Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  “Blood!” screamed the steel mouth. “Blo—” and the edge sheared through the heavy-browed skull as easily as sunlight penetrates crystal. The rest of the word choked off in a gurgle.

  Sharina landed with her feet under her. The axe moved easily; it was balanced like a dream. The creature whose skull she’d split convulsed violently, flinging its arms out to its sides; the club smashed into a sidewall hard enough to shatter into a fibrous broom.

  A second creature stuck its arm down through the laths of the roof. Sharina pivoted, almost without thinking, and slashed through the creature’s humerus. The bone was thicker than her own whole forearm, but the axe sliced it like gossamer.

  “Yes, that’s the way to feed Beard!” the axe cried in a throaty treble. “More blood! More blood for—”

  The creature jerked back, tearing a barrel-sized hole in the latticework. The lower portion of its arm flailed on the triceps muscle which the narrow axe-blade hadn’t severed. The roofbeams shifted with a squeal. Sharina leaped, catching a beam in her left hand and pulling herself up.

  The roof trembled like a ship’s deck. The whole battered structure was shifting toward collapse.

  “—Beard to drink!” cried the axe.

  The third creature was trying to crawl over the thrashing body of the one with the split skull. The doorway wasn’t big enough to hold both giants. The creature with the dangling arm saw Sharina, screamed, and swung its club at her. Before the awkward blow landed, she leaped down onto the back of the third creature. It lurched, dragging its shoulders out of the doorway and glaring at Sharina with eyes further reddened by the firelight.

  “The throat!” screamed the axe. “Let me cut her—”

  Sharina brought the axe around in a backhanded arc. She was a strong woman and the axe was scarcely more than a hatchet with an unusually long helve, but even so she marveled at how smoothly it moved. It was like watching light shimmer on smooth water.

  “—throat!” the axe said.

  Sharina didn’t feel the blade touch and slip through the creature’s neck, but the gush of blood bathed the wall where the frescoes had weathered off. The gout slowed, then spurted again as the creature rose to its feet, lifting its club overhead. The second creature had retrieved its weapon from the pall of dust and splinters raised when it smashed the roof. The dangling arm seemed to be affecting its balance.

  Sharina scrambled sideways around the fire and tripped over a human body trussed with bark cord. She was breathing hard and didn’t get her feet under her as easily as she expected. The creature whose throat she’d cut toppled slowly backward into the alcove holding the loot, completing the room’s destruction with a crash and a pall of debris.

  “Feed me!” the axe cried. “Feed me! Fee—”

  Swinging the axe with both hands, Sharina leaped toward the only creature still standing. Its left-handed club blow wobbled past like a treelimb whirled in a windstorm. Even stretching to her full height Sharina couldn’t reach the creature’s skull, but she buried the axe to the helve at the top of the breastbone where the biggest blood vessels lift from the heart.

  She dragged her weapon out with a sucking sound and a geyser of blood. The creature cried out and swiped its club sideways. Sharina jumped but the club caught her anyway, lifting her onto the ruin of the room from which she’d emerged. She lay stunned, choking on the dust but unable to move.

  The creature dropped its club and staggered forward, clutching the gurgling hole in its chest. Blood welled from between its massive fingers and foamed through its yellow tusks, choking the cries it would otherwise have uttered.

  Sharina got her left sleeve over her nose and tried to breathe through it. That didn’t help much, but now that she’d started moving she crawled off of the shifting rubble. She still held the axe, though she didn’t think she’d be able to swing it.

  The creature fell face-down onto the fire, flinging sparks out to the sides. Burning hair added its stench to that of the woman which the trio had been roasting. Sharina worked her way on all fours around the smothered fire, trying to get upwind.

  “Help me,” a voice whimpered. “Please. Help me.”

  Sharina opened her eyes; she hadn’t been aware that they were closed. Her stomach roiled with the horror of what she’d just done. She kept remembering the startled expression on the face of the creature as her axe sheared its throat, and then the curtain of blood spraying in all directions....

  “Please....”

  The tied-up figure was a hollow-cheeked youth; moonlight turned his hair and his sallow complexion much the same color. His simple garments were filthy; but then, so was Sharina’s sleeping shift, and she hadn’t lain bound by maneaters for an unguessibly long time.

  “Hold still,” she croaked, reaching for the cord binding his wrists and ankles together. “If you squirm, I may cut you.”

  “He’s no use to you, mistress!” said the axe. “Come on, let me finish him for you. Look how his throat is just waiting for Beard to cleave it!”

  The captive flinched and began to cry soundlessly. Sharina looked at the axe for the first time since she’d drawn it carefully from the pile of rusty trash. The steel was as bright and clean as plate polished for a palace banquet, though its shaft and Sharina’s whole right arm were sticky with congealing blood.

  “Be silent,” she said in a rasping whisper. She short-gripped the weapon and carefully touched the edge to the rope.

  “But Beard is still thirsty, mistress,” the axe said. Quivering reflections on the back of the blade looked like a mouth there was speaking; maybe it was. “Please, mistress, let Beard drink his blood!”

  The tough bark fibers parted without effort on Sharina’s part. Though she knew the axe had just split through heavy bones, the edge remained as keen as thought.

  “Axe,” she said in a deadly whisper. “If you don’t shut up now, I’ll give you all the water in Carcosa harbor to drink. Be silent!”

  She paused but heard nothing except possibly a ... thirsty... so faint that it might have been the wind through the ruined palace. She cut the youth’s ankles free, then his wrists.

  “You can move now,” she said, leaning back. “What’s your name?”

  Lady help me, it’s so cold.... But she wasn’t sure it was the wind that chilled her as much as her reaction to the few minutes just passed. Only a few minutes.

  “I’m Franca,” the youth said without meeting Sharina’s eyes. He massaged his wrists with the opposite hands; the skin was worn away into a crust of blood. “Franca or-Orrin, but mostly mother called me Franca. And now she’s gone.”

  He started to cry again. His hands stopped rubbing and he clamped his skinny arms tight to his chest.

  “Your mother was...?” Sharina said, nodding toward where the fire had been; the woman’s feet stuck out from beneath the dead monster’s body. Franca’s eyes were closed, so she said, “The monsters killed your mother?”

  “Of course the Hunters killed the silly woman!” said the axe in a clear, piping voice. “She and her whelp here came right down into Carcosa where the Hunters know every hiding place. But you killed them, mistress! Ah, those were fine strokes!”

  Sharina looked sourly at the axe, but it was giving her more information than the weeping boy so she didn’t snarl again. She needed to learn a lot more if she was to survive, let alone get back to where she belonged.

  “Get up, Franca,” she said. “We’ll roll this Hunter out of the way and then bury your mother.”

  “Bury mother?” the boy said. He stared in horror at the creature with the severed arm, then looked squarely at Sharina for the first time. “But why?”

  “Because we’re human beings,” she said, “and that’s what people do!”

  She set the axe on the base of a fallen column where she could grab it quickly if she had to. It was mumbling to itself, recalling with gusto the slaughter just completed.

  All three of the creatures—the Hunters, Sharina now knew to call them—wer
e females. The one she had to move weighed as much as a heifer, but Sharina threw her weight against one of its long arms to roll it off the human corpse. Franca helped without complaint; he was stronger than he looked.

  The Hunters had run a broken pike the long way through their victim for a spit. Sharina thought about the situation and decided to leave the shaft where it was.

  They carried Franca’s mother down into what had been the garden in Sharina’s world. Debris choked it, but she’d seen a hollow where they could lay the body and mound a cairn over it. They didn’t have the tools to dig even a shallow grave.

  “We had to come to the city,” Franca muttered, finally responding to the axe’s gibe. “Hail flattened our crop and there was nothing to scavenge in Penninvale. Mother thought that maybe in Carcosa there’d be something left, because it was the first place destroyed when She came.”

  “We’ll set her here,” Sharina said, wincing as blackberry canes scratched her calves. “Who’s the She you say came?”

  The night noises were only half-familiar, but the Hunters had probably kept other dangers at a distance. Unless the male of the pack had been off on his own for the night....

  “She’s God,” Franca said. “She came to the world ten years ago. Now She rules everything.”

  “Everything is better now!” called the axe from the ruined palace above them. “Beard was scarcely alive before She came. Now there’s so much more for him to drink!”

  “Start covering her,” Sharina said, looking around. Most of the roof tiles had poured into the garden when the palace collapsed, and there were manageably larger chunks of rubble as well. She picked up a stone barrel from one of the slim paired columns which had framed the window of her reception room.

  “We heard about Her from the people fleeing Carcosa,” Franca said. “Horrible monsters tearing down buildings and eating people. We didn’t know what to do, so we stayed in Penninvale and for a year everything was all right. Except the winter storms were bad, very bad.”

  He used a pole, part of a casement, to lever tiles and a decade of windblown dirt over the body. The rotten wood cracked before he’d made much headway.

  “The storms will get worse!” the axe called. “The storms will last longer until there’s no longer a thaw and the whole world freezes. But until then there’ll be plenty of blood for Beard to drink!”

  “There was an early storm that Fall,” Franca said, lifting handfuls of debris over the corpse. He worked steadily though without enthusiasm. “Out of it came a creature bigger than three houses, all covered with armor, and a pack of Hunters. Mother and I hid in the root cellar and the monster smashed our house down over us. We couldn’t see what was happening, but we heard things. And after a week we couldn’t hear anything more, so we dug ourselves out. Everyone was gone, except for the bits that the birds and foxes were eating.”

  Franca squatted. Sharina thought he was about to lift a larger block, but instead he put his face in his hands and resumed crying. She pivoted a length of stone transom without speaking. It was too heavy for her to lift, but when it shifted dirt and broken tile cascaded down to cover the woman’s face. It wasn’t a real burial, but Sharina hoped it was enough for decency in this hellworld.

  She stepped back. “May the Lady cover you with Her mantle,” she whispered. “May the Shepherd guard you with His staff.”

  Franca looked up. “They didn’t come back,” he said. “There was no one left in Penninvale but mother and me, and the monsters stayed away. But we had to leave because there was no food.”

  “We’ll stay here until dawn,” Sharina said crisply. “There were some tapestries in the room where I—came here. Maybe we can dig them out for blankets. In the morning we’ll go west toward....”

  She didn’t say the words, “Barca’s Hamlet,” from a sudden fear of what she might call down on the place that had been her home. That was superstition, ignorant foolishness; but the night was cold and she was very much alone despite Franca’s helpless presence.

  “May the Lady help me,” she said.

  “There’s no point in praying to the Lady in this world, mistress!” trilled the axe. “And you needn’t pray to Her either, for She’s a God who hates Mankind. But with Beard in your hand, ah, there’s an ocean of blood to drink before the ice covers us!”

  ***

  Moonlight streamed through the windows of Garric’s suite as the mild breeze cleared the fumes of the recently-snuffed lamp. He was briefly aware of the linen sheets and the warmth of Liane beside him; then he slept and, sleeping, dreamed.

  He stood in the ruins of a garden. Usually Garric was alone in his dreams; this time Carus shared his mind as the king did all Garric’s waking hours. Phlox and trillium covered the ground, crowding the fallen statue of a winged female which some architect had placed here for interest.

  “No place I’ve ever seen before,” Carus muttered, his sword hand flexing. His image in Garric’s mind wore a sword; but that too was only an image, an immaterial phantom like the ancient king himself.

  “Nor me,” said Garric. In the dream he wore the simple woolen tunic he’d gone to bed in. The air was muggy, but the stones underfoot felt cool.

  At the back wall stood an altar; around it knelt a dozen or more figures. Men, Garric thought, but they slunk off toward the colonnades to either side, still hunched over. Apes, then, or perhaps bears.

  Garric walked toward the altar. He wasn’t sure his own mind guided his motions. Water pooled on worn flagstones and formed a marshy pond in the corner where cattails grew. Frogs trilled from the darkness, their calls punctuated by the coarsely strident shrieks of toads.

  The altar was spotted with lichen and miniature forests of blooming moss; no sacrifice had been burned here in a human lifetime or longer, perhaps much longer. On it were heaps of apples, peaches, and a soft, fleshy fruit that looked vaguely like a catalpa pod, unfamiliar to Garric.

  “Bananas,” Carus said. “They grow them on the south coast of Shengy, but they don’t travel.”

  Garric looked around. An ancient dogwood shaded the altar; its roots had forced apart the sides of the stone planter in which it grew. A stand of elderberries sprouted nearby. Was this Shengy? It seemed much like Haft, though warmer than normal for the season.

  The odor of the shambling beasts hung in the air. It was musky; not unpleasant, but strange and therefore disquieting.

  “The moon’s closer than it ought to be,” Carus said. “Or maybe it’s just that the air’s so thick. I’ve been in swamps that didn’t seem so muggy.”

  On the altartop was a small ewer, perhaps a scent bottle. Originally it had been clear, but long burial in acid soil gave the glass a frosty rainbow patina. Garric touched it with his fingertip; the surface had the gritty feel he would have expected in the waking world.

  Half-concealed behind the ewer was a four-sided prism the size of a man’s thumb; Garric picked it up. It was so heavy that he wondered if it were metal rather than crystal, but his fingers were dimly visible through it.

  When Garric looked into a flat, it returned a murky reflection of his own face. He rotated the prism slowly. For a moment he stared at an edge as sharp as a swordblade; then his life and his soul scaled off, separating him from Carus and from himself... and yet—

  He was Garric or-Reise, son of the innkeeper of Barca’s Hamlet. His sister, Sharina, was a leggy blonde girl who caught the eye of a drover from Ornifal who came to the Sheep Fair; the next year, when Garric and Sharina were eighteen, the drover returned and married her. It was a good match. Sharina wrote once or twice a year, though she never returned to Haft let alone the tiny community in which Garric remained.

  When Garric was twenty-three, his father Reise slipped on ice in the inn yard and cracked his head on the pump. He lingered over a month but never recovered his senses. His wife Lora died not long after, apparently pining for her husband. It was a surprise to everybody; Lora was a shrew who’d seemed to dislike Reise even more than she dislik
ed everybody else.

  At his parents’ death, Garric became master of the inn. It had prospered under his father; it flourished for the stronger, more active, and far more personable Garric. That summer Garric married the daughter of a wealthy farmer on the Carcosa road, and the next spring the first of their twelve children was born.

  Garric continued to read the classics. He taught his children to read and write; and if none of them became the scholar he was, they were probably better wives and farmers because they didn’t have so many romantic notions confusing them.

  When Garric died, full of years and honor, four generations of his descendants attended his funeral. Representatives of the Count of Haft and both priesthoods came from Carcosa, and drovers from distant islands paid their respects at his grave when they arrived for the Sheep Fair in the fall.

  He was long remembered as the greatest man ever to live in Barca’s Hamlet.

  The prism slipped from Garric’s fingers. For an instant he was back in the ruined garden; the moon was near the horizon and the eastern sky was pale enough to hide stars. Two figures, immense but unseen, hovered beyond the heavens—

  Garric was awake, stifling his shout behind clenched teeth. His muscles were taut and sweat soaked his sheets.

  Liane murmured and shifted in the bed. Garric would have gotten up to rinse his face in the wash basin across the room, but he was afraid to waken her. He’d have to explain his nightmare, and no words he used could convey the horror of what he’d just lived.

  “What did they do to you, lad?” King Carus asked, a wild look in his eyes. His fists knotted and opened, dropping to his hilt and coming away again. “Did you see them? I did. There were two of them, and they were playing me like a puppet!”

  I was innkeeper in Barca’s Hamlet, Garric said in his mind. Immediately he began to relax. He wasn’t alone; and even if he had been, the memory of Carus reminded Garric what a man very like him could face and had faced. But that life couldn’t have been. The forces that we’ve been fighting ever since I left Haft would’ve overwhelmed Barca’s Hamlet and the rest of the Isles long before I died in bed in my old age!