The electric flames halted the bolts that had been shot, turning them into a rain of smoking slag. Then the wild energy, now tinged with orange tongues, ran like acid through the ranks of men. Blue and orange fire danced among them, and the Suevian attack disintegrated as terrified sailors threw their weapons into the water and dove after them in an attempt to escape the elemental fires that surrounded them.
A few bold men stood their ground and winched their bows, but as the earthborn fire transformed their weapons into smoldering kindling and sagging iron, they ran, those who could. The tardy ones remained transfixed while flesh melted like hot wax from their bodies and unsupported bones collapsed into greasy, blackened piles.
The sickening odor of burning meat reached even to the interior of the blue field of Celtic force, and Morgan felt his/Brigid’s stomach churn and spill its contents upon the stones at her feet. Then the blue shield darkened with a suddenness that jarred his expanded senses, and his earth-charged energies ebbed frighteningly. His Cunneda-self cried out in an agony that Morgan felt with his own nerve endings. A pure wrongness, refined through centuries of visiting evil upon mankind, stretched out its claws to pierce to the center of the Wheel.
Scatha stood still no longer.
Using the extended sword as the focus of their threatened energies, the living ring faced humanity’s oldest enemy.
Kettelmann, still pinioned by the goddess’s power, held the dead naval officer’s short sword in his right hand. Scatha had cloaked the German with her powerful negative strength so that Kettelmann appeared like a medieval monk, wearing ebony robes. A black cowl of evil covered his head.
“You were wrong to oppose me,” the Dark One warned through Kettelmann’s mouth. “For when I defeat you, the Earth Power you have borrowed will be added to my own, and none will be able to withstand me!” Her laugh rattled in the German’s throat like the warning of a coiled rattlesnake.
Kettelmann’s right arm blurred upward with unnatural swiftness and the two blades crossed with a sound like thunder. Two auras met at the juncture of steel with a clash of their own, and the sword twisted and jerked in Morgan’s grip as if it desired to avoid contact with Scatha’s weapon. Inky tendrils began to swirl darkly into the pure blue of the Celtic flow and slithered down the steel toward Morgan’s upraised arm. The black force did not mix with the blue; instead the blue was shoved aside with an ease that terrified him. He watched the inexorable encroachment of the Dark Goddess’s power as he would have watched lava flow toward a village in its path.
He experienced a total helplessness and he could sense similar emanations from his other selves as they witnessed the black reality that was Scatha.
His Cunneda persona exhibited the most frustration: let me raise my own sword against this monster. I cannot stand helpless while others fight for me!
No! His Brigid-consciousness whispered. There is another way. Her thoughts whirled in confusing patterns in that part of Morgan that he had attempted to reserve for himself. We must add Life Force to the Earth Power that flows through us.
Life Force? the Connach segment of his being asked disdainfully. I never paid more than scant attention to the drivel spouted by the priests. What you did, I never could understand at all, so I never asked.
Patience, the Daughter of Aiofe’s Grove thought. I will show you.
She did.
As the full import of Brigid’s revelations struck him, Morgan experienced a chill that shook his entire body and numbed the edges of his mind.
The sacrifice demanded by Brigid’s gods was nothing he could not give. He thought of Verulamium as he had first seen it from the dead of Taranis, the first glimpse he had had of Brigid herself, lovemaking in the ruined school. He allowed his senses to register the warmth of her fingers as they rested, entwined with his, the colder touch of Martin Cunneda’s fingers now on his right wrist, immobilizing his sword.
What your people have built is good, he silently told his companions.
Our people, Brigid thought back.
Our people, then. I will do it.
Aye, Connach asserted.
I will sit on the edge of Cernunos’s Cauldron sooner than I anticipated, Cunneda thought with a sigh that was half laugh. Yet I too will do this thing, my brothers and sister.
For a brief instant, the pressure on Morgan’s sword wrist tightened. It was a sign that Cunneda meant what he had sent as a thought, although none of them could lie in their mind-linked state.
Peace, my new brother, Morgan told the nobleman and received another quick tightening of fingers.
If all are agreed then, their Brigid-self stated, enter my mind more completely so that I might control and direct what we must down do. Leave nothing of yourselves back, she ordered.
Morgan felt her shudder of revulsion and disgust as he and his two male companions poured the remainder and most hidden parts of their beings into Brigid’s bruised mind.
His last conscious, separate Morgan-thought was one of pure admiration for the courage she was showing.
Thus, completely joined in all but actual body, the warriors blended themselves into one super-mind. If it was Brigid who actually took the lead in what followed, Morgan could not tell, for he had become as completely Brigid as himself, as much Cunneda as Connach.
In the sharing, they were One, and in that sharing, the tap that released the Life Force was turned on.
At first they experienced an intense euphoria. The power they added to that which had been given by the Earth was heady and awesome. The blue field deepened in color and richness, and where it met Scatha’s sable reach, it was lined with a red that was as rich as arterial blood.
They wanted to laugh, to sing, and to taunt the Dark Goddess. Where their enhanced force met the evil, the red surge ate away at the black and pushed it from them.
Then, at the point where steel met steel, the dark power held fast, seeming to absorb the Celtic attack without effort. Scatha did not advance, nor did she retreat. She held fast, siphoning off the priceless energy that could not be replaced.
They gasped as they realized how quickly they could be sucked dry like a spider’s victim. They had surely overreached themselves by presuming to combat Scatha.
A vision of Verulamium as seen from the harbor filled their mind along with the sound of bells. They decided.
We must do more!
How can we? They asked.
We must.
With a groan that was never voiced, the tap of life was turned fully open until it was no longer a trickle; it became a flood.
The power they freely released roared through their veins and entered the blue field with a rush that sounded like lifting rockets. The Celtic force, freed from Scatha’s hold, raced down Kettelmann’s sword and his arm, subduing and swallowing the black aurora.
Then, evil held fast again. Less than a meter from the stones beneath the German’s feet, the dark line ceased its sudden retreat and challenged the red-shot blue.
They uttered a cry that was carved from an agony so intense that a single human could not endure. They had no more reserves. They had failed!
Scatha laughed and began edging the weakening column of goodness upward.
They could feel the dissolution of their energies. The Celtic whole was beginning to disintegrate, and they knew despair. Scatha had proven too powerful; they understood that now, and they would pay for that knowledge with their lives and their culture.
Then from within their dying multiple consciousnesses came a memory, a hope, and they did a most dangerous thing. They redirected their dwindling energies away from the battle against evil and focused the totality of their force upon the stones worn by two of them.
Aiofe! They cried as the black force rushed into the way they had consciously created.
Hear us! They called as evil poured across the touch of steel, hungrily reaching for the source of their lives, touching it with scaly fingers.
They felt a thorn-like piercing of their heart,
an agony beyond compare. Then it was gone, the pain, the group consciousness, the clash of the Earth’s Dragons.
Morgan realized the change in himself when he tasted acrid smoke on his tongue. He coughed forcibly and looked up from where he knelt on the stones. His sword lay near his feet. Kettelmann had lost his black cover and lay on the quay, trying to raise himself to a sitting position.
Brigid had fallen to his left and was moaning softly, hugging herself tightly as if to keep her body together.
Cunneda was hugging himself as well, but for a different reason. He was drooling blood upon the toes of his own boots, gasping for air between bounds of coughing. His flesh had taken a transparent appearance.
Morgan reached out and touched Cunneda on the arm, trying to somehow to reestablish that miraculous rapport, to share his strength with the man he no longer hated or despised, for how could he hate himself?
“Forget me, and look to your bride, my brother.” The nobleman parted his lips in a hideous smile. His teeth were stained with his dwindling life, and blood ran freely from the corners of his mouth. A wheezing, bubbling sound accompanied each labored breath.
Morgan reached out and took the High Chief’s shoulder to steady his weak swaying. “We can get help in Verulamium,” he lied.
Cunneda’s eyes were filled with a final wisdom and he attempted to smile through the spasms that shook his body. “There is more truth in death than in you, foreigner,” he managed. A terrible series of coughs bent him nearly in two, and he spat. His skin had taken the waxy look of the already dead.
“The splinter has most certainly killed me.”
Morgan opened his mouth to deny the truth, but the mortally stricken prince waved him into silence.
“You have the living to succor and the living to contend with.” His gaze was steady and Morgan felt that Cunneda could see things that he could not, that he was going to soon become a part of the great forces that had touched all of them a brief time before.
Morgan nodded and turned to help Brigid to her feet. He never made it.
Jay Kettelmann had reached her first. The fingers of his left hand were embedded in the flesh of her upper arm and he was dragging her upright. The M-16 was unslung and pointed one-handedly at Morgan’s chest.
“Stay right where you are, asshole!” He shouted, his voice overlaid with a hint of the Dark Lord’s intonations.
When Morgan obeyed, Kettelmann grinned triumphantly.
“Danke, for confirming what I already suspected,” he crowed. “When the magic goes, the bullets again work, ja?” The freshly minted Mercian jerked Brigid to her feet, making her cry out. “The game here is over, kaput. He emphasized his words by shaking Brigid by the arm.
Helpless rage flared in Morgan, but the muzzle of the M-16 with its certain promise of death held him as firmly as Kettelmann held Brigid. He glanced at his grounded rifle and the sword that lay at his feet. They were as remote as the lost moon to him, but he knew that he was going to challenge the German one last time, even if it meant that a bullet might shatter both his chance and his life. A guttural shout from the end of the quay made him turn his head in that direction.
The Suevians were on the move again, evidently convinced that the Celts held no more threats to them. In moments, Morgan, Brigid, Connach and the dying Cunneda would be either dead or captives of a brutal empire that did not reward its enemies. Morgan needed a miracle.
He squeezed his ring and silently implored the Winged Spirit to intercede, but once again there was no answering thrum of power. Aiofe was on another coffee break! He thought, bitterly.
Morgan’s miracle came from an entirely different source: Arthur, the Boy Wonder.
An onager-propelled bomb traced a silent curve above the burning battleground and impacted against one of the struts supporting the huge fuel storage cylinder that towered over the harbor. The explosion was lost in the general din, but the joints as they twisted and distorted during the tower’s long fall to the water screamed as if all the damned souls in Cernunos’s cauldron had been released at once!
Kettelmann’s concentration was diverted for only an instant, but it was enough. The Ax-Wielder’s sword was back in Morgan’s grip as if by magic and in its violent upswing, caught the M-16 in the upper hand guard, shattering the plastic into flying scrap.
The German grunted and crushed the trigger, releasing three ineffective rounds into the air. He then swung Brigid around so that she became a shield. She struggled to free herself from Kettelmann’s maniacal clutch.
The broadsword hung, poised over Morgan’s head. If he brought it down, Kettelmann might twist Brigid into the blade’s path. If he did not swing, Kettelmann would kill him where he stood, unable to act.
“Go limp!” He cried out to Brigid in Pan-Celtic, hoping to win one more slim chance at Kettelmann. He flexed his fingers against the grip and watched for a sign that she had understood. Kettelmann was grinning, his big teeth showing in a manner that would have been genuine pleasure in anyone but a vicious pervert. His low laugh did not mask the sound of the Suevian bowmen as they moved cautiously toward the end of the quay.
“Aufwiedersehen, Morgan.”
Kettelmann laughed again and pulled the trigger...and missed Morgan altogether.
Brigid had understood Morgan’s plea and had slumped in Kettelmann’s grasp just as he fired. The spent round flattened itself against the paving stones and spun harmlessly off into the bay. Bridget hung from Kettelmann’s left hand, too close for him to shoot, no longer a shield, only an encumbrance.
With a growl, he released her, throwing her to his side where she lay motionless against the stones.
“Now,” he said, moving to correct his field of fire.
But Morgan was quicker still.
The Highland steel caught the assault rifle just behind the front sight, twisting it out of shape in a shower of sparks, driving the flash-suppressor into the paving stones. With a laugh of his own, Morgan ground the muzzle deeper into the gritty surface with his boot.
“Let’s go,” Morgan said to the German in a voice that sounded quite reasonable in his own ears.
The former PacSail hero pulled desperately at the rifle with both hands, heaving with his legs, keeping his eyes locked with Morgan’s, apparently unmindful or uncaring that Ian Connach had picked up Morgan’s M-16 and was aiming it at his chest.
Morgan sighed and raised the heavy sword once again.
“He’s mine, Ian,” he said quietly.
It was only then that the German seemed to become fully aware. His eyes left Morgan’s and followed the upraised sword arm to the very frontier of steel.
Morgan watched full comprehension enter Kettelmann’s brain. The obfuscating layers of Scatha-induced delusion and scarlet superiority peeled away like odious onionskins while a genuine emotion animated his face for the first time...fear. A sound that could have been a whimper escaped twisted lips, and Kettelmann covered his eyes with his left arm. Morgan saw that the right was still tugging at the rifle.
Morgan strained and bent at the waist, heaving the sword downward. He felt a brief resistance then heard a sound like a dry branch breaking. The blade rang against the stones, chipping shards of rock. The shock traveled up Morgan’s arm like a hammer strike, and he almost let go. Kettelmann’s hand was still wrapped tightly around the M-16’s lower handgrip, index finger curled against the trigger.
Breathing heavily, as if he had just run a race, Morgan placed the sword point in a space between stones and pushed himself upright like an exhausted old man using a came. As he did, he watched the German stagger backward toward the end of the quay.
How could this be?
He looked again. Kettelmann still gripped the assault rifle. Yet he stood two meters from the scarred weapon. Morgan stood fully upright and shook his head to clear it, spraying perspiration from his hair. He looked again to verify his bizarre perceptions. He had not been mistaken. Both were Kettelmann, only they were somewhat disconnected at that mo
ment.
The heavy blade had bitten deeply through Kettelmann’s right humerus, six centimeters below the clavicle, cleaving the bone. That had been the snap Morgan had heard. He watched the staggering German for a moment without speaking. Kettelmann’s right shoulder was nothing but a spurting ruin of flesh and tattered scarlet cloth. The man himself swayed back and forth unsteadily, staring back at Morgan with a ferocious malevolence. It seemed to Morgan, as he watched the certainly fatally wounded man,that Kettelmann’s image rippled like the waters of a dark, tainted pool. For a time it was the German who stood before him, losing bright arterial blood, but in another instant it became something else...a foul, slithering thing that had crawled into the light from the depths of a Teutonic nightmare.
The images blurred, then came into focus again. It was Kettelmann who faced Morgan.
“Fuck you, Morgan! Fuck all of you!”
Morgan stood astonished as the man who should have been dead took three strong strides to the edge of the quay and dove headfirst into the water. Kettelmann instantly disappeared, leaving only a string of bubbles to dissipate on the oily surface.
Morgan stood transfixed for only a split-second. He would have time to think about Kettelmann later, if there was to be a later for any of them. Savagely, he kicked the bloody M-16 into the polluted water where it sank immediately out of sight like its thief, dragging the dismembered arm to the bottom with it.
No time for thought, reflection or recrimination, Morgan decided even before the last bubble burst upon the surface. He strode to the prize sloop’s forward mooring line and cut it with one quick movement of the notched sword without bothering to uncleat it. He pushed the bow from the dock with his boot and gestured impatiently to the others.
“This is the last boat out of hell,” he said tiredly, feeling old, and then he cut the stern line as the Suevian archers began their deadly firing once again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Leaving hell was not as easy as he had hoped. He stood, still rooted to the quay with the heavy smell of burning fuel irritating his nasal membranes and the sonorous thuds of exploding ordinance paining his ears. Uneasily, he faced the enemy sailors, armed with only Kettelmann’s undamaged M-16; the jammed magazine had been as easy as a tap against the flagstones to remedy, but he knew it would take much more than that single magazine to halt any renewed Suevian attack. Brigid and Connach had already boarded the sloop to a questionable safety, but the wounded Cunneda adamantly refused to heed Morgan.
The Celtic Mirror Page 43