The wan starlight seemed almost glaring after the impenetrable blackness of the abyss. Dawn must not be far off, Morgain decided, for she sensed that she had lain in a stupor for some hours. Unsteadily the girl picked her way over the shallow bar of gravel, struggled atop a spur of tumbled boulders to see if she might orient herself. A sharp pang stabbed through her side with each lurching movement. Morgain had no clear memory of receiving an injury, but she guessed there were a few cracked ribs, if nothing worse.
The stars seemed to be dimming as she worshipped the night skies. Either dawn was stealing their light, or else her eyes were growing accustomed to their glow-if such reverse acclimation were possible. Morgain stood on a rising mound of stream-washed boulders, overlooking the narrow valley of a rushing mountain torrent. The escarpment rose black and close at either bank of the river. Morgain could discover no break in the rock face of the cliffs that might demarcate the point of emergence of the underground river. Either she had been washed downstream for some distance without realizing she was in the open water, or presumably the buried river fed this mountain stream through some underwater cavern.
A thick boskage of birch and pine clotted the floor of the gorge. Bracken clothed the banks of the stream, and blooming clusters of heather climbed the steep slopes of the ravine. The Highlands of Caledon, clear enough. Morgain smiled for the first time in an age. No matter where in the Highlands. She would follow the river until she came upon some Pictish dwelling.
Climbing down from her vantage, the girl painfully made her way along the fern-fringed river bank, skirting the jumbled piles of boulder and floodstranded drift. Several hours of deep sleep had restored her somewhat, and the starry vision of the free Highlands gave her new strength. Nonetheless, she longed to drag her wounded body into the shelter of bracken and stretch out on the soft earth there, sleep for a day or until hunger awakened her. But it seemed wisest to work her way downstream, put as much distance between herself and the watery egress from the caverns of the Children of the Night as possible.
The stars now had definitely grown dim. It was the intense darkness that foreshadowed the dawn. Otherwise Morgain might earlier have caught sight of the mound of stone that she limped toward along the winding gorge. She at last made out its vague outline bulking up from the base of the escarpment and against the pitch-black skies. A huge mound of broken stone-but this was not the work of nature.
It was a cairn.
And Morgain knew she was in Serpent Gorge.
Ghosts no longer had power to terrify her. Not after she had wandered through the mazes of hell. Morgain repressed a shudder not born of the cold wind, and resolutely picked her way past the silent cairn.
The cairn was not entirely silent. A spill of gravel spun Morgain about with a gasp.
Two-three-no, more! Shapes in Roman armor suddenly loomed up from the thin ground-mist. They were cutting her off.
Ghosts! Legend told that the cairn in Serpent Gorge was haunted by the ghosts of the massacred Ninth Legion.
Or Romans-living Romans! The ruined camp had been under construction not far from here. Stragglers, or fresh troops sent to avenge the massacre.
Morgain started to dash through them-saw that she was cut off. She whirled around. No retreat either.
There was not so little starlight now that she could fail to notice how their eyes gleamed amber in the false dawn. Morgain knew then these were worse than Romans, shades or flesh.
“Why Morgain, you seem to be lost,” observed Claudius Nero.
20
PROSERPINA AND DIS
“You are a very resourceful woman, Morgain,” stated Claudius Nero with sardonic admiration. “Either it is true that Picts are harder to kill than cats, or fortune has made a favorite of you.”
Morgain had her own impressions as to the whims of fortune just then, but chose not to voice them.
“You are also a very beautiful woman, Morgain.” The admiration was unfeigned.
Conscious of the legate’s frank scrutiny, and of the circle of his inhuman soldiers, Morgain felt her skin crawl from a deeper chill than the night winds. Concealment was as unpossible as escape. She reminded herself that she was the sister of the King of Pictdom, and did not cringe-returned his personal appraisal with chin high, eyes level and aloof. The girl stood proud and fierce as some bird of prey.
“Proserpina,” Nero mused aloud, recalling a favorite legend. “And Ssrhythssaa is a fool. You shall not be bait for the Great Old One.”
To Morgain’s astonishment, the legate unpinned the cloak from his shoulders. She stood very straight and still, as he came close, wrapped his woolen cloak about her bare shoulders, fastened it with a gold pin. Morgain’s eyes flashed in wonder.
“Proserpina must not take a chill,” Nero told her. “Do you know the story of Proserpina and Dis?” Morgain shook her head, drawing the cloak tighter about her body. She had not realized how cold she was.
“No?” Nero’s voice was strange. “All the better, for I shall presently tell you their tale.”
He gestured to his men, and they fell in behind her. “I think it best to go back now,” Nero hissed. “I have been able to accustom myself to endure the touch of the sun at dawn, but some of my command are less accomplished than I. This way, if you will,” he invited with irony.
A section of what appeared to be sheer rock pivoted outward from the base of the escarpment, not far from the cairn that marked the doom of Legio IX Hispana. Darkness and the mephitic taint of the serpent folk oozed from the gaping doorway.
A Door to Those Below, Morgain reflected as she followed Claudius Nero. Mother of the Moon, how many more such hidden portals were there, where the vermin of hell could issue forth to poison the clean land of heather and moor! Was the entire earth but a hollow and crumbling shell, beneath which waited the realm of nightmare and shadow? Morgain knew that if by chance she lived to walk the Highlands of Caledon again, she would forever wonder how fragile was the shell of reality over which she trod.
The last of Nero’s legionaries entered the tunnel, and behind them the door swung shut. Back within my tomb, Morgain mused morbidly, deriving some scant relief from the torch that someone set flaming.
“Unlike our dwarfish kinsmen who skulk within the nether caverns, we still find use for light,” Claudius Nero told her, with a trace of pride that Morgain marked.
“I rather thought you might have escaped the crawlers,” Nero remarked as they walked along. “We trailed you to where you had blundered into their lair. There was a great mess of carnage where the crawlers had feasted-and a trace of blood-smeared footprints that ran to the shore of the river, that only I saw. I sent word to Ssrhythssaa that you had been eaten by the crawlers, then passed through the caverns to where I knew the river must cast you forth, if you still lived.”
“What were… the crawlers?” Morgain asked reluctantly, unable to deny her curiosity.
“Some more of one thing, some of another,” Nero said evasively. “But I forget you could not have seen those who hunted you beside the river.
“The People of the Dark have sunk far into the slime of devolution-deeper than Ssrhythssaa dares admit. There have been certain mutations, monstrous couplings with other creatures of the abyss. Certain of the offspring have escaped to lair in the unused sections of the caverns-feasting on carrion and fungi, breeding still more loathsome monstrosities. Were it mine to command, I should have exterminated them all. Ssrhythssaa finds them amusing.”