The Celtic Mirror Read online

  Morgan slammed the chest lid closed and lay back down on the couch, resting his head on his laced fingers. Automatically he intoned a short evening prayer to Belenus asking for and getting a dimming of the room lights so that he might sleep the remainder of the interminable day away. At least the Celtic pantheon was generous to him with its simple favors. A little objective research, however, might prove that the more apparent magic that permeated Reged society was nothing more than a matter of natural telekinetic and telepathic talents made strong by ritual and belief. The idea of exploding the fictional foundations of Ian’s spiritual culture perversely excited him.

  Only Connach could authorize such research, however, and Morgan could envision no favors from that quarter. He closed his eyes and tried to weave a little magic of his own.

  The dream he began to spin was a pleasant one. He imagined himself in Brigid’s apartments, holding her….

  “Kerry.”

  The dream became so vivid that he clearly heard her voice as she whispered into his ear.

  “Kerry!” The voice was insistent and did not follow the fantasy he was fabricating. He sat up in the darkness, listening, alone.

  “Brigid?” he called softly, disoriented. A blue glow tugged at his awareness. It was the ring. Incredulous, he raised his left hand to his face. The featureless stone had vanished. Instead, a perfect likeness of Brigid peered from between Aiofe’s protecting wings, and the ring thrummed a steady vibration on his finger—or was it the trembling of his hands?

  But for the blue tinge, the diminutive image might have been an ordinary Kodak holo. Morgan had once owned a cube of the old Miss Match, frozen in the act of winning America’s Cup back from the Aussies a decade before she had been retired to charter. Then Brigid’s lips moved. Holo-cubes had no motion, no sound.

  “Tomorrow,” the thin voice piped, “you will be allowed a visitor, a Lieutenant Malo. This will be arranged by the Lord Connach.” It was her voice but not her intonation—like the computerized imitations of human speech that had always made Morgan uneasy. “Malo will not speak either to the guards outside your rooms nor to you. Do not ask him to respond until the door to your quarters closes behind him.”

  “Brigid!” He called, but the face collapsed again into a featureless blue oval that was warm against his skin, though silent.

  Morgan closed his eyes again and attempted to reconstruct the bizarre communication. It made no sense to him. The message was clear enough, but had the messenger been Brigid, Aiofe, or some agent of the vengeful High Priest of Reged? Like the worlds seen through Connach’s Mirror, the message could hold the promise of heaven or of hell. As his thoughts spun out the possibilities hidden behind the veiled stone, he dimly heard his guard bark a challenge to someone whose approach down the corridor had been noiseless. The answer muffled by the thick chamber walls, reached Morgan only as a sibilant hiss. If one sentry had been relieved by the next, he appeared to be in no hurry to rush home to the guards’ barracks. A silence settled thickly on Morgan’s isolated section of the Batchelor Officers’ Quarters, and a sudden drowsiness penetrated his mind like a sea mist, pulling rather than soothing him to sleep.

  Groggy, he tried to fight the compelling urge and was immediately struck with a powerful nausea. His head began to spin as he attempted to open his eyes, to sit up. He was unable to do either simple task! He was imprisoned on his couch by muscles which no longer obeyed his commands! A change of air pressure in the room rustled the tapestry behind the couch.

  He was alone no longer!

  Soft footfalls neared him. Exercising no particular caution, the intruder seemed eager to close with the helpless Morgan. His body odor won the unequal contest. The pungent reek of stale sweat violated the room’s atmosphere like a sweaty gym sock packed with a box of roses. Morgan commanded his legs to slide him off the couch. Nothing happened. His body had betrayed him.

  The other halted a few centimeters from Morgan’s all too vulnerable side. With every nerve ending, he felt a presence he could not see nor challenge. He told his body to move once more—unsuccessfully.

  Goddamn it, Aiofe! Help me now if you damned well can help anyone! he screamed inside the coffin of his skull. A thrilling sensation on his ring finger, stopped, and then began tentatively once more, growing in intensity and spreading like liquid to his spine, warm. The return of feeling flowed toward his legs but was turned by a stronger opposing one…a cold tightening that gripped his limbs with reptilian coils.

  Aiofe! Damn it, answer your phone! The coils did not loosen their chilly possession of him, but he found that he could will his hands into feeble fists. The ring continued to emanate warmth that gave him a focus for his hope.

  Aiofe?

  By experimentation, he discovered that he could rock his body slightly from side to side by bunching the muscles in his shoulders alternately. The movement was not much, but it was, Morgan guessed, more movement than the dark invader would expect of his intended victim. With grim determination, Morgan bunched and relaxed his shoulders, rocking in a higher arc with each attempt. He added imperceptibly to his movement by pushing with his near-paralyzed fingers.

  With his third cycle, the low susurrations commenced which chilled him more thoroughly than his helplessness. The stranger he could not see had begun chanting Morgan’s death song!

  “Scatha of the Dark World,

  I call upon thee

  To bind this foreign one.

  Keep him still, nerveless, cold.

  Guide thou my blade

  With thy serpent’s eyes.

  Pierce thou his heart

  With thy serpent’s fang.”

  Another movement of tainted air reached Morgan, and he knew that the intruder had raised an arm, ready to strike. He bunched his shoulders in a last attempt to avoid the assassin’s steel and thrust desperately with his enfeebled fingers. As he rolled onto his opposite side, Morgan felt rough knuckles pass across his spine and distinctly heard the thud of a blade embedding itself in the wood beneath his couch’s padding. A surprised grunt escaped the intruder. Christians: one; Druid assassins: zero.

  Morgan’s roll for life stalled, and he remained suspended for an agonizing moment. A roll back onto the center of the couch would be fatal, for the killer would have no difficulty in targeting his victim. I didn’t change worlds only to die here on this couch! He exhaled all of his breath, hoping to reduce the contours of his body just enough to encourage a continuation of the uphill roll. It seemed to take him forever to empty his lungs.

  The couch vibrated slightly. The knife had been freed!

  Morgan’s body suddenly sagged the remaining distance. There was no hesitation that time. As soon as he passed the center of his mass over his left shoulder, he dropped stone-like to the floor. Astoundingly, he had retained some breath. It exploded from him as he hit with both shoulder blades on the rug.

  He gasped convulsively, rolling over and drawing his knees to his heaving chest. His muscular control had returned with the blow, but he remained hunched, fighting to get his breathing back under control. He was frightened, and could never remember having been so terrified—not even in combat. He was weaponless, in a pitch-black room with an armed killer who apparently could see in the dark.

  “Oh, Lord,” he wanted to pray, “save me from this pagan asshole,” but he was not sure that the God of his youth could hear him in that place. He was not sure that his God would favor him with protection even if He existed in Connach’s world. What had Morgan become but a pagan, himself, exhorting and honoring Celtic gods for little favors, and loving a Druid priestess?

  A meter away, his attacker was panting, not from exertion, Morgan decided, but from frustration at having missed his prey. The gasps grew and faded, and Morgan realized that his adversary was casting about like a hunting dog, attempting to focus upon the sounds of Morgan’s own breathing.

  Alarmed, Morgan changed his breathing pattern, drawing careful, silent, unsatisfying breaths although his adrenalin
e-charged body demanded the deep, screaming lungfulls he could not risk.

  Why hasn’t that bastard come for me, yet? He cautiously positioned his feet and steadied himself with both arms outstretched, ready to lunge in any direction. The couch! I’m hidden from him down here, but it won’t take him long to find me if he moves. Morgan knew his spartan apartments as well as any blind man knows his own rooms, but like any blind man, he was at a distinct disadvantage in that unfair contest with his “sighted “opponent.

  If he moved, he was a dead man. If he remained behind the couch, he was a dead man.

  For Morgan, the decision was easy. He moved.

  He dove onto his left side and rolled twice, coming up hard against a wall. A bare foot touched something cool and smooth—tile. The bathing chamber lay in that direction.

  “Ha! Cursed foreigner. I see thee clearly, now. The Horned God awaits thee and will make thee his own as soon as Scatha’s tooth bites thy flesh.”

  “Both you and Scatha can go to hell!” Morgan croaked and lurched through the bath chamber doorway, slipping immediately on the tiles. The sunken tub lay behind him. There was no escape from the chamber except into the assassin’s arms, and there was nowhere in the chamber to hide or ambush the man who wanted to kill him.

  He was trapped!

  A soft shuffle, a barefoot slap sounded on the tiles behind him. He had company, and he was to be the entertainment.

  Not if I can help it! He stretched his hands out in front of his body to ward off any sudden attack.

  “Belenus! Do your thing! Help him, Aiofe!” The chamber light flared weakly, then increased steadily,

  “Stop! In the name of Scatha the Vengeful! Out, I command!”

  The light submitted to the stranger’s will, but in that instant of returned sight, Morgan saw the tattooed body of his opponent, the double-bladed dagger held in the right hand, the left arm held across the eyes, against the light. For the moment, the assassin was as blind as Morgan!

  It was the best advantage that Morgan would get.

  He took two confident steps to the wall nearest the tub. His searching fingers found the stone bottles on the chest-high shelf. There were three.

  Damn it! Which one? His fingertips examined the stone containers, identical in the darkness.

  “Ah, there thou art. Wait for me, chosen of Cernunos, and receive thy summons to the Blessed Cauldron.”

  The middle one, I think! Hoping he had chosen correctly, Morgan thumbed the stopper from the bottle’s mouth and silently poured the contents in a semicircle in front of him. When the bottle was emptied, he flung it in the direction of the doorway. A meaty smack and a sharp cry indicated that his enemy had not moved.

  “Aiiaah! I will find thee, now!” Scuffing and scraping noises told Morgan that the assassin was on the move once again.

  He bent and scooped water from the tub spreading it over the same general area where the bottle had been emptied. He stepped back.

  “Come on, then, Druid dog shit. Let’s see which one of us will provide dinner for Cernunos tonight.”

  “For thy blasphemy, I will make Scatha’s bite a painful one.” A second low laugh made Morgan’s skin crawl.

  “Try it then, sweetheart. You know I can’t go anywhere.”

  The low laugh came to Morgan, again. “Then await my approach, foreigner. Ah, I can see thee better now.” The padding footsteps were eager, hurrying.

  Morgan shrank back until his back touched the wall. His only defenses were puddles on the floor, and that defense was of questionable value if he had chosen the wrong bottle. If he could make the assassin careless through overconfidence, he might survive this attack. The rest would be determined by the relative close-combat skills of the opponents. His days of confinement in quarters had taken the edge off his physical conditioning despite the hours of punishing exercises he had forced upon himself, hoping Ian Connach would walk through the door, unarmed.

  Even with a Morgan in top physical condition, a fight with Ian Connach would be a toss-up. The opponent he faced in his darkened chambers was an unknown factor. Then, there was the matter of the knife. Morgan was all too conscious of that knife.

  He loosened the ties of his tunic and opened it, baring his chest to the man that could see in the dark.

  “Here,” he called, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. “Let’s not keep Cernunos waiting.”

  “Then die!” The confident hiss became a shout, followed quickly by the slam of a body on the tiles.

  The bottle had contained oil after all. Morgan’s blind preparations had been successful, but he was not prepared for what happened next. He had hoped that the fall might stun the assassin long enough for Morgan to disarm him and turn the weapon against its owner. The best he had hoped to find was an unconscious man on the floor. Then all he would have had to do was call for lights and his curiously absent jailers.

  Instead, his legs were slammed against the wall with such a brutal force that he screamed with pure agony. He collapsed onto his naked enemy. His left hand found the assassin’s wrist almost of its own volition. The long knife was held in a grip so powerful that Morgan began to realize that he might end his life on the bathing chamber floor—a blood sacrifice to the Druid pantheon.

  Morgan’s right leg lay between the assassin’s thighs. Forcing the pain in his knees away with a supreme effort of will, he shifted his weight onto his hands, trying to pin the killer’s massive arms to the floor. Biting through his lower lip in an effort to keep from crying out, he brought his injured knee up hard into the other’s groin.

  Instead of screaming in agony, the assassin laughed.

  “Fool. Those who serve the Dark Goddess have no need of earthly women. That which we no longer need, we dedicate to her that we might become the stronger for the gift.”

  Morgan’s enemy was a eunuch.

  While Morgan fought his pain, his opponent lifted his arms from the floor as if Morgan was not holding them. The flat side of Scatha’s blade actually touched Morgan’s face. It was sticky and warm.

  “Feel Scatha’s caress on thy cheek? Soon it will stroke thy chest.” Foul breath sickened Morgan, and the touch on his face horrified him.

  “Now, turn over little man so that her tooth might pierce thy breast.”

  Morgan might have been little more than a rag doll despite his solid two hundred pounds. The assassin rolled him onto his back as if Morgan had been a child.

  The blade inched towards Morgan’s chest; he had little strength left to resist single-handed. He released the assassin’s left wrist and locked his fingers around the knife hand, trying to pry the thick fingers open. Even two-handed, he made little gain, succeeding only in turning the blade away from his heart. That gain was soon offset.

  Finding his left hand freed from Morgan’s grasp, the Druid assassin seized Morgan’s throat and squeezed the airway closed.

  Morgan’s only hope was to remain conscious long enough to turn the blade upward. That hope was a slim one. As his lungs fought for the air that was denied them, a roaring began in Morgan’s head pyrotechnics exploded behind his blind eyes. His lungs could move air in only one direction—out, and a rattling sound escaped his jaws.

  The sounds of Morgan’s distress seemed to amuse the assassin, for his hissing laugh penetrated the surf that beat in his ears. You bastard! Morgan redoubled his efforts to turn the blade and felt the spirit’s metal wings cut deeply into his flesh.

  The ring! He could not call out to the guardian deity for help. Scatha’s servant had choked nearly all the air from his lungs; the meager amount that remained to him was stale and oxygen-poor. His chest convulsed agonizingly.

  He was dying.

  His power rapidly waning and his mind growing a thick, velvety moss, Morgan prayed silently to the dark stone that he could not see. Aiofe! he pleaded, suffocating, his joined fingers trembling. In the name of the Daughter of your Grove, Brigid of the House of Connach enter my body and add the strength of your spirit to my s
trength! It was the ultimate surrender for the Methodist minister’s son, to pray for possession, yet he could do no less. In a matter of seconds, his body would no longer be his to dispose if help of some kind did not arrive.

  The roaring had until then dominated all other sensations and he was, at first, unable to discern the vibration that had begun anew in his ring finger until the warmth that surged from that source began to eddy into his clouded mind and push the darkness back a little. As he became more aware of his surroundings, the need for oxygen appeared to subside, his muscular trembling, less evident. If it was death that had taken possession, then Morgan was prepared to die. Physical desperation had been replaced by something else.

  “Peace, mortal,” a voice sharing his drifting mind, soothed.

  Brigid? His thoughts, still whirling, formed a compelling vortex, which led ever downward toward surcease and a complete negation of being. Help me, my love.

  “Thou hast called upon me twice before, mortal. Dost thou not know me? I am the Winged One, and, alas, but a poor candle to resist Scatha’s dark powers. But, we three will try, thou, my daughter who is also thy lover and I. And try we must, for the gods of the light have need of thee.”

  Brigid? Is she here with you? His open eyes, protruding from their sockets, showed him nothing but skyrockets.

  “No, man. She rests now. I have compelled her to sleep even as the Dark One’s servant has bound thee. We will join our separate strengths through the ring that binds us, yet she will know nothing. She will dream dreams, but will know naught of our struggle in this place.”

  I don’t think I have the option of questioning your methods, motives or existence, Voice. If you aren’t the hallucinatory echoes of a dying brain, help get this bastard off of me! He no longer questioned Aiofe’s presence; insanity was assuredly the lesser of the two devils that confronted Morgan at that moment.

  Scatha’s man hissed a laugh and tightened his already deadly grip on Morgan’s bruised throat, then rotated his knife hand to demonstrate that he was in complete control, and that he was only toying with his victim with the cruelty of a predator that killed, not for food, but for sport.