Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  The final panel should have been the couple’s holy marriage. Sharina was neither prudish nor more of an innocent than any other peasant raised in daily contact with nature. Even so she felt her breath suck in when she saw the scene as lighted through the stone.

  Beara stood by the urn, hiding her face with her raised left arm and trying to reach down inside with the other hand to snuff the lampwick. It was too deep for her to reach. The girl sobbed bitterly as her arm flailed.

  Sharina closed her eyes. The patterns on the ice stone were soothing when the sun lit them from the outside, but they had a wholly different significance when light streamed through them from within. She felt the mottled patterns eating away her flesh like huge cancers.

  “Push it over!” she cried. She grabbed the urn’s rim and twisted, trying to roll the urn off its stand. In her present hysteria she should’ve been able to lift the urn overhead and smash it down on the floor in a thousand harmless fragments, but it didn’t move. It was as rigid as an iron post driven down to the center of the earth.

  Sharina looked for a tool, a spear or a poker that would reach farther into the urn than a human arm. There was nothing in the reception room. She ran back into her bedroom, thinking that the tongs on the charcoal brazier there might serve her need.

  The bedroom was decorated with a frieze of birds and vines on a trellis. The light flickering through the open doorway touched them as it had the decoration of the reception room. Sharina felt her stomach tense as she glimpsed what had been a pleasant design: now it made her feel like a corpse watching as the crows and vultures descend.

  She reached for the tongs from the cold grill, but they were too short to reach the flame. She could throw them down at the lamp—

  No, much better! On the bedside table was a clear glass water pitcher, etched on the inside with a hunting scene. Sharina grabbed it and ran back into the reception room.

  The evil glare from the urn repelled her like the door of an open lime kiln, but she’d faced other hard things in her life. Flinging away the tumbler upended to cover the pitcher, Sharina shouted, “Get out of the way, Beara!”

  The maid, frightened beyond hope of reasoning, continued to whimper and vainly grope. Sharina grabbed her left shoulder and half-lifted, half-pulled, the girl out of the way. She smashed the pitcher into the mouth of the urn, shattering the glass and releasing its contents in a single gout.

  The flood of water shattered the hot earthenware lamp and lifted the oil up the sides of the urn. For an instant there was darkness and peace in the suite. Then a spark from the glowing wick ignited the thin sheet of oil in a flash thousands of times brighter than the original flame.

  The light enveloped Sharina. She hung suspended in a chamber of ice that sucked all warmth and all life from her body. Cold squeezed her to a spark and began drawing that into itself.

  Sharina thought she heard the maid screaming through the gray hellfire, but perhaps she was screaming herself. Then she was gone.

  Chapter 9

  The cryolite urn had been even more delicate than Garric thought: the pieces shattered on the tile floor were eggshell thin. Liane knelt in the debris, supporting Sharina’s weeping maid with one arm and holding up a rushlight in the other hand. The tallow-soaked reed pith burned with a pale yellow flame; Liane carried a bundle of them as reading lights in her document case.

  “We broke in quick as we could, I swear we did!” said the officer of the guard. “When we heard the screaming, we put our backs to it. I figured if it was just the lady having a good time, well, I’d rather go back to following a plow than make a mistake the other way.”

  The hall door had been of sturdy beechwood. The overlay of bronze filigree, though meant for decoration, would’ve slowed the troops who were trying to break in. They’d splintered the panel, half of which still hung from the hinges. The bronze was a lacy tatter trailing into the room.

  “You were correct, ensign,” Garric said, his hand clenching and unclenching on his swordhilt. “What did you see?”

  The guards had brought their lantern with them; that and the rushlight were the only illumination in the reception room. Soldiers and servants were squeezing in from the hall, and troops from the courtyard hammered on the outer door now that they realized there was something wrong.

  The screams hadn’t been loud enough to alert them. It’d been the sound of soldiers battering down the door with their spear butts that’d warned Garric something was wrong, though his suite was adjacent.

  “Just the girl there crying on the floor and the vase all in pieces,” the ensign said. “To tell the truth, I thought the girl’d broke the thing and was afraid she’d be whipped to an inch of her life, but then I saw the bed empty—”

  He gestured toward the bedroom with the sword in his right hand. The point almost skewered the under-housekeeper who’d run in to see if her staff was the cause of the commotion.

  ”—and I said, ‘Where’s your mistress?’ to the silly bint, and she starts crying louder than she’d been doing, which is plenty loud.”

  Liane rose to her feet with a supple motion; the maid immediately sank back into the sobbing puddle as she’d been when Garric followed the guards into the room. She’d come from Valles in Reise’s entourage, chosen by him and therefore as trustworthy as human judgment could determine.

  “Beara said a servant she didn’t recognize put a lamp inside the urn,” Liane said, speaking loudly enough for Garric to understand over the increasing volume of noise. Lords Waldron and Attaper arrived together from opposite corners of the palace, both trying to take charge. “In the middle of the night she woke up because there was something wrong with the light coming through her curtain.”

  Liane nodded to the patterned muslin hanging that shadowed the maid’s alcove from the rest of the suite.

  “She said it was awful,” Liane continued with the dry humor that was so much a part of her, even in a crisis. “She can’t explain what she means, but judging from her state I’m willing to accept the assessment. She tried to put out the lamp and couldn’t, then Sharina did something—”

  “Poured water onto it,” said Garric, pointing with his bare toe. Fragments of etched glass were mixed with the urn’s ice-stone shards.

  “Yes, of course,” said Liane approvingly. “Sharina poured in water. The urn broke, and Beara says it sucked Sharina somewhere as it did so.”

  She frowned with concentration and cocked her head toward the door. Garric heard the familiar voice also, barely a chirp among the raucous, angry men.

  “Waldron and Attaper!” he roared, determined to be understood. “Bring Lady Tenoctris to me at once, if you please!”

  There was a stir by the door. Soldiers moved aside quickly, cursing their fellows who kept them from getting out of the officers’ way. The commanders walked Tenoctris the two steps from the doorway, one to either side of the frail old woman. Without their bulk and angry authority, she might as well have been on the other side of the moon for all her chances of reaching Garric.

  “Tenoctris,” Garric said, so coldly furious that there was no emotion at all in his voice. “Sharina’s been attacked or taken away by this urn. Can you learn anything about it here, or is there someplace you might better be?”

  “I can possibly determine something here,” the old wizard said. “Though....”

  She looked around doubtfully. “Not, I think,” she went on, “while there’s so many people around.”

  “Right,” said Garric calmly. In a bellow that rattled the windows he went on, “Clear the room! I want all the soldiers out and all the servants except the girl on the floor. Now!”

  There was an immediate shuffle and whispering, then a shift toward the door. It couldn’t be called a stampede, but he was being obeyed. That was good, because he was in no mood to be balked....

  He looked at Liane. “Will you stay here with Tenoctris, please?” he said. “Help her as she requires?”

  “Yes, of course,” Liane said.
She lit the overhead lamp with her rushlight, then said to Tenoctris, “You left your equipment in your room? I’ll fetch it and be right back.”

  Garric watched Liane slip out with the last of the Blood Eagles. Many amazing things had happened to him in the past year; Liane was both the most amazing and the most wonderful.

  “Lord Attaper,” Garric said. “I’ll take two companies of the Blood Eagles. Lord Waldron, I want whichever regiment is on standby to come with me also.”

  “That’s Lord Rosen’s regiment, your highness,” said Waldron with a frown. “They’re a Blaise regiment, though.”

  “Are you saying they’re not to be trusted, Waldron?” Garric snapped. Tendons in his throat stood out with his fury.

  “What?” said Waldron. The commander of the royal army had spent most of his long life fighting or in preparation to fight. He was stiff-necked, arrogant, and extremely competent. “Of course I trust them, or they wouldn’t be on duty!”

  “Then I don’t care if they’re bloody demons from Hell and the Sister commands them!” said Garric. “They’ll come with me to the Temple of the Lady of the Sunset. I’m going to turn the place upside down until I get answers about this urn they sent—and I learn what they’ve done with Sharina!”

  ***

  Sharina lay on the floor, trembling from a chill greater than that of any winter wind. Her eyes were closed, though it was a moment before she realized that and opened them. She’d been close to death; she’d thought she was dead.

  She was wearing the shift in which she’d gotten out of bed. It was night and the air was bitter, but even so she was warm by contrast with the place she’d been. She turned her head slowly, afraid that a quick movement would cause the tangled rubble around her to shift and crush her.

  When this building’s outer wall collapsed, the roof had tilted down to form a lean-to. The tiles had cracked off. Though the substructure of lathes and trusses remained, enough moonlight streamed through the gaps for Sharina to identify her surroundings.

  She was in the reception room of her suite—but the palace was a ruin overwhelmed by time and the elements. The floor humped like a tilled field, and only memory told Sharina she was lying on a mosaic instead of a scatter of sharp-edged gravel.

  There could be no doubt, though. A patch of fresco remained on the inner wall from which rain had flaked most of the plaster. The moon shone on it—fittingly, for it showed the face of the Lady who was the Moon in one of Her guises. In the world Sharina’d just left, the same painted visage smiled from a couch in Her garden of peace and delights.

  The passage to the hall was blocked by debris. The other doorway had skewed when the wall shifted but it hadn’t fallen in. Sharina could see into what had been her bedroom, where now an open fire burned on the floor. The three creatures squatting around it would’ve looked like gangling, raw-boned men from a distance, but upright each would stand more than twelve feet high.

  The creatures’ foreheads sloped; their noses were broad and flat, and coarse reddish hair covered their bodies. They didn’t wear clothing, but one had a necklace of some sort. Occasionally they made noises, but Sharina couldn’t tell whether they were speaking or simply grunting like dogs rolling on the ground. Meat was cooking on the fire; Sharina smelled pork and heard the regular pop and sizzle of dripping fat.

  As her eyes adapted, Sharina realized that the objects around her included loot along with the debris of ruin: the creatures in the next room used this half-fallen alcove as a storehouse for the baubles they’d collected, sorting them by type. Beside Sharina was a jumble of gold and silver plate: platters, goblets, and the gilt frame of a handmirror set with glass beads.

  Piled partly on the floor and partly on fallen roof tiles was a tangle of fabric, chosen for shiny threads rather than art. A border decorated with gold braid had been cut or torn from a woolen tapestry; the corner cartouche of the Three Graces dancing remained. Even by moonlight Sharina thought that Ilna would’ve been interested in the weaver’s skill.

  On the slant of rubble blocking the hall doorway were swords and daggers whose hilts were decorated with jewels and gold wire. The blades were masses of rust; many of them had been broken. A glaive of perforated brass, some usher’s symbol, had survived exposure, but it had never been a weapon.

  At the bottom of the pile, visible because of its soft gleam in the moonlight, was a narrow-bladed war axe with gold inlays whose complexity and beauty probably meant nothing to the creatures which had collected it. A spike in the shape of a long nose balanced the axe’s single bitt. The blade was a work of art in uncorroded steel, the stylized head of a sharp-featured man with an angry expression.

  The creatures in the other room began to eat, tearing chunks of flesh from the carcase without removing it from the fire. Sharina watched them for a long moment, then with a grim expression turned her attention to finding a way out before the owners decided to gloat over their hoard after dinner.

  The reception room’s only surviving doorway was the one between Sharina and the creatures. The maid’s alcove was packed with more of the gathered loot: unguent bottles, jewel boxes, and a few larger containers with shiny metal or sparkling inlays—brass, tin and glass as well as what humans would’ve called precious. Even if the door beyond weren’t blocked, the treasure would clatter down like a deliberate alarm.

  The only possibility of escape was the slanted roof. The beams were spaced a foot and a half apart, far enough for Sharina to wriggle between them easily. The lattice of laths laid across them was the problem. She could easily tear her way through the thin wood, but that’d make noise—particularly if she dislodged one of the few remaining tiles.

  Sharina slowly rolled over on her back to survey the roof without getting a crick in her neck. The creatures weren’t paying any attention to this room as they grunted and slobbered their way through the meal, but there was a risk one of them might catch a flash of her white face moving in the moonlight.

  The back wall, which had originally separated the room from the interior hallway, remained upright. It was the fulcrum supporting the roof beams when the outer wall collapsed. When the tiles slipped downward, they’d pulled the laths some distance with them.

  Sharina was sure she could worm through the gap. To reach it, though, she’d have to climb the slope of rubble which had poured through the hall doorway, debris from the other side of the building. That should be possible; and anyway, she didn’t have a choice.

  She rolled onto her belly again, slowly and carefully, then crawled to the slope on all fours. Tufts of coarse grass grew from the rubble. She could at least hope that their roots had cemented debris into a solid mass that wouldn’t slide noisily when she put her weight on it.

  She paused, looking at the assortment of weapons in front of her. The only one that remained useful was the axe. It was on the bottom of the pile, and Sharina had no experience with anything bigger than the hatchet by the kitchen door for chopping kindling. Work that required a real axe had been Garric’s job from an early age.

  The dagger blades were lumps of rust, though, and she was certainly going to need a tool if not a weapon when she got out of this dreadful lair. Reaching carefully into the stack of rusted iron, she worked the axe out—first the head, then the two-foot long hardwood helve which ended in an iron knob. The sculptured face glared at her.

  Gripping the axe in her right hand, just below the head, Sharina started up the slope. The rubble was as firm as she’d dared pray. The moonlit opening above her was narrower than she liked, but she—

  “Masters!” screamed the axe. “Masters, a thief is taking me! Masters, I’m being carried away!”

  A triple bellow filled the night. Sharina looked over her shoulder. The creatures had risen from the fire and were picking up clubs the size of her body. One of them still held in his free hand the side of ribs he’d been gnawing with massive yellow teeth. They were from a human being, not a pig.

  “Masters!” cried the axe. “Kill the
thief and drink her blood!”

  ***

  “Oh,” said Cashel as they came around the angle of rock. He’d thought the gleam on the peak above was snow or a concentration of quartz. “Oh!”

  “Lord Bossian’s manor,” said Kotia with a smug smile at having finally managed to impress Cashel. “We’ve arrived, or very nearly so.”

  The manor was huge. Maybe the buildings scattered over the acres of the palace compound in Valles put together would’ve added up to this, but Cashel doubted it—and anyway, these towers and blocks and terraces were all in one place, one structure.

  And though of many different colors, the whole thing was made out of crystal. No wonder sunlight glinting from and through its angles shone for miles above the surrounding crags.

  The beads of wizardlight guiding them continued up the hillside, but now the route was paved with textured blue-gray glass instead of being a waste of boulders and pebbles. Cashel cleared his throat. “Ah...?” he said. “Will Lord Bossian be glad to see us, mistress? If you’re having trouble with your father and all?”

  “I’m having trouble with Lord Ansache, whom I thought was my father, you mean,” Kotia said, starting up the pavement with brisk strides. “He and Bossian aren’t friends, I assure you. As a matter of fact, Lord Bossian offered to wed me last year, but my—but Ansache refused him.”

  Her back was straighter than it’d been for most of the morning’s hike. Cashel was barefoot, but his soles were hardened to any kind of use. Kotia’s slippers hadn’t fallen apart on the journey—whatever they were made of was tougher than the light suede it looked like—but they couldn’t have cushioned her steps much either. If there’d been much farther to go, Cashel would’ve been carrying the girl.

  Kotia looked at Cashel with an expression that he still couldn’t read, though it was becoming familiar. “I doubt Bossian would’ve taken me in if Kakoral were still pursuing me,” she said. “Bossian is a great wizard but he couldn’t have protected me against the demon, so he wouldn’t have tried. But I had nowhere else to go.”