Andrew Offutt - The Sign of the Moonbow

For the first time, he spoke. His voice was as emotionless as the eyes of a serpent. “Ye be fast.”

Cormac said nothing. Having gained the tiniest of psychological advantage, he would now adopt the menacing silence that had been Elatha’s.

After a moment of silence, Elatha’s face moved in a soundless snarl and he cut again. Once more Cormac waited until the torturemaster’s brawny arm came over, and then he moved. This time he did not dodge, but ran. He could not bear the inactivity of remaining only a defender. Several paces rightward he rushed, and then he charged the torturemaster of Moytura’s dungeon.

He was within four feet when the swift sideward jerk of Elatha’s wrist brought his whip leaping over like a striking reptile. It curled around his attacker’s buskined right ankle. The whip wrapped but once for it had not been hard-directed, in Elatha’s desperation.

Cormac stumbled, windmilling arms laden with buckler and brand. His charger was broken. Elatha jerked; the whip came free without yanking Cormac’s legs from under him. As the Gael regained his balance, Elatha paced swiftly backward. His arm was already snapping his length of leather to himself, and behind.

The whip rushed out. It slapped loudly on leather and wrapped four times about Cormac’s right leg. Then came the bite of its iron fang, and leather legging split just above the Gael’s knee. A gust of air leaped from his lungs, with the sound of voice in it. He strove to prepare himself for what must come next; there was no time. The moment the whip began its encircling, Elatha’s bicep leaped and he yanked.

Cormac was jerked to the floor with a crash and a grunt.

Grinning openly, Elatha the Whip transferred his stock to his left hand and spun to wrap the lash once about himself. He was brought thus that much closer-while he drew his short sword of dark iron.

Trapped a-wallow on the floor with his leg caught and held tautly extended, Cormac used all his strength and will.

He flopped onto his back; he sent his buckler racing up to meet a downrushing blade of iron that resembled in its shortness those of the Roman legions who’d lately roamed the world they had claimed to own. Iron blade crashed down on ironbound shield of hardened wood while Cormac’s own blade flicked out like a sliver of blued lightning. With a terrible impact like that of hammer on forge, Elatha’s sword struck the metal rim of the other man’s shield. A stone had cracked the wood of that buckler; now sword driven by powerful muscles actually ate into its rim, iron into iron. Despite his braced, cording muscles Cormac’s buckler was driven down nearly to his body; the sword of Elatha was no less notched than the shield-rim.

The sword of the Gael meanwhile rushed through the whip that stood taut betwixt his leg and Elatha’s waist. Its point missed the Danan’s flesh by less than the breadth of three fingers.

Great shock showed itself on the face of Elatha the Whip, who Cormac was to learn had never felt pain or known any semblance of defeat or fear; the man was accustomed to plying his whip and the other dread tools of his trade on unarmed victims, and them usually with dark despair already on them. His whip was worse than halved; his sword had failed to find flesh and was both notched and bent; the arm that wielded it was beset by a thousand needles from that terrible impact.

The burly Danan spun away, and his face bore no longer an expression of mockery, or triumph.

At the same time Cormac rolled and stood. His leg complained, for blood darkened the leather there where the severed whip dangled. He faced now a man armed with a short whip and a short sword, and it notched, and Cormac mac Art was no longer at the disadvantage.

The Gael was made overconfident thereby.

Elatha was hardly in despair or helpless. A master of whip-wielding needed no more than the yard or so of good leather strap he clutched, and he proved it. Gone was the deadly iron fang at the end of his lash, but it struck the wrist of Cormac’s sword arm so forcefully that it wrapped twice just below the leather bracer and snapped the meaty base of his thumb with its very tip.

The Gael’s arm twitched with a jerk; Elatha yanked; Cormac’s sword flew from his open-flexing fingers to ring skidding across the floor of stone and stone-hard earth.

Elatha was smiling openly and far from prettily. His short sword leaped beneath his foe’s buckler and its point grated hard against Cormac’s ribs. Only the Gael’s armour of steel chain saved him from death then, or from the wound that would have been the next to last. Still he grunted and was staggered by the blow he felt and the grating pressure on a rib. In truth, iron point slipped between linked chain and pierced through padded tunic to touch the skin over the rib. The blade widened back to the point; a circle of steel held it; the rib did not give.

Even while his arm was whipping around in a half-circle and his empty sword-hand grasping the short length of whip between himself and the Danan, Cormac’s smallish round shield rushed up and around to slam its ironbound rim into Elatha’s upper arm.

Another man grunted in pain and another hand flexed open. A second sword clanged to the floor. And another man jerked the whip. Elatha, struck hard in right shoulder and yanked by left arm, was jerked leftward and overbalanced. He staggered sidewise and only now remembered to release the whip-stock.

It returned to him instantly; Cormac slammed it thudding into the other man’s right cheek and then his gut and then into the center of his leather breechclout. Blood started from Elatha’s cheek and mouth from split skin and a broken molar. At the same time Elatha started to double over, with both hands leaping to his crotch.

A mailclad forearm crashed into the torturemaster’s mouth and his eyes rolled loosely. Elatha went to his knees, leaning backward now; Elatha toppled sidewise and lay groaning through shredded lips.

Panting, working his stinging right wrist, Cormac mac Art retrieved and sheathed his sword.

Elatha’s brand he caught up and crashed violently against a pillar of stone so that the blade bent a quarter way in on itself. Hurling it from him, the Gael turned to the torture table.

“Elatha… bested and down!” Dithorba said from behind Cormac, in an elated whisper that bespoke his nearness to disbelief.

“Who be this man?” Cormac asked, having discarded his buckler to pluck at the table-bound man’s cords with both hands.

“Lughan Senlac, my… my fellow adviser to the queen. Will ye not save time by merely cutting him free, defeater of Elatha?”

A groan escaped the oldster bound facedown on the table, his soft buttocks-darkly marked by Elatha’s whip.

“Lord Lughan,” Cormac muttered, “I loosen these knots rather than slice them, for the reason that Elatha the Whipless will soon replace ye on this table.”

After a moment of silence, Lughan gasped his reply. “Be not concerned… with haste. A tiny space of time more on this… restful bed will not finish me. To the end ye state… I can wait!”

Chapter Twelve:

The Guardian

The prisoners of Cairluh and Tarmur Roag were free of bonds and cells in Moytura’s dungeon; their former torturer lay groaning and sweating on his own fanged table. His weight, his greater development of chest and belly and thighs pressed the ends of the scores of upward driven nails into his flesh more deeply than they had bitten Lughan Senlac. There were no guards in the dungeon; prisoners were weak and helpless, and Elatha was proud and jealous of his reign.

Cormac mac Art held the shortened whip he had taken from him who had wielded it to such agony, even to the deaths of some. For Cormac and Dithorba had found two in the cells who need not be freed; they had died of whippings that had torn them open and ruptured internal organs.