The Great Old One was somewhat like a giant serpent and somewhat like a monstrous slug. Long and limbless, it crawled forward on a silver trail of slime. Bran guessed it was at least two hundred feet in length and almost twenty feet thick at its broadest-it was impossible to judge because the monster seemed to have no more skeleton than a worm, and its rubbery bulk seemed to stretch and hump upon itself. Eyes there were none, nor any recognizable organs of perception. Countless fleshy tentacles and palpi of unguessable nature surrounded its great circular maw, giving it something of the aspect of a sea anemone. Bran saw that certain of these tentacles were armed with adamantine claws, some with rows of rasp-fanged suckers. Further, it seemed to be able to issue long, whip-like tentacles from its head at will, much as a snail thrusts forth its horns.
A great shout echoed from the mist below. And the ordered ranks of Legio IX Infernalis marched forward against the sundered wall of Baal-dor.
Slowly, as if confused by the starlight whose constellations had so shifted since the age of its birth, the Great Old One lowered its actinian head and oozed forth from its burrow. Its cable-like tentacles flickered in the manner of a serpent’s tongue toward the retreating Picts. A score of bodies lay crushed by falling debris. Fleshy palpi gripped and tore. The hell-worm feasted.
Bran’s driving leadership overmastered total panic by the thinnest of margins. Bawling commands, he sought to direct his men’s attention to the advancing legion-its menace all but forgotten in the hell-worms dread attack.
Arrows by the score sank feather-deep into the creature’s rubbery flesh. The hell-worm gave no discoverable response to the tiny shafts. A few daring warriors flung themselves against its sides, hewing with swords and spears. The slower ones were crushed beneath the creature’s unfeeling bulk, or torn to pieces by the darting tentacles, stuffed screaming into its grinding maw.
Mindlessly seeking its prey, the feasting maw swung after the retreating Picts. Either through blind hunger or the guidance of whatever powers commanded it, the hell-worm would have the walls stripped bare of all defenders in the space of a few minutes.
Then, from where Bran had ordered them trained on this section of wall, the two scorpions slammed their tails vengefully. Twin trails of flame arced from the catapults, and fire spilled across the night.
Bran’s desperate hope to halt the monster from the sunless abyss, a leviathan against which their arrows and blades were less than pinpricks-fire.
At Gonar’s direction they had prepared great bales of tinder, soaked with melted pitch and nitre. Ignited and flung from the scorpions’ slings, the fireballs flared to incandescence in their flight-bursting into countless clinging fragments of flame when they struck the hell-worm.
This time the nightmare shape reared in silent agony. Sputtering flame ate into its pallid flesh. The air filled with a yet more nauseating stench of charring corruption. Rubbery tentacles lashed at the clinging gobbets of burning pitch, drew back in baffled pain.
As quickly as their crew could remind, the scorpions lashed out again. Another direct hit, the other fireball burst upon the torn earth beneath the monster’s contorted bulk.
Emboldened by the creature’s agony, Picts darted close to hurl buckets of oil onto the convulsing coils. Men were ground into the dirt, flung a hundred feet through the air-but blotches of yellow flame licked across the slime-coated flesh. Another fireball burst against the monster.
Legion From The Shadows 229
In mortal agony, the hell-worm was deadlier than ever. Striking aimlessly, its diamond-rasped maw chewed off great hunks of rampart; its writhing tentacles tore men into tatters. Fire burned across its flesh in a dozen places, and its throes of agony shattered a tower from the wall, crushed scores of fleeing Picts.
They rushed upon it undaunted-flinging more oil, slashing with useless blades. The field of this nightmarish struggle between man and elder horror was ablaze from a score of fires, littered with smashed and torn bodies. Inconceivably huge, the hell-worm could not be killed. But the etching flames tormented it-perhaps terrified it, if the mindless leviathan could understand fear.
By chance-or had the enraged monster sought to snap at its enemy?-a fireball struck the monster full in the writhing mass of its actinian head. The earth shook under its colossal convulsions, as the creature flung its head about in insane agony-only fanning the pitch-nitre mixture to greater heat. Smouldering lengths of palpi rained down on the milling attackers.
It was enough. Whatever commands had directed the hell-worm to the surface world, that power failed now. Trailing yellow flame and great clouds of reeking smoke, the hell-worm turned away from the Picts and their fires. In frenzied spasms it crawled back to the ruined wall, plunged its smouldering head into the gaping crater-and dragged its charred coils back down its slime-festooned burrow to earth’s secret abysses.
The Picts howled in triumph. Dying or only singed, the Great Old One had been driven away by apish savages with mankind’s oldest weapon. Scores of their comrades lay dead. It had been a costly victory.
It was about to prove too costly.
Advancing under ineffectual fire-it was impossible for the archers along the walls to concentrate on their duty while the hell-worm ravened in their midst-the legionaries had gained the earthworks. No sooner had the hell-worm dragged itself into its burrow than the van of Legio IX was streaming through the breach in the wall.
Bran Mak Morn whirled from bellowing frantic orders to the distracted defenders-only now remembering that steel can kill as surely as hell-worm’s coils. From behind him, shouts and clamour of combat resounded from within Baal-dor.
Bran swore. Nero’s men could never have staged an assault from that quarter. The cliffs fell in a sheer wall to the river far below.
A runner dashed toward him from that unseen melee. “Milord!” the man blurted. “They’re springing up out of the earth! From some sort of tunnel they’ve mined beneath the wall of the ruined tower! Romans with snake-heads! Hundreds of them!”
Bran’s heart went cold. He had committed all but a skeleton force to this quarter of the citadel. And Nero had come upon him from the rear through the passage no amount of searching had uncovered since the night of Morgain’s abduction.
“Grom!” he ordered rapidly. “Take my personal guard! Destroy these burrowing vermin, and seal off their rats hole!”
“Milord Bran!” Grom protested. “What of you…?”
“Do as I say!” Bran snarled. “And hurry! They’ll butcher the women and children! I’ll stay here to try to hold the wall! Get moving, damn you!”
He turned to the black-robed sorceror, who carried no weapon other than his ashen quarterstaff “Gonar, go back with them. There’s nothing for you to do here. See to Morgain! If Baal-dor falls, don’t let them take her!”
Ignoring further protest, the Pictish king dashed for the breach. He had counted on his personal guard as a reserve unit to counter such a thrust as this against the wall’s harried defenders, but the attack from the hidden tunnel demanded priority. If Nero carried this second front, he would have the Picts in a vise.
Already the situation on the wall seemed hopeless. While the Picts battled the hell-worm, Claudius Nero had carried the ditches and earthworks almost without resistance. Too late the defenders concentrated their arrows on the armored tide. Moving under upraised shields, the legionaries toiled past the earthworks and through the sundered wall.