Andrew Offutt - The Undying Wizard

“Bas… your pardon, Holy Druid… what say ye this chair be made of?”

’Bas stared, blinking, obviously having been far and now coming back but slowly.

“Cormac mac Art,” he said in a strange voice that came as if from that faraway place, “see ye that so long as ye live ye do never again interrupt a Druid in converse with Those he serves!”

It was Cormac’s turn to blink. His armpits prickled and a chill touched his back. Almost, he who bent knee to no man, not even crowned head, considered kneeling… almost. He made no reply, for he could think of naught to say.

Now Bas, with no visible rancor whatever, looked down at the ancient throne, ran his hands over it. The druidic ring flashed. His head came up, long dark hair flurrying at his shoulder, and there was enlightenment in his clear eyes.

“Oak!”

“Aye, so I thought even from afar. Oak! From the tree holy and beloved to Behl and-”

But the druid’s grey eyes had swerved to look past him, widening. Cormac broke off. He knew what he’d see ere he turned, for he felt it: Silent menace and the chill of the grave had entered the lofty hall of Atlantis. The air hung thick with a loathsome aura of blood-freezing horror and the cruelest sorcery devised by demonic mind.

He turned, and they were there.

There had been no sound; there was none now. They were there.

Men in plain helmets of iron bands and helms with horns like the Old God, Cernunnos the Horned One; men with eyes of blue and grey, and drooping pale moustaches; men carrying axes and swords and the round shields of far Norge. And… others…

Cormac’s body went all overchill and damp, and the sweat was atrickle in armpits and palms. Ah, gods! He knew them, those Danes… Hrothgar of the bent broken nose and brilliant swordwork, and Hrut Forkbeard with his ornately hilted sword and silver-chased leather jerkin and vainly twisted mustachioes… and there Edric, aye and Hnaef…

“Gods! Oh my old comrades… I saw ye all dead on this very floor! ”

Chapter Six:

The Throne of Kull

Dull eyes staring fixedly from faces like pasty masks, the men who were at once dead and not-dead began to move forward.

Bas rose to his feet. Deeply green sleeves slid back over surprisingly thick wrists as the druid extended his arms. Toward those stalking shades he held out mistletoe and oak. They stared, every one with naked sword or ax in hand, and no wounds upon them.

“Be at rest! By Sun and Moon, fire and water, oak and the green mistletoe that lives all the year… BEGONE! Mead awaits you in Valhal… your Valkyries cannot find you… bodies unborn await you in the land of the living! Your mighty god Odin of the Single Eye awaits you! Journey to him-Leave us! This is the realm of the living, where there is no place for slain men… and… ye be dead! ”

They stared dully, fixedly, those horrid spectres that looked so unlike spectres, but living men. Two-and-twenty, they ceased their slow forward movement. Every eye, Cormac saw, was on the druid’s hands…

Then they began their ghastly silent moving again, edging around sidewise, avoiding Bas… coming at Cormac. In winged helm and shining scale-mail, one Norseman was well ahead of his fellows. Blue eyes, dull as though mindless, stared at Cormac mac Art.

Cormac’s buckler was on his arm and sword in hand. The Gael attacked, for all the prickle of horripilation up his back and on his arms.

His sword swept out and around like a gale, humming through the air, and he watched it slash through the Viking’s bronze-cuffed sword-arm. Watched it slash… through… without resistance… without blood… and with no effect on the arm, which continued rising. It descended in a rush. The Gael’s shield leaped up and he shuddered as the descending sword crashed onto its metal-ringed edge.

“By all the gods! My steel has no effect on him-none! But his blade’s as deadly as ever steel is! A man has no chance against this horror-BAS!”

Cormac could only retreat or die; a swift jab showed him that the Norseman’s shield, too, was fit to defend a living man. An unslayable kill-machine, the Viking swept up his terrible ax.

For the first time in his life, Cormac mac Art turned and ran from a foeman.

From the shocked druid’s hand he tore the oaken hafted ax of Ruadan mac Mogcorf. He was unsure why; it was as if some instinct drove him. His sword he left against the throne-chair as useless, nor did he wield the ax as a man should. Holding it close to the head he’d thought overlight for a fighting man, he drove the end of the haft at the Norseman who had followed-but had stopped three paces from the throne.

The ax was poorly balanced for a thrusting weapon, held thus wrong end before, but with it Cormac thrust. Nor was he averse to using the Saxon tactic of feinting at the body and stabbing at the face.

The tip of the haft jolted home as if against living flesh and bone. Cormac could have wept for happiness at the shock to his arm.

A horrid groan filled that soaring chamber, and seconds later an equally horrid stench, the stomach-turning fetor of putrefaction and decay. And the Norseman seemed to melt, the flesh fading from his bones, hanging in tatters, vanishing into the air. His body quivered all over.

While his back crawled, Cormac watched what oaken stave had wrought, when steely brand was of no avail.

Bronze armlets dropped to ring on the floor, and one rolled noisily. Coat of scalemail caved in , cleaving to a form suddenly fleshless. For a brief moment Cormac stared into the eye-holes of a skull, a whiteboned death’s head bereft of so much as a scrap of flesh.

Then the lifeless skeleton crumpled to the floor with a rattle. It lay there, as should have done the bony structure of a man slain three months before.

“It’s the O-O-O-OAKHH!” Cormac mac Art shouted, partly in triumph and partly in a release of fear and horror, tension close to hysteria. “The OAK, Druid! Behl’s symbol of LIFE-the dead cannot withstand its touch! This be why that man Osbrit alone survived, for he sat that oaken throne! Here is why they sought to avoid you and come ‘round at me, Bas-you held this ax!”

Then Cormac did that which was alien to a weaponman, and against the grain of his very nature.

With all his might, he swung the ax against a broad thick pillar of smooth, time-darkened stone. His hands shifted so that it was the side of the steel head that struck with a great ringing thump and a terrible jar to his arms. A loud crack split the air as the haft broke. With another swift stroke Cormac smashed the head from his ax so that it hurtled through the air until it struck another pillar-and rebounded, and rebounded, and drove bloodlessly through one of those horrid foes to ring and clatter on the floor.

The Dane was unharmed; the ax was an ax no longer; Cormac held a thick oaken stave as long as his arm, to the fingers.

With it he drove at another man of the Norse. A whirring ax-blade rushed past his head, while he slammed the haft of what had been Ruadan’s ax into the shield-arm of the Viking. An awful death-cry rose; again came the stench of a mouldering putrid corpse-and a second skeleton clattered horribly to the floor.

Bas stared with half-glazed eyes as the tall weaponman of Eirrin fell to one knee to avoid a swordthrust, and cracked that attacker’s knee with his strange cudgel. And there were three skeletons amid the corpses on the floor of Kull’s Castle.

They closed in now, and Cormac did what he must to avoid death-dealing thrusts and slashes of un-dead men whose blades his targe could not turn all at once; he hurled himself aside.

Then he ran , racing around the seated druid to come upon a Dane at the edge of the cluster. Cormac knew that lightly bearded man; had fought beside him and trod the decks of ships named Raven and Wolfsail with him. But the Gael was steeled, sure now that he had the means of providing rest for these men brought back from the land of the dead on the murderous mission of some unknown mage. Cormac was the means.