The Celtic Mirror

by Louis Phillippi

  The sailor’s face was yet masked by the uncertain light, but the Governor-General thought he discerned a look of distaste and shame cross the foreigner’s handsome features. Nonetheless, the stranger that had shared Thorkell’s bed for a week, groaned with pleasure to the movements of the Mercian’s long fingers.

  Thorkell again kneaded Kettelmann’s warm loin, engaged more in assuring the sailor’s attention than his arousal.

  “What are you doing, Aethelric?” the young bull asked, answering Thorkell’s touch with one of his own, hesitant at first, and stronger as Thorkell began to move with greater determination.

  Thorkell’s head was sundered between the promise of pleasure and the certainty of agony. The one he needed as desperately as he needed air to breathe. The other he wanted to avoid if he was to draw breath much longer. He withdrew his hand from Kettelmann’s shaft.

  “Liebchen,” he said like a coy Froulein,” go and wake Kronin for me. Tell him to make me another headache potion. Have him make it double the strength he mixed last time, Love.”

  The effort in speaking drained Thorkell, and he knew that he was slurring his words as his brain slowly turned into mush.

  Obedient, the handsome foreigner swung his legs over the edge of the high oak bed.

  “I hope I don’t put my foot again into your new goddamn lizard’s throat,” he said with petulant irritation as he reached for his breaches and started to pull them on, keeping his feet well off the floor.

  “Lover,” Thorkell moaned, “you needn’t put on your clothing. I need you to hurry!”

  “I’d feel better,” the sailor murmured, sliding farther toward the foot of the bed, “if I had some clothes on.”

  Thorkell watched him with appreciation. He was a handsome sight in the increasing illumination. Ah…this one had been reluctant to share the bed that belonged to the overlord of Dumnonia. That was before Wulfe explained the way of this world to the young foreigner and had gotten him well “conditioned” on Kief. After that, he had been as good as most, even better than those that he could remember in recent months.

  Thorkell watched Kettelmann. The room was growing lighter still; shapes were resolving into the familiar. The foreign sailor was the most beautiful lover he had bedded in years. If only the pains would cease and let him enjoy the conquest as he had in the past – before the pains began—he might be truly content. He did not regret relaxing his edict on Kief for that one. Later, perhaps, he would forbid the drug even to Kettelmann...later.

  Like a blow to his temple, sudden pain again hammered him into near insensibility, and he fell onto his side, reaching for Kettelmann, groping for the reassurance of his lover’s hand.

  He closed his fingers around nothing then lunged to a sitting position again. Through the roaring in his years, he heard the sound of creaking leather, followed by a soft footfall. When he turned his eyes toward the alien sounds, it took several seconds to bring them into focus. He began to tremble. He was half-certain that the silhouette of a man-like being stood at the foot of his bed. He gave a violent shake and gathered the covers around him, though the cold was in his soul and not in the room.

  Is this, he fought with terror, the moment when the spirits of my dead have chosen to take me into the underworld? He peopled the room with a multitude of personal terrors that continued to rise from beneath the floor.

  Yes, there was a definite movement. The shape at the foot of his bed had been joined by a second.

  “Hansl!” Thorkell cried out, looking for help, confirmation that he had not gone mad.

  He received confirmation in Kettelmann’s stare, directed at the same spot.

  Thorkell assembled fragments of his arrogance, which would have to substitute for his vanished courage.

  “Who dares to enter the Governor-General’s chambers without permission or escort?” he rasped in a tremulous voice, despite his efforts at an outward calm.

  A silence answered him; the silence was as ominous as the coiling of a serpent. His heart careened against his rib cage as a rotted hand reached for him and pointed a long finger in his direction. Then, the shadowy figures moved closer to the bed. The Mercian lord was terrified into paralysis. He opened his mouth, but no intelligent sounds issued forth, only a choking gibberish that might have been mouthed by an idiot.

  “Light!” He finally managed to form, “lightlightlightlight!” The words blended into a single mad wish.

  The room then exploded into brightness as Kettelmann touched a panel above the headboard. Thorkell screamed as the intruders materialized. Next to him, Kettelmann slumped back against the pillows in apparent defeat.

  The figures confronting him held more horrors than did the dead, more than the assassin.

  “What’s the matter, old pal? Aren’t you glad to see a couple of friends from bygone days?” Ian Connach’s voice cut through the intervening distance like a finely honed blade.

  “My one-time...friend,” stabbed Martin Cunneda.

  Thorkell sat up straighter, despite his shock, and reached a hand toward his uniform to cover his nakedness.

  “Don’t!”

  “Ian!” The Mercian lord cried. “You wouldn’t deny me dignity, would you? I cannot face either of you as I am.” His voice was pleading still, but his mind had recovered from its own cowardice and was beginning to cast about for a solution to the menace that threatened. These two, he reassured himself, would use no magic, no poison. These two, his newly confident soul cackled with sudden glee, are mere mortals, no snake men. A clever man can defeat them. With that thought, the grip of pain left him. His mind had not felt so clear for weeks. He felt liberated, godlike. He listened to Connach speaking with half of his unshackled mind while the other half plotted.

  Connach’s laugh was a whip-crack that Thorkell remembered from his youth. “Therein lies one difference between us: a Celt knows no shame in nakedness. It is only creatures like you that fear exposure to the light. At any rate, friend of my youth, you can no longer exercise free choice. This room, this building belong again to us, and we will dictate conditions here from now on.”

  It had been a calmly delivered statement, but each incredible word struck Thorkell’s confidence like thrown rocks.

  “Wulfe!” He called, still assuming his mantle of command.

  “Dead.”

  “Horst!” He screamed, nearly blind with both fear and pain which coursed through him unchecked, uncheck able.

  “Dead.”

  “Dead?” He collapsed back onto the bed and covered himself, shaking as though the chill of those Mercian deaths had settled in the bedroom like winter. “All dead?” He asked in a child-like voice.

  “All are quite dead.”

  Martin Cunneda advanced, his expression ugly in the artificial light. Thorkell cowered away from him.

  “You,” Cunneda snarled. “My father took you into his house as if you were one of his own sons. You ate from our table, sat at our fire. You learned to be a member of my clan. You even pretended to accept our beliefs.”

  Cunneda loomed over Thorkell, a menace larger than life, exuding a feral hatred that turned the Mercian’s intestines into water.

  “I never pretended those things, Marti,” Thorkell pleaded. “It was only after I was recalled to my own father in Londstaadt and when diplomatic relations between our two peoples were again broken that I had to choose. I chose as I did because I could never continue to live as a Mercian while thinking like a Keltaner. We are different, as you say.” While he spoke, his left hand slithered to the peg that held his uniform. A Suevian throwing knife hung there in its sheath covered by his dress tunic.

  “I sent for you, Marti,” he told Cunneda, looking up at the Kelt as a lover might through his thick, feminine lashes. “I wanted to explain everything to you, to ask for your understanding and forgiveness.”

  The vehemence of Cunneda’s response made Thorkell flinch and halted his furtive groping.

  “Killer of women and children! Do you think I’d
ever come to you as long as you sat on my grandfather’s chair? You! Conqueror of my people, slave master, murderer!” He paused and spat in Thorkell face.

  The Mercian made no attempt to wipe the spittle from his cheek. To do so, would be to admit weakness. After his initial show of cowardice, he felt his confidence flowing back. He was a Mercian after all. The fire inside his skull receded further as his courage returned. He was alert, in charge of himself once again.

  “I wanted you to rule with me, Marti: I wanted you to share my bed and my kingdom,” he watched the Keltaner’s face for a reaction, a lessening of concentration.

  It worked.

  “You dung-sucking bastard!” Cunneda shrieked, growing louder and shriller with each word. “Everything you learned, you turned against us!”

  That, at least was true, Thorkell acknowledged as he moved his hand closer to its goal.

  “Look outside your window.” Thorkell’s one-time lover stepped back and thrust aside the curtains. “Do you see the day?”

  Thorkell nodded while stretching, stretching farther with his fingers, using Cunneda’s movements to cover his own.

  “You will not live to watch the sun rise above the courtyard wall. The Mercian Empire will never see another dawn as rulers of my land.”

  The Keltaner’s brave talk made Thorkell want to laugh aloud. The Keltik rabble could never prevail against the masters of war. He smiled as his fingers finally closed around the silk-soft leather and brought the scabbard carefully under the bedclothes. No one had seen the movement; of that he was certain.

  “Thor.”

  His fingers stiffened. Had his movements been seen, after all? He did not think so. The foreigner had not even noticed, and he might have felt the movement through the bed. No, he was quite safe in that. He had the impression that the passing of the latest painful attack had increased rather than decreased his mental powers. Everything seemed in sharper focus. He nearly laughed out loud again.

  He had become a god! He had burst his chrysalis and had been welcomed into Odinn’s great company. Keltik posturing and threats meant nothing to him anymore. How could they? He looked up with cunning, feigning fear so that Marti would not suspect his new strength. Both Marti and Ian carried small weapons that bore a passing resemblance to tiny crossbows, ridiculous, small, tubular devices. His good humor increased.

  The weapons...if they were weapons, indeed...were scarce the length of the knife he was sliding from its sheath. Even as he readied his blade, Marti pointed at him with his device.

  Let him point. Marti will not leave this room except in death. He regretted losing such a lusty lover to death, but the realization of his newly discovered immortality more than compensated for the small loss he would feel with Cunneda’s demise. Eternity would be filled with fine lovers.

  “Thor.” Marti’s voice was insistent. He compelled attention, mortal though he was.

  “Yes, Marti?” The new god asked of the man he was going to slay. He brought the sharp blade up under the covers, no longer bothering to hide his intentions. The shrouded steel looked like a rising erection, the way it tented the blanket.

  “Goodbye.” Marti’s words were almost affectionate. Thorkell thought he detected a trace of sadness in the delivery.

  He, too, felt a degree of sadness. Never again would he make love to Marti in the baths. He tensed his arm.

  The tube in Marti’s fist blossomed with a bright flash, and the Vulkanetruppen commander felt a slight impact just above the bridge of his nose. He crossed his eyes inwardly trying to discern what it was that had just cured his headaches for all eternity, the thing that had just cheated him out of immortality.

  Thorkell’s steel erection faded, drooping onto the mattress as his brain, blood and skull fragments splattered his present lover, the headboard, and the wall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Morgan slipped into the killing grounds, noiseless and eager. He moved his head from side to side, a predator on the hunt, looking for signs, listening for the telltale sounds that would indicate the enemy’s presence. With his pistol drawn, he trotted through darkened corridors. Anyone he encountered would die. Ahead lay only Mercian territory and the Celts would mourn no one Morgan might throw into the Horned One’s cauldron. Cunneda’s map of the palace unreeled in Morgan’s mind as he glided downward toward the cellars that had been turned to new purposes.

  The next corridor to the right will lead to the lower levels, he told himself, picking up the pace. Connach had given him only a short lead on the other warriors. Unless he could locate Brigid and soon, surprise would be lost in the General melee that he knew would erupt above in minutes. Segmenti, he corrected himself.

  A sound ahead slowed him to a walk. It had come as two distinct sounds, both faint, both ahead and both to his right. The first had sounded like the whimper of an animal; the second had definitely been a man clearing his throat. Morgan lowered his weapon to chest level and moved forward, hoping he would meet one of Thorkell’s minions.

  He did.

  The Mercian appeared so surprised by Morgan’s sudden appearance that he did not cry out before Morgan’s silenced pistol took away his power of speech forever.

  The impact of the quiet projectile slammed the already-dead soldier into a wall, and Morgan had to lurch quickly forward to prevent the man’s crossbow from striking the hard stones of the floor. He holstered the warm pistol and professionally surveyed the dim passageway. Even in the shadowed hall, the dead soldier stood out like a monument. Then Morgan noticed a heavy marble bench that stood against the wall. He knelt and turned the Mercian onto his stomach. Swiftly he worked the bow under the man’s tunic and slid the arms of the weapon into the tunic’s sleeves. When he was finished, he carried the body to the bench and propped it into a sitting position. Placing his shoulder against the corpse’s chest, he tilted the bench forward, wedging the crossbow butt between the seat and the wall.

  Morgan stepped back. In the poor light, the soldier sat upright as if merely resting before continuing his patrol. Morgan was sorry that he could do nothing about the lolling head. Its nerveless sag gave the lie to Morgan’s hastily rigged illusion. He grunted. It would have to suffice.

  As he hunted again along the corridor that Cunneda thought led to Thorkell’s dungeons, Morgan once more heard a double sound. This time, steel rang upon steel; gunfire could be sporadically heard. The battle for Thorkell’s palace had already begun. He forced himself to discount the battle sounds behind him and strained his senses forward. Ahead of him lay the unknown and the soft sobbing of a wounded creature, an inhuman sound that affected him more than the cries of the injured and dying above. He hurried forward, gambling that the keepers of Thorkell’s dungeons might not have yet heard the clash of combat above.

  The whimpering cries that drew him grew stronger as he moved deeper into the bowels of the building and the sounds of combat faded with each step. Something else grew stronger as well. At first it was only a faint, unpleasant smell, but as Morgan pushed forward, it resolved into the separate stenches of excrement, blood, animal fear and a reptilian reek that merged into one malodorous whole.

  Morgan felt fear then. He was no longer the cold fighting machine that had stepped out of the hidden passageway, driven by the need to rescue Brigid from her captors. At once he was vulnerable and felt he was not capable of overcoming the eerie forces that awaited him at the end of the corridor. The pistol wavered in his grip and his legs felt weak. All the symptoms of a cowardice that he despised swept through him like a foul tide. He heard the soft cries again and forced himself to struggle forward on legs that threatened to rebel at any moment. An overpowering urge to run back along the way he had come gripped him, and he almost gave into its persuasive pressure.

  With an incredible effort he battled the need to bolt. He shifted the pistol to his left hand and held the ring close to his face. The stone was as dead as the Mercian he had slain.

  “Aiofe!” He whispered, fearful that he would b
e overheard.

  The stone remained inert.

  Nerve endings screamed with the felt tendrils of terror, yet he reached into his tunic pocket with palsied fingers and extracted Brigid’s pendant. It too was dark and unresponsive to his plea.

  This place holds mortal danger for you, Morgan, echoed a tiny, sinister voice inside his skull, a voice that was not that of Bridged’s Winged Spirit. Flee while you still can, for the instrument of your death dwells in this place!

  He trembled so violently that he was barely capable of placing the silent pendant back into his pocket. He was more than ready to take the seductive advice which gave a rationale to the abject fear that began to control his limbs. Brigid is certainly dead, he told himself. If I remain here, I will join her, and our lives will have been lost for nothing. I must get back to Ian. In desperate relief, he turned to retrace his steps, to abandon his hopeless quest and the horror that certainly lurked ahead.

  He succeeded in taking two weak-kneed steps in retreat when an overpowering ophidian odor assaulted him, bringing him choking to his knees. As he knelt, nearly retching, the immobilizing coils of fear began to lose their chill dominance and were replaced by something else: fury at being manipulated.

  Glivas! He thought angrily. That bastard must be close if I can be weakened that easily. No more! I will not be controlled! Morgan concentrated his anger on shattering the Scatha priest’s emasculating hold on his mind.

  “Glivas!” He shouted as he regained simultaneous control over his voice and muscles. “I defy your attempt to dominate me, and I refuse to believe that you are capable of dominating any of the Shadow World warriors. Already two of your dark lord’s lackeys are dead by my own hand. Prepare to join them, asshole, because you are going to be the next.”

  A faint sighing sound issued from a space in mid-air, between Morgan and the tunnel’s end. He bared his teeth in a grim smile. First the masking of sounds has left him, he reasoned. Next he will lose his false invisibility because I will not allow it. He stepped to where the sound had come from as if the maker stood, visible, before him. He pointed his pistol at the space he knew Glivas should be occupying.