The shock of frigid water calmed the madness that screamed through her frightened senses. Sputtering for breath, the girl shot back to the inky surface-awareness of her situation coining to her now. The current of the underground river was quite strong, although its depth seemed considerable and it flowed without turbulence for all its swiftness. Morgain was a good swimmer and rode the current without struggling-bobbing upon the midnight surface like a bit of flotsam in the Styx.
The current tended to draw her away from the shore, which may have been just as well. The slime-coated, polished stone of the deeply carven shoreline would have been impossible to climb over if she wanted to regain the nightmare-haunted cavern from which she had just fled-and in the impenetrable darkness, the current could dash her against the unseen rocks with killing force.
Morgain could see neither bank of the river, had no conception how broad or how deep it might be. For all that, she had no idea where the river was flowing-whether out of the caverns or deeper into the earth, perhaps to plunge into some bottomless abyss. The thought was of minor interest, inasmuch as she would have dived into frothing rapids or ravenous maelstrom to escape the unseen shapes that had stalked her in the cavern.
It came to the girl as she drifted with the current, that she must eventually tire of treading water. Before then she must reach the invisible shoreline-or drown.
The scales tipped toward the latter with each passing minute. The chill current numbed her aching flesh, steadily sapped the remaining dregs of her strength. A strong swimmer might breast the current and eventually clamber back onto the shore. Morgain had been on the brink of collapse at the moment she tumbled into the river. Even the minimal effort necessary to keep her head above water taxed her failing strength. With each swirling league, the icy chill of the river seeped into her body, and her limbs were leaden weights that pushed feebly against the relentless current.
Drowning, so Morgain had heard, was an easy death. The girl had never thought to put this platitude to the test, although now that the likelihood crept upon her, it was a far cleaner death than others she had barely escaped here. Already in her numbed state she no longer winced from the lire of her flogged flesh, the ache of fatigued limbs. It would be very easy just to stop this useless struggle to remain afloat, let her mind go numb, let the black waters drag her down.
Remember, when you were young? How you shone in the sun…
No sun here. Endless night. Like death.
And now you’ve grown old. And your skin is so cold…
So cold…
A mouthful of water strangled her, brought the girl sputtering back to the surface. The third time, so it’s said, you don’t come back up. Morgain wondered why it had to be three times.
It occurred to her that she did not want to die. That discovery brought forth another desperate outpouring of energy-wrung forth like the final bits of moisture from an empty wineskin. For a while she kept afloat, thinking of wine and its warmth.
Not mulled wine but icy water now filled her mouth. Choking, Morgain again pushed her leaden body to the surface. Twice. Her last moments of life now. Third time you stay down.
Or was it third time you stay up? Morgain could not be certain any longer. Just now she watched herself sitting by the fire in the great hall in Baal-dor. There was a roaring fire, and she was telling Bran that drowning was too cold a way to die, and that after three times…
Then something seized her leaden body and dragged her violently beneath the surface.
18
DEATHSONG
Hopelessness is an iron cell, lost and buried beneath the floor of hell; where the king who wore the iron crown, shall lose his soul far underground.
Bran Mak Morn never thought it would end this way…
Death had been his constant shadow ever since the day a youth with wild dreams of glory had followed the swords of the Wolf clan southward to daunt a mighty empire. Death had become too much a part of the Piers life for it to concern him overmuch. A mountaineer who daily scales cloud-locked heights and sheer precipices has no fear of heights, although he knows some day there will be a misstep.
Bran’s greatest fear was that he might die before his dream could be won. Beyond that, death in battle was a risk to which he gave little thought. He knew he would die before the Romans could ever take him alive. Bran Mak Morn would never gasp out his life on the Roman Cross, or be dragged m captive chains through the streets of Rome, as was the sorry fate of Caratacus.
Death here, at the hands of the Worms of the Earth, was a doom that left him sick and cold-a dismal fate he would not accept. And infinitely worse-to die with the knowledge that his soulless shell would return to take up his iron crown, to make Bran Mak Morn the foulest traitor to Pictdom in the eons-spanning history of the race.
As the hours dragged on, it came to Bran Mak Morn that there would be no escape from this doom. That realization was beyond any enduring. Desperately Bran sought to deny the inevitable, to defy the workings of fate through sheer force of will. When the final futility of his struggle was borne upon him, Bran Mak Morn would go mad.
Fate.
A web meticulously woven by the omniscient gods, or spun to the demented fancy of a laughing horde of mad devils? Was man’s life a predestined course, or a twisted path that wandered through the chaos of blind chance? Fortune or destiny, it matters nothing to man. Man is trapped by the impersonal malice of the gods he hates. Man is helpless victim of the blind and chaotic workings of chance. Chaos or the gods, either way man is the toy of powers beyond his comprehension. Only a few men have ever seized control of fate, and in doing so they called down both the hatred of the gods and the malice of chance. Fate.
And Bran Mak Morn sat in an iron cell in the dungeons of hell, and vowed to fate that this doom should not be…
Ssrhythssaa had taken the Black Stone and withdrawn to some secret abode wherein he and the witchwoman now conferred over the exquisite preparations for the incantation that would destroy his soul. That the Black Stone held such power, Bran did not doubt. He understood some vague hints as to the powers of unthinkable transmutation contained in the daggerlike glyphs etched into the hexagonal faces of this alien survival of Elder Earth, when the gods were more direct in their mad jests upon mankind.
The power was there. But Ssrhythssaa was uncertain, afraid of failure. Failure that might completely blast the man he sought to control-destroy life along with will. The difficulty and the danger must be extreme-or the ancient serpent-wizard would not have turned to it as a last resort, after the Pictish king had seen through his guile and sneered at his threats.
It gave Bran a grim sense of triumph. He had driven Ssrhythssaa to the desperate limits of his dark powers. That the wizard had held this until the last, that he even now devoted hours of intense study to the spell-meant that Ssrhythssaa feared failure in this final ploy.
Invoking the power of the Black Stone to destroy the Pict’s soul and spare his living flesh, Bran mused, was probably equivalent to attempting to extract an arrowpoint lodged close to the heart through one mighty stroke of a two-handed sword. Possible, perhaps-but…
And knowing that failure for the serpent-wizard meant certain death for Bran Mak Morn, the Pict earnestly prayed that Ssrhythssaa would fail. That faint hope, for death instead of soulless slavery, held Bran’s mind from shattering as the hours stretched bleakly on.