“Yield ye! Drop the sword or it’s no hand I’ll be leaving ye to wield it again against a friend of your queen!”
A mailed leg and booted foot kicked at him. Cormac had been right. The Guardian was stupid, without sense in him to leave off when he was defeated. Up rushed a mailed fist to drive Danan sword at Cormac mac Art in a vicious slash.
Though surprised, Cormac was not astounded; he had been prepared to make movements in response to such insanity. He backpaced two swift steps, tarried but an instant poised on the balls of both feet, while he watched the big iron sword swish. It swept by in a blurred semicircle of dark blue-grey before his body. The strength of its wielding carried it on; Cormac rocked himself forward again, knees bending deeply.
He carried out his threat. His slash sent his fallen opponent’s sword flying. Its hilt was still grasped in mailed fist.
And the Danan’s hard-swung shield slammed into Cormac’s hip as though the Guardian had sustained no terrible wound to his upper arm.
Cormac was swept violently aside; had the rim rather than cloven face of that six-sided buckler struck him so, bone would have cracked. Nor had Cormac mac Art ever known a man who fought ever again after sustaining a cracked hip. In pain he ran to remain vertical, and slammed into the wall. That scraping clang rose simultaneous with the clatter across the room; sword in mailed, severed hand had rebounded from the opposite wall to ring on the floor. Cormac too rebounded, gritting his teeth against the pain in his right hip.
Jerking his head and willing himself to ignore pain and dark incomprehension, Cormac swung about to renew assault on a foe seemingly impervious to wounds.
He was in the act of striking still again at the armour-covered figure stretched on the floor when he saw that which jolted his brain and made him shiver. From the stump of his severed wrist, the Guardian poured forth no blood.
“Blood of the Gods,” Cormac snarled, with no thought on him for the singular inappropriateness of his favourite oath.
His brain staggering, the Gael aborted his ruined sword stroke. Sudden intense heat prickled over his body and sweat seemed to leap from every pore. In that instant he went pure professional, for so he’d been and was still, though in the paid employ of none. His brain moved to another level; became icy cold; functioned at high speed.
“Dithorba! In and pick up his sword-cut free your queen!”
Already his foe had taken advantage of Cormac’s brief moments of confusion to thrust himself to his feet, using both his shield-hand and his right stump to lever up. The hexagon of split wood and bronze was a golden blur as he swung it violently, rapidly back and forth. He advanced on Cormac the while, and the Gael was forced to back from that rushing wall that would hurl sword from his hand-or smash his arm.
To his right Dithorba appeared, near the fallen sword. Still the mailed hand clung to the hilt, and the queen’s adviser could not shake it loose. As dry old fingers worried at linked iron chain, Cormac backed from a shield swept back and forth so rapidly it was but a blurred wall.
Suddenly the helmeted head turned its armour-swathed face toward Dithorba.
The old man had given up attempts to free the sword of the severed hand, and was carrying the grisly linked objects toward the upright stone wheel astride which his queen was bound. Still keeping Cormac at bay with the rushing buckler, the Guardian started toward Dithorba.
Though the shield-created wall continued to daunt him, Cormac knew the invisible eyes of its wielder could not be on him.
He lunged forward, diving to the floor. He rolled onto his back and slashed upward. Solid steel crashed on iron chain with terrible force, and thin rings of iron yielded. Bearing hand and wrist and half of forearm, the hexagonal Danan shield flew across the chamber and crashed to the floor just at the feet of Dithorba Loingsech.
There was no blood.
And the Guardian moved on toward the wide-eyed Dithorba.
“A creature of Tarmur Roag’s!” Dithorba called out, in a voice that rose with both fear and the excitement of incredible discovery. “Cormac! There is no hand in this mail-glove!”
Cormac started to cry out for Dithorba to vanish; instead he took faster action. He rolled again and chopped into the leg of his uncanny foe, just at the point where mail disappeared into boot.
The bearer of that awful wound but twitched at the blow, meanwhile continuing the step. The unbleeding leg swung; came forward, down; it buckled on impact with the floor. The Guardian teetered, leaned, fell sidewise. Again he crashed to the floor.
He did not lie still. Still he fought. The woundless leg swept out and its mailed shank just grazed Dithorba’s lower leg. With a groan of pain, he staggered. Then the armoured warrior began to rise.
“In Crom’s name-this is insanity!”
Cormac’s shout still rang when frustration swelled within him and his eyes went shiny. Rage took him. Lunging across the downed, faceless creature, the Gael brought a tremendous stroke rushing down. Steel blade slid again through iron rings and so hard had he struck that the sword rang off the floor, beneath the Guardian’s leg. Just below the hip, that leg leaped free of its moorings-bloodlessly.
The stump of the other leg slammed into Cormac’s ankle.
With a groan, he staggered and fell to one knee. His heart seemed to have descended into his ankle; it pounded there. With an animal viciousness twisting his features, the enraged Gael struck away the leg that had kicked him.
Laboriously, the legless trunk began pushing itself up on the stump of its right wrist; its shield meanwhile came streaking at mac Art. Aye, its shield, for he knew this could be no man, but some unnatural thing, a fell product of Tarmur Roag’s wizardry. The Danan buckler rushed at him; easily Cormac cut the supporting arm from beneath the thing. It fell back, armour and shield crashing.
A shudder rushed through Cormac mac Art. Without rising he chopped, chopped again. Armless now, the unbleeding trunk writhed. Cormac’s sword bit into the armoured midsection, smashed the chest. On the point then of chopping at the neck covered by shining metal camail, the seething, shaking Gael shortened his stroke. With fine precision, the last inch of his steel tore away the camail.
The veil of chain had covered nothing.
The helmet rested on nothing. There was no face, no head.
With horripilation a maddening writhing along his arms, Cormac knew that there were no arms and legs either; nothing. There was only an animated suit of armour, huge by Danan standards, that had come nigh to putting the blindness of death on him.
He rose shakily, staring down at what had been his foe; the trunk of an armour coat, surrounded by lopped-off pieces of man that had come from no man; pieces of armour in the shapes of human limbs.
After a long moment he gave his head a swift hard jerk. Blinking, he turned to the nude young woman bound astride what appeared to be a millstone. He sheathed his glaive, which was unblooded despite all its awful work. Drawing his dagger, he swiftly freed Riora. She sagged forward. Trying to hold her away from the hard cold steel of his armour, he caught her and eased her from the wheel of her torture.
The Queen of Moytura clung, trembling as she stared down at the trunk protion of the thing that had been set to guard her against rescue.
Legless, armless, headless, empty… the armour continued to twitch and writhe.
Chapter Thirteen:
The Queen of Moytura
Riora of Moytura, queen, was slim as a willow tree and yet with soft and rather voluptuous womanly turnings to her form. White was her skin, almost transparent, and little more colour tinged the hair that fell to the dimples above her backside. Though she was slim and pale and short like all her people, she had no look of frailty about her. Her quivers were understandable, as she held on to the big stranger to her land, who had dared disobey her and had as a result destroyed her ghastly guardian and set her free. Though he was armoured and aware that his carapace of steel rings could tear and bruise her skin with even his slightest movements, Cormac could not think of her as fragile. He stood, though, rather stiffly, unable to think of aught but her nakedness and the harshness and danger to her of his armour.