Scatha knew as well.
The black aura behind the German grew then shrank in size and darkness as if the Dark One’s confidence alternately puffed then deflated like a blacksmith’s bellows. Then as Morgan watched, the pulsations slowed to a complete stop. The black manifestation grew denser, darker, larger, and Morgan feared that Scatha had regained her total disdain for mortal adversaries.
The shadow around Kettelmann’s body loomed, malignant as an element of a child’s night terrors. Kettelmann appeared frozen in place by the dark mantle, unable to move, perhaps as vulnerable to attack, as he would ever be again. Feeling cold echoes in the pit of his stomach, reminders of the waking nightmare he had experienced in the catacombs beneath the Mercian headquarters, Morgan stepped forward with raised sword and sinking hopes, afraid to move so poorly armed into the goddess’s evil orbit, afraid not to move into it.
As he stepped closer to Kettelmann, Morgan felt as if a huge bell jar had been lowered into place over him. He could see everything, but he could hear nothing, yet his ears were filled with noise. It was the absence of sound; it was the presence of all sound. It was the voice of the Dark Goddess, calling for his life. In front of him, Kettelmann squirmed like a bug impaled upon a velvet-covered board; his face was distorted with the certain realization that a genuine horror was using him and using him badly. His mouth opened wide in a sustained scream, but Morgan could not hear his voice. Then the shadow above Kettelmann stretched; a grotesque hand reached out to touch him, to close about Morgan’s chest.
It never reached him.
A thin keening penetrated his overloaded senses, a sound as sharp as a Celtic blade, and accompanying it, a feeling of warmth fought the unnatural coldness in the fingers of his left hand. Aroused from his stupor by the intruding sensations, he broke the intimate, dangerous contact with Scatha and his spiritually corrupt marionette.
Brigid/Aiofe had taken his hand, he saw with slow wonder. She was screaming a high, continuous note that should not have come from a human throat. She was looking, not at him, but at a misshapen bundle attached to the bale of cordage behind him by a wooden peg. The bundle miraculously twitched with a faint life of its own, discoloring the hemp and stones with a blood-red liquor.
Then, to Morgan’s amazement, the bundle lifted a human head and opened dying eyes that stared directly into Morgan’s. A slit opened in the distorted face, but the only thing that emerged was a thick, nearly black fluid that splashed upon the ground, darkening it like Scatha’s shadow.
The mouth continued to leak a great deal of viscous material, but it no longer gaped simply to release fluid; it mouthed a name, Morgan’s!
“Patrick!” Morgan placed his sword on the stones and knelt beside the dying man, taking one cold, limp hand with his own. He saw that the wooden peg that was wrenching the valiant noncom from life was in reality the end of a huge crossbow bolt. Somehow during a shift in the wind, the sailors had managed to wheel one of the monster weapons onto the quay. As he turned his head to check upon his suspicions, a bale of cordage jumped and shifted. A two-meter long, forearm-thick bolt quivered in the middle of it. A hand’s width of the steel tip had actually penetrated to the other side.
Morgan, the hopelessness of the situation heavy upon him, outnumbered, weapons useless, looked into Patrick’s slowly glazing eyes.
“Tell Cernunos of us, my friend. We will be joining you soon enough.”
The Optio managed a weak nod of agreement before his head fell back upon the bolt that had married him to the coil of cordage, and then his eyes registered no more mortal sights.
Morgan released Patrick’s hand and fingered one of the grenades that hung on his harness. The grenades might have been softballs for all the good they would do any of them under Scatha’s neutralization of Shadow World technology. What worried him most was that their lives depended on an illogical solution, and he was not certain what that might be.
Patrick might be our best ticket out of here, he thought with a deep irony. A whisper in Cernunos’s ear, that’s all it would take. He forced himself to shut off his logical self. Even after direct experience with the magic and sorcery of Brigid’s world, he found it difficult to think of them as real solutions to real problems, but he knew that he must.
He had never enjoyed fantasy games or novels; he was not enjoying living in one either. The reality of fantasy is not sword and sorcery; the reality is machismo and magic, he mused, trying to force his mind to think along new paths. A candy commercial jingle popped into his mind. Melts in your mouth. Magic.
The answer appeared like magic.
“You are our only hope, Aiofe,” he said, looking straight at the woman who held Patrick’s head to her breast while she crooned the Prayer for the Dead in a sweet monotone. “If you truly can’t help us, you had better recite that prayer again for each of us right now.
She looked at him with pleading eyes. She released Patrick’s head and stood up to face him. Her cheek, hands and breasts were smeared with the noncom’s blood.
“How am I to help?” She asked, her face betraying that she already knew what he was going to demand.
“By leaving Brigid’s body, and by assuming your former shape and powers,” he answered. “By helping us defeat Scatha.”
Connach made an unintelligible sound then opened his mouth to speak. Morgan silenced him with a shake of his head.
“You will have answers soon, my friend,” he told the prince.
“I cannot leave Brigid now,” Aiofe protested in her own voice that brought looks of puzzlement from both noblemen. “She is not yet ready to take her place with you, unaided.”
“Then all of us will die and she will never take command of her own body again, and you will have lost your own immortality. What is it to be, Goddess?” He released her hand.
The bale of cordage shuddered from another hit from the huge Vik crossbow. The shaft splintered upon impact with a section of heavy chain rode, showering them with knifelike slivers of wood and bits of metal. Cunneda grunted and fell to one knee then reached behind him and tugged awkwardly. He wordlessly dropped a bloody splinter onto the stones.
“I do not understand why you address my betrothed as ‘Aiofe’, Morgan, but I do agree with you that we are going to die on this spot unless the gods intervene for us.” He coughed wetly and gave Morgan a peculiar look, a familiar look.
“It is up to you, Aiofe,” Morgan said, registering the meaning behind Cunneda’s expression. “Help us.”
“There is only one way,” she replied, “but it is dangerous to mortals.”
“Morgan laughed bitterly. “More dangerous than this?” He pointed to Kettelmann and his terrible shadow, then to the pinioned Optio. “If it can only kill us Goddess, you’d better get started.” He sensed that the German had begun to move again. Time had run out.
Aiofe closed her eyes and placed her free hand upon Morgan’s cheek. The electric caress thrilled against his skin; then it was gone.
“You must all join hands and not break free, no matter what you think is happening, no matter what you seem to see, feel, or hear, Ian, master of the House Connach, take the other hand of Brigid, Daughter of my Grove, and do not let go.”
The vortices of Brigid’s spirit-enhanced pupils made his own vision seem to spin, and in that moment, he did not want to lose the other half of the woman he loved.
“Kerry, our love, you must hold fast, not only to this mortal hand, but to the hand of Martin Cunneda, who will also join hands with Ian.” Her voice was filled with loss.
If he had answered her right then, his voice would have shown the same emptiness, but instead, he reached for Cunneda’s hand. The nobleman’s skin was sallow, and his lips were turning blue. His hand felt clammy in Morgan’s, and a fine tremor transmitted itself to the Californian through those aristocratic fingers.
In that instant, Morgan did not think that Cunneda could survive another life-threatening experience. He seemed to be at the end of his endurance, but
there were few choices left for the little band of survivors.
“Whatever it is that you must do, begin quickly,” Cunneda rasped, settling the matter of conscience for Morgan, “for there is no time for delay.” Beads of sweat formed on Cunneda’s brow and upper lip, as if each word had weighed twenty kilos. His fingers felt frail and skeletal to Morgan even though he knew that Cunneda was no weakling.
“Farewell,” Aiofe’s voice cried out through Brigid’s lips. “Farewell, my sometime brother, my sometime betrothed, my certain lover. I will be gone from you, but still with you as I summon the power of the Earth to help fight the evil that surrounds us.
“Success is not assured, for Scatha, too, draws her power from the Dragons beneath the ground. If no other spirit favors thee, my slight strength may be too little to prevail.”
So saying, the spirit raised Brigid’s head to the burning sky and let her eyes roll upward until only the whites showed. Her jaw slackened, and Morgan felt a series of violent spasms shake her body. Twice, Brigid’s hand was almost torn from his grasp. But he held on grimly, knowing he must be hurting her, knowing he must hold on.
An azure brilliance formed around the naked Brigid like a cloak of blue flame, and Morgan felt the winged ring vibrated on his finger in response. The restored pendant pulsed like a living heart between Brigid’s breasts, and a sound like a wind crying through rigging blocked out the battle noises behind them as well as the hollow roaring that had started from Kettelmann’s throat, the voice of the Dark Goddess, manifested through the traitor’s mouth.
Morgan should have been afraid, but he was not. A feeling of intense euphoria filled him as Aiofe departed Brigid’s body in a swirl of mist. Three times around the joined circle of humans went the wraith, touching each one with her cool, sweet breath. Morgan’s spinning mind began to un-reel visions of a place not meant for mortals, a place only for the gods.
Then, as if the ring on his finger had become a tap into a source of intense power, a rush of energy poured into his body through the matrix of the stone and, through his hands into the bodies of those who held them. The power then returned, redoubled through those same hands, charging his blood, his bones, each cell and atom of his being with a new consciousness that he could only described as “godlike.”
With little effort, he found that his heightened awareness could course along the flow of power like an electric current, and he knew what it was to be poor, nearly mad Brigid, to be the Prince of Reged, and to be the obviously mortally wounded ruler of Caerwent.
When he merged with Cunneda, became Cunneda, much in the same way that Aiofe must have become Brigid, he nearly shrank away against the current of energy, sickened by what had been revealed to him inside the nobleman’s flesh.
Yet, against his impulse, he remained another facet in the flawed jewel that was Martin Cunneda and he poured additional strength into the nobleman’s body through the ring. He was not even surprised that he could perform such a miracle; he simply performed.
Then, like a poison in his blood, a new element entered into the flowing, merging of the four, a nauseating wrongness that sapped the energy that wedded them.
“No! No! Nonononononononono!” The internal scream merged into one continuous negation of all they had become and all that they could perform. “I cannot stand it any longer!”
With a wrench of tremendous and unnatural proportions, Brigid twisted out of his grasp and fell to the stones, screaming.
It was as if a switch had been thrown. Drained, Morgan staggered backward, losing Cunneda’s hand.
A darkness so intense that it had a feel of slime and enveloped him with its unkind hands. Scatha’s silent laugh of triumph blew in his face with the tainted odor of decay.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Again, Morgan was forced to struggle against Scatha’s dark pull like a swimmer caught in a tidal race. And again it was anger that saved him; anger that made him open his eyes in an attempt to penetrate the stinking muck the evil goddess had spilled over him. Reaching out with still-deadened senses, he thought he detected an area of a more complete darkness ahead. That is where Scatha hides, he reasoned holding on to his capability for rational thought with the greatest difficulty. To let go, to succumb to the force that surrounded him was to lose his life, his soul and those of his companions.
Where Scatha lies, there stands Jay Kettelmann. He could not make darkness bleed, but he could make a serious attempt on Kettelmann’s flesh. And Scatha, he knew, was hampered by Kettelmann’s own limitations. Concentrating his power on more than one area appeared not to be one of the Dark Goddess’s strong suits.
With numb fingers, Morgan again pulled the long blade again from its scabbard and waded heavily toward the center of malignant blackness.
“Victims don’t attack, Scatha,” he shouted thickly, swinging the sword in an arc, making no contact. “They get attacked!” He sent the long blade through its arc again without meeting any resistance. He thought that the darkness that enveloped him had lessened, but he could not be certain. He took another ponderous step forward into the thick shadow and wielded the sword with a vigor that sapped far too much of his remaining energy.
This time the blade met more than thin air. A brief drag interrupted the blade’s smooth swing and a faint cry of pain penetrated Morgan’s Scatha-induced deafness.
Hope strengthened his sword arm, and he swung the weapon to press his small advantage. Snaking through the darkness a hand caught Morgan’s wrist and arrested his attack. Though the blackness had perceptibly weakened to a gray woolliness, he could not see the fingers that had caught him. They would not hold him long, he vowed, and he reached with his left hand for the dagger at his waist. A need to destroy that evil raged through his veins like a disease out of control, and he desired nothing more than Kettelmann’s death and through that act, the defeat of the noxious goddess.
He never completed the draw of his dagger. Five smaller fingers encircled his left wrist and he stopped of his own volition.
As if spoken from a room behind a closed door, the words “join us!” penetrated the cocoon Scatha had woven around him. Morgan sheathed his sword and joined hands with those he could not see. It was as if a bright light had entered the cavern where he had been imprisoned. The remaining vestiges of darkness shattered like black glass. Shards of anger and fear stabbed at him like knives as his vision returned completely. A sword’s thrust away from him, Kettelmann’s mouth opened and shut, but it was clearly the voice of Scatha that shrilled threats and obscenities at him.
Kettelmann had been cut on his right thigh by the Lothian steel, and blood puddled around his boot. Prevented from even clutching his wound to ease the bleeding, Kettelmann helplessly spewed the goddess’s frustrations and danced like a marionette in the hands of an unskilled puppeteer. His feet drummed upon the stones and his hands, hooked into claws, reached for the hand-joined Celts as if touching them would ease his torment.
Celts. Morgan thought of his self as one of them now. The meaning of his heritage had never been so clear to him as he willingly joined again with his lover, her brother and his aristocratic former rival, and faced his people’s greatest antagonist...the darkest side of their own volatile nature.
Once more he merged his energy and personality with his companions and discovered how much worse Martin Cunneda had become and yet how much more strongly he stood at Morgan’s side, no longer as an enemy. He understood how much it had cost Brigid to rise, to take his left wrist in her fingers and to accept the imprint of his particular male persona upon her own awareness. He read both bewilderment and growing understanding as they twisted in Ian’s mind which had become his own as well.
Yet, most of all, he exulted in the forces that flowed into and through the four of them, forces that accepted their participation as right. He knew then that he was not only in touch with the Dragons that ranged beneath the Celtic earth, but that he, Brigid, Ian, Cunneda, even Aiofe...every animate and inanimate object in the uni
verse were the blood, bone and sinew of those ranging forces. There was power there...power enough to shift the planet from its orbit...power sufficient to rend the fabric that separated universes. There was power to destroy and power to create. He felt the earth force pour like a river of pure energy to the nexus where they stood, linked by human flesh. He felt the flow divide into two branches: one dark and evil, the other a bright stream, bearing with it all the good that the universe had to offer. The two opposing currents were evenly balanced, and balance he knew, meant stalemate.
There could be no compromise with Scatha’s brand of evil; one side or the other had to prevail!
With his collective mind, Morgan sensed the approach of another huge missile from the Suevian wheeled crossbow, and in his multiplied self, he knew that the immediate human threat had to be neutralized before Scatha could be fought. Using Brigid’s knowledge of Earth Power, he understood what had to be done. He was frightened that it would not work, that it had all been another hallucination, but the human Celtic Wheel circled until the spoke that was Kerry Morgan faced the Suevian enemy and the bolt which moved as if through thickened air. With his left hand he held Brigid’s and placed Cunneda’s over hers. Then he drew his sword.
Blue lighting and brilliant sparks lived along the blade of his extended blade so that the steel was transformed as much as was he. Using a knowledge that he had never before processed, he pointed the gleaming blade at the projectile and launched images of destruction along its glittering length.
In the brief instant of time that it took for the bolt of terrestrial energy to meet the bolt of mortal manufacture, a searing blue-white light illuminated the quay. Then the Suevian bolt simply vanished, its space filled by a violent clap of thunder.
They laughed with their collective mouth and pointed their transfigured sword at the bowmen crouched before them. The sailors were frozen in the act of loosing a flight of bolts when the Celtic sword, acting like a lightning rod that released rather than collected, sent a sheet of blue fire toward them.
The Celtic Mirror Page 42