Thessalonica

He did all the things he’d reminded himself to do when the first wolf-demon had been about to attack him. He kept his shield up; the wolf s fangs scraped on the leather facing. He kept slashing with his sword. None of that would have mattered very long. The wolf was immensely stronger than he, and his sword seemed unable to do it much harm.

But then, just as it was scrabbling with paws unnaturally clever to pull down the shield so its teeth could do their deadly work, thud! thud!--two stones struck it blows hard enough to make it roll off him and away. If those stones hadn’t broken ribs, the wolf owned none.

George scrambled to his feet. Elatus grabbed the wolf with human arms and hands, lifted it off the ground in an amazing display of strength, and then threw it down, hard. The male centaur trampled the wolf-demon with both pairs of equine hooves.

The wolf howled and twisted and then clamped its jaws on Elatus’ left hindmost leg. The centaur cried out in anguish as George rushed to its aid. He stabbed the wolf-demon in the belly with his sword. It screamed; supernatural or not, it was sorely hurt. Its blood smelled hot and metallic and almost spicy: an odor much stronger and more distinctive than that of the blood of ordinary living things.

Elatus was bleeding, too. That did not keep the centaur from flailing away with its three good horse’s legs at the wolf-demon, which finally broke away and fled, not just from the male centaur but from the right as a whole.

“We can’t go forward,” George said. “There are still too many of them. We have to go back.”

“A truth may be bitter but a truth naytheless,” Elatus said. The male dipped its shaggy head to George. “And I own myself in your debt, mortal. That was bravely done.” It twisted so it could look at its wounded leg. Scabs were already forming over the bites. In a day or two, George supposed, Elatus would be altogether healed. And, in a day or two, the wolf-demon the shoemaker had stabbed would probably be well again, too. He sighed. Had he been a proper hero out of myth, he would have slain it.

Elatus shouted: a great sound without words George could discern, but one that must have had meaning to the other centaurs. They began to retreat down the path Ampelus and Stusippus had taken. George went with them. The wolves made as if to pursue, but gave up when the centaurs, having opened a little distance from them, bombarded them with showers of stones.

None of the centaurs had escaped without wounds, but all of them were well on the way toward healing by the time they got back to the encampment from which they’d set out. George counted himself lucky to have got away with nothing worse than cuts and scrapes and bruises; no sharp teeth had pierced his tender flesh. He ached and stung as things were. Being in the company of the supernatural beings did not make him so close to immune to hurt as they were.

“Manifest it is,” Crotus said, scratching what had been a bite and was now a rough red scar, “that these folk and their powers desire not your return to the city whenee you were abstracted.”

“I didn’t want to be abstracted from it,” George said. When he thought of Menas, his hands bunched into fists. “I didn’t get what I wanted. I don’t see any reason the Slavs and Avars should get what they want.”

“One reason doth suggest itself,” Nephele observed: “namely and to wit, that they have the power to enforce that which they desire.”

Ampelus came up to George. All the centaurs glared at the satyr, who had been of such little use in the fight against the wolf-demons. Sensitive to that scorn, Ampelus spoke with something like embarrassment: “Not good to go in day. Maybe good to go in night.”

George clapped a hand to his forehead. “When I wanted to do that, everyone said it would be worse than trying it in the daytime.”

“What can be worse than that?” the satyr asked reasonably. “Try in day, not go. Try in night, likely not go, but maybe go.”

George could see one way in which things might be worse. He’d come out of this try alive, even if unsuccessful. If things went wrong again .. .

He wondered what was happening back at Thessalonica. The sally from inside the city had driven back the Slavs undermining the walls beneath the shelter of their tortoises, but had the barbarians attacked again? Had the Avar priest or wizard found yet another set of demigods to hurl against the protective power that came from St. Demetrius and from God?

And on those questions depended the answer to the truly important one: how were Irene and Theodore and Sophia?

“We’d better try and get back, any way we possibly can,” George said. “If it can’t be by day, it will have to be by night.” The children of Israel had traveled by night as well as by day, he reminded himself, with a pillar of fire to light their way as they went.