Icestorm

by Theresa Dahlheim

  Graegor staggered. He heard a stick snap, and his leg suddenly woke, erupting from numb sleep into sheer agony. The earth magic slipped out of his grip and he barely avoided falling on top of Tabitha as he collapsed.

  He curled into a ball and clamped his hands over his leg. It was transfixed by the broken wooden shaft and steel blade of a spear. Squirting blood slicked his hands and pooled under him. Touching it made him dizzy, but he couldn’t pass out. He couldn’t. Tabitha was bleeding too, her arm bright red, and in the brightness of their bond there were no words, because the pain was too much for her, the blood too frightening. She couldn’t heal herself. She couldn’t. She’d never had to. Except, once—she was younger … he saw a canopy over a bed, and something itched, tingled—a flood of embarrassment—

  She blocked their link then, and it was an incredible relief to not feel her pain with his. He had no time to wonder about what she’d remembered. “Your arm,” he rasped aloud. Still clutching his leg, he managed to lift his head to try to see her. She was lying on her side, her eyes shut tight. Something had stabbed her in the crease of her elbow, and her blue sleeve was bright red from halfway to her shoulder to halfway to her wrist.

  “Heal it,” she demanded, her voice very high.

  “I can’t.” God, his leg hurt! “You have to.”

  “But why?”

  “Your power … shuts me out.” Contare had not been able to heal him for the same reason, after the fight. This hurt worse than the fight. At least it seemed to hurt worse. He had to stop the bleeding. “You … can do it.”

  “But—”

  “You can. Do this, do what I do. One of the prayers. The meditation.”

  “I can’t remember!” Her voice was rising even higher in her panic.

  He had to bite off the words a breath at a time, or otherwise he would scream from the pain. “Listen. I’ll … say them … you just … repeat … them. ‘Fields of flowers, open to the sun.’”

  “What …”

  “Helps the pain. ‘Fields of flowers.’ Say it.”

  “Fields of flowers,” she whispered.

  “Open to the sun.”

  “Open to the sun.”

  “The sun was warm, but now it burns.”

  “The sun was warm, but now it burns.”

  “Fields of flowers …”

  “Fields of flowers.”

  “Petals closing …’”

  He spoke the whole meditation aloud with her. His own pain subsided much more quickly than hers, but she did it, she did it, just as he had done it after the duel. With him, step by step, she guided her magic to shut off her nerve endings in her arm, and then to contract her veins. The blood that had already soaked her sleeve started to dry into a seal, and that would hold the flesh together as long as she kept her elbow bent. It was grisly and sticky and horrible—but it would work. It would hold.

  “I did it,” she sent to him. Wonder and warmth filled the silvery cords of their bond as she looked at him from where she lay, her eyes huge and soft. Blood was smeared across her cheek and chin. “I can’t believe I did it.”

  “We’re sorcerers. We can do anything.”

  Something flit across her face, across her mind, too slight and fast for him to know what it was. Then she closed their link and bowed her head, as if shy or embarrassed.

  When Graegor finally looked down at his leg and hesitantly pulled his hands away from it, he could see two half-closed wounds puckering around the spear—one side, the shaft; the other, the blade. The wounds weren’t bleeding anymore, but they also weren’t healed. His shin bones had snapped, and they were already fusing together all wrong …

  “Those heretics did this,” Tabitha said then, aloud, anger climbing back into her voice.

  “No. Rogue magi.” There was no question in his mind. He just didn’t know Rond and Ahren’s role in it. Was there any chance that they were still alive?

  He uncurled from the floor in small, breathless jerks, and then managed to sit up. His medallion now felt very cold against his skin—bracing. The long steel blades that were sunk into the floor to the left and the right of him looked like those big two-man saws that cut down huge, old trees. They stretched from one side of the room to the other, and when he studied at the wall he was facing, he could see straight tracks in the woodwork that had guided the blades down from the falsely coffered ceiling. Two of the nine blades had fallen directly above him and Tabitha, and these were broken, shattered into chunks as big as plates and slivers as fine as glass. The two blades on either side of those had been bent, folded down sideways toward the floor from the pressure of the domed shield he had forged from the earth magic.

  Dozens of needle-sharp metal edges gleamed in the light. The lamp overhead still glowed exactly as it had when they had first entered the room. But the pale green curtains had been sliced clean away into heaps on the floor. On one wall, dozens of crossbow bolts had thudded into the painting and into the wall below it and into the floor beneath it. When he looked at the other painting on the other wall, he saw that its canvas was in shreds. No—not canvas. Paper. The painting was just paper, and the crossbow bolts had punched through it from behind. Past the scraps and shreds, he glimpsed metal racks. Someone had loaded the bolts into the racks, and Graegor was certain that if he looked further, he’d be able to find the tensioning and firing mechanisms.

  Someone …

  There were five more saw-blades sunk into the floor. Nothing had impeded their descent—neither Rond, crumpled near the landing, nor Ahren, mere feet away from where Graegor sat. Crossbow bolts were sticking up from Ahren’s arms and legs, but what had killed him was the huge blade that had hit him in the chest. The whites of his eyes stared up at the ceiling from his blood-drenched face. Sick horror rose up Graegor’s spine, up his throat, and he had to look away. He’d seen very old, sick patients die in hospitals; back home, he’d seen cattle butchered. To see this—to see a human die like an animal becoming meat—

  “They’re dead,” he said to Tabitha, his voice rough. “Don’t look.”

  “No,” she whispered, still huddled on the floor.

  A spasm in his leg made him wince. Control it. Control it. Fields of flowers …

  A small groan from across the room interrupted him. He looked up incredulously and saw that it was Rond. The heretic was lying motionless near one of the blades—but he was alive.

  Graegor moved to stand up, and immediately shouted a vicious curse as the pain in his leg renewed itself. He could barely hold onto the idea of the flowers as he hobbled over the strewn shards of metal from the broken blades. Stepping over them jarred the spearhead in his shin again and again, but he told himself that he was a sorcerer and that Rond needed him.

  Rond’s left arm was on the wrong side of one of the long blades in the floor. Rond had tucked the stump into his other armpit to try to stop the bleeding. In his remaining hand he gripped a length of chain, its small iron links now rust-red. His face was deathly pale under his beard, and his knit cap was halfway off his head as he twitched in feeble agony.

  Can’t save the arm. But he knew what to do with the stump—cauterize it. He’d never actually seen it done yet, but he had seen a picture in a book once, and he knew that the burn would stop the bleeding. Hopefully Rond hadn’t lost too much blood already while Graegor had been tending to Tabitha.

  Tabitha, who was a sorceress, and who would not have died of her wound.

  Wincing with pain and guilt, he got down on the floor next to Rond. In the labyrinth, they had learned from Arundel and Ferogin how to cause heat to flow into ice, wood, and rocks. Metal could not be much different. He scanned the floor to find one of the plate-sized chunks of the broken saw-blade, and he found a good one within arm’s reach. He slid his coat sleeve down over his hand to protect it, but the edge of the metal still seemed to bite him as he picked it up.

  He forced his breathing to slow down. He had to focus to do this. He had to concentrate. He imagined the metal vibrati
ng, each of its tiny, beady particles moving and bumping into each of the others. Ferogin had said that the more they moved, the more they bumped, the warmer the object would grow. In Graegor’s imagination, every single particle of metal began to race in chaotic circles and collide with as many of the others as possible, spinning and spinning and spinning into a tiny, contained storm.

  In only a few seconds, the metal was almost too hot to hold. Graegor did not let himself hesitate as he reached out and pulled the stump of Rond’s arm away from the man’s body. So much old blood had already soaked it—and so much new blood was running from it. He had to hurry. Rond’s face was covered with blood from a slash beneath his right eye. He groaned a tortured breath that became a scream as Graegor pressed the scorching metal shard against the stump.

  It was awful. The sound and the smell were like sizzling meat, something familiar and appetizing gone horribly, sickeningly wrong. Graegor hadn’t heated the metal enough, and it took much too long for the severed end of Rond’s arm to change color from blood red to char black. All the while, the man clenched his jaw and made strangling sounds to bear the pain, and sometimes another scream burst out. Graegor finally dropped the hot metal shard when he couldn’t stand to hold onto it any longer even through his sleeve, and Rond instantly rolled away and onto his stomach. He pressed his forehead to the floor and cradled his stump against his chest, coughing and gasping. The stump wouldn’t bleed now, but amputations frequently became infected. It needed to be cleaned and dressed, at the very least. Contare would …

  Contare. He reached for their link, but it went nowhere. He was still blocked. The rogue magi must have shut the trapdoor at the top of the stairs. He had to climb up the stairs and open it … he had to get up …

  He had to give himself a moment.

  He slumped where he sat. His eyes fluttered closed, but then he forced them open again. Under his shirt, his medallion now felt warm, almost soothing.

  Slow your breaths. Slow your heart. But no rest yet.

  In front of him, past Rond, was the landing at the foot of the stairs. Across it lay a short spear with dark, sticky blood at its point. Tabitha’s blood?

  He looked back toward her. She was lying very still, and her silvery presence laced through his heart had a sense of forced calm. She had mastered the pain. She was controlling it much better than he was controlling his own.

  His eyes returned to the spear. Yes, someone could have thrust it toward Tabitha’s face, or her head, and she in turn would have thrown up her arm to block it, to defend herself. But why would anyone leave the spear behind? Was it too long and awkward to get up the steep and narrow stairs? At least, for someone in a hurry?

  Those rogues hadn’t come down the stairs to attack him and Tabitha. That would have taken too long and made too much noise. Given them too much warning.

  He looked over his shoulder at the wall behind him, opposite the wall that hid the stairs. It was a false wall, just as the ceiling had been false. Narrow openings near each of the wall’s corners revealed closet-sized spaces where the attackers must have hidden themselves. He could see a wooden panel leaning just behind another, and guessed that the attackers had slid the panels out of the way once the bolts had flown and the blades had fallen.

  He thought he could piece it together now, from what he remembered happening, and from what he saw now. The rogue magi had triggered the bolts to fly out of the painting, to make him and Tabitha duck out of the way. Then they had triggered the blades to fall from the ceiling, to slice them both to pieces on the floor. Then they had come out from the wall with weapons, just in case Graegor and Tabitha had survived.

  Four attackers? He thought he remembered four. Two must have come from each of the two corners where the false panels were. One had stabbed a spear into Graegor’s leg, where it had stuck and broken. Another rogue must have aimed his spear at Tabitha, and she’d blocked it with her arm. The other two attackers had probably come out from the wall after that, swinging the scimitar and the axe, but before they’d reached him and Tabitha, he’d pulled the earth magic into his shield to strengthen it and enlarge it from a disc to a dome.

  The giant saw-blades hovering over their heads must have been pushed back up to the ceiling by the sudden burst of earth magic. They’d fallen back down and smashed against his shield. The broken pieces of metal must have sprayed the rogues, but they’d kept attacking, so they’d been wearing armor. Their weapons hadn’t been able to break through Graegor’s shield, and when he’d staggered to his feet, they’d all retreated up the stairs.

  They had failed, but they had also escaped. And Ahren was dead. His blood made a deep and sticky pool on the smooth wooden floor.

  Graegor wasn’t particularly sensitive to the sight of blood, but seeing how Ahren had been mutilated made him turn his head away again, holding his mouth tight and forcing his breath out through his nose to keep from vomiting. He really couldn’t blame Tabitha for being so frantic when she’d seen so much blood. Especially since it was her own blood. She’d obviously never seen it before, not like that. It was likely that the worst wound she’d ever had in her life was a jab from a sewing needle or a nick from a table knife.

  She had healed herself before, though. Or had tried to. That much he had sensed from that brief, embarrassing memory of hers, where she had been lying on a bed under a canopy, itching or tingling. He would never, ever ask her what that had been, but he guessed it was about her moon blood. Jeffrei had once mentioned that some girls—girls without mothers or sisters to teach them—thought their moon blood meant they were bleeding to death. Had Tabitha been trying to “heal” it?

  It didn’t matter. He’d wasted enough time. He had to call to Contare.

  “Tabitha,” he sent to her. “Can you reach Natayl?”

  After a pause, she sent back, “No. The room is still sealed.”

  He’d hoped that it wasn’t, that he was blocked from Contare for some other reason. He looked at his leg. The sharp, gory point of the spearhead stuck out of one side, and the shaft stuck out of the other. It looked very wrong. The pain was dull and throbbing. The fields of flowers had given him all they could for now.

  “I’ll open the hatch,” Tabitha sent then, and he could feel the resolve that filled her. Surprised, he looked at her as she uncurled from the floor and rose to her feet, as graceful as ever. Her cheek was still blood-smeared, her lips were still tight, and she kept her bent arm close to her chest and covered by her elegant wrap. With her other hand, she held up her long skirt as she stepped over the blades. She passed him, and soon he heard her footsteps climbing the stairs.

  He should summon a light for her. The stairway was dark, and she didn’t like the dark.

  He heard more footsteps, heavier ones on the floor above. Someone was shouting. Graegor felt a flash of panic from Tabitha, and he scrambled to pull himself to his feet, trying to put all his weight on his good leg. But then Tabitha tamped down her fear, and he could sense her holding out her good arm, feeding her gen into a shield like his, filling the narrow space halfway up the stairs. The shout from the upper floor repeated, and kept repeating, two or three muffled words. Had the rogues left someone behind? He had to get up the stairs, up to Tabitha, help her hold them back if they opened the hatch.

  But his leg. God, why couldn’t he stop the pain?

  He heard and felt the hatch open, felt fear stab through Tabitha again, but then the muffled shout cleared into a voice he recognized—Lord Henrey, Contare’s First Minister. “Lord Graegor!”

  Before Graegor could shout up to him, Henrey tapped their link, and moments later, it was Contare’s presence also flooding through his mind, a surge of relief followed immediately by a demand for information. Graegor wanted to give an orderly report, but his words soon disintegrated into impressions and images and memories that came out in no order at all.

  Contare seemed to absorb it regardless. “Take care of Tabitha,” he sent after the torrent had ebbed. “I’m almost there.�
� He closed their link.

  Graegor’s whole body sagged. He was vaguely aware of Henrey reaching the bottom of the stairs, and could sense his shock at what he saw. Tabitha had come down the stairs too, and Graegor could sense her determination not to look into the room again, for fear of losing her hard-won composure.

  Rond groaned and rolled onto his back, revealing the blood on his face, and Henrey stepped over to him. The old magus’s looming height and bony face were intimidating at the best of times, and the long black winter coat he wore didn’t help. Rond flinched with a startled yell when he saw him, but Henrey just crouched beside him and frowned at his burned stump. Rond looked like he wanted to back away, but he had no strength to do more than stare.

  “I cauterized it,” Graegor explained as Henrey inspected his work.

  “Yes, my lord. You did well.”

  “Did Lord Contare send you?”

  “Yes, my lord.” Henrey peered at the cut under Rond’s eye, and then slowly peeled back Rond’s knit cap to reveal another laceration at his temple. Graegor hadn’t even noticed the blood there. It looked like Rond had been grazed by a crossbow bolt, maimed by the saw-blade, and hit by the shower of metal slivers. He was incredibly lucky to be alive.

  “Lord Contare asked me to come and keep watch on the house while you were inside,” Henrey went on. He used a handkerchief to dab the excess blood from Rond’s face so he could inspect the wounds. “I intended to find a position near the back door, but I saw four men run out when I was still walking up the alley. Lord Contare sent Magus Stan to follow them, and he told me to find you, if I could do so safely. I checked, and there isn’t anyone else in the house.”

  That was the kind of report Graegor had been hoping to be coherent enough to give Contare. “Did they get away?”

  “Magus Stan lost sight of them, my lord, but Magus Hugh is heading in their last known direction.”

  Graegor sighed. “All right.”

  “My lord, let me help you upstairs. I’ll come back down for him.”