The Celtic Mirror

by Louis Phillippi

  Immediately, the stench grew stronger and he realized that he had drawn Brigid’s abductor himself into anger. He hoped that any further loss of control on Glivas’s part would strip the monster of the cloak of darkness that he had drawn about him.

  “OK, boa-breath,” Morgan taunted with all the insolence he could pack into his voice. “Die invisible, if you like. I’ll just kill the bad smell.”

  The darkness flickered briefly with red sparks as the Scatha master threw away his invisibility.

  Morgan was not prepared for the type of entrance the traitorous Celt chose to make. A slow hypnotic coil of vapor rose from the stone floor not two meters from Morgan. It was as tenuous as smoke, yet as solid as evil. As the Californian watched, the wraith grew both thicker and more defined until, rising a full meter above him, swayed a deadly triangular head.

  Morgan neither feared nor fancied snakes, real or illusionary. He respected them, especially the venomous ones. Glivas was venomous, whether man or serpent. Morgan took two steps to the rear, out of the apparition’s reach and steadied his pistol once more at the spot he guessed the flesh and blood midsection to be.

  The soft whimper reached him again, and rekindled his sense of urgency.

  “Your ugly tricks are wasted on me, Glivas,” he snarled. “I am going to blow your traitor ass away right now. Whether you slither or stumble to hell is no longer a concern of mine.”

  “Ah, but you should be concerned, foreigner,” the Glivas-thing hissed, spade-shaped head weaving atop a tower of colors and patterns that had never graced a living serpent. Dorsal and belly scales shown with ruby and emerald lights and the malevolent eyes below the horned superoculars glittered like coins stolen from the eyelids of a dead man.

  Morgan glared, not intimidated by Glivas’s hallucinatory projection. He held his weapon rock-steady on a spot one meter from the floor. His index finger tensed.

  “Say hello Scatha for me.” Morgan depressed the trigger, but when the pistol failed to fire, a new chill rushed through him like a winter wind. With a calm he did not feel, he ejected the round he hoped was a dud and chambered another.

  Glivas’s hissing laughter filled the chamber.

  “Try it again, Morgan. Fire your Shadow World weapon at me. When it does not perform for you this second time, I shall then proceed to slay you.”

  It happened like a bad dream. Faced with the prospect of a hideous death, armed with a weapon that had just failed him, Morgan depressed the trigger harder than he needed. Only a click rewarded his effort. Realizing then that he had encountred a force untouchable by technology, Morgan holstered the useless pistol and reached across his body for the shagreen scabbard at his left side. As he drew the edged weapon he had not wanted to carry, the serpent hissed another laugh.

  “You are the optimist are you not, Morgan? When Scatha’s power stops your Shadow World toy, you reach, undaunted, for a tool for you consider primitive. You must be a true Celt, indeed, foreign interloper. Nevertheless, you must die here, frustrated in your desire to rescue the Lady Brigid from both my evil touch and the quite expert attentions of Thorkell’s Torturemaster. A pity.”

  Morgan focused on Glivas’s mocking speech, trying to determine the location of the real man’s head. To his dismay, the voice seemed to emanate from the illusionary serpent’s mouth.

  He balanced his weight on both feet as the Ax-Wielder had taught him. Thanks to the wearying hours spent decapitating straw “Mercians” the sword did not feel heavy; instead it felt reassuring. He did not know how to treat the assassin, however. The fantastic serpent’s striking range was nearly two meters by Morgan’s calculations. If the reptile were more than a hypnotic suggestion, he would fall well within range of the man/creature’s fatal bite. Whether the thing that confronted him was man, beast or an obscene combination of the two, Morgan would have to move inside that deadly zone to reach Glivas with his blade.

  He began to circle the abomination. The jeweled head followed his movements like a locked-on radar dish. “You know, Glivas,” he said, edging toward the muscular tail, “we’ve got two options here.”

  “You have no options, Morgan,” the snake hissed.

  “One is that you are immortal in your present state,” the man said, ignoring the susurrating voice. “If that is the case, I am a dead man as you have so pointedly informed me. The second option is that you are still flesh and blood. If that is the case, you, too, can also bleed and die.” He had arrived at a position where he could reach a portion of the serpent’s tail with his sword. He was also, he knew, inside Glivas’s striking range. He looked up into the corrupt gold eyes. He saw that his error had been noted. It was a calculated risk.

  The head flattened and the jaws gaped. Two venom-injecting fangs unfolded from the roof of the serpent’s mouth like jackknife blades. They were, Morgan saw, tipped with sparkling drops of poison.

  Morgan could not keep his stare away from the open mouth and the eyes that bored into him like laser range finders. The head drew back for a strike, yet Morgan leaned forward, closer to his foe. Oddly, he felt no fear. Everything was preternaturally clear to him. Colors, scales—all stood out in brilliant detail. He could even detect the throbbing of blood as it pulsed through the tail as it lashed at him. He knew what he had to do and could only hope that he was quicker than Glivas’ strike. He gripped his sword firmly with both hands and raised it over his head. Out of the corner of his eye he saw muscles bunch in the serpent’s neck. He lunged for the tail and hacked, feeling the strike coming, knowing that it would follow him.

  The sword bit deeply and stuck fast in bone. Still gripping the sword with both hands, Morgan was swung in a vicious arc, and behind him he felt the breeze of Glivas’s strike. The sound of a heavy object crashing into the wall filled the space. Morgan stood on the wounded tail with his booted foot and wrenched his blade free. His steel had bitten deep into his foe, he observed with satisfaction. Bone glistened whitely beneath the parted flesh, and something that was not quite blood seeped from the cut. Regripping the weapon, he studied the serpent’s head. With a feeling of rising hope, he saw that the force of the unchecked strike had driven the monster’s head hard into the granite wall. The nasal orifices were battered and oozed the same fluid that spread from the tail region. One fang had been broken and six inches of it lay on the flagstones, glistening with its own venom.

  Glivas was obviously dazed and in pain. The movements of his second preparation to strike lacked fluidity, and he jerked and twitched like a broken machine.

  Encouraged, Morgan smiled. Glivas could be defeated, but only if he could weaken him and keep him off balance. Recharged, he savagely cut at the mutilated tail, scattering pieces of flesh like woodchips until the blade rang on the stones beneath his feet. A severed section of tail, as long as a man’s arm and as thick at its widest, writhed and twitched with a fading life of its own.

  Then Glivas screamed. It was a sound that ran up and down a chromatic scale invented by demons. Despite the desperate need for further attack, Morgan froze, unable to continue, paralyzed by the hellish finale. It took a lash by Glivas’s truncated tail to bring him again to his senses.

  The blow missed knocking him to his knees by a scant centimeter, but Morgan was splattered across his chest and exposed neck with the ichor that seeped from the serpent’s wound. He felt as if he had been dashed with acid. A burning sensation across his neck had been instantaneous and sharp. As the fluid wicked its steady way through the material of his tunic, he felt a slow fire ignite his flesh. Jolted from his dream-state by the fiery substance, he assaulted Glivas again with strength born of desperation, shielding his eyes with one arm, swinging the weapon one-handed.

  He lunged at his enemy’s twisting body with dogged determination and closed his mind to the pain inflicted by the burning slime and the growing ache in his sword arm. Recalling lessons that had been necessary for a young, injured officer to master in another land, another war, he rolled the totality of his pain into a single
red ball and floated it away from his consciousness.

  Unimpeded by the aborted signals of his physical distress, he focused his entire awareness upon his mortal enemy, slashed at the hated body, and dodged the strikes that came too often. He knew he would pay for his efforts later, but there would be no later if he stopped his own attack on the fiend.

  Glivas became his world. He loathed the scaled being that blocked his path to Brigid. In the tunnel vision that was Morgan’s consciousness, Glivas was every enemy he had ever confronted, every evil he had ever deplored. As he hacked pieces from the thrashing serpent, he called the serpent by one obscene name after another.

  His concentration was intense, but as time passed he realized that the giant snake was counterattacking with less frequency and with less vigor. In an exhausted stupor Morgan halted. With a terrible return of sensation, he became aware of his own deplorable condition. The return of agony made him cry aloud and he took an unbalanced step. Abruptly his boots lost their traction on the slippery floor and he fell into a thick puddle of the slime that had spread across the stones like heavy oil.

  The acidic fluid soaked into the cloth of his uniform and seared his lower legs with an exquisite fire. Morgan cried out again and half stumbled, half crawled away from the ichor, forgetting Glivas in a fog of pain. He collapsed against the rough-hewn granite of the wall, panting like a wounded beast.

  When he lifted his eyes to the obscene serpent, he was relieved to see that Glivas had not taken advantage of his confused withdrawal from the battle. Instead, his enemy had also retreated into a corner of his own, bleeding fluid from dozens of vee-shaped cuts that looked like ax marks on a felled tree and which would have been mortal for any being except one still favored by Scatha. The great body twitched, as it lay, unable to form a coil. Without apparent strength, the battered head rose from the floor and swayed atop the damaged column of sinew and scale. The yellow eyes watched Morgan with hatred.

  All things considered, Morgan counted himself lucky, but he found it difficult to extend his cramped sword arm, and much of his skin felt afire. Yet he was otherwise unscathed; he remained a functioning swordsman. He blinked against the perspiration that stung his eyes, unwilling to swipe at his forehead with a fluid-impregnated sleeve and risk blindness. The discomfort he felt was minor compared to that suffered by the serpent. That buoyed his confidence in the battle’s ultimate outcome.

  “You know,” he rasped at Glivas, “I think you are finished. As soon as I catch my breath, I’m going to send you the rest of the way to Cernunos.” It was not bravado or boast. He felt he could succeed.

  “Nay, Morgan,” the monster hissed in a strained voice, “you give yourself too much hope. The goddess of darkness shaped me with her immortal power. You may wound my flesh, but you cannot slay me with weapons fashioned by mortal hands. The Dark One will heal me; she is healing me even as we speak. Watch closely and lose heart.”

  The serpent’s exhaustion appeared real to Morgan, but so did his prophecy.

  With ebbing confidence, Morgan watched as wounds ceased bleeding and began to close up. The smaller cuts smoothed over almost at once, he realized with horror, but the gaping notches closed slower, with a blurring of the edges as if seen through water. The severed tail and shattered fang did not magically reknit themselves onto the self-rejuvenating body but new ones were regenerating from the stumps of the old. The process was slow and deliberate, but it was happening.

  The only thing on Morgan’s side was speed. His sword was faster then the Dark One’s healing rate. He took two quick steps toward his magical enemy and raised the Ax-Wielder’s gift above his head. He brought it down in a swift arc and cleanly severed the stump of regrown tail from the serpent’s body. As Glivas recoiled in pain, Morgan once again gripped his sword with both hands, trusting to luck to keep Glivas’s blood from his eyes, trusting to the added strength of his left arm to render the monsterous man-beast incapable.

  The results were almost as miraculous as Scatha’s healing. Slices of flesh and scale flew from the undulating monster that writhed under Morgan’s flailing sword. Morgan was no longer obsessed with attempting to kill the unkillable; he was determined to weaken Glivas enough so he could sever the head from the beast’s body. Scatha might be able to regenerate the damaged body given enough time, but not in time to prevent Morgan from leaving the blocked corridor and reaching Thorkell’s dungeons.

  As he sensed the serpent weakening further, Morgan pressed his attack harder. The serpent was obviously spent. In moments the head would droop, exposing a slender neck to the sword’s sharp bite. The snake’s evasions slowed; the head sank.

  Morgan shifted his stance to address that final target and swung, utilizing the last reserves of strength he had hoarded and all the hatred and loathing that Glivas had evoked. The Lothian blade bit deeply but did not decapitate the monster. At the last moment, Glivas had raised his body, preventing Morgan’s bid to end the unequal contest.

  “Time!” Glivas shrieked. “Scatha has given me time!”

  Shocked, Morgan stared at the beast. With the sluggishness of thought that often accompanies a massive loss of energy, he wondered why Glivas was looking past him. He ceased wondering when he heard a shuffling sound behind him. He was trapped!

  Morgan had experienced the overwhelming horrors of war in his own world, and he had witnessed the loathsome evils of black magic in Connach’s. He was, therefore, prepared for anything Glivas or his perverted master might concoct. When he took a look at his new adversary, however, it was the incongruous impulse to laugh that rose to the surface of his consciousness.

  Scatha had apparently chosen to reanimate the Mercian that Morgan had left in the outer passageway. A native Celt from Connach’s world might have been reduced to shivering helplessness at the site of the lurching corpse, but Morgan had been inured to such ghoulish sights by a childhood of movie going. There were, he admitted, nice touches. The Mercian already had the smell of decay about him, and foul breath bubbled in and out of the sucking chest wound that had been created by the now-useless pistol. Scatha had given the dead man the ability to stand erect, but had left the head lolling on a limp neck so that the dead man’s pinpointed pupils regarded Morgan from shoulder-height and at an angle that imitated a canine curiosity.

  Holding the sword in his right hand to keep Glivas at bay, he drew his keenly honed dagger with the left. The corpse shuffled closer, arms held at an awkward angle by the crossbow that remained jammed inside the bloody tunic. Morgan regarded Scatha’s supreme effort with contempt. With its arms pinioned, the Mercian could not draw its own dagger and could not attack Morgan with any effectiveness.

  “Stephen King could have done a better job Scatha,” he jibed, feeling better about his chances. With the terror factor neutralized by a thousand bad films, what advantage could Glivas gain with that poor piece of theatrics?

  He found out soon enough.

  The Mercian cadaver was not meant to engage Morgan in battle. Decaying at an accelerated rate, the corpse had but one purpose—to herd Morgan into Glivas’ striking range by blocking his maneuvering ability. The putrefying Mercian carried out Scatha’s plan by leaning into Morgan at every turn, forcing the Californian dangerously close to the giant serpent.

  The danger was twofold: Morgan could not attack Glivas because the corpse blocked him at every angle, and the snake’s wounds were healing over while Morgan could only watch.

  The Mercian could not be killed a second time, nor did vicious dagger thrusts have any effect on the puppet cadaver. Morgan had those facts proved to his despair again and again as mortal stabs only further opened up the rotting body and allowed liquefying internal organs to spill over Morgan’s boots, further choking him with the odor of the crypt. Nauseated, Morgan decided that his only chance lay in totally dismembering the corpse.

  The golem and Morgan circled each other in a bizarre danse macabre. By then, both adversaries were lurching: the Mercian because the rapid decay of its body
was turning tendons and muscle into liquid; Morgan because of a weariness that made each move and effort almost beyond his ability to complete.

  As if staggering drunk, he swung at the lurching corpse, amazed at the ease with which he was able to dismantle the mannequin with his sword.

  After what seemed to him to be an interminable period, Morgan had reduced the Mercian into pieces which lay scattered upon the passageway floor and which twitched still with the hellish life that had been breathed into the body by the serpent goddess. Morgan slumped over his sword in the center of the carnage, his entire body an unbearable ache.

  Exhausted, he raised his face to Glivas and found himself looking into the golden eyes of an unmarked serpent.

  “Scatha has made me whole again, mortal,” Glivas said in his sibilant voice, “while you lack the strength to raise your sword against me after your futile attempt to destroy the marionette Mercian. Look, Morgan, and know that Scatha cannot be defeated!”

  Morgan glanced around the chamber and realized that unless a fast miracle occurred, he was going to die in that underground room.

  The severed parts of the corpse still obeyed Scatha’s commands and had wriggled, rolled and twitched toward him until he was surrounded by moving, rotting flesh. Some pieces were only as large as a finger joint. The largest was the torso, still hampered by the crossbow fast against its spine. Regardless of size or condition, each hideous fragment moved toward Morgan as if life was a magnet to non-life.

  A hand missing three fingers clutched at Morgan’s trousers and began to climb up his leg. In revulsion, Morgan kicked out and dislodged the mangled hand. It hit the wall with a wet, flaccid sound, and then began to creep again toward Morgan.

  “You see, mortal? You have fought me well,” Glivas said with insincerity, “but you have lost. Lay down your sword and bear your chest to my sting. If I bite deeply, you will die quickly and suffer no pain. Do it now!” The serpent commanded, holding Morgan’s eyes.