Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy by Robert Silverberg

launched itself at her, only a dark shape against the stars, legs outstretched so it looked like some sort of weird bat, but even before it crashed into the woman, striking her in the chest above her halfraised arms and fastening its own teeth on her throat, Roland knew exactly what it was.
    As the shape bore her over onto her back, Sister Mary uttered a gibbering shriek that went through Roland’s head like the Dark Bells themselves. He scrambled to his feet, gasping. The shadowy thing tore at her, forepaws on either side of her head, rear paws planted on the grave-shroud above her chest, where the rose had been.
    Roland grabbed Jenna, who was looking down at the fallen Sister with a kind of frozen fascination.
    “Come on!” he shouted. “Before it decides it wants a bite of you, too!”
    The dog took no notice of them as Roland pulled Jenna past. It had torn Sister Mary’s head mostly off.
    Her flesh seemed to be changing, somehow—decomposing, very likely—but whatever was happening, Roland did not want to see it. He didn’t want Jenna to see it, either.
    They half-walked, half-ran to the top of the ridge, and when they got there paused for breath in the moonlight, heads down, hands linked, both of them gasping harshly.
    The growling and snarling below them had faded, but was still faintly audible when Sister Jenna raised her head and asked him, “What was it? You know—I saw it in your face. And how could it attack her? We all have power over animals, but she has—had—the most.”
    “Not over that one.” Roland found himself recalling the unfortunate boy in the next bed. Norman hadn’t known why the medallions kept the Sisters at arms’ length—whether it was the gold or the God. Now Roland knew the answer. “It was a dog. Just a town-dog. I saw it in the square, before the green folk knocked me out and took me to the Sisters. I suppose the other animals that could run away did run away,
but not that one. It had nothing to fear from the Little Sisters of Eluria, and somehow it knew it didn’t. It bears the sign of the Jesus-man on its chest. Black fur on white. Just an accident of its birth, I imagine. In any case, it’s done for her now. I knew it was lurking around. I heard it barking two or three times.”
    “Why?” Jenna whispered. “Why would it come? Why would it stay? And why would it take on her as it did?”
    Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: “ Ka . Come on. Let’s get as far as we can from this place before we hide up for the day.”
    As far as they could turned out to be eight miles at most … and probably, Roland thought as the two of them sank down in a patch of sweet-smelling sage beneath an overhang of rock, a good deal less. Five, perhaps. It was him slowing them down; or rather, it was the residue of the poison in the soup. When it was clear to him that he could not go farther without help, he asked her for one of the reeds. She refused, saying that the stuff in it might combine with the unaccustomed exercise to burst his heart.
    “Besides,” she said as they lay back against the embankment of the little nook they had found, “they’ll not follow. Those that are left—Michela, Louise, Tamra—will be packing up to move on. They know to leave when the time comes; that’s why the Sisters have survived as long as they have. As we have. We’re strong in some ways, but weak in many more. Sister Mary forgot that. It was her arrogance that did for her as much as the cross-dog, I think.”
    She had cached not just his boots and clothes beyond the top of the ridge, but the smaller of his two purses, as well. When she tried to apologize for not bringing his bedroll and the larger purse (she’d tried, she said, but they were simply too heavy), Roland hushed her with a finger to her lips. He thought it a miracle to have as much as he did. And besides (this he did not say, but perhaps she knew it, anyway),