The Raven Warrior Page 2

  But sometimes . . . sometimes he forced her to contribute the unguessable. . . .

  When they were both stuporous with food and wine, he said, “I have a gift for you.”

  It was growing cold on the terrace above Tintigal. Her women were gone and his menservants had rather thankfully melted away into the dusk. They, too, felt the tension between the two adepts at the table.

  Over the sea the cloud spires were lifted into flame by the sun’s last rays. They burned over the dark water like the towers of a city in flame.

  She shivered. “Let’s go in. You can give me the present as we recline before the hearth. Come, my love.” She reached for his hand.

  Suddenly he wasn’t empty-handed any longer. A cup was in his left. The stem and footing were of gold, which girdled the coiled spiral of a shell, a white shell glowing inside and out with mother-of-pearl.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, but her heart was hammering and she could barely breathe.

  “Yes. Now take it in both your hands and drink.”

  “Wine,” she whispered. “I’d rather not. I’ve had . . .”

  “Drink!”

  The word had the force of command. At the same moment, she felt his right hand encircle her neck, her long, regal neck. He stroked the hollow at the base of her throat with his thumb. She’d seen him kill men that way, crushing the ridged cartilage of the larynx with his thumb, leaving them to kick and gasp their lives away while he watched with evident enjoyment.

  She seized the cup with both hands and brought it to her lips. Its contents filled her mouth and nose both, so she couldn’t even scream when she was drawn into the spiral coil of the vessel.

  She seemed to move down a glowing white, curve-walled corridor filled with pale, diffused light. The inner shell was not transparent but translucent. She fled along a rough pathway like one following an ever-narrowing spiral staircase down and down to some unguessable destination, unable to halt or go back because the walls and floor weren’t sufficiently bumpy to allow her to stop or crawl back.

  Panic struck as she reached a passage so narrow that she could no longer walk or, at last, even crawl. She screamed, and at her first scream, she debouched free of the shell, rolling across a carpet on the floor of Merlin’s stronghold.

  The place both awed and terrified her. It was part of the sea. A sea on some world she was sure the rest of mankind did not share.

  The room was luxurious. Soft rugs, jeweled with many colors, lay like pools of brightness on stone floors. Velvet-covered couches were scattered around haphazard flowers blooming in a dark shadowed mezzanine. The whole front wall of the room was glass, some kind of glass that overlooked the sea. And when the tide was in, as it was now, the blue and green waves crashed against the glass, towering over her as she lay on a soft, scarlet rug on the floor.

  The glass-not-glass allowed sound and air to pass through its permeable surface and the room was scoured by the sea wind. She screamed again as a gigantic wave towered over her and broke, foaming against the glass wall before her, and the wind tore at her hair.

  She scrambled toward the back of the room, where a gigantic double-walled Roman fireplace formed the back of the long sea-view room.

  “That’s it. Incinerate yourself,” he said contemptuously.

  She sat up, shivering. “You know I hate this place,” she whimpered.

  “Too bad,” he said. “But whatever you feel, stop squalling or I’ll have you gagged. Or maybe I’ll just have one of my servants cut out your tongue.”

  She knew he was capable of doing either one as easily as the other, so she was silent.

  He waved his hand and it seemed the glass between them and the raging sea grew denser. The noise of pounding waves lessened and the wind dropped. She realized it was near night in this place, as it was at Tintigal, and some of the brightness in the room was from the fire at the back, fanned by the wind.

  The glow faded and the room grew darker. Beyond the windows, the sea churned higher, the waves now breaking on the roof above the window wall. The trees were scattered around the room in pots, some in leaf, others laden with fruit, and some in flower. Peaches, plums, apricots, apples, and quince. They yielded to his power, dormant flowering, fruiting at his will.

  As she watched, he picked a pale white plum, dewy ripe, from one of the harvest trees. He reached down and put it in her mouth, where it dissolved, honey-sweet within, tart and biting at the skin.

  “Spit the pit into my hand,” he said.

  She held back, keeping the fissured seed in her mouth. But then he caught her hair in one hand and shook her. “Don’t you dare! I will tear out your tongue!”

  She spat the pit into his hand. He snapped his fingers, and two of his golems appeared. She knew this was going to be worse than anything she’d anticipated, maybe worse than anything that had ever gone before.

  The golems always frightened her. They were dead men still inhabiting their bodies. Unlike others he raised, they were not zombies suited only for simple tasks. They retained intelligence and volition, even though they were clearly corpses. Gutted, cooked to render away fat, then soaked, tanned the way a hide is tanned, then sewn back on withered muscle and cartilaginous bone. The faces were tight, dry masks, the eyes lifeless, hard, opaque, and pale, but with a dark ring where the pupil had once been and a spark of light at the center.

  “Your clothes,” he said, “or shall I have them strip you?”

  She shuddered. “No!” she whispered. “No!”

  She rose to her knees and was naked in a few seconds. She had been prepared for him, wearing nothing under her gown and shift.

  Merlin pointed at a dark stair leading down into another, larger room that she could see only dimly below. She hurried to keep ahead of the two golems, running down the shallow steps into the large room.

  Even though night was falling outside, it was filled with light. The roof was a glass dome of fitted pieces, as were the windows of the first room she had been in. Above the dome, the sea crashed and boiled frighteningly.

  Once the domed room had been a small bay, carved from the cliffs above by wave action. But someone, something, had enclosed the bay in glass, smoothed the floor—it was polished gray basalt—and pushed out the encroaching sea. Now it thundered and roared as if in mad frustration at this usurpation of its powers.

  Yes, this was a place of awesome power; she recognized that. Not sea, not land, and she stood there at the moment of not day, not night, not darkness, not light.

  Igrane whimpered with terror.

  Merlin wasn’t interested. He whispered an incantation and a symbol flared into life on the mottled gray floor. It was a Saint Andrew’s cross, an X. It was set in the floor among the remains of sea creatures that lived long ago and left their images pressed into the rock caught in stone. Not dead completely, yet not alive, either.

  “Hurry,” Merlin snapped. “The light is fading! Tie her.”

  She screamed when the golems seized her. They hustled her to the glowing cross-shaped marking in the center of the floor, then tied her arms, fastening them at the wrists to two lines that vanished into the shadows above. Then one of them kicked her legs apart and placed her feet on the glowing X she stood on, so that her body formed another X above that on the floor.

  She tugged and found she couldn’t move her feet. They adhered to the glowing lines beneath.

  She screamed again.

  Behind her, she heard Merlin test the whip. It cracked across the chamber with the sound of snapping wood. Light filled the room and Igrane looked up and around into what seemed a thousand mirrors, all reflecting both of them.

  He was standing behind her, whip in hand. Oddly, she felt relieved. She had been afraid he was going to kill her. But a whipping wouldn’t do that. He had whipped her before and seldom lasted beyond two lashes. By then his desire to see her suffer was at war with his overwhelming need to possess her, and the need to possess her won.

  She felt the surge of power from
the symbol she stood on; erotic need consumed her. She was almost ready to beg for the lash.

  She saw in the thousand mirrors around her the movement, snakelike and savage, of the thing in his hand. A second later, it coiled at her loins.

  Her response was a shriek of uncontrolled pain. God, it had never felt like this before.

  She saw a weal leap up a finger’s breadth and width across her buttocks and down to her thigh, the tender part just between her legs. Then, as the agony faded into a more tolerable ache, the wound began to leak blood from its center.

  “No!” she screamed as the next one came coiling around her body above the buttocks at her waist. The tip flicked her nipple and split it like a ripe cherry.

  She watched transfixed with horror as blood from her breast flowed down her belly and thigh, and dripped down on the floor. She didn’t scream again, but fought the ropes that tied her wrists and whatever power that caused her feet to cling to the floor like a madwoman.

  Then she went limp with almost unspeakable relief as she realized he was walking toward her . . . he’d had enough . . . oh, God! A few seconds later, she felt his arms around her waist and his lips on her neck.

  “That was worse,” she whimpered. “Worse than all the other times. Please, please cut me down.”

  “My poor dear,” he whispered in mock sympathy. “Hold yourself in readiness. It’s going to get worse still.”

  But he did release the ropes holding her arms and forced her to the floor, positioning her on top of the X-shaped symbol. The light in the room died, and, above through the glass, she saw the green and churning sea. It was almost nightfall outside, and she knew he must be in a hurry to complete the spell before darkness wrapped this coast in gloom, because she saw him glance uneasily upward.

  Abruptly, light blossomed all around her and the mirrors returned to the glass dome above her. She saw herself reflected everywhere. She glowed with beauty in the flow of brightness from beneath the floor, naked, her sex shaved clean, skin tawny, her hair a flood of black silk cradling her pale, fair face. Helpless, because she found the X-shaped medallion held her tightly to the floor.

  Desire grew and she saw her labia part slightly to reveal the swollen, hot passage that seemed the center of her being. Her image darkened as he covered her with his body, and she found she looked up not at the mirrored ceiling but at his face, teeth bared, a mask of desire.

  She groaned with both outrage and pleasure as he entered her body.

  “Oh. Oh, my sweet, hot, tight, soft. My darling, my rich course of all joy. I am enfolded in moist, red velvet.”

  Not a good sign, the last clear-thinking corner of her brain informed her. He never spoke tenderly to her, no matter how hotly he desired her.

  But the light from the cross-shaped symbol blazed around both of them and her whole body exploded into orgasm. But then, what seemed a tidal wave of pleasure burned away into incredible pain. She threw back her head, almost blinded by its intensity. Even childbirth, the worst pain she could remember, hadn’t hurt so much.

  The first sight she had as she lay gasping as the pain at last ebbed away was his face grinning down at her, and the first sound his triumphant laughter. Their bodies were separated, but something like a steel rod parted her female portions. He was trying to enter her again.

  “No! No! No!” she screamed.

  He laughed again. “I wonder how many times you will be able to survive it. The best, the very best I ever had, only lasted through five thrusts. He was a strong man—most women only make three. Come now, my sweet, my angel, my beauty. Be nice. Let me in again. You will, you know. In the end you will. They all do. Best get it over quickly. Struggling only prolongs my pleasure and your suffering.”

  His next thrust was like being battered by a stone phallus, but somehow, even though her body was glued to the floor like iron filings to a magnet, she managed to twist away.

  She had often wondered but never wanted to know how he came by his vast powers. Now she knew. He was able to use this room, this place, to call them up from the earth, call them up into his body and spirit by using those he desired as a sort of intermediary. He took the strength they pulled from this wonder she lay on, but they experienced the concomitant price of such a transfer of power: the pain.

  In the thousand mirrors above, she could see him kneeling between her legs, but she was beginning to glow with the excitement of the building fire beneath her. He reached around, palms cupping buttocks, fingers reaching then catching the soft lips of the innermost portal, drawing it open to his rigid member. She threw her head back, trying to knock herself out against the stone floor. Her vision splintered into a thousand lights, but even so, she could feel him entering her again.

  When her eyes cleared, she found she couldn’t see the mirrors above. She couldn’t tell if she was half unconscious or if indeed something was happening above him. It was as though she looked up through the meshes of a net, the only difference being these meshes writhed. They moved closer, further down, toward him.

  A moment of crystal clarity followed while she weighed her choices.

  She could warn him.

  No. Never.

  It might kill her, too.

  Better to die that way than this. Even if, as she saw now, the meshes of this net were snakes, white ones with black eyes and tongues and a faint green line down their slender backs.

  An instant later, they enfolded him. She felt the hard, muscular strength of the narrow bones as they wrapped themselves around him. They moved like no snakes she had ever seen, in a completely coordinated fashion.

  It was his turn to scream and scream as he rolled away from her prone body across the floor. Then he was silent as he concentrated his entire intellect and will on the struggle.

  He tried to kick free, and for a few moments, it looked as though he might succeed. But they wrapped themselves around his legs, immobilizing him from ankle to hip.

  He pulled one arm free, but when he tried to claw the other loose, a half dozen coils lapped around the free arm, pinning it to his body.

  The struggle ended when one coiled around his throat and deprived him of breath whenever he tried to move. At length, he lay still.

  The voice came out of nowhere. “Dung fly maggot. Filthy pile of stinking carrion. I’ve been waiting to corner you for some time now. Such vicious games as you play leave you vulnerable, you crawling louse.

  “You told me the boy Arthur was harmless. You told me he would never learn to elude the watcher I set over him. You lied about both matters, and now she is gone. They are all gone. All those caught in the antechamber. Those whose souls I trapped for companionship in an eternity of loneliness. She escaped me. She whom I loved, she who was my only consolation—has set out across the sea of eternity alone without me.”

  Then the voice slipped into another language, one Igrane didn’t understand. But it must have been an incantation, because the snakes began to strike. They buried their fangs in his chest and throat, and—she smiled to see it—his groin, just at the spot where the penis joins the body.

  His back arched, his mouth opened, but she could hear nothing. The snakes were now lines of light and they sucked his substance away into their bodies, and then very simply, without leaving a trace behind, they were gone.

  We picked up the boats and carried them into the marsh. We didn’t want to leave a trail. Or at least, that’s what Ure said, telling the rest of us that a trail by land in a swamp left far less disturbance.

  And, oddly enough, I found he was right. The track was muddy or grass-covered; the mud oozed back to fill in footprints and they simply didn’t take on the damp turf. Had we forced our way through the rushes and cattails, we would have left clear evidence of our passage.

  It took me a little time to realize I was walking along a road. It wound in and out among trees, past ponds thick with water weed, cress, and lily pads. Or along the edge of more open water, filled with fish. We moved quietly and I saw the fish rise, makin
g circles on the water as they took insects on the surface.

  Twice, tree trunks were visible, laid in parallel rows to bridge low spots where we waded up to our ankles.

  “Is this a road?” I said to Ure.

  “Yes.”

  “There are people living here?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Not now.”

  Knowing his lack of affection for chatter, I forbore to question him anymore.

  What I most remember about the marsh was its silence. I was brought up on a seacoast, where the sound of wind and wave was a constant background to all human activities. Even in the barley fields, we heard the sea’s roar and the wind swept the heading crops into a bowing, rippling mass, which gleamed in the sun just as the sea waves did before its unending breath.

  But here was true silence, broken only by the flop, pop of a leaping frog or fish, or the distant cries of ducks and geese as they fed among the long grasses and sedges that bordered this strange and, I think, ancient, winding road.

  “Snakes,” someone else, I think Albe, said nervously.

  “Too cold yet,” Ure answered. “Later, when it grows warmer, I would fear to walk here without a stout stick, but we are safe enough now.”

  After that, we trudged on quietly, the silence seeming to enter us the way water is poured into a bowl and lies motionless, forming a mirror of sorts for anything above it.

  Maeniel, Gray, Ure, and I took the lead; the rest followed behind. Those who had been sleeping took up the boats, automatically leaving the rowers to walk unencumbered. But none of us were really what you would call fresh, not after ten days at sea. And I wondered how much strength any of us would have to call upon when we faced battle.

  I was frightened. I might not have the strength in my right hand to make the buildings in the fortress burn, even if I poured my strength, my life, my whole soul into the task. Would it be enough?