The Celtic Mirror
Page 34
He felt a cool flowing sensation, a contact between them that ceased after only a brief moment. It had not been unpleasant.
“She will bear the invisible scars of this time as the scars of another time of horror are indelible in thine own brain.” The hands were taken away. “Perhaps as you have done, the hurt can become tolerated, and normal life resumed.”
“It took me a hell of a long time, Goddess, to reach that point. And sometimes I’m not sure that I ever did reach it.” He was about to say more when he heard shouts and the clatter of weapons. They had been Mercian shouts, and they had come from the direction of the torture chamber’s only entrance.
“Oh, shit, Aiofe. Looks like its time to test your work. Can you travel?”
“We can travel, yes. Fight, no. For her to heal well, she needs a time of quiet and rest.”
Morgan ran to the entrance and looked around the corner. A squad of Mercian soldiers was working its way up a side corridor, throwing open each closed door and searching each room. They were only minutes away from the chamber where they stood. Undetected escape appeared impossible.
He withdrew inside, searching the walls with care. There appeared to be only the single exit from Thorkell’s special place. He called softly to Aiofe/Brigid. “Can you search Brigid’s memories to find if she knows of another way out of this trap?” As he spoke, he reached into his thigh pocket and extracted the piece of C-4 explosive he had been hoarding as a gift for Cunneda. The prince would have to wait a little longer it appeared. He pushed the radio-activated fuse into the plastique while examining the room’s supporting arches.
“Lucky for us that this chamber is low-ceilinged,” he said under his breath. He still had to leap high to place the explosive against the keystone of the main supporting arch. He could hear the soldiers outside, much closer than before.
“Well, Aiofe?”
The spirit looked at Morgan through Brigid’s eyes and shook her head. Her body now appeared nearly normal except for the drying gore that caked her face and inner thighs.
“Her thoughts hold no knowledge of another exit from here.”
The beauty had returned again to her face and softly curving form in a way that was painful for Morgan, and he turned away from her.
“Is there any way you can retrieve any memories from that one over there?” He questioned, indicating the mangled jailer.
“Perhaps I can probe his mind if the life force that lingers for a time after death has not vanished in the violence of the death you inflicted upon him,” she said without reproach. “My powers are limited now that I inhabit a body, Morgan, and I cannot promise.”
The crash of a door being kicked open cannonaded through the chamber. The Mercians were next door!
“Hurry!” He whispered, drawing his silenced weapon. He stepped over the body and positioned himself just inside the first cell, getting good fire coverage of the doorway. As he settled into a comfortable firing position, Aiofe/Brigid approached the corpse, disgust apparent upon her face.
He wondered who was in control at that moment.
Brigid’s body knelt beside the Mercian’s torso and her hands were placed on the torture master’s gory temples. Then, with an expression of utter repugnance, Brigid slowly bent to place her forehead against that of the flesh and blood monster.
The first soldier reached the door at that moment. Morgan had decided against closing and barring it so that the movement would not alert the enemy patrol. The partially opened door gave the young soldier a clear view of the bizarre rapporting that was taking place on the bloody floor. Because he stood transfixed, he did not see Morgan crouched in the first cell.
“Odinn! Waas...?”
He got no farther in his observations or his shouts of surprise as Morgan’s pistol sent silent death through the door grille. The round exited messily through the trooper’s unprotected throat.
It was a Pyrrhic victory, however. Morgan had not seriously expected to escape eventual detection by the patrol, and the young Mercian had dashed any remote hopes of that. He had fallen inward, opening the door full wide as he sank to his knees, then sprawled into the chamber. At once, the hallway exploded with Mercian bowmen, and the chamber was transformed from hiding place to snare.
Morgan had no choice. Brigid’s body was exposed to Mercian bolts from several vantage points. He could not let her die, not after so much had transpired. He leapt from cover and charged the doorway as a trio of soldiers appeared. Morgan fired without conscious thought, keeping his shots low.
The first man spun away from the doorway, clutching an arm that abruptly ended above the elbow. The second was catapulted to the far wall, following his intestines which now hung on the stones behind him. The third, wide-eyed with fear, dropped his weapon and began running toward the safety of the next chamber when Morgan’s explosive projectile caught up with him and boosted him beyond his goal with his lower back only a hole through which his life fled.
The hallway was momentarily free of hostile life, but Morgan had heard no sounds of a general retreat. He knew that the remaining enemy soldiers were holed up in adjacent chambers, regaining their courage and resolve. They would come again if they had not fled at the first demonstration of his Shadow World weapon. He checked his load. He had three rounds left in the magazine. He felt his web belt for the ammo pouch that carried two spare loads. It was missing! In its place, he found only a single canvas loop, one of two that had held the pouch.
He sent a curse toward Glivas’s spirit and jumped to his feet, startled by the distinct rasp of metal against stone. The Mercians, wondering why the soldier had not pursued them with his magic weapon, had finally figured out that the Kelt had to be at a disadvantage not to have followed up such a singular rout. They were going to discover that disadvantage soon enough.
Morgan did have a fourth round in his chamber: bluff. As he moved again for the doorway, he turned to Aiofe. She was no longer touching the dead Mercian. Instead she stood, and leaned against the arch that Morgan had mined, her face and body muscles writhing with uncontrolled movement, like maggots under dead flesh. A look of desperate horror solidified on the fluid face.
“Thou should’st never had made us attempt that rapport, Morgan!” she screamed. “Contact with that diseased mind was all it took to awaken her. Even now she is fighting me for control, and I dare not give it. She has gone as mad as he after learning his most hidden memories.”
Morgan’s spirits plummeted to a new low. Brigid mad! Insane, she would be as lost to him as she would be in death. But I will never abandon you, he promised her, Never!
Fighting a battle with his own morale, Morgan stepped again into the corridor. He counted six soldiers advancing on the torture chamber with caution. When they saw him, they all drew back, he noted with satisfaction.
“Aaaaa! Aaaaa!” he thrust his pistol down the corridor. Soldiers dove into opened doorways. “Goddess,” he hissed over his shoulder. “Did you learn of another way out of here?”
For an answer, there was only an inarticulate hash of syllables, sounds thrown out by two distinct voices. The icy tide began to spread outward from his intestines, and he made himself look at Brigid. What he saw confirmed his worst fears.
Her body cowered against a wall, eyes rolling without coordination and her head, her entire face crawling from within. The mad Brigid had wrested control from her guardian spirit.
Giving up the only advantage he processed against the Mercian soldiers, his menacing presence in the doorway, Morgan did the only thing he could do to save them all. He strode to the terror-stricken Brigid and he hit her squarely on the point of her chin. He caught her as she started to fall.
“Take over, Aiofe,” he said, then grabbed her by the waist and eased her onto the stones of an adjacent cell floor. He threw himself on top of her as a crossbow bolt struck sparks from the wall where they had stood scant moments before. A second bolt pocked the wall and sizzled through the straw, a millimeter from Morgan’s head.r />
He rolled off her and twisted through the doorway, keeping his weapon at the ready. When he braced to a stop, two Mercians were advancing into the chamber. Morgan fired only once, aiming at the right-hand trooper’s face. The projectile entered Mercian territory through the nose, spraying blood and brains onto the second soldier. The second man dropped his bow in his haste to exit the chamber.
The pistol felt much too light in Morgan’s hand as he returned to the cell. “They’ll be back soon, Goddess, and I’ve got only two shots left. After that, it’s my sword against Thorkell’s army.”
Brigid’s gaze was steady on his face, and he knew it was Aiofe who looked at him. It was eerie to see the one he loved and know that another persona dwelt inside her skin.
“There is a way from here, Morgan,” Aiofe said at last. “A tunnel links this chamber with Thorkell’s suite. He used it often to watch my people’s misery.” She pointed to the far end of the chamber.
Morgan looked in that direction. Hanging on the far wall was a carved mask, a gruesome face with horns and a snake crawling from its mouth. The eyes were unnaturally black. “The eyes,” he said. “They must have been cut out so Thorkell could watch unobserved.”
“That is so,” his half-human companion answered.
“Stay here.” He dropped to a crouch and ran from doorway to doorway until he stood in front of Thorkell’s secret entrance and, he hoped their escape. Experimentally, he stuck a finger into one of the eye sockets. He could not tell if he reached the other side with it, but cool air blowing on his cheek from the other dark socket told him that the wall was indeed hollow.
It did not take him much longer to trace the outline of the door, an unmortared rectangle in a wall of mortared stone. He had located the exit, but he could find no hinges, no mechanism, and no way to open it.
“Aiofe!” He called. “How do you open it from here?” Then something made him realize that they were no longer alone in the chamber, and he dove for the cover of an anvil set upon a stone block. A heavy bolt struck the bizarre mask, shattering it before ringing harmlessly onto the floor.
At first Morgan could not spot the soldier. The weapon’s trajectory told him that it had not been fired from the doorway. The enemy had slipped into the chamber while Morgan had been examining the wall. Morgan scanned each stone of the chamber with care. He saw nothing on the first sweep. On the second, he spotted a small, brown moving object. It was the toe of a boot, moving with the exertion its owner made, while winding up his bow.
Morgan faced the cell wall and he could clearly imagine the bowman behind the stones as he labored over his weapon. The Mercian crossbow took twenty seconds for a strong man to reload. He knew. The Lothian had made him load and unload a hundred times.
Morgan decided to wait until the soldier rose to a firing position, but Aiofe was not privy to his plans. She had left her cell and was crawling toward Morgan, right into the center of the Mercian’s field of fire. Now the Mercian had two targets, and Morgan could not take the chance that the vulnerable Brigid would be the chosen one.
He took aim at his imaginary target, knowing that the shot he was taking should work, in theory. That is, it should strike the stone head-on and explode with enough force to send sharp fragments from the other side of the cell flying in a lethal half-cone. It would only work, he knew for certain, if the explosive charge in the projectile was slightly more powerful than early reports indicated, or that the stones of the cell walls were thin enough.
The pistol looked insignificant to him just then, and the walls appeared massive.
He fired.
The rock exploded in chaos of dust and flying shards. The crater made by the projectile was substantial, but it had not been enough.
Blood-splattered but not fatally injured, the Mercian sprang to an upright position, his face twisted into what Morgan liked to call a “combat rictus”. He swung his massive weapon to his shoulder and aimed, not at Morgan, but at the crawling Brigid.
The distance was too great; Morgan had no choice. He steadied the pistol with a two-handed grip and fired his last round. The Mercian dropped to the floor in a spray of blood.
Morgan holstered his now-useless weapon and hurried to Brigid/Aiofe. Lifting her to her feet with one hand, he picked up the cocked crossbow that had been dropped by the dead soldier and took the leather quiver from the body. The bow and the sword would be the only weapons he would have to fight off the next attack. The odds for their survival had slipped considerably.
He did not waste time worrying about the encounter he knew would come sooner or later. His concern of the moment was to escape the trap and prolong their chances for survival.
“OK, Aiofe,” he said, cradling the bow stock as he would an M-16. “Where the hell is the door handle?”
The dark eyes that were Brigid’s and yet were not looked into his with sadness. “There is no opening mechanism on this side. Thorkell was afraid that an escaping prisoner might use the passageway to seek revenge.” The eyes broken contact and she looked away. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right for you to say, Goddess. You’re fucking immortal. I might be killed in the next attack and Brigid might die out from under you, but you’ll still be around,” he said with a quiet bitterness formed out of his feelings of futility. He looked away from the beautiful incarnation and stared at the broken mask with hatred, imagining Thorkell’s smirking face behind the granite barrier, laughing at them.
It was Morgan who laughed.
“Jesus! Look at that, Aiofe,” he grinned crookedly and stuck his hand into the break made by the Mercian weapon. His fingers wiggled in free air on the other side. “Thorkell must have had this section hollowed out so he could get as close to his victims as possible,” he said, withdrawing his hand. “That section behind the mask is only a few centimeters thick.”
He shifted the crossbow to his left arm and picked up the bolt that had been fired at him. He began to chip at the remaining pieces of the mask, widening the hole, shard by shard.
“Where’s the latch located?” He grunted, tearing his tunic on a sharp fragment. Relatively thin or not, he could not make rapid progress on the tough stone.
“Down. To thy right.” She drew a ragged breath. “Morgan!” She screamed.
He did not need to ask her why she screamed. He knew.
Morgan whirled, the bolt in his right hand, the bow in his left. A Mercian trooper was charging him with a short sword held over his head.
“Aaaaa!” Morgan yelled, hoping to bluff the soldier. As soon as he yelled, he realized that it had been a stupid attempt. The pistol, with its mystique, lay snug in its holster.
The Mercian slowed but continued to move forward, a slow smile forming on his brutish face. He was close enough for Morgan to smell him.
“Shit, Lady,” he shouted. “How about a little miracle when we need it?”
“You know I can’t do it when I’m like this! You do something, Kerry! You’re holding the crossbow!”
He registered the fact that she had called him Kerry at the same time he realized that it was indeed up to him to hold off the Mercians. He swung the heavy weapon up and pulled the trigger as the soldier began his downswing.
The bolt caught the Mercian in the chest where two thick leather straps crossed. The straps slowed the bolt enough to prevent it from passing completely through the man’s body. Clutching the stub of steel with both hands, the Mercian backpedaled out of the chamber and struck the wall outside the room before sliding to the floor. He screamed as he clawed at his chest, and it seemed to Morgan that his cries increased in volume instead of decreasing as death approached.
Morgan tossed the bow to the ground in disgust. The dying soldier had just advertised that the “magic” weapon that had kept them all cowed was no longer operational.
“Brace yourself, Goddess. The bastards will be on us thicker than shit in a cesspool in less than a segmentum.” He took the blunted bolt in both hands and chipped again at the
stone effigy with a grim determination. Chips flew, but not enough and not soon enough.
The next soldiers entered the chamber with wary caution. It was plain that they remained afraid of Morgan and hung back as he drew his sword.
He reached through the opening that he had widened and felt for the latch Aiofe had promised, which lay on the other side. The tips of his fingers brushed against cold metal, but his forearm was too thick for the opening, and the unrelenting stone kept the mechanism unobtainable, for him.
He waved his sword at the Mercians, keeping them at bay. Aiofe stood to one side, slender and tall in Brigid’s borrowed body. She wore it well.
“Over here,” he ordered, withdrawing his arm from the hole. “You try it.”
Unencumbered, Morgan met the Mercians’ advance. Two to one was not sufficient to give Thorkell’s soldiers an advantage. Chulainn had made Morgan into a superior swordsman, and with the Celtic broadsword against the shorter Mercian weapons, he was able to wreak havoc as easily as if the soldiers had been straw targets. Yet the two were only the beginning, for the Vik tide lapped around the open doorway, waiting on the outcome of this skirmish. The wait was a short one.
Morgan dispatched the second soldier with a thrust through the heart, and braced himself for the next challenger. A burly veteran filled the doorframe, but did not enter at once.
“I can’t reach it either!” Aiofe called out from behind Morgan.
He backed toward her reluctantly, not liking to have the wall so close. He swung his sword threateningly at the older soldier, letting him know that his move to the wall was not a retreat.
He reached her side. “What’s the problem?” He asked, keeping his eyes on the Vik whom had stepped into the chamber, now followed by two other scarred soldiers. They’re standing in the first team, now, he groaned to himself.
“I’ve got enough room for my arm, but I’m not tall enough to reach the latch!” Aiofe stood on her toes trying to increase her reach.
“Stay there.” He slid his left arm around her waist and lifted her off her feet. His hand cupped her breast quite by accident. He was aware of her nipple stiffening beneath his fingers.