Legion from the Shadows

DEDICATION

To David A. Drake-

A Romanophile who doesn’t believe the Empire has fallen; who has been writing fantasy tales of Classical Rome these past ten years; and who furnished the historical data for this novel:

Noli elicere quid deponi nequitur…

EPIGRAPHS

Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?

Letter from Persil Mandifer: Manly Wade Wellman, Fearful Rock

Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred: H. P. Lovecraft, The Festival

PROLOGUE

The sun that morning had shone sullen red through the mists that swirled above the ridges and moors. Now the sun that sank beneath the Highlands’ jagged rim burned a deeper red-as red as the blood that clotted across the trampled heath below. In the lengthening shadow fifteen thousand lay slain-skin-clad savage and armored legionary, Pict and Roman-their hacked and skewered bodies strewn wherever they fell.

Leaning on the shoulders of his chieftains, Othna Mak Morn, war chief of the Pictish clans, looked upon the field of carnage through dying eyes that blazed bright with triumph. An entire legion had died here today-a victory purchased life for life with Pictish blood. Rome had suffered its most crushing defeat on British soil, and Othna Mak Morn would not walk alone on the road to hell.

To protect Rome’s new province from the unsubdued tribes of the North, Emperor Hadrian had ordered the construction of a great wall across the breadth of Britain. Some eighty Roman miles it stretched, the Wall of Hadrian, across the Solway-Tyne isthmus-cutting the island in two with unconquered Caledonia to the north and the partially philoRoman tribes to the south. For years the legions had labored over ditches and earthworks, raising a wall of stone and turf some eight to ten feet thick and some fifteen feet in height, with fortlets for its garrisons at each mile along its length.

The Caledonian tribes made known their wrath over this hated monument of Roman conquest through countless raids and ambushes as the wall progressed. Their tactics were strike and retreat-a sudden storm of arrows amidst the sweating legionaries; sentries slain in the night and fires stealthily set; small bands of legionaries who marched across the moors and never returned. Their sudden, swooping raids were a constant and deadly harassment. The ponderous Roman military machine was too clumsy to overtake these savage guerilla bands who struck like adders and swiftly melted away into the heather-beyond pursuit into the Caledonian Highlands. But neither were the northern tribes powerful enough to mass a major offensive against the entrenched Roman legions, and withal the Wall of Hadrian inexorably rose to completion.

Yes, these murderous guerilla raids demanded reprisals from the might of Rome-some massive counterattack that would impress upon thick barbarian skulls the futility of their petty resistance against the empire that ruled the world. Thus came orders to Publius Calidius Falco, general in command of Legio IX Hispana, whose legion had at last completed its work on the turf wall sector: Advance north among the Caledonian tribes; lay waste to all crops and herds and villages on your march; slay all who stand before you.

And on one morning in late spring the Ninth Legion marched north of Hadrian’s Wall-six thousand legionaries and two thousand auxiliary cavalry, with slaves, women and children in the ponderous baggage train. They marched into the mist and the heather-and vanished from recorded history.

There was little resistance to the Ninth as its iron-shod march carried ever northward through the lands of the Brigantes, the Selgovae, the Novantae, the Damnonii, the Venicones, and others of the Celtic tribes. For how could half-naked barbarians dispute the advance of an entire legion? The barbarians had no towns to burn-towns were a Roman innovation in Britain. But such rude camps and settlements as they encountered, the legion put to the torch-looting herds and stored grain, destroying crops in the fields, slaying all who did not flee. On into the bleak Highlands of Caledonia, where dwelt a race of savages said to be far older than the barbaric Celts.

Calidius Falco had heard tales of the Picts, most of which he greatly discounted. They were blood enemies of the Celts, who feared them and in general left them alone in the fastness of the Highlands. Legends told that the Picts had been masters of Britain in forgotten centuries, before the Celtic invaders long ago defeated them and drove their survivors into the waste places of Caledon. The Picts were said to dwell apart in brutish savagery-a degenerate and ogrish residue of the Stone Age. There were many other dark rumors and legends that brought a sneer to Calidius Falcos lips. On occasion he had been shown corpses of squat, almost dwarfish warriors clad in fragments of crudely tanned fur and armed with heavy black bows. Such men were Picts, Calidius was told-but while he acknowledged their skin was a darker hue and their facial features almost apish, it mattered not to him whether such barbarian carrion was Pict or Celt.

What did matter to Calidius Falco were the persistent reports his spies and scouts brought to him concerning a substantial army of all the Pictish clans that was said to be massing in the Caledonian Highlands. Such reports twisted the general’s sneering lips into a ruthless smile. These barbarian fools were playing into his hands. Had they already forgotten the lesson Calgacus so bloodily learned not fifty years before in these highlands!

For many weeks the Ninth had been burning and pillaging through the heather. They had fought raids and skirmishes beyond counting-but nothing approaching a decisive engagement. Now at last their depredations were drawing the barbarians out of their lairs and mud hovels-luring them together into one great army of rabble that would be meat to dull sharp Roman swords. For it was not battle but butchery when poorly equipped and untrained barbarian armies met the disciplined legions in open battle. Had not Calgacus faced Julius Agricola with an army of thirty thousand barbarians? And had not Agricola left ten thousand barbarian dead on the slopes of Mons Graupius that day, with less than four hundred Roman dead? And in doing that he committed only auxiliary troops, with his legions standing idly by the watch!

Legio IX marched confidendy into the Caledonian Highlands to seek out, engage and annihilate this Pictish army. Calidius Falco felt no fear, for defeat was a chance so unlikely as to change his sneering smile to broad laughter. He was following in the steps of Agricola-and, after all, were not the Picts said to be even more primitive than the barbarians who had followed Calgacus? The Ninth would win a crushing victory, the Caledonian tribes would be subdued, and he, Publius Calidius Falco, would return, in triumph with the governorship of Britain a likely reward once reports reached Emperor Hadrian in Rome.

The Ninth had barely resumed its march that fatal morning when the dawn skies turned black with arrows, and Calidius Falco knew he had at last engaged the Pictish army.

At the moment the Picts attacked, the Ninth had been advancing along a mountain river whose narrow gorge pierced the Highland fastness. Well was it named Serpent Gorge, but guides swore this defile gave passage into the central Highlands where the Picts massed their army. Rain the night before left the rushing stream swollen over its banks, and footing was treacherous on still-damp boulders and slippery mud. Pressed between the walls of the ravine and the flooding stream, Legio IX was stretched out in a poorly ordered column. At the head, men with axes hacked away trees in an effort to clear a roadspace, while midway back cursing legionaries struggled to force the overloaded baggage train through the clutching tangle of tree roots, spiny gorse and rainslick boulders.

Somewhere in the heather beyond, scouts who should have given warning stared sightlessly into the mists that touched their upturned feces. The attack struck the Romans completely by surprise-and this time it was no sudden ambusn and swift retreat. The hills swarmed with Picts, and Calidius Falco felt the chill touch of fear.

Since an attack on a column usually came from the rear, the legions marched with their baggage train in a protective position near the middle. Calidius had intended to build a summer camp in the Highlands, so that Legio IX was hampered with enormous quantities of equipage and paraphernalia, as well as the plunder they had taken on the march. Panic reigned as Pictish arrows struck the ponderous baggage train. Straining horses plunged and screamed, throwing all into disorder as deadly shafts cut them down. Men dashed about blindly-seeking in vain for cover from the hail of arrows. Wagons overturned, throwing screaming women and children onto the crimson-streaked boulders. In seconds chaos was master.

Already stretched out in a long and disordered array in order to pass through the deep gorge, Legio IX was suddenly cut in half by the hopelessly entangled baggage train in its center. Desperately Calidius threw his cavalry against the archers massed along the slopes above. In the steep-walled ravine their stirrupless horses were worse than useless, and in a matter of minutes the arrows of the Picts had annihilated the mounted auxiliaries. And now Calidius Falco knew his position was untenable.

Still the storm of arrows fell. Still the hidden Pictish army held back in its sheltered position beyond the crest of the valley. Quick flanking movements to the fore and rear of the column cut off advance or retreat within the defile. To remain in the gorge was certain death. The only slim chance for the Ninth was to storm the slopes of the ravine and break out of the trap. Desperately the legionaries sought to form testudines, to clamber up the steep acclivities in the teeth of Pictish arrows. It was virtually impossible to keep shields interlocked over the pitched terrain of massive boulders and matted gorse, but somehow ragged clots of legionaries gained the crest.

And there struck the main body of the Pictish army.

The battle lasted throughout the day. But its outcome was foredoomed after that first deadly storm of arrows. Had the legionaries been able to regroup upon struggling out of the ravine, had there been fewer Picts awaiting them beyond the crest… But more than half their number sprawled dead upon the precipitous slopes, and the heather was alive with Picts.

Howling war cries which had echoed before the Stone Age, ten thousand Picts fell upon the legionaries who won past the lethal curtain of archery. This was battle without quarter-fought now in uncounted individual clashes of savage ferocity and Roman courage. As a wolf pack attacks a beleaguered elk herd, the near-naked Picts ripped at hastily formed testudines-assailing the upraised shields with a constant barrage of deadly shafts, stabbing with spear and sword wherever a wavering shield opened a chink in the protecting wall, dragging down legionaries within by the very crush of their bleeding bodies. Time and again the legionaries sought to regroup. But their ranks had been shattered by the ambush, and between every desperate knot of armored legionaries swarmed a seething mass of blood-mad savages who fought with no thought but to slay until slain.

The Romans died hard. The heather was strewn with gory monuments where a closing ring of Pictish dead at last centered upon a mound of butchered Romans. But this time barbarian cunning and savage ferocity overcame superior Roman discipline and armament. Legio IX fought grimly to the end, for the legionaries knew it was for them a last stand.

And as the sun burned the western ridges, the Ninth Legion was no more.

Othna Mak Morn gazed upon the victory that was his triumph and his bane, and felt no regret. Chief of the Wolf clan, his was the dynamic spirit that had rallied the scattered Pictish tribes against the Roman invaders-his the keen mind that had planned this ambush-his the tireless sword arm that had raged across the mountainous battlefield, constantly in the fore wherever Roman resistance held the Picts in check. Finally on that blood-drenched field Othna Mak Morn had fallen from the score of wounds that no surgeon could staunch. And while the wounds that gashed his flesh should have stolen his life hours ago, somehow the war chief of the Picts clung to vitality until the last enemy had fallen.

A gore-spattered nemesis, Othna yet stalked across the battlefield, leaning heavily on the thick shoulders of two other clan chiefs. Their brutish feces were shadowed with grief, for the greatest warrior of their race would not share the victory feast his valor had won.

At the brink of the gorge another chieftain toiled up the slope in answer to Othna’s hail. Like Othna, his form and features were straight and well-molded-evidence of a pure aristocratic bloodline as opposed to the mongrel heritage of the gnarled and dwarfish figures about them.

“Is it finished below, Utha Mak Dunn?” demanded the war chief. Utha of the Raven clan it was, who had led the Picts who attacked Legio IX from the rear-cutting off retreat and forcing the desperate Romans to storm the valley walls.

“Almost so, Othna Mak Morn. By the Moon-Woman, I see nothing but Roman carrion here above! The dogs would have done well to die below and save so hard a climb!”

Utha’s grin fell as he saw the paleness of Othna’s face. A glance at the bleak faces of the others told him all that need be said.

“You said, almost?” Othna growled.

“A cavern opens from the walls of Serpent Gorge,” Utha explained. “When we finally cut down the last of their rear guard and fell upon their baggage train, we found that many of the fools had taken refuge within.”

“How many?”

“I can’t say. Some hundreds, perhaps-though many are women and children from the baggage train. The cavern seems to be a large one, for they’ve drawn wagons of supplies in with them and barricaded the entrance.”

“Can’t you break through?” Othna’s face was implacable.

“So far the Romans have held. The passage is narrow, and it’s impossible to rush their barricade. Time and again we’ve had to drag away our dead to clear the entrance for another assault.”

Utha paused. “Calidius Falco would negotiate a surrender.”

Othna shook off the arms that supported him. “Calidius yet lives!” he shouted. “Thousands slain, and the chief of my enemies yet lives!”

“He cowers in hiding with women and children,” Utha answered scornfully. “With him is the eagle standard of the Ninth and the last of his personal guard. He vows that he and those with him will fight to the last man unless we grant him terms of honorable surrender…”

“By the gods!” Othna stormed. “I’ll grant him such terms as he has offered our people-fire and sword, rope and cross!”

He drew his sword and strode forward, “Are we dogs and slaves of dogs that a handful of cornered Romans think to demand such of us! Picts! Who will follow me into a rats’ den!”

That final blaze of fury was the final spark of life. Othna Mak Morn toppled forward, and Utha caught his slack form as he fell.

“Wo! Wo to Pictdom!” intoned the white-bearded priest who closed the glazed eyes. “In your hour of triumph, your greatest son has fallen. Wo to Pictdom! Wo to the Men of the Heather!”

Utha Mak Dunn bowed his head. Old Gonar was right. Only Othna Mak Morn’s personal dynamism had united the scattered clans into a short-lived confederacy to repel the Roman invaders. Half the blood of Pictdom had been spilled to win this victory, and with Othna dead the clans would quickly drift apart. “Othna has a son,” Utha suggested.

“A babe with a withered arm and crooked back,” Gonar scoffed. “Othna let Berul live only because he feared to die without male issue, and that the ancient line of Mak Morn would thus be extinct.”

“Perhaps Berul will have a son, and he a son…”

“May there be sons of sons for another age to come,” mourned Gonar, “I see naught but wo for Pictdom. Truly today was the last great moment of our race, and now are left only memories of ancient glory. Memories that will fade…”

Utha bit off a bitter retort. One of his captains climbed toward him from the gorge below.

“The Romans still hold the cavern mouth,” he reported. “Calidius demands Othna’s promise of safe passage to the Roman wall. Else…”

His voice trailed away as he gained the crest and saw Othna’s still form.

“By the Moon-Woman, I’ll give the Romans an answer to their demands!” swore Utha wrathfully. “Roll boulders into the cavern’s mouth! By the gods, pull down half the mountain over their rats’ burrow!” He shook tears from his eyes and brandished his fist. “If they dare not give open battle, we’ll grant them a lingering death in the darkness of the earth! Their tomb shall be a cairn to tell of our greatest victory-and their dying moans shall gladden Othna’s heart in hell!”

The order was given, and a thousand willing hands seized boulders and pry-bars-toiled for into the night to roll countless tons of stone over the mouth of the cavern in Serpent Gorge. By dusk the doomed screams of those within no longer penetrated the rising cairn…

Seasons passed. The bones of Legio IX Hispana-the Lost Legion-bleached silently beneath the heather and gorse that bloomed ever more verdantly for the decay that now enriched the sparse Highland soil. Within the river gorge spring freshets washed away the debris of mouldering bone and armor, rotting timber and harness-until at length only the silent cairn in Serpent Gorge stood witness to the blood that once flowed there.

Eighty years passed…

1

TAINT OF THE BLACK STONE

Mist cloaked the heathered hills in the stark blackness that had swallowed the moon in the hour before dawn. Ash-choked embers of a hundred campfires made sullen bits of light along the rolling waste. The night skies were obscured by the veil of fog, so that at a distance the dark hills and dying fires seemed to be a cloud-locked firmament with a scatter of dim red stars.

About the fires three thousand or more warriors lay in fitful sleep fretted with dreams of coming battle. Here and there small knots of men sat awake, talking in low voices and sharpening iron weapons to a final hone. Beyond the dismal glow of the fires, sentries watched in the mist.

Where burned an outlying fire, another kept watch beside a solitary sleeper. Like those about him, the watcher had the appearance of a stunted giant-his massive shoulders and thick chest cast of a mold too large for his gnarled limbs. His savage face and sloping brow were twisted in concern as he stared down at the sleeping man.

Wrapped in a wolfskin cloak thrown over a light shirt of black mesh-mail, the recumbent figure was a man of medium height. The rubrous glow of the dying fire was reflected in the lambent depths of the strange red gem centered in the iron crown that encircled his high forehead and straight black hair. The sleeper’s skin was of the same bleak darkness of the North, and his hawklike features bore a certain racial similarity to those of the ogreish warriors grouped about him. There the resemblance ended, as if the brutish tribesmen were no more than a degenerate caricature of the man who wore the iron crown.

If the savage warriors who squatted by their smouldering fires resembled misshapen apes, the aspect of the sleeper evoked the image of a panther. Even deep slumber could not dispel the alert vitality of his compact frame, the savage potential evident in hardmuscled shoulders and loins, corded neck and deep chest. Lines of exhaustion etched his well-formed features, and the face beneath the gemset crown was that of a youth in his late twenties.

But his youthful face was shadowed with a burden that belied his years, and it was clear to the brutish sentry that more than anticipation of the coming battle was robbing his liege’s sleep of restoring peace. For nightmare had claimed the fretful slumber of Bran Mak Morn-again, as it had for so many nights before.

The dwarfed giant stretched out a calloused hand, then hesitated. His king had scarcely caught more than an hour’s rest during the past several days of forced march. He would need all his great strength come the dawn; better uneasy sleep than no rest at all Had the Pict understood the full horror of the nightmare in which his king now writhed, he would have awakened him from this tortured sham of sleep in an instant.

Chill sweat beaded the sleeper’s face, and behind closed lids wide-staring eyes looked upon the past.

Again the sentinel stones of Dagon’s Ring rose about him, and Bran Mak Morn stumbled as in a trance through that ominous circle of lichen-clad menhirs-a circle that in the space-defying geometry of dream seemed to extend in endless repetitions through other planes and dimensions. The silent monoliths were a maze-a vortex of elder horror from which his mind could no more extricate itself than could his shambling footsteps turn away from their twisting course toward the altar that awaited.

Sick flame in pre-Adamite darkness, the phosphorus-smeared altar drew him toward the horror that lurked in its shadow as certainly as a candle beckons a moth to blackened-winged death. And capering about the altar, her sinuous figure doubly mottled by smears of phosphorescence and the stigma of her heritage-Atla, the half-human witch of Dagon-moor. Bran’s gorge rose again at the memory of those seemingly jointless limbs entwined about his own naked flesh, or her serpentine tongue searching his throat in a kiss of loathsome passion…

The witch-woman’s lithe form postured obscenely upon the altar. Her red lips parted in a pointed-toothed smile. “Welcome! Welcome, King of the Picts!” she shrilled, opening her arms to him. “Have you returned to seek once more my sweet embraces?” Bran’s voice shook with loathing. “No madness, no vengeance could ever force me to seek again your serpent’s kisses.”

Ada’s laughter mocked his revulsion. “Then you seek again a Door to Those Below?”

A stirring in the shadows about the circle of dark stones. Bran glimpsed the shifting turmoil of stunted bodies creeping past the stone pillars-a stealthy advance of slanted, glowing eyes-barely discerned shapes of dread to whose benighted souls even the witch-fire gleam of the altar was a light to be shunned. “There are weapons too foul to use even against Rome!” Bran snarled. His voice echoed-mocking him.

Atlas derisive laughter raced through the hideous sibilants of the lurkers in the shadow. “Too foul? Too foul! And what of the fool who wields them?”

The half-glimpsed shapes cavorted between the menhirs, edging ever closer. Their ophidian whispering was a derisive menace, tearing at his nerves as the grating shrill of talons on slate.

Brans hand sought for swordhilt. “All past! All done!” he roared in defiance. “In one blind moment of rage I summoned the Children of the Night-but never again! Go back to your lairs of slime and abomination, you worms who shun the bourne of men!”

Cold iron gleamed in Bran’s fist and death shone in his dark eyes, but the witch-woman’s laughter scorned him.

“Do you threaten? Do you command? You who have invoked the Black Gods of R’lyeh! You who have sworn by the Namless Ones! You who have touched the Black Stone and summoned forth the Worms of the Earth!

“King of Pictland! King of fools! You have sought to command powers no human hand can leash! You have opened Doors that are not so easily shut again upon those who waited within! You are stained with the taint! You have called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they will come to you again!”

The circle of inhuman eyes surged inward. With a growl of desperate wrath, Bran flung himself toward the witch-woman who stood upon the altar-the fine scales of her naked flesh iridescent in its phosphorescence. His sword slashed to still that hateful mockery.

But the steel blade that should have shorn halfhuman flesh from shoulder to belly slowed in its killing stroke-blurred in dream-like motion, twisted impossibly in his grasp. Blade foreshortened, hilt bulged and expanded. The weight in his fist overbalanced him, wrenched his shoulder.

Bran Mak Morn stumbled to his knees before the stone altar. Dread numbing his brain, he saw that it was not a sword he held, but a black stone. In growing horror, he recognized the unearthly hexahedral shape of dense black stone-the size of his clenched fists and heavier than its bulk evidenced. He saw again the familiar cuneiform inscriptions etched into its smooth sides-sixty characters on each hexagonal face.

The Black Stone…

And then they swarmed over him in a biting and clawing wave of dread. But it was not the abhorrent touch of those hell-spawned dwarfish shapes that bore him to the altar that forced a hopeless scream from Bran Mak Morn’s throat. It was the dawning knowledge of the abominable secrets proclaimed by those dagger-like glyphs carven into the stone by no human hand…

2

THE KING WITH THE IRON CROWN

At the choked sound of the sleeper’s moan, the stunted giant who watched beside him started. What nightmarish horror did his king look upon-Bran Mak Morn, whose stoic mask no hardship nor wound had broken? His gnarled hand gently shook the sleeper’s shoulder.

At the first touch Bran’s breath caught in his throat. Quick as a cat strikes, one corded hand caught the watcher’s wrist-thrusting it away, as Bran’s other hand clasped swordhilt and drew.

“Milord!” gasped the other, wincing at the crushing grip that pinned his hairy wrist. “Milord Bran!”

Like the beat of a raven’s wing, the veil of nightmare passed from Bran’s wide-staring eyes. For an instant he clung to the arm of his grizzled comrade and servant, forcing the shadows of hell from his brain.

“Grom,” he muttered, releasing his grip to wipe cold sweat from his brow. “I almost killed you, old war dog.”

He focused his gaze on the mist-hung moors, then added as if to reassure himself: “A nightmare.”

Grom forbore to mention the moan that had escaped his king’s lips. “It will soon be dawn,” he said instead.

Bran Mak Morn rose to his feet, pantherish grace belying the fatigue that cramped his frame. “You let me sleep, Grom. I had no time for sleep.”

“You’ve been dead on your feet since last sunrise,” a new voice cut in. “I told Grom to let you sleep a few hours when you slumped over your untasted meat. A general must have a clear head and an unfaltering arm to lead his men-thus he must spare time for sleep.”

Only if sleep brings rest, mused Bran wearily. He gazed at the cold joint of meat and rind of black bread in distaste. Days of toil had finally sapped even his iron endurance, and sleep had taken him in defiance of his intention.

“Dawn, is it? Then a good morning to you, Gonar,” he sourly greeted the newcomer. “And there’ll be time enough for sleep by nightfall. For many it will be a final sleep.”

“Final sleep for a pack of Roman dogs,” Grom growled. His was the savage lust for slaughter that counts not the toll of his comrades nor the portents of the following day-so long as no enemy lived to see its dawn.

Bran grunted and accepted the wineskin Grom extended. He swallowed a mouthful of the plundered vintage. Then his eyes fell on old Gonar’s hands, and the wine turned sour in his throat. Short hours ago Bran had stood by to watch while the white-bearded wizard hacked upon the chest and belly of a captive legionary-then dug his talon-like fingers into still-throbbing entrails to make augury for the morrow’s battle. That neither king nor wizard had faith in such primitive mummery mattered little to them and less to the Roman. What mattered were the savage yells from the Pictish host that greeted Gonar’s confident augury of victory.

But Bran Mak Morn-whose steel had strewn Roman entrails and gore upon Britain’s rocky soil almost since the youth had strength to wield a blade-scowled at the rusted smears on Gonar’s bony arms, and spat out the taste of wine. He thrust the wineskin back to Grom.

“Come with me, Gonar,” Bran commanded tersely. Sweeping his wolfskin cloak about his shoulders, the Pictish king stalked away in silence. His age-seamed face masking inward concern, the ancient sorcerer followed.

Striding somberly through the Pictish ranks, Bran passed beyond the scatter of campfires and attained the crest of the ridge. There he halted-arms folded across his powerful chest, braced against the horizon. Winds of departing night caught at his cloak, whipped through his long black hair. From the ridge opposite, a promise of light broke over the eastern sky-filling the shadowed valley below with twisting wraiths of mist and touching the blood-red jewel of his iron crown. Bran filled his lungs with a rush of fresh air and let the predawn chill purge the taint of horror from his soul.

“Gonar,” Bran broke the silence, “I would be free of foul sorceries.”

The wizard stood beside him in thought. Gonar well understood the nightmares that haunted his king-and tactfidly declined to remind Bran that he, Gonar, had begged him not to call upon the Children of the Night.

“But by all the gods!” Bran swore fiercely. “I would see this land free of Rome!”

Gonar hugged his long arms across his scrawny chest, matching Bran in pose and brooding mood. Taller than Bran, the wizard had not half his bulk. His lean frame seemed to be no more than bone and sinew; his skin, dry and scaly from age, was marked with cryptic tattoos from head to foot. A white beard fell to his waist, and the eyes in that age-creased face blazed with strange wisdom.

At length the wizard spoke. “I am directly descended from that Gonar who was the greatest sorcerer in the days of Kull of Atlantis, king of Valusia. And though a hundred thousand years and a thousand fathoms of sea have swept Valusia into forgotten myth, there are fewer links in the chain of my ancestry than common minds could grasp. I am old, Bran-I have outlived a hundred years. I have been a priest of the Serpent, the Moon and the Shadow; now I am high counsellor to the first acknowledged king of Pictdom in five hundred years. My brain holds the secrets of elder lore and hidden knowledge that would drive other minds into gibbering oblivion. But for these years and for this wisdom I have had to pay a price.”

Bran Mak Morn stared at the wizard, sombre question in his black eyes.

“Rome is strong,” Gonar said simply. “Her legions rule the world where in past eons our race held dominion. And we are now but a scattering of savage clans, driven into the bleak hills of Caledon.”

The aged priest’s eyes looked into the past, and as he spoke, Bran wondered how much was known to the wizard only as history-and how much was remembered from personal experience.

“It was two and a half centuries ago that the Romans first invaded our shores. Twice the great Caesar hurled his legions across the Channel into Britain. Ha! How we fought him then on the Ceanntish beaches and made the tides run red with Roman blood! Even the seas and the winds and the land itself fought back the invaders! Still the legions marched onward, and though the Britons for a space united under Caswallon-or Cassivellaunus, as the Romans called him-they could not conquer Caesar’s legions. Treachery and cowardice melted away the army of the Britons in the wake of Roman victories, until at last Cassivellaunus had to capitulate. But by the Serpent, we made the conquered soil bitter with Roman blood, and great Caesar was glad to slink back to Gaul with treaties and tribute so dearly won!

“It was a century before Rome thought again to send her legions to make of Britain a captive colony and to feed her empire with Britain’s riches and blood. Ha! Claudius was quick to scurry back to his marble palace in Rome, and leave to his generals the task of our enslavement. A decade of suffering and a river of blood, before Ostorius Scapula penetrated the highlands of north Wales to rout the Silurian army of Caratacus in his fortress-but it was treachery again that gave Caratacus into Roman hands to be led in chains before the emperor.

“For a decade the Roman eagle held the South in its talons, content to rule through puppets and proxy beyond the bourne of unconquered Caledon. Then Queen Boudicca rallied the Britons to remember their manhood and cast off the chains of Rome. Ha! There was a slaying! Their hated cities fell! Camulodunum, Londinium, Verulamium-pillage, flame and sword! Victory for the Britons, and for the Romans howling death! Ha! It seemed the Romans would be annihilated and Roman rule thrown off forevermore! Two hundred thousand followed Queen Boudicca northwest from the ashes of Verulamium to where Suetonius Paullinus awaited with but two legions. Two hundred thousand Britons against ten thousand Romans! But Roman discipline stood before the charge of British warriors and chariots-broke Boudicca’s hordes and rolled them back against the wagons and baggage drawn up so that their women and children might sit and watch the Roman defeat! The gods were against us that day-for the Romans slaughtered eighty thousand Britons with only four hundred of their number slain.

“For a score of years after the death of Boudicca and the massacre of her army, Rome was content to rule the South. Then Rome’s face turned toward free Caledon, from whose mist-locked mountains and fens the unconquered tribes stole forth to slay and pillage-untamed wolves ripping at the Roman flock. Julius Agricola led the legions northward, extending Rome’s chain of forts and military roads along the heaths and marshes of the eastern coast, encircling the Highland fastness that he dared not attack directly.

“As the Silures gathered behind Caratacus, so did the Caledonians unite under the leadership of Calgacus to meet the Roman threat. For what was the safety of these cold and barren Highlands when the Roman fleet was plundering and burning along the coast, and Roman forts were seizing command of Caledon’s rich eastern plain? But in so uniting, the tribes of Caledon only acted as Agricola had hoped. For which is the harder foe to vanquish-a lion or a hundred striking adders?

“On Mons Graupius Calgacus awaited the Romans with an army of more than thirty thousand and a superior position on the field. Agricola commanded three legions and a like number of auxiliaries-part of them recruited from the Britons. Again the gods turned from us, for that day Agricola’s eight thousand auxiliary infantry fought Calgacus to a standstill on the Graupian slopes, and when his army moved down from high ground to outflank the Romans, Agricola hurled his three thousand cavalry to break their assault and cut the Caledonians to pieces. Three legions had only to stand and watch while auxiliaries won the day-ten thousand Caledonians slain and not four hundred Romans! And thus the eastern plains of Caledon fell to Rome, and thus for more than a century have Pict and Celt alike been forced to skulk like hunted outlaws in the waste places of the Highlands.”

Bran’s angry curse broke through the wizard’s narrative. “Ha! The Romans conquered and drove the Celts into the Highlands-even as centuries before did the Celtic invaders defeat the Picts and send the remnants of our nation to exile in these bleak mountains. And now Pict and Celt must forget old blood-feuds, and stand together against the legions of Rome!”

The ancient studied Bran’s face-saw the wrath that blazed in his black eyes. And more.

“One century has passed and a quarter of another since the defeat of Calgacus,” Gonar intoned, “and though to Rome we are all Caledonians, still Pict and Celt cannot forget the centuries of racial warfare that made this land sodden with blood an age before Rome was aught but a fishing village of mud-walled huts. Rome is a great devourer. Her legions roll over a thousand tribes and peoples in their inexorable march of conquest. What matters to Rome the petty hates and tribal feuds of quarrelling barbarians? Rome devours them all, and in a swift pass of years these former blood-enemies swell the ranks of the legions and are Romans themselves-as the Britons of the South now style themselves!”

Bran’s laugh was one of bitter pride. “If the Britons are whores for Rome, not so the men of Caledon. Eighty years ago Hadrian’s legions built their wall across the island to protect the Roman towns and villas from the unconquered men of the North. But even this was not protection enough for Rome-so that a score of years later the legions of Antoninus Pius marched north into the lowlands of Caledon to build a second wall across the marshy isthmus where the Forth and the Clyde almost make of Caledon a separate island.

“Ha! Well might the Romans fear the men of the North! Well might the Romans raise their walls and dread the sudden deadly raids of Pict or Celtic reavers! It was my great-grandfather, Othna Mak Mora, who led the Pictish massacre of the Ninth Legion when Rome dared creep out from behind its wall. In the year of my birth, the men of Caledon rose up and destroyed the Wall of Antoninus-butchered its soldiers and burned its garrisons. And I was a stripling of sixteen when I drenched my sword in Rome gore as we swarmed over Hadrian’s Wall.

“Gods! Those were months to atone for black defeats in past centuries! We burned their forts and watchtowers, pulled down great sections of their mighty wall! Fire and sword to the Romans and their hated works! They fled before us because they dared not stand and fight! In that year I thought to see the end of Rome and of her legions! Her camps and towns in ashes and all within put to the sword! Death to Rome!”

Bran paused. The fierce triumph of his voice, the exultation in his face… dimmed. Bitterness returned.

“But it was not to be. We were not strong enough to overrun the larger Roman camps. At the first show of Roman resistance, our army broke apart into a thousand bands of reavers. Old feuds corroded the hope of unity, and there was easy plunder among the unguarded villas and fortlets. Our army melted away-content to pillage and rape, then return to the Highlands with wagons of gaudy plunder and tales of meaningless glory. Then the legions returned, and in ten years Hadrian’s Wall was restored.”

“Rome is strong,” Gonar murmured. “Our moment of hollow victory came in that interval while Roman fought against Roman for control of the empire. In the space of a year Rome knew four emperors, and an eagle beheaded is fair spoils for the vultures. Commodus of uncounted infamies they sickened with poison and strangled as he lay in his vomit. His successor, Pertinax, ruled three months before his own Praetorian Guard set his gory head on a lance. Julianus was highest bidder when the murderers sold the empire at auction-but he ruled his purchase only two months before the senate ordered him cut down by a common soldier.

“For the provincial armies would not accept the sale of the empire by the Praetorian Guard. Three powerful provincial governors now sought the throne-

Septimius Severus of Pannonia, Pescennius Niger of Syria, and Clodius Albinus of Britain. Severus was closest to Rome and was proclaimed emperor at the murder of Julianus. This claim was contested by the other two governors, but Severus marched against Niger and defeated him at the Cilician Gates-and when Albinus then stripped Britain of Rome’s legions to march against Severus, Severus met him in Gaul and again was victorious.

“Severus is no weakling, and again the throne of empire is held in the iron grasp of a brilliant and ruthless general. Ten years ago we swept over the Wall of Hadrian in an irresistible wave of flame and steel-overran the South in the absence of Rome’s legions. Then Severus took the empire in hand, the legions returned. Now Hadrian’s Wall has been rebuilt, and again Pict and free Celt are hunted wolves driven back into the Highlands.

“Rome is strong, Wolf of the Heather,” the wizard repeated. “I have seen chiefs and conquerors come and go. Cassivellaunus. Caratacus. Boudicca. Calgacus. Othna Mak Morn. Their bones bleach in forgotten fields. And always the legions return.”

Bran scowled at the ancient priest. “And so?”

“Rome is strong. Just as I have paid a price for long years and secret wisdom-so you must be prepared to pay a price to drive Romes legions from our land;”

“I’ll have no more dealings with sorcery!” Bran growled, following the drift of Gonar’s argument. I’ve made the mistake too often in the past of relying on dark magic to win my battles. I want to be free of its foul taint!”

Gonar kept silent with his thoughts. It had been some three years now since first he had met Bran Mak Morn. At the time Bran, the son of a Wolf clan chief and a descendent of Othna, was consolidating his claim to kingship of the Pictish tribes. Gonar, set in the dying traditions of the Stone Age and cynical of Bran’s rash boasts to drive Rome from Britain, had considered the youth a dangerous hothead who had turned from the old ways of his race, and who ultimately would call down the wrath of Rome with his guerilla raids against the South. Then had taken place an uncanny psychic duel-a combat of ancient will against youthful will-the loser to serve the victor. Gonar had fought for the old ways of savagery and blood-stained altars. Bran had fought for a new age and a return to greatness of the Pictish race. Bran had won. And while Gonar had served Bran faithfully since that duel between two unbending souls, the wizard shrewdly recognized that Bran Mak Morn had been compelled to make use of ancient sorceries and forbidden lore in order to seize victory in his campaign against Rome.

Bran sensed his thoughts. “Don’t sneer at my resolution, old one!” he warned. “I freely admit it was you who warned me against seeking out the Children of the Night to wreak my vengeance on Titus Sulla! I went mad when I watched that taunting governor crucify one of my people as a lesson in Roman justice! In my madness I ignored your warning and sent the Worms of the Earth to burrow beneath the governor’s impregnable fortress-and drag him to me as a gibbering madman whom I slew in pity, not vengeance! By the gods, if I could undo the work of that night!”

He shook himself as if to shake away the taint. After a moment, Bran continued. “But it was your sorcery that then summoned King Kull of Valusia across the gulf of time to lead the Northmen in the ambush of the Roman advance under Marcus Sulius!”

“And do you think you could have won that battle without Kull’s presence?” Gonar argued.

“No,” Bran admitted readily. “No, I could not have. It was Kull who held the Northmen together for that desperate stand that pinned the Romans fast in the jaws of the trap.”

Bran gazed out across the valley where now dawn was spilling light across the heathered slopes. That sun would look upon a new battle today, he mused, and many of those who watched it rise would never see it set.

“No more sorcery!” Bran vowed. “I’ll have done with weapons whose foulness poisons the souls of those who wield them-weapons too foul to use even against Rome!”

“Rome is strong,” Gonar echoed.

“Enough!” Bran’s snarl was like a blow. “The battle today will be Pict against Roman, our steel against their steel-and the victor shall have won his triumph by might and strategy, not through sorcerous interference!

“I will see the Romans driven from our land-and if the price for such a victory is my life, I’ll pay that price gladly! But by the gods, I’ll deal no more in unhallowed sorceries!”

Bran turned and strode back down the slope to rejoin his army-his shoulders straight, resolution driving the shadows from his face. Gonar stood for a moment, stroking his long beard-and in his ancient wisdom thinking of the nightmares that haunted his king.

“Brave words, Wolf of the Heather,” he murmured. “But no man may name the price he must pay for his dream. It was madness to summon forth mat which is beyond your power to put down-and I fear those powers that you would thus repudiate have not released their claim on you.”

3

THE MEN OF THE HEATHER

The rim of the sun made phantom light through the chill blanket of mist. In an hour the mist would melt away, leaving the dewy heather to dry in the distant warmth of the climbing sun. Already the army of Picts was moving across the half-lit moors-a shadowy wave of gnarled and shaggy warriors whose apish bodies barely rose above the mist-buried heather.

Bran’s army numbered well over three thousand-better than half the strength of a legion. Some few were mounted on small shaggy steeds, but the mass of the army was on foot. A line of mounted scouts ranged ahead of the poorly ordered column, while wagons laden with baggage creaked along near the middle. Here and there marched a warrior of taller stature whose savage face showed straight, hawklike features-these were Pictish chieftains whose long bloodlines were free from the ages-ago crossbreeding with the aboriginal race of red-haired giants that had transmuted the Picts into their present ogreish appearance. But such figures were few, and the Pictish army on the march more resembled some Stone Age migration.

Near-naked warriors carried their dwarfish bodies in an ape-like gait. For the most part they were clad in animal skins with some use of coarsely woven cloth. Some wore crude sandals, but many were unshod. No helmets confined their shocks of tangled black hair, nor did they wear body armor.

Cavalry had they none-nor the swift two-man chariots of the Celts of the South. Without stirrups, the chief value of cavalry was mobility-as was the case with chariots, which the Britons used to rush warriors about the field of battle to reinforce key points or retreat from overrun positions. Highland terrain made chariots useless, and it was the infantry who must carry the brunt of battle.

Iron weapons had been introduced into Britain some eight centuries previous, and the Picts were well armed with blades of iron or steel from native forges or bartered from the continent. For weapons many carried heavy bows of black wood and quivers of iron-headed shafts. Most also carried the long-bladed Celtic sword, although many were armed with the shorter stabbing sword of the Roman legionary-loot from past victories. Knives were thrust into crude scabbards at their belts, and nearly all bore a round buckler of stout wood and toughened hide. Elsewhere, a random array of lances, axes and maces were gripped in determined fists.

Looking over his army, Bran smiled in grim pride. They were savages with only a ragtag semblance to the mechanized discipline of the Roman legions-but it was an army on the march, not just a mob of milling barbarians. If history had taught one lesson well, it had proven with gory finality that sheer weight of numbers and brute courage could not defeat the Romans. Disciplined troops must be countered with equal discipline and organized tactics-else certain slaughter under the short swords of the Roman war machine.

Old Gonar rode beside him near the head of the column-the small, swift Caledonian horses holding back pace to the mass of foot soldiers. The wizard had spoken little since their predawn council. Now he squinted back at the Pictish ranks and observed, “It would be well to have Cormac na Connacht and his Gaels with us today.”

Bran grunted. “Cormac has fighting enough in the West. Alfenus Senecio has sent the Roman fleet to burn the Gaelic settlements along the Alban coast. We’ll not need him-nor will Cormac need us.”

L. Alfenus Senecio, who had succeeded Titus Sulla as governor of Britain after Bran Mak Morn’s unhallowed vengeance cut short that sadistic tyrant’s brief tenure, had completed reconstruction of Hadrian’s Wall and for months now had striven ineffectively to subdue the rebellious tribes of Caledonia. Cormac na Connacht, leader of the Gaelic reavers who had crossed from Erin to claim a foothold on the western coast of Caledonia, now suffered the wrath of Rome.

Cormac it was, whose wild Gaels had harried the Wall to lure Titus Sulla to his hellish doom at the Tower of Trajan. Again Cormac, who had led five hundred Gaelic warriors to join with Bran’s combined army of Picts, Britons, and Northmen in the massacre of eighteen hundred legionaries under Marcus Sulius. Bran felt no sense of guilt at the Roman reprisals against his ally. To Bran Mak Morn, Rome was the common foe of all the tribes of Britain, and it mattered little whether steel was Pictish or Celtic, so long as it was steel stained with Roman blood.

It was curious, brooded the Pictish king. Their ancient feuds and racial identities prevented the scattered tribes of Britain from uniting against the Roman invader. Yet to Rome they were all barbarians, and Roman maps simply referred to the wild tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall as the Maeatae, who dwelt close to the wall, and the Caledonii, who dwelt yet beyond them. Bitterly Bran reflected that his own race, the Picts, was merely an obscure and backward Celtic tribe to the Roman. Ages ago Celtic savages had conquered the Pictish civilization in a thousand unsung battles-had driven the Picts from the Mediterranean into their last refuge in the Caledonian Highlands. But to Rome they were all Caledonians. Bran wished grimly that such a unified people might indeed exist.

“I shall lead the way,” he murmured.

“Milord?”

Gonar’s expression of inquiry broke Bran’s revery. He drew a deep breath of heather-scented air and laughed. The shadows that haunted his eyes lifted; the lines of fatigue smoothed from his face.

“I was thinking aloud,” Bran told him. “When we defeated Marcus Sulius it seemed to me then that no single victory could be more important to me. Now it seems to me a victory today will mean much more.”

“How so?”

“The army that defeated Marcus Sulius was a hasty alliance of Pict, Gael, Briton, and Northman-and a king of lost Valusia summoned by your magic from the gulf of time. Our victory proved that a combined army of the people of the heather could stand before the legionaries-but our alliance lasted only for that battle. Kull returned to his age of forgotten legend; the Northmen lay together beneath a great cairn where they fell; the Britons south of Hadrians Wall have been subdued once more; the Gaels have been forced to defend their own holdings from the Roman fleet. Only for Pictdom was unity achieved-for that victory won for me undisputed kingship of our clans.

“Look behind you, Gonar! We are an army of Picts! A victory today will prove to all Britain that Pictish savages can defeat the Roman colossus-defeat Rome without Celtic allies, without ensnaring sorceries! That will be a victory, Gonar! Pictish valor and Pictish steel will win that victory-and then shall the Celtic tribes look to Pictdom for leadership! To Rome we are all Caledonians. Well then, Pictish victory will form the nucleus of a solid alliance of all the peoples of Caledon-then let the Romans cower behind their wall!”

Old Gonar followed Bran’s sweeping gesture, his tattooed face reflecting the pride his king expressed in the army that marched behind them. “Such a victory must first be won, Wolf of the Heather,” he advised in a low tone for only Bran’s hearing. “My augury was only a gory sham to fire the savage hearts of your army. No man can in truth predict the issue of today’s battle.”

Bran laughed. “We shall conquer, Gonar. Pictdom is done with skulking in the Highlands of Caledon. When was there last such an army as this!”

“Not since the army of your great-grandsire, Othna Mak Morn, some four-score years ago,” Gonar reminded him. “And his was more than thrice your number.”

“And his the greatest victory our race has won since its lost age of glory,” Bran mused. “It is fitting that Pict and Roman today shall do battle near that same ground-an omen that Pict shall again conquer.” It was not chance that had directed the course of Bran’s campaign against Rome to this day’s battle.

By the time he was old enough to swing a wooden sword, every son of the Picts knew by heart the saga of Othna Mak Morn’s massacre of the Ninth Legion at Serpent Gorge. The memories of that great victory were yet alive in Bran’s youth, and though the line of Mak Morn had fallen into obscurity with Othna’s son, Berul Crookback, Bran had rekindled the flame of his great-grandsire’s glory. Once again the line of Mak Morn had bred a leader-this time a king with an iron crown.

Just as that battle was a saga of paramount pride to the Picts, so was it a memory of fear and humiliation to the Romans. The now abandoned Wall of Antoninus had been raised in the aftermath of that crushing defeat, and though the confederation of Pictish clans had drifted apart soon after Othna’s death, no legionary ever patrolled his frontier post without the terror of the Picts gnawing at his heart.

Yet, despite his fatal rashness in underestimating the danger into which he marched, Calidius Falco had correctly chosen Serpent Gorge as one of the most accessible points of entrance into the Caledonian Highlands. By converse, it was also one of the major avenues of egress. While Rome seldom dared to send her legions into the Highlands, the threat of Caledonian raiding parties issuing forth from Serpent Gorge to pillage the South was a constant concern. To counter this menace, the Romans were presently constructing a fort to guard the southern end of the pass.

Such a fort posed a real threat to Bran’s ambitions-for once complete it would both pose a barrier to his own guerrilla raids and cut off possible Celtic support from the South as well. Thus destruction of this new fort was not only a strategic necessity, but such a victory would be more fuel for the beacon of Pictish unity.

And Bran knew he must strike quickly. Fully garrisoned and with permanent fortifications, a large Roman camp was virtually impregnable to assault by an army of savages such as Bran led. Bran’s spies reported that some two thousand men-legionaries and auxiliaries-were at work on the new fort, and, that construction progressed at a rate that smacked of sorcery to men accustomed to rude camps of hide tents and mud huts. The earthworks and temporary wall-already more elaborate than those for any marching camp-were thrown up almost before the people of the heather knew the Romans were among them. Bran’s only hope of victory was to launch a massive attack before completion of the permanent system of defenses.

Thus from the Highlands of Caledon had Bran summoned his army-banding together as many Pictish warriors as he dared await to gather. Grueling days and sleepless nights of preparation-begrudging each hour of delay. Then the forced march across the moors and ridges-gathering more warriors as they passed through heath and fen. Slipping from the Highlands by another pass, Bran had swept southward to strike the Romans from that quarter which would appear to them most secure. So swift was their coming that, while doubtless Roman spies had learned of the Pictish army, there had been no time for those at their objective to summon reinforcements from the Wall.

Reports from his scouts the night before indicated that as of yesterday the Romans had no definite knowledge of the approach of the Pictish army-that construction continued apace, and that there was no evidence of reinforcements marching northward. A few scouts yet remained to spy out the camp until their attack-and they would give warning if such reinforcements did arrive. Bran smiled wolfishly. By now the Romans must know of his approach. He pictured the confusion within the half-finished fort as the legionaries desperately rushed to throw a last shovel of dirt, lay a last slab of turf to the wall-knowing that in another instant they must seize weapons and fight for their lives.

No place for cunning stratagems this day. Pictish arrows would pin down the defenders along the unfinished rampart, while the mass of his army swarmed over the outer ditches on bridges of felled trees and stormed the weaker sections of the wall. The Picts outnumbered the defenders, and once they succeeded in breaching the turf-wall, Bran was confident his warriors could overwhelm the Romans within. If cynical old Gonar did not share his confidence, it was because the Pictish king was still flushed with his victory over Marcus Sulius several months previous-and Bran still remembered laying waste to the forts along Hadrian’s Wall not many years before.

For a moment Bran thought back on those wild days. He was just in his middle-teens, son of the chief of a minor clan-but a youth who dreamed great dreams, who saw in those days of fire and pillage the vision of Rome swept into the sea, of a new Pictish nation…

A pair of scouts galloped headlong toward the Pictish van. Bran cut short his musing and instinctively grasped swordhilt. The men rode as if the hounds of hell were hard on their heels.

“What is it!” Bran demanded. “Have more legionaries come up from the Wall? An ambush…?”

“Milord!” gasped the first scout. “The Roman camp!” He choked for words, fumbling like a stricken idiot.

Bran caught the paleness of the man’s face, the stunned look of horror. He shook the man roughly.

“Tell me, damn you!”

“It is a camp of dead men!”

4

FALSE DAWN

The aura of death hung over the Roman camp like a tangible pall. Already carrion crows by the hundreds hovered about the ruined fortifications-somehow reluctant to descend upon the hideous banquet strewn below. Bran saw their black-winged cumulus overlying the camp as the Picts approached.

As his scouts blurted out their frightened and incoherent reports, Bran first wondered whether some dark spell had stricken them all with stark madness. But as one man after another corroborated their account of wholesale massacre and of horror transcending mass carnage, Bran struggled to grasp what surely must be some inconceivable Roman stratagem-some unthinkable deception to entrap the Pictish army.

Yet such a ploy defied all logic and sanity-and Bran had fought the Romans long enough to know their tactics were founded on superior discipline and equipment, not on some insane artifice such as this. Nonetheless…

An anxious murmur rose from the Picts as distorted versions of the scouts’ reports passed from mouth to mouth. Suspicious of some hellish Roman trick, Bran’s army advanced with extreme vigilance.

Such caution was needless.

The early-morning skies were clear and blue, but there would be no battle today. Within the ruined camp the shadow of death overcast all, and crawling horror leered and gibbered over each mutilated corpse.

The wall of turf was breached at several points-undermined, Bran noted uneasily. Undermined, as were the heaps of broken stone and masonry that had been watchtowers. Tents, half-finished barracks and principia-all lay smashed and strewn about the hundred-acre enclosure, as if some demented titan had run amok here. Destruction was both wanton and complete. Someone had taken time to do a thorough job of seemingly maniacal vandalism.

Someone…

Something…

Yesterday two thousand Romans were at work here. Today the Romans were still here, but for them there would be no more battles. Their corpses…

Even cold-blooded old Grom was shaken, his battle-scarred face showing sickened disbelief as they picked their way through the wreckage of the fort. Grom swore in awe.

“By the gods! Where are their heads!”

Bran swallowed, wondering whether this might not be another nightmare. In the bright blue light of the spring morning, two thousand headless corpses sprawled as hideous evidence that some unspeakable horror had held mad revelry here in the night. Presumably two thousand-some of the mutilations…

“Are there no other bodies?” Bran asked in a strained voice. “Where are the bodies of the warriors who did this?”

“I see none,” Gonar answered. “Only Roman dead.”

“Grom! Have the men search thoroughly for bodies other than those of the Romans,” Bran ordered. “And have them search beneath the wreckage for survivors. I must know who did this!”

“Cormac na Connacht…?” offered Grom-knowing it could not be so.

“Cormac’s Gaels do not take heads for trophies!” Bran scoffed. “Nor do any of the Celts on so mad a scale as this ghoulish butchery! Let the men search well for any evidence of who did this. And bring me the scouts who were to spy upon the Romans through the night!”

The Pictish king dismounted. Followed by Gonar he walked among the carnage, studying each grisly corpse, each tangle of wreckage.

“They died near midnight, Gonar,” Bran decided. “And they must have been all slain in one sudden overwhelming attack. See-their limbs have only begun to show the rigidity of death. Most likely there was no warning until they were aroused from sleep by the attack.

“Whoever slew the Romans had time to enjoy his triumph,” Bran continued, looking about the camp. “Time to strip weapons and armor from the dead. Time to carry away their own dead. Time to hack away the head of every man here. By the gods! This is all madness! This has the features of some unthinkable jest!”

Grom shook his shaggy head. For once the sight of butchered Romans foiled to fire his heart with savage glee. Here, there was something wrong, something inhuman…

“An army did this,” Grom muttered. “Yet how could an army have attacked and withdrawn-and only miles from us-without our knowledge? That they massacred the Homan dogs proves they shared our hatred of Rome. But they could not have been Celt or Pict-else they would have allied with us-unless they knew not of our presence here. Were they reavers from the sea?”

“We are two days hard march from either coast,” Bran reminded him. “There is nothing here to tempt such pirates to come inland.”

“Then have the Britons of the South risen against Rome?” Grom wondered.

“Without our knowledge? Impossible! Were it so, the South is crowded with Roman towns and forts for their taking.”

“Then who?”

“Tell me, Grom-and I give this crown of iron to you.”

The old warrior muttered to himself and moved on with his bandy-legged gait. Gonar spoke in a voice for only Bran’s hearing.

“You suspect, my king-don’t you.”

Bran Mak Morn scowled. There was an uncanny hush to the scene. Only the motionless dead and the baffled Picts who gazed at their intended opponents in awe mingled with fear. In the silence he could hear the mournful cry of the ravens and rooks who gathered overhead-hear the somnolent buzz of the black clouds of flies that swarmed over the butchered flesh. To his nostrils came the sweet-sour reek of blood-drenched earth, of torn flesh and dangling entrails. The bittersweet stench of death drowned the scents of heather and spring morning. There was only a nebulous ghost of smoke from the embers of the Romans’ fires-all the more strange that the raiders had not put the camp to the torch.

And there was a fouler taint. Bran drew a deep breath. Underlying the scent of death he could sense an acrid reptilian musk-a stomach-wrenching stench like the miasma from a serpent’s den. That reptilian scent was ever so feint-but it was there.

Bran recognized that stench. And looking at the undermined wall, he remembered that night of dread when the impregnable Tower of Trajan had toppled upon its defenders…

“These men were slain by the blades of warriors,” Bran protested. “That much is obvious at a glance. Though I cannot say at whose hands they died, their slayers perforce were men.”

Sharp-eyed Gonar suddenly stooped to scrabble through the debris at an angle of a fallen wall. He straightened and extended to Bran Mak Morn the grisly relic he found there.

“Are you certain, Wolf of the Heather?”

Bran’s dark face for an instant lost color enough to highlight the shadows beneath his eyes. It was a severed forearm that Gonar had uncovered. Small and slender as a woman’s-but sheared from neither woman nor child. The fingers were hard and lean as a lizard’s toes; the nails were stubby spatulate talons. The dead-white flesh was hairless, though mottled with tiny scales, and the congealed blood that oozed from the stump exuded a reptilian stench.

“It would seem the victors here were not entirely successful in removing all traces of their casualties,” Gonar mordantly observed. “And while the Romans died by sword and steel, it may have been no human hands that wielded those blades.”

“I think it best no one else see this,” Bran told him-hurriedly wrapping the artifact in a scrap of cloak. “The Romans, after all, keep strange pets from strange lands-parrots and apes and spotted jungle cats. Who are we to say what beasts might not lurk in far-off corners of Asia or Africa?”

A shout from Grom spared Gonar the necessity to reply.

With growing unease, Bran Mak Morn made his way through the wreckage of the camp to where Grom anxiously called to him. A group of Picts stood murmuring fearfully, clustered about a circle of earthworks.

Then Bran reached the frightened group and saw that his initial impression was wrong. Freshly turned earth was heaped all about, but no Roman spade had shaped this tumulus. Surrounded by a mound of earth and crumbled rock, a circular pit opened from the ground just inside the wall of the camp. Roughly twenty feet across, the pit dropped to a sheer depth of at least fifty feet. There its sides suddenly sloped away at an angle, and the shadowy passage was totally blocked with clods of earth and broken stone. A miasma emanated from the pit that was at once suggestive of the foulness of a newly opened crypt and of the acrid musk of a vast serpent den.

“The Romans thought to dig a well here, and instead broke through the ceiling of an underground cavern,” Bran brusquely explained. “The mountains here are honeycombed with such caves.”

He tried not to look at the freshly torn turf whose roots were only starting to dry in the bright morning sunlight.

Grom rose from the brink of the pit. He held his gnarled palm to his face-then in sudden disgust he wiped his hand against the broken sod-continued to wipe at the foulness that clung to his fingers. His eyes held Bran’s in mute question.

But the Pictish king had already noticed the drying gobbets of slime that edged the pit-that made a grey sheen in the sunlight along the depressed streak in the earth that crossed the enclosure to the crushed and splintered barracks-and then returned as a silver band flecked with rust-red blotches. Bran thought of the mucoid trail of some unthinkably huge slug.

Bran Mak Morn did not share his thoughts with the others. Already the insidious whisper of panic stole through the Pictish ranks.

“Fungus,” he said sharply. “Some slime-mold from the cavern walls.”

Grimly Bran strode away from the gaping wound in the earth, whence something loathsome had crawled forth and, hideously sated, crawled back again. Two thousand of his enemies lay horribly slaughtered, yet there was no joy in the Pictish king’s heart. The earth had spewed forth some eons-buried horror-of that he was certain, and beyond that all was madness. Let old Gonar unravel the enigma of headless corpses and plundered fort, of unknown raiders who slew and vanished, of a severed demon’s arm and a burrow that led to hell.

As Bran quitted the nightmare-laden enclosure for the free heather without, he again heard his name hailed. In the distance he recognized Bocah, one of the clan chiefs.

Quickly Bran plunged across the expanse of moor beyond the Roman camp and climbed toward the crest of the low ridge where Bocah and several of his clansmen awaited him.

“My king,” Bocah explained, “We have found Nron, one of those who were to spy upon the Roman camp during the night. Of the others we can find no trace.”

A glance at the tight-lipped faces already had told Bran that the Pictish scout would not make his report. Bran followed Bocah’s gesture.

“Bury him,” ordered Bran Mak Morn gruffly, wondering what vision of madness had blanched the young warriors hair before insurmountable horror had burst his heart.

5

BAAL-DOR

The weather broke during the night, and the cold rain of spring drenched the morning and the day that followed. As the chill torrent washed away the grey ashes of their campfires, so did the army of the Picts melt away beneath the icy breath of horror that followed their retreat from the Roman camp.

Strangely, it was a retreat. No triumphant return-although not a Roman remained alive and the Picts had sustained virtually no casualties. Had it been otherwise-had the Picts come upon a massacre that was plainly the work of the Gaels or another of Britain’s savage tribes-there would have been a let-down, an emotional anticlimax over being cheated of their expected battle-yet with it a shared feeling of triumph that their allies had conquered a common enemy. But this… Had they found the Roman camp devastated by some deadly plague, the shock could not have been greater.

Bran Mak Morn had massed his army with visions of glory and triumph, of loot and slaughtered enemies. They would have followed him against any army Rome could muster-shouting their ancient war cries and wielding their blades with no thought save to slay until no foeman answered their feral challenge. Instead their king had led them to a scene of nightmare horror-a silent field of death where elder horror slithered up from the abysses of racial memory to whisper mad secrets dead eons had not quite buried…

Only Bran’s indomitable will had averted total panic. While terror shadowed their sodden retreat, bit by bit his army disintegrated. Small knots of warriors drifted away silently, to return in uncomprehending fear to their scattered villages-there to speak in frighted whispers of what they had seen-and to dwell upon the ancient legends of the Pictish race.

They were not deserting, they swore to Bran and to themselves. Since there was to be no battle, they would return to their homes to await their king’s next call-to-arms. Bran Mak Morn did not seek to halt their withdrawal-dry sand cannot be held in a clenched fist for all the strength of its sinews. Dully he wondered whether they would indeed rally to his standard on another day.

Exhaustion and overwrought nerves took their toll in the chill drizzle. As the remnant of Bran’s personal guard reached the familiar walls of Baal-dor, the Pictish king looked upon his fortress through fever-bright eyes.

The Pictish keep commanded a position of strength in the Highlands of Caledon. Its stone walls had lain half in ruin until Bran had undertaken its restoration. Pictish legends held that Baal-dor had been a citadel of the autochthonous race of red-bearded giants against whom the Invading Picts had striven and conquered in epic battles obscured by the veil of centuries. Certain other legends attributed its building to darker eons still, and its name was clearly not Pictish. This much was certain: that the massive stones that bore up the rising walls of Baal-dor were of extreme antiquity, and that the fortress had been occupied and again abandoned at several points in the long centuries of Pictish dominion in the Highlands.

The Picts had no cities or towns, such as the Romans had introduced to Britain-nothing of a more complex order than the fortified stronghold of a chieftain with the dwellings of his clansmen in close enough proximity for the clan to band together in event of attack. In his vision of a unified Pictish nation, Bran saw a need for a central stronghold-both for an administrative capital as well as a permanent base for his army. Early in his efforts to consolidate his claim to kingship, Bran had reoccupied the ancient fortress and begun repairs on its ruined walls.

The position was one of considerable natural strength, so that Bran’s decision was well conceived, even were there not already standing walls whose massive stones neither the rush of armies nor the erosions of time had breached. Baal-dor crowned the heights of a towering bluff below whose precipitous slopes two tumbling mountain streams came together. From here the fortress commanded any approach along the river gorges, while ascent along the face of the cliffs from below was impossible for purposes of assault.

From that quarter of the height that did not rise above the converging streams far below, the ground sloped sharply away. Here the approach was guarded by high walls of stone from whose ramparts archers could command the heathered slopes without. The ancient foundations were of cyclopean construction, in places incorporating stone slabs as large as menhirs. In repairing the fortress Bran had raised its walls another ten feet, building upon the existing construction a continuous rampart of packed earth and rock enclosed within a dry stone revetment. A system of ditches and earthworks was carved from the rocky slopes beyond-further indication that the Pictish king had carefully studied the defenses of a Roman camp.

The surrounding heights were all well beyond bowshot, while from Raal-dors ramparts Pictish archers had the advantage of trajectory over an enemy toiling up the forward slope. To breach Baal-dors walls would require siege equipment on a scale never seen in Britain. Again acting on the Roman model, Bran had ordered construction of stone and timber barracks and storage buildings within the fortress-giving it the appearance within the high walls of both a Roman camp and a Pictish settlement. Fully provisioned and with a certain flow of water from its deep wells against the downward wall, Bran was confident that his army could hold Baal-dor against any siege.

A warmth of pride returned to him, cutting through the haze of fever, as Bran caught sight of Baal-dor rising above the river mists that swirled beneath its precipices in the gathering twilight. Let his army melt away, those grim stone walls would remain.

Now he wearily straightened on his saddle-pad and rode ahead of his loyal warriors as they labored up the slope to the gates of Baal-dor which welcomed them through the smurr of rain.

The fear that had haunted them since the discovery of the massacred camp awaited them in Baal-dor. News of the enigmatic slaughter had preceded the returning army, and the faces that looked down from the walls bore expressions that defied precise definition. These were not the grim, set visages that might await a defeated army, reflected Bran. Nor was there the loud jubilation with its undertone of mourning that greeted the heroes of some blood bartered victory.

The Roman enemy were dead. The warriors of Pictdom had returned unscathed. True, they had been cheated of their battle, their foemen butchered by an unknown army… It was good that the Romans had died; it was good that comrades and clansmen had returned without wounds or losses; it was strange that another army could have struck and vanished… The faces showed a mingling of triumph, relief, bewilderment…

But above all else, Bran recognized, the faces showed fear.

Fear of an unknown power that struck savagely and invisibly, that killed and mutilated in a manner that chilled the fierce hearts of warriors inured to bloodshed and torture. A power that had slain and disappeared-to strike again… Where?

Had ten Roman legions pursued Bran’s army to Baal-dor, the Picts would have welcomed them with a shout of defiance, and all within who could hold spear would man the walls to hurl back the enemy. Instead an army of ghosts dogged their retreat, and dread of the unknown chilled the spirits of Baal-dor as thoroughly as the cold drizzle dulled the nerves of the returning warriors.

Bran shook with a sudden chill. After that one rush of pride, despondency gripped him again. Give the Picts an enemy of flesh and blood, and Bran knew they would leap into battle with no thought of odds. But the whisper of supernatural dread awoke atavistic fears in their savage breasts-racial memories etched indelibly in lost eons when primitive man was prey for the forces of elder horror whose shambling presence sent mans apish forebears cowering in the depths of cave or treetop.

And for this, Bran could not fault his people. For in all Pictdom, he, Bran Mak Morn, with his straight features and his proud dreams, was the greatest atavism of this age.

In a dreary procession the Picts filed past the fortress gates and into Baal-dor. Many of them made their way to the newly erected row of barracks; but for most their women and children gave a joyous welcome-forgetting their anxiety at the safe return of their men. To an extent Bran had organized a standing army after the Roman model, at least his warriors’ families had not joined in the ill-fated march on the Roman camp, as was the usual fashion in all movements greater than a small raiding party.

Smoke hung in a heavy reek in the cheerless drizzle, obscuring the limits of the some two hundred acres enclosed within Baal-dor’s walls. Rude huts and hide tents were scattered in chaotic prolusion, vying with the recently built barracks and halls of stone and timber. The dismal rain laid a scum of mud upon the hard-packed earth, and the smells of cooking fires, packed bodies and livestock thickened the damp air. Knots and clusters of Picts broke away from the press at the gates, straggled away to familiar hearths amidst a whirl of yapping dogs and yelling children. Later there would continue the anxious questions and frightened speculation. For now, warmth and shelter, food and rest.

“Bran!” A glad voice welcomed him, and for the king of Pictland there was also a homecoming.

A rare smile broke across Bran’s gloomy countenance. “Morgain! I’d begun to think you’d forgotten your brother!”

The girl flashed him a peeved look, knowing by his tone he spoke in jest. She stepped toward him as quickly as she dared, concentrating fiercely on the steaming goblet she carried in outstretched hands. “Here’s mulled wine to drive the chill from your bones,” she announced, reaching him the cup.

Bran drained the hot, spiced wine in a long draught. “That’s welcome,” he sighed, returning the silver goblet. Wearily he slid from his mount and gave the reins to Grom.

Morgain stared at him intently, not liking the sweat that beaded his forehead in the dank mist, nor the leaden quality of his movements as Bran dismounted. Word of the uncanny slaughter at the Roman camp had reached Baal-dor the night before. Since then all those within the fortress had awaited the army’s return-exaggerated reports and wild rumors evoking all manner of sinister speculation. Through it all, Morgain had waited in a mood of bleak apprehension, recognizing the crippling blow this might be to her brother’s dreams of glory-unless a logical and natural solution to the hellish enigma was quickly discovered.

“You’ve a fever,” Morgain spoke accusingly.

Bran laughed and evaded the small hand that sought his brow, instead gathering her slight shoulders into a brotherly hug. “Nothing that sleep and more of the wine won’t settle.”

She scowled. “Gonar, give him something. His face is pale as a powdered Roman whore’s, and his flesh steams like a winded nag’s.”

“Enough!” Bran protested. “I’ll drink my wine mulled with your spices, but not with any wizard’s powders or elixirs.”

Leaving old Grom to see to the horses, Bran walked on with his sister sheltered under his cloak-Gonar following them toward the king’s great hall.

The companionship of his sister did much to lighten Bran’s sombre mood. Their father, Malis Mak Morn, son of Berul Crookback, had fallen in the bloody destruction of Hadrian’s Wall twelve years previous; their mother, Gydda, had not long survived the grief of his passing. No other siblings had lived past infancy, and, Bran having taken no wife, his sister was the sum of his household. On his lonely path to kingship, there was none so close to Bran Mak Morn’s brooding soul as Morgain.

This would be Morgain’s eighteenth summer. Bran reflected. She was no longer the child who shrank in fright from the apparition of Gonar when the tattooed priest first came to them-who begged for the life of a legionary captive, a Goth the wizard had marked for the bloodstained altar.

From a shy sprite Morgain had grown into a girl of slender beauty-her lithe, lean limbs displaying the same quick, pantherish grace of movement that characterized her brother. A thundercloud of bright black hair framed a round face and firm chin. Thick, straight brows almost met in a single dark line above the high-bridged nose. Her eyes were great, flashing pools of darkness that seemed to mirror all the brooding mysticism of the Pictish soul. Her skin was of that same dark complexion of the North, and her clean, graceful form proved the pureness of her aristocratic bloodline.

It was a bloodline that must continue, Bran mused. The budding fullness of the slender figure beneath Morgain’s short woolen gown reminded him that he must be thinking of a suitable match for his sister. The thought caused a pang of sudden loneliness.

Grimly Bran recalled the wealthy merchant of Corinium who, hearing of the Pictish maid’s beauty, offered a thousand pieces of gold to whoever might steal her for his lusts. One man had crept North to seek this bounty. Not many nights after, that merchant sought his couch and discovered his spy’s head leering back from the pillows.

The great hall of Baal-dor rose from the center of the knoll-a sprawling, solidly built structure of stone and timber. Modelled in part after the principia of the legionary fortress and partly after the fortified manor of the barbarian gentry, it served both as a headquarters and assembly hall, as well as living quarters for the king and his immediate circle. The hall itself occupied most of the edifice-a high-raftered chamber with massive hewn beams, great sooty fireplaces, long wooden tables flanked by log benches. To the rear was a section for kitchens, storage and servants. Another wing was set aside for the king and his household; beyond that quarters for his inner circle. A low tower rose from the front wall, a final redoubt in the event an enemy overran the outer walls.

As Bran Mak Morn was the first acknowledged king of Pictdom in half a millennium, so was Baal-dor the first central fortress the Picts had raised since days of lost legend. Baal-dor was the marvel of Caledon, a symbol of the rising Pictish nation. In some measure Bran felt a renewal of his former confidence as he and his party strode into the familiar warmth of his great hall.

The crisp smoke of roasting meat filled the hall. At the massive fireplace at the opposite wall a crew of greasy kitchen servants labored over the huge spit on which a whole steer slowly turned. Underlying wafted the sweeter scent of baking bread from the ovens to the rear. On a smaller hearth, a vast cauldron of spiced wine hung over a slow fire, its heady vapor piercing the other smells.

“I thought to have ready a feast to celebrate your victory,” Morgain explained.

Bran scowled and flung off his sodden cloak. “There’ll be no feast. There’s been no victory. There’s nothing to celebrate. Have them clear away this mockery!”

“No!” Gonar contradicted. “Continue with the feast.” Bran glared at him. Shedding his cloak, the wizard calmly stepped to the steaming kettle of wine and thrust his bony fingers within to pluck forth one of the apples that bobbed upon its surface. With an old man’s disregard to scalding heat, he began to munch the spiced fruit-steam rising from his damp garments as he stood almost in the embers.

“The Roman camp is no more,” Gonar said between bites. “Celebrate Rome’s defeat-and another’s victory.”

Bran swore, struggling out of his shirt of mail with Morgain’s aid. “But whose victory, wizard?”

“Does it matter?” Gonar filched another apple. “As Rome is their enemy, you can consider them potential allies.”

“That wasn’t a battle!” Bran protested. “It was hellish slaughter.”

The ancient priest snorted. “I tell you, it was nothing-and so you would agree had you seen the sack of the Roman towns when Queen Boudicca’s horde passed over. Women were raped amidst the ashes of their homes and the gore of their butchered babes; children crucified and dangling from the trees; and in the sacred groves altars streamed with heart-blood, and the air was choked with the reek of burning wicker cages and the shrieks of the captives within.”

“You know what I mean,” Bran growled, joining the wizard at the fire. “You saw that severed arm I sank into the tarn by night.”

As the Pictish king bent to fill his cup with wine, Gonar leaned his mouth close to his ear. “And you know what I mean, Wolf of the Heather,” he said in a low voice. “You need a victory feast this day.”

Bran straightened testily. The wizard insouciantly snagged a third apple. The appearance of the tattooed priest popping spiced fruits into his age-creased face with all the careful gusto of a boy was incongruous, but not comical.

“You are king, Bran Mak Morn,” Gonar told him. “They look to you for leadership. When you are strong, Pictdom is strong. When the king has courage, his people will follow his sword with a brave shout though he leads them on the road to hell. But when the king shows indecision-stumbles in confusion and falters in the shadow of fear… Soon he is king of no man.”

“I fear nothing!” Bran snarled, his face dangerous. “Of course.” Gonar swallowed a mouthful of apple. “But let your people see that. I don’t have to tell you what their mood is after what we found at the Roman camp. You’ve got to break that mood. Go on with the feast. Fill their bellies with warm meat and ale, fill their hearts with bold talk about an unknown ally who hates the Roman as much as do we. Don’t let them slink to their beds with their spirit unmanned by fear and wild conjecture.”

“So be it!” Bran snapped. “A sham victory feast at the behest of my high counsellor. Let all rejoice in our triumph. And fm off to shed these damp garments to put on my festive robes.”

Morgain watched in concern as he stalked away. “He’s exhausted-his face burns with fever. He should take his couch, not his seat at high table.”

“He is king,” Gonar muttered. “He must do what a king must do.”

“But it’s senseless!” Morgain turned on him. “All day I’ve heard the people murmur. Some say he is unlucky, that he has drawn down the wrath of the old gods. Others say an army of unseen demons is among us-phantoms who will strike at either Roman or Pict according to their malice. Everywhere there is fear and uncertainty-and without reason they hold my brother to blame!”

“So does the pack always turn on its leader when the hunt goes not well,” Gonar rejoined. “The Wolf is strong. He can rule his pack if he shows his strength.”

“But it’s senseless!” Morgain repeated angrily. “Why should Bran shoulder such burdens!”

“Because Bran Mak Morn would be king,” the wizard told her. “And kingship has its price.”

6

VOICE IN THE MIST

The banquet was not a success.

It was a brave show, but only a show for all that. Men gnawed at their food without seeming to taste it. Ale and mulled wine they drank heavily, but without gusto. In place of the customary deafening din of loud voices and raucous laughter, there was only a sullen murmur of guarded conversation. Ordinarily merriment and carousal would have spilled out from the great hall and swept up all within Baal-dor. This night all those not specifically summoned to the feast appeared to have fallen into uneasy slumber in their dwellings and barracks.

At the high table Bran dutifully appeared in festive garments-called out toasts, engaged his sister, Gonar, and his clan chieftains in ioudly confident plans for driving the Romans into the Channel. That these were empty boasts was all too apparent to Bran himself to inspire more than half-hearted responses from his chieftains. The entire evening had an atmosphere of forced gaiety-too much like the funeral feast of some departed hero. It sickened Bran, so that he was well pleased when none of his guests made to tarry any longer than courtesy demanded.

He could not be certain when he at last drifted into a troubled sleep. As is often the case when extreme fatigue and overwrought nerves combine with an increasing fever, the transition into sleep is not a clean fall into slumber-but rather a tormented spin into the miasma of delirium. Sleep sucked Bran Mak Morn down into its fevered depths-eventually.

At first he thought the nightmares had returned…

“Bran! Bran Mak Morn!” The familiar, poisonous voice called to him. “Awaken, King of Pictland!”

Bran cursed, tossing feverishly on his sweat-soaked couch.

“Bran! Bran Mak Morn! Awaken!” The call was repeated, insidiously creeping through the fog of delirium.

With an oath, Bran flung aside the fur coverings and sat bolt upright. His skull sang with fever; his eyes sought to focus through the haze and shadow. The chamber was empty.

“Bran Mak Morn!”

Fiercely he shook his head, trying to dash away the mists that clogged his brain. The voice came from just outside his door. Bran pushed himself dizzily to his feet. He must see…

In a dream-like haze, he crossed his chamber, mechanically taking up his sword. The room swam about him, but he reached the heavy door and drew back the bolt.

The hallway beyond was empty.

“Bran! Bran Mak Morn!”

The witch’s voice whispered like trailing silk-somewhere from the deep shadow at the end of the long hallway. Not troubling to dress, the Pictish king stepped over the sprawled, comatose body of Grom. Listening intently, he followed the phantom summons down the hall corridor to where it made a turn.

The hallway stood empty for its entire length. In the shadow of the stairs leading downward…

“Bran Mak Morn!”

The witch was below, in the wing that held the kitchens and storage rooms. Bran pursued the hateful voice.

The stairway was deserted. Stealthily Bran descended to the hallway below. Again there was no one.

“Bran! Bran Mak Morn! Come to me!”

A chill breath of wind. The massive iron-bound door that gave egress from the rear wings stood ajar. Tendrils of mist reached through the rift.

“Come to me, Bran!” The voice beckoned from the darkness without.

In this dream it did not occur to Bran Mak Morn to wonder that the postern should stand unbolted. Grimly he pushed past the outer door and followed the siren voice into the night.

The slumped figure of the guard who stood watch at his post shouted no challenge, expressed no surprise at the sudden appearance of his king, naked as the sword that gleamed in his fist. The guard’s eyes stared glassily into nothingness-as they would continue to stare until a trembling hand closed them.

“Here, King of Pictdom!” teased the voice out of the mists. “Come to me, my lover!”

There. Just ahead. Was it a trick of the mists, or did he catch a glimpse of the witch’s lithe form dancing away from him? Bran set his lips in a snarl and tightened his fist about sword-hilt. Reality or nightmare-he would teach the serpent-bitch to taunt him.

The drizzling rain seemed to have stopped, although the dank fog was so dense that moisture beaded his bare flesh nonetheless. The damp earth was cold beneath his bare feet, and in the chill of the night pearls of fever-sweat made rivulets with the condensate of mist. Bran clenched his jaws to still their chattering, while his flesh seemed scalded with flame.

The heavy reek enveloped him completely, obliterating sight and sound. If any other living thing stirred within the walls of Baal-dor, Bran saw and heard no indication, nor did he question this. With dreamlike steps, he followed the phantom voice and the fleeting shape that might be spectre of delirium or wraith of the mists.

“Bran Mak Morn! Come to me, my king!”

Surely that was the witch just beyond-a laughing face fleetingly seen in the swirl of fog! Bran lunged. No one there.

Wait! Now farther on! A flash of bare limb. Listen! A patter of light footsteps? Or the chattering of his teeth?

“Bran! Bran! Come, my Bran!”

A trill of venomed laughter.

Bran lunged for the sound. His blade clove only mist. Mist on whose droplets hung that faint reptilian taint.

“Over here, my lover!”

“Damn you, bitch!” The fog smothered Bran’s curses as he lurched clumsily for the tormenting voice. His own voice was hollow and dream-like to his ears. His breath shook in broken gusts; sweat stung his eyes, and damp strands of hair hung in his face. Sharp stones tore the calloused soles of his bare feet, leaving dark smears on the dank earth as he stumbled onward.

“Here, my Bran!”

“Damn you!”

“Come, my Bran!”

“Kill you!”

“Kiss me, lover!”

“Kill you, witch!”

There! The witch’s face!

A jutting slab of stone broke Bran’s lumbering rush, cruelly smashing against midshin. Bran sprawled headlong under the impetus of his charge, tumbling onto broken stone. Agony burst through his consciousness as the rock gouged and crushed his bare flesh. His sword was flung from his sweaty grasp-clashing off into the darkness instead of impaling him.

The lancing pain in part drove away the coils of delirium. Bran rolled to his knees, wincing at the agony in his legs. Blood ran warm down his shins and over his ankles, and from the throbbing pain he might well have broken both tibiae. He stared about him-in abrupt clarity realizing this was no dream.

Huge menhirs loomed darkly before him in the lighter grey of the mists. But this was nightmare returning, surely-there was no cromlech within Baal-dor. Yet the pain was reality; the night winds cold on fevered flesh. Had he somehow wandered past the fortress gates?

There was a vague reptilian stench in the night-and now underscoring it, a heavier stink of death.

Bran stumbled warily to his feet. The movement was shot with new agony, but at least his legs bore his weight. He cast about him in the darkness for his sword.

Where was he?…

“Bran! Come to me, king of fools!”

Bran swore wrathfully. So this was still delirium…

“Here I am, my lover!”

Standing between the menhirs. The serpentine-lithe figure with the mockery in her pointed-toothed smile. Atla!

Bran snarled and lunged-goaded to berserk rage. His wrenched legs betrayed him. Once again the Pict sprawled drunkenly into pain-shot darkness, slithering on his belly across slippery stone.

Death hung on the reek, choking his gasping breath. A great pyramidal mass loomed obscenely before his outstretched body. Bran caught his breath and stared at the cairn of horror before which he prostrated.

The vacant eye sockets of two thousand gory heads sightlessly returned his stare.

7

FROM THE SHADOWS

A ripple of hateful laughter.

“Bran, my lover! Why were you so slow to answer my call? Are you no longer so eager to seek the doors of hell? Or were my kisses too cold for your hot barbarian blood?”

Atla swayed toward him, her sinuous grace stirring chill revulsion within him. Bran spared her a quick glance, still gaping at the grisly pyramid before him. Two thousand heads made a considerable pile, impressive even to one inured to the horrors of war.

Bloodless faces still set in final grimaces of agony. Others slack in death, gaping stupidly. Skulls cloven and crushed, many with features mashed beyond recognition, obliterated beneath masks of filth and gore. Some with necks neatly severed; others with hacked and ragged stumps; some with lower jaws shorn away-trophies carelessly taken, or perhaps wrested while the victim still had life enough to struggle. Two thousand butchered heads-a nightmarish refuse heap piled high as a barrow. Sufficient congealed blood remained to ooze in a greasy puddle from beneath the cairn, and the effluvium of new decay did not wholly overpower the acrid reptilian musk.

In a tiny corner of his brain that strove to hold back the flood of madness, Bran found pause to wonder what had become of their eyes…

Nightmare? Delirium? Or the final plunge into madness?

The pain and the cold and the smell of death were real enough. As was the poisonous laughter of the witch-woman of Dagon-moor.

Grimly Bran Mak Morn gathered himself for a leap. His eyes sought to pierce the darkness for his fallen sword. Flesh or phantom, creatures of hell lurked in the mist, and Bran meant to test their substance with cold steel.

“So this is Bran Mak Morn, great King of Pict-land,” sneered a new voice. “I see only a naked barbarian, crawling in the mud.”

The voice was that of a man, and he spoke in Latin. Bran came to his feet in a sudden bound.

“Softly!” warned the voice. “Is this what you were searching about for, my dirty barbarian king?”

Bran would have leapt for the man, but already the swordpoint that pressed against his chest had stabbed a warm rivulet of blood. The blade, Bran saw, was his own.

The compelling menace of stark steel brought Bran to full awareness of his situation. Some final stronghold of savage instinct withstood the onslaught of madness to leave the Pict clear-headed and poised to face the danger that surrounded him.

These were not the menhirs of a cromlech that rose about him in the night, he realized-nor had he left Baal-dor. Rather, he stood within the broken walls of a ruined tower atop the high bluff overlooking the convergence of the rivers. Presumably this had been an ancient redoubt-one of several ruinous fortifications within the enceinte left over from the citadel’s hoary past. Most were beyond repair and had been cannibalized for building blocks. Here the massiveness of its stone was probably the reason Pictish masons had avoided this ruin.

No phantasmagoria was the ghastly cairn of eyeless heads that overflowed the broken walls, nor the cloak-wrapped figure of the witch who laughed at him in the mist.

Bran shifted his weight, drawing back from the jabbing swordpoint.

“Softly, King Bran,” menaced the voice, slurring the Latin sibilants in a manner that stirred the Pict to instant loathing. “We have no wish to harm our potential ally.”

Bran glared, making no sudden moves as the swordpoint did not waver. In the darkness he could barely discern the figure of the man before him, other than to note that it was a slender man of middle height who wore the armor and accoutrements of a Roman officer.

“What devil’s game is this, Ada?” Bran demanded hoarsely.

The witch laughed again at his helpless anger. She made a grand gesture. “Hail, Bran Mak Morn, King of Pictdom! We stand before you in your royal court, bringing gifts to show our loyal allegiance: I, Atla, witch of Dagon-moor, and he Quintus Claudius Nero, legate of the Ninth Legion!”

“Enough of your mockery, witch!” snarled Bran. “The bones of the Ninth have bleached unburied in Serpent Gorge these four score years, nor has Rome ever reformed Legio IX because of its disgrace, so men say. What do you with this Roman?”

“Not a Roman, my king,” Atla told him. “Nor were all of the Ninth left unburied.”

Bran ground his jaws, furious at being the object of the witch’s secret jest. Another instant and he would hurl himself barehanded against the pair.

“Hold!” again warned the officer called Claudius Nero. “You’ll not live to complete that leap.”

The Pict had been tensing his muscles for the effort. Now he relaxed angrily. With a sudden chill he realized the other man had called his move even as Bran had tensed for the rush. Bran was too seasoned a warrior to believe he could have betrayed his intent under the thick cover of darkness. Could this man see in the dark, then?

“There’s no need for this petulance, milord,” Atlas voice was reassuring. “We’ve come to you as friends.”

“Friends who steal upon me in the dead of night?” scoffed Bran.

“An hour circumstances demand,” Atla replied. “But surely these gifts we here bestow upon you must convince you of our amicable intent.”

The mockery of her tone was salt on the Pict’s wounded pride. “How did the whore of serpents acquire such bounty as this?” he retorted, controlling his voice with difficulty.

“Bitter words!” laughed Atla. “Say rather, leman of kings!”

“In a moment,” Bran growled, “I shall call to the guard. I want to see how well you trade jests as the faggots begin to crackle beneath your feet.”

“Bran, you bluster! This night even the dogs of Baal-dor doze placidly, and in this reek a shout would scarcely carry beyond our hearing. But why do you spurn this gift we offer?”

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis,” sardonically quoted the Pict, to whose warlike spirit the Aeneid of Vergilius Maro had been solace during the trying weeks in Eboracum. His wit evoked no response.

“Explain to me quickly then,” he said after a pause, “why a witch and a renegade Roman steal into my capital by night to bestow upon me this gory spoil of the battle of which my army was cheated.”

“You were not cheated of a battle,” Ada argued. “Rather, you were presented with a bloodless victory as a gesture of good will by those who see in Rome a common enemy. Surely you would not have been so discomforted had Cormac na Connacht and his Gaelic reavers awarded you this spoil?”

Bran’s scowl only deepened. “Enough fencing, Ada.

I saw what I saw there at the Roman camp. Speak plainly now and to the point, or I call my dogs from their dreaming.”

“So you saw things at the ruins of the camp, milord?” The man called Claudius Nero laughed jeeringly. “Thank your savage gods that you saw not the visions of hell that these eyeless faces beheld before death stilled their terror!”

“Theirs was a doom that shall befell Rome and all her works!” hissed Atla. “A doom which Bran Mak Morn shall help bring to pass!”

Again the sibilant whisper of nightmare shrilled from the shadows of the Pict’s soul. “Bran Mak Morn shall act for the weal of Pictdom, witch!” he challenged. “What master does your Roman friend serve?”

“Your dull barbarian wit is slow to grasp,” spoke Claudius Nero. “I am legate of the Ninth-but we are no longer Legio IX Hispana, nor do we obey the emperor in Rome.”

“Then what master do you serve?”

Quintus Claudius Nero chuckled as at a private jest. “The Ninth is now Legio IX Infernalis, King of Pictdom. And we serve the Black Stone.”

Bran caught his breath. With studied calm he retorted, “Then you’ve forsaken the Roman eagle for the standard of hell, legate. Atla, whatever hellish plot that’s afoot, I’ll have no part of it! I’ve vowed never again to stain my cause with the taint of foul sorceries!”

“King of Pictdom, you have no choice.”

Bran snarled his answer. “No choice, witch! Is the king of Pictdom a vassal of the serpent! Try to kill me-if you dare! For while Bran Mak Morn yet lives, he shall curse and defy you and your hell-spawn kinsmen who lair in the bowels of the earth!

“Whore of worms! Do you threaten Bran Mak Morn! I’ll flay your mottled skin from your cringing flesh! And your screams will affright your limbless kinsmen in their sunless burrows-where they fear the clean light of day no whit less than the swords and arrows of the Picts!”

Atla recoiled from his rage-but it was not that the witch-woman of Dagon-moor shrank back in abasement, rather that she reared back as an angry viper coils to strike.

“King of fools! You threaten me! Atla, whom you courted with hot kisses for the secrets you would now abjure! Fool! Fool and slave of fools! Did I not warn you that in their own time the Worms of the Earth would come to you\”

“And let them come if they dare! With cold steel and a thousand Pictish warriors at my back, HI give them a welcome! Or be it lone and with naked fists, I’ll give them the same reply! And though they kill me, the survivors will scurry back to their burrows to tell a tale that will daunt the black souls of any others of their hell-spawn race who dare to think the Worms of the Earth can command a king of men!”

Bran Mak Morn raised his fists on high. “Go back and tell your masters, whore! Hide in their burrows or die! Let them come to me with answer if they dare!”

“Bran, they are already here. And there is another whose life I think you will not so quickly throw away…”

The Pict’s iron control shattered at Atla’s insinuations. With the blurring speed of a panthers strike, Bran sidestepped the blade that menaced him. Ignoring the soldier, he lunged for the witch-woman who taunted him.

The darkness heaved about him, and Bran’s murderous rush never reached its object. Cold hands clawed at his legs, tackling his struggling body to the blood-slick earth, as Nero’s slash clove the space he had quitted.

“Don’t kill him!” Atla yelled. “He’s useless to us dead!”

Clammy hands sought to pin the heaving Pict. Bran wrested free his right arm-drove a fist at one of the shadowy figures. With fierce delight he felt an unseen face pulp beneath his blow. The assailant fell away into the convulsing shadows.

Slewing on the slick ground, Bran’s clawing fingers sought and found a face on his left. Sharp teeth tore at his fingers. Bran shifted his grip on the face, found the eyes, and drove his fingers into the sockets. The grip on his left arm subsided. Bran heaved upright, and for an instant the Pict almost tore free of the arms that clutched at him in the darkness.

A sudden blow snapped Bran’s head back. Blindly he sought to rise again. A second blow-dimly Bran felt the cestus-clad fist-filled his face with blood and stretched the Pict senseless on the slimy earth.

Pain burst over him in a wave of star-shot blackness. Bran was vaguely aware of the legate standing over him.

“Don’t kill him!” Atla’s voice came from a thousand miles away. “He’ll bargain with us yet!”

“Doesn’t look like much worth troubling with to me,” sneered Nero from a similar distance. “I’ll give him something for his pride.”

The kick that slammed Bran’s head into the slime came from inches away. It brought complete oblivion.

Unless it was delirium, the voice that seemed to sob: “Oh Bran, did I not warn you!”

Through the smothering pall of blackness rough hands were shaking him. Each jolt evoked a star-burst of agony across the blackness in his skull. Eventually it got bad enough that Bran sought to brush aside the annoying touch. He opened his eyes.

The darkness about him was less intense than the darkness he had been summoned from. Perhaps it was the approach of dawn. He recognized the gnarled form of Grom crouched beside him.

Dizzily Bran sat up. His head was a blaze of pain. Dried blood caked his face.

“Thank the gods, milord Bran!” Grom cried out. “I’d feared they’d broken your skull!”

“A fool’s skull is hard,” Bran muttered through split and swollen lips. “What has happend, Grom?”

“Devil’s work, by the sight of this cairn of heads that black sorcery must have heaped up in our midst!” The old Pict thrust the haft of his dagger into Bran’s fist, then raised his bearded chin to bare his throat. “Strike, milord! I slept like a suckled babe across your threshold, while you were lured out here to deadly peril!”

Bran blinked his eyes, striving to clear his blurred vision. “Keep your blade for sheathing in enemies’ throats, old war dog. It was sorcery that beguiled us both, and I’ll bear the blame for its coming upon us in the night.”

“Aye, sorcery-black sorcery!” swore Grom. “I awoke from strange nightmares-frightened to wakefulness like a child who cries out in the night. The fear did not leave me when I saw your door open, your chamber empty. I arose, and a gust of night air showed me the postern standing ajar with a corpse standing watch. In a rush of panic, I ran out into the darkness in search of you. The stench of carrion drew me to this place, where I feared I had found you as a dead man.”

Bran clutched Grom’s thick shoulders in a grip of iron. “The postern left open! The watch dead! You fool! Did you call out the guard!”

Grom cringed. “My wits were slow and thick as though I’d quaffed ten times the wine I’d drunk last night! I thought only to find you! Kill me now if I’ve betrayed you!”

But Bran remembered the sinister threat that had sent him raging for Atla’s throat. Ignoring the lancing pain, he pulled himself erect, recovered his sword that Claudius Nero had contemptuously thrown down beside him.

“Quickly!” he grated. “Back to the hall! Pray to the gods they’ve not…”

But already a woman’s scream tore through the mists-a rising, keening scream that seemed not to pause for breath as it sought in vain to impart some horror that was beyond human expression.

Heedless of the vertigo that throbbed through his skull, Bran raced across the enclosure. Barely seen obstacles loomed before his lurching rush, but the Pictish king was intent only on reaching the darker mass of the great hall that bulked against the greying skies.

The scream tore endlessly-like the call of some demented banshee.

The postern still stood open, and its glassy-eyed guardsman offered a huge smile of welcome with the raw edges of his slashed throat. Bran hurtled past him and into the horror-reft hall, where already the tramp of feet and gobble of confused voices echoed the tocsin of fear.

Pale faces crowded the hallway beyond the door to Morgain’s chamber. Someone held a lamp high, peering open-mouthed within. Reeling away, a maidservant sputtered in sickness. Bran thrust them all aside and flung himself into his sister’s room.

The endless scream came from the throat of Helta, Morgain’s maidservant, although it took a second look for Bran to recognize the fear-distorted face and the eyes that stared wide with madness. Her stark gaze centered on the shape that sprawled obscenely upon the fur robes of Morgain’s couch.

Bran groaned through clenched teeth. Veins stood out from his blood-caked brow. Staring at the object on Morgain’s bed, the king of Pictdom swayed dizzily, black rage roaring in his brain.

Nestled in the depression in the furs where Bran’s sister had lain to sleep was a shape of horror beyond any human depravity. The young girls skin had been meticulously flayed from her body-cunningly sewn together again. The lamplight made the skin translucent, so that Bran could see the hollow skin had been stuffed with hundreds-many hundreds-of human eyes.

After a black interval-when Bran Mak Morn recognized that the abomination on his sister’s bed was not Morgain, but some other maid-his horror only increased…

8

SECRET ALLIANCES

It was a square of thin parchment, and it had lain upon the breast of the boneless abomination sprawled across Morgain’s bed. The message was in Latin, printed in a careful hand that appeared to be feminine. The finely-grained parchment had also once been feminine.

Q. Claudius Nero to Bran Mak Morn: Having been taken hostage, your sister is being held in my camp. Come alone to the barrow below Kestrel Scaur this night to conclude our compact. Morgain has not been harmed. Fail to comply and it will not be well with her.

Grimly Bran Mak Morn reread the lines that were already indelibly etched in his thoughts. The westering sun gilt the scrap of human skin, and the graceful capitals of russet ink still read the same. Carefully Bran rerolled the parchment and thrust it again into a pouch at his belt. His mount tossed its head and, unbidden, resumed the climb along the slopes where broom and whin blossom clustered yellow and orange among green spears of spring growth.

The grey eminence called Kestrel Scaur was beyond the next ridge. He would reach it before dark.

***

“You go to your death,” old Grom had mourned at his parting.

“I think not,” Bran laughed bitterly. “If they wanted my death, there would have been one more head atop that cairn last night.”

Grom shook his grizzled head. “Then there are worse things waiting for Bran Mak Morn than death.” Gonar understood. The ancient priest’s eyes had glittered strangely while Bran blurted out his confused remembrance of his encounter with Atla and Claudius Nero.

“I thought it was another of the nightmares,” Bran groaned. “By the gods! If it were only nightmare!”

A cairn of rotting heads and the horror in Morgain’s chamber gave hideous proof by daylight…

“You say he called himself legate of the Ninth Legion?” Gonar questioned.

“So he and the witch both said.”

“Bran, I saw the massacre of Legio IX Hispana.”

“Claudius Nero styled his command Legion IX Infernalis. It seemed to him a jest.”

“And he said he served the Black Stone?”

Bran nodded impatiently. “The mystery only deepens,” he said with a curse. “A renegade Roman who claims to command a legion steals into Baal-dor to boast of the massacre of a Roman camp-and who brings with him Atla to talk of an alliance of Pictdom with those who worship the Black Stone. This is madness, Gonar!”

The aged wizard stroked his long beard, eyes lost in thought.

“Madness, perhaps,” he spoke at last. “Or ruthless cunning. This begins to hint of a meticulously wrought plot-albeit inhumanly cruel in its conception.”

“Inhuman, I grant you,” Bran swore. “But I cannot see any coherent conspiracy in this evil nightmare of demented slaughter and impossible coalitions!”

“Can’t you? Ten days ago every blade of Pictdom was behind you. Had you called for an attack on Rome itself, the very hills of Caledon would have followed you to the Tiber. Today all Pictdom murmurs against the unlucky king who has at once called down the wrath of Rome and summoned forth the evil of the Children of the Night. And not even the unassailable walls of Baal-dor are protection against phantoms who can rise from the night to flaunt the trophies of their power-and steal the sister of the king from her own chamber!”

“Enough!” Bran’s face darkened in rage.

Gonar did not relent. “Ten days hence not a hundred blades will remain loyal to Bran Mak Morn. The Pictish nation will break apart like a crystal chalice dropped on stone, nor will you ever again raise the shattered vessel on high!”

“Enough!” Bran roared. “So my hidden enemies have undermined my position! But these came to me claiming friendship. Explain to me now why Roman slays Roman for the weal of Pictland.”

“It is commonplace for Roman to slay Roman,” Gonar responded. “And more evil has been done in the name of friendship than ever blows were struck in open warfare.”

“But a coalition of renegade Romans with the Children of the Night! I know what inhuman hands clutched at me there in the darkness!”

Gonar shrugged. “And it is commonplace for man to become the willing servant of darkness. I can only guess as to the webs of elder evil that have now been spun to enmesh Pict, Roman-and Worm!”

“He said the Ninth Legion,” Bran wondered. “Legion IX lies buried in Serpent Gorge.”

“He said Legion IX Infernalis…”

***

His mount nickered anxiously, recalling Bran from his gloomy musing. Pulling short, Bran gazed upward along the slope below Kestrel Scaur, around which he had been picking his way.

The grey expanse of rock showed stark in the gathering twilight along the horizon. Rising from the shadow beyond the scatter of detritus stood the barrow designated as rendezvous on the square of parchment. Like so many of the tumuli and dolmens of this haunted land, the barrow had no name nor tradition surviving in present memory. Cromlechs and menhirs raised by forgotten hands, barrows and dolmens that entombed unknown bones. The Romans attributed the eerie stone circles to the Druids, but the Celts believed the Picts had raised these megalithic enigmas, and the Picts had discovered them looming over the silent plains when first they came to the Isles.

Uneasily Bran remembered his descent through Dagon’s Barrow to the chamber of the Black Stone. This Britain was an ancient land, much of its history lost long before the Pictish invaders had wrested the island from the red-haired giants they found here. It was a haunted land of heroic myths and dark legends. Perhaps the age would come when Pictdom, too, would vanish into the mists of legend, and Bran Mak Morn would be a forgotten saga.

The moon was but a sickle, honed thin as a Druid’s blade, and gave no light as it glinted over Kestrel Scaur. Bran paused in the copse of white-petalled rowans that encircled the nameless barrow, watching across the clearing. His mount snorted nervously and stamped. Against the grey hump of the barrow Bran glimpsed the outline of a cloaked figure.

Bran calmed his anxious steed, speaking soothingly and stroking its mane. When he glanced up again, he saw that he had been mistaken, for there was no figure standing there after all. A trick of the deepening gloom on his taut nerves. The Pict scowled and stared more intently.

The twilight faded entirely, a massy cloud groped across the rind of moon, and for a moment the blackness was unbroken. When the cloud drifted past the wan sickle, Bran saw that he was no longer alone.

Taking a long breath, the Pict nudged his horse from beneath the rowans and across the expanse of bent and broom that surrounded the silent barrow. A darker square yawned from the grass-grown curvature of the tumulus, whence issued the mephitic, dead air of a long-enclosed tomb. Earlier, in the dying light, the slopes of the hillock had seemed unbroken. Now a darkened tunnel pierced the barrow, and standing beside the great stone that formerly guarded the entrance were two figures. Riding closer, Bran recognized the sinuous form of Atla and a soldier in armor he took to be Claudius Nero.

His horse cared little for the breath of the tomb that the black portal exhaled-or perhaps it was the faint reptilian scent that hovered on the night air. Bran remained mounted, controlling his stamping mount with difficulty as he scowled down at the pair who awaited him. Unless the two had steathily come up through the darkened trees around them, Bran concluded they must have hidden within the barrow itself. Such probability did nothing to enhance the Pict’s impression of either.

“Have you brought Morgain?” Bran demanded, in his savage wrath unable to dissemble.

“Patience,” Nero assured him. “Your sister shall be safely detained until we have evidence of your good will.”

Bran spat. “Whatever your fold schemes, Roman, the king of Pictdom does not ally himself with woman-stealers and cowards who strike from shadows!” His face still broken and swollen from Nero’s cestus, it took all of the Pict’s control to keep his sword in scabbard.

Atla laughed softly, oblivious to the death that danced in the Pict’s glare. “Would you so rashly refuse our alliance, Bran Mak Morn? Think better on it! The king of Pictdom has need of powerful allies-now more than ever!”

“What do you mean!”

“All secrets are heard by those who listen in darkness.”

“I hadn’t thought such worms had ears,” sneered Bran.

“The Children of the Night have ears enough to listen to the murmurs of discontent that rumble in every Pictish village, Bran Mak Morn,” the witch returned. “Even in Baal-dor the stout warriors of Pictland quail before the cairn of Roman skulls that has followed them into the heart of their proud citadel.”

“Enough! I know the loyalty of my people!”

“Then that worry that gnaws at the hearts of all kings must feast in your breast, milord Bran,” smiled Atla. “But the listeners in darkness hear the outraged voices of the Romans in their camps and villas as well. All the South is astir over this last Pictish atrocity, for thus the Romans give our triumph to Pictdom. South of the Wall there rises the cry for vengeance-and in Eboracum, Alfenius Senecio has again sent word to Rome for aid against the wild Picts of Caledon!”

“Rome will not heed,” Bran snorted.

“Not so, Black Bran! This time Rome will listen. Already the emperor himself prepares to come to Britain with new legions.”

“Let Severus come if he dares! We’ll send him and such of his legionaries as escape howling in fear back to the safety of Rome’s walls!”

Nero’s voice cut him short. “Who will? You alone?” Bran bit down on his angry retort. Black rage smouldered within him, controlled only barely by his iron will. He knew that once unchecked, that rage would be an all-consuming blaze-and he dared not yet unleash that force for Morgain’s sake.

“So you’ve cunningly undercut my strength in order to compel me into some unhallowed coalition, have you, legate? Well then, I’ve come to hear your mad proposal-so enough dissimulation. Who are you and what powers do you really represent?”

The moon was a sharp lens in the night skies, where a bright river of stars shone between rolling islands of cloud. Bran’s mount continued to vex at their proximity to the barrow entrance. By stages Bran allowed the stamping horse to draw away from the dank-smelling passageway, so that unconsciously the pair on foot stepped away from the barrow to keep apace. As they passed from the thick shadow into the wan fall of moonlight, Bran noted with a start that both pairs of eyes made yellow slants in the reflected luminescence.

Claudius Nero smiled as one with superior knowledge, and though his features were still masked by shadow, Bran caught the bright flash of teeth. “Eighty years ago, Pict, your ancestors massacred Legio IX Hispana in Serpent Gorge-but that massacre was not so complete as they might have hoped…”

“No Roman left Serpent Gorge alive!” Bran growled, for he had heard the tale of that battle a thousand times.

“True-to that extent, King of Pictdom!” Nero hissed with mockery. “But not all those who remained in Serpent Gorge were dead.”

Bran frowned, knowing that he was being played with, but forced to accept it for Morgain’s sake. “There were some few who fled into a cavern-Calidius Falco and the last of his men took refuge with their women and brats. My people sealed the cavern and the Ninth never again crept forth from their hiding.”

“The caverns ran deeper than your barbarian ancestors suspected. Far deeper.”

The starlight brightened with the clearing of the night skies. Perhaps Bran’s eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness. Glowering down at Claudius Nero, Bran now could see the subtly pointed ears and the thin-lipped smile over sharply pointed teeth.

There was sardonic light in those slanted yellow eyes, and Bran knew how wrong he had been to call Claudius Nero a Roman…

“The Children of the Night came upon the Ninth in the darkness,” Nero explained needlessly. “Not all were slain.”

“By the gods!” Bran cried with loathing. “My people inflicted a far more evil doom upon the Romans that day than any dared imagine! Would that Utha Mak Dunn had broken in to see that all perished by sword and flame-instead of entombing human souls to spawn with the Worms of the Earth!”

Sick with revulsion, the Pict stared at the being who was neither Roman nor wholly human-like Atla, an unthinkable hybrid of man and a race of creatures who had almost become as man in distant ages before the Picts had driven them from the surface of the earth. His mind groped to conceive of the visions of hell that must have followed when the doomed survivors of the Ninth were set upon in the depths of the earth by creatures who had sunk closer to their reptilian heritage with each generation in darkness. Death, no matter how hideous, would have been the lot of the fortunate.

“I don’t understand,” Bran said slowly. “It was my race who doomed your ancestors thus. By all logic you should hate us-yet you claim to seek alliance with Pictdom.”

Atla laughed. “Not so, king of Pictdom! You forget your own oft-repeated wisdom. Rome is the common enemy of all Britain!”

“Witch! You know full well I meant only the tribes of man!”

“Here speaks the king of fools!” Atla shrilled. “His own people murmur against him, a world-spanning empire sends its might to destroy him-and now, too late, he scruples over weapons and allies!”

Bran Mak Morn ground his jaws to master his rage. “You waste my time. Skim away this dross of lies and trickery! What mad scheme is this to align the People of the Dark with the armies of man?”

“No treachery, Black Bran! For Rome is the common enemy. You have seen how Rome has scourged the Druids from the forests of Gaul-slaughtered their priests and cut down their sacred groves. Rome cares nothing for the liberties and beliefs of its conquered peoples. Rome is an all-devouring leviathan that has ground uncounted tribes and clans under its iron-shod advance. One day there is a land peopled with many clans, each cherishing its age-old customs and individuality. Then comes Rome, and another day that same land is peopled only by Romans and those who so relinquish their heritage as to boast of their Roman citizenship.”

Atla paused. “But who am I to say these words to Bran Mak Morn-when they are the very words that the king of Pictdom has so often spoken to rally the tribes of Britain to his banner.”

“My words were for the hearing of men, not for those who listen from below!”

“But true words nonetheless,” Nero said with heavy irony. “Pictdom alone cannot halt the advance of Rome. No nation has been able to conquer Rome. The emperor will come with his legions, and Bran Mak Morn and his brave Picts shall be one with the armies of Cassivellaunus and Caratacus and Boudicca and Calgacus and all of Britain’s other dead and defeated heroes. Roman villas will spring up among the Highlands of Caledon, and Picts shall till the fields of their Roman masters. And in a few generations Picts shall dress in togas, speaking Latin and claiming Roman citizenship, as do the conquered Britons of the South.”

Bran sat his horse, dizzy with the hot blood that roared in his ears. “Such a doom has not yet befallen Pictdom-nor shall it so long as I live.”

“Which will not be long if you face Rome alone.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“You throw away that chance.”

“Witch! Do you think my warriors would fight alongside creatures who stink of the serpent!”

“Once Pictdom sacrificed upon the altars of the Serpent!”

Bran choked on his anger, for Atla spoke the truth. “That was in another age. The temples of the Serpent are deserted now, nor does the white god of the Moon feast on man flesh. Once Pictdom seemed destined to sink into such degraded savagery, but I have given over my life to leading my race on a path upward and away from such degeneracy.”

“And in doing so you have brought down the might of Rome to crush Pictdom,” Atla hissed. “Do not think, Bran Mak Morn, that your people thank you for forcing your ideals upon them!”

“Such is a matter for men to decide among men. I do not seek the counsel of serpent-spawn.”

“Your dream is about to be snuffed out by the power of Rome,” Nero promised. “We would change that.”

“You would change that dream into nightmare.”

“Rome will destroy the dream.”

Bran grew tired of argument. “And what do you seek to gain?”

“Our lives. Rome will seek to destroy the Children of the Night even as the legions butchered the Druids and poured salt on the ashes of their groves. Together our armies will be strong enough to repel Rome’s advance. Once we have driven the Romans from our shores, there shall be a return to the old ways. The villas and towns of the Roman shall be burned to the ground, their roads and walls torn asunder stone by stone. The tribes of Britain shall be free of Roman ride and Roman taxes.”

Atlas voice became insinuating. “If it is your will, Bran Mak Morn shall be king of all Britain. Pictdom shall emerge from these bleak Highlands to reclaim those lands the Celts stole from them centuries ago. Pictish lords shall rule the land…”

“And what of the Children of the Night?”

“An end to persecution. Freedom to dwell as they will in their burrows beneath the earth. The People of the Dark have no longer any yearning for the world of men.”

Bran made a sarcastic sound. “And how is it this proposed alliance shall be carried out?”

Claudius Nero spoke with deep pride. “We have given you compelling proofs of what the Ninth can do. For reasons that should be obvious to you, we cannot attack by day. Further, our numbers are limited. My proposal is to coordinate our armies to mutual advantage. You and your Picts shall take the field by day and provide the main thrust of arms. The Ninth shall strike terror by night-nor shall any Roman wall or fortification stand against our onslaught!

“Let Severus come with his tens of thousands!” Nero exulted. “By the autumn nothing of Rome and its legions shall remain, and all Britain shall hail Bran Mak Morn as deliverer and king!”

“And the old days shall return?” Bran suggested. “Yes!” Atla smiled. “The old days, the old ways…”

“And with it, the old gods!” Bran laughed mirthlessly. “You fools! Did you think to gull Bran Mak Morn into some unhallowed pact with bright promises of glory and power! Go back to tell your hidden masters that the king of Pictdom is no thick-witted barbarian lout to leap and dance as their dupe! Did you really believe me such a fool as to trust the venomed lies of the Worms of the Earth!”

“You have no choice!” Nero warned. “We have your sister.”

“True enough,” Bran agreed evenly. “You have Morgain. And I most assuredly have you!

“Ho! Picts! To me!” Bran shouted suddenly. Wheeling his horse between the startled pair and the barrow entrance from which he had skillfully lured them, the Pictish king gave a wild cry and swung free his sword.

From the darkened copse came answering shouts, the crash of many bodies rushing from concealment.

“While we had our little council, my men took position about us,” Bran told them. “You’re surrounded. Stand where you are and you’ll not be harmed!”

“Fool!” Atla hissed. “Morgain…”

“Your lives hang on her safe return!”

“Have you forgotten Titus Sulla?”

Bran’s voice rang with menace. “Morgain shall be returned unharmed-or you’ll learn at your leisure that Picts are not without some knowledge of the refinements of torture!”

“Fool!” Ada shrieked.

But Nero spat out a stream of sibilants that no human throat could have uttered.

A sudden tremor gave Bran scant warning. Then the earth buckled and heaved apart in a rending cataclysm-as the summons was answered from below. His horse screamed and plunged in a violent somersault through the blackness. Flung over the beast’s neck, Bran flailed through the riven air and tumult of exploding earth.

He had one fleeting glimpse as serpentine horror reared colossally out of the sundered earth to affront the spinning stars. Then the ground smashed against him, and Bran saw no more, nor heard the doomed cries of his men.

9

KING NO MORE

Unconsciousness lasted only a short interval. Stunned by his fall, Bran quickly recovered into a darkness where the stars stopped spinning and the crescent moon watched silently from between drifting clouds.

Cold hands touched his brow. Bran opened his eyes to return the gaze of the white face that looked down at him intently. The earth no longer moved. His head was raised up by a cold pillow of linked mail. He rolled his head, saw that the pillow was mail-clad knees.

Bran grunted, tried to sit up. The face and the moon swam again in his vision. Red lights of pain stabbed through his skull. Blackness returned.

Then he heard Grom’s hoarse voice shouting his name, and when he struggled upright he was alone. Wings of blackness flapped across his brain, but Bran Mak Morn reeled to his feet.

“Milord Bran! Are you all right!” Old Grom all but bowled his master over as he flung himself to Bran’s side. In the dim moonlight Bran could see the man’s face was clotted with dirt and blood.

“Well enough,” commented Bran unsteadily, glancing to where his horse lay dead, its head twisted to a grotesque angle. “Lucky to have escaped a crushed skull and a shattered back.”

Still groggy, Bran gazed about him without comprehension. A tremendous wound gaped from the clearing, and vaguely Bran could see a vast tangle of smashed and uprooted trees disrupting the circle of rowans. Great clods of soil and rock had erupted from the crater in the earth, and now Bran became aware of a foetid stench-a stench he remembered from the Roman camp.

“By the gods! What happened!” Bran blurted, chaotic memories returning in a jumble.

“May the Moon-Woman curse their souls, the others all fled when the hell-worm struck from below!” Grom snarled, not wholly suppressing a shudder. “I was stretched senseless by a flying clod, and when I recovered my wits all was still.”

“The hell-worm?”

“Did you not see? It was such a vision that I thank the gods the moon shone no brighter! It was the very grandfather and grandmother of all serpents-no, it was the god of all serpents! Even the great serpents the Romans at Eboracum boast to bring from distant jungles for their arenas are as maggots to this one! Its maw could engulf a man as easily as a salmon snaps up a minnow!

“It burst forth from the earth even as we ran to you. I saw a man die horribly in that instant-then I was dashed to the ground, and for a space knew nothing of what followed.”

Bran grunted. “Who was it beside me a moment ago?”

“Milord, I saw no one as I came up.”

“No one?” Bran’s frown was puzzled. “I had thought… But no matter. My brain was all adaze.”

Grimly Bran took stock. Of Atla and Claudius Nero there was, of course, no sign. He had expected the two to come to this rendezvous prepared for a desperate move on his part, but there was no way Bran could have planned for such as this. With a curse, Bran realized he had gambled all and lost-how dread that loss might be he dared not imagine. The memory of Titus Sulla called to mind possibilities he refused to consider.

“They might have killed you,” Grom reassured him, noting the despair that twisted his masters face.

Bran shrugged. “Likely they thought the effort not worth the bother. By the gods, they’ve made a fool of me at every turn of their black conspiracy!”

Grom did not contradict him. “What now, milord?” he wondered bleakly. “How can men fight things of shadow and nightmare?”

“With steel!” Bran declared hotly. In silence he stared into the pit that had been torn through the earth. Small clods and pebbles still trickled into the reeking darkness far below. A vague trail of slime glistened tepidly in the wan starlight.

“Even this,” he breathed to himself.

Stay and let me show you real fruits of the pits! So had promised Ada that night in the Ring of Dagon, when Bran Mak Morn had fled with loathing from the corpse of the mewling wretch who had been Titus Sulla. And they had Morgain…

Bran’s jaws achea from tension. Grom stared at him in astonishment. Dimly Bran realized the low grinding rasp that he heard had come from his own throat.

“Come, old war dog!” Bran spoke loudly. “There’s no more we can do here. It’s back to Baal-dor to await further contact from these serpent-folk. We have no other choice.”

Bran reeled suddenly. In an instant Grom had leapt forward to bear him up.

The king of Pictdom leaned his weight heavily on his servant’s massive shoulders. “It is nothing,” Bran protested. “Rest is all I need…”

“Milord!” Concern edged Grom’s voice. Clumsily supporting the taller man, the dwarfish warrior assisted his king across the clearing and past the wreckage of the thicket.

Sprawled among the smashed rowans was grim evidence that not all Bran’s Picts had fled.

***

They had covered the better part of a mile when sounded the cautious clink of hooves from the darkness ahead. Instandy they halted in the deeper shadow of a massive beech.

The rider slowly approached, his long white beard flowing silver in the starlight. The tall, bony silhouette was unmistakable.

“Gonar!” hissed Bran, stepping away from the shadow of the bole.

The wizard pulled rein. “So you yet live?” he observed with irony. “I met frightened men on the road who swore that a demon-serpent had broken loose from hell and swallowed Bran Mak Morn whole.”

Tersely Bran gave account of the disaster at Kestrel Scaur.

“They let you live,” Gonar observed as Bran finished. “Then they still hope to bargain with you.”

“There can be no bargain.”

“Once the altars of the Serpent were served by both Pictdom and the People of the Dark.”

Bran glanced sharply at the ancient priest. In the darkness he could not read his face. “No/ Those days shall not return!”

“They have Morgain,” Gonar reminded relentlessly.

“Not for long,” Bran vowed softly.

“What do you intend?”

“Come deeper into the shadow,” Bran told him. “I know not what ears may listen, what eyes watch. I was certain someone followed us from the barrow, though I think by now we are alone. I half-sprained old Groms back making him lug me this far, but it should have convinced any watchers that Bran Mak Morn will lay a cripple for some while.”

“Bran! What madness do you plan!” Grom exclaimed in sudden realization.

“To all the world the king of Pictdom must lie half-dead in his chambers-I charge you to keep this deception! If Atla seeks contact, it must be understood that Bran Mak Morn is too grievously stricken to leave his couch for some days. Gonar’s mount can carry me back to Baal-dor, and after I’ll steal away on my own. The ruse should stay their vengeance from Morgain…”

Bran refused to contemplate otherwise. He must at all costs preserve Morgain’s value as a hostage. “Bran…” Gonar began in protest.

“I stole their Black Stone. I can damn well steal back Morgain.”

“You can’t! You’re mad to attempt…”

“I know the odds!” Bran snapped.

“Then you know you go to your doom.”

“I know there will be no alliance with Pictdom and the Children of the Night so long as Bran Mak Morn draws breath. And I know what Morgain will suffer once they understand not even her life can shake that resolve. I go to bring Morgain back-or Bran Mak Morn shall not return either.”

“True-you won’t return,” Gonar assured him bleakly. “And Pictdom shall perish without its king. A king cannot throw his life away thus. His duty is to his people…”

“To hell with my duty to my people!” Bran snarled. “Even now my people speak against me-complaining of taxes and troop levies and wars of my making! I try to make them see the rebirth of Pictdom as a great nation-and they see no farther than their next meal! And in this hour of crisis, they murmur against me! Enough I say!

“I’m done with this kinging it! I cannot call myself a man if I left my own blood kin to be the sport of the Worms of the Earth! Thus far they’ve made a fool of King Bran! Well, no more! Now it is not the king of Pictdom with whom they shall deal! It is Bran Mak Morn they must answer to!”

Bran’s arm came up swiftly to his brow, then flung away.

Something flashed in the moonlight, smacked into the folds of Gonar’s cloak. It was an iron crown.

10

ENCOUNTER AT DAWN

It was, of course, madness. Bran Mak Morn grudgingly admitted it to himself, if not to the others. More than any other man, the king who had flung away his crown understood the inhuman dangers he must face.

Almost two years had passed since Bran had made his descent through the Door in Dagon’s Barrow to steal the Black Stone. If you meet any on the Road, you will die as no mortal man has died for long centuries. So Atla had warned him then. With rash courage Bran Mak Morn had gone ahead with his quest for the Black Stone.

What he now intended called for a deeper courage. For now Bran knew what shapes of elder horror held dominion over the burrows beneath the earth.

High overhead a kestrel soared silently on the cold wind, riding the skies of dawn. Other than the hunting bird, Bran seemed to be entirely alone on the desolate heath. Hurriedly he made his way across the expanse of brown bent and yellow-blooming furze for the slopes beyond, where the boskage of birch and pine afforded better concealment in the growing light. Gaining the thicket, the Pict soon climbed to the base of Kestrel Scaur, even as the sun crept over the eastern ridges.

Carrion crows flapped heavily in the morning ground-mists, as Bran circled Kestrel Scaur to look down on the barrow that lay in its shadow. The scavengers broke their fast upon the pitiful fragments of human refuse strewn upon the crushed circle of rowans, and Bran was not so alone as he might wish. Later, when the sun was high and confident, his men would come to bury whatever they might find of their comrades.

Bran tried to piece together the vague, fragmented memory of what he had seen spewing forth from the earth scant hours ago. He did not entirely regret his inability to grasp a coherent picture of that mad instant.

His plans were of necessity unformed and imprecise. Bran only knew that Morgain was a captive of the Children of the Night and their half-human minions. Somewhere beneath the spring-touched heather, she was imprisoned within those burrows that bored through the earth like the paths of maggots through some dead giant’s skull. Alive or dead, Bran had no way of knowing-and remembering Titus Sulla, he was not at all certain that he wanted to find her alive.

But he would find Morgain-if not to rescue, then to avenge. Anguish spiking his heart, Bran knew the latter was far more likely.

So be it! He, Bran Mak Morn, had summoned this horror forth from the depths of hell-where the Worms of the Earth had laired for centuries, all but forgetting, and forgotten by, the world of men. It was only just that he should bring an end to this curse that he had boldly unleashed on the earth. There would be a killing of vermin such as the Children of the Night little imagined could strike them in their hidden realm. And when at last he fell upon the masses of slaughtered serpent-folk, such as survived would have little heart for creeping forth from their secret burrows ever again. And afterward old Gonar could pass on the iron crown to some other bold fool who wished to lead a pack of apish savages-or throw the crown into the deepest loch, as he saw fit.

The Worms of the Earth had come to the king of Pictdom. Now Bran Mak Morn was coming for them.

“Grim thoughts darken the brow of Bran Mak Morn,” a sudden voice spoke from beneath a pine. “Why broods the king of Pictdom on death and slaying on so fair a spring mom?”

Bran spun on his heels-sword clearing scabbard in a silver blur. He had believed himself to be alone here-for what affair would draw any other to this haunted spot after a night of feasting horror?

The voice laughed softly. “Nay-restore your blade, King Bran. What-will you do battle with whosoever accosts you, milord? A savage mood in truth for a morn that bespeaks new life.”

Bran peered suspiciously into the shadow. The tone was light and the speech was Pictish, albeit with curious inflection. Despite the disarming pleasantry, Bran caught a glimpse of mail in the filtered sunlight beneath the spinney of pine.

“Come out!” Bran warned, his mood dangerous.

A stirring and a clink of metal. A tall figure stepped away from the shadow of the grey pillars and their drooping boughs of dark green needles.

Bran grunted an astonished curse.

The newcomer was half a head taller than Bran Mak Morn. A wolf-skin cloak was flung back from one shoulder over a long shirt of curiously wrought link mail. The figure beneath the mail tunic and bracae was slender and straight, and-Bran made certain by a closer look-feminine. A fullness of the breast beneath the shirt of chainmail and a swelling of the hip where a long sword hung belted-not buxom, but unmistakable nonetheless.

“Who are you?” he demanded, somewhat taken in awe.

The girl laughed at his unease. “I am Liuba.”

“The name is strange to me,” Bran commented, studying her in open wonder. She was a personage to compel attention even in his present frame of mind.

Hair black and glossy as a raven’s wing was drawn back in a long fall, fastened at the nape by a gold brooch. Straight bangs came low across her wide forehead, then dropped across her temples at cheekbone level-hanging in a square cut as far as her ears, whence her untrimmed locks were drawn away by the brooch. The style-one unfamiliar to Bran-framed a face whose straight nose and severe jaw line seemed too harsh for a woman, yet too finely-hewn for a man. Her eyebrows made another straight, thin line across her forehead, and the eyes beneath were deep-set, black and bright as onyx. There was bitter irony in those eyes, carried through in the mordant twist of her full, pale lips.

Liuba laughed sardonically at Bran’s scrutiny. Her teeth were fine and very white against her dark complexion.

“Do you stare, Bran Mak Morn? In truth, it is I who should so stare at you-for your face is a mask of scab and swollen bruises.”

“I seek those who will give accounting for my battered face,” Bran returned with a hard smile.

“You’re a Pict?” he said-half statement, half questioning.

“I am a Pict.”

Bran furrowed his brow in thought. That she was of untainted Pictish blood was evident to him. Yet those who could claim such unbroken heritage were all too few in this age.

“I thought I could name all the gentry of my race,” mused Bran.

“Remnants of Pictdom yet lair in corners unknown even to King Bran,” replied Liuba in a tone of irony. “My clan has fallen into obscurity, and I have only lately come from afar to offer my sword to Bran Mak Morn.”

Bran grunted. That a woman should bear arms was not uncommon among so savage a race as the Picts-whose feuds and battles were deadly and final, with no thought of quarter. Even the barbarian Celts had shivered at the stone age ferocity of the Picts, and many a Celtic invader had died beneath the feral fury of those whose squalid huts they thought to burn. But while Pictish women might seize clubs and blades to follow their men onto the field of battle-and the gods take mercy on what wounded enemy they set upon-it was unheard of to encounter a woman fully armed and accoutred in costly battle gear.

Stranger still that such a woman should have been utterly unknown to Bran Mak Morn…

It was a mystery whose unraveling could not concern him now.

“Your sword is welcome, and gratefully accepted,” Bran told her, wondering what course he should take. For the success of his desperate scheme, his presence here on the moors must not be made known. Under the circumstances, there was no choice but to accept her at her word and trust to her good intentions.

“My position is awkward,” he began. “The nature of my venture demands secrecy. If you would render me a great service, proceed to Baal-dor and tell no one that you have seen me. Presently I will return to Baal-dor, and we can talk at greater length…”

“The King of Pictdom shall never return to Baal-dor,” Liuba promised in sombre tones. “Where Bran Mak Morn would boldly venture, he shall no more return to the world of men.”

Bran’s eyes narrowed. “It seems you are more than commonly informed. Are you prophetess, or merely clever spy?”

Liuba broke off a length of convolvulus, twining the blue-flowered vine about her long fingers. “Does it matter? Enough to say that you go to your doom.”

“What game do you play, Liuba?”

Her dark eyes met his. “You go to slay the ancient enemies of our race. Alone, you shall never return. Let me come with you. It may be that two blades of Pictish steel can stay the scales of fate from their predestined balance.”

At another time Bran might have acted otherwise. This dawn his nerves were wire-taut, his patience thin as a knife’s edge. It riled him to be confronted thus by this self-assured girl in man’s attire.

“Since you affect to know so much of my affairs and my destiny,” he told her curtly, “then you doubtless know as well that this is a personal blood-feud. If you would help me, go your own way and say nothing of this meeting.”

“Personal blood-feud?” Liuba’s brows rose. “And what of your sister? With my help there’s a chance…”

“If I’d wanted help, I could have chosen from the best of my warriors!” Bran snapped. “It will take stealth and iron nerve to save Morgain-a task only one man can hope to carry out. This is not the work for a blundering army, or for a girl who struts about wearing man’s weapons.”

The convolvulus vine snapped in her fist, as the girl’s hand fell to swordhilt. One glance at the wrath in her eyes, and Bran knew he must kill her if she drew blade.

“So be it!” spoke Liuba after a dangerous pause. Her lips were tight with icy rage.

“I have freely offered you my aid. You have refused. Have done. When next I offer you my aid, it shall be for a price.”

“As you will,” Bran returned dourly. “I ask that no man serve me without recompense of sorts.”

“Be sure that I shall set the price!”

“As you say. Now enough of this delay. Go your own way and-I charge you-say nothing of this meeting.”

But Liuba had already spun on her heel, and with feral grace the girl strode away into the pines and was instantly lost from sight.

11

REALM OF ENDLESS NIGHT

For a moment Bran Mak Morn stared after the vanished girl. A strange apparition, he meditated, this girl who offered herself as sword-companion for a doomed quest. He could almost imagine her a fantasy of his overwrought mind, or a phantom of this haunted land, so fantastic her mien, so abrupt her appearance and departure. In truth, this stretch of heath and ridge was shunned by Pict and Celt alike, although no sinister legends survived to account for this avoidance.

Then, shrugging, Bran turned his steps once more for the nameless barrow beneath Kestrel Scaur.

As once before, two years ago, Bran Mak Morn sought a Door to Those Below. Then he had found one within Dagon’s Barrow. But the king of Picdand was too well known these days to risk a journey south of the Wall to the Welsh Marches, nor did it seem likely the People of the Dark would have left unguarded that Door through which he had stolen their Black Stone.

Bran knew Atla and Claudius Nero and their minions must have entered Baal-dor through some hidden burrow that night they stole away Morgain and left a cairn of Roman heads as proof of their power to strike where they willed. A careful search had not disclosed such a passage, and Bran concluded they would likely have blocked its entrance in some cunning fashion to protect their retreat.

Skirting the foetid pit that yawned blackly from the clearing about the barrow, Bran noted that it was similar to the crater he had examined at the ruined camp. Some twenty feet across, the tunnel was gouged from the earth to a depth of perhaps fifty feet-rising from below at a sharp angle, its lower end totally occluded with a rubble of broken earth and stone. Bran’s belly drew tight at the memory of the horror he had glimpsed as it burst forth here. Hell-worm. A nightmare that had lurked beneath the surface to strike at Nero’s command.

Bran pondered a moment as to what other unknown horrors might he waiting beneath the fragile shell that men foolishly called solid earth. The tunnel that was its spoor was blocked below. Were the passage clear, even in his fury Bran would have had little heart to follow its slime-hung course.

Hunched and ominous, the barrow stood watchfully from the center of the clearing. The stone at its entrance was still rolled away from the opening. A glance showed the freshly torn earth and hanging roots of turf where the great stone had only recently been wrenched aside. The stone was immense; it must have called for many hands to pull it away from the tunnel mouth.

Bran’s face grew hard. Atla and Claudius Nero had first appeared from beside the barrow; when the hell-worm struck, they had fled from here. Remembering the steps that descended from beneath the central slab of stone of Dagon’s Barrow, the Pict thought he knew where the two had fled.

The tunnel that pierced the barrow was dank and fusty, though the breezes of spring dawn seemed to have stirred the dead air within. Ghosts of sunlight stole past the opening, revealing a section of tunnel lined with joined slabs of sweating stone. The passage was low and narrow, and vanished into blackness.

Bran took a long look at the spring morning, drew a deep breath of blossom-scented air. His love of the cloud-chased blue skies and the rolling heather was deep and abiding. He regretted that he should never see them again.

Turning, he plunged into musty darkness.

The passageway was cramped, even for a man of Bran’s tightly knit frame. He did not like the cold beads of moisture that oozed from the stone slabs, but he had no course but to brush against their slimy pressure as he stooped through the close passageway.

Then he was through, and into a low domed chamber where a man could stand clear of the compressing walls of stone. A wan mist of sunlight seemed to filter through the tunnel, lessening to some extent the thick gloom within. As Bran’s eyes became accustomed to the tenuous light, he could dimly discern the confines of the buried tomb. Heavy deposits of nitre encrusted the chamber walls, and trickles of soil had sifted past crevices in the stones to form melted hillocks of debris across the stone flags of the floor. Overlying all was a soft carpet of dust and mould and rotted spiderwebs of uncounted centuries.

It was a solidly crafted barrow, this eons-defying tomb raised in some lost age. In the center of the chamber stood a massive stone table-an immense slab of stone perhaps ten feet long and half as broad, supported at either end by two squat blocks of stone. Raised to chest level, the stone table suggested an altar at first glance. Finding no groove carven into its periphery to channel away sacrificial blood, Bran concluded that here had reposed the body of that unknown king or warrior for whom the barrow had been raised.

The stone slab was completely bare, and no trace of the lich remained. Bone and sinew, garments and accoutrements-all had disintegrated into impalpable dust. Bran felt a twinge of pity for the unknown king whose grieving people had built for him a tomb that had outlasted both bones and memory.

Intruders had violated the crypt, and recently-so Bran observed from the disrupted carpet of debris and decay that covered the floor. Sword in hand, the Pict scowled suspiciously into the palpable gloom. A blurred trail marked the passage of many feet from the tunnel opening and into the barrow crypt.

In Dagon’s Barrow the stone floor had been constructed of six regularly-shaped slabs of stone, grouped about a seventh, hexagonal central stone. That six-sided slab Bran had pried forth to disclose a passage of worn steps, leading down, down…

Here the blanket of sifted decay obscured the stone flags, so that Bran could not discern any especial regularity or pattern. And here, the center of the chamber was taken up by this massive stone table. There was a space beneath the huge slab and its block supports. Bran squatted and peered underneath.

Beneath the stone table the paving slab had been thrust away. A pit of deeper blackness fell away below.

Bran would have given much for a torch, but while he carried flint and tinder, he disdained to show a light unless as final recourse. Very probably the way would be guarded. A torch in this sunless realm would reveal his presence instantly to whatever eyes were watching. This stygian darkness was the abode of the Children of the Night. If he would seek to stealthily invade their hidden realm, then whatever infernal luminescence served their slanted yellow eyes must also suffice for Bran Mak Morn.

There was loose earth around the edge of the pit. Bran dropped a bit of gravel into the well of darkness. Immediately he caught the clatter as it struck against stone only a short distance below.

Grimly the Pict glanced toward the rectangle of daylight that called from beyond the barrow entrance. But Bran Mak Morn had no thought of turning back. Indeed, it seemed his steps had been turned toward this path ever since in an unhallowed lust for vengeance he had sought and found the Door to the Black Stone and those who worshipped it.

The opening of the pit was not wide-not much more than shoulder-width for a man. Gripping the edges firmly, Bran tensed his muscles and cautiously lowered himself into the black well.

At a depth of perhaps six feet his toes touched solid stone. Gingerly Bran released his hold, putting full weight on the slippery rock beneath. Again taking sword in hand, he probed the sides of the well. At an angle of the bottom, his blade poked into emptiness.

Bran closed his eyes tightly for a moment. When he reopened them, the blackness was somewhat less absolute. Vaguely he could see the darker blotch at the base of the well. About him the walls of the shaft showed freshly gouged clay. Recently dug, Bran mused, the dirt dragged away from below.

Stooping, he peered into the opening below. The rock ledge on which he squatted pitched sharply away in the direction of the aperture. From below, a vague reptilian scent lingered. Groping forward, the Pict pushed his sword before him and crawled headfirst into the cramped burrow.

The burrow-for it was little more than a crawl-space-sloped downward at an increasing angle. Like the well beneath the stone table, this tunnel seemed to have been only recently dug through the earth. The stone beneath Bran’s knees and elbows was slick with clinging clay, and he sensed that the burrowers had followed the slope of a rising shelf of rock.

Down. Down, and deeper still. A timeless interval of crawling through claustrophobic blackness. Sweat and mud smeared Bran’s flesh and garments. His joints ached from unwonted confinement and usage, the rough stone gashed and chaffed his bare arms, and in the close burrow his breath came in hard gasps. The rock ledge pitched more steeply still, and Bran had to grip at the slippery clay to impede what otherwise would become a headlong plunge downward.

Again it was borne upon him the alien degeneracy into which the People of the Dark had fallen. It would have been far easier to traverse this cramped burrow by flopping limblessly forward and wriggling on one’s belly.

His out-thrust blade again met emptiness, and Bran abruptly halted his descent. His fingers groped blindly. The burrow came to an end, evidently opening onto another passage.

Cautiously the Pict probed with his sword. Its point scraped across stone only a few feet below the lip of the aperture. Bran warily emerged head and shoulders, felt about beneath him. Here the blackness was absolute. Moving by touch, Bran hauled himself from the sloping burrow and rose to his feet.

Stygian darkness enveloped him like a palpable shroud. He thrust out his arms, found he could touch a wall opposite, and, by straining, graze the unseen ceiling overhead. Taking stock, it was apparent he had emerged into some sort of narrow cavern or artificial passageway far beneath the surface.

It came to him that he now stood within the hidden realm of the Worms of the Earth-that the burrow down which he had crawled had been only recently dug to furnish a secret egress to the world of men. It was not pleasant to ponder that the mouth of this crawl space was but a few feet from the floor of this cavern.

Which way now?

Bran had set forth on his mad venture with no more thought than to trail his enemies to their lair-there to wrest away from them Morgain, as fortune favored him, or reap a gory vengeance. The passage here ran in either direction; he had no way of knowing which way might bring him to his sister.

Uneasily he remembered that the land was honeycombed with caverns and interconnecting passages. He might wander for days without encountering those whom he sought. He might quickly become lost beneath the earth-eventually to perish dismally from hunger and fatigue. And in the darkness-a sudden fall might cripple him-leave him to wait in helpless pain…

Bran growled a curse. Such worries and doubts availed him nothing. He would find Morgain-though fate and the gods waged against him. Angrily he started off along the passageway to his left.

The passage continued to incline downward. Keeping his left hand against the wall, Bran made his way as best he could. The stone of the wall and the floor beneath his sandals was irregular to his touch, but not so uneven as to cause him to stumble. Gradually Bran became convinced that he followed some natural passageway that had been reshaped for improved thoroughfare.

This awareness emboldened him, and the Pict increased his pace with growing confidence that a misstep would not bring him up against a fang of rock, or precipitate him into a sudden deep pit. The floor seemed littered with dust and loose bits of stone that snagged at his toes. Bran reflected that this passageway apparently was not heavily traversed-not surprising considering the vast maze of caverns and burrows whose terrifying extent the Pict was only beginning to grasp.

From time to time Bran paused to attempt to orient himself The passage seemed to extend forever downward. In the choking blackness, the rough stone wall where his left hand pressed was his only contact with reality. For all else, he might well be walking through infinite and starless night. His thrusting blade at times scraped rock overhead or on the wall opposite. As often it touched nothing at all. The left-hand wall of the passage frequently made sharp angles and barely perceptible bends, yet the blackness was so intense Bran could not be certain whether the passage merely curved or if it made some unseen branching. Sometimes the right-hand wall pressed against his shoulder; other times the mute echo of his footfalls suggested he traversed some greater cavern whose far walls stretched endlessly away into the earth’s secret recesses.

Time and distance became lost and hypothetical concepts. He might be a blind man groping through the final night of the world after the death of the sun. Had an hour passed since he entered the barrow-or a day? Had he covered a mile of unseen passageway-or ten miles?

Claustrophobic horror pressed down on him at one moment. Then, as he passed through some seemingly-limitless cavern, vertiginous panic clutched at him-a sense that if he lost contact with the left-hand wall, he would fall eternally through cosmic blackness.

Bran drew strength from hatred, and let his rage drive back the growing waves of fear and madness. Bitterly he recognized that it had been Atlas guidance two years ago that had directed him to the chamber of the Black Stone. Atla again who had led him to that cavern in the mountains of the Welsh Marches wherein awaited the People of the Dark. This time Bran had gambled that he might swiftly come upon those he sought by entering the Door beneath the barrow at Kestrel Scaur. Now it seemed that Atla and Claudius Nero had made use of some obscure and little frequented branch of these labyrinthine caverns to arrange that ill-fated rendezvous.

More than ever it seemed to Bran Mak Morn that he must wander endlessly through this unlighted subterranean maze, never reaching those he sought. Perhaps he could retrace his steps to the burrow down which he had crawled…

No. No turning back. Morgain was somewhere ahead. Maniacal in his determination to find her, Bran plunged grimly deeper into the stifling darkness.

Only the fact that his senses were strained to preternatural acuity gave the Pict any warning at all. His nostrils were inured to the pervasive reptilian musk. Abruptly Bran became aware that the acrid stench had thickened. He froze.

Blackness everywhere. Somehow Bran sensed the passage had widened-that a scarcely perceptible wind stirred from his right, heavy with the mephitic smell of the serpent-folk. Then the dry slither of claws and scales on stone.

Bran snarled-and the darkness surged upon him.

Instantly the Pict put his back against the left-hand wall of the passage. Seizing his long dagger in his left: fist, he swung savagely with his sword in a long arc before him. The stroke was blind-and the blade nearly tore from his fist as it clove into a mass of unseen bodies.

Bran gave a howl-like a blood-mad panther as it leaps upon its prey. His wrathful cry echoed throughout the midnight cavern-answered by a hateful chorus of sibilant hissing.

Thunder of all gods! How many were there!

For an instant they held back. Bran felt the warmth of blood dripping over his fist, heard the voiceless shrill of agony from those his sweeping stroke had maimed. Something flopped aimlessly on the stone before his feet.

Some feral instinct served where vision failed. Bran lashed out his foot-felt his sandal smash a creeping face into ruin. Taloned fingers clutched at his leg, sharp fangs tore at his flesh. They were crawling for his legs to drag him down.

The shackles of intellect snapped then-and Bran Mak Morn exploded with berserk fury. He struck downward with his dagger, feeling flesh and sinew rip beneath his frenzied thrusts. The hands that wrestled at his legs fell away-even as Bran swept his sword outward in a lower arc, shearing the forefront of those creeping vermin.

But this time there was no hesitation. In an irresistible wave the unseen horde fell upon him. Bran howled and slew. His dripping sword reaped their dwarfish bodies like rows of rotted grain. Their suicidal rush remained unchecked-though Bran’s shoulder ached from the sickening impact of his slashing sword against unseen flesh. Still they crawled over the butchered carcasses and shorn limbs-crept forward and died under the Pict’s blind attack.

They could not come upon him from behind because of the wall to Bran’s back. Yet with suicidal determination the serpent-folk pressed hard from either flank, seeking to drive him away from the stone face. Bran shifted his feet, kicking and stabbing about with the dagger in his left fist. Then the long blade wedged in bone. Bran desperately jerked back-but the blade was pinned, the haft slick with gore-and the knife was torn from his fist.

It mattered not to Bran. Changing to a two-handed grip on the long sword, the Pict tore into his assailants with renewed fury. His great iron blade swung in murderous arcs, shearing bone and muscle, spilling gore and brain and entrails across the cavern floor. The stone was slippery with blood and gobbets of flesh-the Pict bathed in his own frothing sweat and the splattered gore of his attackers. The cavern echoed with the sickening crunch of iron on flesh, Bran’s berserk yells, the mindless hissing and shrills of death agony from the serpent horde. It was like the doomed howl of some damned soul in hell-who had determined to repay the infernal demons in kind.

The serpent-folk were myriad. Bran Mak Morn was but one man. Only the feet that those who set upon him were weaponless had given the man that much respite. The Pict knew the People of the Dark to be cunning workers of flint-and the dim realization that they seemed intent on taking him alive only lent renewed strength to his berserk rage.

Unconsciously Bran moved away from the stone face-needing more room to swing his great two-handed strokes. Footing was treacherous on the gore-sotted stone. Before him in the blackness was heaped a vast windrow of slaughtered serpent-folk, enclosing Bran in a writhing crescent. From this berm of butchered vermin, yet more of their kin crawled for the Pict-many using the elevation to hurl themselves upon his shoulders.

By their very numbers they stopped his blade-impaling themselves suicidally upon his sword, wrestling with the iron as they died with its length through their stunted bodies. Desperately Bran hauled back on his sword-almost lifted it clear with its weight of skewered flesh.

This instants break in his lethal defense was enough. More bodies grappled for the imprisoned sword. At the same moment, unseen assailants leapt upon his shoulders from behind. From either flank they surged upon him-fangs and talons tearing at his legs, scaly arms gripping to drag him down.

The Pict’s blade was twisted from his gore-soaked fingers-even as the hissing pack swarmed over him. Falling through the press of their loathsome bodies-living and dead-Bran was dragged down to the cavern floor, awash with blood and spilled entrails and dismembered serpent-flesh.

Weaponless, the Pict still slew the vermin. His fists, his feet lashed about blindly-splintering their sickly bones, crushing ribs and limbs, caving in biting jaws and inhuman skulls. They could not hold the Pict-even with their hundreds-in his berserk murder-lust. Though he could not win free, Bran flung them away by the tens-smashed them against the cavern wall, crushed them to the stone floor, bludgeoned them against their reeling kinsmen.

When they pinned his limbs, the Pict tore at them with his teeth. Time and again he struggled upward, flinging away their tearing, clinging bodies-as a bear makes his last stand against the closing pack. They tore at him, bit him with their pointed fangs-his chainmail did not protect face or limbs. Ten smashed to the gory cavern floor-and a hundred leapt over their twitching corpses.

Buried under a maelstrom of clutching serpent-folk-of broken and dying bodies, of fresh hordes piling over the dead-Bran never knew when oblivion at last claimed him.

12

MORGAIN

A sense of motion stirred Morgain from her tormented stupor. In nightmare-haunted delirium she slowly awoke to a feeling of vertigo, unable at once to distinguish her surroundings from the lingering phantoms of monstrous dream. In this world of living nightmare, the task was not that simple.

Pain. Black, spinning pain…

Pain was a focus of reality for her. Morgain wondered dully about the pain, and tumbling images of memory came back to her.

***

Morgain remembered awakening to horror that last night in her chamber in Baal-dor. Vaguely glimpsed dwarfish shapes had torn her from her bed. There had been no warning, though Morgain slept fight as a cat. For a confused instant she thought her own people had set upon her. Then the glow of her lamp showed the cadaverous-thin, leprous-hued bodies-too stunted even for Picts.

Their faces…

Morgain had opened her mouth to scream. A wad of rag was stuffed into her throat instead, almost choking her. Struggling and clawing with desperate strength, the girl could not break away from the cold hands that gripped her. In a brief, silently fought struggle, the outraged girl’s wrists and ankles were securely bound with leather thongs, her gag tied tightly in place, and a blindfold strapped over her eyes.

The last was a mercy of sorts. Morgain retained only a chaotic remembrance of being hauled through the misty night, brutally dragged through dank tunnels and passageways that seemed to go on forever. Blind and mute, the girl could nonetheless hear the hideous sibilant cries of her captors. On a thousand nights Morgain had shivered beside the hearth, listening to lurid tales of the Children of the Night and of young maids who strayed too far from their home-fires. Her thoughts as she felt her bound body pulled through narrow passages of clinging earth were not pleasant ones.

At length her captors had halted, and Morgain was allowed to lie sprawled across a surface of cold stone. She had tried to struggle against her bonds, until several harsh kicks to her belly discouraged her efforts. Half in shock, the girl lay there… the loathsome voices of the serpent-folk telling her she was not alone.

Eventually rough hands pulled away her blindfold. Wild-eyed, Morgain had stared about her. To her utter amazement, her vision focused on two people she, at first, thought to be human. For a moment her mind grappled with the mystery of this man and woman who stood looking down upon her, here in the hidden caverns of the Worms of the Earth.

The woman was beautiful, in a repellent sort of way. Morgain watched her sway toward her, and thought of the jewel-scaled grace of a gliding serpent. A closer scrutiny caught the subtly pointed ears, the oblique yellow eyes. Bran had told her somewhat of his ill-fated quest for the Black Stone.

The woman knelt over her, untied her gag. Morgain spat out the choking ball of rag. “You’re Atla?” she queried, speaking with difficulty.

The witch arched her brows. “Do you know me then, girl? Has your brother been one to boast to you of his mistresses? I’d thought better of so bold a lover!”

“Bran has told me some things of you,” Morgain returned with forced coolness. “Do you now sleep with Romans?”

Atla slapped her-stingingly, with casual cruelty. “Speak softly, girl! Or I’ll regret removing your gag.”

“Remove my bonds, and then try to strike me!” snarled Morgain through bleeding lips.

Atla smiled with deadly malice and drew back her hand.

“Leave her alone,” snapped the Roman. “The girl shows fine courage. I like that.”

“Who are you to command me, Claudius Nero!” hissed Atla, turning on him.

The other only touched his swordhilt. “You are not indispensable to our plans, Atla.”

He spoke the Pictish tongue haltingly, slurring its sibilants in an unpleasant manner. His meaning, however, was clear enough to Atla. Angrily she drew back from the girl.

Ignoring the witch, Morgain studied the Roman. The light was poor, only a flaring cresset which did not define the limits of the cavern. Beyond the pool of light, Morgain glimpsed sidelong the wavering yellow glimmer of countless pairs of eyes. It was better to look at the Roman.

Of the man called Claudius Nero, she could discern very little. He wore the garb and armor of a Roman officer, a rich woolen cloak offsetting his thin shoulders. The man was no taller than her brother, and lacked Bran’s compact bulk. A pointed chin and narrow face with high forehead were masked by shadow. His eyes had that same subtle slant and yellowish glint that at first made the girl suspect kinship to Atla-though she had not yet grasped the nature of that kinship.

Morgain did not like the way Claudius Nero stared down at her. It suddenly made her aware that the thin shift she had worn to bed was badly ripped and pulled high upon her hips. Her belly coldly tense, the girl wriggled on the stone in an effort to slide the torn garment lower on her thighs.

Atla laughed spitefully.

“What does this mean, Roman?” Morgain demanded with a new flash of anger. “My brother will feed you with bits of your roasted entrails while I watch you die!”

“Your brother will do nothing except as we command,” Nero said evenly. “Or well send him your flayed skin as remembrance.”

“Fool! Am I to be hostage? Bran Mak Morn will make a truce with Rome when wolves become shepherds!”

Nero laughed, gestured about him. “Morgain, you are not in Rome. And be sure that I am no Roman.”

The girl groped for understanding-dreading to acknowledge that which she suspected. Claudius Nero knelt beside her, taking her chin in his thin hands and lifting her face to his. Defiantly Morgain glared back at him-for the first time she saw clearly the pointed ears and sharp-fanged mocking smile, the fine-grained, mottled texture of his skin…

And now Morgain understood what blood-ties Atla and Claudius Nero shared in common.

Nero seemed not wholly pleased with the flash of dread he had provoked in Morgain’s eyes. He rose fluidly to his feet, letting her slump back to the stone.

“You are my hostage,” he told her curtly. “As hostage, you shall not be harmed. That is, so long as Bran Mak Morn undertakes to cooperate with us. If your brother proves stubborn, I assure you your death will not come half so swiftly as you would wish.”

Nero gave commands in the repellent sibilants of the serpent-folk. Morgain tried to repress a shudder as the stunted vermin slunk into the circle of light.

Their misshapen, dwarfish bodies were hideous in their nakedness. They carried their snaky heads bobbing forward on sinewy necks as they shambled in a travesty of human gait-creatures whose degenerate pride was to walk, in defiance of a resurgent heritage that bade them crawl on their bellies. They were no larger than children, though their stunted limbs belied their bulk. Tiny scales of leprous and mottled hue made shapeless blotches over their distorted bodies. Beneath strangely flattened foreheads, unwinking yellow eyes gleamed with ophidian evil. Pendulous hps like wattles writhed over curved serpentine fangs in jaws that seemed curiously articulated.

Child-like hands, cold and tense as chilled steel, clawed at her ankles. Morgain bit down her rising nausea, shrinking from that contact. But they only meant to untie the thongs about her ankles.

Nero stepped forward, gripped her shoulders in a touch no less repugnant, hauled the girl to her feet with a strength Morgain had not suspected he possessed.

“Come with me,” he ordered. “It will be better for you if you walk. If not-as you will.”

Morgain had had no choice but to follow him. Atla caught up the torch from its cresset and walked close behind. About them, the People of the Dark scrambled and scurried. Morgain had kept her eyes on Nero’s billowing cloak.

They had walked at least a mile, perhaps two or more-Morgain lost track during the nightmarish trek through limitless grottoes and cramped passageways in between. At first the girl had tried to take note of their path-soon realized she could never hope to retrace it.

Morgain was exhausted when at last they entered a great cavern, where witchfire radiance shown from some source the girl could not immediately identify. The extent of the cavern was beyond the glow of light, and from the sudden loss of echo, Morgain realized that its ceiling must be unthinkably vast. The floor of the grotto sloped slightly downward toward its center, forming a shallow bowl-whether natural or hewn out from the stone, she could not decide.

In the center of the cavern was an altar of human skulls. Atop the cairn of grinning death’s-heads was-Morgain knew it instantly-the Black Stone.

Sullen black and strangely ominous, it dominated the colossal vault, even though in size it was no larger than one of the pallid skulls stacked high beneath it. There existed a repellent magnetism about the sinister object. Morgain would have known it for what it was, even had Bran not described the unearthly hexahedral stone, with its sixty dagger-like glyphs etched upon each hexagonal face.

Morgain halted, and, noting her look of terror, Atla laughed. “So you recognize the Black Stone, girl?”

“Are we then in Wales?” asked Morgain in wonder, for it seemed indeed that she had been dragged through these burrows beneath the earth for an eternity.

“No, you are in hell,” Atla assured her. “The People of the Dark chose to remove the Black Stone to a less accessible temple after your brother stole it from them.”

Morgain swallowed her dismay. Despite its sinister aspect, the sight of the Black Stone had given her a spark of hope. Bran had won through to its altar once before-surely now he would lead his army through the familiar tunnels beneath Dagon’s Barrow in search of her. But the Black Stone had been hidden in some new and secret grotto within these labyrinthine caverns. He might never find her here.

A sombre row of iron cages waited within the cavern-empty and ominous, their thick bars stark and rusted. Morgain did not care to speculate as to why these grim cages had been placed here, nor upon the fate of those who had been imprisoned within.

Fumbling with the tight knots, Nero untied her wrists and pushed her into one of the empty cages. The iron door swung shut with a groan of rusty hinges; the lock engaged with a dull rasp. Passing the curiously wrought key to Atla, Claudius Nero and the witch had left the girl to her thoughts.

The cage-and the others as well, from what she could see-had been vacant for an indefinite time. The grating extended beneath her feet and over her head a foot or more beyond her outstretched fingers. The bars were thick, deeply pitted with rust though still quite solid, and spaced too closely for even one of her slight frame to pass between. The stone beneath was dry and free of debris or refuse-only a few crumbling patches of dust, vaguely recognizable as ancient bone. Morgain could not conjecture how these cages were brought here, though clearly it had been very long ago-nor how such vermin as the serpent-folk came into possession of so costly and complex a work of iron.

Long hours passed-how much time, Morgain had no means to ascertain. She grew hungry despite her fear-and terribly thirsty. She had not drunk so much at the banquet to account for her parched throat and throbbing head. She wondered whether some subtle drug had been placed in the food or wine. Eventually one of the serpent-folk approached from the darkness beyond the altar, and thrust a jar of tepid water and a lump of rancid meat through the grating. With some misgivings Morgain gulped down the water, but she left the meat lying where the creature had dropped it.

The vast cavern remained in eerie silence, and only rarely did Morgain see the stunted figures slink past the area of light. The light, she finally decided, seemed to come from the altar itself-either the cairn of skulls had been treated with some phosphorescent substance, or perhaps the Black Stone itself emanated some uncanny radiance.

Often the girl sensed the baleful scrutiny of some unseen presence-somewhere from the darkness beyond. The sensation terrified her, all the more so for she could never discover the hidden watcher from the shadow.

At least they had given her food and water-evidence they wished to keep her alive. With that bleak bit of hope, Morgain slumped into a corner of the bars and tried to sleep.

Sleep would not come, her overwrought nerves overmastering her fatigue. In a nightmarish daze, Morgain shivered against the cold grating and tried not to think. The rusted iron was harsh and bruising to her slender frame, so that she formed a vague notion of the passing of time from how often the dull ache of the bars against her flesh forced her to change position. After a while she lost count even of that.

An angry murmur of voices snapped the girl back to alertness. Stiffly Morgain rose to her feet and stared through the bars of the cage. Torchlight flamed eerily beyond the blackness that curtained the vast cavern.

As it bobbed closer and into the circle of light, Morgain recognized Atla and Claudius Nero. To her amazement there were several other men with them. She could not see them clearly, but the flickering light glinted on Roman armor and weapons. Their speech was in Latin-which Morgain poorly understood-and in the hissing gibberish of the serpent-folk. Morgain could not grasp the cause of their anger.

The witch had separated from the others then, and the torchlight wavered off into the darkness again, vanishing about the turn of a barely seen passageway from the grotto’s far wall. Toying with the heavy key that hung at her belt, Atla glided toward her. Her smile was deadly as the grin of a viper.

“Your brother is very foolish,” Atla told her icily. Morgain noticed the witch’s disheveled appearance, the scum of dirt that smeared her sheath-like gown and sinuous limbs. “Did you fall down a hole?” she asked solicitously.

Atla’s smile twitched. “We sought to make terms with your brother. The fool will not listen.”

“Bran will make no pacts with serpent-spawn!” Morgain sneered.

“Your lofty-principled brother is a treacherous fool!” Ada retorted. “He thought to capture us. We showed him one of the real nightmares of the pit.”

“Is he…?” Morgain cursed herself for not withholding that cry of dismay.

The witch exulted in her fear. “Bran Mak Morn will live to remember-though his men fared not so well. The Wolf of the Heather dragged himself back to his lair. We shall allow him one last chance to bow to reason. If he remains obstinate…”

Atla studied the girl intendy. “I suggested to Claudius Nero that we might present Bran with some memento to remind him of his sister’s plight. Your tom-out nails, perhaps-strung on a necklace along with your ears…”

“But your ears are so much prettier,” Morgain told her. “Tell me, how do you achieve that lovely pointed effect?”

Atla hissed in fury, struck at her face through the bars.

With desperate quickness, Morgain seized the witch’s arm and flung herself backward. Jerked off balance, Atla fell against the cage, brutally slamming her head and shoulders into the rusted bars.

Leaping forward, the Pictish girl grappled with the stunned witch. Whipping her strong forearm through the bars, Morgain caught Atlas slender throat in an armlock, jammed her head against the bars-cutting off the woman’s outcry.

The witch struggled with greater strength than Morgain could equal-clawing at the arm that pinned her with her one free hand, and kicking frenziedly. Grimly Morgain maintained her armlock, twisting Atlas captured arm sharply behind her back. Atlas sandaled heels gored the girl’s shins. With her free hand, Atla tried to reach something beneath her slit skirt. Savagely Morgain drove a knee into the witch’s kidney-pounding her head against the iron bars, as Ada gasped in agony.

Atla slumped against the cage, her struggles growing weaker. Fearing a trick, Morgain only tightened her crushing forearm. The witch’s body grew slack, hung as dead weight against the bars.

Releasing Atlas right arm, Morgain reached around her supple waist to yank the key from the thong at her belt. The witch hung loosely, dependent from her arm. It was Morgain’s intent to strangle her, but time was more precious than revenge, so that the girl did not make certain of her kill as Bran had taught her.

Letting the motionless form drop to the stones, Morgain darted to the door of the cell and hastily worked the key into the lock. Her actions were clumsy, reaching around from behind the grating as she did, and the unfamiliar lock was rusted and resisted her efforts. The girl swore and twisted desperately.

The key slithered from her sweaty fingers and clattered onto the stones.

Almost sobbing in her urgency, Morgain threw herself to the floor and stretched her arm for the fallen key. It was just beyond her reach. The girl fell prone to the stones, grinding her shoulder against the rusty bars-stretching out her arm as far as she might. Her straining fingers grazed the key-almost tipped it farther away. Then her nails caught on a flake of rust, scraped the key into her grasp.

Still no tocsin of alarm. Again Morgain applied the key-forcing her hands to stop shaking. A twist, a sudden, wrenching snap. Morgain groaned.

But it was not the key that snapped. It was the sliding of the rusted tumblers. The bolt snicked back. The door swung open under her pressing weight.

Morgain stumbled through the opening, caught herself and stared warily about, like some wild thing at bay. She was free from her cell-but free to do what? To go where?

No matter. They would not capture her alive again. Beyond was the passage through which they had led her. She might be able to retrace their route-or find another access to the surface. She needed a torch. And a weapon.

She studied Atla’s still form. The witch might have a weapon-one she had not been able to reach in their brief struggle. A second idea came to Morgain. If she had not killed the witch, she might be able to force Atla to lead her out of this hellish maze.

Quickly Morgain knelt over the motionless body. Bran had told her of the witch’s dagger that had snapped against his mail at their first meeting. Morgain ran her hands over the limp figure. There was nothing at her waist; the low bosom of her tight gown could hide nothing. Morgain caught the spasmodic rise and fall of the witch’s breast. She lived, then.

But at the same instant her fingers brushed over a length of steel and leather along the witch’s thigh. A dagger, sheathed against her thigh beneath the slit skirt. Morgain bent to capture the weapon.

Atlas knee caught her on the point of the chin. The girl’s head snapped back, and pain blotted out her senses.

Morgain did not quite lose all consciousness, though for a space the world was a pain-shot vortex, and nausea shook her belly.

Dimly she felt the witch drag her unresisting form back into the cage, heard her spit out angry commands in the serpent-folks’ sibilant tongue. Other hands grasped her suddenly. She felt her shift torn from her body, her arms jerked sharply over her head. Pain in her wrists and shoulders, coldness on her bare skin. And vertigo-a sense of spinning, floating in the blackness of the star-shot void. It was raining…

More water dashed in her face. Morgain opened her eyes. She was floating. The cavern floor was inches below her dangling toes.

Full consciousness returned. Her wrists were lashed together over her head-the rawhide thongs looped over the iron bars overhead. Stripped of her garment, Morgain hung by her wrists in the center of the iron cage.

Slowly her body spun to face Atla. The witch’s throat was bruised, a trickle of blood traced her forehead. Her smile was a terrible thing, as she lovingly flexed the serpentine coils of a long whip.