Night & Demons (31 page)

The Greek looked at his daughter and added, “I captured two of them. Did you . . . ?”

She shook her head sharply. “No,” she said, “no. Are any of these suitable for use?”

She glanced around the carnage the Gael had left of the raiding party. Lopped limbs, coils of intestines tangling the feet of a victim who had tried to run despite his wound; a woman who lay limp in a roundel of blood, her glassy eyes staring upward . . .

“No,” Antheia said. “I see.”

“Where did they take him?” Cormac repeated in a voice so loud that the words battered the walls like fists.

“How—” Antheia said and froze, seeing her death at the end of the hot reply. She had aged horribly. The price of the power she and her father wielded was nearly as high as that of the wand Cormac watched kill its user.

“I suppose they would have taken him to wherever they live on the ring island,” Creon said. “If the Guardian doesn’t get them all, despite the wand. I wouldn’t believe they could make it past him, had they not done so.”

Creon backed and sagged against the chest from which the light sprang. Cormac poised, but the Greek was only reaching for support. He looked like a scarecrow instead of the vibrant man of middle age who had greeted the castaways.

Cormac had sheathed his dagger after he cleaned it. Now he shot the long sword back in its scabbard and stepped to the hole in the floor. He could glimpse light of sorts past the skewed block, a pale glow too even to come from a lamp.

“You can’t go down there!” Antheia protested. “The Guardian is—”

“Unless the savages killed it?” Creon suggested in sudden fear.

Antheia turned on him. “With a single wand?” she snarled. “Don’t be a fool. You and I together couldn’t manage it, and that was when it was smaller!”

Cormac touched the block of stone, not gripping it but judging the texture and finding places at which he
could
grip.

“You can’t go down there,” Creon said in shocked anger. “It’s—you’d be throwing yourself away, merely feeding the Guardian.”

Cormac looked back over his shoulder. The savages whom Creon had choked comatose were on the floor where the device dropped them. Servants bound the captives’ wrists and legs with ribbons of raw silk, no less strong for its lustrous beauty.

Bandages of the same material wrapped Wulfhere’s ankles as the savages dragged the Dane away.

Cormac straightened in a smooth motion that proved his muscles were under his full control. He raised one of the bronze stools by a leg and shook the draping fabric from it. Creon started back; servants ran squealing in wide-eyed terror.

Antheia’s left hand closed on her ruby brooch. Her face was cool and emotionless.

Cormac swung the stool overhead as he would have used a flail. He released the metal an instant before it crashed into the chest from which Creon spun blue light. The Gael didn’t want to touch the device, and he didn’t want to touch
anything
that touched the device in the moment of its destruction.

Bronze chest and bronze stool melded in a ringing crash. The metal glowed, not blue but a hot yellow-orange like the core of a charcoal kiln. Molten bronze spattered in all directions with the smell of something foul burning.

The servants had fled. A dying savage moaned softly. The Greeks stood transfixed.

“So you’d treat us as you were doing these folk?” the Gael shouted, gesturing left-handed toward the bound savages. “Choke us, tie us—and then what, I wonder?”

His voice had a musical lilt, as playful as a cat’s paw. He spat on Creon’s sandaled foot. “Get out of here before I deal with you as I did your evil toy!”

The Greeks swept from the room, silent and blank-faced. A spot on Creon’s robe smoldered from a spark thrown out by his melting device.

Cormac squatted and gripped the block of stone. The iron chape of his scabbard skittered on the floor.

Wulfhere’s bow and quiver stood in a corner, but the bearded axe had vanished with the Dane. Hope had no more to do with Cormac’s actions than fear did, but—

If Wulfhere believed in anything, he believed not in a god or gods but rather in that axe which had cut through every foe he faced. So long as the Dane and his axe were together, woe to their enemies.

Cormac squeezed and lifted. The stone block was twice a man’s weight and awkward, with no proper handholds. Gravity and friction on the sides of the hole fought the Gael’s strength. Human muscles won the struggle, raising the block with a grating snarl.

Spinning as his knees straightened, letting the stone’s inertia carry the weight past him, Cormac rose from the hole. He released his burden at a calculated moment. The great hexagon smashed down on the welded mass of what had been Creon’s device of power, crushing the ruin flat with a few additional sputters.

Cormac snatched up his shield, drew his sword, and dropped feet first into the tunnel beneath.

* * *

The ground—the pavement—was a full eight feet below the tunnel’s brick ceiling. The savages were folk of moderate height, even though they weren’t stunted like their kin who served the Greeks. Cormac wondered how they’d been able to lift a massive slab so high above their heads—then remembered the wand. The price for its power was a high one, but that power was real.

The tunnel was a drain, choked at its inner end by silt and rubble swept down on storm waters. The lower end, leading to a greater cavern beyond, had been cleared in the immediate past sufficiently to pass a line of hastening warriors. The dirt was freshly turned, and a copper-headed mattock stuck in the wall. Its shaft had broken when the user tried to lever out a stone which was actually part of the masonry.

Cormac followed his swordpoint from the tunnel.

The light he had seen came from the coat of fungus which slimed the floor and stone columns of the vast world that opened before him. The roof, forty—fifty—sixty feet above the sloping floor, was covered in metal which repelled the fungus.

Ripples across the ceiling indicated that the metal had been twisted fiercely at some time in the past; some of the support pillars had a shaken look. Pumps sighed like mighty lungs in the unguessed distance.

This underworld had been a vast dockyard in the time before the fall of Atlantis. Ramps, now dry save for the fungus, slanted upward from channels to central quays. The sloping surfaces were meant to hold vessels drawn out of the water. A fleet that could have required docks of such extent was—

Was beyond present conception, even for a reiver who had travelled as widely as Cormac Mac Art.

There was no sign of the ships. If they had been docked here at the moment of collapse, then millennia had finished the business of destruction. Fungus lay smooth on the ramps, without so much as a mound to indicate where vessels had been berthed in the dim past.

The channels were twenty feet deep, sufficient for ships of greater draft than any which coursed the seas of Cormac’s age. The water had vanished, drained or pumped away when magic ripped the citadel from its proper time and space. Cormac wondered at the power which circulated air and water in this trap that held him; but, like the false sun lighting the surface above, it was a matter beyond his immediate interest.

First he would find and free Wulfhere. Then they would escape. Nothing else mattered.

The savages’ trail was easy to follow in the disturbed fungus. They’d crossed a channel, then turned outward along the axis of a quay. Weapons and equipment were scattered at the bottom of the channel. The surface was trampled in a broad circle as though there had been a battle.

Cormac thought there were no bodies, until he noticed that a human forearm lay where fungus had been kicked up in a wave. The bones were crushed at both wrist and elbow ends.

The illumination was deceptive. Because the glow was weak and shadowless, Cormac found it hard to judge distances. He thought he saw movement to his right side. He poised with his buckler advanced, but it was only a vertical slash across a pillar’s coating. The slanting mark seemed to move when the Gael caught it in the corner of his eye.

Half of a woman’s body lay a hundred yards from the mouth of the drainage tunnel. Her torso had been chewed away, but the legs were still joined to the pelvis. The head had fallen twenty yards further along the track.

The woman’s features were shrunken with age; milky cataracts closed both eyes. She’d already been dead or next breath from dead when some creature devoured her body.

Cormac jogged on, planting his boots squarely to keep from slipping on the glowing slime. Echoes passed strangely among the channels and pillared aisles. The pump’s sighing was overlaid by a quavering note that might have been either a harmonic or a completely unconnected sound. Occasionally he felt a rumble so deep that it seemed bowel-loosening vibration rather than noise.

As the Gael strode forward, he kept an eye out for signs of whatever had eaten the savage’s body. “The Guardian” Creon and his daughter spoke of, no doubt; but they had given no description. There were no tracks in the fungus coating. Was the creature winged?

Cormac glanced up—and saw, reflected in the smooth metal ceiling, the pattern that had eluded him at ground level. Curving ripples marked the fungus, each a yard long and nested together into a fuzzy line. He’d assumed they were caused by stress markings in the quay.

A similar track paralleled the first, five yards farther from the path the savages had worn. The nests of arcs faced one another, concave sides to concavities. Something many-legged and fifteen feet wide had followed the raiders as they returned through the tunnels.

A human leg lay on the stone where it had dribbled from jaws that bolted the remainder of the corpse. The muscles were shrunken with age and more than age, like those of the chieftain who struggled with Cormac in the palace. The savages were using the wand to fend off their pursuer—and the wand was using them up.

Farther along the track were fragments of another body, too shredded to determine even the species had not Cormac known it must be human. Corpses the wand of power had drained would provide little further sustenance.

As he neared the rim of this bubble world, Cormac found increasing evidence of the damage done when Atlantis submerged. Pillars were twisted on their axes. Some remained staggeringly upright only because of the weight of the ceiling sagging upon them. The metal sheathing was buckled in ridges as much as a foot deep, tracing the curve of ancient Shockwaves.

Purple-green light swelled in the near distance. A column had collapsed, dragging with it a section of the surface above. Dirt and rubble lay in a broad ramp toward the world above, though its top lay thirty feet below the hole in the ceiling.

The bones of large animals lay in and near the mound of debris. Half-buried and half-crumbling was the skull of an elephant with a curving tusk longer than that of its kin in Cormac’s day. The other tusk was broken off short. Beasts from the ring island had stumbled into the pit and been killed by the fall, just as happened regularly in sinkholes in the world beyond Atlantis.

A purple-green blur tinging the pillars far to Cormac’s right suggested there were other, similar tears in the cavern’s fabric. He couldn’t guess at the total, two or three or possibly scores.

But whatever the number of such pitfalls, they provided sufficient food to keep
something
alive for a very long time.

Cormac started up the tumbled ramp, though he didn’t know how he would deal with the thirty-foot gap between the top of it and the surface. He didn’t have materials for a grapnel. Perhaps he could improvise something with strips of clothing and his dagger . . .

Clicks, rapid and increasingly loud, came from the glowing vagueness. Echoes hid the direction of approach. Cormac pivoted on his left heel, keeping his buckler close to his body and his swordarm cocked at his side to slash or stab.

A centipede the size of a nightmare curled like a tidal wave over the ramp toward him.

Cormac shouted, thrust out his shield, and whipped his longsword around in an overarm cut. He might as well have slashed at a landslide.

The creature had one feathery antenna and a stump where the other should have been. Its mouth parts were multiple, side-hinged, and hideous. Mandibles dripping a corrosive poison stabbed out, the right glancing along the steel boss of Cormac’s buckler as the other thrust toward his chest.

Cormac’s sword rang against the centipede’s headshield and rebounded, though the edge left a scar on the chitinous armor. There were other scars, some of them fresh. The blow did nothing to prevent the mandible from striking.

Cormac’s mail held, but the ribs beneath were those bruised or cracked during the fight in Antheia’s suite. Pain was a white blur that shifted the universe out of focus. Cormac’s sword swung again unaffected.

The centipede’s eyes were in clumps of six to either side of its armored head. The Gael’s steel edge crushed through the lenses of three of the left-hand cluster, splashing clear ichor. The creature’s weight rammed Cormac backward off the ramp.

The centipede was a jointed tube, six feet in diameter and longer than the Gael could guess under the circumstances. The legs, one pair to each body segment, splayed out to either side. Their joints sprouted hairs as coarse as tiger whiskers.

Each leg was tipped by a pair of pincers the size of blacksmith’s shears. The creature lifted the front of its body so that the first trio of leg pairs remained free to grip its prey.

Cormac fell on his back. He screamed and chopped sideways with the edge of his shield, clearing two of the pincers fumbling at his mail. The creature’s mandibles drew back for another attempt. Behind them plates of chitin clashed and spread, their margins jagged to serve as teeth.

Cormac thrust upward into the mouth. The jaw plates closed on his sword, gripping it firmly. Steel shrieked as the Gael drove the point further by main force.

The centipede tossed its head and flung Cormac thirty feet in the air. He bounced off the creature’s curving back, then crashed down onto the heap of rubble. His helmet flew into the cavern. He still held his sword and, for a wonder, his buckler.