One advantage was held by the living man among the Un-dead; when his stave struck other than shield or enemy blade, an enemy fell.
The wood of the god-tree met sorcery-driven steel. Another of the resurrected dead was struck. Another skeleton crashed to the floor. A hand broke, and fingerbones rattled free to roll about. It was then Cormac fell backward across a Briton corpse. Ghoulmen who had been enemies, allied now in death, leaped in concert to carve the fallen man like a ham at feast-time.
Bas groaned in horror. But the other Gael was lean and more than passing quick.
Cormac rolled, contriving to hurl himself several feet along the floor with a wrenching twisting exertion that would have crippled the back of a man whose body was not so agile and muscle-sheathed. Armour screamed on tile. A rushing ax chopped down the corpse of the Briton over which Cormac had fallen, and where he’d sprawled but a second before. Already he was scrambling to his feet, aiding himself with his hands like the animals that were his remotest ancestors. To such was he reduced.
A brief glance showed the Gael five foes converging on him. These were uncanny foes, unnatural foes, impervious to aught but the headless ax in his hand. Again he must needs run, fleet as a hare before hounds, racing around and between pillars tall as oaks-which he wished they were.
In shuddery silence, dead men followed, to join him with them.
Bas saw that Cormac was bent on making his way around and back to him. He saw too how the Dane hurried to cut off his former piratic comrade-and the druid hurled the broken piece of oak in his hand. The dead man moved too fast to be struck where Bas aimed, between the shoulder blades. The splinter-bristling chunk of wood fell short.
Yet again the druid was lucky or Behl-blessed; it struck the back of his knotty calf. In seconds he became mere bone. Again the ghastly cycle: man who had turned into corpse and then into bone and then into man-returned to bone.
With cries of rage and challenge that rang and echoed in the room, Ros and Brian burst into the hall of horror. Having heard the clangour and Cormac’s shouts, they’d hurried onto the gallery to stare down at that which erupted their bodies into gooseflesh. The two youths withstood the moveless watching as long as they could without intervening. Swallowing all fear, they came now loping like young hounds with more enthusiasm than knowledge or sense.
“STOP!” Bas bellowed, and it was no small voice the druid possessed. “Hold-only oak slays them-only oak!”
The two young men looked at him, at Cormac and his assailants-who though eerily silent looked quite natural-and at each other, and back to the druid.
Bas chopped a piece of splintery wood from the ruined airm of the throne of Kull. As though he’d commanded men all his life, as though he wore a crown and mail rather than robe and center-parted black hair that was rope-held about his forehead above his brows, Bas the Druid called out again.
“Come ye hither, both!”
Cormac was parrying a vicious sword-stroke from a man whose sword-wound he’d once treated, off Rechru isle after an encounter with a boat too full of Frisians. His hurried swing of his makeshift stave at the attacker was well caught on oval shield, even as Cormac blunted the ax-swing of a second foe on his own buckler.
“GET TO BAS!” he bellowed, without looking from his foemen.
Brian and Ros, as confused as they were quiveringly excited, were already doing so in obedience to the sword-wielding druid. Like a man whose wife is dying for lack of wood on the fire, the robed man chopped at the magnificent old throne with Cormac’s sword.
Diving headlong between two attackers and beneath their rushing blades, Cormac was able to strike a leg in passing with his strange weapon.
Nine of the Un-dead remained.
A flying chunk of wood struck one and rebounded to thud into the leg of a second. Brian of Killevy cried out in high glee at the double result of his throw.
Seven Un-dead stalked Cormac mac Art.
He fell before the simultaneous crash of two axes on his shield, which divided in twain nearly to the boss. Yet a moment later there were six of the enemy remaining, and then five, for Ros and the druid each hurled an oaken missile true. Brian’s second throw missed his target.
Slammed into a knee with a jolting force and then struck with a rushing sword, the splinter-tipped stave in Cormac’s hand bit his wrist… and went clattering and rolling noisily across the floor.
Without smiles of triumph on their mask-like faces, four grim, silent spectres from the other side of the grave closed on him. Blades rushed down-
And Cormac hurled himself, not between, but through the legs of one Un-dead enemy!
The cold of death stabbed through mail and tunic like an icy knife, and then he was landing on his hands without so much as a grunt. He skidded, rolled, came up running. The Gael sprinted for the throne and the three allies there. Ere he joined them, Bas had stepped away. His eyes blazed with an unearthly fire and his gesturing hands were like the claws of a rearing bear. Strange words issued from his lips, guttural words from the dim past of the race of man.
Three horrors that had been men-and more lately corpses-stalked toward him with uplifted weapons. From the throne-chair oaken chunks whizzed. Two of the Un-dead became first putrefying corpses once again, then bones-and as they dropped, so fell the last of their number-with his flesh still sheathing his skeleton.
“HOLD!” Cormac called, and his hand leapt out to stay Brian’s arm. “That be the last-and he remains flesh, if not blood! The druid has wrought a spell upon him… upon it.”
The eyes of three weapon-men of Eirrin turned their gazes upon Bas. Still gesturing and still gutturally murmuring, he advanced upon the fallen Viking. The man, if such he could be called, lay still in his horn-sprouting helm and fine scalemail corselet and steel-bossed seagreen belt.
“…hear me?” the druid said aloud. “By all those names and conjuries and by the eternal golden sun and silv’ry moon, lord of day and lord of night, I conjure you… I command you. Answer! Your name, your name!”
The dead man’s chest did not move. The dead man’s voice rasped up from his throat like wood dragged over whetstone, and words emerged as though he had to think hard to form each one, and three men shivered who had never quaked in combat.
“Thor Bast… Shield – hewer-r-r-”
“Ah!” The druid stood now over the living dead man he had bound by ancient words to the floor. Now he forced him to speak on, by dint of powers greater even than the speechlessness of death. “And are ye dead, Thorgast Shield-hewer?”
Rasping and dry: “Ay-ye…”
“Gods,” Brian whispered, and beside him Ros gasped out, “Crom Cruach stead me!”
“Why came ye back, ye who were dead, to war thus on the living?”
“…sent-called, forced-I wa-as… had to-commme ba-a-ack… co-ol-l-ld…”
“Aye, colder than your northern home it is, for ye were not meant to be here thus. Release is at hand, Thorgast Shield-hewer, but first-answer! Why came ye back? What was your mission?”
“Kill-all who ca-ame… herre-kill-Ku-K… Cor-r-mac-mac-Aar-r-r-tt…”
Brian of Killevy saw it, as the dead spoke, but never did flaxen-haired Brian tell what he saw: Cormac mac Art shuddered and paled.
“Why him?” the druid demanded. “Speak, Thorgast Shield-hewer!”
“Let-me-e-ee-go-oh…”
“SPEAK, damned spirit that was a man, answer! Why must ye seek to slay Cormac mac Art?”