The Sign of the Moonbow

PART TWO

Chapter Eight:

Into the Earth

“Eirrin,” Wulfhere Skullsplitter said, “is wet. The weather’s less damp asea.”

“It’s a healthy lot we of Eirrin are, meaning the weather agrees with us,” Cormac told the grumbling Dane. He waved a hand. Misty grey-blue sky; green plain sweeping into deep woods with multicoloured leaves, green hill patching into brown; distant blue mountains.

“For sea-dogs,” the Dane retorted, “mayhap Eirrin is healthful.” He looked about. “Aye, and mountains ever in view, no matter which way one turns. This land has a million rivers, a million foul dark bogs that give off worse air than the grave, and two million mountains.”

“Forget not the clouds ye’ve grumbled of,” Cormac said, a bit wearily.

“Ah! The clouds-they rush about overhead driven by ever-changing air currents like ants from a kicked hill. And… it’s ever wet.”

“Misty,” Cormac said.

“Wet.”

Cormac mac Art compressed his lips. He knew it was not the weather or the scenery of Eirrin that had Wulfhere a-grumble so. Both men were weary. They’d been at the hill of Bri Leith for two days, and now they trudged, rather than strode. Worse, because of the autumn chill and the dampness and Wulfhere’s nagging at Cormac about his native land-even unto the clouds overhead-they had been here two, nights. Despair hovered over them like a vulture.

They had walked. And walked. Up the hill and down the hill. Around it and around it, wading through gorse and daggerbushes and furze. There was no sense in splitting up in their search for the Doorway to the Danans’ subterrene demesne; Wulfhere would not find it. He could not. The Doorways, Cathbadh had said, would reveal themselves to him who wore the Sign of the Moonbow-and only to him. Only to Cormac, then. Otherwise the entrances were invisible, the protection of the Tuatha de Danann within the earth from those who had displaced them and lived on its surface. The two men must remain together. They roamed together, and Wulfhere grumbled aloud.

Cormac remained outwardly taciturn… and grumbled in his heart.

With them always came the apparent druid who

“Bas”; twice Wulfhere had, and then launched into a vicious hailstorm of curses. That had put thought on the Gael.

“An any should separate us, Cormac told Thulsa Doom, “it is my command that ye resume your own worse than ugly form at once. The robe and form of Cutha Atheldane, and the skull that is all we know of your face. Ye be understanding?”

“I understand.”

“And ye’ll obey, though we’ve separated and I not there to order or see?”

“Aye. I must.”

And they trudged on.

“An island,” Wulfhere said, “is a piece of land afloat but anchored on the bosom of the sea. Aye, and completely surrounded by the water.”

Cormac said nothing. They trudged.

After a time he could not bear the silence that followed the Dane’s remark, and he said, “Aye.”

“Eirrin,” Wulfhere said with pleasure, “with all its rivers and lochs and fens and thrice-damned bogs, and with its mountains all along the coast so that the whole land slopes inward to the center. Eirrin is water, completely surrounded by land.”

“And Loch-linn of the Danes is perfection itself,” Cormac said, hanging onto his temper only with effort. “Which is why ye left so long agone and never return. Come, blood-brother, it’s only weary of this searching ye’re after being. There’s more grass under my two feet this instant than in all of Loch-linn… and more moisture in a lungful of the air of Britain than in all Eirrin’s sweet air!”

Wulfhere only sighed, without reply. The other man was right; in this sort of situation, he’d have muttered darkly even about the paradisic Isle of Danu. He sighed anew. With all its anxious womenfolk… he should have remained there!

They walked slowly along the hillside, stumping, one leg long and the other short, for it was easier than walking up and down, up and down. Though their movements were not quite listless, they were hardly energetic. Nor came this from lack of sleep. Though the nights were cold and heavied with the added chill of dampness and their limbs and backs complained at morningtide, both men slept well enough. The lives they’d led had hardly accustomed them to soft beds and the warmth of night-fires. If ever men could sleep anywhere, under any conditions, and indeed nigh at any time at will, the Wolf and the Splitter of Skulls were among their number.

Nor did their captive provide any problem. It was the growing feeling of fruitlessness that preyed on their minds.

Despair was a brooding shadow that hovered over them and their thoughts were dark with it. Surely they had trod every inch of this mocking hill, and of the greensward at its base. They had found no Doorway, not even a cave; there was no sign. They were weary of the search, and nervous that it was to come to naught.

Samaire, with Bas and Brian, had reluctantly parted their company and gone on to Tara. With Thulsa Doom in the likeness of Bas as he was now, the two weapon-men had struck westward-afoot. Neither was accustomed to horses, and Cormac hated that sort of transport that made a man’s tailbones and thighs sore-and worse next day. Too, he stated a further reason for walking. What would they do with their mounts once they discovered the Doorway and entered the earth? The horses could not remain tethered. Nor could they be turned loose to roam free and doubtless cause consternation and damage for others. Nor, on this mission, was there a way to hire someone, even a boy, to accompany them and return the mounts once the Doorway was found. He’d likely become a flying gibbering idiot when his employers vanished… and might well be waiting with an army of angry, fearful men and stern druids when Cormac and Wulfhere emerged from below ground. If they emerged, after-how long a while within the earth?

And so they had walked, and, waded, and forded, and slept out in damp chill, and now two days and two nights had passed here, and the third day still brought them nothing to lift sagging spirits. And so Cormac mac Art was morose, and Wulfhere grumbled about Eirrin and its clime.

Yester eve they had conferred. For two days, confident, excited, they had merely walked about, hither and thither, each expecting at any second to espy the object of their quest. When whim struck, one announced and both hastened to that place, only to experience a renewal of disappointment. Cormac felt no qualm about asking Thulsa Doom for the location of this Doorway. But Thulsa Doom did not know.

Last night they had decided to do what they should have done on arrival after their trek from the coast: put the quest on a systematic basis. Walk every inch of the hill. They would not admit defeat and leave this area until they had walked, one behind the other, around and around over every finger’s breadth of the hill and its perimeter.

With them trudged the cause of this anguish and so much else that was unpleasant and evil, him whose death they sought, and him dead beforetimes. His green robe was a mockery that rustled as he walked. Nor, seemingly, did Thulsa Doom tire.

“An we find it now,” Wulfhere said from behind the Gael, “we’ll have to decide whether to rest ere we… go in. My belly’s begun to growl.”

“When has it not? When have ye not? Wulfhere!” Cormac jerked and came to a halt so that the Dane ran full into his back. “It… it be time to make that decision,” Cormac said, in a voice that was not without a bit of quaver.

All weariness flowed from mac Art’s limbs and spirit as he stared at it: a wound had opened or appeared, huge and gaping in the hillside. A dark hole it was, twice the breadth of his shoulders though several inches shorter than his height. But a moment ago had been naught here but grass. Now gaped the cave, closer to him than the length of his forearm. It yawned darkly, a cavern into the hill but a few steps above its base. Wide enow for two men to walk abreast-two short men. And women. And the animals the Tuatha de Danann had taken with them from the face of Eirrin…

The diffused sunlight spilled into the cave for a little way, then paled to grey. The grey became black. There was no gauging the depth or length of this tunnel into Eirrin’s depths; there was only blackness.

“Cormac?”

Stepping a half-pace downward, Cormac turned to look at Wulfhere. He swept an arm at the gaping hole in the earth, large enough to be visible for many many feet, much less these few.

Wulfhere turned his gaze that way. He frowned. He turned the frown on his companion.

“See ye nothing, itch-beard?”

“The hill,” the Dane said. “And grass. Cormac-has the damp and our frustration got to ye, man?”

Cormac looked again. The cave was there. With a glance at Wulfhere, he stepped forward. Within the hole in the hill of Bri Leith, he turned to look again at Wulfhere Hausakluifr, and him who appeared to be Bas the Druid.

“Cormac!”

Wulfhere’s eyes had gone wide. He hurled badly shaken glances this way and that. Cormac saw those eyes fall on him-and knew that Wulfhere saw him not, from a distance of less than a body length. Cormac mac Art remembered, and stepped forth. Waving aside the Dane’s excited demands as to what had happened to him, he explained: Cathbadh had advised that the Doorways to the Danans would reveal themselves to him who wore the Moonbow.

“It is… there?”

“It is there, Wulfhere.”

“The… Doorway.”

“Aye. The Doorway to the People of Danu. We have found our goal.” He looked again into the blackness that Wulfhere could not see. “Ye have but to tread in my tracks, and-”

“Cormac mac Art.”

It was the voice of Bas; both men turned to look at him-or rather, his likeness.

“Forget this ill-advised adventure, Cormac mac Art. Ye know not what lies in that dark pit. Your own doom, perhaps. Think you a Gael will be welcomed by those the Gaels drove into this land’s subterranean depths, into the cold and the dark? Take from me this Chain of Danu; free me, and neither Wulfhere, nor Eirrin, nor any born of Eirrin anywhere will suffer the slightest from me-aye, you and yours will be the chosen people! And too any others ye name, elsewhere. Riches will be yours, Cormac mac Art… no more exile, no more wandering… shall there be again one named Cormac mac Art who rules supreme in Eirrin?”

“Thulsa Doom! Hush. Say no more. Keep silent.”

Knowing his commands were irresistible, Cormac turned from the mage at once. He found Wulfhere looking thoughtfully on him.

“Ye’d not be king over this land, blood-brother?”

“It’s nothing that one says and no promises of his I’d believe, blood-brother.”

Slowly, Wulfhere nodded. “It is tempting, though.” The Dane was musing aloud.

“Oh aye. Aye, temptation is on me. Doubtless others have been tempted. I hold myself no good man, Wulfhere.” Cormac held up his hands before his face, and there were scars on both. He examined the palms and dark long fingers. “It’s much blood these hands have spilled, Wulfhere.” The Gael’s voice was inordinately quiet. “Widows have been created to weep because of the son of Art of Connacht. Had that Art not been slain, murdered with treachery done on him, none can say what might have been. But… to be given the choice now of allying myself with purest evil, or of striving to rid this world of it… no choice exists, Wulfhere. It’s no bad man I am, either.” Cormac gestured to the cave invisible to the other. “We enter, Wulfhere. Is it still with me ye go?”

Wulfhere was smiling. “Was you said the words, Cormac. I see no cave-but I can see where ye go, Wolf. And I follow.”

At last the torches they’d brought would be put to use. Cormac entered the Doorway. Wulfhere followed. Aye, and now he could see: sunlit Eirrin behind, and the black darkness of the cave before. The huge Dane had to stoop even more than his friend, but this was no time to make complaint. With Thulsa Doom in the likeness of Bas of Tir Connail, they entered the cavern.

They walked between gloomy walls of earth and stone, on a floor of the same. It was bare and hardpacked and dustless beneath their feet. Uplifted torches surrounded them in a bright yellow glow that was engulfed by darkness but a few paces ahead. They advanced; the dark retreated, but was ever there, lurking, waiting, closing in behind them as they ranged downward into the earth.

Wulfhere glanced back, and his helmet clonked dully against a low ceil of solid stone. He saw only the darkness; they had followed the cavern downward, and its mouth had vanished.

“How can people, live down here, in this blackness? Cormac… there cannot be people down here!”

Cormac said nothing. Doubts plucked at his confidence and his hopes, too, but he’d go on until uncertainty became certainty-one way or another. An there be a crowned woman down here, he mused, sure it’s Queen of the Dark she is!

So, and so. Let it be that, then. If such there were, he’d be finding her. Behind him paced Thulsa Doom in silence; last came Wulfhere Hausakluifr. Cormac walked on, leading the others ever deeper into the earth. A silence surrounded them, and it seemed ominous, brooding, a menace. Waiting. Silence and darkness swallowed them. The air grew heavy with the odour of damp loam.

Their footsteps and the clink of chainmail were the only sounds, and close-pressing walls gave off echoes. Even their breathing seemed loud, echoic in this subterrene silence.

Cormac mac Art knew not how long they’d paced forward, ever downward, but his back had begun to complain of having been so long bowed. Many minutes, he knew; many, many minutes. He was sure that Wulfhere suffered even more, by reason of his great height. But the Dane did not complain. Cormac realized, and appreciated. Wulfhere Skullsplitter was no child. He knew when not to jest or jape or make complaints.

Aye-and surely the ceiling’s height is proof enow of the origin of this endless tunnel, added to the sorcerous invisibility of its mouth; this passage was constructed for people far shorter than I, than men of normal height… the Tuatha de Danann.

“Cormac!” Wulfhere’s voice came in a rumblous whisper.

“Aye.”

Cormac’s voice, too, was cautiously low, for there was light ahead. They advanced toward the pallid grey glow. Now the walls ahead became visible, in a dim pearly light that seemed to have no source and yet was like… moonlight. It did not grow brighter as they approached, though they were soon able to see more clearly. The illumination was like that of earliest dawn just when the birds commence to sing, rather than the final blush at day’s end. Toward that light the three walked-and what they became able to see directly ahead was a blank wall of stone.

Just as they reached that dead end of the passage they trekked, they saw that it was not; the tunnel split and went off at angles to left and right. In the broader space formed by the three openings in the earth, they paused, peering down each arm of the Y and looking at each other.

There came help then in the matter of choosing: from. along the leftward passage came sound. It was that of weeping, in the naturally high voice of a woman or an adolescent.

After the exchange of another glance-and one directed at Thulsa Doom-they turned and entered the channel to the left.

Was it an omen of ill favour that the first sound they heard in this subterrene road to the tuatha de Danann was of sobbing; that the first person they met here inside Eirrin was deep in sadness?

The passageway descended, angled-and they saw the weeper.

She was a girl or young woman, huddled on the cavern floor, close to the far wall with her legs drawn up and her head in her hands.

She was entirely naked but for a bracelet, which looked like bronze.

Deciding as he had about Sinshi that this nude little weeper was more girl than woman, Cormac paused, lifted a hand to halt the others. His buckler was on his arm and his sword in his sheath. They gazed on the girl, whose head was down while she wept with quaking shoulders and yet little sound as though she strove not to be heard; nevertheless she had neither seen nor heard their approach. In silence, the three trespassers of under-earth stared.

Never had Cormac mac Art seen anyone so pale.

An infant, mayhap; a toddler never out of the house. As this girl of the Danans had never been out of the earth. No sun had ever touched that skin, nor that of her parents or their parents before them, nor indeed any of her forebears, for some five centuries. They and their arcane art had somehow brought with them the light of their goddess, for this chamber was brighter, as though bathed in moonlight. But not sunlight. Aye, the Danans, for so pale was this one that she had to be of those people of sub-Eirrin, despite her great difference from those of the Isle of Daneira.

Though strange, the pearly colour of her hair, ever so faintly tinged with the palest slate blue, was far from distasteful. Cormac had seen ash-blonds afore, though hardly often, and he had seen too those whose hair went grey and even white ere they had lived long enough to gain the wrinkles of age; he thought such hair beautiful.

This Danan’s hair was that hue all over her body, he saw, and she was superbly constructed-strangely no darker round her nipples than the inner shell of a mussel-and attractive by the standards of any people he knew, assuming they judged not beauty by the amount of flesh. Though true, he had not yet seen her face.

Like those of Daneira, this sobbing Danan was slight, lightly boned and extremely short; five feet, if that tall.

Cormac spoke quietly, with deliberate slowness and care for pronunciation.

“Whatever it is that puts sadness on ye, we’ll not be adding to it.”

Up came her head; wide went eyes more pale than ever Cormac had seen even among the Norse. Her sobs ended. Fine nostrils flared as with a little cry she drew back against a wall of rocky earth shored with both wood and stones. She stared, shrinking.

“We bring you absolutely no harm,” Cormac said, uncomfortable in the role of gentleness; it was little practice he’d had. “D’ye understand my words?”

Silent and huge-eyed, weird-eyed, she nodded. Her head was longish, her face thin and with pronounced bone-structure. Like those of a rabbit though nigh without colour, her eyes swiftly shifted their skittish gaze from one to the other of the three men before her. Cormac knew that they were even stranger to her than she to them; they expected the unusual. On impulse, he squatted. Even at a distance of two lengths of his body, he towered over the girl on the floor against the wall, her legs and arms drawn up defensively.

“My name is Cormac mac Art. He of the red beard is Wulfhere. Wulfhere. This is… Thulsa. It’s from… above, that we’ve come. And in peace… oh.”

He had forgotten. From between tunic and mailcoat he lifted the silver chain, with its pendent sign of the Moonbow.

The girl gasped, stared. Her head came forward a trifle to peer at the sigil. Her gaze shifted to the chest of Thulsa Doom. She blinked and tucked her lower lip betwixt her teeth.

“It is as friend of Danu and Her people I come, with my blood-brother and him who is my captive, bonded to me by the Chains of Danu.” Cormac smiled. “We are not monster Gaels come to eat ye! Indeed, we come bearing some gifts, and begging a boon.”

Still she said naught, but only stared.

“It’s slowly I’m talking because it’s apart our tongues have grown, your people’s and mine, across the hundreds of years. Please do the same. It’s of the Danans ye be?”

Long he waited for her reply; at last she said, in a tiny voice, “Aye. Cor… Cormac mac… your hair! And his hair… and so tall ye be, all three!”

Cormac showed her another smile, working very hard at being gentle and confidence-winning. “And to us ye be lovely small, child of Danu! I… it’s on me to ask…” He paused. “See us as friends of yourself, g-will ye be telling us your name?”

She was staring past him with those positively unsettling eyes with less colour than the underside of a cloud. Abruptly realizing that it was not cold as he’d expected, so deep in the earth, he gave thought to the possibility that the Danans of sub-Eirrin wore no clothing. But her legs were drawn up and to one side, heels at her buttocks, thus concealing her privates in apparent modesty. Her arms remained across breasts that he had already seen were firm and high and pointy of tip, like cones of snow.

He asked her again. Her gaze snapped to his face.

“Oh! I make apology-I was staring… the beard of… of…”

“Wulfhere,” the Dane rumbled, and she jerked a little.

“Oh! And what a voice! Your beard is beautiful, my lord Wulfhere. I-my name is Erris. Of the de Danann, aye. It’s handmaid I am, to Queen Riora Feachtnachis of Moytura.”

Queen Riora! This time Cormac’s smile was broad and genuine.

Chapter Nine:

Battle Beneath the Earth

Cormac gazed smiling upon Erris the Danan, handmaiden to Riora, Queen of Moytura. His heart surged and he felt as if a breeze had arisen to blow warm air over him.

A queen ruled here, beneath and within Eirrin; a crowned woman!

The queen of Moytura… Moytura: Magh Tuiredh, the site of the long, long ago battle in which the Danans had put defeat on the Fir Bholgs, the first rulers of Eirrin. As for the other names, Erris and Riora; well, the sounds were familiar, though Rory-Rudraighe-was a man’s name. The naming of people had taken its own course here, he realized.

Cormac mac Art twisted about to share an elated look with Wulfhere.

Grinning, Wulfhere asked, “And do the people of Moytura wear no clothing?”

Immediately Erris of Moytura erupted anew into tears. Cormac resisted the desire to get up and strangle the Dane…

Rising, he pulled around the sizeable belt-pouch he wore, and fished within it while he approached Erris. He squatted before the small huddled form. His touch was gentle, and his hand on her shoulder looked like the shadows of night swallowing the wan glow of the moon. She looked up briefly, stricken and tear-stained; dropped her head to her hands again.

He felt foolish, proffering the necklace from the Doom-heim trove. Jewels they had brought, aye, hopefully to deal with a queen. But of clothing-none. All, every scrap of cloth, Samaire and the others had taken to Tara. Yet now he remembered that he had that to offer her which would cover her nakedness, though he hated with a man’s instincts and urges to see it done. Naturally he and Wulfhere wore cloaks; they had wrapped themselves well in them, each night.

He cupped his palm under the disk of his mantle’s brooch, drew forth the pin, and caught the disk in his palm. Setting them aside, he removed his cloak, placed it over her drawn-up form, to the chin. He tucked it around.

She stilled her sobs, looked up sniffing. For a long while she gazed into his eyes.

“You are kind,” she said.

“Is it kindness to lend clothing to someone who has none? Here, here is the clasp to my cloak.” He considered. “Ye have done wrong, Erris Rioranacht? ye were stripped and…” He looked about, and it came to him. This was not Moytura-not yet! “And cast out!” he blurted.

She nodded, her so-pale eyes watery and leaking tears down the cheeks of her thin face. Looking at him, she tugged the cloak up to cover all of her save her head-and her back, which was against the tunnel’s wall. She told him.

Yes. She had been stripped, and cast forth-but not for wrongdoing. Because she was the queen’s favourite.

Cormac frowned and a coldness grew around his heart.

Erris of Moytura spoke more, and all elation faded from him, and from Wulfhere, until it had ceased to exist and it was only distress they knew.

Riora of Moytura was daughter of Riora, queen. But a year ago the queen had died; her daughter was crowned. Riora, daughter of Riora, was queen of Danan Moytura.

But Queen Riora did not rule in Moytura.

Her cousin Cairluh had plotted with the mage, Tarmur Roag. Cairluh and Tarmur Roag had seized power in Moytura; they ruled.

Cormac clutched at a fleeting and unlikely hope. “Cairluh is not… a woman’s name here, is it?”

Erris shook her head and cloudlike hair flew. She looked at him without smiling, and there was less colour in her eyes than in the nails of his fingers.

“Oh no,” Erris said, but she did not smile at his suggestion.

Cormac sighed. “How is it then that the people of Moytura suffer a male cousin to rule in the place of her who is their rightful queen? Is your mistress so bad a ruler?”

“She is not!” Erris snapped with some anger and much vehemence, and then she softened and explained.

Tarmur Roag was a man of considerable power. A simulacrum of Riora, created or called up by Tarmur Roag in the queen’s precise likeness, ruled in her stead. She-or it, was controlled, of course, by Tarmur Roag and Cairluh.

“Hmm. And-what differences have come of it? Does it matter who rules Moytura?”

“Of course! My lady Riora is Queen!”

Cormac nodded. Yes, yes, of course, but rulers came and went…

“And Cairluh believes that with the power of Tarmur Roag we of Danu can rise up and overthrow… you who live above. The people are being stirred up to such a belief, and all-all, men and women and girls and boys-are being forced to train with weapons, to carry red death above along with the sorceries of Tarmur Roag!”

Cormac thought: Aye, it matters who rules in Moytura within Eirrin! For even though it was a ridiculous thought, a futile concept that these people could conquer his, there’d be much, much blood shed in the trying of it. And he knew that the sons of Eirrin would not stop this time until no Danan remained alive in all the land-on or in the isle called Emerald.

Clinks and a rustle announced the drawing close of Wulfhere. His voice was a hopeful croak. “The queen? What have the plotters done with your mistress?”

New tears scudded down the white cheeks of Erris as she replied. Riora, the real Queen Riora, languished in misery of mind and body in her own dungeon, an ensorceled and pain-fraught captive who was mocked and teased and preyed upon by the torturemaster. He had made brag he’d get a child on her ere he ruined her face and body forever.

With a long sigh, Cormac stared down, half-seeing. Gentle were the de Danann of the isle; not so these of Moytura of sub-Eirrin, whose queen’s demesne included a dungeon and a master of the tortures administered there! He twisted partway about to stare at the face and robe of Bas the Druid.

Thulsa Doom.

So long as he lived, Cormac mac Art was in danger, and so was all Eirrin, for it was Cormac who had brought the monster here, and him evil incarnate and a hundred and eighty centuries old. And it was only a queen could end the mage’s unnatural life that was not life at all but foul un-death. And Riora of Moytura was such a queen… and Riora of Moytura was dethroned and crownless.

Queen Riora is… presently dethroned and crownless, Cormac thought.

“Wulfhere… in order to end the menace of Thulsa Doom… I must attempt to restore their queen to her throne.”

Standing beside the squatting Gael, Wulfhere said nothing. Cormac heard his great sigh. Then:

“Girl-Erris. We, Cormac and I, will aid ye and your queen. For no matter how many men it is that Cairluh and Tarmur… Ro have guarding her prison, we shall send them dripping gore to their goddess. Now-what of this Tarmur Ro? He is to be feared? He is impervious to this?” Wulfhere’s ax hummed in the air.

“Tarmur Roag,” she corrected.

“He-he is a… none is so powerful, not even Dithorba!”

Cormac said, “Dithorba?”

“Aye. Dithorba Loingsech, the queen’s own adviser and himself a mage. But-”

It was Thulsa Doom who interrupted. “The two of ye cannot overcome this Tarmur Roag, Cormac mac Art. Release me now, O Cormac of the Gaels, and I swear never to bring harm upon ye or your land or any of its people, wherever they be, and all your friends, and to make you a king among men… King Cormac… more than a king!”

Cormac swung and stared with his lips held tight. “I trust ye no farther than I could be throwing ye, skullface-uphill! Now be silent, and…” He looked back at Erris. “Erris, prepare yourself for a hideous sight, and remember that he is chained to me by Danu’s own bonds.” He slid an arm back and down and, found her hand. It was not cold. “Thulsa Doom: Be silent. And give over the likeness of Bas the Druid that ye dishonour-assume your own form, creature of death!”

The undying wizard obeyed. The robes and face of Bas swam, went all murky and tenuous, were gone. The gleaming head of death stared at them from above the dark robe of Cutha Atheldane.

With a gasping throaty cry Erris lunged up to press hard against Cormac’s back. She clung there, and he felt her shudders. Wulfhere glanced at her back, and down. His eyes widened and he raised pale red brows. The Danish giant looked away-and then at her again, as if helplessly, to admire the young woman’s naked back.

After glancing at him, Cormac said, “Best ye back away, Erris, and swing that cloak about yourself properly.”

“He-he-”

“He has no face. He is a mage. He is in my control. I wear the Moonbow-and ye see it on him, too, downside up. Do as I bade ye.”

She released him reluctantly, looked at Wulfhere, glanced at Thulsa Doom, and then with the cloak held before her she squatted to catch up its brooch. Unblushingly she swung the cloak about her as he’d suggested, and pinned it above her left breast. The greyish blue mantle enveloped her completely, to the toes. Again she moved to stand close to Cormac.

“Erris… where be this Dithorba Loingsech? It’s he should be as glad to be our ally as we his, I’m thinking.”

She shook her head distressedly. “Tarmur Roag mocks his fellow mage by binding him with chains of silver-” Her head jerked up and her eyes were wide as new excitement and hope came upon her. “HERE, outside Moytura!”

A smile toyed with Cormac’s lips; failed to manifest itself. “Any hands can remove the Chains of Danu, save those of the wearer of the inverted Moonbow-why have ye not released him?”

Her shiver was conveyed by the rippling of the encompassing cloak of blue-grey woollen. She licked her lips.

“I was just put forth from Moytura. Dithorba is guarded. I… I…” Erris looked down. “I was too loyal to my mistress. It is why I was stripped and thrust out here… for them. Those who guard Dithorba. Rough weapon men who are like blood-hungry beasts with Tarmur Roag’s sorcerous bidding upon them. I was… I was to be their… ‘Here, wench,’ snarled those who thrust me forth, ‘provide entertainment for the lonely watchers of Dithorba, that they may recreate themselves.’ This was just before you came.”

Cormac heard the emphasis on the word “you” without making any indication of reaction. Yet at her words of Danan weapon-men about, his and Wulfhere’s hands had gone to sword-hilt and ax-helve as if at a signal. The Dane’s crimson beard twitched, which meant he was smiling, somewhere within that flaming bush.

“And where is Dithorba, Erris… and his guards?”

She pointed past them. “Straight there. Along the other branch from… from the Door to Them.”

Cormac mac Art saw to his shield-straps. “Say not ‘them’ with such a fearful heaviness on ye, Erris… Wulfhere and I, after all, are ‘Them’!” He turned to look at his weapon companion of several years, grim and blood-splashed seagoing years as rievers. “Wulfhere?”

The giant hefted ax and buckler. Anticipation lit his cerulean eyes with bloody portents for the guards of Dithorba.

“How many guards be there?” Cormac asked Erris.

She shook her head. “I know not. Less than ten methinks but no mere two or three-five, mayhap.”

“Hmp, Wulfhere rumbled. “In that event, Cormac, why don’t ye wait here? I’ll be back from this encounter in a few heartbeats…”

Cormac gave him a look. “Stay ye well back, Erris,” he said, and the two men set their feet in the direction she’d indicated; the other arm of the Y down the stem of which they had come from outside-Outside. At Cormac’s beck, Thulsa Doom fell in behind them-and Erris stayed well back, indeed, staring at that hairless and gleaming skull.

They moved along the subterranean hallway with the cautious silence of great stalking cats. An occasional scuff of buskin on hardpacked earth or stone, and a faint clink of mail were the only hints of the advance of two weapon-men followed by a silent, faceless mage and a cloak-swathed young woman. All three men were forced to stoop as they went along that pearl-lit passage within the earth.

It came upon Cormac to wish he had asked whether the tunnel debouched into such a chamber or “room” as the one in which they’d found Erris. Too late now. If not-fighting in this low-ceiled tunnel with oppressively close walls might well be to the advantage of the Danans, Cormac clamped his lips. He had not come here to fight the people of Danu!

If only surprise could be with him and Wulfhere…

They rounded a turning, and Cormac’s eyes narrowed; aye, up ahead was an obvious widening and heightening on the other side of what resembled a doorway notched in the earth. Dithorba Loingsech was not bound in the tunnel itself, then, but within a larger chamber. Good! They approached more slowly now, careful not to jostle each other or to make the faintest sound.

At what might be called a doorway without a door, they paused. Within lay a chamber of stone that was nigh square, each wall perhaps thrice Cormac’s length. Not a huge room, but big enough for the wielding of ax and sword and buckler, and the swift necessary movement of their feet.

In the far right corner was piled a cairn of stones, and there too was him they sought. The Moonbow of Danu hung upon his chest at the end of its silver chain, its points downward. This had to be Dithorba, who like Thulsa Doom was captive of the Chains of Danu. A very short and passing thin man he was, with a beard like dirty snow that was plaited on his chest; above, his pate was bald and gleaming. In addition to the Moonbow necklace, the queen’s mage was chained to the wall itself by shackles of silver. Pitifully, the old fellow wore naught but a loincloth.

Gael gave Dane a querying look; Dane nodded.

And the bigger man moved. Before Cormac could step forward, Wulfhere entered the chamber of stone. He sidestepped swiftly leftward so that there was room for his companion to enter and range himself beside him-and it fell out that the guards were there, to the left of the entry.

Two men squatted, and the knuckle-bones in the hand of one struck the floor with a little clatter just as the newcomers came upon them. Four others stood about them. Instantly a dozen pale de Danann eyes fixed on Wulfhere the Splitter of Skulls, and every man showed shock.

A full half dozen there were, unnaturally pale, grim-faced men who were both armed and armoured. Their widened eyes changed swiftly; now they flared as unnaturally with the scarlet killing-lust. Cormac saw on the instant that Tarmur Roag was their master, and that the traitorous sorcerer of Moytura had made animals of these guards; they were mindless, fearless slayers.

The two dicers scrambled up and wrapped, fists around pommels; six short pale men faced the two who had come so unexpectedly upon them. Surprise had been lost; Wulfhere had not immediately charged. Yet the men of Moytura hesitated, staring at men who to them were weird of hair and complexion-and gigantic of stature. Like their cousins of the Isle, none of these Danans was above five and half feet in height.

Corselets of scintillant, superbly wrought mail they wore, chain after the manner of Eirrin rather than the short coat of overlapping scales that armoured Wulfhere’s massive frame from collarbones to upper thighs. The links were dark. Each Danan bore a sword rather than ax or spear, and their bucklers were ornately wrought, six-sided and inlaid and painted and enameled as though the makers had sought to make jewellery of the implements of war and red death. Shaped like crescent moons were their helmets, with outcurving wings that Cormac thought were surely silver, welded onto the sides of their round helms of iron.

As though frozen, the Danans stared. Cormac seized the moment.

“It’s for Dithorba we’ve come,” he said. “Stand ye back all, and live another day.”

Wulfhere rotated his wrist so that his great ax swung in readiness. The face of mac Art twisted into a sinister and violent expression as he lifted his buckler. In his fist his sword was ready for the letting of Danan blood. A light that seemed to welcome battle blazed blue in his eyes like sword steel.

The Danans made reply in action rather than words. They came grimly, death-hounds of the land below-earth pitting their hatred-glaring selves against two tigers of the sea, men with hearts of wolves and thews of fire and steel, feeders of countless eaters of carrion; men to whom the death-song was sweeter than the love-croon of a maiden.

Wulfhere grinned and waited. Far greater men than these had been given pause by that smile that betokened joy in battle. Not so these sorcerously encouraged Danans; they came on.

Grim of mien, a man of the earth launched a sword-slash with a savagery that bespoke his unreasoning hate for these who challenged his charge-and his blind senseless obedience to the fell conditioning of Tarmur Roag. Only then did the redbearded giant heave up his weapon and with a tremendous swipe of that outsized ax destroy sword and beautiful mail, skin and bone, shoulder and chest so that the attacker was cloven to the pectoral and Wulfhere was forced to fight and worry his ax free. It came away drooling scarlet gore while his victim sank down with only a gasp to mark his passage from this world into the next.

The man beside and just back of him was shocked at the tigerishly lithe swiftness of the unbearded man with the dark skin. Then he knew shock again when that scarred intruder did not chop, but thrust, in a blurring forward motion of his entire right arm. Steel entered the Danan betwixt his collarbones and sank to the length of his own hand. That hand flexed in a spasm and his sword fell at Cormac’s feet. The short man’s body followed, twitching.

None cursed or made battle cry; the battle beneath the earth was fought in an awful silence but for the ring and scrape of arms.

The other diminutive sons of Danu came frothing on in a ravening onslaught so that Cormac and Wulfhere were forced to use all skill and swiftness against the close-bunched foe. Blue sparks flew from the edges of shield and hacking blades and the terrible clangour of war arose.

A mighty sword-sweep missed the Gael only because he blurred backward a half-pace. Then forward; Danan blade rang off stone wall with an ear-splitting screech that sent a thousand bright sparks aflying. At the same time, Cormac’s point whisked forth like a striking blue-grey serpent and vanished into the eye whose socket it widened. Another sword came rushing at his side; before he could shift up his buckler Wulfhere’s ax-blade came whining to shorten the deadly sliver of death by a halfscore inches. Ten inches of Danan iron clanged and clattered off wall and floor of yieldless stone-and three inches of Gaelic steel destroyed Danan chainmail and opened its wearer’s stomach nigh to his backbone. A dark hand of incredible skill and strength gave the sword a quick twist and jerked it forth so swiftly that it was clear and rushing elsewhere ere the spate of blood followed.

In the narrow chamber walled all about with closely pressing, echoic stone beneath its low ceil, the clangour of striving weapons was nigh onto deafening.

At the doorway stood robed man and cloaked woman, watching; Erris had forgot her fear to press against the undying wizard while she stared at a sight she had never before witnessed. So too stared Dithorba, moveless in his bonds amid the pile of loose stones.

A hideously grimacing head rolled over the floor of hardened earth, sheared from Danan shoulders by the bite of Wulfhere’s ax. At the same time, an ugly grunt was wrenched from Cormac by the impact of the edge of a Danan blade on his sword-arm. His fingers quivered, threatening to drop his own brand.

But an inch lower and he’d have lost the arm or been struck to the bone at least; only the linked steel sleeve of his mailcoat saved him from that horror. With the battle-fever on him he felt no pain, only the blow. Promised nevertheless a bothersome arm later and a huge tender bruise, he snarled blasphemous curses and drove his buckler forward with such vicious force that it not only struck the attacker full in the face but snapped the man’s neck.

The last Danan died instantly, to fall without a mark on him.

Chapter Ten:

The Wizard of Moytura

The deadly steel-hued eyes of Cormac mac Art were wild and glittering as he snapped his head this way and that, seeking the next foeman. There was none. It was over that swiftly, in a mad flurry of hand-to-hand ferocity that left six diminutive men of under-earth lying amid a spreading welter of blood whilst the victors had scarce begun to pant.

Wulfhere lowered his red-smeared ax and glared at his comrade. Blood dripped from his arm; it was not from his veins.

“Is that all, Wolf? I’ve not even raised a sweat!”

“Blood-mad demon from the demesne of Hell” the Gael accused, and grinned an ugly wolfish grimace. “What is it ye want? It’s six men we’ve just been after hacking our way through with steel, and ye’re after bemoaning the lack of their number! There-that one moves still; be a kind man and swiften his pace into Danu’s arms that he suffers less.”

Wulfhere first frowned in puzzlement at the seeming verbal attack. Then he began to grin, and his ax slit an agonized man’s throat with surgical precision. Cormac was meanwhile looking across the corpses to the rear of the chamber of earth and stone.

“It’s Cormac son of Art I am, a Gael from the land above. I and this redbeard are come to release ye, man… ye’ll aid us in the freeing of your queen?”

The old man blinked, and one foot shifted amid the loose stones surrounding him like a premature burial cairn. He gazed on Cormac, and there was anguish in his eyes. He spoke not.

Cormac mac Art frowned, looking up from his squat; he was carefully wiping his swordblade on the skirt of a dead man’s tunic.

“Can ye not speak? Can ye move your head, then?”

The old man nodded.

“Ah.” Cormac rose and sheathed his sword. “It’s sorcery done upon ye, is it?” He turned. “Wulfhere, we-”

“Cormac! FALL!”

The Dane’s shout rose high and loud with a definite note of desperation. Cormac knew the, tone, and saw the horrified face, and he knew this urgency signal they had each used in past. It told him that he was sore menaced from behind, could not meet the menace, and must betake himself out of the way instanter. He responded with swift obedience to exigence. Cormac did not fall; he dived to the unyielding floor with a clash of buckler and a twist of his head that allowed helm and hair to absorb the impact.

Prone, he sensed more than heard the overhead whiz of some unknown missile. He was already scrambling around to bring up sword and shield to meet whatever malign force might have materialized between himself and the Danan mage. Aye, materialized, for the experiences with Thulsa Doom had conditioned him to accept the awful reality of sorcerous attacks.

It was Wulfhere and the others who were behind him now, and from that direction he heard something hard smack the stone wall near the entry; the thrown object was not metal. On his back he faced-no one. Nothing. There was only the pile of grey and grey-brown stones, twinkling with flecks of quartz and feldspar, around the bare thin shanks of Dithorba.

Frowning, his mind weighted with the darkness of confusion, Cormac twisted again. Was Dithorba helpless-had the Danan hurled something? But he was chained… Asprawl and raised partway on one elbow, the Gael stared while Wulfhere stooped. The big man straightened, hefting the fist-sized chunk of rock he had picked up.

“This leaped from the pile and rushed at your back, Cor-Cormac! Another!”

Cormac mac Art lay on his back, legs extended toward the cairn, his neck twisted so that he faced Wulfhere. At the Dane’s words his nape crawled. There was no time to give thought to the eerieness, though; again danger threatened imminently. Even as he started to turn his face again in Dithorba’s direction, his left arm moved in a rush. Weaponman’s reflexes sent his buckler sweeping up in protection, however blindly. Luck or the gods of Eirrin guided his arm. Instinctively he swung it up and in before his sprawled body, ere he could see what he was doing.

There was a grating chunking impact on his shield, a smallish round targe, and his arm shivered. He groaned then in pain, for onto his leg dropped the flying stone he had providentially deflected with his buckler. Several pounds in weight, the rock fell on him below the hem of his mailcoat’s short skirt. Leather leggings afforded protection, there, but the blow was forceful and he felt it to the bone.

Staring eyes told him that Dithorba remained helpless. There was no one else there. No one had hurled the stone. Yet it had come flying. Twice then, stones had hurled themselves at him.

While he was starting to rise, another chunk of granite sprang at him from the jumbled pile about Dithorba Loingsech. With a feeling of horror Cormac saw the inanimate thing detach itself from the others, become animate. Agleam with twinkling quartz, it came skimming at him, low so as to catch him in face or neck.

Cormac hurled himself down and aside. He rolled. Suddenly the most important goal of his life was getting himself off the rough floor of stone and earth and into a vertical position.

It had come again.

Dark sorcery stalked him.

Again, Donn, the Dark One, dread lord of the dead, roamed the world, and again his keen eyes had fallen on Cormac mac Art. Again it was not man or beast attacking him, but the mephitic manifestation of the malign power of some wrathful wizard; the uncanny horrors of sorcery; the death that affrighted and confounded even as it came seeking, like a loosed arrow that could not be met with sword and ax or even intelligence-born tactic, but could only be feared and avoided. And yet it was worse than any humming arrow, for such at least was the product of human hands as was the bow that loosed it and even the power that drove it.

Here there was naught to attack, no place to hide and no hand or body at which to direct slaying steel.

But what or who was the source of this attack?

The Moonbow of Danu the Goddess still flashed dully on his breast, and its reversed mate hung still just below the collarbones of Thulsa Doom. Not from that master of frightsome illusions and the walking dead this unnatural assault, then; it was another who struck, and him invisible or directing from afar.

A huge stone shaped like a mollusc of singular size came whizzing, and Cormac dodged convulsively.

“Wulfhere! To your shield-side and along the wall to Dithorba! Erris-keep ye back, girl, for ye’ve no defense against this assault of rock! Thulsa Doom, move not so much as a fing-uh!”

So intent was mac Art on his directions for the circumvention of the indefensible onslaught that he was caught by it; a knobby stone just bigger than Wulfhere’s fist slammed into his right bicep. Sleeve of linked steel rings saved him from shredded skin and broken bone, but his hand flexed and his sword dropped to clatter. Cormac staggered, getting his feet back and out of the way of his own dropped glaive. With his pain-filled eyes on the source of the silent, hair-raising attack, he bent for the sword.

He paused while he reconsidered. Then he retrieved his sword-and sheathed it. Still in a crouch, staring at the cairn as though it were some snarling beast or Donn-sent demon, he backed two paces. He caught up a sword of one of the fallen Danans. As his fingers worked, shifting and shifting the pommel for the feel and balance of this brand shorter than his own, he glanced over at Wulfhere.

As Cormac had bade, the Dane was moving warily along the wall, advancing toward the corner; thence he would move across the chamber’s rear wall to the corner in which Dithorba was bound.

Cormac’s nape prickled; a chunk of granitic rock lifted without a sound from its piled fellows and went end-over-end at the huger target of the redbearded giant.

“HO!” Wulfhere cried. “Practice does a man good!”

With an almost preposterously expert sweep of his ax, the giant struck the rushing missile away-over an arm’s length from his body.

Another followed close behind, rushing low. Cormac did not wait to see its effect; Wulfhere was prepared, sweating, though from neither heat nor exertion, mac Art rushed toward Dithorba. But the invisible attacker was not distracted. A rock came spinning his way, but a pair of inches above the ground, to catch his shin. He danced, saw another chunk of stone rush off at Wulfhere while still another lofted itself at him, and in dodging he fell.

“Leave this place!” Dithorba’s voice was dry, crackly with age. “Ye cannot free me, so long as I wear the Moonbow points down; Tarmur Roag will put death on both of ye giants. Leave me; this is only death for ye both!”

“Why made ye no reply be-uh-fore!” Wulfhere demanded with some petulance, briefly interrupting himself to fend away a platter-size stone. It scraped across his buckler with an ear-scratching noise.

“Go!” Dithorba Loingsech cried. “I held my silence in hopes Tarmur would not know of your presence and the deaths of the guards he set to watch over me. He knows. More weapon-men will come. Go, go, ye cannot free me; ye cannot fight stones hurled by a powerful mage far from here!”

“Augh!” Wulfhere crashed against the wall. precisely in his armoured stomach a skull-sized stone had struck the Dane, and he slid weakly down the rocky wall with a screeching of steel scales.

“All we need do is pluck that necklace from round your neck, Dithorba Loingsech!” Cormac snarled, and like a vicious animal he used shield to bash away a flying shape of rock that twinkled as if set with a score of diamonds.

“And these chains? Be not foolish, dark man-your comrade is already down and more guards are doubtless on their way!”

Steel will cut silver chain very nicely, Cormac thought, but he said nothing.

Three grey stones leapt up from the dwindled pile; they hurtled at him in a flurry, separating naturally.

With his targe he smashed away the largest, though he heard stout wood crack; in stooping to meet that crotch-aimed lump of rock he bent under the second, which he heard hum past his ear. The third, aimed at his body, struck his helmet with a belling crash and a shower of shivered stone.

His head ringing both at ears and within, Cormac fell and did not rise.

“Wolf!” the Dane called in concern. He was getting himself grunting to his feet with the aid of wall and ax-helve. And two sorcery-driven stones rushed at him.

Cormac’s blue-grey mantle fluttered and bare white legs flashed. Across the floor strewn with stones and corpses and slippery with blood raced Erris of Moytura in a lunatic dash-and in seconds she had reached the shackled mage. As her hands rose to his necklace he swiftly bent his head; the slave snatched away the chain and the Sign of the Moonbow. She hurled it to the floor of hardpacked earth.

Immediately Dithorba went rigid and his eyes closed.

A big flattened rock, just elevating to begin its assault on Wulfhere, clattered back onto the other stones remaining about Dithorba’s ankles. Nor did more stones move.

Totally heedless of her nudity, made the whiter by the slate-hued cloak of Cormac mac Art, Erris squatted beside the fallen Gael. He was up on one forearm, twitching his head, staring dully down. His helmet was dented, though no blood seeped from beneath its rim.

“An we… free Riora, Erris… it’s you… who’s made it possible.”

“Oh please, please Cormac mac Art-be all right, get up get up oh please…”

A great burly form loomed over her, squatted beside her. “What’s this? Be ye tired from this little fray, battle-brother? What ails ye?”

Cormac looked at him. “I have a headache.”

Wulfhere laughed gustily. Cormac detected the trace of hysteria that denoted relief on the Dane’s part. The man was unequipped to cope with an injury to someone he loved, and the men of his chill land were too sure of their masculinity to avoid stating love for another man. Nevertheless Wulfhere’s way was to lard on bluff jests as cover for nervous concern that made him most woefully uncomfortable.

Work remained to be done, and Cormac willed himself to move. His pushing himself was accompanied by twinges in right upper arm and left thigh. His head seemed to tighten within a deep grey band and he staggered in a long moment of vertigo. Leaning on the Dane, he bent to retrieve the Danan sword he’d dropped. He frowned against the throbbing in his head as he straightened. Cormac turned to Dithorba.

“See that ye move not, Dithorba Loingsech,” he said, and he went to the old man and caught his thin arm in a vising grip.

Dithorba shrank and closed his eyes; the other man wielded sword. With five careful strokes of the Danan blade, Cormac freed the queen’s adviser of his four chains. He gazed a moment at the sword; held it up for Wulfhere’s eyes. The Danan blade was both bent and badly notched.

“Hmp! Ruined, by Odin’s eye! My ax would have cut through thicker links of silver than those without taking note-much less bending!”

“Iron,” Cormac said quietly. “All their swords are of iron, not steel.” He went to one knee beside a corpse, moved to another. “Iron! All their helms, their armour… not steel, Wulfhere, but iron.”

While he spoke and moved among the bodies, Erris moved to Dithorba. With more respect than self-consciousness, she removed Cormac’s cloak and swept it around the spindly old man. Naked, she stood with head deferentially bowed. Dithorba but nodded. He stood looking from one to the other of the strangers, rubbing his arms. Despite their being held immobile by Cormac while he struck through the chains, each stroke had brought a painful wrench. The shackles remained, though but one link of silver chain dangled from each.

Danan and Gaelic eyes met.

“Ye’ve come from above,” the dry, brittle old voice said. “A Gael, with that hair and skin and those eyes. We’ve not forgot what ye look like.”

Cormac nodded.

“But ye come not as enemy.” Dithorba glanced at Wulfhere. “And… you. A giant with hair the colour of the pain-rock that yields iron. Two from above-and not as enemies, but to set me free.” The old man shook his head and the plaited white beard stirred on his chest. Erris was a slave, and he took no note of her while she fussed with the cloak’s clasp.

“Wulfhere-Erris has better use for his tunic than the man lying yonder with no wound on him,” Cormac said. “Dithorba Loingsech: my name is Cormac mac Art. Wulfhere the Dane is my battle-brother… my blood brother, though our mothers knew each other not. It is to release ye we’ve come here. It’s help we can provide each other, you and we.”

Dithorba glanced at Erris, who was gazing with longing on the man of her people who lay dead among the others, him with neither wound nor blood on him, save at his nostrils. Reluctantly, Wulfhere went to that corpse.

Dithorba said, “To rescue me, and aid each other. Why?”

“Together,” Cormac said, meeting the old man’s light-eyed gaze levelly, “we must try to free your queen.” Cormac swung his right arm vigorously, against a stiffening of the bruised bicep.

Dithorba stared for a time into the slitted eyes of the dark, scarred man. He nodded, briefly. “Aye-I’d set my life to that end. But… why yourself?”

Turning, Cormac extended a pointing finger at the tall, dark-robed figure in the doorway. “There stands a mage of much power and evil, and as ye well know this holds him mine.” He touched the Moonbow on his chest. “It is because of him I must have… audience with Riora of Moytura, after she is enthroned with her crown upon her.”

“I must be hearing more of this matter… that creature has no face!”

“Ye’ve said Tarmur Roag knows of our presence here, and was he hurled those stones though he be not here to see us.”

“I wore this chain,” Dithorba said, picking it up. “He saw ye through my eyes-whether I held them open or closed. But-”

“Ye spoke of his sending weapon-men,” Cormac reminded. “Mayhap we’d best be getting ourselves elsewhere for talking.”

Dithorba’s eyes widened and he blinked. “Aye! There’s been so much, so fast… it had actually fled my mind. Aye-armed men will be here in minutes!” And with those words, Dithorba Loingsech vanished.

Chapter Eleven:

The Dungeon of Moytura

Wulfhere Skull-splitter rose from a denuded corpse. He held a tunic of some thin, shining cloth of a pearly opaline hue. “Here, girl, ye can don this or make covering of it-though I seem to have slipped with my dagger, and made a slit or two in places.” Then as he turned his grin faded and he blinked. “Where-Cormac! What’s happened to him we loosed?”

“He… disappeared,” Cormac said dully.

This time Erris’s concern was for covering herself, not the vanished mage or the manner of its accomplishment. She went naked to Wulfhere, took the tunic with a tiny word of thanks, and stepped past him. Though she’d been naked when they found her and but a few minutes agone denuded herself anew to clothe the queen’s adviser, she now kept her back turned while she slipped the soft, thin fabric of the tunic over her head.

“Thor’s beautiful red beard,” Wulfhere said, “but I’d love to be asea again, facing only such trifles as gales, whirlpools, a few boatloads of ravening Frisians and Norse, and a simple sea-monster or three!”

Cormac looked at the other man with complete empathy.

Erris came to the side of the Dane, and looked up; the man towered a foot and a half above her. “Again I make thanks to you for my clothing, my lord Wulfhere-though your accidental slip of the dagger bares both my legs to the waist!”

Before either man could comment, Dithorba was among them again.

Exclamations greeted his reappearance; none was fully coherent. The loinclothed man in Cormac’s cloak lifted bony hands for silence.

“I have been to my own chamber in the palace. It has been searched, and is empty. They have not found my secret room, though, and I took not even time to clothe myself. Erris! Come-we must show them how Dithorba travels!”

Erris drew back, though Cormac saw that there was more nervousness on her than fear. Dithorba stretched forth a hand; slowly one of hers reached out to take it. Bony, wrinkled old fingers gripped smooth young ones no less white. There was no warning, no fading; the two Danans merely vanished. Cormac and Wulfhere jerked at the popping sound, as of two palms slapping together.

The two weapon-men looked at each other.

And Dithorba was back. He stretched forth a hand. “Cormac mac Art. Come.”

“What… what have ye done, man? Where are ye after being?”

“I’ve told you. My secret room in the palace is far from here. There Erris is safe and not unhappy that her handsome thighs are bared; there we can talk and plan. Come.”

“Ye… ye have the ability to… to move yourself, by… some cantrip?”

Dithorba shrugged bony shoulders on which Cormac’s cloak hung like a sail on a windless day. “Time grows short. I can take with me but one at a time. No, no spells or cantrips. I have… such ability to travel. I merely will myself to be elsewhere; someplace I have been and can see in my mind. And I am there. It’s my life you’re after saving, son of the Gaels; I cannot do harm on you! Come.”

Cormac looked at Wulfhere. The giant’s mighty chest heaved a great sigh.

“Methinks it’s either that we trust him, battlebrother, or remain here and see how many of Tarmur Roag’s Danans we can slay ere they give us our deaths.”

“I see which of ye counsels well,” Dithorba said, and Wulfhere grinned.

Cormac did not essay to answer the unanswerable. He took the Danan’s small, dry old hand.

He knew an instant of complete mental dissociation, as though his brain were aswirl amid blinding sulphurous mists that would swallow it and choke him to death… and then his legs were jarred badly, as though he’d taken a downward step when he’d surmised himself on level ground. He straightened, feeling the spinning of his brain, the tingling that ran up his legs. As if coming from the dark into the light, he became aware-and was looking at Erris.

“A law should be passed to force ye to wear a tunic such, slitted to your waist,” he told her inanely, and was instantly aware of it, for his brain had not yet been his own. He looked about.

He was elsewhere.

Dithorba had brought him hence from the chamber outside Moytura as swiftly and simply as that, and he was none the worse for the instantaneous transfer. They were in another room of stone, this one decorated and with a floor of handsome, well-fitted stones, smoothly polished. The walls were hung with draperies in rust-red bordered with silver; the cloth was the same fine, scintillant stuff of which Erris’s tunic was made-and indeed, Dithorba’s breechclout as well. Shelves and niches and an alcove had been fashioned into the stone itself; in them rested utensils and clothing, various closed pots and caskets of assorted sizes. There squatted a stone table; there a bench onto which were bound red pillows, there another, its pillows of blue. Light illuminated the room, without apparent source. Nor was Dithorba present-

But he was, and with Thulsa Doom.

“The giant bade me bring this one first-he’s nigh attacked!” Dithorba said, and was not there.

Without patience or peace of mind Cormac waited, and then here was Dithorba once more, with Wulfhere Hausakluifr. The Dane grunted; his legs bent and he nearly fell. Cormac saw that the shorter Dithorba had miscalculated for them both; Wulfhere had been conveyed here at a level different from the Danan and like Cormac had… arrived off balance.

“We must not talk loudly, though as ye see, this chamber has no door. It is most privately mine; to my knowledge none other in Moytura possesses my ability to mind-travel. Yet we can be heard, for my apartment is just beyond that wall and through that one is a guardpost. Too, none can be sure of Tarmur Roag’s power; a man who either raised a lamia or created the queen’s exact likeness, even unto the voice and mannerisms, is not one to wager lives against. Finally… even stone walls can be broke through, should we be heard.”

In seconds the wizard had clothed himself in a robe of the same cloth as the draperies that mitigated the cold grey roughness of stone walls. Cormac was able to assume that lichens existed here within the earth; the robe’s purple must have resulted from the action of stale urine on such growths. The rust colour of the drapes, he supposed, came from just that: rust, or the paint-stone from which came iron. The sleeves of Dithorba’s robe, which fell past his ankles, were round, open, and three-quarters the length of his arms. Wulfhere paid him no mind, but was staring unashamedly though shamelessly at Erris. She appeared not to notice, which Cormac mac Art assumed was a pose.

Behind a drape Dithorba opened a wooden door; from within that little chamber he drew forth a leathern bag. It sloshed; Erris lost Wulfhere’s attention. Soon the three men were appreciatively wetting their throats with ale, at which Erris turned up her nose. Under other circumstances so might Cormac have done; the stuff was hardly of the best and he feared to ask what served as grain, beneath the earth where no sun shone.

“I ask again, son of Gaels. Why came you two here?”

“A wizard stalks this world, all the world, like a plotting spider,” Cormac said. He pointed at the long dark robe surmounted by the head of death itself. “Thulsa Doom. Anciently dead he is and raiser of the dead; master of illusion and enemy of all men; a servant of the serpent god he is, time out of mind.” And he told Dithorba of the wizard who was dead and yet not dead, and how they believed he could be slain for good and all. “Only the Chains of Danu hold him at bay now, or he’d be snarling like an animal-and worse.”

“Well I know the efficacy of the silver chain and Moonbow!”

While Cormac had spoken, Wulfhere laid buckler and ax and helmet on the long table of stone. Leaning against it, he combed hair and beard with his fingers and kept the corner of his eye occupied with the watching of Erris.

“My blade sliced that tunic not enough,” he muttered, when she handed him another cup of ale. Most valuable that cup; the Danans must have found a vein of precious metal and mined it well, for the cup, like the chains and the trim of draperies and of Dithorba’s robe, was of silver.

She gave the big man a look that was part archness and part defiance, and turned away-though, he noted, with a swift movement that made her sideslashed skirts fly. Abruptly that little face was smiling back at him over her shoulder.

“Ye be so clever, my lord-without knowing that handmaidens of the queen accustomedly wear only these bracelets and a girdle suspending two long strips of cloth!”

“It’s danger you’ve brought to Moytura then,” Dithorba said, “Cormac mac Art of the Gaels.”

“As ye’ve said, your goddess protects us and Moytura through her silver chains and Sign, wizard of under-earth. Now tell me of your queen.”

Dithorba did. Riora Feachtnachis she was called, the very young ruler of the Danans within Eirrin; Riora the Fair, righteous One. The story of the treachery done on her and her intimates and advisers, and of their imprisonment, was as Erris had told it. Simulacrum or Riora-mimicking lamia wore the coral crown and sat the throne of Moytura. Through her or rather it Cairluh ruled; he in turn was dominated by Tarmur Roag. The queen was endungeoned, watched over and tormented by one named Elatha the Whip. About her were her handmaidens and others, as well as her ministers and the commander of her guard. Others had been slain.

Cormac thought on it. It occurred to him that he need not worry about gaining entrance to the dungeon; surely this man could convey him there by his own unique means!

“And Tarmur Roag is powerful. What powers else have ye, Dithorba Loingsech?”

“With a few little abilities learned in time,” the Moyturan said quietly, “ye’ve seen most of my powers, Cormac mac Art. Much can be accomplished by a clever, thinking man who can disappear and reappear where he will-unless he is fed a drug, and taken in his sleep as I was. Oh, I am not without other abilities, but Tarmur Roag is my superior. If only I possessed the martial skills of your extraordinary self, Cormac of the Gaels, Elatha the Whip were no deterrent to the freedom of my lady Queen!”

Cormac showed the Danan his ghost of a smile. It little resembled pleasantry or mirth, but few others living had seen more. “Ye need not seek to persuade me; ye know my purpose and the necessity of its doing. Ye have my size and skills, Dithorba, so long as ye can take me anywhere at all, and that faster than the curvet of a trout! Anywhere at all-such as into the queen’s dungeon.”

“Cormac!” Wulfhere was distracted even from Erris.

Cormac turned on his friend a mild look, then returned his slit-eyed gaze to Dithorba. “Be there a bit of food hereabouts, Lord Dithorba?”

The old man looked most sorrowful indeed. “Not a morsel.” He sighed. “The queen’s own advisor-reduced to thievery!” And he vanished.

“Ouch!” Wulfhere grunted. “Erris! I did but fondle what normally ye wear bare-where’s he gone now, Wolf?”

“To someone’s kitchen or storehouse, there to snatch provender for us, poor man,” the Gael said. “Do ye have animals in Moytura, Erris?”

She frowned. “Animals… oh! I’ve heard of such-no. They live on that which we cannot grow here, Cormac mac Art. Wulfhere-please! Many kinds of mollusc we have, for we have cultured them and coaxed them over the years to… modify, so I’m taught. And fish aplenty too, of many varieties. And lichens, and oh! marvelous mushrooms of more than one variety. Ye-ye’ve seen… animals? Legend has it such were here, once, but could not survive. Beasts that walk like… like us?”

“On four legs. But whence comes the cloth for your clothing, for these drapes?”

“The mif and the great spiders,” she said, and when questioned she explained that the mif was a great worm that throve here within the earth, and of its dried slime excellent cloth was made, along of course with the filaments spun by spiders Cormac did not care to see.

“Ugh,” Wulfhere said succinctly and with fervour.

“An ye like not our cloth,” Erris said, low-voiced, “keep your enormous hands away from this I wear, then.”

“Mayhap we can find time and place to remove it together,” Wulfhere said, “later.”

Cormac sighed, turning away-and Dithorba was there, bearing food stolen from someone’s very cookfire, for the pot was hot and issuing a most savoury aroma.

Thrice he left them, and thrice he returned laden, and none asked questions. They ate and drank then, four of them; Thulsa Doom required no nourishment.

The visitors learned that nay, not all rooms in Moytura were carved from living rock as was this one; stone was cut and used in building, and there was a mortaring paste they had made, too, to hold together blocks of stone in this land of no baking sun, no softening rain, no freezing snow or ice. In a great pool and in the two rivers that ran near there were creatures of sea and fresh water, and some were of a sort never seen above. Their hides were much used; as mining was constant and iron and silver plentiful, frames were easily made for the stretching of hides of walrus and water-creatures even bigger. Every scrap of cloth otherwise came from spiders and mifhe; the large snow-hued worms fed on the gigantic mushrooms that throve here within the earth. The queen’s adviser, the handmaiden, and the two weapon-men from above dined well on dishes of various fish and molluscs and mushrooms, and when Wulfhere made brag on one dish, he was advised that it was comprised of mushrooms, a mussel they called ab, snails and two kinds of lichen. Whereupon the Dane deemed himself sufficiently well fed to confine his grinding teeth to fish and a mushroom dish.

And what of the pearly light that bathed sunless Moytura?

Dithorba, who was indeed possessor of few necromantic and thaumaturgic powers or knowledge, could not tell them. It had been devised, or brought by the first settlers from the land above, long and long agone. It was Danu’s light. She shed her silvery moonish glow on her own that they might not have to dwell in darkness but were ever in this soft twilight, and no more Dithorba Loingsech knew.

Nor did he know what was meant by steel. None such was there in all Moytura, a land sprawling, large as Meath above, among natural caverns and chambers and those created by men, beneath and within a seabound land anchored to the ocean’s floor. Too, the working of iron was no ancient skill with them, and it became plain, now, how long ago the Gaels had bested the People of Danu, for all their magickal powers.

For it was the Gaels had brought iron to Eirrin, whose people-the Tuatha de Danann-were workers and users only of bronze; the tin they needed for their plentiful copper came from Britain. Since then the Gaels had learned to modify their iron unto the making of steel, while those of Moytura had progressed only so far, as iron. All was wrought, and impregnated with tiny bits of slag. Apparently bars of wrought iron were not here packed with charcoal in containers of clay, so that with sufficient heat it became steel. Nor did Cormac or Wulfhere advise Dithorba of the process.

“Steel,” Gael said to Dane, “cuts iron.”

“And these men are small,” Wulfhere said, with a hand beneath the table of stone; despite her protestations, Erris had taken seat beside him. “Umm. Fair odds for me here would be about a half-score to my one, then.”

Cormac gave him a look. Seeing that the man was serious, mac Art rose and roamed the room, high-bending his legs, swinging and cranking his arms, now and again bending suddenly or dropping into a squat. He had just eaten well, and would not ask for possible danger and the necessity of all skill and agility until he was certain his body was ready.

It was. His skull had been unbroken by the blow; ale and food had done away with his headache, and a pair of bruises were little to him who had fought with far worse wounds and debilities.

“The direct way would seem best, Dithorba. Will you be taking me to the dungeon?”

“Loki’s wiles,” Wulfhere swore, “what a request!” Then he added, to Dithorba, “And return instanter for me.”

“He will not,” Cormac said, while Dithorba fetched a robe to take to his queen, “unless there’s sorest need. Despite the Chains of Danu, Wulfhere-remain ye here… with Erris.” Seeing the Dane’s grin, Cormac added, “-and Thulsa Doom.”

Dithorba came, carrying a robe. Helmeted, cracked shield on arm, sword girt at his left hip, Cormac extended a hand. Dithorba took it; the others saw the two men become not-there, and there was a slapping sound in the ears of Wulfhere and Erris and Thulsa Doom. Again Cormac was experiencing the unpleasant dissociative sensation, the dizzying spinning of his brain. Again he staggered and again temporary bewilderment was on him, as of his just having wakened.

He blinked, came alert, swiftly cleared his head while his hand left the Danan’s and went to the pommel of his sword. There was reality and security and comfort there, in the familiar heat-hardened wood with the cool spots that were insets of bronze and silver, tooled and chiseled and all designed and well shaped for enwrapping fingers.

Hand on hilt, Cormac mac Art looked about.

Here was eldritch gloom. No penetration was effected by the strange light of the moon that was Danu’s property and manifestation. Illumination there was, aye, and of a sort familiar to mac Art. This light was the pallid, ever-restless yellow of torches set in iron cressets or peg holes drilled into walls of forbidding and gloomy stone. Here no drapes hung to soften or add colour to these rocky walls. There was only the stone, living stone, a mottled grey that was darker higher up, from the greasy smoke of torches and oil lamps and braziers. Iron poles braced the walls and there were shelves formed of the outsized tap-roots of great trees, for these provided wood for the Danans and Cormac now understood why mighty trees died unaccountably on the surface of Eirrin. His eyes swept cell-like divisions, stone and hide and wood, with great doors on iron hinges.

To his nostrils came the odours of smoke and sweat, and too there lingered the acrid stenches of excrement and of urine. He knew they were of human origin. And he knew that much of the sweat had poured forth in fear and pain.

Chains gleamed dark and sinister, dark-splotched tables squatted malignantly about the floor. His gaze paused at a large brazier of black iron, set on iron legs above a firepit. From the pot thrust several dark stems of iron, each equipped with wooden grips. To facilitate wielding when the irons are hot, he mused grimly. The coals beneath the brazier were still golden and the air seemed to quiver above them. Cormac’s lips tightened. He’d seen torture-irons before.

Too, in that grim sprawling chamber beneath the earth, there were moans.

Cormac looked about him, at the human alluvia thrown up by the changing tide of fortune that had swept Riora Feachtnachis from her throne.

Some of the sounds and misery emanated from within closed cells into whose darkness he could not see-though fleetingly he bethought him how better if Dithorba had transported them into one of them. Instead, they were in the wood-columned, stone-columned, sprawling main chamber of the dungeon. That barn-large chamber was peopled.

There stood a well-built man rising threescore years, with a dark spot just below his ribs that was either a burn or a bruise; a huge splotch of yellow and purple flowered ugly on his right upper arm, the mark of a violent blow of another day; from his nipple stood a sliver of wood blackened at the end by burning and atremble with his uneasy breathing; his so-pale beard was shortened and darkened on one side, singed; his arms were drawn back around a column and secured to the same chain of iron that ringed. his naked midsection and the column, which was a mortared pile of square-cut stones whose edges cut into the prisoner’s arms. A few feet to his right a young woman lay huddled-insofar as was possible for her, with her bare left leg lifted high and chained to a great nail standing darkly from a column to the ceiling; her weight was balanced on naked buttock, which was both befilthed and marked by a whip.

Elatha the Whip, Dithorba said, Cormac thought with his teeth pressed tight; the lord of this demesne of dim ugliness was sinisterly called “the Whip,” torturemaster. Closeby another woman, and her in her middle years, stood slumped against the stone wall against which she was held, partway erect, by chains fastened to large-headed iron pegs driven into the wall-or morelike thrust ere they had cooled into drilled holes, so that the pegs sealed themselves there; the tatters of clothing that hung on her made this prisoner a more piteous sight than had she been naked. To her had been done that which was unspeakable, and Cormac’s jaw quivered with the grinding of his teeth. Staring in helpless fascination upon the loathesome demonstrations of the work of Elatha the Whip Cormac turned…

Standing against another wall, shackled there so that she was agonizingly spreadeagled, stood a moaning maiden who was young and shapely; though she wore a sort of breechclout of filthy once-white, Cormac saw that it was neither tied nor bound by brooch but that wooden slivers pinned the mocking scrap of cloth to her hips; one lovely apple-firm breast was fire-blackened and a terrible bruise marked her swollen cheek. Near her a young man was chained, with slivers of wood thrusting from beneath his toenails and whip-stripes dark and ugly across his muscular stomach. But a few feet from them was a sort of machine, a device for constant torment. It was of simple construction, for nothing complicated was necessary to the creation of human misery.

Up into the bottom of a long table constructed of strips of wood had been driven scores of slim iron nails, so that a tiny portion of the tip-end of each protruded upward; on that toothily ugly table of torture lay a naked man, and him not young. Stiff and straight he was bound there, and he had been beaten severely across bare and flaccid buttocks. Beside that sombre table of anguish stood another Danan, and him unbound.

This was the largest man Cormac had seen among the Danans, powerfully built with muscle-knotted arms and legs and chest; even his height was a thumb’s length greater than that of most of these people of Danu. On one burly thigh a dagger was sheathed. At his left hip hung a short slim sword. He wore only a leathern covering for his loins; something like walrus hide it was, while great thick leather bracers encased each thick wrist. His ankles and feet were encased in buskins of leather that was dark with sweat and smoke-and bearing darker splotches that mac Art knew were from the flying spatters of the blood of others. Scarless and of a sternly hostile mien, this man held a whip longer than Cormac’s body.

The big man was staring at Cormac and Dithorba. “Elatha!” Dithorba said, in an emotional whispering burst.

Elatha the Whip but stared at the two who had appeared in his demesne within the rock of under-earth. His whip trailed from his hand like a menacing black serpent ready to leap with cold determination to bring pain and scars.

“Bastard,” Cormac snarled, “sired by a pusdemon and whelped of a fly-swarming sow!” And his sword came sliding up from its sheath.

Elatha said nothing. His lips twitched; perhaps that was a tiny passionless smile. His arm shifted; his long whip trembled along the stone floor behind it. He snapped it back then and, striding two paces forward as he brought it whistling forward, the torturemaster sent his leathern serpent of torment rushing at Cormac mac Art.

The Gael seemed only to twitch, fading rapidly aside while instinctively, jerking up his shield to save his face from an incredibly aimed lash. With a great drumming sound the whip struck his buckler, and its tip came snapping over to send a slash of fire into his forearm.

Pain was a shock; so too was realization of the Danan’s skill and the vicious deadliness of his whip. Blood dripped where its tip had bit, for that long whip ended in a knot about a V-shaped plug of iron.

“Get ye back, Dithorba! He’ll slash out your eyes! “

Dithorba back-paced; Elatha the Whip said nothing but only smiled. A seemingly gentle twitch of his wrist sent his whip scurrying snakelike across the floor to him. Cormac started forward. The whip snapped back, again came racing forward. With the same leftward sidestep and the same swift jerking up of his buckler Cormac again saved his face-and again his forearm was opened to let his blood fall to increase the number of dark spots that covered the floor of the hell-chamber. He bit his lip against groaning out his pain.

Blood of the gods! He durst not rush this demon of a whipmaster; the devil had absolute control over his serpentine weapon and knew precisely how to protect himself against sword-charge by the taller man; either Cormac remained at bay or charged into maiming lashes, or backed-to be followed and cut open-or used brain as he seldom had to in what he saw as simple one-to-one encounters.

Already Elatha’s lash was snaking back to him in response to a flick of his thick wrist. Cormac pondered, poised and trembling like a hound with the nervousness of the hunt on him. From their slitted sockets his sword-grey eyes glittered as he stared at the Danan whipmaster.

The two were some ten feet apart. Cormac knew he dared make no rushing Wulfhereish charge, despite his inclination to do; he’d be cut open or worse ere he reached Elatha. The torturer would but have to retreat a bit then, to place the same distance between them… having gained greater advantage by the infliction of a wound. Silently he stood, daring, mocking; come to me, his grim little smile taunted, try it!

Cormac held his ground, his eyes flicking this way and that. His brain pondered, worked, propounded ridiculous hopes and suggestions. He was helpless to attack; he must hold on the defensive, though he was hardly accustomed to it.

Again Elatha attacked. Swiftly he backed a pace, again strode lunging forward with his sweeping lash, so that the force and strength of his wrestler’s body backed and drove the long whip.

Twice had Cormac dodged leftward; to the right he moved this time, and in a cat-like pounce. The jingle of mail was followed by the great loud cracking sound of a whip’s snapping empty air. Elatha’s eyes had swerved to follow the Gael with his pale glance, but he’d been unable to change the direction of his powerful whip-stroke.

For the first time, he spoke. His voice was as emotionless as the eyes of a serpent. “Ye be fast.”

Cormac said nothing. Having gained the tiniest of psychological advantage, he would now adopt the menacing silence that had been Elatha’s.

After a moment of silence, Elatha’s face moved in a soundless snarl and he cut again. Once more Cormac waited until the torturemaster’s brawny arm came over, and then he moved. This time he did not dodge, but ran. He could not bear the inactivity of remaining only a defender. Several paces rightward he rushed, and then he charged the torturemaster of Moytura’s dungeon.

He was within four feet when the swift sideward jerk of Elatha’s wrist brought his whip leaping over like a striking reptile. It curled around his attacker’s buskined right ankle. The whip wrapped but once for it had not been hard-directed, in Elatha’s desperation.

Cormac stumbled, windmilling arms laden with buckler and brand. His charger was broken. Elatha jerked; the whip came free without yanking Cormac’s legs from under him. As the Gael regained his balance, Elatha paced swiftly backward. His arm was already snapping his length of leather to himself, and behind.

The whip rushed out. It slapped loudly on leather and wrapped four times about Cormac’s right leg. Then came the bite of its iron fang, and leather legging split just above the Gael’s knee. A gust of air leaped from his lungs, with the sound of voice in it. He strove to prepare himself for what must come next; there was no time. The moment the whip began its encircling, Elatha’s bicep leaped and he yanked.

Cormac was jerked to the floor with a crash and a grunt.

Grinning openly, Elatha the Whip transferred his stock to his left hand and spun to wrap the lash once about himself. He was brought thus that much closer-while he drew his short sword of dark iron.

Trapped a-wallow on the floor with his leg caught and held tautly extended, Cormac used all his strength and will.

He flopped onto his back; he sent his buckler racing up to meet a downrushing blade of iron that resembled in its shortness those of the Roman legions who’d lately roamed the world they had claimed to own. Iron blade crashed down on ironbound shield of hardened wood while Cormac’s own blade flicked out like a sliver of blued lightning. With a terrible impact like that of hammer on forge, Elatha’s sword struck the metal rim of the other man’s shield. A stone had cracked the wood of that buckler; now sword driven by powerful muscles actually ate into its rim, iron into iron. Despite his braced, cording muscles Cormac’s buckler was driven down nearly to his body; the sword of Elatha was no less notched than the shield-rim.

The sword of the Gael meanwhile rushed through the whip that stood taut betwixt his leg and Elatha’s waist. Its point missed the Danan’s flesh by less than the breadth of three fingers.

Great shock showed itself on the face of Elatha the Whip, who Cormac was to learn had never felt pain or known any semblance of defeat or fear; the man was accustomed to plying his whip and the other dread tools of his trade on unarmed victims, and them usually with dark despair already on them. His whip was worse than halved; his sword had failed to find flesh and was both notched and bent; the arm that wielded it was beset by a thousand needles from that terrible impact.

The burly Danan spun away, and his face bore no longer an expression of mockery, or triumph.

At the same time Cormac rolled and stood. His leg complained, for blood darkened the leather there where the severed whip dangled. He faced now a man armed with a short whip and a short sword, and it notched, and Cormac mac Art was no longer at the disadvantage.

The Gael was made overconfident thereby.

Elatha was hardly in despair or helpless. A master of whip-wielding needed no more than the yard or so of good leather strap he clutched, and he proved it. Gone was the deadly iron fang at the end of his lash, but it struck the wrist of Cormac’s sword arm so forcefully that it wrapped twice just below the leather bracer and snapped the meaty base of his thumb with its very tip.

The Gael’s arm twitched with a jerk; Elatha yanked; Cormac’s sword flew from his open-flexing fingers to ring skidding across the floor of stone and stone-hard earth.

Elatha was smiling openly and far from prettily. His short sword leaped beneath his foe’s buckler and its point grated hard against Cormac’s ribs. Only the Gael’s armour of steel chain saved him from death then, or from the wound that would have been the next to last. Still he grunted and was staggered by the blow he felt and the grating pressure on a rib. In truth, iron point slipped between linked chain and pierced through padded tunic to touch the skin over the rib. The blade widened back to the point; a circle of steel held it; the rib did not give.

Even while his arm was whipping around in a half-circle and his empty sword-hand grasping the short length of whip between himself and the Danan, Cormac’s smallish round shield rushed up and around to slam its ironbound rim into Elatha’s upper arm.

Another man grunted in pain and another hand flexed open. A second sword clanged to the floor. And another man jerked the whip. Elatha, struck hard in right shoulder and yanked by left arm, was jerked leftward and overbalanced. He staggered sidewise and only now remembered to release the whip-stock.

It returned to him instantly; Cormac slammed it thudding into the other man’s right cheek and then his gut and then into the center of his leather breechclout. Blood started from Elatha’s cheek and mouth from split skin and a broken molar. At the same time Elatha started to double over, with both hands leaping to his crotch.

A mailclad forearm crashed into the torturemaster’s mouth and his eyes rolled loosely. Elatha went to his knees, leaning backward now; Elatha toppled sidewise and lay groaning through shredded lips.

Panting, working his stinging right wrist, Cormac mac Art retrieved and sheathed his sword.

Elatha’s brand he caught up and crashed violently against a pillar of stone so that the blade bent a quarter way in on itself. Hurling it from him, the Gael turned to the torture table.

“Elatha… bested and down!” Dithorba said from behind Cormac, in an elated whisper that bespoke his nearness to disbelief.

“Who be this man?” Cormac asked, having discarded his buckler to pluck at the table-bound man’s cords with both hands.

“Lughan Senlac, my… my fellow adviser to the queen. Will ye not save time by merely cutting him free, defeater of Elatha?”

A groan escaped the oldster bound facedown on the table, his soft buttocks-darkly marked by Elatha’s whip.

“Lord Lughan,” Cormac muttered, “I loosen these knots rather than slice them, for the reason that Elatha the Whipless will soon replace ye on this table.”

After a moment of silence, Lughan gasped his reply. “Be not concerned… with haste. A tiny space of time more on this… restful bed will not finish me. To the end ye state… I can wait!”

Chapter Twelve:

The Guardian

The prisoners of Cairluh and Tarmur Roag were free of bonds and cells in Moytura’s dungeon; their former torturer lay groaning and sweating on his own fanged table. His weight, his greater development of chest and belly and thighs pressed the ends of the scores of upward driven nails into his flesh more deeply than they had bitten Lughan Senlac. There were no guards in the dungeon; prisoners were weak and helpless, and Elatha was proud and jealous of his reign.

Cormac mac Art held the shortened whip he had taken from him who had wielded it to such agony, even to the deaths of some. For Cormac and Dithorba had found two in the cells who need not be freed; they had died of whippings that had torn them open and ruptured internal organs.

“Dithorba and I have business elsewhere. Here lies him who put sore torment and indecent horror on ye all. Who will take this whip?” He stretched out his hand, the whip lying across it like a napping serpent.

It was the young man who stepped forward, he who bore the marks of that same strap of leather across his muscled belly and who limped from the wooden splinters that had been forced under his toenails. Dithorba had identified him as an officer in the household staff of Queen Riora, by name Tathill; the young woman bound near him was his sweetheart. Perhaps he would bear no physical scars of this imprisonment; she would, all her life.

“I will wield that black eel on the creature who made it sting so well,” he said quietly and with strain, “and yield it up to whomever wants it else.”

“I,” a weak voice said.

Cormac gazed not with shock but with sadness on the speaker, the older woman in rags, with the marks on her of obscene torments and mockery. Surely, the Gael thought, such as she would not have dreamed of vindictive whip-wielding before she’d been brought to this grey domain of pain and degradation. It hurt him only that he had not put his cloak on again, that he might clothe her in it. Elatha’s foul breechclout he would not offer her. Guards or other keepers would be outside bound doors, though obviously no sound of the battle here had reached their ears. At their dicing most likely, Cormac thought, and turned to look after Dithorba. The old mage was walking back into the dimmer area of the dungeon, his robe flapping and the one he’d brought for his queen hanging over his arm. He paused at the doorway of a wooden enclosure, and looked within. Cormac saw the man stagger as if struck, and heard his gasp.

And he heard the weak girlish voice: “Stay back!”

Cormac had taken a perverse pleasure in leaving the freeing of two men until last; they were the strapping, handsome Commander Balan of the Royal Guard and Torna, long Riora’s tutor and now most favored adviser. Now the Gael turned from the still bound pair and strode back past the torture table and light. Dithorba stood in dimness.

The chamber into which he stared was a square some ten feet on a side; a chamber of royal size for the imprisonment of Moytura’s royalty.

The slim young queen was within. She wore only a spiked girdle and collar of iron, both drawn tightly and held by cinch-pins. Her straw-coloured hair was dragged back and bound to the cruel girdle behind, so that her neck was constantly strained. Riora of Moytura was bound astride a great stone wheel, like a millwheel, that abraded her inner thighs and displayed her lewdly. Aye, and she’d been marked by Elatha’s whip. The dragging back of her tresses strained her face so that her brows were unnaturally arched and her cheekbones threatened to thrust through taut skin.

Tinted only by the faintest of tawny hue, her eyes swiveled from Dithorba at Cormac’s arrival. She stared at him.

When the Gael started forward, Dithorba stayed him.

“Lady Queen, a Gael from Eiru above, Cormac mac Art his name. He and a companion saved Erris from becoming a toygirl to a squad of six rapacious guards set over me, and slew them all. He freed me, and has just defeated Elatha though he bears wounds of the long fangwhip. All this, lady Queen, in quest of your freedom. The sounds my lady queen now hears are of Elatha’s own whip on his own foul body.”

“Talk and talk,” the Gael said. “Why stand we here?” Again he started forward.

“Stand ye back!” the queen bade him, and she winced at the pain the exertion put on her. Her hands were behind her back, her legs bracing the upright millwheel, to which ropes bound her. She softened the command: “-friend of Danu and Moytura-and Riora.”

“Your pardon for the questioning of a weapon man, lady queen… but why must we stay from yourself?”

“This I have… borne,” she said in the voice of strain forced upon her by the back-drawn hair. “I can… longer. For ye both, though, there’s death within this chamber… I am bound not only as ye see… but by the sorcery of Tarmur Roag ‘as well. Aye, and guarded… Cor-mac Mackart. There is a… Guardian.”

Cormac stepped close to the doorway to peer within the large chamber. He saw three walls of stone and one of wood; a chipped bowl of fired clay and a dented iron cup; a length of chain. Another hung from a nail in the wooden wall, as did a short flail with three tails of plaited leather… or rather the hide of some great denizen of the waters, as novas all leather of Moytura. Two crumpled bits of cloth lay forlornly on the floor. He saw naught else, not even a pile of stones.

“I see naught of menace or Guardian.”

“I am queen, Cormac… I am not… questioned.”

He gazed on this naked, whip-marked, painfully bound young woman with wonder and respect. An she could talk so in these straits, she was queen indeed!

“Ye cannot free me. Cormac. He who comes through that door, save for Elatha, will instantly die. Tarmur Roag… demonstrated. It’s he must be captured and forced to release me; I’ll have no champion such as your huge self slain so, for naught and to no avail.”

Cormac was hardly huge. He realized, though, that in Moytura he was. Standing beside Dithorba, he made a child of the man, both in height and physique. A thought of hope came on him.

“Dithorba! Can ye be mind-hurling me to her side, man?

The succinct reply shattered the Gael’s excitement: “No.”

Cormac’s face stiffened. After a moment, he asked, “Then… dare ye carry me to her, by your sorcerous means?”

“No!” the queen cried.

“In this matter, lady Queen, your commands are second to mine. It is possible for too much nobility to be on a person, even a monarch.”

Both Riora and Dithorba stared at this tall, darkskinned stranger to their land who dared speak so to a queen. Cormac kept his gaze expectantly on Dithorba, who realized the Gael still awaited his answer.

“I dare, Cormac mac Art.”

“No, Dithorba! I forbid it!”

Cormac saw to himself. Blood oozed no longer from his twice-punctured left arm. His buckler remained serviceable-hopefully. His right wrist bore only a pair of barring lines, with neither wound nor stiffness on him there. The wound to his leg was only to the superficial meat, not into muscle, nor had it had time to stiffen. His Saxon knife was in its sheath and his sword was ready for the drawing on the instant.

Deliberately he drew Dithorba away from the doorway, out of sight of the piteously imprisoned queen.

“We go in,” he said quietly. “The moment we alight, release my hand, and return ye here.” When Dithorba nodded, Cormac turned and shouted to those others they’d released. “Free Balan and Torna! Take up chains and Elatha’s dagger; whatever armament there be, and remain ye there-sentries may come.”

The last was an afterthought, added in hopes their weakness might be forgot in renewed fear that he knew led in some to renewed strength. Such surely would be the case at least with Balan and the young man who was showing his energy in the flogging of Elatha.

Cormac took Dithorba’s hand. “In.”

He said it too loudly; from her prison came Queen Riora’s weak shout: “No! It’s your death!”

Cormac felt Dithorba’s hand quiver and he gripped it the tighter. “My command, Dithorba my friend,” he said softly, “In-and leave me.”

The familiar unpleasant sensations came immediately, and then Cormac was jolted, stumbling. Even so his hand fled Dithorba’s and leaped to the hilt of his sword. On this third occasion of his transport by means of another man’s mind, the Gael’s brain acid eyes cleared more swiftly.

His staring eyes saw that Dithorba had already left him, and was peering into the chamber from beyond the doorway. Their sorcerous means of transport had triggered no attack, for they had not passed through the door. Cormac stood in a crouch, feral-eyed and with sword and shield at ready. His slitted eyes swiveled to the side; he saw naught but Riora the Fair and Righteous.

Awkwardly he caught her hair in his shield-hand, betwixt head and binding; his sword sliced swiftly through the rope that had forced her head up and back. It was allowed to assume a natural position. Her eyes focused-and she cried out. Dithorba’s call of alarm crowded close on hers.

Her Guardian had appeared in the queen’s prison chamber.

Cormac had hardly expected to face here a foe of his own height and apparent build, nor had he ever seen a man so helmed and armoured.

No skin of the Guardian was visible. His scalemail coat fell from neck to knees; beneath it he wore leggings of good mail that vanished into short boots. Mailed gloves covered the hands that clutched sword and six-sided shield; faced with bronze it was and on it a death’s head had been picked out in awl-punched dots filled with black enamel. But once had Cormac seen such an eye-covering helm, on an arrogant Roman commander. From that visored helmet depended a camail of mail, which was connected in front to the nosepiece of the helmet so as to conceal the tall figure’s entire face.

Cormac faced a grim and silent foe covered all in iron.

With some nervousness on him though without sinking heart, the Gael remembered to crab-step from the bound queen of Moytura. She must not receive a chance slash.

“It’s your queen this be, man. Elatha is-no more. I am come here to set her free, and if ye insist I’ll be doing it through yourself. Sheathe sword and stand Ye back to serve your queen, for she will be free.”

The ironclad Guardian said nothing. Cormac could not see so much as eyes, to read their expression. Stance and ready-lifted buckler, with the upraising of the broad long sword in mailed hand, were indication enow of his reply and intent.

The man of iron paced forward, not toward Riora but at Cormac.

“Ye’ll be dying then, for all your armour,’ Cormac said, and moved but the tips of his fingers, ensuring his grip on shaped hilt.

He would let the other strike first, move while he took the stroke on his shield, and attack instantly and viciously. No such traitor as this, and him stupid besides, deserved to draw breath.

The Guardian’s arm came around in a blur. Cormac’s shield caught the sword-edge and his arm turned to let the sword slide on, thus allowing the attacker’s momentum to continue-while the Gael moved rightward and drove his blade forward. The impact of sword on shield was tremendous, a jolting surprise to mac Art’s arm and mind, as was the fact that the other’s bronze-faced buckler moved so rapidly. Yet it did not quite catch his rushing thrust; rather than plunging as he’d intended into an armoured side, Cormac’s blade screamed through iron links and completely transpierced his foe’s shield-arm, near the shoulder.

Cormac yanked his blade forth. It was well for him that he did not assume the fray to be over then, but remained mindful of the other’s long brand and his shield.

He had already seen; no blood marked the blade of mac Art.

Nor did his opponent seem to take note of his wound; he backswung and Cormac had to skip while thrusting back his shield to avoid the prodigiously powerful slash at his neck. Again the iron sword crashed on the Gael’s shield with a sound to torture the head, eardrums, and again the terrific impact shook his arm and rattled the teeth in his head.

He moved two rushing paces on, for a few snatched moments to relieve his shield-arm… and to try to hurl from his brain the numbing influence of shock.

Again he looked at the blade of his sword; he could not believe what he had seen-or rather not seen. It was true. The steel shone bloodlessly. Nor did any so much as ooze from his ironclad foe’s arm, which should have been pouring scarlet, if not spurting with his heartbeats.

Still without so much as a grunt or a curse, he who had been set to prevent the queen’s rescue struck again.

This slash came high, and Cormac at the last instant chose not to meet it with his buckler. Nor did he counterattack with his usual thrust; he ducked low and chopped deeply into the Guardian’s left thigh.

That titan in iron chain staggered-and back came his arm, in a hardly interrupted backswing.

This time Cormac dived away, and again he saw with hair-raising incomprehension that his blade was unblooded. His antagonist swung to follow; again he staggered a little on a leg that nevertheless held him erect-and bled, not.

Mac Art did not wait but struck hard, side-armed and with all his strength. The Guardian’s shield dropped swiftly into line so that Cormac’s blade chopped half through it. The wood held. The iron man was cleaving; Cormac lunged desperately forward to be within that sweep-and to crash his buckler into his foeman. Into the junction of arm and torso it smashed, so that iron shield-rim slammed both chest and arm and the boss centered between them drove into the hollow just above the silent attacker’s armpit.

The Guardian’s slashing glaive struck naught but air though his mailed arm rapped Cormac’s back. The Gael bore on, to hurl backward a foe who should have been down and half bled.

The Danan staggered back with a harsh jangle of overlapping iron scales that covered him from nose to toes and fingers. His left thigh, shorn half through, gave. He began to topple. Bracing himself, Cormac jerked his sword arm with a rapid up and down movement. With a screech of steel on wood and bronze, the blade came free. Panting, Cormac watched his silent foe crash backward to the floor.

Under such circumstances a man either yielded or died. Cormac stepped swiftly forward.

“Yield ye! Drop the sword or it’s no hand I’ll be leaving ye to wield it again against a friend of your queen!”

A mailed leg and booted foot kicked at him. Cormac had been right. The Guardian was stupid, without sense in him to leave off when he was defeated. Up rushed a mailed fist to drive Danan sword at Cormac mac Art in a vicious slash.

Though surprised, Cormac was not astounded; he had been prepared to make movements in response to such insanity. He backpaced two swift steps, tarried but an instant poised on the balls of both feet, while he watched the big iron sword swish. It swept by in a blurred semicircle of dark blue-grey before his body. The strength of its wielding carried it on; Cormac rocked himself forward again, knees bending deeply.

He carried out his threat. His slash sent his fallen opponent’s sword flying. Its hilt was still grasped in mailed fist.

And the Danan’s hard-swung shield slammed into Cormac’s hip as though the Guardian had sustained no terrible wound to his upper arm.

Cormac was swept violently aside; had the rim rather than cloven face of that six-sided buckler struck him so, bone would have cracked. Nor had Cormac mac Art ever known a man who fought ever again after sustaining a cracked hip. In pain he ran to remain vertical, and slammed into the wall. That scraping clang rose simultaneous with the clatter across the room; sword in mailed, severed hand had rebounded from the opposite wall to ring on the floor. Cormac too rebounded, gritting his teeth against the pain in his right hip.

Jerking his head and willing himself to ignore pain and dark incomprehension, Cormac swung about to renew assault on a foe seemingly impervious to wounds.

He was in the act of striking still again at the armour-covered figure stretched on the floor when he saw that which jolted his brain and made him shiver. From the stump of his severed wrist, the Guardian poured forth no blood.

“Blood of the Gods,” Cormac snarled, with no thought on him for the singular inappropriateness of his favourite oath.

His brain staggering, the Gael aborted his ruined sword stroke. Sudden intense heat prickled over his body and sweat seemed to leap from every pore. In that instant he went pure professional, for so he’d been and was still, though in the paid employ of none. His brain moved to another level; became icy cold; functioned at high speed.

“Dithorba! In and pick up his sword-cut free your queen!”

Already his foe had taken advantage of Cormac’s brief moments of confusion to thrust himself to his feet, using both his shield-hand and his right stump to lever up. The hexagon of split wood and bronze was a golden blur as he swung it violently, rapidly back and forth. He advanced on Cormac the while, and the Gael was forced to back from that rushing wall that would hurl sword from his hand-or smash his arm.

To his right Dithorba appeared, near the fallen sword. Still the mailed hand clung to the hilt, and the queen’s adviser could not shake it loose. As dry old fingers worried at linked iron chain, Cormac backed from a shield swept back and forth so rapidly it was but a blurred wall.

Suddenly the helmeted head turned its armour-swathed face toward Dithorba.

The old man had given up attempts to free the sword of the severed hand, and was carrying the grisly linked objects toward the upright stone wheel astride which his queen was bound. Still keeping Cormac at bay with the rushing buckler, the Guardian started toward Dithorba.

Though the shield-created wall continued to daunt him, Cormac knew the invisible eyes of its wielder could not be on him.

He lunged forward, diving to the floor. He rolled onto his back and slashed upward. Solid steel crashed on iron chain with terrible force, and thin rings of iron yielded. Bearing hand and wrist and half of forearm, the hexagonal Danan shield flew across the chamber and crashed to the floor just at the feet of Dithorba Loingsech.

There was no blood.

And the Guardian moved on toward the wide-eyed Dithorba.

“A creature of Tarmur Roag’s!” Dithorba called out, in a voice that rose with both fear and the excitement of incredible discovery. “Cormac! There is no hand in this mail-glove!”

Cormac started to cry out for Dithorba to vanish; instead he took faster action. He rolled again and chopped into the leg of his uncanny foe, just at the point where mail disappeared into boot.

The bearer of that awful wound but twitched at the blow, meanwhile continuing the step. The unbleeding leg swung; came forward, down; it buckled on impact with the floor. The Guardian teetered, leaned, fell sidewise. Again he crashed to the floor.

He did not lie still. Still he fought. The woundless leg swept out and its mailed shank just grazed Dithorba’s lower leg. With a groan of pain, he staggered. Then the armoured warrior began to rise.

“In Crom’s name-this is insanity!”

Cormac’s shout still rang when frustration swelled within him and his eyes went shiny. Rage took him. Lunging across the downed, faceless creature, the Gael brought a tremendous stroke rushing down. Steel blade slid again through iron rings and so hard had he struck that the sword rang off the floor, beneath the Guardian’s leg. Just below the hip, that leg leaped free of its moorings-bloodlessly.

The stump of the other leg slammed into Cormac’s ankle.

With a groan, he staggered and fell to one knee. His heart seemed to have descended into his ankle; it pounded there. With an animal viciousness twisting his features, the enraged Gael struck away the leg that had kicked him.

Laboriously, the legless trunk began pushing itself up on the stump of its right wrist; its shield meanwhile came streaking at mac Art. Aye, its shield, for he knew this could be no man, but some unnatural thing, a fell product of Tarmur Roag’s wizardry. The Danan buckler rushed at him; easily Cormac cut the supporting arm from beneath the thing. It fell back, armour and shield crashing.

A shudder rushed through Cormac mac Art. Without rising he chopped, chopped again. Armless now, the unbleeding trunk writhed. Cormac’s sword bit into the armoured midsection, smashed the chest. On the point then of chopping at the neck covered by shining metal camail, the seething, shaking Gael shortened his stroke. With fine precision, the last inch of his steel tore away the camail.

The veil of chain had covered nothing.

The helmet rested on nothing. There was no face, no head.

With horripilation a maddening writhing along his arms, Cormac knew that there were no arms and legs either; nothing. There was only an animated suit of armour, huge by Danan standards, that had come nigh to putting the blindness of death on him.

He rose shakily, staring down at what had been his foe; the trunk of an armour coat, surrounded by lopped-off pieces of man that had come from no man; pieces of armour in the shapes of human limbs.

After a long moment he gave his head a swift hard jerk. Blinking, he turned to the nude young woman bound astride what appeared to be a millstone. He sheathed his glaive, which was unblooded despite all its awful work. Drawing his dagger, he swiftly freed Riora. She sagged forward. Trying to hold her away from the hard cold steel of his armour, he caught her and eased her from the wheel of her torture.

The Queen of Moytura clung, trembling as she stared down at the trunk protion of the thing that had been set to guard her against rescue.

Legless, armless, headless, empty… the armour continued to twitch and writhe.

Chapter Thirteen:

The Queen of Moytura

Riora of Moytura, queen, was slim as a willow tree and yet with soft and rather voluptuous womanly turnings to her form. White was her skin, almost transparent, and little more colour tinged the hair that fell to the dimples above her backside. Though she was slim and pale and short like all her people, she had no look of frailty about her. Her quivers were understandable, as she held on to the big stranger to her land, who had dared disobey her and had as a result destroyed her ghastly guardian and set her free. Though he was armoured and aware that his carapace of steel rings could tear and bruise her skin with even his slightest movements, Cormac could not think of her as fragile. He stood, though, rather stiffly, unable to think of aught but her nakedness and the harshness and danger to her of his armour.

“You are brave,” she murmured. “You disobeyed me and came into this horrid cell, with no idea of what you might be facing.”

Cormac could think of nothing to say. Unaccustomed words came; good words. He spoke them.

“I had seen you,” he muttered, with gruff galantry. He would tell her later of the urgency on him for her freedom. At present she was overdue for the kindness of flattery.

“He… it hurt you, I saw it. You fought on. You destroyed it.” She arched her back to look up into his face. “Your brows… your black hair… so fascinating! Am I-are we so, to you, Cormac of the Gaels?”

“Aye.” He gazed down into her wan, angular face and saw that she was both pretty and interested in him as more than saviour and curiosity among her pale people. It came on him that there was no more colour in Riora’s eyes than in an inch of water held in two cupped palms.

“L-Lady Queen…”

It was Dithorba’s voice; neither of them glanced his way.

“Dithorba has a robe for you, Queen of Moytura,” Cormac said.

“I have been… naked so long. It seems forever… Elatha… that foul spider has daily thrown me down on this floor and… used me.” She glanced down. “Aye, I am naked, and queen, and you are clad in iron that is cold and hard-and it grates.” She sighed. “And there are things to be done.” Again she looked up into his scarred face. Her hands pressed his arms, disregarding the chain that indented her skin. “The Queen of Moytura is indebted to you, Cormac mac Art na Gaedhel. Moytura is indebted to you. And… my name is indebted to you, Cormac mac Art na Gaedhel. Moytura is indebted to you. And… my name is Riora. I, Riora, am indebted to you, Cormac, and I thank you.”

While Cormac floundered for words, she released his arms and looked at the other man.

“Thank you, Dithorba,” she said, putting out an arm. “The robe, to make me more a queen and less a woman. Ah-and it’s mine, too!” She smiled, astonishing Cormac who would not have thought her capable, so soon after being released from a stern imprisonment that had been fraught with torture. “Ah, Dithorba, into the queen’s chamber to bring herself her very own robe! How can one trust a man with such abilities? Why-you could be in my very bedchamber at any time.”

Dithorba’s face was stricken. Had Cormac any doubts about the old man’s love for his young queen, they were dissipated now. Riora saw it too, and immediately her smile vanished. Taking the robe to hold against her, she reached forth with her other hand to squeeze her adviser’s bony shoulder.

“Only a jest, my friend. If not before, after this day Dithorba is first among all Moyturans!” Then she turned her head to look at Cormac over her shoulder and from under eyelashes that were more pale than any he’d ever seen. “First, of course… with Cormac mac Art of the Gaels, friend of Danu and Moytura-and Riora!”

While she turned away to don the robe, Cormac and Dithorba kept their eyes fixed as if by honourable pact on each other.

“Hump!” the queen’s voice came brightly. “Neither of you watching? Queen Riora is slipping!”

Both men looked at her with wan smiles.

The robe was a pale blue, that of the sky she had never seen, sewn with a complicatedly twisting design in silver thread, at bosom and down to the girdle, which Cormac now saw was of gold thread and jewelled as well. The silver pattern was repeated at the end of each three-quarter length sleeve and at the gown’s hem, which fell just past her ankles. Strangely, the Gael saw that clothed and with her body outlined and hinted at here and there, she was more fetching than had she been in her shameful nakedness. Now her stance was different, her shoulders back, and her eyes too had changed; the girlish woman had become a queen.

“You said that Elatha was being beaten, Cormac-and you told… the Guardian that he was no more. Which is the case?”

“Unless they’ve beaten him to death, Elatha lives, bound to his own toothy table.”

An expression of pleasure appeared on her face-and then her features stiffened. Suddenly her face was bereft of all warmth and much of its beauty. She moved forward, toward the doorway behind Cormac; he stepped aside. As the Queen of Moytura passed him, she deftly plucked his dagger from its sheath without interrupting her stride.

Aye, five feet one and not a spare ounce of flesh on her save that of womanhood, Riora Feachtnachis was regal.

Cormac looked at the wheel, glanced around at the walls, at the thing on the floor. He looked at Dithorba.

“It’s all of us ye must be taking from here, Dithorba, one by one. And we’d best start now, for who knows what guards may come, or someone bearing food?”

As Dithorba nodded, both of them heard outside the dungeon’s main chamber the sound of respectful greetings to the queen. And Cormac, to whom her eyes and words had shown more than gratitude but greetings to the queen. And Cormac, to whom her eyes and words had shown more than gratitude but indeed the promise of more, the desire for more, thought that which would not have made happy the woman in her:

A crowned woman! A crowned woman!

Then he and Dithorba left that chamber of torture and preternatural horror. Just without the doorway and in the main dungeon again, they paused. Both men stared in silence; they watched while Queen Riora, with viciousness and obvious gusto, killed the bound Elatha. She used Cormac’s dagger, and she did not hurry her ugly work.

With Cormac’s Saxon knife dripping in her hand, she turned to see his frown. Around her stood her people, in silence that may have been shock or approval.

“You look disapproving, my champion,” Riora Feachtnachis said. “Would you have dealt differently with a monster who has tortured me and forced his body on me twice daily for a week?”

Cormac paced toward her, aware of the silent stares of her advisers, her handmaids, her Guard commander and the captain; the queen’s closest aids to brain and body.

“He deserved worse, lady Queen. But when it is necessary that I do death, it’s swiftly I deal it.”

For just a moment she stared, her face working. Then with one hand lifting her skirts, the queen ran to him in manner hardly regal. Clothed now and with her hands wiped, she was heedless of his armour; Riora hugged him.

“You are good, Cormac, trenfher,” she breathed, calling him “champion” once more. “Good, a good man. Moytura needs such, Cormac mac Art; Moytura needs you-Moytura’s queen needs you!”

Over her head Cormac noted the cold glare of Commander Balan. Uncomfortably he said, “We must depart this place, lady Queen. All are released; now Dithorba must transfer us to his quarters, where await your loyal Erris and my friend, Wulfhere.” He pondered; could she end Thulsa Doom’s existence now, though her fair head bore no crown?

“You will come at once, my trenfher?” She did not let go the man who stood so tall over her.

“An he agrees, Balan and I will wait until all others are gone-lest our arms be needed here.”

Riora met his eyes, nodded, and released him. She turned to Dithorba. Cormac saw that she knew the old man’s abilities; she stretched forth her hand to him. Seconds later, queen and mage vanished.

“One wishes you had not bent Elatha’s sword, Cormac mac Art,” Balan said.

He was a large man, far from unhandsome, strongly built and with uncommonly short hair. He was in perhaps the third decade of his life. Both bruises and the marks of hot irons darkened areas of his ribs and chest, and his beard was singed. The man seemed unconcerned by his nudity; his body was good.

Cormac recognized his statement as a challenge, nor had he any desire on him for conflict with the commander of the royal bodyguard. “It’s truth ye speak, Balan. I should not have done. Will ye be straightening the blade, or shall I?”

“I will,” Balan said dourly, and, using his foot and the table of torment on which lay Elatha’s bloody body, he did.

The others stood by, nude or nearly, injured and weakened and some with scars on them they’d be bearing to the end of life. They were a pitiful group of tortured nobles and highplaced slaves, all accustomed to the good life around the throne, and Cormac mac Art was far from comfortable among them. That poor girl who was Captain Tathill’s sweetheart; could they withstand what had been done to them here? Could he bear the awful marks and scars she’d wear; could the very young woman stand the knowledge that he found her far less beautiful than she had been?

“Who will bleed for those who have bled and will bleed in years to come?” Cormac mac Art muttered, stroking the hilt of his sword with his fingertips. “Elatha, a tool, is not vengeance enow.”

Before any could ask what he’d said so quietly and grimly, Dithorba was back-and with him Queen Riora.

“Cormac! Wulfhere and Thulsa are gone!”

Cormac felt as if he’d taken a blow to the belly. Then worms seemed to crawl within him. He fingered the Moonbow on his chest. He was concerned about Wulfhere, aye, and if the man were dead blood would flow like a river. But… Thulsa Doom in the hands of others was worse, aye, and enough to put fright in strong heart. For if some fool were to remove the Chain of Danu from that vengeance-driven monster and end Cormac’s control over him…

He remembered to ask about loyal little Erris, unmentioned by Dithorba. Riora answered in a dull voice, turning partway from all eyes; Erris was there, in the secret room that now had a gaping hole smashed through one wall; she was there still, though without head or breasts.

“So we’re found out, and your enemies have my friend and my prisoner, and are my enemies,” Cormac snapped. “They will shortly come here, for they know too that Dithorba is free, and surely his powers are known to your cousin and the mage. Dithorba! Where lies a place of safety for us all?” He glanced about at the pitiful little group of people become his responsibility. “A safe place with food;” he added, for it was obvious the prisoners had been fed but whimsically.

“Lughan… is dead,” the older woman said, rising from the naked body.

Riora came to the Gael, who had spoken so swiftly and decisively while Balan and her advisers remained as if in shock. Cormac noted again how Balan watched, frowning, and he saw the man’s Danan-pale knuckles go even whiter around the short sword that had been Elatha’s.

Balan has an eye for the queen, and mayhap there’s been aught between them, for sure and she’s a passionate woman, Cormac thought, and he’d not be forgetting.

It was Torna who spoke, the only one among them who bore some fat. “The rear room of the Inn of Red Rory! Ye know it, Dithorba.”

“O’course. But… if he be not loyal?”

Balan shrugged, stepping forward with some dignity despite his nakedness. “Cite me our choices,” he said, and all were aware of the sword in the naked man’s hand.

It was at Cormac Dithorba glanced; the Gael kept his eyes on Balan. Dithorba devised his meaning, and he too looked at the Guard commander for decision.

“My lord Torna first,” Balan said, “as he must seek to make… arrangements, with Red Rory.”

Dithorba took the hand of the queen’s chief adviser. They disappeared. The queen continued to press herself to Cormac, all heedless of his chainmail-and Balan. Cormac was most aware of that man, and of the others as well. Dithorba was soon back, alone; all seemed well at Red Rory’s.

“Lady Queen? Will yourself come now?”

“Take Balan,” she said, and turned only partway from Cormac, from whom she took not his hands.

“See that Commander Balan is clothed and armed immediately. Balan: have thoughts of raising a force of men for us.”

Balan had opened his mouth to speak; meeting his queen’s eyes and hearing her last words, he nodded and said naught. His gaze raked Cormac as he took Dithorba’s hand, and then they were gone. Cormac had not put his hands on the blue-gowned Riora, while hers had not left him.

Again Dithorba returned; this time he took young Captain Tathill. Six females remained, and Riora and Cormac. Instantly Tathill was gone, she stretched herself long to seek Cormac’s lips with her own, all heedless of the watching girls and woman. He saw that the woman of middle age was aware of his discomfort. She gave him a small understanding smile across the top of her monarch’s head.

When Dithorba returned once more, the discomfited mac Art wrapped powerful fingers around the queen’s azure-sleeved arm, and let her feel their strength. “Take the queen now, Dithorba.”

“No!”

Riora’s voice was loud and peremptory. Regaining her composure swiftly, she turned and coolly bade Dithorba take the others first. Her arm remained around the Gael, on the side of him away from Dithorba and her women. He wondered if she felt safe with him but had doubts about the Inn of Red Rory and was thus a wise ruler aware of her own value, or… if she wanted merely to continue possessively holding him she had called her champion.

Embarrassed and looking as if in some pain, Cormac shot Dithorba a look. The old man would not meet his gaze; he was less capable of making demurrers to his lady queen than the tall, rangy man she presently clung to. And with her free and no emergency on them, Cormac dared not countermand her or attempt even to argue. A sensible reason for her tarrying here was too obvious.

Dithorba took Tathill’s sweetheart, who was definitely in need of bed and blankets and whatever these people had of poultices and potions. Five remained; four were young and well-formed. The usurpers and Elatha the Whip had obviously been more than pleased to imprison the queen’s fetching handmaidens with her.

As they were taken unnaturally elsewhere, Riora pressed to Cormac and her lips were warm and soft and partway open, seeking and moving on his mouth. Her hands found his, drew them inward to her breasts. In seconds the links of his mail were marking his knuckles, for she pushed herself in forcefully as if her goal were the crushing of her bosom. Her breathing heightening, Riora had no care for the presence and eyes of her girls; Cormac had, but he was soon made to forget.

He responded helplessly to Riora’s insistent lips, her urgency… aye, and Cormac mac Art responded to the flattery, to the fact that this warm body crushed so urgently to his was that of a ruler of men… other men. His pulse began to be a drum in his temples.

“Ah! Alone but not alone-I want you, Cormac mac Art! You must remain here, remain in Moytura with me!”

Cormac sought words and sought not to be stiff. “Much… remains to be done, lady Queen, ere the crown is restored to yourself. The future is far from now and it’s injury ye do yourself by this behavior before your… intimates.”

“Intimates! I have no intimates-my lessers!” She thrust herself back from him, though with both hands still on his arms. Her faintly tawny eyes flashed and seemed to flame. “You dare much, Cormac the Gael!”

His face worked. How to tell any woman, much less a queen, that she put much discomfort on him, that he was embarrassed for her? And this was a dangerous woman as well, passionate and swift to change her mood. His melancholy troubled look was not mirrored in her features, which drew and writhed with emotion. Was it anger? Was she acting? He did not know. He could not know; he knew this woman not at all. Certainly she could be cruel as a cat: witness Elatha’s slow, agonized death.

Though he’d never have expected such a feeling of himself, he was glad that he wore mail and that Dithorba had brought the gown for her to clothe her nakedness.

He was still seeking words when he heard the noises.

Far away behind her, chains rattled. That scrape and creak was of a great door’s being opened. Now he could detect the murmurous undertone of several voices, male. Aye, and those tiny clinks; he knew the sound of weighted scabbards sliding and thumping against mail under the impetus of the wearers’ steps.

Cormac’s arms rose and his wrists turned so that his hands moved over and in close on both her forearms. Riora mistook his intent, apparently not having heard the coming of men, though he was not sure whether her eyes shone or glittered. He forced her hands from him.

“Men come,” he whispered, looking past her into darkness, that part of the dungeon that was a corridor leading, to steps and the great door for sealing in prisoners. “They descend steps-hear ye, Queen Riora? Armed men approach, nor can they be other than minions of your cousin Cairluh. Get ye behind me. Ye have my dagger still?”

She heard them then, and in a rustling whisper of skirts Riora hurried to the iron-toothed table whereon lay the bloody corpse of Elatha. Swiftly she returned, bearing Cormac’s knife. It was marked with blood. The sound of muttering men drew closer and Cormac could see on the wall well up ahead the dance of yellow light; torches borne by striding men.

“Elatha!” a voice called, but the shouter was too far up the passage to be seen.

Coming instantly after that call, Dithorba’s appearance a few feet away brought a jerking response from Cormac mac Art.

“Give me the dagger, lady Queen Dithorba! Men come. Take her and hasten back for me, man!”

Riora clung to both dagger and Cormac while Dithorba looked confused. The Gael’s hand leaped out to grasp her slim wrist. Riora gasped, and his dagger clinked to the floor. Immediately he flung the queen of Moytura to Dithorba, and Cormac was quietly talking the while.

“Take her hence. Return ye to the chamber of her late punishment, Dithorba!”

Snatching up the knife he’d taken long ago from a Saxon who had no further use for it, Cormac mac Art wheeled. Crouching, he ran with a cat-footed lack of sound into the depths of the dungeon. Behind him he heard a squeaking sound from a human throat and knew Riora’s protest had been continued into a room elsewhere in Moytura.

Just as he was rushing at the doorway to that which had been Riora’s prison chamber, mac Art remembered her warning that the entry was guarded by some wizard-sent murder.

Too late now to stop, he instead drove himself forward with a renewed burst of momentum. He sprang through the doorway and as far into the chamber as he could hurl himself. He was drawing steel even while he turned.

There was no attack, no menace. Here was the great stone wheel on which Riora Feachtnachis had been bound; here lay his former foe, the untenanted suit of armour he had chopped to bits. Without, he heard the clamor of excited exclamations of consternation and rage; the Danan soldiery had found the broad area that was empty of all but the corpse of him who had presided over it.

Within the chamber was no menace; perhaps the slayer at the door had died with the destruction of the Guardian, or the removal of the prisoner. Cormac’s dagger was in its sheath and now he scabbarded his sword. Stepping quickly back around the mill-wheel, he squatted. Mayhap someone would come and but glance in, then rush back to report the place empty; astonished by that fact, he might miss the man squatting in the shadows behind the wheel standing in its frame of stone and wood. If not, the Gael should be able to hold the chamber, provided he could reach the door and remain just within.

“The queen!” he heard a yell, and after an instant of silence he heard the steady jingle and clink of mail on running men. A Danan weapon-man appeared at the entry.

“Dung and darkness! She’s not here! Danu’s eyes-what’s this?”

With another crowding close behind, the Danan in silver-winged helm and scalemail of dark iron entered. He squatted to examine the remains of the Guardian.

“It-it be just armour, Din, empty armour! and hacked as if-”

He broke off, having raised his head to find himself looking directly into the deepset eyes of Cormac mac Art. The Danan’s own glims grew wider when the man behind the torture device stood and was revealed to be impossibly dark of skin; by Danan standards, he was no less than a giant.

“The queen is gone from here, traitor. It’s soon back on the throne she’ll be, and best ye begin to run, now.”

Both Danan weapon-men were frozen in staring silence. Then, “You… you… what are you?”

“Him who conquered Elatha and that toy there at your feet, a monstrosity set by Tarmur Roag to guard the queen.”

The man in the doorway jerked his head back in the direction of the torturemaster’s grisly corpse. “You… you did that to Elatha?”

Cormac hesitated only for a moment. “Aye, and it’s shame on me for letting the beast die so quickly. An ye’d seen the condition of the queen’s maidens, of her high advisers and Commander Balan-ye’s serve no longer bloody-handed men who conscioned such and who employed such a spider as Elatha.

The two exchanged a look. “Uh-but you… never have I seen such skin. And-be all your hair… black? It is not possible! Who-what are ye?”

“An elemental, called up by Tarmur Roag,” Cormac said, who had previously called himself Partha mac Othna, and Curoi mac Dairi, aye and even Kull, to an equally mazed Briton one night on a dark strand. “But even I could not hold with what he has caused to be done, and… I rebelled. It’s to no one I belong now, though I’m after pledging loyalty and aid to the queen-your queen.”

The two men continued to hesitate, eyeing him. Believe him or no, it was plain that neither relished a passage at arms with this over-tall stranger with the dark skin and hair they knew to be impossible. Yet neither wished to lose face-or life, by means of sorcery?-by calling for the help of their companions. No challenge had been issued, either by the Danans or the “elemental”; all three swords remained sheathed, though two wan hands and one dark gripped their three several hilts.

One of them decided to stave off the decision a bit longer. “Where-where is… Riora Feachtnachis?”

“I call her Riora, little man. It is of your queen ye speak? Dithorba! Behind the wheel!”

The robed Danan had appeared, well within the chamber and facing the weapon-men.

“It’s Dithorba Loingsech! Swiftly Dungan-seize him!”

Dithorba whirled; the man named Dungan shot out a hand to catch at his robe; Cormac swung around the millwheel. Dungan released Dithorba and reached for his sword. While Cormac’s right hand stretched toward the mage, his shield drove forward as if bow-shot. Dungan’s arm came up just in time to parry the unorthodox attack with his own buckler, shield against shield. There was a great crash and Dungan’s shield-arm slammed back into his face. At the same time, Cormac caught Dithorba’s hand. Ten fingers linked and pressed.

Ere the man called Din could blink, his companion was down with blood on his mouth and both the big dark man with the scars and the queen’s mage had vanished from the chamber.

It was a strange and motley group that gathered in the back room of the inn of highly trusted Red Rory. Motley too was the manner of their clothing, which included bedsheets. The innkeeper’s own wife was tending the hurts of the former prisoners, aided by the older woman. Balan was gone when Cormac arrived, sent by his queen to find loyal men and bring a report of the activities of the usurpers.

The Gael was not long in that crowded room ere he was certain the queen had bade her girls be silent. They stared, large-eyed, while he bent and wriggled his way out of his mailcoat. His assortment of small wounds complained. Ale there was; food, a well-fed man in an apron told them, was coming; there could not be much bustle, so as not to arouse the attention of the patrons in the inn’s main room. Riora was in a corner, talking quietly with Torna. While she paused to shoot Cormac a hot-eyed look, Dithorba hurried to join that conference.

Cormac did not. He drank off a draught of ale, but glanced at Riora, and approached the aproned man. The Gael carried his pouch, slid from his weapon-belt.

“Ye be Red Rory?”

“Aye,” the fellow said though there was no sign of red in his cloud-pale hair and no ruddiness on his face. “And you are the hero of us all, he who-”

“Aye, all ye’ve been told-none of which I could have come close to accomplishing without Dithorba Loingsech, true hero of Moytura. And see that ye remember, Red Rory: your queen is a strong and heroic woman! It’s a physician that’s needed here, man, and here’s what ye’ll be needing to do to avoid suspicions of other guests: go to the kitchen, cry out, emerge with your hand wrapped in much cloth, and send for one with knowledge of wounds and the potions for them.”

Red Rory smiled. “A clever hero as well,” he said. “None of us had thought of such a ruse. Indeed, we all feared calling for skilled help, that someone might be suspicious of his coming.”

“There are those here who have need of it. My name is Cormac; call me that, not hero. Need there is for the placing of Captain Tathill and his dairlin’ into a room of themselves, very alone. As for me-none others must see me.”

Rory nodded. “That I know, having seen yourself now, Cormac!”

“In minutes, Rory, I’ll be dropping for need of sleep. Food can wait until I wake; a little more ale I’d be appreciating. First this day I did much walking, and that on a hillside-seeking the Doorway to Moytura, ye see. Then another and I were forced to do death on the six set by the usurpers to watch over Dithorba. Next it was Elatha, and then a thing created or raised up by Tarmur Roag to hold the queen. It’s hours and hours I’ve been on these feet and at hard exertions, Red Rory, and I will be needed here. That must be later-I’m nigh onto collapsing. Ye’ve a brewing room below-can I reach it without being seen?”

“Aye, Cormac Trenfher, but-”

“It’s there, in marvelous privacy, I’ll be sleeping, Red Rory. And violence may be done on that person who wakens me out of time!”

Within the hour a physician arrived; both Tathill and his young woman had been smuggled out to secret and private lodgings-and Red Rory had dared lie to his queen about the whereabouts of her trenfher; her champion. In truth that one had stretched his bruised length-and what a length it was!-on the floor of the brewing room back of the inn’s kitchen. He was snoring.

The physician, as he was departing, was led there by Rory.

While he was seeing to the supine man’s wounds, the snoring was interrupted, lids rose, and eyes like sword-steel stared into Danan glims.

“Durlugh the physician,” Rory said quickly, and a bit fearfully.

Cormac said nothing; his eyes closed; he was snoring again ere Durlugh had finished his work. In several places was the champion’s body smeared and poulticed, and Durlugh and Rory departed. Nor was there brewing the next day, for in the world above that was his own, the sun came and went and was just coming again when Cormac mac Art awoke.

It was then he discovered that he’d been found by the Queen of Moytura, and she had a wakening surprise for him. It was herself.

Chapter Fourteen:

Tarmur Roag

“What kind of ceremony?”

“All are there,” Dithorba said. “Cairluh, Tarmur Roag, the simulacrum of Riora, the priests of Danu, and the people have been bade to come into the great Square of the Moon before the temple. Too, the filays and seanachies are present.”

Cormac straightened. He was clothed only in his breechclout which he wore tight. He had been exercising, he told Dithorba, testing legs and arms, flexibility and reflexes, after yesterday’s exertions and the hurts put upon him. His left forearm had been wrapped again and again with the lightweight Moyturan cloth, that his buckler would not chafe the two wounds left there by the fanged tip of Elatha’s whip. Elsewhere his skin was colourful with bruises.

He repeated the other man’s last two words, his eyes narrowing until they were invisible. “Poets and chroniclers?”

“Aye. You know their function here?”

“The same as among my people; they keep alive the time-that-was for the Now and the time-to-come. They are our… our history. And Moytura’s too?”

“Aye,” Dithorba said with a nod. “The same, Cormac. Tarmur and Cairluh plan something of moment, then. An announcement, methinks. The false Riora is going to make a speech to the people, assembled before the temple, that her words may have Danu’s blessing.”

Cormac considered, started to scratch his left forearm, realized what he was about, and left off. “They know of my presence here, and that you and Riora are free. They have Wulfhere and Thulsa Doom-oh, saw ye them, Dithorba?”

“No, Cormac.”

“So, Tarmur Roag and Cairluh have decided to take some swift action. Prompted by my presence and yours and the queen’s freedom? Aye… mayhap the false Riora is about to announce marriage with Cairluh, or abdicate, in favour of her dear cousin?”

“It is as Torna and I believe.”

“Balan?”

Dithorba shook his nigh-hairless head. “Commander Balan was for the barracks of the Queen’s Guard. There I dare not go-nor have we seen or heard from him.”

Cormac nodded, thinking. He rubbed the bruise on his right upper arm, staring reflectively at nothing. “Dithorba… ye know where your queen is.”

Dithorba put on an innocent face as he looked around. “Why nay, Cormac. I see her not.”

Smiling, the Gael said, “It were better thus. Now-do you bring Torna here whilst I get clothes on me, be ye so kind.”

With a nod, Dithorba departed the brewing room; he used his feet.

A brewing room, Cormac thought. The planning place for the restoration of a queen-by a foreigner! Danu, Danu, it’s a whimsical lady ye be, moon-goddess! A brewing room, behind an inn… and what a queen!

He turned to the heavy framework that supported ale vats and mugs; it was of a size to speak well for Red Rory’s business. Cormac walked around it, to where his clothing lay entangled with a blue gown. He looked down at Riora. She blinked lazily up at him.

“Ye heard?”

“Nay. I… think I was unconscious for a time,” she said. “Oh, Cormac! You are absolutely-”

“Later, little girl. There’s business afoot. Best ye rise and come see to the business of your kingdom.”

“You call the Queen of Moytura ‘little girl’?”

Cormac smiled; she’d but jested, and he’d missed her point and now called her by name-the queen! She levered herself into a sitting position, reached for him; he backed away.

“Dithorba was just here,” he told her. “Give listen.”

And as he dressed and then grunted into forty pounds of linked-steel coat that had so long been a daily part of his attire, he told her what Dithorba had just reported, and their surmise. Swiftly he sketched a plan; a concept-a hope. She considered that with an expression both stricken and yet hopeful. Rising, she drew her soiled blue robe over her head and smoothed it as best she could.

They had just emerged from behind the vats when Dithorba returned with the senior adviser, Torna. Cormac began speaking at once.

“It’s the queen’s advisers ye two be, and it’s her champion I seem to be, now. Now methinks the swiftest action is called for.”

Torna nodded. “If we be right, Cormac mac Art, in but minutes Cairluh will have been proclaimed king by the false queen.”

Cormac looked at Riora. “We have a bargain, lady Queen?”

“We have, Cormac. Once you have accomplished my reinstatement, I shall perform the strange task you have requested.”

“Your pardon, lady Queen… but will ye just be speaking it aloud for the ears of these your ministers?”

She blinked in surprise, arched an eyebrow-and repeated their bargain, and her strange and grisly promise to mac Art.

“Dithorba,” Cormac said, “take me to the temple, to the very side of the creature calling herself Riora.”

“It’s on the Crescent Balcony she is, Cormac. There too are guards.”

Cormac signified that he understood and was ready, and they joined hands, and were gone. The moment they were there, on the outer balcony of the Temple of Danu, Cormac was speaking.

“Dithorba, time races and we catch it now or miss it forever. Fetch the queen here man, and instantly! Then it’s to the barracks ye must go, and-”

But Dithorba had winked out amid a little sound like the clap of hands.

A far louder one succeeded it; a resounding cry form many, many Danan throats. The Gael looked out on the strange city that was subterranean Moytura, and down on thronging thousands of the People of Danu. Their light-eyed faces were turned up at him, and many uplifted hands were pointing.

His knees in the partial crouch of a weapon-man’s readiness, he turned his head to his left. There, others stared at him; two. A handsome young man in a robe white as foam of the wave, with a large collar of silver on him, a carcanet from throat to mid-chest. It flashed with jewels. His robe was girt with a doubled cord of woven cloth-of-silver, and his fair hair was lustrous, clean and long-combed. At his side, bejeweled, in an ornately ornamented, and purfled robe of the same marmoreal white, on her pale locks a chaplet of silver and coral chased with gold, stood… Riora.

Nay. Not Riora. Some Thing called from an unnatural elsewhere by Tarmur Roag! A lamia, mayhap. And mayhap Dithorba was more than right, in giving me this new dagger!

Ready to act, he becautioned himself to look behind him; along the white-colonnaded balcony.

No wizard was there; doubtless Tarmur Roag thought it wise to remain out of sight of the people whilst his plans were put forward by Cairluh and… the simulacrum. Cormac instead saw three Danan weapon-men in fine armour polished to high sheen, and with bronze on their wrists rather than bracers of leather. As their eyes met Cormac’s, all three reached for their swordhilts.

So too did Cormac mac Art-and turned, and plunged toward her who was Riora’s exact likeness and him the Gael assumed was the queen’s plotting cousin, Cairluh.

“It is done, Cairluh!” mac Art said, biting out the words, and he drove his sword into the white-robed woman with such force that the point brast through her back and tented her garment before tearing through it.

Cairluh stared in horror; so too did the people below. It was the total and all of Cormac’s plan; that he come here with all swiftness and, pausing for naught, seek to slay the thing in Riora’s likeness.

A chorus of screams and roars of rage swelled up from the people gathered below, as their eyes reported the stabbing to death of their queen by a towering man with dark skin never got of Danan parentage.

They were still shrieking when she they thought their queen was transformed before their thrice-shocked gazes.

The skin of that lovely Riora-face became a liquid, melting and oozing, running. A frightful howling sound issued from her lips even as they changed. Then Cormac, Cairluh, three frozen weapon-men and thousands of duped Moyturans saw the queen become a ravening snarling demonic thing that was shaggy with red hair. The snowy robe fell from the metamorphosing body. Red too were the tufts of hair on the fox-like ears, though black was the hideous snarling animal’s face and the taloned claw-hands of the creature.

The crown of Moytura clattered to the floor of the balcony.

Dithorba was right, Cormac thought, and he transferred his swordhilt to his shield-hand. Iron and steel will not slay a demon, a lamia.

Far from dead the thing was, and as it pounced, Cormac drew the dagger Dithorba had foresightedly given him and in the same motion plunged it into the heart of the monster. A single curving claw sought to tear open his arm; it left instead a deep groove in his bracer of good cow’s hide.

With another snarl that lofted into a shriek, the thing gouted blood around the silver dagger. Staggering sidewise, it struck the parapet that ran around the Crescent Balcony, and fell over.

Below, the people cried out anew, and not this time in rage. Citizens nigh trampled one the other in their efforts to hie themselves well back from the tumbling monster. It struck the green-and-white stones of the Square of the Moon with a loud and sickening thump and a great plosion of blood.

Then all who could see stared, as the slain demon-thing that had worn the likeness of their queen melted again-into a shiny putrescence that gave off the stench of a thousand dead fish.

Aye, Cormac thought, silver slays the demonic!

No cries rose now from the populace. There were only murmurs. Again many eyes rose to the balcony. A new silence fell, followed by more excited muttering and isolated shouts; at the side of the demon-slaying stranger had appeared two well recognized figures: Dithorba Loingsech and the Queen of Moytura.

Below, the last trace of the demon vanished.

Stooping, Dithorba picked up the Coral Crown of Moytura, and placed it on the head of his queen.

Yet no cheering bedlam arose; the people were too shocked and confused to react so. Had not they seen their queen afore; had not they seen that she had been a foul slavering thing? Now-was this their Riora? And the giant at her side with un-Danan skin… what or who was he, and from whence? Was not that the Sign of the Moonbow on his chest? The queen was lifting her arms to them…

The silence deepened. Into it Riora called, “I am Riora, Queen of the Moyturans, Chosen of Danu. And this my champion, Moytura’s champion, Danu’s champion-Cormac mac Art!” And in a natural tone she said, “Your voice is stronger, Cormac-tell them.

He did. The Gael bellowed out a few sentences, speaking slowly, pronouncing carefully and knowing that to them he spoke with a frightful strange accent. It was the content of his words that held import: he identified her at his side as the real queen, and accused Cairluh and Tarmur Roag of having done treachery on her.

No proof was necessary. Cairluh provided it. He turned and fled, holding high the skirt of his regal robe to facilitate the churning of his surprisingly muscular legs.

Again Riora lifted high her hands to her people; a queen crowned and in a soiled blue gown. And this time the cheers rose. After a moment of smiling on them, she turned to the three weapon-men who’d been coming at Cormac and who now stood frozen, as horrified again and again as those in the square below.

“In your hands I see swords,” she said, “and on you I see the clothing of the Queen’s Guards. I am that queen. Sheathe your weapons!”

The trio did. One fell to his knees; his companions swiftly emulated him.

“Basest treachery was done on me,” the queen said. “And you were tricked-you thought that… creature was I?”

All three kneeling men assured her that they had; from the anguished eyes of one tears rolled.

“Then into the temple, Queen’s Guardsmen, and take Tarmur Roag, traitor to all Moytura-traitor to Danu! “

The three guardsmen rose, bowed, and drew their iron swords. Cormac’s hand hovered at his hilt while he watched those men in crescent-shaped helmets for any hint of movement toward Riora. There was none; their pained expressions remained. One man spoke.

“Lady Queen… below are the Lord Cairluh, and Tarmur Roag, the filays and seanachies and other guardsmen. There were a score of us for the… the ceremony; seventeen are in the temple.”

“All dupes, as you were?” Cormac asked.

The men’s expressions showed that they did not know. Some of the men below with the usurpers might well have been tricked into believing the lamia was the queen. Yet some were almost certainly knowing tools of the plotters, loyal to Cairluh and Tarmur Roag because of threats or promises or both.

Cormac strode past Riora to the head of the stairway leading down into the temple.

The Temple of Danu of Moytura was laid out in the shape of a crescent; a moonbow. Nor was it huge, as the Gael had already surmised from the balcony’s length. The arms of the crescent flowed out away from him on either side. The roof was supported by four colonnades that marched along the arms of the crescent; columns of pale stone blocks banded around by bronze. Within the innermost lines of columns, between them and the outer walls, hung deeply purple drapes or curtains, trimmed in silver. He assumed a sort of gallery or passageway lay behind, betwixt hangings and walls.

The altar rose at the far end, in the center of the string of the moonbow. From Cormac’s vantage, the statue of the goddess appeared to be of excellently detailed workmanship, and all of silver. Plated to iron surely, he supposed, or to stone. The temple floor was of smooth and refulgently green marble or a similar stone of that unusual hue. On it stood men, and they stared up at him.

Five were priests. Just under a score wore the helms and armour of the Queen’s Guards. The central figure was a plump man whose grey beard was plaited, like Dithorba’s. On the chest of his shimmering silver robe hung a Moonbow sigil; a Chain of Danu that was like the one Cormac wore. Beside him stood Cairluh. The traitorous cousin even so swiftly had doffed his snowy robe to reveal himself in a coat of fine scalemail, and sword-armed. Around the two plotters, for Cormac assumed him in the robe of silver to be Tarmur Roag, were ranked others he took to be filays and seanachies; poets and chroniclers or historians. Thus in Eirrin was history of centuries passed down, without written words.

A movement at his side drew Cormac’s attention.

Both Riora and Dithorba had come up beside him. There too were the three weapon-men, with nervousness and some anguish visible in their faces. Along half the length of the temple and up the steps, the queen’s usurping cousin and he who had effected his schemes-or laid them-stared at their queen and the dark, tall man beside her.

With a fine sense of royalty and drama, Queen Riora lifted an arm and extended an accusing finger at the silver-robed sorcerer.

“You have failed, foul wizard! And you, Cairluh, murderous cousin! This man has slain Elatha, and brought me forth from the prison where I was tortured, with my girls and Torna and Balan and others. Lughan has been murdered, by Elatha the Whip! Now this same man, Cormac mac Art, slew the monster who wore my face and body-and the people saw that transformation; they know of your treachery and of the foul thing that bore my face! They saw it melt and ooze away to naught, that thing you put upon my throne-the throne of Moytura!”

Cormac was watching carefully. He saw horror on the faces of four priests; saw the fifth smile thinly. The poets and historians stared too in shock, and backed from Tarmur Roag and Cairluh-all but one, him in the blue tunic and beige leggings. As for the weapon-men… it was hard to be certain, but Cormac thought that two looked shocked, horrified. Two of seventeen!

If he was right about those two, then they were the only, fighting men loyal to their queen, with himself and these three beside her. Six of us… against sixteen with Cairluh… and Tarmur Roag with his dark powers!

It was not possible. Had one of those with him been Wulfhere… had these men beside their queen been of his own people, or Danes… but they were not.

It was not possible. Two could put defeat on six, when the two were Wulfhere Skull-splitter and Cormac the Wolf; six could not defeat sixteen, when as allies mac Art had only the small men of Moytura. And besides, there was Tarmur Roag, and Dithorba had more than merely admitted that the man in the silver robe possessed powers transcending his own.

And then, horribly, there were four, not six. Suddenly men below drew shining blades of dark iron, and sheathed them anew in the two Cormac had rightly taken to be without knowledge of the treachery and deception. They fell, almost in silence.

Tarmur Roag smiled.

“That foreigner from among those who drove our ancestors from Eiru will aid ye no more, Riora! Let him and those three beside you come down among us, that we may see who rules Moytura!”

While the queen stood stricken silent, Cormac drew steel and brandished the blade in a shining arc above his head.

“It’s the Sign of the Moonbow I wear, given me by the People of Danu driven from Moytura by your ancestors, Tarmur Roag… for favouring rule by a Male! Six guards ye set to hold Dithorba; they lie dead and here he stands. Elatha the Whip daily raped the Queen of all Moytura-and Elatha lies dead. Who of those little sniveling cowards and traitors about ye will ye send to take me, Tarmur Roag-who will come to his doom?”

Cormac mac Art was striving as much to persuade and fire himself as he was engaging in the standard challenging rhetoric and braggadocio of weapon-men throughout the world. And he felt his own spirits surge, the blood seeming to warm in his veins, even while he sought to cut the confidence from beneath those traitorous guardsmen below as the scythe went through the grain-field.

Cormac descended two steps and stood in a posture of arrogance and confidence.

Below, sixteen men stood with naked iron in their hands.

Tarmur Roag’s arm rose and the silvery sleeve slid away from a white wrist as he pointed at the Gael.

“TAKE him! To him who cuts down that foreigner goes command of the guardsmen… the King’s Guard!”

The guardsmen hesitated, exchanged glances. Suddenly one started forward, grinning. Command! Then another followed-and then all of them, none wishing to be left behind and all hoping to put death on the foreigner or to be there when it was done and thus hold favour with the next commander.

While he stood on the steps and glared down at them like a snarling wolf at bay, sixteen armed men began converging on Cormac mac Art.

It was then that the thunderous booming sound exploded from the other end of the temple and filled the large chamber with rolling echoes. On the temple floor, many men turned to stare at the tall brazen doors on either side of the altar.

“Balan!” Dithorba muttered, and Cormac knew there was more hope than certainty with the old man. Again someone hammered on that faraway door.

The voice of Cormac mac Art roared out, with all the volume he could put into it. “Ye unarmed poets and chroniclers of Moytura-draw aside that none may put wound or death on Moytura’s finest!” Then he swung halfway around. “Dithorba-use your power, man! Open that door!”

Frozen in indecision, Dithorba jerked, blinked. He smiled-and vanished.

Cormac saw him reappear at the other end of the temple, saw the mage forge swiftly forward to grasp the bars on the great door. No eyes were on him-until Tarmur Roag looked back over his shoulder.

“Kill that man!” he bawled, pointing.

“Kill Tarmur Roag!” Cormac shouted, and without looking to see whether the three loyal Danans were with him, he charged down the steps,

Now men were shouting, and Dithorba’s cry came but thinly: “Take away your weight from the door!”

The three rearmost of the traitorous guardsmen had wheeled and made for him. One, seeing that so many were hardly necessary to cut down a single old man, swung back to join his fellows against the big dark maniac coming like a charging bear down the steps. At that a second of those making for Dithorba paused, biting his lip; surely two of them were unnecessary for this piddling task, and if it might be his sword that slew the foreigner who opposed his masters… He too turned back. He joined the mass of men who waited, crouching, swords up, for the charge of Cormac mac Art.

One man continued toward Dithorba, who was pitting all his strength against the massive bar across the door. Again it shook and boomed with assault from the other side. Now two others rushed after Dithorba’s nemisis; unarmed both: poets or chroniclers. At the sound of the slap-slap of their sandals behind him, the weapon-man looked back. He was forced to pause, to turn with upraised buckler and ready sword.

“Would you do death on Reyan, foremost among poets of Moytura?” one of his pursuers demanded.

While the guardsman hesitated, full of the high respect for the poet of all men on and within Eirrin, the bar rose-and crashed down outside its iron rest. Dithorba tried to skip away but was bowled over by the inwardly rushing door. Into the temple boiled Balan at the head of a score or so swarming guardsmen of unquestionable allegiance and intent.

Balan paused. His eager followers brought themselves to a halt at the lifting of his shield, though they glared about like leashed hounds with the scent of blood in their nostrils; twenty men in scalemail armour, shields whose faces were etched in silver with the moonbow of their goddess, and from whose helms projected crescents of silver; men exactly like those with Tarmur Roag and Cairluh. Their pale eyes roamed the interior of the temple.

They saw the poets and chroniclers of Moytura, who had drawn to one side; they saw a mass of their fellow Queen’s Guardsmen in number about equal to their own; they saw beyond them the semicircular stairs with Cormac but two steps from the temple floor, brought to pause by their advent; above them they saw three others, partway descended, swords naked; and at the top of the flight was their queen.

“Balan!” Cormac shouted into the sudden silence. “Behind me is the real Riora; Tarmur’s creature is slain! As for these-every guardsman ye see belongs to Tarmur and Cairluh, and they’re just after murdering two of their own number!”

Balan hesitated only a moment. Then he pointed with his sword to the traitors.

“Yield!”

Tarmur’s voice bellowed out a moment after: “Slay!”

So it was to be, and battle was joined in the very Temple of the Moon. The Queen’s Guardsmen were pitted against the Queen’s Guardsmen. Her commander led one band; her treacherous cousin and the sorcerer the other. The groups closed with arching blades crashing through hastily interposed shields in a storm of ringing iron. The two forces were soon indistinguishably intermingled.

Into that milling mass of sword-wielding men Tarmur Roag durst not unleash his sorcerous powers. Instead, wheeling, he hurled it at the stranger who had brought on this thwarting of his plans and their execution. But a few minutes agone he had been scant seconds from the rule of Moytura; now all his plans were endangered, aye, and his life as well.

Tarmur Roag gestured.

A spear of dullest, shadowy black streaked at mac Art.

He both dodged and struck out at it with his buckler. A sensation as of ice assailed his shield-arm as he scrambled aside, nearly falling from the bottom step. His slitted eyes saw that his buckler had been holed through and through, as though by an awl in the hands of resistless god.

His nape prickling and his arm still atingle, the Gael sought to avoid further such magickal attacks by rushing the two Moyturans who had not whirled to meet Balan’s men but remained to brace the tall man with the dark skin. Their faces were set as in granite and their eyes were ice. He saw that they were controlled men, fighting animals, like those who’d guarded Dithorba.

There was a whoosh overhead as another long spear of darkness rushed from the mage. Behind Cormac, gurgles sounded, and then the crashes of falling men. He need not turn to know that the three guardsmen had paid a bitter price for being so slow to follow him to the defense of their queen.

He advanced on two of their fellows, traitors both. They separated.

Death came and pressed him close and he hacked and smote, running a shield and bending an iron blade with his own sword of silver-flashing steel. That man recovered swiftly and hewed without troubling over his blade, which now formed a definite curve.

Spitting a sulphurous oath, the Gael swept his battered, boled shield in a whizzing blurring defensive arc before him; it turned the bent blade and swept away the other man’s so that the fellow was wrenched halfway around. Cormac drove his own sword forward in a terrible disemboweling thrust that sheared through iron scalemail and brought an ugly croak from its victim. His eyes glared at the dark man-who gave his blade a wrenching twist and yanked it free. Blood followed; dropped sword clanged on the smoothness of stone floor; its owner sank beside his blade.

Cormac had not waited to see that man fall. Instead he strode past and swung his blooded blade at the other man. The Moyturan fended it off with his hexagonal shield, which lost half its silver decor thereby.

Over his shoulder Cormac’s eyes recorded iron ranks at clash and stamp; blood spattered as Balan’s and Tarmur’s men battled with edge of blade and point of sword. Battle-lust ruled the Temple of the Moon and Danu could but watch as her own people fought among themselves. Sharp-edged brands of dark iron flashed and glittered in blue-grey streaks, and sword-hacked men fell vomiting scarlet.

The center of the temple of the goddess became a sea, a writhing storm-swept sea, of shining mail and blood.

A hard-driven slash chopped a wedge from Cormac’s weakened buckler in a blow that jolted his arm to the collarbone. His blade streaked his arm with Moyturan blood as he slashed in return. The other man grunted when his carapace of iron scales gave way at the waist to sharp steel sliver driven by steel-sheathed muscles. Cormac’s sword chewed deep. The man was staggered by the blow but stood blinking, not realizing that his own blood washed forth after Cormac had twisted free his blade.

The Gael started past him; the Moyturan hacked.

“Crom’s name, man, know ye not ye’re dead?”

Cormac slammed his shield into the rushing sword. There was the booming grating crash and screech of metal on metal, and the guardsman staggered again. His darker antagonist drove forward, using his shield as an advancing wall heading a body block that would have staggered a horse.

The charge smote the wounded guardsman like a thunderbolt. He was dashed to the floor. Crimson surged from his side while steel-spring muscles carried the Gael past him.

Red chaos ruled the temple, which was become a clangourous maelstrom of surging, hacking men.

Crumpled Moyturans of both sides lay in their glistening blood while their souls raced off to join Donn, Lord of the Dead of Eirrin. Cormac saw the air alive with swords that flashed blue and sprinkled crimson drops. Staggering from woundy blows; men yet strove to fight on; some for queen and throne, others because they were the controlled tools of a wizard with not a care for them, body or soul.

The Gael saw Balan hurl an attacker from him with a mighty twisting heave of his six-sided shield and, while he roared out his constant cry of “Riora and Danu!,” sent his point leaping out to gird into the breast of another. An iron blade battered down on his helm; Balan trembled, staggered, cursed-and swept his smeared glaive around in a whistling half-circle that sliced away a sword-arm.

Cormac’s grin was wolfish and ugly. Balan of Moytura not only knew how to use body and blade and buckler, the man reveled in it! His command, the Gael mused, was the result of no woman’s favouritism or political appointment!

But as Cormac looked about, the ugly little smile gave way to a frown.

Where was Tarmur Roag?

The frown became a snarling scowl; the mage had skirted the mass of men, while none dared so much as glance aside from points and iron edges that sought and chewed like the fangs of ravening wolves. Aye, the plump traitor was ghosting betwixt the pillars on the far side of the great hall. He headed for the purple drapes that obscured the wall.

Fleeing for some hidden door, Cormac thought, and he rushed after the Moyturan wizard.

The Gael must leap high; a man came staggering back from the ringing combat to crash to the floor at his feet like a felled tree. Cold eyes blazing, Cormac raced on. On his shield-side howling devils crashed their flashing blades through bucklers and flesh; to his right, across fifteen feet of gleaming green floor, the steps rose. A glance told him that the queen stood still there, with Dithorba now at her side.

It’s danger she’s in, Cormac thought, should one of the traitors see her and bethink himself of charging the steps. A sword at her breast and all fighting ceases-and Balan and the rest of us are butchered! But nay, he reminded himself; Dithorba was there, and could whisk her out of the danger of any traitorous attack in a twinkling.

Cormac reached the edge of the main floor; plunged past the colonnade of bronze-bound pillars. Ahead of him, Tarmur Roag reached for the violet hangings. The edge of Cormac’s eye remarked a guardsman racing toward the mage, but he knew not whether that man was Balan’s or Tarmur’s.

With a freezing cry ripping from his throat, the Gael charged Tarmur Roag with all the speed of his powerful legs.

Having begun his action, the treacherous wizard completed it: he ripped away the heavy curtain ere he responded to Cormac’s shout.

Behind the drape lay the wall, with two feet of space between. There stood a night-dark robe surmounted by a noisome death’s head; around its neck gleamed a slim chain of silver and on the robe’s breast flashed the sigil of Danu, moon-points down. The undying wizard was otherwise unbound. Beside him stood a redbearded giant who looked nigh naked without ax or scalemail corselet or round Danish helm; in chains he was, and with a gag covering his mouth. Cormac saw that iron links secured Wulfhere’s wrists to his ankles, but without play enough to allow the Dane to get his fingers at his gag.

That scene Cormac mac Art saw all in the flash of a moment. There was no time for a sigh of relief at seeing Wulfhere alive and Thulsa Doom still immobilized by the Sign of the Moonbow; Tarmur Roag turned at the Gael’s shout and his pallid gaze fell on the dark man who raced at him with naked sword in hand.

At sight of him who had done such violence to his plans, the Moyturan wizard’s eyes seemed to spark yellow, as with leaping flames of hate. He gestured viciously, as if he were hurling some missile.

Was instinct saved mac Art; piratic weapon-man’s instinct caused him to lunge sideward. Materialized from nothingness, from the air itself and the arcane power of Tarmur Roag, a long shadow-spear drove at and past him.

In that desperate dodgery Cormac lost his footing. He fell, armour crashing and grating on the floor of glaucous stone.

Tarmur Roag whirled and with both hands whipped the Chain of Danu from around the neck of Thulsa Doom. He tossed it away, and plucked a dagger from a sheath up the sleeve of his silvery robe. Instantly the eyesockets of the skull blazed the red of witchfire on a foggy night. The will of the undying wizard had been returned to him-and with it returned his sheerest malevolence and lust for vengeance.

Cormac rose in time to see two things: the charging Moyturan weapon-man had swerved to attack him, not the wizard-and Wulfhere’s chains did not prevent him from lifting his hands as high as Tarmur Roag’s neck. The Dane grasped the mage by the throat with a suddenness and violence that jarred the dagger from Tarmur Roag’s hand.

The guardsman came on for Cormac. It’s no time I have for this interfering idiot, the Gael thought, angered at the delay. He took one step forward while he launched a sword-cut with such irresistible strength and savagery that it met his attacker’s stroke and sheared through his blade as though it had been cheese.

Half the traitor’s blade flew through the air to ring clanging and skirling on the floor. The other half completed its chop, though weakly; Cormac’s raging blow had nigh broken the man’s arm along with his sword. Now, just as viciously, Cormac kicked him up under the hem of his mailcoat, bashed him in the head with his buckler as the retching fellow started to fall, making sick noises. Then the Gael’s sword came whizzing back to cleave into the other’s face at the nose. The gory corpse sprawled and Cormac had to set a foot against it to free his blade of the Moyturan’s skull.

Tarmur Roag’s face had taken on colour for the first time in his life. It went red, then began to blacken. His eyes bulged and his tongue quivered out. His heels cleared the floor as Wulfhere lifted, and a great shudder went through the Moyturan mage. Then, as Thulsa Doom marshaled his senses and started past, the Dane swung that ugly corpse so as to stagger the ancient wreaker of evil.

Tarmur Roag’s body fell limply. Thulsa Doom rose from his knees and turned blazing red eye-pits on the giant. In the wizard’s bony hand was Tarmur’s dagger.

“Wulfhere! Pig of a blood-bearded barbarian… for you I can spare a moment!”

A long sword of shining steel whizzed down in a blurring streak of silver. The dagger drove at Wulfhere-and was carried away with the arm that wielded it. No blood splashed as Thulsa Doom groaned and turned his awful faceless head toward his attacker.

With a second wild sweep that narrowly missed the Dane’s swelling chest, Cormac’s sword lifted the skull of Thulsa Doom from his shoulders. The flying death’s head struck a pillar, rebounded to the floor with a loud cracking sound, and rolled.

“HAIL THE QUEEN! RIORA REIGNS!”

Cormac recognized the bellowing voice; it was Balan, triumphant. He and his remaining men had defeated their erstwhile fellow guardsmen. And Tarmur Road lay dead. And the undying wizard was beheaded.

But he was not dead.

The headless, one-armed robe turned, stopped when its front was turned toward the yellow-white object that gleamed on the floor fifteen feet away.

Then Thulsa Doom started for his head.

Cormac was already striking away the chains that linked Wulfhere’s feet to the wall. On one knee then to sever the length that connected the Dane’s ankles, Cormac saw the horror that brought silence on all else who witnessed: the tall, headless robe bent, clutched up the skull, and set it upon the center of its shoulders. Instantly it adhered and was fast.

A ringing peal of satanic laughter burst from the death’s head mouth and echoed from the temple’s stone walls.

Then Thulsa Doom ran, with astonishing speed, toward the steps at whose top stood the Queen of Moytura.

Bellowing “Dithorba!” Cormac leaped after the undying wizard. Behind him, chains clinked as Wulfhere started to follow.

Dithorba had said he possessed but few talents beyond that of his strange travel-by-mind. At last he demonstrated; his was the Danu-given power of Cathbadh. A wall of flame leaped up a few feet in front of the running Thulsa Doom. Cormac saw that the fire rose not so high as those of the mage of Danu’s Isle, and was pale blue rather than yellow and orange. Nevertheless the fire-wall served its purpose. The skull-surmounted robe skidded to a stop and back-paced hurriedly.

“Attack!” Balan’s voice cried, and frozen Queen’s Guardsmen were mobilized… though only Balan and six others were on their feet.

Snarling, Thulsa Doom seemed to waver, to shimmer… and became a plaintively wailing Erris of Moytura.

Cormac was running, and his broad sweeping cut was already begun. Again he lopped off the head of the undying wizard. It rolled on the floor, a piteous sight to shake strong men: the head of a pretty young woman whose eyes and mouth gaped and whose lovely pale hair flew.

And then Erris’s head was a rattling, hairless, fleshless skull; the true head of Thulsa Doom.

Once again the robed body went for its severed head… but Wulfhere, charging past Cormac like an enraged bear, seized the headless body. Both fell, to roll wrestling, desperately seeking crippling holds. Cries rose as the robe vanished, and the flamehaired giant appeared to be wrestling with a huge growling shaggy bear…

And then Wulfhere fought a lashing, writhing serpent…

And then a woman, her with orange-red hair and green eyes, in leathern armour and tall, tall boots that rose up under her tunic, a woman who cried out, “Wulfhere, No! Wulfhere-”

Shaking like a wind-blown aspen, Cormac tore his pouch from his belt. Ruthlessly he spilled onto the temple floor the gifts he’d brought for a queen: garnets and emeralds, a great twinkling sapphire and two sunny amethysts, a necklace of coral and stones found only in Europe. The treasure of Doom-heim twinkled and sparkled on the stone floor. It was the sack Cormac mac Art needed, now.

A few steps he took, and caught up the death’s head of Thulsa Doom, and popped it into the leathern bag.

As he drew its strings, the wall of blue flame died without leaving so much as a smoke-smudge on the temple floor.

The Queen of Moytura descended the steps while Cormac mac Art strode toward them. Behind her came Dithorba. He carried a hammer, brought from the Inn of Red Rory.

A few feet away, Wulfhere rolled grunting and cursing on the floor. Wide-eyed guardsmen saw with fearful horror that he seemed to be wrestling with the same man who approached their queen.

With a proud queen’s sense of drama and her dignity-and an awareness of Cormac’s height-Riora Feachtnachis halted at the bottom step but one. Thus her eyes were slightly above the level of Cormac’s. He extended the leathern bag, puffed bulgy with the skull it contained. He rested it on the step at her feet.

“Lady Queen,” he said, “our bargain.”

The man with whom Wulfhere wrestled shrieked in anguish and horrid knowledge; the final death of the Undead wizard was imminent.

“Lady Queen,” Dithorba said, and he handed her a hammer all of iron.

Her light eyes met Cormac’s directly.

“Strike!” he urged, almost shouting.

“Not so fast, Cormac, Champion,” Riora said. “There is another matter we must discuss, first.”

Cormac stared at her. He spoke quietly, his teeth tightly together: “We have a bargain, Riora. My part was to return yourself to the throne. That I have done. Your part is merely to strike this bag with that hammer, to smash the skull of Thulsa Doom.”

“Oh, Cormac,” she murmured, but he gazed implacably. Riora’s face firmed. She lifted her chin haughtily, and Riora spoke for all to hear. “The Queen of the Moyturans will grant the boon you ask, Champion of Moytura, Savior of Moytura… in return for that which Moytura has not-a consort and husband for its queen, and one worthy of her and her people. Yourself, Cormac mac Art!”

Chapter Fifteen:

The Throne of Moytura

“Lady Queen,” Dithorba said, with reproach and accusation in his voice. “You gave your word; both Torna and I were present! It is as Cormac has stated!”

Her face stiffened still more; her jawline was as if chiseled from stone. Her mouth, insofar as her sensuous lips were capable, assumed a straight line.

Her head lowered slowly, until her eyes met Cormac’s. As a reminder, she tapped the head of the hammer into her palm. “Stay with me, Cormac mac Art, Trenfher na Moytura!”

From behind the grimly staring mac Art, Balan’s voice roared out and echoed from wall to wall of Danu’s temple: “NO man of the GAELS may rule the Tuatha de Danann! There may be no such consort of our queen!”

Riora’s light eyes went cold and hard as diamonds as she stared over Cormac’s head. She lifted an arm; she pointed. “Cormac my darling, my champion-slay that traitor!”

Cormac backed from the steps and moved to one side. The pouch of leather lay at Riora’s feet; still Wulfhere strove to hold the headless Thulsa Doom and still the latter struggled to break free of the huge man. Cormac turned to gaze into Balan’s eyes, and the Danan commander stared no less levelly. Cormac looked again at Riora, who stood with chin high and eyes cold. He waited until she looked again at him.

“I will not,” he told her.

After a long moment, Riora cried in a voice almost pitiful, “Who rules in Moytura?”

“The queen,” Balan called, “and no other-and never one who is not of the de Danann!”

Cormac’s voice was a mere mutter, which only Riora and Dithorba heard. “A girl, who knows not how to behave herself as a woman, much less a queen… and who does dishonour on herself and her people by breaking her word… and insisting on the impossible.”

Riora swung her eyes and then her head this way and that, as if seeking approval or aid; any sort of reinforcement for her unreasonable and egocentric willfulness. She saw none. All stared, and on the faces of some were worried frowns-nervousness and worry both for herself and her people.

“But… it is my will! It is what I want! Can never a queen have what she wants? Must she belong to her people and the old men who advise her?”

There was no reply.

“Wulfhere,” Cormac said, “release Thulsa Doom.”

Wulfhere still struggled, for though two Danan guardsmen had stabbed his opponent, they sought not to pin Thulsa Doom and so he was unaffected, woundless and strong as ever once their iron blades left his robed body.

“Wha-”

“Release him, Wulfhere!”

Wulfhere objected, and did not understand, and did as his friend demanded.

The headless body rose. It seemed to look this way and that, though without eyes or even a skull to set them in. It rose-and advanced on Riora. The queen cowered against Dithorba, then reached out piteously to Cormac. He put a symbolic additional pace between them and stared coldly at her.

Thulsa Doom approached.

Dithorba could not bear it; again a wall of weak blue fire rose before the stalking horror.

This time Thulsa Doom only paused. Then he, it, walked through the fire. His robe caught at the hem and the yellow flame licked up. The undying wizard reached the foot of the steps-and reached for Riora Feachtnachis.

With a little cry, the fearful queen squatted and brought the iron hammer smashing down onto the leathern pouch Cormac had left at her feet. The hammer struck the bulge of the skull within; all heard it crack and saw the bulge flatten.

Instantly the headless body twitched into gruesome shuffling movement. The unspeakable ancient abomination that was Thulsa Doom lurched into uncontrolled and uncontrollable movement; spastic jerks and twitches took possession of the robe that was his sole manifestation. The queen struck again. The long dark robe convulsed and staggered, shuddered and lurched even as the yellow flames rose up its shifting folds.

Then the flames roared up unnaturally, formed a plume of fierce yellow-white. Straight up that jerking figure they rose in a plume, and-vanished. That which had been Thulsa Doom had turned to ash, like dust that settled to the temple floor as after a windstorm during a drought.

Men murmured; their queen crouched, staring, shivering.

Only then did Cormac return to her.

From beneath her hammer he drew his belt pouch. The bag was limp. He opened its drawstrings, widened the mouth, and upended it. The small quantity of fine, almost transparent dust that sifted down may have been all that remained of that fearsome skull… or it may merely have been dust, in the bag aforetime. Nothing more emerged save those few grains of dust. Cormac held only an unornarnented leathern sack; the pouch that had contained the dread skull of Thulsa Doom was empty.

After eighteen thousand years, a hundred and eighty centuries, Thulsa Doom was dead; permanently dead. Evil incarnate had left the world.

Cormac stared at the woman who crouched on the steps in a manner far less than regal. She looked like an awed, fear-filled girl whose eyes begged for understanding and comfort.

“It is done, Riora. The throne is yours. Tarmur Roag is dead. Your cousin is wounded and your prisoner-and from what I’ve seen of ye, better for him he’d lost his head to Balan’s sword rather than a mere few fingers.”

She stared. Her lips moved. No sound emerged.

“It is done,” he repeated. “Wulfhere and I must return to our own. All the world owes ye a debt, though I’ll not be thanking ye for doing that to which ye were forced.”

She found her voice. The hammer clanked on the steps as her hand moved out to clutch his arm. “Cormac… stay. Be King of Moytura-King of the Danann.”

“I will not. I cannot.”

Her voice lowered and her fingertips stroked the skin of his forearm. “Stay anyhow, then. No crown need be on you. Tarry with me.”

Cormac looked around. Poets, chroniclers, priests-ah!

“Balan! Yon man in the yellow tunic-he wants arresting and questioning. And… all the priests save him.” He pointed.

Balan turned; his men, so long frozen, came alive. The man in the tunic of primrose hue betrayed himself by falling to his knees and swearing that Tarmur Roag had forced him. The priest Cormac had singled out glanced about and, as if evading some dread plague, stepped away from his cohorts. They glared their malignance at him and at the Gael.

“He in the yellow tunic, and those four,” Cormac said, “I noted well, earlier. No shock or surprise seemed upon them at news of the treachery done here, or of the queen’s imprisonment.”

Balan nodded. “Many will want questioning,” he said.

“Many will DIE!” Riora cried, rising, quivering.

Cormac looked at her, and his face was inscrutable-unless it was sadness it showed, and perhaps a trace of pity.

“Odin’s beauteous red beard, it’s days I’ve been prisoner, and not enough food given me to nourish a titmouse! Be there food in Moytura?-and ale?”

Cormac smiled slightly at Wulfhere, and he nodded. “We will remain, and eat and sleep and share ale with ye of Moytura… our brothers beneath the earth.” And on the morrow, he mused, we will hie ourselves from this place of an unworthy ruler.

The queen turned bright eyes on him, but Cormac’s expression when he looked upon her was unreadable. Then he turned from her to stride half the temple’s length and to pick up that which Tarmur Roag had slung to the, floor; the Chain of Danu that had so long held Thulsa Doom.

The little band of people who made their way from temple to royal palace learned that they’d hardly be going hungry; a celebratory feast had been ordered long hours before and was in preparation. No matter that it had been for traitors who, expected to celebrate their victory in usurping rule in Moytura; there was victual and ale aplenty for the truly victorious. And the menace of Thulsa Doom was ended.

Eighty guardsmen were found locked in an old barracks. Balan made an assumption about their loyalty, based on the fact that the plotters had mured them up. Of none others save the six who’d fought at his side in the temple-and the three wounded others now attended by the queen’s own physician-could he be sure. Hence the eighty became at once the Palace Guard, and officers were set to arranging their shifts. None knew how many others might have been privy to the plot of Cairluh and Tarmur Roag-and in sympathy with it. Peoples had been so stupid before as to throw over one distasteful ruler only to install the equally bad, or worse, and of a surety would do so again.

As for Cairluh, Balan insisted that the queen’s cousin-who was also Balan’s, Cormac learned-Cairluh receive either medical treatment or instant execution as a mercy; the queen was for sending her plotting cousin at once to the dungeon she’d so recently quitted, and him with wounds untreated. Cormac heard her shout at her Commander of Guardsmen, the Lord Balan. Balan never raised his voice. Dithorba and Torna joined their entreaties to his, speaking much of what was seemly. They prevailed.

Cormac and Wulfhere were given sumptuous quarters, a room for each, and with every inch of stone covered and disguised; the Moyturans saw enough of bare rock. The Gael soon learned that his room abutted and adjoined the royal apartment. Onto an overly soft bed he tossed the Chain of Danu that Thulsa Doom had worn. He stood gazing at it, fingering his own Moonbow.

While Wulfhere was served by ale-bearing young women, Cormac went seeking Balan. He obtained privacy with the commander, despite the fact that the latter was passing busy. His queen was bathing and seeing to herself; her advisers and aides saw to the business of the queendom.

“It’s a brace of questions I’d ask of ye, Lord Balan.”

“We are weapon-men together; call me Balan. You who saved us all-ask.”

“Ye love the queen? No-I mean: Ye love Riora?” Balan’s face went rigid. “I would kill you for her, brother weapon-man.”

“There’ll be no need. It’s among our own Wulfhere and I will be returning, on the morrow, however ye reckon day and night in this kingdom of twilight. And Balan: It’s no love I have on me for Riora.”

“Nor do you understand my loving her.”

Cormac shrugged. “It is no business of mine to say, Balan. Have-have ye been lovers?”

“Nor is that for you to ask, Cormac mac Art.”

“True. I have asked. I have some… semblance of a plan, Balan. Her feeling for me is infatuation, no more. I would know of yourself.”

“We have been lovers. We have spoken love. We have even spoken of marriage. She is… a difficult woman.”

“Umm. Moytura could-your pardon, Balan-Moytura could be the worse for her in uncontrolled rule, and far better with you as her lover, or more. Ah. Your face has turned to stone. I’ll be saying no more.”

Nor did he. But the Gael held much inner converse with himself, and was still at his thoughts when Wulfhere had downed six huge cups and was disporting himself in his chamber with a maid more than willing. And still the sombre mac Art turned thoughts in his mind; he was still pondering when a door opened behind him. He turned.

She was beautiful. The gown and jewels and chaplet crown on her were beautiful, and her face with its reddened lips and darkened brows and lashes and eyelids to break the Danan pallor and set it off to her advantage; Riora the Fair and Righteous knew how to enhance the natural sensuous loveliness that was hers.

“I would have the Champion of Moytura escort me to the feast, Cormac.”

He considered. Aye, he would do that, and he did. He was aware of many eyes on him, more than a few of which held troubled gazes. And the queen and courtiers and their two guests banqueted, and quaffed ale. The Gael and the Dane were plied with questions about the outer world, so that they were able to ask but few of their own. Cormac did learn why his head had bothered him since he’d set foot here, and why too the goddess-flame Dithorba had raised, just as Cathbadh on the isle, had burned blue rather than brightly. The air of Moytura was not good, and fire was a great danger in this world without plants, though underground rivers found the sea and air from the sea found all parts of Moytura. It was thus simple for Cormac to prevail upon Dithorba for a strong sleeping potion, though the mage counseled more ale.

Considerably later, Cormac mac Art opened a door from his chamber into a sumptuous and sprawling one that was darkened by the drawing of heavy drapes against the perpetual light of Danu. There awaited a sensuous woman for her champion, and he joined her. Once he had done what he intended with Dithorba’s potion, stupor replaced desire in the eyes of Riora and her quickened breathing relaxed more and more. Then the queen was asleep.

Cormac returned to his own room, dressed, and went along the hall to the chamber given over to his Danish friend. Abed with no less than two Moyturans, Wulfhere protested violently-and grumbling, rose and dressed himself. Aye, the smiling young women with him knew where they might find the lord Balan.

Balan stared at the two men in much surprise; both were dressed, and armoured, and with their weapons by them.

“She sleeps,” Cormac said, without preamble. “And no, we did not, she and I. Wulfhere and I leave tonight, Balan-now. Nor do I wish to leave behind in Moytura an enemy, and for naught, and him a weapon-man with high skill and bravery on him.”

“I am not so petty, Cormac mac Art.”

Aye, the Gael thought, it is why yourself should be king of Moytura-and not Riora.

“For saving us all from torture and the slow death-and the de Danann from misrule by Tarmur Roag through Cairluh, Cormac mac Art of the Gaels, we and even Danu herself owe you debt.”

“Balan: you are better than a good man. You have a queen now whom you are too good a man to serve. It’s no thanks I deserve for setting Riora again on the throne.”

“Be careful, my friend. I love her.” Balan looked down. “Danu help me-for what you say is true. For me her rule will be a life of joy and misery, each giving way to the other. For Moytura, she is considerably the lesser of two evils. I cannot be her husband. No man can control a queen, and I’ll not be my wife’s subject!”

“Balan: attend me, and hold rein on yourself whilst ye hear my words. She sleeps… deeply, for I asked Dithorba for a sleeping potion and gave it her. Easy man,” Cormac cautioned, as Balan showed reaction. “The more fool yourself, Balan, an ye are not by her side when she wakes-on the morrow and every morrow after.”

“I like not your drugging her, but I’ll not dispute those words.”

Cormac was smiling. “Go there. Ye’ll be finding that she has a gift of me, Balan… a certain necklace of silver. Lovers may wish to wear a sign, an identical piece of jewellery,” he went on, lifting from his breast the sign of the Moonbow he’d so long worn. “This one is for you, then.” He slipped it over Balan’s head.

“Balan, be wise. Methinks ye be fit to rule here. Love for a woman is on ye, and she loves ye but has had her head turned a bit by a stranger. She rules Moytura… and now ye rule her, for she cannot remove her Chain of Danu or order its removal. Keep them both in place, Balan, and rule both Riora and the people of Danu! All will be happier for it-aye, Riora included!”

Balan was staring as the two men left him in quest of Dithorba’s quarters in the palace. Gazing after them, fingering the silver chain and its sigil, Balan commenced to smile…

Dithorba was not happy at being roused from his sleep. Had the potion not worked? Aye, Cormac assured him, and he explained. Then he stated his intention, and made his request, and Dithorba agreed. One by one he mind-conveyed the saviours of Moytura to the tunnel just outside the precints of his land.

“I shall say nothing, Cormac mac Art. But five in Moytura have had knowledge of the Chains of Danu. Tarmur Roag, and the queen herself, and the lord Balan, and my apprentice. Nor will he say aught of it, an Balan is… wise.”

“And Riora can not.”

“Aye.”

“Advise the queen, Dithorba… and the king.”

“Fare well, Wulfhere Skull-splitter. Farewell, Cormac mac Art. Danu shed her light on you, both.” And Dithorba Loingsech was not there.

The two men walked, not without weariness on them. When at last they came to the mouth of the cavern in the hill of Bri Leith, they saw that it was night outside. Nor were they saddened; retreating a little way, they lay down on unyielding earth and stone, and they slept as thought they were in the finest of palace beds.

“Cormac,” Wulfhere said on the morrow as they emerged from the cavern, “ye do realize… with him gone forever, we have no hope of returning to our own dimension.

“Aye. We must be seeing what this land holds for a pair of scarred sea-wolves, Wulfhere!”

A few paces down the hill under the misty sun of Eirrin, they glanced at each other, and they looked back.

The Doorway to the People of Danu had vanished.

Wulfhere shook his head. “Here we be, and the Doorway gone, and with all we’ve done, it’s nothing we have to show for it but these two cloaks woven of cloth made by worms!”

Cormac mac Art but smiled, and as he walked the Chains of Danu that had been worn by Tarmur Roag and Dithorba clinked in the pouch at his belt.