Andrew Offutt - The Undying Wizard

“Aye,” she said. She was still frowning. Her knowledge that something was amiss prevented her remarking on their odd position for such converse: she standing below and craning her neck, he asprawl and looking down at her. “But my love… Wulfhere? I just left him, as I came to seek you.”

Cormac’s stomach lurched. He made two attempts before he was able to form words. “You just… what… what did Wulfhere, when ye saw him last?” Gods; it was as if worms crawled about on his body and within his guts.

“Why, it’s back in the castle the overgrown boy is, and half drunk already.” With amusement in her voice: “He was bawling out challenge to all and any from the Other Side of death who’d care to come forth and face his ax, dead foes or live sorcerer!”

Samaire chuckled, for she could not see Cormac’s expression.

“Wulf… but-but Sa… Samaire…”

“Cormac!”

He fought to control himself; be strong, why alarm her so? “He was thus, and ye came directly along the passage, along the tunnel, so that he can… he cannot be aught else but behind you?”

“Aye. O’course. Cormac, methinks-”

“Bear… with me,” he said, more confused and truly fearful than ever before in his life. Resistless sorcery stalked him, loomed grim and threatening, and he could not know B from L or what was white and what black.

“I’m all right… dairlin girl,” he said huskily, striving with all his might to give the semblance of truth to the lie. A thousand ants seemed at the running of footraces over his body, while his arms and back had gone chill under tunic and mailcoat. Seeking sanity, he fled the dread impossible and spoke the mundane. “Why have you followed me?”

Samaire answered with seductive softness, “Why, to be alone with you, love.”

He stared down at her. “You came not to attack me?”

Again she cried out his name, this time more in confused accusation than apprehension. “Cormac!”

Before he could wrestle forth words from his clouded mind and tense lips, Samaire chuckled. It was a rippling throaty sound that he liked much and had so told her.

“Oh!” she said. “Aye then… I came to attack you, king of my heart. I followed you because I want you.”

He knew that he was not responding properly, in words or body, to that frank statement. But he could not, not yet. “Samaire,” he said with a grave seriousness that sent her smile afleeting. He heard his own voice shake. Cormac took control of himself as though he were a nervous but strong-willed rider on a worse than nervous horse. He had to. Else he’d be gibbering, and Cormac mac Art knew it.

“Behind ye,” he said, intoning words in the manner of a druid at his most solemn rites, “is the only way out of that pit, save the tunnel. Have care-one step through and it’s death. But… do you look forth, and down… and tell me what you see.”

He clenched his teeth, angered that he’d let those last several words tumble forth in such a rush.

Samaire raised her hand to her cheek. An extended finger rubbed nervously in her hair, at the ear, where she had the wispiest of golden sideburns. She was frowning and a tremor rode her voice.

“What is it, my love? It’s far from natural you are!”

He heard the pleading note and was moved-but he firmed his jaw. “ Please , Samaire. Do you look as I asked.”

After a moment, she did so without a word, and he knew he’d put hurt upon her. From above he gazed at her back, with the thick mass of curling vermillion tresses bright against the dark leather. Her hair appeared recently to have been much-combed.

Samaire emitted a startled “oh” on discovering the sheer drop at her feet, and clutched at the edge of that doorway that oped upon plummeting death.

“The sea,” the woman said. “The endless ocean I see, and awful rocks like teeth directly below. Ugh! Far below.”

O ye gods my ancestors swore by and found solace… “Look… look ye to the left along those rocks!” he commanded with a sudden desperate urgency. He could not look.

She did, and he watched her head turn both to the left and then rightward. “ Cormac … the sea . Water. And more rocks. Stones and great rearing boulders. A spot of sand here and there. And it’s not happy I am looking down on such; it puts a dizziness on me. Cormac? What-love, what am I to see?”

But Cormac lay shuddering, holding his breath, clenching fingers into palms until the nails deeply dented even that calloused skin. He nerved himself. With a sudden lurch, he twisted onto his side. And he looked down.

He remembered the words of Osbrit the Briton. O ye gods , he’d babbled in his horror, and Behl show mercy , and the most poignant, man reduced to boy by horror and the unknown: Gods! O mother…

“Behl help!” Cormac exclaimed, and his voice broke as it teetered on hysteria’s brink.

Wulfhere’s body was no longer there.

Cormac fell back. He stared at the lowering sky. Wulfhere was dead, he told himself. Wulfhere was dead. He knew it. The man had not dragged his broken body off those rocks and crawled or walked anywhere . Cormac had seen him fall; Cormac had long stared down. Nor had there been the merest whit of movement.

A feeling of the eerie crept over him like palpable fog.

The Gael moved now, though not voluntarily; he was so tense that he shivered. His heart slammed at his chest like a great fist within him and the pulse was thunder in his temples. He was cold and hot both at once. Dusk-shot and darkly streaked, the sky seemed to glower above a world peopled with slavering fangs and dead-who-walked and unknowable evil and a lurking black abyss of unconsciousness and madness.

Cormac wrestled with his own mind. Desperately he sought logic, some sane explanation.

Wulfhere had landed on the jaggedly rearing rocks below, and was dead. He had seen that. Yet Samaire said the Dane was in the castle a mile distant, drunk and foolishly challenging a power that hacked at Cormac’s horror-distorted mind as with a blade steeped in some numbing, insanity producing toxin. Wulfhere lay dead… Wulfhere was in the castle… Wulfhere’s corpse had vanished. At one and the same time Wulfhere had been here, and fallen to his death, and lain there-and had not been here at all; he had fallen/stood roaring out defiance; he had died, burst and shredded on rearing rocks like gigantic fangs/he was merely, predictably and characteristically, drunk…

No!

No. Fight! Fight to regain control of a mind staggering like a man with an adder’s venom turning his blood to consuming fire. Cormac shuddered-and was hot. He became aware that pain was on his fingers. So tightly did he clutch the edge of the precipice that his knuckles had gone white as the sea’s foam on the rocks so far below. The Gael was hanging onto the solid tangible rock for fear of flying off into a redshot void of black horror and insanity.

He heard her voice. He began breathing deeply, pushing out his stomach as he filled his lungs to bursting before expelling that air to the last flutter and dragging in more. She was begging, she was tearful in her fear for him.

“Samaire!” He spoke to the sky. “Step back. Into the tunnel and out of the way with ye, lustful woman!” he said, trying to cover his staggered mind with lightness. “It’s down I’m coming.”

“Ohh… I’d hoped to come up , love. Oh my love-let me hold you… the tunnel is so dusty, Cormac…”

“Oh. Aye. Of… course.”

Pretending all was aright, she was, that strong magnificent woman he called dairlin girl. Almost, he smiled.