It returned to him instantly; Cormac slammed it thudding into the other man’s right cheek and then his gut and then into the center of his leather breechclout. Blood started from Elatha’s cheek and mouth from split skin and a broken molar. At the same time Elatha started to double over, with both hands leaping to his crotch.
A mailclad forearm crashed into the torturemaster’s mouth and his eyes rolled loosely. Elatha went to his knees, leaning backward now; Elatha toppled sidewise and lay groaning through shredded lips.
Panting, working his stinging right wrist, Cormac mac Art retrieved and sheathed his sword.
Elatha’s brand he caught up and crashed violently against a pillar of stone so that the blade bent a quarter way in on itself. Hurling it from him, the Gael turned to the torture table.
“Elatha… bested and down!” Dithorba said from behind Cormac, in an elated whisper that bespoke his nearness to disbelief.
“Who be this man?” Cormac asked, having discarded his buckler to pluck at the table-bound man’s cords with both hands.
“Lughan Senlac, my… my fellow adviser to the queen. Will ye not save time by merely cutting him free, defeater of Elatha?”
A groan escaped the oldster bound facedown on the table, his soft buttocks-darkly marked by Elatha’s whip.
“Lord Lughan,” Cormac muttered, “I loosen these knots rather than slice them, for the reason that Elatha the Whipless will soon replace ye on this table.”
After a moment of silence, Lughan gasped his reply. “Be not concerned… with haste. A tiny space of time more on this… restful bed will not finish me. To the end ye state… I can wait!”
Chapter Twelve:
The Guardian
The prisoners of Cairluh and Tarmur Roag were free of bonds and cells in Moytura’s dungeon; their former torturer lay groaning and sweating on his own fanged table. His weight, his greater development of chest and belly and thighs pressed the ends of the scores of upward driven nails into his flesh more deeply than they had bitten Lughan Senlac. There were no guards in the dungeon; prisoners were weak and helpless, and Elatha was proud and jealous of his reign.
Cormac mac Art held the shortened whip he had taken from him who had wielded it to such agony, even to the deaths of some. For Cormac and Dithorba had found two in the cells who need not be freed; they had died of whippings that had torn them open and ruptured internal organs.
“Dithorba and I have business elsewhere. Here lies him who put sore torment and indecent horror on ye all. Who will take this whip?” He stretched out his hand, the whip lying across it like a napping serpent.
It was the young man who stepped forward, he who bore the marks of that same strap of leather across his muscled belly and who limped from the wooden splinters that had been forced under his toenails. Dithorba had identified him as an officer in the household staff of Queen Riora, by name Tathill; the young woman bound near him was his sweetheart. Perhaps he would bear no physical scars of this imprisonment; she would, all her life.
“I will wield that black eel on the creature who made it sting so well,” he said quietly and with strain, “and yield it up to whomever wants it else.”
“I,” a weak voice said.
Cormac gazed not with shock but with sadness on the speaker, the older woman in rags, with the marks on her of obscene torments and mockery. Surely, the Gael thought, such as she would not have dreamed of vindictive whip-wielding before she’d been brought to this grey domain of pain and degradation. It hurt him only that he had not put his cloak on again, that he might clothe her in it. Elatha’s foul breechclout he would not offer her. Guards or other keepers would be outside bound doors, though obviously no sound of the battle here had reached their ears. At their dicing most likely, Cormac thought, and turned to look after Dithorba. The old mage was walking back into the dimmer area of the dungeon, his robe flapping and the one he’d brought for his queen hanging over his arm. He paused at the doorway of a wooden enclosure, and looked within. Cormac saw the man stagger as if struck, and heard his gasp.
And he heard the weak girlish voice: “Stay back!”
Cormac had taken a perverse pleasure in leaving the freeing of two men until last; they were the strapping, handsome Commander Balan of the Royal Guard and Torna, long Riora’s tutor and now most favored adviser. Now the Gael turned from the still bound pair and strode back past the torture table and light. Dithorba stood in dimness.
The chamber into which he stared was a square some ten feet on a side; a chamber of royal size for the imprisonment of Moytura’s royalty.
The slim young queen was within. She wore only a spiked girdle and collar of iron, both drawn tightly and held by cinch-pins. Her straw-coloured hair was dragged back and bound to the cruel girdle behind, so that her neck was constantly strained. Riora of Moytura was bound astride a great stone wheel, like a millwheel, that abraded her inner thighs and displayed her lewdly. Aye, and she’d been marked by Elatha’s whip. The dragging back of her tresses strained her face so that her brows were unnaturally arched and her cheekbones threatened to thrust through taut skin.
Tinted only by the faintest of tawny hue, her eyes swiveled from Dithorba at Cormac’s arrival. She stared at him.
When the Gael started forward, Dithorba stayed him.
“Lady Queen, a Gael from Eiru above, Cormac mac Art his name. He and a companion saved Erris from becoming a toygirl to a squad of six rapacious guards set over me, and slew them all. He freed me, and has just defeated Elatha though he bears wounds of the long fangwhip. All this, lady Queen, in quest of your freedom. The sounds my lady queen now hears are of Elatha’s own whip on his own foul body.”
“Talk and talk,” the Gael said. “Why stand we here?” Again he started forward.
“Stand ye back!” the queen bade him, and she winced at the pain the exertion put on her. Her hands were behind her back, her legs bracing the upright millwheel, to which ropes bound her. She softened the command: “-friend of Danu and Moytura-and Riora.”
“Your pardon for the questioning of a weapon man, lady queen… but why must we stay from yourself?”
“This I have… borne,” she said in the voice of strain forced upon her by the back-drawn hair. “I can… longer. For ye both, though, there’s death within this chamber… I am bound not only as ye see… but by the sorcery of Tarmur Roag ‘as well. Aye, and guarded… Cor-mac Mackart. There is a… Guardian.”
Cormac stepped close to the doorway to peer within the large chamber. He saw three walls of stone and one of wood; a chipped bowl of fired clay and a dented iron cup; a length of chain. Another hung from a nail in the wooden wall, as did a short flail with three tails of plaited leather… or rather the hide of some great denizen of the waters, as novas all leather of Moytura. Two crumpled bits of cloth lay forlornly on the floor. He saw naught else, not even a pile of stones.
“I see naught of menace or Guardian.”
“I am queen, Cormac… I am not… questioned.”
He gazed on this naked, whip-marked, painfully bound young woman with wonder and respect. An she could talk so in these straits, she was queen indeed!
“Ye cannot free me. Cormac. He who comes through that door, save for Elatha, will instantly die. Tarmur Roag… demonstrated. It’s he must be captured and forced to release me; I’ll have no champion such as your huge self slain so, for naught and to no avail.”
Cormac was hardly huge. He realized, though, that in Moytura he was. Standing beside Dithorba, he made a child of the man, both in height and physique. A thought of hope came on him.
“Dithorba! Can ye be mind-hurling me to her side, man?
The succinct reply shattered the Gael’s excitement: “No.”