“ Meseems it’s to the Consul Syagrius I speak.”
“I am he. And yourselves?” Tired that voice-and still powerful.
“Our names mean naught,” Cormac said, lying mightily. “Mawl of Bro Erech I am, and this be Brogar, a Dane. It’s to settle a score with Sigebert One-ear we’ve come. He is hated by many.”
“I believe it,” Syagrius said drily. “Look there! They retreat!”
Unable to withstand a merciless arrow-storm that struck them down gradually and horribly efficiently yet could not be fought, the supporters of Frankdom withdrew through the gates into the late Count’s manse. The heavy gates slammed with a crash.
“Save your arrows!” Wulfhere roared to his men. “Come down here! This night’s work is to be finished hand to hand!”
While mounted men blinked at that Olympian voice, Cormac spoke to Syagrius: “Be Sigebert in there?”
The consul looked into that face with its incongruous grey eyes, and he recognized a man of his own kind; a man other men followed. Besides, Syagrius had reason to be grateful. Of his Goths, some six score survived. Within the manse and its ground waited Sigebert with fifty Franks and something like a hundred Gallo-Roman traitors. Two dozen such fighters as he now saw entering the bloody square might well turn the scale, especially as they seemed fresh. The giant called Brogar and the dark swordsman who gave his name as Mawl looked worth another dozen, by themselves alone.
Therefore Syagrius said, “The swine now calls himself Count of Nantes, from which I infer that Bicrus is dead. A very good man, Bicrus. As for me-I am here now partly because of Sigebert’s machinations. Ere he left Soissons he corrupted a part of my army. The result was that those men deserted me when my need was the sorest. That slimy bas- With Count Bicrus murdered,” Syagrius went on almost dully, “all hope of rallying now seems lost. I must flee into exile or die here in Gaul. But by the saints, I shall settle accounts with Sigebert of Metz first!”
“This boon I ask,” Cormac said. “Let us have him.”
“You ask much.” Syagrius frowned. “Still… were it not for your archers, I might have lost the fight in merely clearing yon gateway…”
“A good man,” Wulfhere said. “I’d never ha’ admitted that!”
With no change of expression or tone, the consul said, “Suppose we go in together, and agree that Sigebert belongs to him who lays hands on him first?”
Cormac mac Art never had to reply to that suggestion he liked not.
The black owl appeared.
Huge, malevolent and horrific, it dropped from the flame-lit sky. At its awful screech Syagrius’s war-horse reared. Not even its training could hold the beast steady in the face of such eldritch terror. The horse threw its rider and bolted. The consul fell heavily.
The black owl rushed down on him with another ear-splitting scream. Its wings were black brooms, thirty feet from tip to tip, that drove the summer air in gusts. Its eyes flamed yellow. Its beak was stretched wide for cracking bones while its feet flexed like twin arrays of metal hooks. Other war-horses scattered in blind fear before it.
Cormac’s sword was in his hand without his conscious thought. He slashed at the monster-and felt gooseflesh when his sword passed through its body to no effect. It glared, gathered sinewy legs beneath it, and made a hopping spring at the Gael. He went down beneath it.
“Ah no,” Wulfhere, groaned, “not the claws-not him too!”
For Cormac all was suddenly darkness, fetor and unnatural cold. The vast black wings were a buffeting storm about him. Talons fastened in his thighs with eightfold stabs of agony. The beak darted at his face.
Cormac’s hands leaped up. He seized death’s’ own throat, as Wulfhere had done on Midsummer’s Eve. Like Wulfhere, he found nothing tangible to grasp. Black feathers. Numbing, weakening chill. Neither flesh nor bone resisted his grip to make it effective. The pain of its talons left him not even breath to cry out.
They rolled and thrashed amid the rubble of war, man and monster, and only one was in pain, awful pain. Cormac’s free hand stabbed and slashed with his sword-uselessly. That cruel gape of a beak came closer.
Advice flashed into Cormac’s mind as he knew he was to die; advice from Zarabdas and later from Morfydd.
Against every instinct of the weapon-man, he let fall his sword.
Fumbling beneath his mail, barking his knuckles, he tore the Egyptian sigil from his neck. In his haste he broke the chain, whose links cut sharply into his skin ere they parted. Cormac never noticed. He thrust the emblem of the winged serpent, of the Sun, into the black owl’s face. And the monster fell back. In that heartbeat of time, Cormac attacked.
His hands gripped the broken ends of the chain as it had been a strangler’s knotted rope. He twisted the pendant hard about the black owl’s neck. It was inspired, that move: for the first time there seemed to be resistance; solid purchase to his grip. Was as if the old amulet had lent substance to the creature. As if? Like it or no, the Gael knew that was precisely what was happening.
The monster thrashed frenziedly in attempt to flee. Its talons came out of Cormac’s thighs. The vast wings beat. Cormac squinted in that wind and hung on while he knotted the broken ends of the pendant’s chain immovably together. The round, sinister head turned then; the beak attacked. Instinctively mac Art flung up his arms to shield his face, and hurled himself backward.
The black owl whirled up with an awful shriek. When Cormac tried to climb at once to his feet, he discovered that his legs would not lift him. He groaned at the caustic pain in his muscled thighs; he, who had not groaned when years before he’d been tortured by Picts. The best he could do was rise to one knee. Blood of the gods it’s crippled me!
Nor had the black owl gone. It fluttered wildly in air above the corpse-gutted square. Cormac stared, and thought of an immense black moth that blundered back and forth between invisible walls, seeking escape from a confinement it could not understand. Battering its own wings and body with mindless persistence. A monster presence over Nantes.
Then it began to burn.
It burned. Bright golden fire encircled its neck like a blazing torc. The dazzle hurt the eyes of every staring watcher. Metal poured molten from a crucible had been less painfully brilliant. The flame, fell and preternatural as the victim, spread along the black owl’s wings to their very tips, streaming behind, shedding sparks. They fell in bright array toward the watchers below, and winked out in air.
Sunfire, Cormac thought, while his back crawled.
The dark soul of Lucanor the mage thrashed in the bright fire it had tempted once too often. The blaze covered its head, took its head. It screamed one final awful cry and lurched aloft. It flew higher, higher, higher, until there was but a brilliant spark in the sky, a phoenix pyre from which there would come no renewal… and then naught.
Silence filled the square. Owl and fire had vanished, and amulet.
Wulfhere broke that silence: he destroyed it. He had staggered and clutched at his mighty mailed breast as the black owl was destroyed. Now he cried out in amaze and relief, and it was a bellow.
“The pain is gone! Gone! It-I’ll wager the talon-marks are vanished, too! Cormac; the curse is lifted! I’m whole again! WHOLE!”
Cormac’s legs had been freed as suddenly of the crippling pain. He rose. He stood. Crom and Behl! He’d felt that agony for mere moments. It awed him to realize that Wulfhere had endured it for weeks; had given orders, fought battles, slept, led his men while under such a burden.
“I’m fieeee!” Wulfhere thundered. “I shall live!” He lifted ax and fist to the sky, a titan on spraddled legs like treetrunks. “HAAAAA!”