The Guardian’s arm came around in a blur. Cormac’s shield caught the sword-edge and his arm turned to let the sword slide on, thus allowing the attacker’s momentum to continue-while the Gael moved rightward and drove his blade forward. The impact of sword on shield was tremendous, a jolting surprise to mac Art’s arm and mind, as was the fact that the other’s bronze-faced buckler moved so rapidly. Yet it did not quite catch his rushing thrust; rather than plunging as he’d intended into an armoured side, Cormac’s blade screamed through iron links and completely transpierced his foe’s shield-arm, near the shoulder.
Cormac yanked his blade forth. It was well for him that he did not assume the fray to be over then, but remained mindful of the other’s long brand and his shield.
He had already seen; no blood marked the blade of mac Art.
Nor did his opponent seem to take note of his wound; he backswung and Cormac had to skip while thrusting back his shield to avoid the prodigiously powerful slash at his neck. Again the iron sword crashed on the Gael’s shield with a sound to torture the head, eardrums, and again the terrific impact shook his arm and rattled the teeth in his head.
He moved two rushing paces on, for a few snatched moments to relieve his shield-arm… and to try to hurl from his brain the numbing influence of shock.
Again he looked at the blade of his sword; he could not believe what he had seen-or rather not seen. It was true. The steel shone bloodlessly. Nor did any so much as ooze from his ironclad foe’s arm, which should have been pouring scarlet, if not spurting with his heartbeats.
Still without so much as a grunt or a curse, he who had been set to prevent the queen’s rescue struck again.
This slash came high, and Cormac at the last instant chose not to meet it with his buckler. Nor did he counterattack with his usual thrust; he ducked low and chopped deeply into the Guardian’s left thigh.
That titan in iron chain staggered-and back came his arm, in a hardly interrupted backswing.
This time Cormac dived away, and again he saw with hair-raising incomprehension that his blade was unblooded. His antagonist swung to follow; again he staggered a little on a leg that nevertheless held him erect-and bled, not.
Mac Art did not wait but struck hard, side-armed and with all his strength. The Guardian’s shield dropped swiftly into line so that Cormac’s blade chopped half through it. The wood held. The iron man was cleaving; Cormac lunged desperately forward to be within that sweep-and to crash his buckler into his foeman. Into the junction of arm and torso it smashed, so that iron shield-rim slammed both chest and arm and the boss centered between them drove into the hollow just above the silent attacker’s armpit.
The Guardian’s slashing glaive struck naught but air though his mailed arm rapped Cormac’s back. The Gael bore on, to hurl backward a foe who should have been down and half bled.
The Danan staggered back with a harsh jangle of overlapping iron scales that covered him from nose to toes and fingers. His left thigh, shorn half through, gave. He began to topple. Bracing himself, Cormac jerked his sword arm with a rapid up and down movement. With a screech of steel on wood and bronze, the blade came free. Panting, Cormac watched his silent foe crash backward to the floor.
Under such circumstances a man either yielded or died. Cormac stepped swiftly forward.
“Yield ye! Drop the sword or it’s no hand I’ll be leaving ye to wield it again against a friend of your queen!”
A mailed leg and booted foot kicked at him. Cormac had been right. The Guardian was stupid, without sense in him to leave off when he was defeated. Up rushed a mailed fist to drive Danan sword at Cormac mac Art in a vicious slash.
Though surprised, Cormac was not astounded; he had been prepared to make movements in response to such insanity. He backpaced two swift steps, tarried but an instant poised on the balls of both feet, while he watched the big iron sword swish. It swept by in a blurred semicircle of dark blue-grey before his body. The strength of its wielding carried it on; Cormac rocked himself forward again, knees bending deeply.
He carried out his threat. His slash sent his fallen opponent’s sword flying. Its hilt was still grasped in mailed fist.
And the Danan’s hard-swung shield slammed into Cormac’s hip as though the Guardian had sustained no terrible wound to his upper arm.
Cormac was swept violently aside; had the rim rather than cloven face of that six-sided buckler struck him so, bone would have cracked. Nor had Cormac mac Art ever known a man who fought ever again after sustaining a cracked hip. In pain he ran to remain vertical, and slammed into the wall. That scraping clang rose simultaneous with the clatter across the room; sword in mailed, severed hand had rebounded from the opposite wall to ring on the floor. Cormac too rebounded, gritting his teeth against the pain in his right hip.
Jerking his head and willing himself to ignore pain and dark incomprehension, Cormac swung about to renew assault on a foe seemingly impervious to wounds.
He was in the act of striking still again at the armour-covered figure stretched on the floor when he saw that which jolted his brain and made him shiver. From the stump of his severed wrist, the Guardian poured forth no blood.
“Blood of the Gods,” Cormac snarled, with no thought on him for the singular inappropriateness of his favourite oath.
His brain staggering, the Gael aborted his ruined sword stroke. Sudden intense heat prickled over his body and sweat seemed to leap from every pore. In that instant he went pure professional, for so he’d been and was still, though in the paid employ of none. His brain moved to another level; became icy cold; functioned at high speed.
“Dithorba! In and pick up his sword-cut free your queen!”
Already his foe had taken advantage of Cormac’s brief moments of confusion to thrust himself to his feet, using both his shield-hand and his right stump to lever up. The hexagon of split wood and bronze was a golden blur as he swung it violently, rapidly back and forth. He advanced on Cormac the while, and the Gael was forced to back from that rushing wall that would hurl sword from his hand-or smash his arm.
To his right Dithorba appeared, near the fallen sword. Still the mailed hand clung to the hilt, and the queen’s adviser could not shake it loose. As dry old fingers worried at linked iron chain, Cormac backed from a shield swept back and forth so rapidly it was but a blurred wall.
Suddenly the helmeted head turned its armour-swathed face toward Dithorba.
The old man had given up attempts to free the sword of the severed hand, and was carrying the grisly linked objects toward the upright stone wheel astride which his queen was bound. Still keeping Cormac at bay with the rushing buckler, the Guardian started toward Dithorba.
Though the shield-created wall continued to daunt him, Cormac knew the invisible eyes of its wielder could not be on him.
He lunged forward, diving to the floor. He rolled onto his back and slashed upward. Solid steel crashed on iron chain with terrible force, and thin rings of iron yielded. Bearing hand and wrist and half of forearm, the hexagonal Danan shield flew across the chamber and crashed to the floor just at the feet of Dithorba Loingsech.
There was no blood.
And the Guardian moved on toward the wide-eyed Dithorba.
“A creature of Tarmur Roag’s!” Dithorba called out, in a voice that rose with both fear and the excitement of incredible discovery. “Cormac! There is no hand in this mail-glove!”
Cormac started to cry out for Dithorba to vanish; instead he took faster action. He rolled again and chopped into the leg of his uncanny foe, just at the point where mail disappeared into boot.
The bearer of that awful wound but twitched at the blow, meanwhile continuing the step. The unbleeding leg swung; came forward, down; it buckled on impact with the floor. The Guardian teetered, leaned, fell sidewise. Again he crashed to the floor.
He did not lie still. Still he fought. The woundless leg swept out and its mailed shank just grazed Dithorba’s lower leg. With a groan of pain, he staggered. Then
the armoured warrior began to rise.
“In Crom’s name-this is insanity!”
Cormac’s shout still rang when frustration swelled within him and his eyes went shiny. Rage took him. Lunging across the downed, faceless creature, the Gael brought a tremendous stroke rushing down. Steel blade slid again through iron rings and so hard had he struck that the sword rang off the floor, beneath the Guardian’s leg. Just below the hip, that leg leaped free of its moorings-bloodlessly.
The stump of the other leg slammed into Cormac’s ankle.
With a groan, he staggered and fell to one knee. His heart seemed to have descended into his ankle; it pounded there. With an animal viciousness twisting his features, the enraged Gael struck away the leg that had kicked him.
Laboriously, the legless trunk began pushing itself up on the stump of its right wrist; its shield meanwhile came streaking at mac Art. Aye, its shield, for he knew this could be no man, but some unnatural thing, a fell product of Tarmur Roag’s wizardry. The Danan buckler rushed at him; easily Cormac cut the supporting arm from beneath the thing. It fell back, armour and shield crashing.
A shudder rushed through Cormac mac Art. Without rising he chopped, chopped again. Armless now, the unbleeding trunk writhed. Cormac’s sword bit into the armoured midsection, smashed the chest. On the point then of chopping at the neck covered by shining metal camail, the seething, shaking Gael shortened his stroke. With fine precision, the last inch of his steel tore away the camail.
The veil of chain had covered nothing.
The helmet rested on nothing. There was no face, no head.
With horripilation a maddening writhing along his arms, Cormac knew that there were no arms and legs either; nothing. There was only an animated suit of armour, huge by Danan standards, that had come nigh to putting the blindness of death on him.
He rose shakily, staring down at what had been his foe; the trunk of an armour coat, surrounded by lopped-off pieces of man that had come from no man; pieces of armour in the shapes of human limbs.
After a long moment he gave his head a swift hard jerk. Blinking, he turned to the nude young woman bound astride what appeared to be a millstone. He sheathed his glaive, which was unblooded despite all its awful work. Drawing his dagger, he swiftly freed Riora. She sagged forward. Trying to hold her away from the hard cold steel of his armour, he caught her and eased her from the wheel of her torture.
The Queen of Moytura clung, trembling as she stared down at the trunk protion of the thing that had been set to guard her against rescue.
Legless, armless, headless, empty… the armour continued to twitch and writhe.
Chapter Thirteen:
The Queen of Moytura
Riora of Moytura, queen, was slim as a willow tree and yet with soft and rather voluptuous womanly turnings to her form. White was her skin, almost transparent, and little more colour tinged the hair that fell to the dimples above her backside. Though she was slim and pale and short like all her people, she had no look of frailty about her. Her quivers were understandable, as she held on to the big stranger to her land, who had dared disobey her and had as a result destroyed her ghastly guardian and set her free. Though he was armoured and aware that his carapace of steel rings could tear and bruise her skin with even his slightest movements, Cormac could not think of her as fragile. He stood, though, rather stiffly, unable to think of aught but her nakedness and the harshness and danger to her of his armour.
“You are brave,” she murmured. “You disobeyed me and came into this horrid cell, with no idea of what you might be facing.”
Cormac could think of nothing to say. Unaccustomed words came; good words. He spoke them.
“I had seen you,” he muttered, with gruff galantry. He would tell her later of the urgency on him for her freedom. At present she was overdue for the kindness of flattery.
“He… it hurt you, I saw it. You fought on. You destroyed it.” She arched her back to look up into his face. “Your brows… your black hair… so fascinating! Am I-are we so, to you, Cormac of the Gaels?”
“Aye.” He gazed down into her wan, angular face and saw that she was both pretty and interested in him as more than saviour and curiosity among her pale people. It came on him that there was no more colour in Riora’s eyes than in an inch of water held in two cupped palms.
“L-Lady Queen…”
It was Dithorba’s voice; neither of them glanced his way.
“Dithorba has a robe for you, Queen of Moytura,” Cormac said.
“I have been… naked so long. It seems forever… Elatha… that foul spider has daily thrown me down on this floor and… used me.” She glanced down. “Aye, I am naked, and queen, and you are clad in iron that is cold and hard-and it grates.” She sighed. “And there are things to be done.” Again she looked up into his scarred face. Her hands pressed his arms, disregarding the chain that indented her skin. “The Queen of Moytura is indebted to you, Cormac mac Art na Gaedhel. Moytura is indebted to you. And… my name is indebted to you, Cormac mac Art na Gaedhel. Moytura is indebted to you. And… my name is Riora. I, Riora, am indebted to you, Cormac, and I thank you.”
While Cormac floundered for words, she released his arms and looked at the other man.
“Thank you, Dithorba,” she said, putting out an arm. “The robe, to make me more a queen and less a woman. Ah-and it’s mine, too!” She smiled, astonishing Cormac who would not have thought her capable, so soon after being released from a stern imprisonment that had been fraught with torture. “Ah, Dithorba, into the queen’s chamber to bring herself her very own robe! How can one trust a man with such abilities? Why-you could be in my very bedchamber at any time.”
Dithorba’s face was stricken. Had Cormac any doubts about the old man’s love for his young queen, they were dissipated now. Riora saw it too, and immediately her smile vanished. Taking the robe to hold against her, she reached forth with her other hand to squeeze her adviser’s bony shoulder.
“Only a jest, my friend. If not before, after this day Dithorba is first among all Moyturans!” Then she turned her head to look at Cormac over her shoulder and from under eyelashes that were more pale than any he’d ever seen. “First, of course… with Cormac mac Art of the Gaels, friend of Danu and Moytura-and Riora!”
While she turned away to don the robe, Cormac and Dithorba kept their eyes fixed as if by honourable pact on each other.
“Hump!” the queen’s voice came brightly. “Neither of you watching? Queen Riora is slipping!”
Both men looked at her with wan smiles.
The robe was a pale blue, that of the sky she had never seen, sewn with a complicatedly twisting design in silver thread, at bosom and down to the girdle, which Cormac now saw was of gold thread and jewelled as well. The silver pattern was repeated at the end of each three-quarter length sleeve and at the gown’s hem, which fell just past her ankles. Strangely, the Gael saw that clothed and with her body outlined and hinted at here and there, she was more fetching than had she been in her shameful nakedness. Now her stance was different, her shoulders back, and her eyes too had changed; the girlish woman had become a queen.
“You said that Elatha was being beaten, Cormac-and you told… the Guardian that he was no more. Which is the case?”
“Unless they’ve beaten him to death, Elatha lives, bound to his own toothy table.”
An expression of pleasure appeared on her face-and then her features stiffened. Suddenly her face was bereft of all warmth and much of its beauty. She moved forward, toward the doorway behind Cormac; he stepped aside. As the Queen of Moytura passed him, she deftly plucked his dagger from its sheath without interrupting her stride.
Aye, five feet one and not a spare ounce of flesh on her save that of womanhood, Riora Feachtnachis was regal.
Cormac looked at the wheel, glanced around at the walls, at the thing on the floor. He looked at Dithorba.
“It’s all of us ye must be taking from here, Dithorba, one by one. And we’d best start now,
for who knows what guards may come, or someone bearing food?”
As Dithorba nodded, both of them heard outside the dungeon’s main chamber the sound of respectful greetings to the queen. And Cormac, to whom her eyes and words had shown more than gratitude but greetings to the queen. And Cormac, to whom her eyes and words had shown more than gratitude but indeed the promise of more, the desire for more, thought that which would not have made happy the woman in her:
A crowned woman! A crowned woman!
Then he and Dithorba left that chamber of torture and preternatural horror. Just without the doorway and in the main dungeon again, they paused. Both men stared in silence; they watched while Queen Riora, with viciousness and obvious gusto, killed the bound Elatha. She used Cormac’s dagger, and she did not hurry her ugly work.
With Cormac’s Saxon knife dripping in her hand, she turned to see his frown. Around her stood her people, in silence that may have been shock or approval.
“You look disapproving, my champion,” Riora Feachtnachis said. “Would you have dealt differently with a monster who has tortured me and forced his body on me twice daily for a week?”
Cormac paced toward her, aware of the silent stares of her advisers, her handmaids, her Guard commander and the captain; the queen’s closest aids to brain and body.
“He deserved worse, lady Queen. But when it is necessary that I do death, it’s swiftly I deal it.”
For just a moment she stared, her face working. Then with one hand lifting her skirts, the queen ran to him in manner hardly regal. Clothed now and with her hands wiped, she was heedless of his armour; Riora hugged him.
“You are good, Cormac, trenfher,” she breathed, calling him “champion” once more. “Good, a good man. Moytura needs such, Cormac mac Art; Moytura needs you-Moytura’s queen needs you!”
Over her head Cormac noted the cold glare of Commander Balan. Uncomfortably he said, “We must depart this place, lady Queen. All are released; now Dithorba must transfer us to his quarters, where await your loyal Erris and my friend, Wulfhere.” He pondered; could she end Thulsa Doom’s existence now, though her fair head bore no crown?
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