It was a team of white goats, shaggy pelts glowing as though with captured moonlight. Their eyes were red as embers, and their heads seemed somehow gravely wrong: when he thought of it afterward he could never say why, except that the shapes of their hairless muzzles seemed to suggest some kind of unpleasant intelligence. The goats, nine in all, drew behind them a great black sled; it was the sound of the runners crunching through the snow that he had heard. Seated on the sled was a hooded figure that even across a distance of some hundred cubits seemed too large. Several other, smaller
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