Both arms bent. Both bone-lean hands moved back toward the body. They planted themselves, palms down, at the shoulders. The head moved. Lank silver hair stirred. The hands pressed down. Buskin-shod feet scraped.

The corpse pushed itself up from the dusty floor.

On its feet, the dead man who was not dead wavered, tottered on long-still legs. A hand swung out to slap the earthen wall, as a brace for a body that had long lain prone. A long moaning sound issued from the thin slash of a mouth. All through the tall form, a great shudder ran. Then, as though just remembering, the mouth closed.

The head turned on its thin neck with another stirring of shoulder-length hair like lifeless silver thread. One hand, the right, rose before the face. It turned there, like a specimen the dead eyes studied, while the robe’s dolmen sleeve slid down. Revealed was a wrist that was only skin drawn over bone like hide tedded for its tanning.

The skin was not tan, but nearly white, like new linen.

The hand slapped the chest, moved over the face. It traced out the high forehead, the deep crag-surmounted sockets of the pale, pale eyes, that thin nose with its porcelain-like nostrils, the gaunt cheeks, the mouth that was little more than a horizontal gash between mustache and ashy beard.

The resurrected corpse, alone beneath the earth… spoke.

“Thin, O Great Serpent, this body-merely skin over bone like the fine parchment of Vanara stretched over stone to dry!” The voice that issued from the corpse was soft, almost a whisper. “A lean body, far from young. A priest, a seer, a mage-a Druid, it is called. From a land called Norge, where the ice remains long and snow falls and lies ever atop the craggy peaks, and wind howls cold to cut like a chariot-wheel’s scythe.”

Up leaped robe-swathed arms, to raise clenched fists on high.

“ALIVE! Alive and in the form of a man once more, with hands, aye and feet to walk the earth again! Cutha Atheldane. That was the name of the life-force that quickened this body before mine animated it anew.”