mountains."
  The prince nodded. "So you have some experience of mountains and their treachery. Good. 
But on my side of those peaks, beyond Galich, in that area called the Khorvaty after a 
certain people, there lives a Boyar who is... not my friend. I claim him as one who owes 
allegiance to me, but when I called in all my little princelings and Boyars he came not. 
When I invite him to Kiev he answers not. When I express a desire to meet with him he 
ignores me. If he is not my friend then he can only be my enemy. He is a dog that comes 
not to heel. A wild dog, and his home is a mountain fastness. Until now I've had neither 
the time, the inclination, nor the power to winkle him out, but-"
  "What?" Thibor was astonished, his gasp cutting the Vlad short. "I'm sorry, my Prince, 
but you-no power?"
  Vladimir Svyatoslavich shook his head. "You don't understand," he said. "Of course I 
have power. Kiev has power. But all so extended as to be almost expended! Should I recall 
an army to deal with one unruly princeling? And in so doing let the Pechenegi come up 
again? Should I form up an army from farmers and officials and peasants, all unskilled in 
battle? And if I did, what then? An army could not bring this Ferenczy out of his castle 
if he did not wish to leave it. Even an army could not destroy him, his defences are so 
strong! What? They are the mountain passes themselves, the gorges, the avalanches! With a 
handful of fierce, faithful retainers, he could hold back any army I muster almost 
indefinitely. Oh, if I had two thousand men to spare, then I might possibly starve him 
with a siege, but at what expense? On the other hand, what an army cannot achieve might 
just be possible-for one brave and clever and loyal man..."
  "Are you saying you want this Ferenczy taken from his castle and brought to you in 
Kiev?"
  "Too late for that, Thibor. He has shown how he "respects" me. How then should I 
respect him? No, I want him dead! His lands then fall to me, his castle on the heights, 
his household and serfs. And his death will be an example to others who might think to 
stand apart."
  Then you don't want his thumbs but his head!" Thibor's chuckle was throaty, without 
humour.
  "I want his head, his heart, and his standard. And I want to burn all three on a 
bonfire right here in Kiev!"
  "His standard? He has a symbol, then, this Ferenczy? Might I enquire the nature of this 
blazon?"
  "By all means," said the prince, his grey eyes suddenly thoughtful. He lowered his 
voice, cast about in the dusk for a moment, as if to be doubly sure that no one heard. 
"His mark is the horned head of a devil, with a forked tongue that drips gouts of 
blood..."
  Blood!
  Gouts of blood soaking into the black earth. The sun had touched the horizon and was 
burning red there like... like a great gout of blood. Soon the earth would swallow it up. 
The old Thing in the ground trembled again; its husk of leather and bone slowly cracked 
open like a desiccated sponge to receive the earth's tribute, the blood that soaked 
through leaf-mould and roots and black, centuried soil down to where the 
thousand-year-old Thibor-creature lay in his shallow grave.
  Subconsciously Thibor sensed the seeping blood and knew, in the way all dreamers 
"know", that it was only part of the dream. It would be a different matter when the sun 
had set and the seepage actually touched him, but for now he ignored it, returned to that 
time at the turn of the tenth century when he'd been merely human and had gone up into 
the Khorvaty on a mission of murder...
  They had travelled as trappers, Thibor and his seven, as Wallachians who followed the 
Carpathian curve on a trek designed to get them deep into the northern forests by the 
onset of winter. In fact they had simply come from Kiev through Kolomyya and so to the 
mountains, but they'd taken all the paraphernalia of the trapper with them, to 
substantiate their story. It had taken them three weeks of steady riding to reach the 
place in the very lee of the sheer mountains, (a "village", consisting of a handful of 
stone houses built into the hillside, half-a-dozen semi-permanent cabins, and a 
smattering of gypsy tents of cured skins with the fur inside) which the current 
incumbents called Moupho Aide Ferenc Yaborov, a mouthful they invariably shortened to 
Ferenc, which they made to sound like "Ferengi". It meant "Place of the Old One", or "of 
the Old Ferengi", and the gypsies spoke of it in lowered tones and with a deal of respect.
  There were maybe a hundred men there, some thirty women and as many children. Half of 
the men were trappers passing through, or prospective settlers uprooted by Pechenegi 
raids, on their way to find homes further north. Many of the latter group had their 
families with them. The remainder were either peasant inhabitants of Ferengi Yaborov, or 
gypsies come here to winter it out. They'd been coming since time immemorial, apparently, 
for "the old devil" who was Boyar here was good to them and turned none away. Indeed, in 
times of hardship he'd even been known to supply his wandering occasional tenants with 
food from his own larder and wine from his cellars.
  Thibor, asking about food and drink for himself and the others, was shown a house of 
timbers set in a stand of pines. It was an inn of sorts, with tiny rooms up in the 
rafters which could only be reached by rope ladders; the ladders were drawn up when the 
boarder wished to sleep. Down below there were wooden tables and stools, and at one end 
of the large room a bar stocked with small kegs of plum brandy and buckets of sweet ale. 
One wall was built half of stone, where burned a fire in the base of a huge chimney. On 
the fire was an iron pot of goulash giving out a heavy paprika reek. Onions dangled in 
bunches from nails in the wall close to the fire; likewise huge coarse-skinned sausages; 
black bread stood in loaves on the tables, baked in a stone oven to one side of the fire.
  A man, his wife and one scruffy son ran the place; gypsies, Thibor guessed, who'd 
chosen to settle here. They could have done better, he thought, feeling cold in the 
shadows of the looming rocks, the mountains whose presence could be felt even indoors. It 
was a gloomy place this, frowning and foreboding.
  The Wallach had told his men to speak to no one, but as they put away their gear, ate 
and drank, spoke in muffled tones to each other, he himself shared a jug of brandy with 
his host. "Who are you?" that gnarled old man asked him.
  "Do you ask what I have been and where I have been?" Thibor answered. "That's easier to 
tell than who I am."
  "Tell it then, if you feel like talking."
  Thibor smiled and sipped brandy. "I was a young boy under the Carpatii. My father was 
an Ungar who wandered into the borders of the southern steppe to farm-him and his 
brothers and kin and their families. I'll be brief: came the Pechenegi, all was uprooted, 
our settlement destroyed. Since then I've wandered, fought the barbarian for payment and 
what little I could find on his body, done what I could where and whenever. Now I'll be a 
trapper. I've seen the mountains, the steppe, the forests. Farming's a hard life and 
blood-letting makes a man bitter. But in the towns and cities there's money to be had 
from furs. You've roamed a bit yourself, I'll vow?"
  "Here and there," the other shrugged, nodded. He was swarthy as smoke-grimed leather, 
wrinkled as a walnut from extremes of weather, lean as a wolf. Not young by any 
standards, still his hair was shiny black, his eyes too, and he seemed to have all of his 
teeth. But he moved his limbs carefully and his hands were very crooked. "I'd be doing it