"Cuchulain!" cried Goban looking wildly up into Cullan's face, and calling him by the name all the Tuatha had called him because of his resemblance to his long-dead ancestor. "Cuchulain, you've come back! But too late!"
He choked the last words out in a groan, looking around the corpse-littered palace.
"Goban, what has happened here?" cried Cullan hoarsely. "Where is Fand?"
He spoke in the Tuatha language, so like the ancient Gaelic, that he had learned here before time.
"The Fomorians have her—Tethra's dark warriors have taken her to black Mruun in the north!" groaned Goban. "They slew all here but me, and I should have died, too."
Cullan's blood iced with dread. Fand a prisoner of the dealiest enemies of the Tuatha, the dark Fomorians whose evil had been legend even in Earth for ages?
"It was that traitor Mannanan's doing," said Goban thickly. "The cursed one who was once Fand's husband."
"Mannanan?" cried Cullan. "But he was killed two years ago—two days ago, by your time—when we smashed his plot to seize the Gateway."
"Aye," said Goban, "but it seems now that Mannanan's plot was not really his own. He was but a pawn in the hands of the Fomorians. Those black devils were the ones who really coveted the Gateway, so that they could go through into your Earth.
"And when Mannanan's plot failed, Tethra's black horde acted quickly. They came to seize the Gateway mechanism and Fand, who is its guardian and knows the secret of its opening. They poured into Ethne last night from hundreds of boats and slew all in the city. They pressed the last of us into the palace as we sought to defend Fand."
Goban's eyes lighted fiercely. "You should have seen her, wielding sword with us like a tigress against the swarming dark ones. And as she fought, she cried, "If Cuchulain were but with us still!" That was all I heard before a sword grazed my face, and I fell stunned."
Brian Cullan's heart was bursting with wild emotion. And from his lips there broke a sound of rage that was almost a snarl.
That strange resurgence of ancestral personality, of ancestral memory, that once before had made him Cuchulain reborn, was waking in him again.
"We'll not stay here wailing her loss!" he cried. "We'll follow northward after them, even to Mruun!"
The red rage was creeping ever stronger across his brain, the terrible personality of the ancient Hound beginning again to dominate his maddening mind.
To have lost Fand, by merely hours! To have spent those long months of toil and danger and deadly risk to win back to the Shining Land and her, only to find himself too late!
"Wait, Cuchulain!" pleaded Goban. "We two could do nothing against all the Fomorians in black Mruun. The Tuatha of all the isles must be told of this. I must call, Lugh, lord of the Tuatha."
"Why didn't you call when danger first threatened?" Cullan demanded savagely.
"There was no time!" Goban protested. "The Fomorians burst in upon Ethne like a flood, a wave of death that rolled upon us in moments."
Goban rose unsteadily to his feet with
