The Undying Wizard
( Cormac Mac Art - 6 )
Andrew J. Offutt
Andrew J. Offutt
The Undying Wizard
Prologue
The enormous reptile lay in a cavern passage, eerily lit by some means surely preternatural; sorcerous, perhaps. Walls and ceiling glowed. The strange illumination was dim, pearly, hardly akin to that of torch or lamp, much less the sun-which could not pierce the cavern’s ceil of earth and rock beneath the man-made pile of masonry that capped the thick natural layer. The pale light emanated from the very walls of the world-old tunnel itself.
In this weird luminous emanation from a source not visible the great reptile lay, a green monster twisted as a vine on rocky soil.
Several times the length of a man the creature was, and nigh as thick. It lay motionless in a great lake of red-brown cruor. The blood had thickened and crusted over in coagulation, so that it shone as if glowing, reflecting the wall-light. The serpent was still. Its eyes, the colour of new flax and large as a man’s eyes, were filmed over.
Yet it gave off no stench, nor was it bloated. There was no sign of putrefaction. Nevertheless, the monster was dead. Its great twisted tree-trunk of a body bore the many wounds that had ended its life. It had been stabbed and hacked, sliced and chopped. No juices remained in that prodigious corpse; the number of wounds and its own volcanically violent death throes had seen to that.
It was fearsome, even in death. No ordinary man had brought red death upon this haunter of subterrene passageways.
In a somber cavern beneath the earth beneath a towering castle of extraordinary antiquity, the reptile that appeared to be the father of all snakes lay dead.
And… it moved.
Only the hint of a shudder was that movement-but no, it was a shimmer, giving but the weird illusion of motion. A Something stirred within the corpse. Some… thing was struggling to gain freedom from its prison of death.
In the whelming silence of a tomb, the air stirred about the great snout. Slowly, above the moribund shell of the reptile, a haze formed. It spread, lengthened, billowed only slightly, and rose. Tenuous, wavering creepers of mist shuddered on the stale air of the cavern. Luminous walls were clearly visible through the gossamer floating haze. It was blue-grey, that ever-shifting amorphous cloudlet; the colour of human death.
Yet about it there was nothing human.
For just a moment among the fleeting motes of time, the necrotic haze seemed to coalesce, as if attempting to form a shape: rounded at the top, pierced below by two holes, narrow and latticed below-a death’s head.
But that was gone in an instant, nor were there living eyes present to have seen.
The mist floated up, free of the serpentine corpse that had spawned it. It moved, and surely there was purpose in the flowing movement of that faint cloud of haze along the subterranean corridor.
The passage bent and twisted again and again, as though formed by a restless reptile-or by long-dead men who had sought to confuse and slow possible pursuit. For though the mist-thing moved away from it, the tunnel gave off a concealed passage in the centuries-old castle above.
The mist-thing drifted along above a dusty, ever-descending floor of packed earth. Around convoluted turnings and twistings writhed the wraithy haze, and it touched nothing but air, this form of life from death that trailed in eerie silence through the soundless channel beneath the earth.
Then it paused, writhing in air. It hovered above… another corpse.
The body was that of a man. Old he had been, aged enough to have died of natural causes. But there was visible evidence to the contrary. He who had been tall and unusually thin wore a cowled robe, dark as night. Cloth covered his reed-thin body from head to instep. He lay belly down, and in the center of the robe’s back a darker stain spread. Dried trails of it led over the fabric to the corridor’s floor of packed, dust-piled earth. The splotch and its coagulated runnels were a reddish brown, like old rust. The robed man had been stabbed from behind and had got his death thereby.
Grey and white, forming silver, were his beard and the hair that straggled limp as corn tassels from his head over his cheek. Grey too were his eyes, nearly white in the paleness. Though open, they saw nothing. Bony hands with fingers like claws had not even torn at the tunnel floor; he had been dead even as he fell. Open too was his mouth in a rictus that had been a gasp or cry.
The hovering mist lowered. Wraithy tendrils of transparent blue-grey touched the corpse, as though the amorphous haze-thing was putting forth exploratory pseudopods.
One of them entered the open mouth of the dead man.
Swiftly then, like smoke somehow filtering into a bottle, the haze entered the corpse.
Then all was quiet and still, and none was there to measure the passage of time. Minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks or months… they were as nothing to the dead-and to the mist-thing.
The seagreen serpent lay dead, and it began to rot. Well away along the twisting corridor beneath the earth, the robed man lay dead. And the mist had vanished, as silently and hazily as it had appeared, from one corpse and into another.
The body of the robed man did not swell, or rot.
Then, in that silence and motionlessness of death, there was movement.
It was fingers that twitched; the fingers of the right hand of the dead man.
They curled, clawing inward and leaving trails in the dust of the ancient cavern. Hardly more than bone, these fingers straightened again. And curled once more.
A ripple flowed through night-dark fabric as the dead man’s left leg moved, only a twitch like the rigour after death-but he had been dead far too long for that.
Both arms bent. Both bone-lean hands moved back toward the body. They planted themselves, palms down, at the shoulders. The head moved. Lank silver hair stirred. The hands pressed down. Buskin-shod feet scraped.
The corpse pushed itself up from the dusty floor.
On its feet, the dead man who was not dead wavered, tottered on long-still legs. A hand swung out to slap the earthen wall, as a brace for a body that had long lain prone. A long moaning sound issued from the thin slash of a mouth. All through the tall form, a great shudder ran. Then, as though just remembering, the mouth closed.
The head turned on its thin neck with another stirring of shoulder-length hair like lifeless silver thread. One hand, the right, rose before the face. It turned there, like a specimen the dead eyes studied, while the robe’s dolmen sleeve slid down. Revealed was a wrist that was only skin drawn over bone like hide tedded for its tanning.
The skin was not tan, but nearly white, like new linen.
The hand slapped the chest, moved over the face. It traced out the high forehead, the deep crag-surmounted sockets of the pale, pale eyes, that thin nose with its porcelain-like nostrils, the gaunt cheeks, the mouth that was little more than a horizontal gash between mustache and ashy beard.
The resurrected corpse, alone beneath the earth… spoke.
“Thin, O Great Serpent, this body-merely skin over bone like the fine parchment of Vanara stretched over stone to dry!” The voice that issued from the corpse was soft, almost a whisper. “A lean body, far from young. A priest, a seer, a mage-a Druid, it is called. From a land called Norge, where the ice remains long and snow falls and lies ever atop the craggy peaks, and wind howls cold to cut like a chariot-wheel’s scythe.”
Up leaped robe-swathed arms, to raise clenched fists on high.
“ALIVE! Alive and in the form of a man once more, with hands, aye and feet to walk the earth again! Cutha Atheldane. That was the name of the life-force that quickened this body before mine animated it anew.”
The Undead man laughed aloud and turn
ed quite around in its jubilation.
“ALIVE! One is grateful for having been snatched from eternal exile in that other dimension that would have been like mortal death, from the life-sucking sword. Yet… to have lain here, waiting, handless and voiceless in the body of a son of the Great Serpent… for eighteen thousand years! Ah!”
Again he turned about, he who had been Cutha Atheldane, Druid of Norway and was now… someone else, some Thing else. His movements were quick and more sure now, animated by one of the strongest life-forces that had ever existed, one that had lived and trod the earth before Atlantis rose from the deeps, let alone sank.
“Cutha Atheldane am I, then!” And he laughed. Exultant, was the new Cutha Atheldane. He moved, he cried out his joy.
But he did not breathe.
“One hundred eighty centuries! Ah, Chaos that existed before all and will reign again, a hundred and eighty times a hundred years! But, a moment in eternity, aye-but what an eternity to have been held here by both stone and spell… and in a body with neither voice nor hands! And liberated…”
Cutha Atheldane, who was not Cutha Atheldane, broke off in a short laugh that would have raised the hackles of a dog and sent birds aflying.
“Ah I knew him, I recognized him at once, ere even he came floundering like a barbarian puppet down into my prison… to release me by slaying the serpent’s body that incarcerated me! I know ye for who ye were, not who ye are now! In any incarnation would I know thee, ancient enemy, barbarian king on a throne of fiery gems-a throne you usurped after slaying the noble lord who sat it!”
The voice trailed off like whispering leaves when the wind dies. When it commenced anew it was much lower, quiet now, and full of menace and deadly purpose.
“None there are to believe how long I have lived, or how long I have waited, while uncounted millions of little mortal men have strutted the earth, and bred like the pigs they are, and slew and slew, and so much of the Old Knowledge was lost that what remains-in the hands of these ‘Druids’-is but the ghost of the shadow of the shadow of what I know! But I have LIVED, I have remained on this earth in this dimension, whilst others died and returned scores of times. And now… at last I will have my vengeance, after a hundred and eighty centuries.”
The risen dead man looked about, ruminating. “First I must be invited to leave this isle, for still I am bound here by the old spell. But… I shall come to thee, you who men know now as Cormac mac Art of Connacht in Eirrin! I… will… have… my… VENGEANCE!”
And as the tall and cadaverous figure in the night-dark robe hurled aloft both arms amid a flapping of full tapering sleeves, the eyes and lips of his visage seemed to waver and vanish, to be replaced for an instant by a ghastly, grinning, chalk-white skull!
The most powerful and dedicatedly evil sorcerer in the world’s history was loose again on the face of the earth.
Chapter One:
Eight-and-twenty Picts
Sped by strong hands at its ten banks of oars, the hide-covered ship-or long boat-clove the water as though with good wind behind. Yet its blue sail was furled, for no air stirred the sea that basked so lazily in the sun betwixt Britain and Eirrin. Only where the ship passed was the blue-green water disturbed; it foamed cloud-white along the little ship and for a short distance in its wake.
The men at the oars had set aside their helmets, some of which sprouted horns, while one was decorated with feathers and still another trailed a horsehair plume after the Roman fashion. Long was the hair of these men, plaited or caught back by a thong, and there was but one among the crew of that lone vessel whose locks were more dark than the colour of new copper. Some of the oarsmen were daubed on face and arms with blue paint or dye. Others wore no such paint, though the face of one huge-armed fellow was etched with a scar so fierce it might have been mistaken for a red dye, only slightly faded.
Three men were aboard who rowed not.
One stood well forward; another manned the tiller. Wargirt they both were, and brawny.
He at the prow wore no helm, but he had chosen to crown his dark yellow hair with a cap made of catskins. From that barred cap sprouted a little plume of seven eagle feathers. Bronze were the bracers on his arms, one blade-etched from some past time when it had saved his shield-hand. His tunic was blue; over it he wore an excellent leathern jerkin that covered him from collarbones to his thighs just below his genitals. The cordwain belt slung at his hips supported a dagger on either side. He wore no sword. This man’s weapon, with a broad thong forming a loop where it had been stoutly wet-tied in a groove ringing the haft, was an ax. Its head was invisible, covered with an oiled cowhide bag against the salt spray.
The ax-man’s feet and ankles were laced into what were unmistakably caligulae, the short boots of the Roman legionaries who had for so long ruled his land… and protected it from those many who now came from oversea to carve it up among themselves; Saxons and Angles, Jutes and Frisians, Irish and Danes; aye, and from the north over the old wall, Picts and the Scoti of Alba that the Romans had called Caledonia.
The blond ax-man at the prow looked asea.
The man at the stern wore a sword, long at his left hip and down his leg. Though he stood the deck of a hide-covered longboat and with his light auburn hair plaited behind each ear to fall down his back, the sword had surely belonged to a darker man more at home astride a horse; it was a spatha, a Roman cavalryman’s sword. No adornment relieved his helmet, which was composed of four bands of dull grey metal laid onto a soft leathern caul. He too wore a jerkin of boiled leather, over a tunic of grey wool. The score or more steel rings fixed to the front of that plain lorica were as much reinforcing protection as decoration. This man’s full drooping mustachioes contained more bronze-red than his braids.
Oars creaked and thumped. Men grunted; water gurgled and swished, and the twenty-oared boat seemed to scud on the very surface of the sea as it swept forward, with unusual smoothness. Its heading was southerly.
The man at the bow was gazing southwestward, ahead and to starboard. Gazing that way as well were the auburn-haired man at the tiller and the third of those who did not row.
The blond ax-man at the prow moved his left arm out from his side, almost stiffly. It was fisted but for the forefinger, which pointed. With a nod, though no eyes were turned his way, the man at the stern changed the pressure of his tanned hands on the tiller. The ship, which was little more than fifty feet in length, did not veer, but angled to port; eastward, on its southerly bearing.
The blond at the bow glanced back. His nose had once been broken and was askew, nor did he quite close his mouth, ever.
“Irish,” he grunted, just loud enough to be heard by three-and-twenty men.
An oarsman to port asked, “Reavers?”
“I think not. Cynwas?”
“I think not,” the steersman said, just as quietly. “They’d be fighting else, Bedwyr, not suffering that… harassment.”
“Leaguered about by wolves,” Bedwyr the blond ax-man said, and there was amusement in his voice. “They’ll not see this sun set, though it’s soon crimson they’ll see!”
“Wolves?” This from another oar-plier, a man with a break in his beard from an old slash of sword or knife; surely no ax could have sliced him so without wrecking his jaw.
Bedwyr said, “Aye.”
“Picts,” Cynwas said from the stern.
“This far south? What be Picts doing this far south of their damned heather?”
“Or this far east,” Bedwyr said. “Mayhap they be Picts from far side Hibernia.”
Silent had been the third man who was not rowing, and him nigh-naked. Now he spoke.
“Eirrin, ye corn-headed ass. Eirrin! Ye talk like a Roman… miss ye your masters so much, ye Briton molester of ewes?”
The blond at the prow turned to stare at the speaker. He was a great burly giant of a man with a red mane and full bushy beard.
“Ye talk foolishly free for a man bound to a ship’s mast, Dane! Be ye so anxious
to be oped up for the sun to bake your drunkard’s gizzard?”
The bound man grinned. He wore only a dirty tunic that had been red before its dyes succumbed to wear and sun and salt water and sweat. Now, but for the soil, it was lighter in colour than his full beard.
“It were better than having to list to your stupidity, Briton.”
Bedwyr of Britain cheated his captive, who was bound so that he must remain standing and stare straight ahead, like a strange bow ornament moved back amidships. The blond Briton only grinned, and turned away.
“Row. An they see us, they all be far too busy-and about to be busier still-to trouble us. Nor need we have worry of them.”
The oarsmen rowed. The ship of Britons-and captive Dane-swept on to the south and east, well east of the Eirrinish craft “leaguered about by wolves.”
Aboard that beleaguered ship from the land of Eirrin, caught by the same calm and now by the swift boats of its harriers, a man watched the vessel from Britain. A tall, rangily built man he was, deep-chested and manifestly strong, his eyes deeply planted and slitted, grey as steel or ice. The distance was too great for faces to be seen; had there been aught of the crew of the other craft he knew, he’d not have recognized him. The hair of the ax-man at the prow seemed sunwhite from this vantage.
“They go on.”
The words came from the warrior beside the tall and rangy man; this one was both short and slight, and wearing a bronze-studded leathern cap that covered brow and cheeks, ears and nape.
“Aye. Ours be no business of theirs. It’s a broad sea, and it bears up many peoples. Those be neither Gaul nor Pict, and if it’s Celts they are-not likely-it’s not from Eirrin but Britain they sail.”
“Britain!” called up one of the men at the oars. “The Britons be no seafarers!”
“Some fare asea.”
The small beardless warrior spoke nervously: “Could… might their destination be the same as ours?”
“No no, dairlin’ girl,” the tall man said. He too was beardless, his narrow-slitted eyes giving him a peculiarly sinister aspect. Though he was of Eirrin, his squarecut hair was black as the shaggy mops of the men in their hideboats round about them. He wore neither beard nor jewellery.
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