Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  “Aye,” said Carus, smiling at a grim memory. “I commanded the bodyguard of King Carlake. He put us where it was hottest, and we never failed him. The day an arrow struck me down during the siege of Erdin, my boys went over the wall and took the city. They buried me under a pyramid of ten thousand severed heads!”

  His eyes met Garric’s eyes in his mind; both men shuddered. “Lad,” Carus whispered. “A thing like that could have happened. But it never did, I swear that.”

  I don’t remember King Carlake, Garric thought. Was he a usurper?

  “Carlake was the elder brother of Carilan, the King of the Isles who adopted me as his heir,” Carus explained. “Carlake might well have made a better king for hard times than his brother did, but the same fever carried him off as did their father and left Carilan king in his place. That world couldn’t be, in our world.”

  Garric rolled out of bed carefully. He was calm now, able to reassure Liane if she woke, but she continued to sleep soundly.

  I saw the figures you’re talking about, Garric thought as he poured cool water into the tumbler on the wash stand. Felt them, at any rate. Who do you suppose they were?

  “They’re not Gods, of that I’m sure,” Carus said. “I don’t believe in Gods, and there’s enough trouble without Them meddling too!”

  I believe in the Great Gods, Garric thought as he drank greedily. But I don’t believe They were who I saw. I believe we saw something very different. And very evil.

  ***

  The banquet had more courses than Cashel had fingers to count them on. All the food was good and most of it was better than that, though he found often enough that he was happier if he avoided looking at stuff before he ate it.

  There was wine, too. Cashel had drunk ale when he and Ilna could afford it and water when they couldn’t, which was often enough. He’d never had so much as a sip of wine till he left home and he hadn’t much liked it when he did... but what Lord Bossian served was different, sparkly instead of tasting like juice that’d gone bad in the heat.

  Syl and Farran pretended that Cashel wasn’t at the table. They ate with their right hands only and kept their left raised at funny angles that they adjusted with each new course. Cashel supposed it meant something; to them at least, and the gestures were no more empty than their silly chatter.

  Kotia talked to the others with an easy reserve. Cashel guessed she didn’t have much use for Syl and Farran—he couldn’t see any reason she ought to—but she was polite when she spoke to them and really friendly to Bossian.

  The problem was that when Kotia said something to Cashel, Bossian puffed up like a cat when a strange dog comes into the room. She noticed it, all right, and while it didn’t seem to make any difference to her, Cashel got uncomfortable. It made him want to pick Bossian up by the seat and scruff, then toss him a few times into the stream till he came to a better understanding of who he was glowering at....

  And that wouldn’t be right, seeings as Bossian was the host here and he wasn’t doing anything wrong, just sort of oozing the fact that he’d like to. Cashel started avoiding Kotia’s eyes and concentrating on his food. And the wine, of course.

  There was music playing, soft pipes and bowed strings; Cashel couldn’t tell where the musicians were, but they made a lovely sound. The sky had grown dark but the palace itself glowed with light of the same color as the walls themselves: silver and rose and the pale green of drying hay. The water purling down its channel was steel blue; Cashel could see fish the length of his arm swimming in it.

  He was content. Oh, soon he’d start wondering about how to get home, but Lord Bossian had said he’d take care of that. Cashel didn’t figure there’d be much delay, what with the choice being to have Cashel for a guest until he did.

  It felt good not to be hiking over bare rock and good to have a full belly after a day of hard work and fasting. Cashel swigged his wine and looked up at the stars, wondering if he’d be able to recognize any of the constellations tonight.

  The stars began to vanish slowly from one side of the sky to the other, the way an eclipse devours the moon. Cashel blinked and rubbed his eyes with the back of his free hand, wondering if the wine had been even stronger than he thought. He felt a vibration too low to be sound; it trembled up throught the chair legs and the soles of his feet, and the walls of the manor shivered with the deep throb.

  Syl rose to her feet and screamed. She pointed at the blank heaven, screamed again, and fainted. Cashel lurched up to grab her, knocking over the table as he reached across it. He grabbed the diaphanous sleeve of the woman’s tunic, but it tore like spiderweb and left him with wisps as she fell face first on the pavement.

  Farran clutched his throat with his left hand, perhaps to choke off a scream of his own. Diners were reacting in various ways, all of them fearful. The raised terraces emptied as they fled babbling, stumbling blindly over one another and the furniture.

  Kotia rose and put her hand on Cashel’s shoulder, standing close to him. “The Visitor has arrived,” she said. “As I’m sure you realized.”

  Cashel lifted the quarterstaff that he’d laid on the ground behind his chair for want of a better place. He’d been afraid servants would kick it as they attended the tables, but they’d danced around the length of hickory nervously like it was a snake with a bad temper.

  “What do you want me to do, mistress?” he asked Kotia quietly.

  The blankness overhead flared with azure wizardlight. The stars hadn’t disappeared: they’d been hidden behind vastness, a flying mountain passing overhead. But not a mountain either, for the whorls and ridges outlined in light were as surely artificial as the crystal magnificence of Lord Bossian’s manor.

  The light faded, leaving an afterglow like the smell of decay. The vast darkness passed on and the stars returned. The rumble continued long after the visible cause was gone.

  Only Kotia and Bossian remained in the courtyard with Cashel; the three of them and Syl, sprawled unconscious among the tangle of dishes which spilled when Cashel knocked over the table. Kotia trembled, squeezing Cashel’s shoulder fiercely. Her eyes were closed, and her lips moved silently.

  Bossian looked at Cashel. “Our first business must be to send you home, sir,” he said. “If you’ll come with me to my workroom, we’ll set about the matter immediately.”

  Kotia’s eyes opened. She stepped partly away from Cashel but left her fingertips on his arm.

  “Don’t you think that perhaps Master Cashel should stay, Bossian?” she said. She gestured toward the now-empty sky with her right hand. “Until we know...?”

  “He should not!” Bossian snapped. “Without suggesting your Master Cashel is in any sense responsible for the Visitor’s arrival, I do insist that he’s out of his time and place. That makes him a point of stress at a time when we have very little margin. Besides, if you’re really grateful to him for the help he provided you, why would you wish to subject him to the Visitor’s attention?”

  “Look, I’m not afraid of the Visitor,” Cashel said. He felt extremely uncomfortable. Given the chance to fight something instead of standing here in a conversation where so many currents flowed, he’d have fought—anything. “Just tell me what it is I ought to be doing!”

  “You’re right, of course,” Kotia said with a crisp nod to Bossian.

  She took her hand from Cashel’s arm and met his eyes. She said, “Go with Lord Bossian. He’ll be able to help you return if anyone can. I’ll leave you here, as there’s no point in me becoming involved in a business where my skills would be of no service. Good day, Master Cashel; again, my thanks for your efforts on my behalf, and my good wishes for the success of all your future affairs.”

  Kotia bowed stiffly, turned, and strode in the direction of the silvery building. Bossian called after her, “I told the servants to ready the suite at the top of the tower. If they haven’t, pick any rooms that suit you.”

  Kotia didn’t bother to acknowledge the comment. Cashel guessed that a girl who’
d slept out in the mountains with what she could carry wouldn’t be too concerned about which room of a palace best suited her.

  “Come along then,” Bossian said gruffly. “Master Cashel.”

  He gestured Cashel to stand close to him on the tiled pavement where the table had been set. Cashel obeyed, feeling his guts tighten. He supposed they were going to fly away somewhere. He didn’t want to fall off, and he especially didn’t want to show Bossian that it bothered him.

  Instead of lifting, the circle of pavement around them dropped straight into the ground.

  Duzi, was I wrong! Cashel thought, and he started to laugh. Streaks of deep red lighted the shaft they slid down, plenty to see Bossian’s disgruntled expression by. That made Cashel laugh the harder.

  He glanced up. The circle of sky became oval, then closed, so they weren’t going quite straight down after all. He thought of asking Bossian how far they had to go, but it didn’t matter enough to give his host the satisfaction of thinking Cashel was worried. He wasn’t, after all; just curious.

  The platform stopped. They didn’t enter a room, they were in it: where the stripes of red light down the sides of the shaft had been, now there was a dimly-yellow hall of great extent. The ceiling was low enough that Cashel could almost stretch up and touch it with a fingertip, but thick trefoil columns supported it at frequent intervals.

  “Come this way if you will,” Bossian said, the words polite but nothing in his brusque tone suggesting he cared whether Cashel wanted to obey. The echoes were funny. They made sounds muzzy, and they went on for a very long time.

  Bossian led the way around a series of columns. There were benches and tables of various sorts built into the floor. When Bossian passed close, tables lit with one or another of the pastel colors of the crystal towers. The light held until Cashel too had stepped past, then faded. On each were instruments and other items, few of them anything Cashel recognized as a part of his world.

  “Here,” Bossian said, gesturing to where three curved tables were spaced to form a circle with openings. They glowed the same deep red as the shaft that led down to this place. Each section was crowded with objects: books, tools, and things that might either have been sculptures or trash dug from a midden. “Stand in the center here while I speak the incantation.”

  He reached into the seeming litter on the nearest table and withdrew a scroll of some shining material. It opened as he lifted it.

  “You can send me back?” Cashel said as he walked between two of the raised islands. From what Kotia and Bossian himself had said earlier, he hadn’t thought it’d be so simple.

  “No, no, not that,” Bossian said in irritation as he peered at the scroll. His index finger marked his place, but the winding rods on either end curled through the roll by themselves. “If I could do that, I could send the Visitor away! I will provide you with the tools to go by yourself, however.”

  He glared, at the scroll but not because of what he saw there. “Assuming that there are such tools. As I very much hope there are.”

  Cashel stood where Bossian told him to. The floor was glossy black, but a many-pointed star had lighted on it. Words in the curving Old Script appeared around the margin, changing as the wizard’s finger moved across his scroll.

  Cashel didn’t like Bossian, but he trusted the fellow to do what he said. To do the best he could, at any rate, and that was as much as you could ask. There were plenty of guys out there who’d be willing to dump a rival in a bad place because of anger and envy. Bossian wasn’t like that, and it wasn’t just because he was afraid of what Cashel would do to him if he failed—or what Kotia would do if he succeeded.

  Not that Cashel was any kind of rival, whatever the wizard might think.

  Holding the scroll in his left hand, Bossian extended his right. A wand appeared in it, its color the now-familiar red verging on black. Cashel wasn’t sure whether the wand was solid or simply a brief shaft of light.

  Bossian pointed at the figure surrounding Cashel and said, “Bittalos isti bakion....”

  Words on the floor flared and vanished. The scroll shifted, one rod taking up its portion of the roll while the other spooled more out. Cashel heard echoes from a place vaster and less cluttered than the room in which he stood.

  “Zogenes rake bakion,” the wizard said as the light and sound expanded to fill Cashel’s awareness. He couldn’t see Bossian any more, but there were other figures beyond the wall of light as deep as a dying coal. He wasn’t sure they were human, or at least wholly human.

  ... chuch bain bakaxi... the throbbing redness echoed. The sound no longer seemed to have anything to do with a human throat. Cashel’s skin prickled as it always did in the presence of wizardry. There was a freezing flash.

  Cashel was back in the cellar, dark now save for wisps of rosy foxfire that outlined Bossian. “Iosalile!” he shouted.

  A thread of pulsing scarlet linked the fourth finger of Cashel’s left hand with the table behind which the wizard stood. “There!” Bossian cried, dropping the scroll. He thrust his wand down where the thread touched the array of objects.

  The room shone with a soft yellow light that had no source Cashel could locate. The thread of light, the symbols on the floor, and all other signs of wizardry had vanished when the room brightened. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with his left hand.

  Bossian reached out, but reaction to the spell he’d just worked caught him. He sagged, his out-thrust arms barely able to keep him from sprawling across the table.

  Cashel picked up the object the thread had indicated. It was a lump of coal the size of his fist. As the wizard’s dizziness passed, his eyes focused on the coal. He glared with what looked like the same puzzlement that Cashel felt.

  “What does it do?” Cashel said, handing the lump to Bossian. People in Valles heated with coal, so he knew what it was. Everybody on Haft burned wood or charcoal.

  “It has a virtue,” Bossian said, turning the piece as he peered at it. “Every item in this hall has been gathered by me or an ancestor of mine because of the power that our art has shown to lie in it. This particular piece was found in the tomb of a great wizard from the time before the Visitor’s first arrival.”

  The coal was smoothly shiny top and bottom, with jags and facets on the sides. The image of a leaf which flared like a trumpet was pressed into the top. The all-directional light cast no shadow, making it hard to get a real feeling for the shape. Cashel frowned, wondering if there was anything somebody like him could see; maybe you had to be a wizard.

  “But what does it do?” Cashel repeated. It was good-quality coal; gleaming black on all surfaces. There were none of the gray speckles of shale he’d seen in cheap stuff.

  “To be honest...,” Bossian said in a muted voice. He set the lump back on the tabletop. “To be honest, I haven’t been able to determine that.”

  He gave Cashel a defensive glare. “But it is an object of power, and there’s no question that the spell marked it out for you. Why, you saw that yourself!”

  “Yes,” said Cashel, “but I don’t know what it means.”

  He took the coal again between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it without learning anything more than he had the first time. It was coal; it had a slick feel, and it was lighter than a flint of the same size.

  “Well, you’re the best one to determine that, sir,” Bossian said. He made a gesture with his bare right hand; his wand had vanished. A pastel yellow tunnel suddenly twisted away through the vast hall, while the rest of the room went dark. “I was unable to divine the object’s powers when I had leisure to try, which assuredly I do not at this time.”

  He gestured down the corridor of light. “The path will take you to an exit from the manor,” he said.

  Cashel looked at Lord Bossian, the coal in his left hand, his quarterstaff in his right. He weighed the lump in his palm, silent as he decided what to do. He didn’t like Bossian’s attitude, but—

  Bossian grimaced. “Master Cashel,” he said i
n a raspy voice, “if I were in a position to help you further I would do so. I am not. I suggest you leave here and work out your own destiny, while we determine ours. And I tell you with all sincerity that I wish the task facing me were as simple as the one facing you—however difficult it may seem to you!”

  Cashel nodded. “All right, I see that,” he said.

  The lump was too big to fit in his wallet. He pulled out the neck of his outer tunic and dropped the coal inside; it slipped down to where the sash cinched his garments to his waist, leaving both hands free for the quarterstaff.

  Nodding to Bossian, Cashel turned and started down the lighted pathway. His bare feet shuffled on the pavement; that sound was his only companion for a long time, longer than he was sure of. He was glad he’d eaten, but he wished he’d taken a round of bread with him when they left the outdoors banquet.

  While Cashel was wondering, not for the first time, how long this was going to last, a stride put him abruptly out on a moonlit slope. He looked across a broad valley. Judging by the vegetation around him, it was better watered than the one where he’d met Kotia.

  He turned. In the far distance was a shimmer of light. That might be the gleaming towers of Lord Bossian’s manor, or it might not.

  Cashel thought for a time, leaning on his quarterstaff. Then, smiling faintly at his recollection of Kotia insisting they save the gems Kakoral had thrown down, he rummaged one out of his wallet.

  Quite a lady, Kotia was....

  He hurled the ruby into a ledge of rock.

  ***

  Ilna stood stiffly upright, one hand on the tiny deckhouse as The Bird of the Tide eased to an empty quay. As usual on shipboard, her major concern was to keep out of the way of the sailors while they were busy. Four of the men worked the long sweeps; Kulit stood in the bow, looking straight down, and Hutena held a boat pike to push off with if necessary.

  “Port side up oars!” Chalcus shouted from the tiller. “Ninon, a dab now—just a dab, laddie, and pat us in.”