Aye, Sigebert knew something about the work. He’d a natural talent for it, a coordination of hand and eye and brain. This was the encounter for which he had been obsessively training, half hoping for it. In addition, that early training he had indolently allowed to lie fallow for years had come back to him. He remembered it all, and knew much, and was strong and uncommon fast. Nerve he had too, combined with a devious imagination-and naught in the least resembling a scruple.
Even so, Cormac mac Art could match him on all those grounds save the last-though in combat he also paid no mind to scruples. His advantages of reach and strength were offset by the hard fighting he’d already done this night. There remained his endurance and long experience. These had been hammered into the scarred Gael bone-deep, through years of feud, war, exile, seafaring in all weathers and all seasons; through bitter imprisonment that few others could have survived. These were in his muscle and his heart; in his very marrow by now. They were qualities that Sigebert One-ear, whose life on the whole had been pampered, could never match.
Slowly, the Frank was forced to realize it. In him grew the chilling knowledge that he neared the end of his powers, while this grim dark wolf he faced had yet to extend himself fully.
A try for the neck was caught on buckler. That shield leaped at him, so that he was only just able to get his own shield up to catch the sword-edge that followed Cormac’s offensive use of seventeen pounds of iron-banded wood.
Sigebert had one trick left him. So far, he had used only the edge of his blade. Sure that the Gael was deceived and that withheld knowledge would work, Sigebert feinted once, twice, bringing Cormac’s shield low-and thrust straight for the throat in a bright, flashing line.
A similar tactic had slain the highwayman in awful surprise. Now, mac Art’s swordblade was there. It caught the Frank’s and swept it out of line with a flash and hideous grate of metal, burrs grating along notches and burns. The Gael laughed savagely. Below, so did Wulfhere.
“Now for that I’ve been waiting since we began dance, Frank! Ye fool! Ye did death on one of our men in such wise when we paid our visit to the custom house, remember? I saw his body, thrust through the hollow of the throat. Were ye after thinking I had not eyes to notice it or wits to know what it betided? Blood of the gods! Aye, and when ye warded my own thrust so neatly this night, ye did sureness on me. Now try your last and be accursed, One-ear!”
With a howl of pure frustration, Sigebert flung himself on Cormac mac Art, stabbing, slashing. Again and again his blade banged and skirled off Cormac’s shield, and then his time came and the blades glittered and flamed together one last time and Sigebert’s sword, quite unstained by blood, rattled on the marble. His own sword-arm poured red, laid open from elbow to wrist.
Sigebert’s eyes glared wildly. He was helpless.
“Wulfhere,” Cormac said, low and deadly, and the Morrigan had never been grimmer.
Wulfhere knew what was meant, and came without his ax.
“Romans crucify a man,” he rumbled. “We northrons have another way.”
They stripped a snarling Sigebert of his leather cuirass and threw it aside. He growled like a mad dog, spitting in their faces, snarling, cursing them vilely. Then, while four Danes held him down, Wulfhere drew dagger. He thrust, sliced; again; he cut the blood-eagle on the Frank’s body, the dreadful northlands death Wulfhere had never inflicted on an enemy and never would again.
Sigebert screamed like a soul in hell when he saw what would be done. His bulging eyes stared at the ceil, but he saw it not. Horribly rearranged, his body, too, bulged unnaturally.
Many were the things he might have seen: Black Thorfinn, writhing in agony, screaming likewise while infection bloated his belly and death’s clean mercy was withheld from him; or Cathula’s mother torn apart by hounds while her daughter watched, or that daughter’s later cruel reduction and use; or Count Bicrus of Nantes struggling across a tiled floor in his blood… or a score of other victims of whose fates the pirates knew naught. Uncounted treacheries lengthened the list of Sigebert’s crimes.
He might have beheld any or all of his victims, come from the grey lands of death to witness their murderer’s end. He did not.
He beheld great, misty spaces. An emptiness beyond his little comprehension. Bounding out of the mist came a hunting pack fit for nightmares; pure white hounds, save for the ears of them that were red as their gaping fanged mouths and glowing eyes. Coursing down through the night to harry the soul out of his body; to hunt it fugitive through nine eternities. Behind those beasts, towering on a great horse with flaring nostrils, came a shadow-cloaked Huntsman whose head was crowned with royal antlers. Sigebert saw what few saw; the terrible Lord of Death, god of the Celts of Britain and Armorica and Gaul and other lands as well.
And Sigebert knew, and his final screams formed coherent words while the bones burst from his blood-eagled body.
“The hounds!-aahhhh, mercy, no, no, the hounds, the hounds!”
Syagrius did not flinch to see the thing done. He had intended himself to have the traitor crucified, a death equally dreadful and longer drawn out. He saw only justice. Not without pleasure, he watched Sigebert die.
They found Lucanor in one of the upper chambers. He was unmistakably dead, shriveled as if by fire though neither charred nor blistered. Had his neck been cut, as by a tight-drawn chain, all round? None could be sure.
So, then. King Veremund would be glad to learn that death had been done on the mage who had destroyed his queen, body and mind and soul. Cormac and Wulfhere cared but little. The man who had died at the head of the marble stair had been more dangerous than forty such as the mage, for all Lucanor’s powers of sorcery.
Count Bicrus’s body they discovered below. It was wrapped, with cynical pretense at respect, in a shroud.
“It is over then,” Syagrius said wearily. “Poor Bicrus was the last hope left me. I might as well have fled south at once. I have achieved little save to spend lives and burn a part of the city.”
“Blame Sigebert for that, not yourself,” Wulfhere said gruffly. Almost he clapped the Roman on the shoulder, but remembered the man’s freshly splinted arm. “Let the city-and Gaul-take care of itself, as it will. I and Cormac mean to go away from here and get mightily drunk until dawn, and it’s my counsel that ye do the same. What say ye?”
Consul-King said to pirate. “I say lead on!”
24
The long dusty road shimmered in summer’s haze. At its end lay the town of Vannes, and the enclosed stretch of water known as the Mor-bihan, with the open sea behind it. There waited the lean pirate ship named Raven. Other ships lay in there too, to carry a deposed king and his followers into exile.