Whatever monster lurked in the bottomless waters, it had plunged deep out of sight again, and the back-wash of its going drenched the three of them with chill, spumey spray. Storm cried piteously, till Hardcastle, with a rough oath, cuffed him into silence.
Their candle, held high above the spray, flickered and went out, and Hardcastle let it fall, knowing his tinder-box was drenched and useless.
“This is the end of all?” asked Causleen, reaching for his hand.
“The end. Nita will send her swine—be sure of that—and they might take you, child, after I was beyond aiming another blow. But it’s in my heart to kill another Garsykes Man or two before we go.”
Her grasp tightened. He had spoken quietly, without haste, as if he were reckoning the chances of the weather when they mowed the hay at Logie.
“I would not fear the pool, Dick—or the dark—if we’d not seen what lurked there.”
“Better even that than Garsykes,” he said.
She crept nearer to him, and they stood there on the brink of dread, waiting for death. The lake still lapped and gurgled at its rocks. Storm whined fitfully, afraid of things more terrible than his second-sight had ever glimpsed on the wildest moorland nights. He had seen Habatrot go by, and the Heather Dwarf, and the dog shaggy as himself—the dog known as Guytrash, that waited on lonely gates and frightened his own kin, who shuddered by and would have none of usual, honest fight.
Storm, as he shared this night watch with his chosen two, longed for the moor-winds and the sky. Nothing he had found there—the worst of it—was like this sick, clammy air, peopled with foul shapes of the underworld.
“What is beyond?” asked Causleen by and by. “Cannot we get further down the track?”