“Dare you come with me and meet them in the night?” she asked.
“Thunder of all gods!” he roared, “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 to Trajan and Caius Camillus has marched to the Wall.”
That night the king went across dark desolation of the moors with the silent were-woman. This night was thick and still as if in ancient slumber. The stars blinked redly, mere points of red struggling through the unbreathing gloom. Their gleam was dimmer than the glitter in the eyes of the woman who glided beside the king. Strange thoughts shook Bran, vague, titanic, primeval. Tonight ancestral linkings with these slumbering fens stirred in his soul and troubled him with the vague, eon-veiled shapes of monstrous dreams.
Ahead of them loomed a low range of hills, which connecting with other, further ranges, climbed at last to the mountains of Wales, far away. The woman 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 king!” her laughter rang hateful in the gloom, “Dare ye enter?”
His fingers closed in her tangled locks and he shook her viciously.
“Ask me but once more if I dare,” he grated, “And your head and shoulders part company! Lead on.”
Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom. They passed into the cave and Bran struck flint and steel. The flicker of the tinder showed him a wide dusty cavern, on the roof of which hung clusters of bats. Lifting his torch he scanned the shadows recesses, seeing nothing but dust and emptiness.
“Where are THEY?” he growled.
She beckoned him to the back of the cave and leaned against the rough wall, as if casually. But the king’s keen eyes caught the motion of her hand pressing hard against a projecting ledge. He recoiled as a round black well gaped at his feet. Again her laugh slashed him like a keen silver knife. He held the torch to the opening, and saw again 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.”
She thrust the torch into a nitche above the well; it shed a faint red light into the darkness below. She gestured into the well and Bran loosened his sword and stepped into the shaft. As he went down into the mystery of the darkness, the light was blotted out above him, and he thought for an instant Atla had covered the opening again. But he then realized that she was descending after him.
The descent was not long. Abruptly Bran felt his feet on a solid floor. Atla swung down beside him and stood in the dim circle of light that drifted down the shaft. Bran could not see the limits of the place into which he had come.
“This is a great cave,” said Atla, her voice seeming small and strangely brittle in the vastness, “Many caves in these hills are but doors to greater caves which lie beneath. Even as a man’s outer actions are but small indications of the dark caverns of thought lying behind and beneath.”
And now Bran was aware of movement in the gloom. The darkness was filled with stealthly noises he knew no human foot might make. Abruptly sparks began to flash and float in the blackness, like flickering fire-flies. Closer they came until they girdled him in a wide half-moon. And beyond the first ring gleamed other sparks, a solid sea of them, fading away in the gloom until the furtherest were mere tiny pin-points of light. And Bran knew they were the eyes of the beings who had come upon him in such numbers that his mind reeled at the contemplation – and at the vastness of the cavern.
Now that he faced his foes, Bran knew no fear. He felt the waves of terrible menace emanating from them, the grisly hatred, the inhuman threat to body, mind and soul. Being of an incredibly ancient race himself, he more fully realized the horror of his position than a Briton or a Roman would have been able to do, but he did not fear. His blood raced fiercely, but it was the hot excitement of the hazard, not the drive of terror.
“They know you have the Stone, oh king,” said Atla, and though he knew she feared, though he felt her physical efforts to control her trembling limbs, there was no quiver of fright in her voice, “You are in deadly peril; they know you of old – oh, they remember the days when their ancestors were men! I cannot save you; both of us will die as no human has died for ten centuries. You have stolen their Stone – and you are a Pict.”
Bran laughed and at the savagery in his laughter, the closing ring of fire shrank back. Drawing his sword with a rasp of steel, he set his back against what he hoped was a solid stone wall. Facing the glittering eyes, with his sword gripped in his right hand and his dirk in his left, he laughed as a blood-hungry wolf snarls.
“Aye,” he ground, “I am a Pict, a son of those warriors who drove your ancestors before them like chaff before the storm! My people 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; Bran faced the fire-lit darkness, tensed like a wolf at bay, waiting the charge; at his side the woman cowered, her eyes a-blaze. Then from the silent ring that hovered beyond the torch-light, sounded a vague abhorrent murmur. Bran, prepared as he was for anything, started. Gods, was THAT the speech of creatures which had once been called men?
Atla straightened, listening intently. From her lips came the same hideous soft sibilances, and Bran, though he had already known the grisly secret of her being, knew that never again could he touch her save with soul-shaking loathing.
She turned to him, a strange smile showing her red lips dimly in the ghostly light.
“They fear you, oh king! By the black secrets of R’lyeh, who are you that Hell itself quails before you? It is not your steel they fear, but you yourself by the stark ferocity of your soul have driven unused fear into their strange minds. And they will buy back the Black Stone at any price.”
“Good,” Bran sheathed his weapons, “They shall promise not to molest you because of your part in this night’s work. And,” his voice hummed like the purr of a hunting tiger, “they shall deliver into my hands Titus Sulla, governor of Ebbracum, now commander of the Tower of Trajan. This they can do – how I know not. But I know that it the old days, when my people warred with these Children of the Night, babes disappeared from guarded huts and none saw the stealers come and go. Do they understand?”
Again rose the low frightful sounds and Bran, who feared not their wrath, shuddered at their voice.
“They understand,” said Atla, “Bring the Black Stone to Dagon’s Ring tomorrow night when the earth is veiled with the blackness that fore-runs the dawn. Lay the Stone on the atlar. There they will bring Titus Sulla to you. Trust them; they have not interfered in human affairs for many a century, but they will keep their word.”
Bran nodded and turning climbed up the stair with Atla behind him. At the top he turned and looked down once more. As far as he could see floated a glittering ocean of yellow eyes, upturned. But the owners of those eyes kept carefully beyond the dim circle of torch-light and of their bodies he could see nothing. Their low hissing speech floated up to him, and he shuddered as his imagination visualized, not a throng of biped creatures, but a swarming swaying myriad of serpents, gazing up at him with their glittering unwinking eyes.