“By all the gods! My steel has no effect on him-none! But his blade’s as deadly as ever steel is! A man has no chance against this horror-BAS!”
Cormac could only retreat or die; a swift jab showed him that the Norseman’s shield, too, was fit to defend a living man. An unslayable kill-machine, the Viking swept up his terrible ax.
For the first time in his life, Cormac mac Art turned and ran from a foeman.
From the shocked druid’s hand he tore the oaken hafted ax of Ruadan mac Mogcorf. He was unsure why; it was as if some instinct drove him. His sword he left against the throne-chair as useless, nor did he wield the ax as a man should. Holding it close to the head he’d thought overlight for a fighting man, he drove the end of the haft at the Norseman who had followed-but had stopped three paces from the throne.
The ax was poorly balanced for a thrusting weapon, held thus wrong end before, but with it Cormac thrust. Nor was he averse to using the Saxon tactic of feinting at the body and stabbing at the face.
The tip of the haft jolted home as if against living flesh and bone. Cormac could have wept for happiness at the shock to his arm.
A horrid groan filled that soaring chamber, and seconds later an equally horrid stench, the stomach-turning fetor of putrefaction and decay. And the Norseman seemed to melt, the flesh fading from his bones, hanging in tatters, vanishing into the air. His body quivered all over.
While his back crawled, Cormac watched what oaken stave had wrought, when steely brand was of no avail.
Bronze armlets dropped to ring on the floor, and one rolled noisily. Coat of scalemail caved in, cleaving to a form suddenly fleshless. For a brief moment Cormac stared into the eye-holes of a skull, a whiteboned death’s head bereft of so much as a scrap of flesh.
Then the lifeless skeleton crumpled to the floor with a rattle. It lay there, as should have done the bony structure of a man slain three months before.
“It’s the O-O-O-OAKHH!” Cormac mac Art shouted, partly in triumph and partly in a release of fear and horror, tension close to hysteria. “The OAK, Druid! Behl’s symbol of LIFE-the dead cannot withstand its touch! This be why that man Osbrit alone survived, for he sat that oaken throne! Here is why they sought to avoid you and come ‘round at me, Bas-you held this ax!”
Then Cormac did that which was alien to a weaponman, and against the grain of his very nature.
With all his might, he swung the ax against a broad thick pillar of smooth, time-darkened stone. His hands shifted so that it was the side of the steel head that struck with a great ringing thump and a terrible jar to his arms. A loud crack split the air as the haft broke. With another swift stroke Cormac smashed the head from his ax so that it hurtled through the air until it struck another pillar-and rebounded, and rebounded, and drove bloodlessly through one of those horrid foes to ring and clatter on the floor.
The Dane was unharmed; the ax was an ax no longer; Cormac held a thick oaken stave as long as his arm, to the fingers.
With it he drove at another man of the Norse. A whirring ax-blade rushed past his head, while he slammed the haft of what had been Ruadan’s ax into the shield-arm of the Viking. An awful death-cry rose; again came the stench of a mouldering putrid corpse-and a second skeleton clattered horribly to the floor.
Bas stared with half-glazed eyes as the tall weaponman of Eirrin fell to one knee to avoid a swordthrust, and cracked that attacker’s knee with his strange cudgel. And there were three skeletons amid the corpses on the floor of Kull’s Castle.
They closed in now, and Cormac did what he must to avoid death-dealing thrusts and slashes of un-dead men whose blades his targe could not turn all at once; he hurled himself aside.
Then he ran, racing around the seated druid to come upon a Dane at the edge of the cluster. Cormac knew that lightly bearded man; had fought beside him and trod the decks of ships named Raven and Wolfsail with him. But the Gael was steeled, sure now that he had the means of providing rest for these men brought back from the land of the dead on the murderous mission of some unknown mage. Cormac was the means.
Before the Dane could swing his weapon into line, a truncated ax-haft struck his shield and then his arm. As silently as he’d done three months before, Cormac’s comrade of erst died again, and there were four skeletons.
Bas jerked erect as though waking from some dark dream.
“Cu Roi mac Dairi,” he said in a shaky voice as his hand closed around the hilt of Cormac’s sword, “son of Behl, servant of Crom, be with me! And… King Kull… pardon!”
With that the druid crashed Cormac’s sword down onto one arm of the priceless ancient throne. The blade bit deep; wood older than old splintered and broke. The throne shuddered-as did Bas’s surprisingly powerful arm.
A man in an iron-banded helm of dented grey rushed past the oaken throne to swing his shining glaive at Cormac mac Art-and Bas the Druid smashed a ragged chunk of chair-arm into the Viking’s back. Released by fingers from which the flesh began instantly to dangle in tatters like old draperies, the Norse sword rushed past Cormac to clang and clatter far across the room. A thrice-banded helmet slipped down over the shining white mound of bone that had been a human head. A skeleton once more, the Norseman fell.
Cormac too had struck, and six skeletons lay on the tiles.
A sword crashed off Cormac’s shield and he saw another rushing in from the side. Desperately he struck at it with his oaken club just as he’d have done with his own good sword-which was now so horribly useless. Ax-haft deflected glaive-blade; the point tore a channel up the Gael’s forearm. Later he would feel pain and be discommoded by the rip in the skin and flesh; now he did not so much as notice. Ax-haft thunked into mailed hip, jerked away, leaped sidewise swift as a striking adder. Oak met skin; skin became tatters; tatters vanished to leave only bone.
The two skeletons fell almost together, with a rattle as of many games of knuckle-bones at once.
The ghastly battle continued. It was two against fourteen now, and one of the two unarmoured. Unhelmeted too he was, and cumbered by rustling robes of woolen girt with a rope composed of four intricately plaited strands.
“Bas, Bas! Back to the throne, man, ere ye be slain for naught! Hack the throne… and hurl the pieces!”
Bas skipped away from an overweight man of Norge. He turned-and faced an ax that had already commended its downward rush. Reflexively the holy druid jerked up his splintry chunk of ancient oak, and up leaped his other hand to brace it with a grip on either end.
The ax rushed down to cleave through that time-weakened slab of wood so that it was two, and had only slowed the descent of steel death. Bas went to one knee. His shocked arms quivered. From one nerve-tingling hand, even as the un-dead drew up his ax for the death-stroke, a piece of ragged wood fell. It struck the floor and bounded, just a little, onto the buskined foot of the ax-wielding Dane.
From above his head Bas heard a grunt. Then there was the stench of death’s decay eerily accelerated, and then that was gone, as Guthrun Black-shield died once more. Again he returned to pallid smooth bones that clattered on the tiles.
Ten skeletons lay on the floor in their mail or leather; twelve men who were not men shuffled on. Twelve Un-dead men continued to do what they must: endeavour to slay the living. Helpless voiceless minions of the ghoulish sorcery that had raised them, they clove blindly to their one purpose: murder.
Bas of Tir Conaill gained the throne-chair and turned to look upon the awful sight.
The floor was strewn with corpses and man-shaped collections of bones. Bleeding from right forearm and left shoulder where the capping sleeve of his mailcoat was shredded, Cormac mac Art leaped and dodged, ducked and skidded, lunged and jabbed and swung. He danced, armour a-jingle; he raced away to attack again like a great spitting cat amid harrying dogs. Succor he knew lay only in nimbleness; a dash here, a jab there with his headless ax, and duck and dodge to continue the grim work from a new direction.