Night & Demons (32 page)

Cormac got to his feet as the centipede circled like a river of gleaming bone. Sticky juices streaked his blade, but he knew he hadn’t stabbed deep enough to do serious damage. The centipede’s body was so thick that he wasn’t sure he
could
reach a vital spot.

The monster wasn’t used to steel weapons, nor to a swordarm as strong as that of Cormac Mac Art. The creature would, nonetheless, crush and devour the man just as surely as the sun rose and set in the world beyond this hellpit wrenched out of time . . .

The centipede started toward him. Cormac poised.

“Cormac!” bellowed a familiar voice.

Cormac’s sword rang against the centipede’s headshield, rupturing another of the bulging eyes. Powerful hands gripped beneath his armpits and lifted him bodily.

The centipede’s head and forequarters rose effortlessly, fluidly. The mandibles spread like the jaws of a spring trap. Drops of pale venom winked on the hollow tips. The remaining antenna, longer than the Gael’s body, nodded forward.

Cormac brought his Roman blade around in a sideways stroke that didn’t endanger the man who held him from behind. His edge sang on the feathery chitin, severing the antenna near its midpoint and sending the fragment out into the trampled slime.

The centipede flowed forward unaffected. Cormac shouted and drew his knees up against his chest. The creature’s mandibles clacked together like the lock of a catapult releasing.

Cormac slashed down between his feet. The blow swiped only air. He and the man holding him swayed abruptly upward, pulled by numbers of folk on the surface above the hole in the ceiling.

The centipede quivered over the mound of soil and bones, returning in the direction from which it had appeared. The beast had either given up once its prey rose above the height to which it could comfortably reach, or its damaged vision had lost Cormac in the relatively bright light streaming through the roof of the cavern.

Fresh body segments slid past all the time that Cormac dangled from the hole. The claws, scissoring forward in perfect rhythm, sounded like skeletons tumbling down a scree of other bones.

The Gael’s head rose at last above the surface of the ring island. A large fish slapped nearby, in the belt of water. The foliage was rich and full, though the light of the false sun gave it a cast Cormac found unpleasant. After the guardian who prowled the tunnels below, however . . .

A pair of brown-skinned children stared at the Gael wide-eyed. The adults were all tugging on the rope which had raised Wulfhere and Cormac to safety.

Wulfhere released Cormac, who stepped thankfully to solid ground. The Gael’s knees wobbled with reaction to the stress just ended. The pain in his rib cage was cold fire.

The Dane stood arms akimbo, grinning. “I figured you’d be coming,” he said. “Matter of fact, I was going down to look for you. The folks here who saved me from that Greek wizard—”

Wulfhere gestured with his big thumb toward the dozen savages behind him. They were rubbing their palms where the rope had rubbed the skin into incipient blisters. One of them, a very young woman, wore an ornately beaded vest and carried the wand of power thrust beneath the tie of her breechclout. She stepped up beside the Dane.

“—didn’t think it was a good idea; but I thought it was a better idea than having you down there alone with our leggy friend.”

Cormac took a deep breath. He shot his sword home in its sheath.

“You were both right,” he said.

“I am Loughra,” said the girl with the wand of power. “I am Queen of Atlantis, now that my brother is dead.”

Thus far, her voice was animated by a sense of cold pride. She looked around her domain—fleshy vegetation, two children, and a double handful of adults. In a sudden break, which reminded Cormac of how young she really was, Loughra added, “We’re all dead, now or shortly. Kanin and the others wouldn’t let me take the wand when we fled. It was my right.”

She glared at her fellows. Most of them were her seniors. Several were in their seventies or even older, though their features lacked the preternatural ancientness with which the wand branded those who used it.

“It was my right!” Loughra shouted.

The other Atlanteans stared at their hands or the far distance. They had the look of survivors of a beaten army . . . as indeed they were. Between those slaughtered when they attacked the palace and the numbers the Guardian or wand had devoured in the cavern, most of the tribe had died this day.

Cormac eyed the savages. Now that he was among rescuers rather than trading blows in blood-spattered chaos, he was struck by their high foreheads and the craftsmanship displayed in their dress and equipment.

One of the band held a steel-headed spear whose seven-foot shaft was reinforced with metal strips for half its length. The broad blade was inlaid with runes of silver.

Ichor from the centipede dulled the runes carved into the steel. The Atlantean wiped at it with a wad of bark cloth.

Wulfhere followed Cormac’s eyes. “Yes, Aslief’s,” the Dane agreed. “We’ll meet in Valhalla, it seems, but not before. Gorm was honored to fall to such a foe.”

Cormac looked at his friend in surprise.

“Aslief the Saxon came to us just before Hotin and Balla were born,” Loughra explained, nodding toward the pair of children. Two-year-olds, Cormac guessed. It would be difficult to tell time in a place without day, night or seasons.

“He and his men fought their way past the wizards who would have drained them as they do all their captives. The Saxons built a raft, but the water monsters tipped it and took all but Aslief himself. We healed his wounds, and at the end he led us against the wizards.”

“The oily bastard Creon who choked me silly with his blue light?” Wulfhere said. “He’s not the descendant of the wizards who came here all that time ago. He and his daughter
are
those wizards. They drink the blood of everyone they catch to keep themselves young.”

The Dane’s finger unconsciously traced the hammer rune on the flat of his axe.

“Not the blood, but the life,” Loughra corrected. “Though it comes to the same thing. Aslief led us through the tunnels. He fought the Guardian while the rest of us opened the way into the palace.”

“A good job, that,” Wulfhere said softly as his finger moved. “I hadn’t really seen the leggy one—”

To avoid omen, the Dane didn’t say “the Guardian,” though that was merely a title rather than a name.

“—until I went down after you. Handling him for however long with a spear was man’s work.

“Poseidon has forsaken us,” Loughra said miserably. “He caused the monsters—”

Creon and Antheia, not the beasts in the water and cavern; and from what Cormac now believed, the term was well-applied.

“—to be prepared with their magic when we arrived. Otherwise we would have ended their reign forever!”

It wasn’t just the Greeks’ magic that turned the attack into a catastrophe, Cormac realized uneasily. A moment before he had thought the eyes of the Atlantean survivors were dull, torpid. Now his mind put a sinister cast on their expressions.

“I have no friends on the other side of a battle line!” Cormac said harshly. He eased his right foot backward, to brace him if he needed to clear his sword in the next instant. “Whatever he may have been before or become since.”

Wulfhere stepped close to the Gael and hugged him, pinning his arms. “The folk here kept me tied while they carried me through the runnels,” the Dane rumbled. “Otherwise I would have killed them all before they could explain they were rescuing me . . . and the one with legs would have eaten me as he did Aslief, like as not.”

Wulfhere released his friend.

“It was Poseidon’s will,” said Loughra. “You were no more than his instrument.”

“A big fellow, Aslief,” Wulfhere said with a grimly reflective expression on his face. His eyes were focused well beyond the artificial horizon. “His flesh delayed the leggy one for some time, even after it had gotten past his spear.”

Cormac stretched his powerful arms up and back, working the weight of his armor loose from the grooves it dug in his muscles as he stood motionless. Something large shrieked half a mile away. He remembered the elephant skull in the cavern beneath.

“The folk here say there’s no way out,” Wulfhere said without emotional loading. “That much of the Greeks’ story was true. They say we can stay here with them on the island.”

“There are no children born here anymore,” Loughra said. “Hotin and Balla were the last, and before them, none for—half my lifetime. Poseidon has forsaken us.”

The elephant trumpeted again. Cormac looked at the Atlantean queen, but his mind considered all the threads of the net that knotted about him.

The ring of water was broad and deep enough to be a world in itself. The creatures there would live and breed for so long as the bubble that was Atlantis remained. There was no realistic chance that men could live to cross it. That Aslief had done so was a comment on the number of Saxons whom he’d led: more meat than there were hungry maws to devour it.

The cavern was another matter. Hard-shelled creatures could live indefinitely without food. Cormac had once found a spider beneath a helmet which had been rusting for at least three years. The helmet rim, stamped into the wet soil during a massacre, blocked any potential prey—but the spider, silent and patient, waited nonetheless alive in its ragged web.

Creon and Antheia spoke of “the Guardian” as if the centipede were as old as they were; but also as if it were alone. A single creature could be killed, but not, Cormac judged from his own experience, by weapons in the hands of two pirates and the surviving Atlanteans.

Something had to be done. The Greeks, like bad husbandmen, had cropped the fittest of their herd of servants for millennia so that now only stunted rejects remained. Forced by circumstances of their own creation, Creon and his daughter had turned their powers beyond the boundaries of the world in which they were trapped, snatching folk out of the sea.

Irishmen, Saxons, the leaders of a band of Danish pirates.

“Speaking for myself . . .” Wulfhere said, watching the Gael sidelong, waiting for cues on a visage which for the moment was as quiet as cast bronze, “. . . I just want to get out of this place.”

“That was all I wanted before,” Cormac whispered. “Now—I still want to leave. But first we’ll put an end to the folk who brought us here, not so, my friend?”

He looked at Wulfhere and smiled. It was a terrible expression.

The Dane shrugged his mighty shoulders and smiled back. “If you want it so much, why not?” he said. “I’ve killed people for less.” Wulfhere laughed, the audible equivalent of the Gael’s visage. “I’ve killed people to test the edge of a new sword!”

The reivers clasped their right arms; hand to elbow, wrist to wrist. They both laughed. In a moment, the distant elephant trumpeted again in frightened surmise.

“This is madness!” Loughra cried in sudden fury as she watched the reivers’ preparations. “You’ll die for no reason!”

Her words echoed unconsciously those of Creon when he realized Cormac was determined to follow the Dane’s captors into the tunnels. The humor of the thought was no more than the quiver of butterfly wings around the grim monolith of Cormac’s concentration, but it was present to that extent.

Wulfhere checked the balance of the spear which had been Aslief’s. Spears weren’t the Dane’s weapon of choice, but neither was the centipede a normal opponent.

“A man can die but once,” he said without concern. “And besides, Othinn loves brave men.”

“We won’t help you with this!” Loughra said. “If you stayed here with us—perhaps the monster’s spell against children won’t work on you and, and . . .”

“No one asked you for help,” Cormac said. He ignored the remainder of the girl’s—the woman’s—statement. The first female he’d gotten involved with on Atlantis had nearly brought his death. He wasn’t sure that Loughra was a safer bet than Antheia had been; and anyway, he had other business.

The Gael braced his heels against the ground and tugged with all his strength at the cords of bull sinew which anchored the rope ladder to three separate trees. Aslief had constructed the ladder to accept his weight and that of the entire Atlantean raiding party climbing down behind him, but Cormac believed in being doubly sure when that was possible.

“It would make a fine saga, would it not?” Wulfhere commented. “How the two of us went into the dragon’s cave and fought him?”

Wulfhere eyed his axe critically. He buffed the steel on his trouser leg. He’d worked on the edge with an oilstone for an hour, though he hadn’t used the weapon since a raid in the Orkneys nearly a month earlier. Creon’s snare of blue light had caught the Dane with no target for his steel and fury.

“Of course,” he added, “it isn’t really a dragon. And there won’t be anyone left to write the saga. But it would be a fine one.”

“We aren’t going to fight anything if we’re lucky,” Cormac muttered. “Down and back, that’s all.”

He looked at the ladder and their equipment, then to his hulking friend. “The gear’s ready. Are you?”

“To
not
fight?” Wulfhere said. “But whatever you say, little man. You understand more of this business than I do.”

Cormac kicked the ladder into the opening. Bamboo battens stiffened the rungs, though cross-ropes would provide support even if a rung cracked under the reivers’ weight. The hollow wood clattered now.

Cormac dropped hand over hand into the glowing cavern.

Cormac’s boots hit the pile of rubble. The vast cavity was filled as before by an echoing sigh. It would fade to the impression of silence in a few moments, deadening the way the sound of surf on a rocky strand did. That was dangerous, because the background the mind taught itself to discount was still loud enough to conceal the approach of an enemy.

Conceal the approach of the Guardian.

Cormac pivoted his head as he jumped clear. Wulfhere crashed to the ground with an angry grunt. The Dane’s axe was jagged lightning in a battle, but climbing wasn’t a skill on which the big man prided himself.

“What now?” he demanded, checking around him as the Gael had done. “You’re not planning to fight, but the one with the legs may have his own ideas.”