Finally, as his lungs burned like molten metal and his extremities felt the early gnawing of frostbite, a yellow light appeared over the horizon. Russ was too exhausted to cheer. He pushed himself on in the trail of the wolf all the harder.

The wolf slowed. The light split into two, then three, then more becoming many small windows in the low walls of a chieftain's longhouse. Like an upturned wolf boat fifty metres long, its roof swelled generously in the middle, tapering towards either end, where crossed angular posts tipped with carven wolves' heads made frames to support the central beam. A thick covering of snow hid the shingles of the roof, and lay piled in delicate towers upon the posts. Light poured from a smokehole, and from the open gates fires cast a great yellow trapezium of light upon the ground.

Slowing further, the wolf approached, and as it neared it lost some of the form of a wolf. With a bound it skipped from four to two legs, its forelimbs changing shape and becoming like the arms of a man. In the next few steps its shoulders broadened, its rear legs lengthened. In all other respects it remained a wolf, hirsute, so dark it looked like a shadow upon the light patch of snow. Its hands were clawed, and though it walked upright, the hind legs retained a wolf's configuration of hock, stifle and pastern.

The man-wolf howled to announce its presence, and swaggered into the hall.

Russ jogged up. He could not see beyond the light within. Despite the killing cold, the windows were unshuttered, as though the hall's master was enjoying the few gentle days of a Fenrisian spring before the summer of the Wolfs Eye cast all into ruin.

Russ held up his hands to his eyes to shade them, but could see no better into the light.

There was only one course of action open to him.

Leman Russ set his shoulders and strode within the hall.

Thirteen

Thirteen

The Court Of The Erlking

Inside, the hall was clingy as any human dwelling. The brilliant light seen without vanished as soon as Russ stepped through the gates into the single room. Two rows of posts delineated a large central space, with shadowed aisles down either side. A huge pile of coals upon a slab of stone in the centre crackled with the slow dying of fires. Torches in iron sconces attached to the posts provided inconstant light that hardly supplemented the red glow of the hearth.

The room was full of man-wolves as large as legionaries.