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    A low ridge of fallen rock afforded scant shelter from anyone entering onto the gallery, barring a careful search of the entire ledge. Bran stretched out behind this covert and forced himself to wait. It was torture to lie here, doing nothing, thinking of Morgain’s plight. Action of any sort would be infinitely preferable, but Bran knew he could do no more than this-wait here for Morgain until he had reason to do otherwise.

    Despite the discomfort of his cramped position and his proximity to the hell-worm’s burrow, Bran found that he was nodding. It had been hours since he last slept-and fatigue sapped his strength. The Pict decided it would be wise to catch such sleep as he could. He would need all his strength and more in the hours to come, and Bran’s savage reflexes were such that any faint stirring within this pit of hell would snap him to instant alertness.

    Sleep came to him quickly-deep slumber that soothed the ravages of his ordeal. Here on the brink of hell’s abyss, Bran knew less troubled slumber than any in recent months.

    And in his slumber he dreamed he came upon old Gonar…

    The wizard’s face was strained with exhaustion and concern. “Bran!” he cried. “So you yet live! I’ve tried to reach you for more than two days.”

    “I’m here, old one,” Bran told him. He had spoken with the tattooed wizard on other nights through the portals of dream-once in Eboracum when Gonar pleaded in vain for him to abandon his ill-starred search for a Door to Those Below.

    “Where are you, Wolf of the Heather?” Gonar begged, his voice and apparition dimming. “Are you truly in the realm of the living? I see your face only vaguely. It seems to me you lie within the cold flames of hell.”

    “I wait in the lair of the hell-worm for Morgain, old one,” Bran said in dream. “Has my sister returned to the world of heather and sky?”

    “Not so, Bran,” Gonar told him. “Naught has been known of either of you these three days since you left us here in Baal-dor. Your people clamour after you, King Bran. Come back to us. The Romans gather in force in the South to march against us. Pictdom calls for its king.”

    “I’ll not return until I have Morgain safe beside me,” Bran vowed. “My people spoke against me only days ago. Why should I heed them when they now cry out to me?”

    “You are king, Bran Mak Morn. It is a fate you cannot cast away with the doffing of your iron crown. They are your people, and your life belongs to Pictdom.”

    “I shall return to my people if it is within my power,” Bran swore. “But I shall not return alone. I return to the heather with Morgain, or there shall be an end to this curse I have brought upon the line of Mak Morn.”

    “Bran! Come back to us…” Gonar’s voice trailed off. His image vanished as a shadow in the deepening twilight. Bran slept soundly again.

    Since there was no interruption, and his exhaustion had taxed the limits of even his endurance-Bran slept for several hours. Nonetheless, the slight tread of running feet on bare stone-a sound so light most men of civilization could not have heard it even had they concentrated-was a tocsin that jerked the Pict into instant wakefulness.

    Bran gripped his sword and watched the passageway beyond the ledge-down which the faint sounds grew louder. Someone ran toward him. One person alone.

    Liuba burst from the tunnel, dashed recklessly toward his concealment. It seemed to Bran that she must be pursued, but a look at her face stabbed him with a deeper fear.

    “What is it!” he demanded sharply, seeing that she made no attempt at stealth.

    “Morgain!” Liuba gasped. “Your gamble has failed! Ssrhythssaa has taken her to the altar of the Black Stone!”

23

CONSTELLATION

    The cavern of the Black Stone was no longer deserted. The outflung walls were awash with the hordes of the Children of the Night, packed into the temple of their alien god-thing as feasting maggots outflow the confines of a corrupt skull.

    Skulls blazed with uncanny luminescence, a cairn of cold flame that limned an eerie nimbus for the hexahedral crystal of elder evil that crowned the pyramid. Two of the iron cages had been placed in the hellish glow of the altar. Neither were the cages deserted any longer.

    Morgain stood against the bars of one cage. She felt a macabre sense of dйjа vu that might have been amusing had it not the elements of recurrent nightmare. Stripped naked, the girl stoically returned the stare of unnumbered pairs of glowing yellow eyes-musing, with the part of her mind that held out against the waves of mindless terror, that it was as if she stood nude amidst the cloudless sky of stars. The maidens of the constellations must feel this way-although she was not a maiden, and neither was this the heavens.

    In the other cage coiled a mammoth serpent whose pallid scales turned a ghostly reflection of the scintillant fire of the altar. Snared in some hidden den beneath the earth, the serpent had never known the touch of the sun. Thick as a man’s thigh and twenty feet in length, the reptile stirred anxiously in the unaccustomed glare of light, its black tongue flickering in a long caress of the iron bars.

    The precisely formed ranks of several hundreds of Claudius Nero’s legionaries were islands of order in the chaotic hordes of the serpent-folk. Stiffened to attention, the half-humans with their Roman armor filled a section of the crowded cavern. Beneath stolen helmets, their inhuman faces were turned toward the altar of the Black Stone and to the pair of cages that stood in the circle of lambent verdigris.

    Claudius Nero clenched his pointed jaw and tried not to look at the face of Morgain. His angry eyes sought Atla beside him, and death made an amber flame.

    “It wasn’t me!” Atla whispered, her face tight with fear. “He already knew.”

    Probably true, Nero realized. According to his men, the wrathful serpent-wizard had stormed into the praetorium well before Atla could have told him of Morgain’s presence in the legate’s chambers. Nonetheless, in his helpless rage, Nero let the witch suffer his vengeful glare.

    The two of them stood before the iron cages, in the fore of the thousands who gathered about the altar of the Black Stone. Their attitude was anxious, as was the aspect of the legionaries-that of errant children awaiting the stern whim of the master.

    His flowing robes a web of gauzy color, Ssrhythssaa poised before the altar. The quick flicker of his tongue over his double-fanged jaws mimicked the caged serpent. The demon-mask visage somehow conveyed the wizard’s deadly wrath-and gloating knowledge of total power.

    Speaking the hissing sibilants of the serpent-folk, Ssrhythssaa harangued the ophidian multitude. Outlined in the eerie radiance of the altar of skulls, the ancient serpent-wizard stood evil and implacable as the arch-demon in the flames of hell.

    The demonic shrilling of the Worms of the Earth echoed his angry tirade. Morgain could not understand a syllable of it. From the cringing stance of Claudius Nero and Atla, she sensed the object of the wizard’s anger.

    Their fall from the wizard’s favor, Morgain realized, did in no way bode well of her own fate. She still shuddered at the memory of Ssrhythssaa’s sudden appearance within the camp of Legio IX Infernalis, of being pulled through the winding passages by the dwarfish serpent-folk, thrown once more into an iron cage in the cavern of the Black Stone. Then the assembly of the People of the Dark and their slaves. She did not like to speculate as to why Ssrhythssaa had summoned them.

    Ssrhythssaa turned to the assembled legionaries now and began to address them in Latin-whether for their better understanding or to impress upon them their degraded position, Morgain could not guess. Her command of Latin was a haphazard thing, Nero had spoken to her in Pictish for the main, but Morgain could follow as much of the wizard’s speech as sufficed to bear out her worst fears.