Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  There were three of them, dipping and swooping in the clear air. Ilna couldn’t estimate the distance closer than ‘many miles away’, but that was enough to prove that the creatures were huge. In a sudden simultaneous rush they vanished again over the horizon.

  “Shausga and Ninon,” Chalcus called. “Go string your bows, I think. Likely we’ll not need them, but... have them ready regardless. Kulit, take over the lookout.”

  Chalcus grinned at Ilna with a wolfish good humor that had nothing funny in it. “And for me, my dear, I think I’ll have my sword about me till we dock. Not that we’ll need that either, but....”

  “We’ll need it before this voyage is over,” said Ilna, folding a swatch of coarse fabric over the hand frame to protect it when she packed it in the hold. “That’s why we’re here, after all.”

  She was smiling also. It struck her that there probably wasn’t much difference between her expression and that of Chalcus.

  And because Ilna really was in a positive mood, she laughed at the thought.

  ***

  “We should’ve come double-time,” Attaper muttered to Garric as they reached the plaza in front of the Temple of the Lady of the Sunset. “My boys could’ve taken the gates and held them till the regulars came up.”

  Ten Blood Eagles were ahead of them; seventy more—companies in the bodyguard regiment were badly understrength because of recent fighting—were behind. Rosen’s regiment followed, filling the street eight abreast and singing a Blaise warchant.

  The hut beside the temple steps was empty, though the watchman’s lighted lantern hung from the hook over his open door. The gates to the compound behind the temple were closed and barred; that might have been normal for the hours before dawn, but an alarm was ringing within and torchlight shimmered behind the walls.

  “If you think we could’ve run ahead and not have those Blaise armsmen decide it was a race, Lord Attaper...,” Garric said as King Carus in his mind grinned approval. “Then you’ve seen surprisingly little of the world. Besides, we’re not dealing with foreign enemies. These are citizens of the Isles, although they may be a little vague at the moment regarding their duty to the crown.”

  “We’ll sort ’em out,” grunted the file leader close behind Garric. “By the Lady, we will!”

  It struck Garric momentarily as an odd oath. On consideration he decided it was exactly the right one.

  The courtyard walls were ten feet high. A man squirmed over them from the other side, then dropped down into the plaza. There were angry shouts within the compound.

  Attaper grabbed Garric by the shoulder and held him fast. “Blood Eagles!” he ordered. “Close ranks twenty feet from the wall!”

  The wall-jumper trotted toward them, stopping with his hands raised, palms outward, just short of the guards’ lowered spears. “Your highness!” he called. “My name’s Birossa. I’m Lady Liane’s man!”

  “Bring him here,” said Garric.

  “Your highness,” said Attaper, “I don’t think—”

  Instead of shouting in frustration, Garric laughed and twisted away from Attaper’s hand, then slipped through the rank of Blood Eagles. The guards were doing their job as they saw it, but Garric’s job was to rule the Isles. He wouldn’t let his friends keep him from his duty, any more than he would his enemies.

  “Master Birossa,” he said, ignoring the curses behind him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Commanding a squad of temple heavies until just a moment ago,” Birossa said. He wore only the simple undertunic that would be covered by a priestly robe when he was fully dressed. “They call them the Lady’s Champions, but they’re thugs. Lady Liane sent me to Carcosa three weeks ago, and I didn’t have any difficulty getting hired. I know how things’re laid out inside, so I can guide you.”

  “That’ll be helpful,” Garric said quietly. Liane hadn’t told him she’d placed a spy in the Lady’s camp—and very likely the Shepherd’s also; but gathering intelligence before Garric needed it was part of her job, and she did it very well.

  “They were alerted by a messenger a few minutes ago,” Birossa said, nodding to the compound. “They’ve called out all the Champions and issued swords.”

  “Have they indeed?” Garric said, his voice very light. His muscles trembled, and it was with effort he kept from drawing his sword. Attaper was at his side again, but this time the Blood Eagle didn’t touch his prince.

  The gate was made of heavy timbers with a hawser crossing each leaf diagonally to keep it from sagging. The left panel had an iron-barred window at eye height. Garric walked up to it; Lord Attaper accompanied him, mumbling curses.

  “I’m here to see Lord Anda,” Garric said, his voice pleasant. The trill of emotion wasn’t something the stranger looking out from the bars would find threatening. “Take me to him at once.”

  There was a brief conversation behind the gate. A different pair of eyes replaced the first. A woman said, “Lord Anda’s at his devotions, your highness. As soon as he completes them, I’m sure he’ll be glad to admit you.”

  Garric stepped back, still smiling. He toyed with the hilt of his sword. “Lord Attaper,” he said in the same high, cheerful voice, “Open this gate, if you please.”

  “We’ve got it, your highness!” cried Lord Lerdain, Garric’s 15-year-old aide and—significantly at the moment—the son of the Count of Blaise. Garric turned.

  “Hup!” cried an officer of the Blaise regiment. Stone scrunched as a pair of armsmen levered an altar over on its side with their spearbutts; six of their fellows caught the toppling stone and lifted it to waist height.

  “Hup!” repeated the officer.

  “Hi!” cried the men as they started forward, shouting in unison at each stride. The officer ran alongside his troops. “Hi! Hi! Hi!”

  The Blood Eagles opened a passage as they saw what was coming. Several of them cheered.

  “Hi!” bellowed the officer. The altarstone was too stubby to use as a ram, but it made a very good missile for six strong men to throw into the center of the gate. The panels lurched open with a crash loud enough to wake the dead.

  The six armsmen staggered through first on the inertia of their rush, but Garric with Attaper and a squad of Blood Eagles was immediately behind them. The bronze crossbar hadn’t broken, but the stone’s impact had torn loose the staples holding it to the gate leaves. The woman who’d spoken to Garric was stretched out with a startled expression and a bloody forehead; the bar had hit her as it spun back.

  A large number—scores if not over a hundred—of armed priests had gathered in the courtyard; more were running to join them from the two-story barracks on the left side. Torches and the lanterns over doorways flickered, emphasizing the nervous haste of the scene. The Blaise troops drew their hooked swords as the Blood Eagles raised their spears to thrust over their locked shields.

  Garric stepped between the forces. “Lord Attaper!” he said. “Count to three aloud. When you’ve finished, deal with any civilian still holding a weapon as a traitor to the kingdom!”

  “One!” bellowed Attaper. The armed priests shuddered closer together. One of them shouted a question toward the ornate dwellings lining the right side of the courtyard.

  “Monsayd!” called Birossa, who seemed to have squirmed in with the soldiers. A burly priest in the front rank looked up, surprised. “Throw down your sword, you bloody fool. Do you want to die? Vaxus, Catual—save your lives, boys!”

  Somebody in the rear dropped his sword. At the clang, half a dozen more fell. Monsayd looked at his own weapon as if wondering how it got into his hand, then hurled it across the courtyard.

  “Two!” said Attaper, but nobody was likely to hear him over the raucous clamor of the rest of the ‘Lady’s Champions’ disarming themselves.

  Garric caught the spy’s eye and said, “Good work Birossa!”

  And good work, Liane. Without her help and her knowledge, the job of being prince would be beyond Garric’s capacity. As well as what she
brought to the private part of Garric’s life....

  “Back up, away from the swords!” ordered a young Blaise officer with gilt suns on his silvered helmet and breastplate. “Serjeant Bastin, I want those men tied with their sashes to await his highness’ determination.”

  He wasn’t formally under Attaper’s command, a fact Garric had overlooked in his haste to reach the temple. To the normal rivalry between the Blood Eagles and the regular army was added hostility between Ornifal and Blaise. By the Shepherd! Garric snarled mentally. Do I have to worry about my friends as much as I do my enemies?

  And the answer, of course, was that he did; that this was part of being a prince. So, because it was his job, he said, “Lord Attaper, take charge here.”

  He turned to the Blaise officer and went on, “You’re Lord Rosen, I believe?”

  “Yes, your highness,” the fellow said, holding himself in a tense mixture of concern and belligerence. He’d been pushing and knew it; what he didn’t know was how Prince Garric of Haft was going to react to his behavior. Lord Lerdain stiffened, midway between Rosen and Garric.

  “Turn your troops over to Attaper and come with me,” Garric said. “We’re going to discuss with the leaders of this place exactly how their gift caused my sister to vanish. Attaper—”

  He rotated his head yet again, feeling like a spectator at a ball game.

  “—detach twenty of your men to come with us. That ought to be plenty. The ones we’ll be talking to aren’t the sort to dirty their hands on a sword hilt.”

  Attaper paused to fight down his urge to protest any time Garric announced he was going to do anything personally. “Yes, your highness!” he said. “Undercaptain Kolstat, take a section along with the prince. Serjeant Bastin—”

  The Blaise officer who’d taken charge of battering down the gate.

  “—you heard Lord Rosen. Get those men tied!”

  “This way, your highness,” said Birossa, leading the way toward the freestanding residence at the far end of the residence block on the right. The spy had picked up a sword in the confusion, and the Blood Eagles weren’t arguing his right to carry it.

  A group of real priests—the aides who’d accompanied Anda when he greeted Prince Garric on the harborfront—were clustered in the doorway, clucking among themselves like hens as a fox approaches. They scattered to either side as Lord Anda strode out, dressed in his full regalia and accompanied by a servant bearing an ornate lantern on a long pole.

  “Greetings in the Lady’s name, your highness!” Anda said, looking three steps down on Garric from the porch of his residence. “I apologize for my subordinates. They mean well, but they don’t appreciate that sometimes temporal affairs take precedence over spiritual matters.”

  “Bring him to me,” Garric said quietly. “Don’t hurt him, but—”

  Two Blood Eagles tossed their spears to their nearest comrades to free their right hands. Lord Rosen’s hands were already free; he took the two lower steps in a single long stride and had Anda by the left arm before a Blood Eagle grabbed the priest’s right. Together they jerked Anda down.

  The servant with the lantern gave a startled cry and started forward. The Blood Eagle who hadn’t gotten a piece of Anda knocked the fellow down with the boss of his shield. Aides twittered and fled as burning oil spread from the smashed lamp.

  “Anda,” Garric said, his voice trembling, “a lie now will cost you your life. You sent me an ice-stone urn yesterday but I gave it to my sister. She vanished into it a short time ago. Tell me how to get her back unharmed.”

  Anda straightened; he didn’t try to struggle with the men holding him. His jeweled tiara had slipped so that it now hung from his right ear, but he managed not to look ridiculous.

  “Your highness,” he said, his voice quavering despite an obvious attempt at control, “we didn’t send you an urn. Our gift—”

  Garric grabbed Anda by the throat with his left hand. He didn’t squeeze, but his big hand was tensed to crush the old man’s windpipe. “Liar!” he shouted. “Lord Moisin and four temple servants arrived yesterday with the urn as a gift from the Lady!”

  “Your highness, we gave you a globe!” Anda cried. “Moisin was sent with a crystal globe from the Old Kingdom, etched with a map of the Isles and the world beyond!”

  Garric stepped back, shocked as few other statements could have done. The chief priest was wrong, but he clearly wasn’t lying. “Let him go!” he said to Rosen and the guard.

  Anda turned to his aides. “Where’s Moisin?” he said, his voice rising. “He should be here!”

  “This way, your highness,” Birossa said, gesturing toward the accommodations block beside Anda’s detached dwelling. “Moisin’s suite’s the one on this side of the second floor.”

  “Bring Anda,” Garric snapped as he started for the outside staircase.

  The door at the head of the stairs was painted with an image of the Lady crowned by the setting sun. The soldier preceding Garric lifted his boot to smash though the thin wood; Birossa reached past and flipped the latch instead; it was unlocked.

  The interior was dark until a Blood Eagle who’d grabbed a lantern entered and used its candle to light the wicks of a hanging lamp. Garric looked around him. Though there were variations in luxury, the priests of the Lady in Carcosa obviously lived well. Moisin as one of the highest ranking, lived very well indeed.

  The walls were frescoed with hunting scenes, the ornate couches had cushions of lustrous fur, and a section of marble relief from the Old Kingdom was set over the door at the back. Garric thought of the tithes from peasants in Barca’s Hamlet who ate bread made of hulls and moldy barley for a month before the first spring crops came in.

  King Carus watched in grim silence through Garric’s eyes. He hadn’t been a peasant himself, but he understood very well what his descendent was feeling.

  Garric took his hand away from his sword hilt. He deliberately avoided looking at Lord Anda as his guards—Lord Rosen had turned the duty over to a Blaise regular—hustled him through the doorway.

  “Moisin!” Anda cried. He was winded, but his tone now showed anger instead of desperation. To the men around him he added, “Aren’t the servants here either? There should be two servants.”

  Soldiers carrying lights pushed through the inner doorway. A torchflame licked the marble relief; Garric winced, then laughed at his reaction. When so much else was going wrong....

  Indeed, a beautiful sculpture which had survived a thousand years did deserve to be treated better than that; but Garric’s first duty was to make the kingdom safe. That way more artists could create more beauty, and ordinary people could sleep soundly in their beds.

  The rooms to either side of the inner doorway were for servants, though the beds hadn’t been slept in. Beyond was Moisin’s own bedroom, even more richly appointed than the reception room. The ebony bed frame was inset with gold and ivory reliefs, while the coverlet and canopy were of rainbow-patterned silk embroidered in gold thread. Along the walls were storage chests, some of inlaid wood and others of metal or metal banded.

  “Open them,” Garric said, but the soldiers were already throwing back the lids. If the chest was locked, a spearbutt or a stout swordblade levered into the catch or hinges opened it promptly, even the ones that were meant for strongboxes.

  A Blaise soldier set his sword in the latch of an iron casket, smaller than the clothes stores. His partner slammed a bootheel into the unsharpened back of the blade, shearing the locking pins. The chest clanged open.

  “There!” cried Anda. “There—don’t break it, you fool!”

  The last comment was to the armsman reaching one-handed for a crystal globe padded with silken tunics. It wasn’t the smartest thing to say to somebody with a hooked sword bare in the other hand, but Garric understood.

  “I’ll take it,” he said, pausing a moment between Anda and the soldier before bending over to lift the globe from its swathing. He raised it carefully. Though larger than a man’s he
ad, the crystal was as thin as a soap bubble. In the light of swinging lamps and hand-held lanterns Garric couldn’t really view the pattern etched inside the crystal, but the detail was obvious.

  “That was what Moisin was to bring you, your highness!” Anda said. “I swear it was!”

  What does a false priest swear by that would make anybody trust him? Garric wondered; but for all that, he didn’t doubt that Anda was telling the truth. This globe was worth the throne of Haft to anyone who could appreciate its wonder... as Garric certainly could.

  “Moisin should be here,” Anda said, desperation returning to his voice. “I don’t know where he’s gone or what he’s been playing at. I swear it!”

  “Your highness?” said Lord Rosen, tapping the flat of his sword on his thigh. “What would you like us to do now?”

  Garric wanted to rub his eyes, but he was afraid to put the globe down in a room crowded with restive soldiers. “Everybody out!” he said after a moment’s thought. “Clear the room!”

  As the troops filed out pushing later arrivals ahead of them, Garric set the globe back in its nest and closed the lid. To the trailing pair of Blood Eagles he said, “Carry this, and don’t on your lives drop it! Carry it as if it held my soul!”

  Then, to Lord Rosen who remained stiffly behind—wondering if he’d been insulted and wondering further how to react if he had been—Garric continued, “Milord, you and I will return to the palace with the Blood Eagles. I’ll leave Attaper here to secure the compound and question everybody about where Moisin might have gone.”

  Now he rubbed his eyes. Smiling grimly he said, “I’m going to see what Tenoctris may have learned about Sharina. And I pray to the Shepherd that she’s learned something!”

  Chapter 10

  Sharina poised on the pile of rubble, analyzing the situation for a heartbeat. If she tried to crawl through the roof, the creature already hunching in the skewed doorway would grab her ankle with a hand the size of a bear ham and drag her back for a club stroke. Instead she twisted like a cat and leaped down, swinging the axe overhand.