It was. His skull had been unbroken by the blow; ale and food had done away with his headache, and a pair of bruises were little to him who had fought with far worse wounds and debilities.
“The direct way would seem best, Dithorba. Will you be taking me to the dungeon?”
“Loki’s wiles,” Wulfhere swore, “what a request!” Then he added, to Dithorba, “And return instanter for me.”
“He will not,” Cormac said, while Dithorba fetched a robe to take to his queen, “unless there’s sorest need. Despite the Chains of Danu, Wulfhere-remain ye here… with Erris.” Seeing the Dane’s grin, Cormac added, “-and Thulsa Doom.”
Dithorba came, carrying a robe. Helmeted, cracked shield on arm, sword girt at his left hip, Cormac extended a hand. Dithorba took it; the others saw the two men become not-there, and there was a slapping sound in the ears of Wulfhere and Erris and Thulsa Doom. Again Cormac was experiencing the unpleasant dissociative sensation, the dizzying spinning of his brain. Again he staggered and again temporary bewilderment was on him, as of his just having wakened.
He blinked, came alert, swiftly cleared his head while his hand left the Danan’s and went to the pommel of his sword. There was reality and security and comfort there, in the familiar heat-hardened wood with the cool spots that were insets of bronze and silver, tooled and chiseled and all designed and well shaped for enwrapping fingers.
Hand on hilt, Cormac mac Art looked about.
Here was eldritch gloom. No penetration was effected by the strange light of the moon that was Danu’s property and manifestation. Illumination there was, aye, and of a sort familiar to mac Art. This light was the pallid, ever-restless yellow of torches set in iron cressets or peg holes drilled into walls of forbidding and gloomy stone. Here no drapes hung to soften or add colour to these rocky walls. There was only the stone, living stone, a mottled grey that was darker higher up, from the greasy smoke of torches and oil lamps and braziers. Iron poles braced the walls and there were shelves formed of the outsized tap-roots of great trees, for these provided wood for the Danans and Cormac now understood why mighty trees died unaccountably on the surface of Eirrin. His eyes swept cell-like divisions, stone and hide and wood, with great doors on iron hinges.
To his nostrils came the odours of smoke and sweat, and too there lingered the acrid stenches of excrement and of urine. He knew they were of human origin. And he knew that much of the sweat had poured forth in fear and pain.
Chains gleamed dark and sinister, dark-splotched tables squatted malignantly about the floor. His gaze paused at a large brazier of black iron, set on iron legs above a firepit. From the pot thrust several dark stems of iron, each equipped with wooden grips. To facilitate wielding when the irons are hot, he mused grimly. The coals beneath the brazier were still golden and the air seemed to quiver above them. Cormac’s lips tightened. He’d seen torture-irons before.
Too, in that grim sprawling chamber beneath the earth, there were moans.
Cormac looked about him, at the human alluvia thrown up by the changing tide of fortune that had swept Riora Feachtnachis from her throne.
Some of the sounds and misery emanated from within closed cells into whose darkness he could not see-though fleetingly he bethought him how better if Dithorba had transported them into one of them. Instead, they were in the wood-columned, stone-columned, sprawling main chamber of the dungeon. That barn-large chamber was peopled.
There stood a well-built man rising threescore years, with a dark spot just below his ribs that was either a burn or a bruise; a huge splotch of yellow and purple flowered ugly on his right upper arm, the mark of a violent blow of another day; from his nipple stood a sliver of wood blackened at the end by burning and atremble with his uneasy breathing; his so-pale beard was shortened and darkened on one side, singed; his arms were drawn back around a column and secured to the same chain of iron that ringed. his naked midsection and the column, which was a mortared pile of square-cut stones whose edges cut into the prisoner’s arms. A few feet to his right a young woman lay huddled-insofar as was possible for her, with her bare left leg lifted high and chained to a great nail standing darkly from a column to the ceiling; her weight was balanced on naked buttock, which was both befilthed and marked by a whip.
Elatha the Whip, Dithorba said, Cormac thought with his teeth pressed tight; the lord of this demesne of dim ugliness was sinisterly called “the Whip,” torturemaster. Closeby another woman, and her in her middle years, stood slumped against the stone wall against which she was held, partway erect, by chains fastened to large-headed iron pegs driven into the wall-or morelike thrust ere they had cooled into drilled holes, so that the pegs sealed themselves there; the tatters of clothing that hung on her made this prisoner a more piteous sight than had she been naked. To her had been done that which was unspeakable, and Cormac’s jaw quivered with the grinding of his teeth. Staring in helpless fascination upon the loathesome demonstrations of the work of Elatha the Whip Cormac turned…
Standing against another wall, shackled there so that she was agonizingly spreadeagled, stood a moaning maiden who was young and shapely; though she wore a sort of breechclout of filthy once-white, Cormac saw that it was neither tied nor bound by brooch but that wooden slivers pinned the mocking scrap of cloth to her hips; one lovely apple-firm breast was fire-blackened and a terrible bruise marked her swollen cheek. Near her a young man was chained, with slivers of wood thrusting from beneath his toenails and whip-stripes dark and ugly across his muscular stomach. But a few feet from them was a sort of machine, a device for constant torment. It was of simple construction, for nothing complicated was necessary to the creation of human misery.
Up into the bottom of a long table constructed of strips of wood had been driven scores of slim iron nails, so that a tiny portion of the tip-end of each protruded upward; on that toothily ugly table of torture lay a naked man, and him not young. Stiff and straight he was bound there, and he had been beaten severely across bare and flaccid buttocks. Beside that sombre table of anguish stood another Danan, and him unbound.
This was the largest man Cormac had seen among the Danans, powerfully built with muscle-knotted arms and legs and chest; even his height was a thumb’s length greater than that of most of these people of Danu. On one burly thigh a dagger was sheathed. At his left hip hung a short slim sword. He wore only a leathern covering for his loins; something like walrus hide it was, while great thick leather bracers encased each thick wrist. His ankles and feet were encased in buskins of leather that was dark with sweat and smoke-and bearing darker splotches that mac Art knew were from the flying spatters of the blood of others. Scarless and of a sternly hostile mien, this man held a whip longer than Cormac’s body.
The big man was staring at Cormac and Dithorba. “Elatha!” Dithorba said, in an emotional whispering burst.
Elatha the Whip but stared at the two who had appeared in his demesne within the rock of under-earth. His whip trailed from his hand like a menacing black serpent ready to leap with cold determination to bring pain and scars.
“Bastard,” Cormac snarled, “sired by a pusdemon and whelped of a fly-swarming sow!” And his sword came sliding up from its sheath.
Elatha said nothing. His lips twitched; perhaps that was a tiny passionless smile. His arm shifted; his long whip trembled along the stone floor behind it. He snapped it back then and, striding two paces forward as he brought it whistling forward, the torturemaster sent his leathern serpent of torment rushing at Cormac mac Art.