But Bran remembered the sinister threat that had sent him raging for Atla’s throat. Ignoring the lancing pain, he pulled himself erect, recovered his sword that Claudius Nero had contemptuously thrown down beside him.
“Quickly!” he grated. “Back to the hall! Pray to the gods they’ve not…”
But already a woman’s scream tore through the mists-a rising, keening scream that seemed not to pause for breath as it sought in vain to impart some horror that was beyond human expression.
Heedless of the vertigo that throbbed through his skull, Bran raced across the enclosure. Barely seen obstacles loomed before his lurching rush, but the Pictish king was intent only on reaching the darker mass of the great hall that bulked against the greying skies.
The scream tore endlessly-like the call of some demented banshee.
The postern still stood open, and its glassy-eyed guardsman offered a huge smile of welcome with the raw edges of his slashed throat. Bran hurtled past him and into the horror-reft hall, where already the tramp of feet and gobble of confused voices echoed the tocsin of fear.
Pale faces crowded the hallway beyond the door to Morgain’s chamber. Someone held a lamp high, peering open-mouthed within. Reeling away, a maidservant sputtered in sickness. Bran thrust them all aside and flung himself into his sister’s room.
The endless scream came from the throat of Helta, Morgain’s maidservant, although it took a second look for Bran to recognize the fear-distorted face and the eyes that stared wide with madness. Her stark gaze centered on the shape that sprawled obscenely upon the fur robes of Morgain’s couch.
Bran groaned through clenched teeth. Veins stood out from his blood-caked brow. Staring at the object on Morgain’s bed, the king of Pictdom swayed dizzily, black rage roaring in his brain.
Nestled in the depression in the furs where Bran’s sister had lain to sleep was a shape of horror beyond any human depravity. The young girls skin had been meticulously flayed from her body-cunningly sewn together again. The lamplight made the skin translucent, so that Bran could see the hollow skin had been stuffed with hundreds-many hundreds-of human eyes.
After a black interval-when Bran Mak Morn recognized that the abomination on his sister’s bed was not Morgain, but some other maid-his horror only increased…
8
SECRET ALLIANCES
It was a square of thin parchment, and it had lain upon the breast of the boneless abomination sprawled across Morgain’s bed. The message was in Latin, printed in a careful hand that appeared to be feminine. The finely-grained parchment had also once been feminine.
Q. Claudius Nero to Bran Mak Morn: Having been taken hostage, your sister is being held in my camp. Come alone to the barrow below Kestrel Scaur this night to conclude our compact. Morgain has not been harmed. Fail to comply and it will not be well with her.
Grimly Bran Mak Morn reread the lines that were already indelibly etched in his thoughts. The westering sun gilt the scrap of human skin, and the graceful capitals of russet ink still read the same. Carefully Bran rerolled the parchment and thrust it again into a pouch at his belt. His mount tossed its head and, unbidden, resumed the climb along the slopes where broom and whin blossom clustered yellow and orange among green spears of spring growth.
The grey eminence called Kestrel Scaur was beyond the next ridge. He would reach it before dark.
***
“You go to your death,” old Grom had mourned at his parting.
“I think not,” Bran laughed bitterly. “If they wanted my death, there would have been one more head atop that cairn last night.”
Grom shook his grizzled head. “Then there are worse things waiting for Bran Mak Morn than death.” Gonar understood. The ancient priest’s eyes had glittered strangely while Bran blurted out his confused remembrance of his encounter with Atla and Claudius Nero.
“I thought it was another of the nightmares,” Bran groaned. “By the gods! If it were only nightmare!”
A cairn of rotting heads and the horror in Morgain’s chamber gave hideous proof by daylight…
“You say he called himself legate of the Ninth Legion?” Gonar questioned.
“So he and the witch both said.”
“Bran, I saw the massacre of Legio IX Hispana.”
“Claudius Nero styled his command Legion IX Infernalis. It seemed to him a jest.”
“And he said he served the Black Stone?”
Bran nodded impatiently. “The mystery only deepens,” he said with a curse. “A renegade Roman who claims to command a legion steals into Baal-dor to boast of the massacre of a Roman camp-and who brings with him Atla to talk of an alliance of Pictdom with those who worship the Black Stone. This is madness, Gonar!”
The aged wizard stroked his long beard, eyes lost in thought.
“Madness, perhaps,” he spoke at last. “Or ruthless cunning. This begins to hint of a meticulously wrought plot-albeit inhumanly cruel in its conception.”
“Inhuman, I grant you,” Bran swore. “But I cannot see any coherent conspiracy in this evil nightmare of demented slaughter and impossible coalitions!”
“Can’t you? Ten days ago every blade of Pictdom was behind you. Had you called for an attack on Rome itself, the very hills of Caledon would have followed you to the Tiber. Today all Pictdom murmurs against the unlucky king who has at once called down the wrath of Rome and summoned forth the evil of the Children of the Night. And not even the unassailable walls of Baal-dor are protection against phantoms who can rise from the night to flaunt the trophies of their power-and steal the sister of the king from her own chamber!”
“Enough!” Bran’s face darkened in rage.
Gonar did not relent. “Ten days hence not a hundred blades will remain loyal to Bran Mak Morn. The Pictish nation will break apart like a crystal chalice dropped on stone, nor will you ever again raise the shattered vessel on high!”
“Enough!” Bran roared. “So my hidden enemies have undermined my position! But these came to me claiming friendship. Explain to me now why Roman slays Roman for the weal of Pictland.”
“It is commonplace for Roman to slay Roman,” Gonar responded. “And more evil has been done in the name of friendship than ever blows were struck in open warfare.”
“But a coalition of renegade Romans with the Children of the Night! I know what inhuman hands clutched at me there in the darkness!”
Gonar shrugged. “And it is commonplace for man to become the willing servant of darkness. I can only guess as to the webs of elder evil that have now been spun to enmesh Pict, Roman-and Worm!”
“He said the Ninth Legion,” Bran wondered. “Legion IX lies buried in Serpent Gorge.”
“He said Legion IX Infernalis…”
***
His mount nickered anxiously, recalling Bran from his gloomy musing. Pulling short, Bran gazed upward along the slope below Kestrel Scaur, around which he had been picking his way.
The grey expanse of rock showed stark in the gathering twilight along the horizon. Rising from the shadow beyond the scatter of detritus stood the barrow designated as rendezvous on the square of parchment. Like so many of the tumuli and dolmens of this haunted land, the barrow had no name nor tradition surviving in present memory. Cromlechs and menhirs raised by forgotten hands, barrows and dolmens that entombed unknown bones. The Romans attributed the eerie stone circles to the Druids, but the Celts believed the Picts had raised these megalithic enigmas, and the Picts had discovered them looming over the silent plains when first they came to the Isles.