“I must be hearing more of this matter… that creature has no face!”
“Ye’ve said Tarmur Roag knows of our presence here, and was he hurled those stones though he be not here to see us.”
“I wore this chain,” Dithorba said, picking it up. “He saw ye through my eyes-whether I held them open or closed. But-”
“Ye spoke of his sending weapon-men,” Cormac reminded. “Mayhap we’d best be getting ourselves elsewhere for talking.”
Dithorba’s eyes widened and he blinked. “Aye! There’s been so much, so fast… it had actually fled my mind. Aye-armed men will be here in minutes!” And with those words, Dithorba Loingsech vanished.
Chapter Eleven:
The Dungeon of Moytura
Wulfhere Skull-splitter rose from a denuded corpse. He held a tunic of some thin, shining cloth of a pearly opaline hue. “Here, girl, ye can don this or make covering of it-though I seem to have slipped with my dagger, and made a slit or two in places.” Then as he turned his grin faded and he blinked. “Where-Cormac! What’s happened to him we loosed?”
“He… disappeared,” Cormac said dully.
This time Erris’s concern was for covering herself, not the vanished mage or the manner of its accomplishment. She went naked to Wulfhere, took the tunic with a tiny word of thanks, and stepped past him. Though she’d been naked when they found her and but a few minutes agone denuded herself anew to clothe the queen’s adviser, she now kept her back turned while she slipped the soft, thin fabric of the tunic over her head.
“Thor’s beautiful red beard,” Wulfhere said, “but I’d love to be asea again, facing only such trifles as gales, whirlpools, a few boatloads of ravening Frisians and Norse, and a simple sea-monster or three!”
Cormac looked at the other man with complete empathy.
Erris came to the side of the Dane, and looked up; the man towered a foot and a half above her. “Again I make thanks to you for my clothing, my lord Wulfhere-though your accidental slip of the dagger bares both my legs to the waist!”
Before either man could comment, Dithorba was among them again.
Exclamations greeted his reappearance; none was fully coherent. The loinclothed man in Cormac’s cloak lifted bony hands for silence.
“I have been to my own chamber in the palace. It has been searched, and is empty. They have not found my secret room, though, and I took not even time to clothe myself. Erris! Come-we must show them how Dithorba travels!”
Erris drew back, though Cormac saw that there was more nervousness on her than fear. Dithorba stretched forth a hand; slowly one of hers reached out to take it. Bony, wrinkled old fingers gripped smooth young ones no less white. There was no warning, no fading; the two Danans merely vanished. Cormac and Wulfhere jerked at the popping sound, as of two palms slapping together.
The two weapon-men looked at each other.
And Dithorba was back. He stretched forth a hand. “Cormac mac Art. Come.”
“What… what have ye done, man? Where are ye after being?”
“I’ve told you. My secret room in the palace is far from here. There Erris is safe and not unhappy that her handsome thighs are bared; there we can talk and plan. Come.”
“Ye… ye have the ability to… to move yourself, by… some cantrip?”
Dithorba shrugged bony shoulders on which Cormac’s cloak hung like a sail on a windless day. “Time grows short. I can take with me but one at a time. No, no spells or cantrips. I have… such ability to travel. I merely will myself to be elsewhere; someplace I have been and can see in my mind. And I am there. It’s my life you’re after saving, son of the Gaels; I cannot do harm on you! Come.”
Cormac looked at Wulfhere. The giant’s mighty chest heaved a great sigh.
“Methinks it’s either that we trust him, battlebrother, or remain here and see how many of Tarmur Roag’s Danans we can slay ere they give us our deaths.”
“I see which of ye counsels well,” Dithorba said, and Wulfhere grinned.
Cormac did not essay to answer the unanswerable. He took the Danan’s small, dry old hand.
He knew an instant of complete mental dissociation, as though his brain were aswirl amid blinding sulphurous mists that would swallow it and choke him to death… and then his legs were jarred badly, as though he’d taken a downward step when he’d surmised himself on level ground. He straightened, feeling the spinning of his brain, the tingling that ran up his legs. As if coming from the dark into the light, he became aware-and was looking at Erris.
“A law should be passed to force ye to wear a tunic such, slitted to your waist,” he told her inanely, and was instantly aware of it, for his brain had not yet been his own. He looked about.
He was elsewhere.
Dithorba had brought him hence from the chamber outside Moytura as swiftly and simply as that, and he was none the worse for the instantaneous transfer. They were in another room of stone, this one decorated and with a floor of handsome, well-fitted stones, smoothly polished. The walls were hung with draperies in rust-red bordered with silver; the cloth was the same fine, scintillant stuff of which Erris’s tunic was made-and indeed, Dithorba’s breechclout as well. Shelves and niches and an alcove had been fashioned into the stone itself; in them rested utensils and clothing, various closed pots and caskets of assorted sizes. There squatted a stone table; there a bench onto which were bound red pillows, there another, its pillows of blue. Light illuminated the room, without apparent source. Nor was Dithorba present-
But he was, and with Thulsa Doom.
“The giant bade me bring this one first-he’s nigh attacked!” Dithorba said, and was not there.
Without patience or peace of mind Cormac waited, and then here was Dithorba once more, with Wulfhere Hausakluifr. The Dane grunted; his legs bent and he nearly fell. Cormac saw that the shorter Dithorba had miscalculated for them both; Wulfhere had been conveyed here at a level different from the Danan and like Cormac had… arrived off balance.
“We must not talk loudly, though as ye see, this chamber has no door. It is most privately mine; to my knowledge none other in Moytura possesses my ability to mind-travel. Yet we can be heard, for my apartment is just beyond that wall and through that one is a guardpost. Too, none can be sure of Tarmur Roag’s power; a man who either raised a lamia or created the queen’s exact likeness, even unto the voice and mannerisms, is not one to wager lives against. Finally… even stone walls can be broke through, should we be heard.”
In seconds the wizard had clothed himself in a robe of the same cloth as the draperies that mitigated the cold grey roughness of stone walls. Cormac was able to assume that lichens existed here within the earth; the robe’s purple must have resulted from the action of stale urine on such growths. The rust colour of the drapes, he supposed, came from just that: rust, or the paint-stone from which came iron. The sleeves of Dithorba’s robe, which fell past his ankles, were round, open, and three-quarters the length of his arms. Wulfhere paid him no mind, but was staring unashamedly though shamelessly at Erris. She appeared not to notice, which Cormac mac Art assumed was a pose.
Behind a drape Dithorba opened a wooden door; from within that little chamber he drew forth a leathern bag. It sloshed; Erris lost Wulfhere’s attention. Soon the three men were appreciatively wetting their throats with ale, at which Erris turned up her nose. Under other circumstances so might Cormac have done; the stuff was hardly of the best and he feared to ask what served as grain, beneath the earth where no sun shone.
“I ask again, son of Gaels. Why came you two here?”
“A wizard stalks this world, all the world, like a plotting spider,” Cormac said. He pointed at the long dark robe surmounted by the head of death itself. “Thulsa Doom. Anciently dead he is and raiser of the dead; master of illusion and enemy of all men; a servant of the serpent god he is, time out of mind.” And he told Dithorba of the wizard who was dead and yet not dead, and how they believed he could be slain for good and all. “Only the Chains of Danu hold him at bay now, or he’d be snarling like an animal-and worse.”