Morgan shook himself free of the evil being’s gaze. The first of Scatha’s creatures he had encountered had not had an easy death. If that was an example of the Dark One’s mercy, he wanted none of it.
“I decline the offer,” he answered. Suicide was preferable to Glivas’s triumph; however, cutting his own throat was out of the question. His dagger was stuck fast in the Mercian’s sternum, and he was too weakened to dislodge it. There was only the Roman way left to him. As he turned his sword butt to the ground and lodged the hilt in a gap between two flooring stones, he heard the serpent speak in anger.
“You will not cheat me Morgan! You will feel Scatha’s punishment!”
Glivas struck at Morgan with a savage swiftness that startled him into instinctive reaction.
Instead of falling forward onto the sword-point, Morgan took a quick step backward, dodging the attack. His foot rolled on the mutilated hand that was just then reaching for him, and he fell onto the Mercian’s torso.
The fall saved his life. The snake’s huge head with its distended jaws struck only air in the space that Morgan had just vacated. The momentary reprieve from death was a mixed blessing, however. His sword lay near Glivas’s massive coils. The dagger that had protruded from the Mercian’s chest had been dislodged by the force of Morgan’s fall. He watched as it spun out of reach and came to rest under a stinking stump of leg that was trying to crawl over it on its blind quest to find the sprawled man.
“Sweet Jesus,” he whispered. “I can’t even give myself a clean death.” He had lost all hope of leaving the chamber alive, but he still fought against the numbness of fatalism. He saw that the Mercian’s knee joint had been unsuccessful in its attempts to crawl over the dagger and instead, pushed it along the floor as it headed toward Morgan.
“Just give me the strength for one more try,” he prayed to the God of his world and the gods of Brigid’s. “Just a little closer,” he urged as the ghastly joint edged his dagger nearer.
He began a roll across the Mercian’s oozing torso even as he sensed Glivas’s lightning-swift strike. Once again, instinctive reactions took over from conscious thought. He continued his roll, directly into the path of the serpent’s thrust, but as his shoulder struck the stone floor, he hooked his fingers around a portion of the crossbow that still protruded from the Mercian tunic. He fell onto his back with the torso held across his chest.
Glivas’s aim was true, and he struck with an incredible force, but caught by surprise by Morgan’s sudden suicidal effort, Glivas had been unable to check his attack. The fangs impaled the corpse’s chest with such power that all the air was driven from Morgan’s lungs, and he could feel the outline of the Mercian bow imprinted on his flesh. Trying to ignore the ichor-caused fire on his skin and the near complete draining of his remaining strength, Morgan clutched at the curve of the bow that he could feel through the tunic. He strained to hold firm as he felt the Mercian’s weight lifted from his chest.
The deadly fangs had stuck fast in the Mercian’s ribcage, and the monster serpent unsuccessfully attempted to dislodge the carrion by shaking it as a dog shakes a toy. Morgan held on grimly as the Glivas-thing flailed with a power that seemed to grow rather than to diminish with time.
Then Morgan’s miracle occurred.
At the apogee of a tremendous arc, the Mercian tunic simply tore, and Morgan was hurled across the room with the crossbow in his arms. He skidded to a stop half a meter from the fang that had broken off in the early part of the battle. Its tip still glistened with poison.
Morgan’s smiled for the first time since he had accepted the fact of his own death. He began to wind up the bow as another giant had taught him.
As Morgan finished arming the bow, Glivas freed himself with a triumphant cry and coiled again into a striking position. The coin-like eyes stared at Morgan with a mixture of hatred and contempt.
“You have delayed me long enough, Morgan. I shall kill you now, and it will be a most painful death.” The eyes shifted to the crossbow. “You can wound me anywhere you like with that clumsy weapon, but you cannot prevent your own death.” The breathy voice taunted. “I have told you already that I cannot be killed by human weapons, and you will not be able to weaken me enough with the single bolt left to you. You cannot escape.”
The laugh that followed was as chilling as the serpent’s earlier screams had been; yet Morgan still smiled. He spat onto the floor.
“Only the delivery system is manmade, snake-shit. The weapon that will destroy you was made by a goddess herself.”
Too weak to hold the crossbow properly, Morgan wedged the butt into the stones as he had moments before placed his sword-hilt. The bow was a crude but powerful device of wood, steel and twisted cable, entirely made by Mercian hands, but at the tip of the steel bolt was a golden droplet of amber liquid.
The yellow eyes registered recognition the instant that Morgan pulled the trigger sending the poisoned bolt directly into the serpent’s mouth.
Instantly, Morgan was struck a blow that sent him crashing into a wall. He closed his eyes against the pain and slid once more to the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
He opened his eyes when he felt the gentle penetration of two dissimilar but pleasurable awareness: a feeling that a heady vitality was flooding back into his body and the certain knowledge that an incarnate evil had fled the place in which he lay. He strongly sensed the warm vibrations of the two keening stones he carried, and all filled him with real hope for the first time since meeting Glivas.
Morgan looked around the chamber wide-eyed then sat up in astonishment. All signs of the desperate, one-sided battle had vanished. The ichor and blood-slopped floor was unstained, the Mercian who had become mere body parts and his crossbow were nowhere to be seen, and Morgan’s dagger and sword rested, beside him, sheathed. There was only the unmarked body of the traitor, Glivas, lying as if in sleep, against a corner where Morgan had last sent a hideous monster to Cernunos.
“Aiofe?” He called, standing up without pain. He had a feeling of total well-being, a feeling he distrusted at once.
I am here, Kerry Morgan, a soft, feminine voice he remembered so well answered from inside his head.
He clenched and unclenched his hands, looking at them for several seconds. During the battle they had become rigid, blistered slabs of painful meat. The hands he now saw were rough and calloused from hard work, but they were undamaged and strong.
“Am I mad, Lady?” he questioned in awe, casting about for some telltale mark, a smear of blood, something to assure him that he had not dreamed.
Nay, foreign one. What transpired here was real enough. Death would have most certainly claimed thee if the false Glivas had not been slain by thy hand.
Morgan shook his head in disbelief. Only moments ago evil and corrupt magic had been as real and tangible as a terrorist booby-trap. “How long? “
In the time as you sense it now, the mere blinking of an eye, but it was long enough, the spirit replied, not waiting for Morgan to complete his question. I could not assist thee, Morgan, as Scatha’s power was much too strong within her servant, Glivas. A note of urgency entered the disembodied voice. But let us make haste, good man, for my beloved daughter is in the hands of a far more human evil, yet one no less dangerous than the one you faced here.
“Where is she?” Morgan asked, full of dread.
I will lead thee, the voice replied. A filmy plume of blue, almost swanlike in shape, formed in the air in front of Morgan. It glided down the passageway, casting a delicate glow upon the stones which had only reflected the sights and sounds of innumerable acts of evil and inhumanity since the Mercians and their treacherous allies had taken possession of all that was good in Dumnonia. Morgan followed, pistol drawn against a more understandable enemy, one more susceptible to Shadow World weapons.
He smelled and heard Thorkell’s torture arena shortly before he actually reached its threshold. The serpent odor was not present, but he could smell terror, vo
mit and blood.… Old terror, old vomit, old blood, mingled with the new. The sounds that came to his ears were not what he had expected from such a place, however. The whimpers that had drawn him onward were absent, as were the groans and cries for mercy he would have expected. Instead, the only sounds that reached him from behind the heavy door were slaps of flesh against flesh and grunts of pleasure which reminded Morgan of the noises made by pigs rooting in garbage.
Hurry! Aiofe cried. She is in more danger than I had before thought! The spirit’s manifestation gyrated with agitation before the chamber door.
Morgan reached out with his left hand and gently pushed on the planked surface. The door moved a few centimeters. It had not been barred from the inside. There has been no reason to lock that door, he reasoned. None would enter here without invitation or business. And I have business. He kicked the door open the rest of the way lunged through the opening without hesitation and fired a single shot. He skidded to a stop.
He had blown half of the fat man’s face away without totally registering what he had been doing with his victim, but as he rolled the gross, hairless body onto the floor, he could see that Thorkell’s torture master had been raping her cruelly.
The insides of Brigid’s thighs were bruised and bloody. She did not move, and he could not detect breathing. He touched her.
Morgan straightened with a slow deliberation. The numbness that Aiofe had lifted from him now returned.
“You were right, Goddess,” he said tonelessly. “She was in more danger than you had imagined.”
He glanced at the tangle of blood-smeared black hair that covered her face, the sallow, lifeless skin, and barbarously used body. “You were right, Aiofe” he said, sinking back down, resting his forehead upon her unmoving, bloody abdomen, “because she is dead.”
He shot the already dead Mercian twice more, and then he began to cry.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Aiofe touched the ruined body like a delicate mist then darted about her head, settling upon it, a shifting, glowing hood. Then the mist collected into its bird-shape and hovered close to Morgan.
Morgan was too submerged in his own misery to pay the spirit more than cursory attention. If she could not effectively counter Scatha’s power, filtered as it was through a human agent, then she would not be capable of returning Brigid to him either.
It is right to grieve for this one, Morgan! The voice of the spirit demanded. But the one you would mourn is not the daughter of my Grove. Look but closely at her!
He surfaced from his shock at the voice in his head. Not only had Aiofe’s words penetrated his brain, but also he could feel her actual presence like cool hands upon his forehead. Obeying the spirit, he examined the broken body with gentle care, as if fearful of defiling her further. She was battered and torn, but even through the ravages of the Mercian instruments of torture, he could see that she was shaped and proportioned like Brigid.
Holding his breath in fear, he turned her head toward him and smoothed the raven hair away from her face. He then forced himself to look at her. The Mercian had been more than thorough with her. Her face had been savagely altered from what it must have been; and her mouth was a jagged wound full of splintered teeth, but a tiny mole at the corner of one eye told him that Aiofe had spoken the truth.
He held the body of a stranger in his arms.
Morgan let out his breath in relief and closed the dead eyes. He mouthed a silent prayer to the gods of two worlds and tenderly lowered the body to the ground.
“Where is she?”
She is somewhere in this place of torment, Morgan, but her life force is too faint for me to follow. Yet she lives.
Morgan rose from the dead woman’s side, at once feeling hope overlaid with fear.
“If Brigid dies before we find her, can you…?”
I can heal the body, Aiofe replied, but it is an abomination to rekindle a semblance of life in the dead. Let us find her alive.
Without further words spoken and without the necessity, Morgan and the kindly spirit divided the search. Taking one side of that chamber of terror as his personal territory, Morgan stormed each cell like a Fury, digging through the rotted straw that served as both sleeping pallet and latrine, throwing it aside in a blizzard of debris. He encountered only the sedimentary layers of excreta and straw of long occupation and the vermin that fed upon it and bred in it. The spirit, on the other hand, seemed to sniff the atmosphere within each cell like a hunting dog and moved on without disturbing the vile strata as Morgan did.
It was Morgan, however, who found her. There was no doubt in his mind that she had been tortured in the same methodical and sadistic manner as the dead woman. If she lived, he knew with a certainty that she might never be capable of making love to any man, nor ever again experience the desire.
Ashamed of himself, he dismissed the observation as an unworthy one. He knelt beside her in the filthy straw and placed two fingers on her throat, feeling for life. Her pulse, when he found it, fluttered faintly and was dangerously slow.
“In here, Aiofe! Quickly!” He placed an arm under Brigid’s shoulders and eased her to a sitting position. Her head lolled, nerveless, like the Mercian bowman’s, and the similarity was not lost on Morgan. He lifted her head and rested it in the crook of his shoulder while he rocked her, willing her to live.
The spirit wasted no time. Flowing over her torn body like cool fog, Aiofe came to rest as a bright cowl on Brigid’s head.
I must enter her body now, Morgan, the voice sounded again in his brain. Hold her firmly so that she will not injure herself further.
“You mean to possess her?” Morgan questioned. The concept was even more difficult than ever for him to accept, since he had seen the result of such a partnership with Glivas.
If an inner voice could be irritated, the spirit was irritated. If there were any other way to preserve her life, I would not merge with her without her permission. She cannot give permission in her present condition, and I can heal her best from within, the spirit answered as if explaining a self-evident fact to a slow child. At any rate, she cannot remain here for long, since the battle is certain to involve the entire palace. We cannot take the chance that it will be friendly soldiers that reach this place next, and you cannot carry her and fight effectively.
Morgan acquiesced, nodding. “You are correct, Goddess,” he said, holding Brigid’s fragile shell to himself. “Do what you must.”
The fog-like form moved from Brigid’s scalp to mask her slack-featured face.
Hold her well, the spirit voice commanded.
Morgan answered by placing his other arm around Brigid’s back. She was cold against him, too cold to sustain life for much longer. Then like a blue smoke being inhaled, the mist-like wraith poured into Brigid’s nostrils and open mouth, disappearing at once.
Immediately Morgan felt Brigid’s body give a violent twist in his grasp and her eyes sprang open in a mad staring that looked through him to horrors that he could only guess at. Then the stiffening relaxed and the eyes softened. Horrified, he watched the muscles of her face crawl and twitch as if being individually tested. At the same time he felt the long muscles in her body move in response to the same irregular internal proddings.
The disconcerting movements ceased almost as quickly as they had begun. Bridget’s hands rose to his chest and pressed firmly against him. Her skin was no longer gray; it felt warm through the cloth of his uniform.
“Release us now, Morgan,” she said in a voice that was not quite Brigid’s. “I want to see if we can stand alone.”
Morgan obeyed and watched without offering help as she rose to her feet on shaky legs, swayed a moment, and rested a hand upon his shoulder for support. She then removed the hand and walked with jerky steps to one wall of the cell, turned, and walked back to him. It was if a teenager was driving a standard shift car for the first time. The analogy did not make Morgan smile.
“It has been a long time since I have had a body,” that not-q
uite Brigid voice said. “It would have been a good feeling almost any other time, but my daughter has been so vilely used that it is a wonder that she yet held on to life.” The battered face took on the look of loathing. “It is too bad that thou hast slain the one who did this to the one we both love.”
Morgan looked at her in surprise.
“I would have gladly entered him and used his own body against himself.”
Morgan already knew what the healing process could be like under spiritual manipulation; he could vividly imagine what an unhealing process might be like. He forced his thoughts away from the pictures that formed, unbidden in his mind, of healthy flesh becoming putrid, bones breaking of their own accord, blood vessels bursting, all the while the five senses becoming unnaturally heightened. He wrenched his thoughts free.
“What do you intend to do for Brigid?” He asked, fearful of the alterations that might now be taking place within her helpless body.
“Quiet thy fears, Morgan,” Aiofe said in a more Brigid-like voice. “I am healing my daughter, not taking her for my pleasure or abuse. To answer thy unspoken questions, I am repairing the damage to her body as rapidly as I can. I have removed the blanket of shock that was killing her and stilled the pain she felt. Her mind has been eased again into a deep sleep.”
It was obvious to Morgan that the healing was indeed taking place. Already the bruises had faded, and the welts and swellings had begun to recede. She was filthy and matted with coagulated blood from numerous wounds that were closing as he watched.
“She will look the same as before she was given to Thorkell, and she will be as physically whole, perhaps even more so with my help. But....”
“But?” He asked, swallowing dryly.
“Even though she will be bodily able to make love again, dear Morgan, she might never wish to after this.” Aiofe reached out with Brigid’s hand and touched Morgan’s forehead.
The Celtic Mirror Page 33