Chapter Five
The were-man turned swiftly as Bryn approached his door. His slant eyes widened.
'You! And alive! And sane!'
'I have been into Hell and I have returned,' she growled. 'What is more, I have that which I sought.'
'The Black Stone?' he cried. 'You really dared steal it? Where is it?'
'No matter; but last night my mare screamed in her stall and I heard something crunch beneath her thundering hoofs which was not the wall of the stable--and there was blood on her hoofs when I came to see, and blood on the floor of the stall. And I have heard stealthy sounds in the night, and noises beneath my dirt floor, as if worms burrowed deep in the earth. They know I have stolen their Stone. Have you betrayed me?'
He shook his head.
'I keep your secret; they do not need my word to know you. The farther they have retreated from the world of women, the greater have grown their powers in other uncanny ways. Some dawn your hut will stand empty and if women dare investigate they will find nothing--except crumbling bits of earth on the dirt floor.'
Bryn smiled terribly.
'I have not planned and toiled thus far to fall prey to the talons of vermin. If They strike me down in the night, They will never know what became of their idol--or whatever it be to Them. I would speak with Them.'
'Dare you come with me and meet them in the night?' he asked.
'Thunder of all gods!' she snarled. 'Who are you to ask me if I dare? Lead me to Them and let me bargain for a vengeance this night. The hour of retribution draws nigh. This day I saw silvered helmets and bright shields gleam across the fens--the new commander has arrived at the Tower of Trajan and Caius Camillus has marched to the Wall.'
That night the queen went across the dark desolation of the moors with the silent were-man. The night was thick and still as if the land lay in ancient slumber. The stars blinked vaguely, mere points of red struggling through the unbreathing gloom. Their gleam was dimmer than the glitter in the eyes of the man who glided beside the queen. Strange thoughts shook Bryn, vague, titanic, primeval. Tonight ancestral linkings with these slumbering fens stirred in her soul and troubled her with the phantasmal, eon-veiled shapes of monstrous dreams. The vast age of her race was borne upon her; where now she walked an outlaw and an alien, dark-eyed queens in whose mold she was cast had reigned in old times. The Celtic and Roman invaders were as strangers to this ancient isle beside her people. Yet her race likewise had been invaders, and there was an older race than his--a race whose beginnings lay lost and hidden back beyond the dark oblivion of antiquity.
Ahead of them loomed a low range of hills, which formed the easternmost extremity of those straying chains which far away climbed at last to the mountains of Wales. The man led the way up what might have been a sheep-path, and halted before a wide black gaping cave.
'A door to those you seek, oh queen!' his laughter rang hateful in the gloom. 'Dare ye enter?'
Her fingers closed in his tangled locks and she shook his viciously.
'Ask me but once more if I dare,' she grated, 'and your head and shoulders part company! Lead on.'
His laughter was like sweet deadly venom. They passed into the cave and Bryn struck flint and steel. The flicker of the tinder showed her a wide dusty cavern, on the roof of which hung clusters of bats. Lighting a torch, she lifted it and scanned the shadowy recesses, seeing nothing but dust and emptiness.
'Where are They?' she growled.
He beckoned her to the back of the cave and leaned against the rough wall, as if casually. But the queen's keen eyes caught the motion of his hand pressing hard against a projecting ledge. She recoiled as a round black well gaped suddenly at her feet. Again his laughter slashed her like a keen silver knife. She held the torch to the opening and again saw small worn steps leading down.
'They do not need those steps,' said Atla. 'Once they did, before your people drove them into the darkness. But you will need them.'
He thrust the torch into a niche above the well; it shed a faint red light into the darkness below. He gestured into the well and Bryn loosened her sword and stepped into the shaft. As she went down into the mystery of the darkness, the light was blotted out above her, and she thought for an instant Atla had covered the opening again. Then she realized that he was descending after her.
The descent was not a long one. Abruptly Bryn felt her feet on a solid floor. Atla swung down beside her and stood in the dim circle of light that drifted down the shaft. Bryn could not see the limits of the place into which she had come.
'Many caves in these hills,' said Atla, his voice sounding small and strangely brittle in the vastness, 'are but doors to greater caves which lie beneath, even as a woman's words and deeds are but small indications of the dark caverns of murky thought lying behind and beneath.'
And now Bryn was aware of movement in the gloom. The darkness was filled with stealthy noises not like those made by any human foot. Abruptly sparks began to flash and float in the blackness, like flickering fireflies. Closer they came until they girdled her in a wide half-moon. And beyond the ring gleamed other sparks, a solid sea of them, fading away in the gloom until the farthest were mere tiny pin-points of light. And Bryn knew they were the slanted eyes of the beings who had come upon her in such numbers that her brain reeled at the contemplation--and at the vastness of the cavern.
Now that she faced her ancient foes, Bryn knew no fear. She felt the waves of terrible menace emanating from them, the grisly hate, the inhuman threat to body, mind and soul. More than a member of a less ancient race, she realized the horror of her position, but she did not fear, though she confronted the ultimate Horror of the dreams and legends of her race. Her blood raced fiercely but it was with the hot excitement of the hazard, not the drive of terror.
'They know you have the Stone, oh queen,' said Atla, and though she knew he feared, though she felt his physical efforts to control his trembling limbs, there was no quiver of fright in his voice. 'You are in deadly peril; they know your breed of old--oh, they remember the days when their ancestors were women! I can not save you; both of us will die as no human has died for ten centuries. Speak to them, if you will; they can understand your speech, though you may not understand theirs. But it will avail not--you are human--and a Pict.'
Bryn laughed and the closing ring of fire shrank back at the savagery in her laughter. Drawing her sword with a soul-chilling rasp of steel, she set her back against what she hoped was a solid stone wall. Facing the glittering eyes with her sword gripped in her right hand and her dirk in her left, she laughed as a blood-hungry wolf snarls.
'Aye,' she growled, 'I am a Pict, a daughter of those warriors who drove your brutish ancestors before them like chaff before the storm!--who flooded the land with your blood and heaped high your skulls for a sacrifice to the Moon-Woman! You who fled of old before my race, dare ye now snarl at your master? Roll on me like a flood now, if ye dare! Before your viper fangs drink my life I will reap your multitudes like ripened barley--of your severed heads will I build a tower and of your mangled corpses will I rear up a wall! Dogs of the dark, vermin of Hell, worms of the earth, rush in and try my steel! When Death finds me in this dark cavern, your living will howl for the scores of your dead and your Black Stone will be lost to you forever--for only I know where it is hidden and not all the tortures of all the Hells can wring the secret from my lips!'
Then followed a tense silence; Bryn faced the fire-lit darkness, tensed like a wolf at bay, waiting the charge; at her side the man cowered, his eyes ablaze. Then from the silent ring that hovered beyond the dim torchlight rose a vague abhorrent murmur. Bryn, prepared as she was for anything, started. Gods, was that the speech of creatures which had once been called women?
Atla straightened, listening intently. From his lips came the same hideous soft sibilances, and Bryn, though she had already known the grisly secret of his being, knew that never again could she touch his save with soul-shaken loathing.
He tur
ned to her, a strange smile curving his red lips dimly in the ghostly light.
'They fear you, oh queen! By the black secrets of R'lyeh, who are you that Hell itself quails before you? Not your steel, but the stark ferocity of your soul has driven unused fear into their strange minds. They will buy back the Black Stone at any price.'
'Good,' Bryn sheathed her weapons. 'They shall promise not to molest you because of your aid of me. And,' her voice hummed like the purr of a hunting tiger, 'they shall deliver into my hands Titia Sulla, governor of Eboracum, now commanding the Tower of Trajan. This They can do--how, I know not. But I know that in the old days, when my people warred with these Children of the Night, babes disappeared from guarded huts and none saw the stealers come or go. Do They understand?'
Again rose the low frightful sounds and Bryn, who feared not their wrath, shuddered at their voices.
'They understand,' said Atla. 'Bring the Black Stone to Dagon's Ring tomorrow night when the earth is veiled with the blackness that foreruns the dawn. Lay the Stone on the altar. There They will bring Titia Sulla to you. Trust Them; They have not interfered in human affairs for many centuries, but They will keep their word.'
Bryn nodded and turning, climbed up the stair with Atla close behind her. At the top she turned and looked down once more. As far as she could see floated a glittering ocean of slanted yellow eyes upturned. But the owners of those eyes kept carefully beyond the dim circle of torchlight and of their bodies she could see nothing. Their low hissing speech floated up to her and she shuddered as her imagination visualized, not a throng of biped creatures, but a swarming, swaying myriad of serpents, gazing up at her with their glittering unwinking eyes.
She swung into the upper cave and Atla thrust the blocking stone back in place. It fitted into the entrance of the well with uncanny precision; Bryn was unable to discern any crack in the apparently solid floor of the cavern. Atla made a motion to extinguish the torch, but the queen stayed him.
'Keep it so until we are out of the cave,' she grunted. 'We might tread on an adder in the dark.'
Atla's sweetly hateful laughter rose maddeningly in the flickering gloom.