Other sinews shrieked, for now her elbows were able to bend, however slightly, and every long-strained muscle in each arm hurled icy stabs of pain along its length and into her torso. Her shoulders burned. Both hands remained bound above the level of her head.
And then it occurred to her, with the return of full intelligence and ability to reason, to wonder. About the torches, about the who-she wondered where he was, and that thought was like a cruel hand that clutched at her stomach from within.
Her mouth was open to call out. She reconsidered, and compressed her lips.
Not knowing who had strangled her into unconsciousness and bound her here, or why, she held herself in check. There was determination upon her not to be some pleading quavery-voiced captive. She was Samaire of Leinster, she was a weapon-woman of Eirrin, and she did not speak until she knew she could trust her voice and had chosen her words.
“It’s awake I am. Which am I to be, raped or tortured? Or do we continue with the cowardice of you behind me in silence?”
Her voice was hollow in the cavern, and it welled about her like a physical object. She was grateful for the sound.
No voice answered.
It was then she heard the leathery rustling sound, the little snap from well behind her, followed closely by the fweep noise that was as of a rushing arrow cleaving the air. Nor had she time to flinch or tense before the loud cracking sound came. It was so loud and close to her ears, taking her so by surprise that she gasped and lurched painfully against the wall.
For just an instant there was the feeling as of ice on her back.
Then sudden white-hot pain burst there. It engulfed her back in a blazing agony that misted her mind. Her eyes opened wide and stared, bulging, at nothing. Her breath exploded from her in an ugly grunt. Involuntary tears rushed hot down her cheeks in a watery cascade. She jerked violently and tried to put back her shoulderblades against the pain. She felt her knees buckle at the sudden weakness the pain imbued, but at the same time she knew there was no escape, nowhere to go, nothing she could do about the pain-and that which was to come. She knew what she’d felt, what had been done to her.
She had been struck with a whip.
Now she felt it slither down her back, catch for a moment on the shelf of her backside, and drop from her.
The agonized woman’s skin rippled and tensed with sudden desperate efforts to break free. The ropes only chewed remorselessly at her wrists when she tried to jerk her way to freedom. She could not. The awful thought struck her that the raw pain and sudden warmth at her wrists meant that the ropes had bitten in, that each torn wrist was now streaming blood.
She could not tear free. She had accomplished only the spilling of her own blood.
Again the vicious lash came, a leather serpent that dashed onto her shoulder this time, and again her eyes snapped wide and spurted tears and her body lurched from the fiery caress. It was all she could do to keep from screeching as new searing fire tore through her.
Silent and unseen, her captor struck again.
The sinews of Samaire’s arms and thighs and calves knotted and bulged outward at the strain, for she could riot help tugging at her bonds. Her chest ground painfully into stone and stone-hard earth. She knew that rivulets of blood streaked her arms. Constant shudders of pain and anguish twitched through the flesh of her beaten body, and she knew frustration with the pain, and then anger.
I will not be reduced.
Even with that determined vow she felt a blow of monstrous agony between her shoulders. A lancing pain began there and raced down to her heels and out to the tips of her flexing fingers. Surely she’d not have been stung so had a knife transpierced her. Again the lash hissed downwards, streaking through the air to streak her skin with scarlet.
Now the first whip-cut was a pleasant memory, a sweet caress compared with the fifth, which cut across her full calves. She felt the quivering of her every nerve, from scalp to toenails. The pain in her lungs seemed more severe than it had while she was strangled. Ignominy struck with the whip, for her body failed her and released the valve of her kidneys.
The rushing leathern lash struck, and struck again, and then again until the white-faced victim knew she was crossed and crisscrossed with purple-red welts that were like ugly serpents writhing across her scarified flesh.
A princess born, she had never known such pain and terrible anguish, mental and physical. She felt as if she would surely burst in the internal parts of her body.
Samaire’s determination held. Not giving the unseen him the satisfaction of making her cry out became the sole object of her concentration, the entire purpose of her existence. When she realized on the fiery falling of, the twelfth or twentieth lash that she had emitted a groaning sound, she mentally cursed its utterance. To prevent repetition, she thrust her tongue between her teeth and clamped. She held it there with no care whether she bit through.
Every stroke seemed to penetrate more deeply into her flesh, and now the filthy jackal behind her was aiming his lash so as to torment her with the most reviling violation of her body.
Samaire felt as if she had lived all the time of this life in pain and torture, and that the time when existence was painless, much less pleasurable, was but a dimly-remembered fantasy. The whip hissed and cracked.
Who and why no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. Relief, perhaps: death would bring that. For she knew that he was leaving bloody gashes on what had been the white flesh of her body.
Maintaining silence with an effort of sheer will and a surely ridiculous determination, she sobbed without sound at the agony in her back and shoulders, the throbbing in her wounded haunches and legs, the wounds that quivered and swelled and seethed with a liquid fury-while leaking forth the blood of life. She could feel it trickling in warm rivulets that went swiftly cold and thick.
Nameless and nigh-mindless, the victim knew that she was washed with crimson, that she would soon bleed to death. She wished sincerely that she had died before, of strangulation. Logic had left her, and Samaire’s thought was only that it was not fair that one should be made to die twice.
The princess of Leinster knew the absolute depths of human despair as she felt her skin being flayed off by the cruel whip. From tear-dimmed eyes she stared at nothing. Shaking in constant spasms, her body moved weakly. She ground herself against the wall hewn from stone and earth as though that pain could alleviate the other. Desperately she reminded herself to keep her blood-washed thighs together.
In silence, unseen and unknown, he struck on.
Idiot, she thought incongruously, that stripped a woman and beat her, rather than used her!
A new, surely insane thought filled her reeling mind: She was bitterly sorry not to be able to aid Cormac in his struggle against the undying wizard Thulsa Doom, not even to be able to be with him… and then she broke, and Samaire of Leinster tore her body against the stone wall of the cavern while she screamed and screamed.
Chapter Fourteen:
The Undying Wizard
Cormac heard the strange little snapping sounds long before he reached their source. Pacing determinedly back along the subterrene passage from sea to castle, he wondered at those inexplicable sounds well ahead, with no idea as to what they might be…
He did not walk like a man who had been subjected to the most cruel of torments and had been reduced to quaking shudders. He had rescued himself from insanity. He had stood tall and angry and bellowed forth his challenge to his enemy. He had waited grimly, prepared for anything at all.
Thulsa Doom had not responded.
He’ll not be meeting me face-on in sunlight then, Cormac mused, and he had shouted that aloud, as a new challenge and a taunt.
Mayhap then it’s given up he has, and fled this isle or withdrawn into “that other dimension,” whatever be the meaning of that. In which case-there are ships to be loaded and sails to be spread! And if he be here still-I’ll see that no man is out of sight of all others. And if it’s Cutha Atheldane comes
walking among us-why then we’ll be hewing him into so many pieces none will recognize so much as a toe!
And back along the corridor beneath the island Cormac mac Art strode, a man full of mettle and unwavering purpose.
Then the screaming began.
The shrieks that fled to him down the tunnel were those of a woman in unbearable agony, and there was but one woman on this accursed isle that wrongly bore her name, and Cormac mac Art broke into a mindless run.
His re-lit torch roared and streamed fire in his wake with his running along that dark cavern beneath the earth. He raced as though a thousand demons sent from the Norse Hel slavered on his trail. The corridor’s squared turnings he took at the run, so that he struck the wall again and again. And he paid no mind.
Cormac ran, and the dust of centuries flew up from his feet.
He came upon the strange scene, and it brought no horror but only puzzlement-and anger. Cormac took it all in with slitted eyes-while never slowing his pace.
Against one wall of the cavern stood Samaire, pressed to the stone with her arms outstretched. Vermillion hair sprayed out over her leather coat of armour; in their tall boots of gleaming, soft black leather her legs quivered. Indeed her entire body quaked as though freezing cold, while she stood fully clothed and armoured, stretched and tense as if she were frozen in place-or bound by invisible cords or chains.
Behind her stood Osbrit the Briton of Wroxeter.
The only survivor of his crew was steadily tapping the woman’s back with a folded belt. Though he was only tapping her leather-sheathed legs and back, not striking her, the walls echoed Samaire’s constant shrill, throat-tearing cries. She squirmed and lunged against the wall as though bound to it and afflicted with awful torment.
Cormac did not pause to consider or question. With the full unthinking fury of his dash, he charged the Briton. With such force did the Gael smash into Osbrit that the bronze-haired warrior was knocked off his feet and hurled through the air.
Cormac paid the flying body no heed, but plowed to a stop ere he crashed into the cowering woman. His torch he held high; his other hand and arm slid around the seemingly agonized Samaire’s waist from behind.
“Samaire… Samaire!”
Once more the screamed, in mortal agony. Then, “Cormac,” she gasped in a weak sigh, and she sagged back against him. Yet her arms remained in place, stretched along the wall higher than her head. “Oh… oh Cormac… cut free my wrists!”
Cormac’s stomach lurched and his scalp prickled. She was not bound, but thought she was… Wulfhere was not there, but I thought he was… she had not been whipped, but thought she had been… O ye gods, he torments her too!
“There, my love,” he told her, “I have done. You’re free.”
On the instant, her arms dropped, falling as if her hands were leaden weights. With a groan she began sliding down, so that only his hand under her breast prevented her dropping into the dust of the cavern’s floor.
No sound warned the Gael, and he was not aware of seeing aught from the edge of his eye. Nevertheless he twitched his head rightward in a weapon-man’s instinct-to see Osbrit’ Drostan’s son coming at him with naked sword. A malevolent smile of anticipated death-dealing twisted the man’s mouth.
Cormac’s hands were full of torch and limp woman. The one he released, pushing her sideward so that again she sagged against the tunnel wall; the other he swung before him as both defensive shield and fiery offensive weapon. Flame streamed and roared in the tunnel’s fetid air.
The rush of fire gave Osbrit of Wroxeter pause, and that swiftly Cormac’s sword rushed from its sheath. A ferocious delight was upon him; here was something he could fight, here was a living body to receive the frustration and vengeance-need that were like a canker in his guts.
The Gael did not strike, but advanced a foot and thrust with all his strength.
He felt the familiar jolt of glaive-point against mail, metal against metal, and the resistance, then the rushing of his extended arm as scales bent and twisted and snapped and sharp steel buried itself in flesh and blood.
Belly-stabbed, Osbrit stared at the other man.
“Treacherous snake! Was I showed ye kindness, and I alone!” Cormac snarled, and gave his wrist a twist before he yanked forth his blade.
It emerged agleam. No blood followed the emergence of steel blade from sundered flesh.
Osbrit’s lips writhed in a smile. “Aye… so ye did… kindness. For it was you slew serpent and robed Norseman, and freed me from the one that I might animate the other!”
Then that smile widened, and the lips shriveled up as the skin writhed and moved on that tanned face, and it paled and paled while the skin left it, and once more Cormac mac Art stared into the death’s head face of Thulsa Doom.
Knowing the man had shown pain when the sword went into him, Cormac stabbed again. His blade plunged into the robed body just below the ribs. This time he drove forward with knotting calves to hurl the wizard backward and to the cavern floor, impaled on two feet of steel.
Dust flew up as his foeman fell, and again when Cormac dropped beside him, to his knees. Maintaining his grip on his pommel, he ground the sword in, seeking to pin the other man, if man he was, to the cavern’s floor.
“Ahgh-it hurts, lowborn vulture! It-hurts! It’s cold!”
“But kills ye-not!” Cormac grunted, exerting his strength to twist the impaling blade.
The supine body lurched and writhed. “Aahhhhhh! Son… of a moment’s dalliance… that is pain-n-nn!”
Cormac kept his eyes on the skull face, his squeezing, downpressing hand on his pommel. “Samaire-I need you!”
She must have turned then, and seen for the first time what he held pinned down like some unslayable writhing serpent.
“Gods of my-he has no face!”
“Nor blood, but he’s a body, and it’s helpless I have it, and there’s cord enow on my arm to enwrap two such! Hither, love, and bind him with this rope!”
Samaire’s horror at the awful apparition did not prevent her responding to Cormac’s need for aid in subduing… the thing. Already he was changing his squatting position and leaning hard on his pommel with his right hand, while he held out his shield-arm. Samaire hurried to remove the coil of rope.
And Thulsa Doom changed. The gaunt but powerful weapon-man’s body shivered-but the shiver was a shimmer, as eerie metamorphosis commenced. Flesh and bone changed…
“Demon!” Cormac cried out in his surprise.
“Cormac-it’s Bas!”
“Cor… mac,” gasped the druid, his face stricken. His hands shook as they went to the steel blade that pinned him down, hovered there as if he only just prevented himself from seizing the sharp steel. “Why…? Let me up, Cormac… I… I can exert druidic powers to heal myself… but… not if you will not let me up swiftly-”
Cormac spoke betwixt clenched teeth. And he leaned on his sword, though instinctive horror and unease at apparently thus pinning the druid he respected brought the sweat starting from his palm.
“No, ancient monster! It’s as Wulfhere I’ve seen ye, and then as Samaire herself; there can be no using this trick on me again! This time ye grow desperate, Thulsa Doom! Now I know the horrors of wizardry ye be capable of, I might not be surprised to see the face of Bas become your ugly relic from a boneyard. But… to see you become Bas? It’s not such a fool I am, skullface. I know who ye are, creature, and it’s hard your sorceries have made my heart. So-writhe and wriggle, Thulsa Doom, and if ye choose to retain the face of Bas the Druid-then so be it. I am unmoved by such petty attempts!”
“Barbarian scum!” Bas snarled. “Nescient as a foal newly born ye are, and proud and crowing of what ye think is knowledge! I cannot be killed, barbarian! Already I have known death, and longer ago by thousands of years than your simple mind can comprehend!”
Cormac braced himself, leaned on his sword with his right hand, and again extended the left arm. “Prate on, wizard. Samaire-the rope.”
/> The head of Bas the Druid whipped toward the woman. “Aye, fetch the rope, ignorant blowze. And note well that my hands are not pinned down-bend to me and I’ll tear your head from your shoulders!”
Cormac’s swift-flicking eyes caught Samaire’s shiver, and he doubted her. But in that he erred against her.
Samaire drew the dagger that had never left her sheath whilst she had thought herself naked and beaten. “Then I shall have to be pinning your hands to the earth, one by one!”
The teeth of Bas of Tir Connail clashed in rage-and then the lips fell away from those teeth, and again there was only the fearsome skull with its teeth that seemed ever to grin. Skull-set eyes burned in a face that was bare white bones…
Next instant it was changing, growing new skin, and slitted eyes, and a snouted mouth from which a long forked tongue flickered and plunged. The flattened head that was bigger than her hand lashed at Samaire, and instinct made her flinch away.
Cormac was hard put to hold down, with point of sword, what Thulsa Doom had now become: a serpent. A writhing thick cable of muscle it was that lashed and snapped its cold slender barrel of a body.
“Cormac,” Samaire called, and there was a shrill pleading note to her voice that ascended toward hysteria. “I-I cannot bind a serpent!”
“No,” the Gael said grimly. “But I can lean on this good glaive so that-”
With a sibilant hiss of waist-thick body, the serpent hurled itself halfway up the sword. As it dropped back, the scaly form twisted and wrenched wildly. These were not death-throes, but a fresh attempt at escape. Partway through its barrel form Cormac’s sword sliced-and then its tail lashed. Thicker than his wrist it was, and it slammed against his shins with every bit of force Thulsa Doom could concentrate there.
Cormac fell sidewise. His hand on the sword twisted, and the blade sliced crosswise a bit more…
But such was not the escape scheme of a man who had survived unbelievable centuries. With Cormac fallen on his side and striving to maintain grip on pommel to hold the impaling brand in place, the wizard resumed his own form once more.
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