Night & Demons (30 page)

Antheia thrust her torch into a sconce shaped like an open-mouthed dragon. The room’s other furnishings consisted of a bronze bench and number of metalwork chests against the walls. A circular bed was visible through the open doorway to an inner room.

Cormac reached for the woman. She eeled through his arms, caught his right hand and pressed it to her breast, and was out of reach again before he could turn the touch into a grip.

“Take that nasty armor off,” Antheia commanded lightly as she opened one of the chests. The container was almost as tall as she was, but it was no more than a foot through or across.

“It won’t get in the way,” Cormac rumbled thickly. “The first time, at any rate.”

He started for the woman. She giggled. Trails of blue light, wavering like threads being spun into a skein, lifted from the top of the device as she fingered it.

“See?” Antheia said. “Ancient magic, as I told you. Touch it—it feels good.”

The light wobbled slowly from the chest and began to extend vaguely in the direction of Cormac and the door.

“Turn that off,” Cormac said.

He was rapidly becoming sober again. His shoulders hit stone, startling him to the edge of white rage before he realized that he’d backed against the wall. He hadn’t thought he’d moved so far away . . .

Silvery horns a few inches long rotated on the top of the chest, emitting blue light the way a spider’s spinnerets ooze silk. Antheia’s fingers danced on a metal pad behind the horns. Her eyes were on Cormac rather than the controls she manipulated. The skein of blue continued to expand, but it no longer snuffled toward the Gael.

“Silly, it’s harmless,” the woman laughed. “Watch me.”

There was commotion down the hall, metal banging on stone. A bench had overturned.

“Wulfhere?” Cormac called. His right hand hovered near the pommel of his sword. Embarrassment prevented him from drawing the weapon. He didn’t have a good reason for being so afraid.

Antheia, one slim hand still on the controls of the device, stepped fully into the blue light. The pattern flowed past and around her like water pouring over a glass statue. The jewel on her shoulder blazed with redoubled fury, taking no color from the skein through which it glared.

A sheen, vaguely purple and as thin as isinglass, lay on the woman’s skin and garments. The hue tinged both the portion within the blue light, and her legs from the thighs down which were below the skein.

“See?” Antheia said. “Harmless.”

Her voice bubbled as though she were speaking from underwater. She held her free hand out to Cormac enticingly. The blue threads lurched in his direction again.

“Stop—” Cormac shouted. His sword sang from its scabbard. “—that, or—”

The suite’s flimsy door burst inward. A brown-skinned man with the muscular body of an athlete lunged through the opening. He wore a beaded breechclout, a headband, and a torque of copper strips. His stone-headed axe was already swinging down in a mighty cast as the door flew out of his way.

Cormac stabbed the warrior sideways through the rib cage. The fellow didn’t realize the Gael was present until the sword sliced his lungs and took the two lower chambers off his heart. The savage tried to cry out, but his surprise drowned in a spray of blood from his mouth and nostrils.

There were ten or a dozen warriors in the corridor behind the first victim, pressing forward and carrying the corpse with them as Cormac tried to clear his sword. Steel shrieked against bone as he dragged the blade back.

The skein of blue light enveloped Antheia wholly. Her visage was harsh and desperate. The first savage’s axe hung at the edge of the blue cocoon. The weapon sank slowly toward the floor, as if it had fallen into a vat of cold treacle.

Cormac fumbled with his left hand, trying to find the buckler which ought to hang behind his hip. The shield was in the dining room where he’d left it.

A spear slammed Cormac full in the chest. His mail was of double-wound links riveted for strength. It held, but the blow rocked him bruisingly. His attackers might be the same race as the Atlantean servants, but there was nothing physically degenerate about them.

Cormac jumped back, finally freeing his weapon. He swung clumsily but with desperate speed to block the blade of a savage slashing at his face. The other sword was bronze, cast in the attractive curves of a poplar leaf. Cormac’s steel—a long Roman cavalry weapon, forged in Bilbao—sheared tile bronze where it narrowed near the grip, then clopped into the savage’s unprotected skull.

The man went down like a toppling statue. His headband fluttered behind him. Its severed ends were bloody.

The spearman thrust for Cormac again. This time the Gael was ready for him. The spearshaft was wrist-thick cornelwood, too sturdy to sever confidently with a swordblade. Cormac instead used the shaft itself as a chopping block to lop off the savage’s leading hand. The spearpoint wavered aside without the left hand to guide it. Cormac back-slashed through the savage’s throat, choking his scream into a gurgle.

Cormac drew the dagger from his belt and waded into his opponents at close quarters. These Atlantean savages were sturdy men, but they were naked and none of them was near the Gael’s size.

The blade of the Spanish dagger was five fingers broad at the hilt. Cormac ripped the edge up through cartilage where ribs joined the breastbone. He used the dying victim as a shield while his sword struck right and left above the limp shoulders. Two more savages fell, hacked so fiercely that Cormac’s steel split their collarbones and severed the great blood vessels rising from the heart.

A bronze warhammer smashed into Cormac’s side. The Atlantean was squat and powerful. He’d swung the weapon with both arms and the full strength of his body. Despite the mail and its quilted leather backing, the impact shot dazzling pain through Cormac’s ribs. It numbed his side for an instant.

The savage had been pulled off balance by his own blow. He stumbled forward as he tried to follow up the shocking impact. Before he could recover, the Gael’s dagger took him at the base of the jaw, thrusting upward like a gaff through the gills of a struggling trout. The body went into spastic convulsions as Cormac flung it aside.

The surviving savages broke and ran. Metal clanged as they tripped on fallen equipment. Some of them flung weapons away to speed their flight.

Cormac staggered after them. He ignored Antheia; she remained in her wrap of clinging light. The stone axe had finally reached the floor. A spear, caught in the same ambiance, was sinking slowly after the axe.

There was a stitch in Cormac’s side from the hammerblow, and pain blurred his vision every time his right heel hit the floor. The tip of the Gael’s sword ripped red sparks along the stones at eye height; weakness from the injury had caused him to drift closer to the wall than he had understood. He cursed and brought his mind back in focus by an effort of will.

If the tip of a broken rib had pierced his lung, he would know it by now from the bloody froth he’d be exhaling.
That
hadn’t happened, and anything else was mere pain.

Pain was nothing at all when Wulfhere was at risk and there were enemies to kill.

The servants had disappeared. The last of the attacking savages darted into the dining room. The Gael followed, thrusting the fleeing man through the small of the back.

The dining room was chaos. Two rushlights remained, but most of the illumination now came from a skein of glowing threads like those which had wavered toward Cormac in the moments before the savages attacked.

Creon stood within a ball of blue light emanating from another vertical chest. Instead of manipulating the control panel, the Greek gestured. Pseudopods of fibrous light extended in the directions he stretched his arms. The threads gripped the throats of two savages, lifting their bodies off the floor as it throttled them.

More than a score of other savages crowded the room, stabbing and hacking at the envelope of light. A number of the attackers were women. An age-frail man held out a wand that could, in the doubtful illumination, have been either crystal or metal. Instead of a cloth headband, he wore a cap of spiral mesh formed from wires of gold, silver, and their alloy electrum.

A hexagonal block had been displaced from the flooring. As Cormac entered the room, he saw Wulfhere’s bound legs disappearing into the hole beneath where the slab had been.

Cormac hit the savages as a scythe does a wheatfield. There was no time for finesse: numbers would bear him down if his foes had an instant to organize against the fresh danger. The Roman sword whirled in wide arcs. When a savage ducked close, Cormac disemboweled him with a hooking cut of the dagger.

A sword’s point is the trained killer’s tool. The edge is spectacular but far less lethal in its effects. Cormac knew that well, but at this juncture he slashed nonetheless instead of thrusting deep for each opponent’s life.

A well-placed thrust lets a man’s life out in a minute or so when his heart has pumped the blood vessels empty. During that minute, the victim is as deadly an opponent as before he got his death wound.

What Cormac required to survive this maelstrom was terror and disablement. An eight-inch gouge along a rib cage spread like the jaws of Hell when tensioning muscles drew the edges of the skin apart. The wound wasn’t as dangerous as a heart thrust, but the shock of it stunned the victim and terrified his friends.

A hand severed at the wrist could no longer hold an axe. A head wound need not penetrate the skull to bludgeon the victim into dazed helplessness.

The chieftain with the wand shouted an order. Surviving savages scrambled down the hole in the flooring. Cormac’s attack had been so sudden and overwhelming that there was no real attempt to withstand him. Warriors, some of them women, flung up weapons for self-protection, but in the dim-lit chaos they didn’t realize their assailant was alone and therefore vulnerable.

Cormac was in a killing rage. He didn’t care if his foes ran or stood. The Gael sheared the spine of a fleeing savage, then swung at the chieftain who raised the wand against him.

The tip of the wand spun tendrils of blue fire like those emanating from the Greeks’ devices. Light caught the blade, slowed it, and finally froze the sword in mid-air.

“May the pigs eat your flesh!” Cormac screamed as he pressed close and stabbed upward with his dagger.

The chieftain dodged back. More tendrils whirled from the wand tip and wrapped the Gael’s left wrist. Their touch was cold as a drowned corpse.

Behind the chieftain, the last of his whole-bodied followers dived into the hole. The savage tugged on the hexagon he and his fellows had displaced to launch their attack. The stone toppled into the hole sideways and stuck, wedged by its great weight against the sides of the cavity.

Crippled victims of the Gael’s attack screamed and groped on the floor, blind from head wounds and fear. Creon continued to hold the pair his device had captured. The Greek’s face looked as strained as that of a man being crucified.

Cormac forced his body toward the chieftain. His sword and left hand were held as firmly as if gyved to the living rock. A separate tendril flicked down to wrap his right wrist lest he drop the sword and strike his opponent with his clenched fist.

Antheia entered the room, carrying a sword from one of the savages. A handful of the stunted servants followed her.

“Father!” she cried. She had aged decades since Cormac last saw her.

The Atlantean chieftain spun away. Blue fibers released Cormac from their grip. The chieftain hurled his wand toward the hole. It struck the skewed block and clattered down to the savages below.

The chieftain was toppling forward. Cormac’s sword tore deeply through his back and spine, but the Roman steel was slicing a man already dead.

The volume of light encircling Creon sucked inward with the abruptness of a bubble bursting. The Greek staggered, scarcely able to keep his feet when the strain of his activity was released.

“They got through the tunnels,” he gasped to his daughter. “Despite the Guardian. They had a wand of power.”

Creon looked . . . old,
ancient.
Cormac was reminded of the withered features of the chieftain as the two of them struggled breast to breast.

The Gael stripped the breechclout from a corpse. The garment was made of leather, sliced thin and sueded. Clamshells individually smaller than a fingernail were stitched hollow-side out in a pattern, alternating blue nacre with yellow.

Cormac wiped his sword, then his dagger, with the breechclout. He inhaled in racking gasps. He had to bring his quivering muscles and his breathing under control before he attempted the next stage of what was necessary.

The room’s walls and ceiling were splotched with traceries of blood slung from the Gael’s swordpoint. Most of a man’s wadded scalp stuck over the lintel. The floor looked flat, but thousands of years of footsteps had worn troughs in the stone. Blood pooled there, as much as an inch deep.

“A wand of power?” Antheia repeated. “After so long? That’s impossible!”

“No, but the drain is terrible,” Creon replied. “Look, this is the one who was using it.”

He touched the corpse of the chieftain with the toe of his sandal. The forearm of the corpse crumbled. The flesh was as dry and flaky as if it had baked for a year in desert sunlight.

“Where,” said Cormac, “is Wulfhere?”

His chest still pumped vast amounts of air through his open mouth, but his breathing had settled into a regular pattern instead of the desperation of a man saved from drowning. Cormac didn’t have his full strength back, but the spasms that had followed his adrenaline-fueled exertions had passed.

He wasn’t in perfect condition; but life wasn’t perfect, and the present situation was
far
less than perfect. His body would serve.

The Greeks stared at him.

“The Atlanteans took your friend with them,” Creon said. “Tribesmen from the ring, attacking through the tunnels beneath the moat. I can’t imagine what they wanted with him. They can’t have known anyone was present but Antheia and I.”