr-wolves turned and trotted away. Kyra watched them go, her mouth dry. Before long, they had vanished beyond the undulating landscape.
She couldn’t understand it. Maybe they had decided that just two of them would not be a match against an armed Markswoman? Perhaps they had gone to fetch the rest of the pack.
But they hadn’t appeared that interested in her—more as if they simply wanted to see her, and be seen by her.
There was no time to puzzle it out, for every minute that passed brought Tamsyn closer to her heels. Kyra turned Akhtar around to try to find a way up to Yashmin-Gah.
It wasn’t long before she spied the rock-strewn path to the forest in the upper reaches of the hills. They climbed, Akhtar picking his way among the rocks, Kyra scanning the horizon. No sign of pursuit yet. No sign of the wyr-wolves either, and it was getting to be daylight. Good; Akhtar should be safe then, if she sent him back to the caves.
They entered the old spruce forest, dense with undergrowth and sweet with the scent of rhododendron. Kyra dismounted and patted the stallion’s head. “Go home, Akhtar. Nineth will take care of you.” The horse whinnied and nipped her shoulder.
“Go back, Akhtar.” Kyra put as much command as she could muster into her voice.
Akhtar snorted and trotted away, down the path they had come. Kyra felt bereft. The last link to the Order, and she was sending him away.
Now was not the time for sentimentality. Anyone seeing Akhtar returning riderless might assume she was dead or injured. It could throw Tamsyn off her trail, at least for a little while.
She went deeper into the forest. It was cool and dark. Birds chittered at her and she saw a monkkat, its whiskered black face splitting in a snarl before it leaped away. She moved through the undergrowth, pushing aside branches and vines from her face, letting instinct guide her.
She came upon it suddenly, as she had all those years ago, a little pool of water surrounded by rushes, the boughs of an old elm touching its surface. The water was dark and still, like an unseeing eye.
She parted the rushes and stood by the edge of the pool, scrutinizing the area. The door was close now, hidden somewhere a few feet from her. Her skin prickled with the certainty of it. She walked around the pool, summoning the vision that had brought her there.
The third time she circled the pool, she caught a glimpse of the door from the corner of her eye. It was beside the elm, beneath a mound of earth covered by a prickly bush. She stooped in front of the mound and pushed aside the spiky green plant, ignoring the scratches to her hands and arms. She scrabbled away at the earth with her fingers, feeling the hardness beneath her palms. And there it was—no more than two feet high—a dark rectangle embedded in the ground, unused for decades, perhaps centuries.
Kyra carefully held her katari to the slot on the diminutive door. As with every other Hub, the slot glowed blue and the door swung open, as she had hoped it would, revealing a low, dark tunnel inside. She smiled. Easy, it had been easy. With a sigh of relief, she bent her head and squeezed in, crawling into the tunnel.
Behind her the little door swung shut, engulfing her in darkness.
Kyra stopped smiling and her sense of triumph vanished, replaced by dread.
It wasn’t merely the darkness. It was the dreams, except that the dreams were real now; she was in them and there was no escape. The door had closed behind her and she was five years old, weeping because she was trapped and they were all dead. No, she was dead and they were trapped and what difference did it make whose face she saw; the door would be how everything ended.
Stop it. Stop it now. You’re okay. This is an old Hub no one’s used in a while, that’s all.
Kyra counted her breaths, trying to slow them down.
She went farther in. The tunnel became larger and she was able to stand up in the corridor without hunching. The glowing blue slots of Transport doors stretched away into the darkness. All was as it should be, so why was she having trouble breathing? Why was her heart thudding away fit to burst her rib cage?