Lord of the Hollow Dark by Kirk Russell

Archvicar struck again, forcefully, upon Pereira’s head, and the acolyte tumbled in a heap and lay still.
    Sweeney reached hesitantly for the revolver in the heather, but the Sicilian girl, darting as a cat, was before him. Snatching up the gun, she handed it to the Archvicar.
    “Thank you,” a faint voice said. The stranger had contrived to sit up, and was feeling his bare legs below his kilt as if to learn whether they were broken. He wore heavy battered brogues on his feet, and a sgean-dhu’s hilt protruded from one of his stockings. A sporran hung about his waist. He was tanned and muscular.
    What Sweeney wanted was the weapon. “Let me have that,” he told the Archvicar, hoping that he sounded firm. “Somebody took my own gun.” He meant to make his way out of this bedlam today, if he possibly could, and he might need the gun at the pend. He stretched out his hand to receive the pistol.
    Unperturbed, the Archvicar extracted the cartridges from the magazine, dropped them into one of his pockets, and put the gun upon Sweeney’s palm. “There you are. It will be of no use to you now, my lad. You’d be a menace if you were armed; nervous people always are. You’re to carry this pistol straight to Mr. Apollinax, with my compliments, and tell him that I say he must teach his little idiot devils better manners, or I’ll break the crowns of more of them.” Sweeney gazed at the old man in disbelief. What a change from Gerontion’s tone at Haggat or here at the Lodging, until now! He spoke crisply, as one having authority. “Put away that toy, Apeneck, and help me to have a look at this man. Not that devil-boy, you ass: I mean this newcomer.”
    The hill-walker was feeling his rib cage now. “That takes the wind out of a man,” he murmured. “Sorry to trouble you.”
    He must have fallen from the cliff face into a tall spreading rhododendron, smashing most of it, Sweeney could see; the man was bleeding from scratches all over, and blood covered his face from a nasty cut on his forehead, but he actually was trying to get on his feet. Sweeney and the Sicilian girl helped him to rise, and the Archvicar clapped a handkerchief upon that forehead cut. The disheveled Sicilian would be a first-rate catch, Sweeney thought, on getting this close view of her: a strong girl, who would fight hard before being subdued. She sustained the stranger’s weight as well as Sweeney himself did.
    “No bones smashed, my friend?” Archvicar Gerontion was inquiring. “Not even a tibia? How are your ribs? You astound me. If you had fallen at almost any other spot...”
    Sweeney put one of the stranger’s arms round his shoulder. He muttered to the Archvicar, “What do we do with this fellow? Apollinax won’t care for this.”
    “Then he must lump it.” The Archvicar had produced a second handkerchief and contrived a rough bandage for the stranger’s hand. “If Apollinax’s devil-boy hadn’t snatched out that gun, we might simply have sent our adventurer on his way through the pend, after some refreshment. But now-why, after being prodded in the ribs with a deadly weapon, he might give awkward testimony about the new keepers at Balgrummo Lodging.”
    Sweeney nodded. “And Apollinax won’t like the way you thumped Pereira here, either.”
    “Won’t he? I should have cudgeled Pereira days ago, and the other young devils besides. Ah, Marina, don’t look so terrified: I don’t mean to thump you, too, my dear. Do give her a whiff of your smelling salts, Grizel. Do you think I’m an ogre?”
    A cut on the stranger’s right calf was nearly as bad as the one on his forehead. “We must have him into the Lodging and put sticking plaster on him,” the Archvicar declared. “I’d never have thought that a man might come down that way and live.” He studied the stranger’s face as he spoke.
    The hill-walker extended his arms slowly, took three deep breaths, and looked back into the Archvicar’s face, now that the blood no