Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  Nabarbi had dropped the pike and was wrestling with a Sea Guard. Ilna twitched her noose back to throw, but as she did so Nabarbi slammed his dirk to the hilt in the Guard’s chest. He flung the dead man from him with one arm, clearing his weapon by tugging on it with the other. The great seawolf leaped so high to meet the victim that Ilna glimpsed his wedge-shaped head over the gunwale.

  Chalcus was killing with single thrusts, using his dagger to block his opponents’ strokes. His slim, curved blade didn’t seem sturdy enough to stop the Sea Guards’ stout swords, but Ilna saw Chalcus lock one of them in a shower of sparks. When the Guard fell back, his neck cut through to the spine, the sword flew out of his hand. The dagger had cut a deep notch in the heavier blade.

  The Bird was free of boarders again, all but the man who sprawled half into the open hatch. Convulsions had thrown him there when Hutena crushed his skull with the axe. Ninon’s two-handed blow had finally severed the grapnel’s line, and the ships were drifting apart.

  The Defender’s bow was fully ablaze. The roar of the flames was louder even than the screams of men still trapped on the lower deck with the reef snakes.

  Lusius climbed out on the bitts holding the steering oar; he’d thrown away his helmet but his silver breastplate gleamed in the light of his burning vessel. He looked down at the sea, then up again at the Bird already ten feet distant. He was clinging to the end of the steering oar, leaning forward but unwilling to risk the leap.

  “Jump, man!” Chalcus shouted. “I’ll spare your life!”

  He reached out with his free hand, but not even the outstretched boarding pike would’ve touched his fingers. “Sister take the fool,” Chalcus said in a voice of calm disgust. He sheathed his sword and dagger with a skill that was far more remarkable than the way he drew them. “We’ve questions for him, though, so—”

  As Chalcus stepped to the Bird’s gunwale, Ilna cast her noose with a side-arm motion. It dropped neatly over the Commander’s head and outstretched arm.

  “Jump, you fool!” she shouted in a voice that would’ve pierced bronze. When Lusius still hesitated, Ilna braced her right foot on the gunwale and jerked back with all her considerable strength. Lusius gave a despairing cry as he flew toward her.

  More hands grasped the silken rope—Chalcus took it in front of her and at least two of the sailors grabbed the end trailing behind. The Commander splashed into the sea.

  “Pull!” Chalcus bellowed, tugging upward with the whole strength of his back. His tunic ripped as the muscles bunched under it. Ilna sat down on the deck—the deck and Hutena’s legs as the bosun fell down behind her.

  Lusius grabbed the gunwale with both hands and started to lift himself over. His polished breastplate was flopping loose: he must have tried to take off the heavy armor when he realized he had to abandon the Defender.

  Chalcus dropped the lasso and grabbed the Commander’s right wrist. As he did so, Lusius gave a terrible scream and slid backward. Nabarbi stepped to the gunwale, holding the pike overhead in both hands. He stabbed straight down.

  Lusius screamed again but Chalcus lifted him over the side and flopped him belly first on the Bird’s deck. The Commander’s right leg had been severed raggedly above the knee; blood spurted from the big artery which had been pulled several inches free of the torn muscles.

  The men were shouting. The dead Sea Guard from the first attack had worn a waist sash as well as carrying his sword and dagger on a leather belt. Ilna freed the sash with a quick pull, then looped it over Lusius’ right thigh and tightened it for a tourniquet.

  “I’ll take it, mistress,” Hutena said. He laid his axe helve across the simple hitch, then knotted the free ends of the sash over the wood to give him leverage. He twisted, squeezing off the blood that still dribbled from the open artery.

  Ilna rose, swaying slightly. Lusius was a heavy man and for a moment she’d supported his weight by herself. She had the strength to do it, but that didn’t mean her body didn’t have to pay for her exertions.

  She glanced over the side. The two vessels continued to drift apart. The Defender was burning from bow to stern. She saw a man, his hair and clothing ablaze, try to climb over the railing. He fell backwards instead.

  The flames hammered reflections from the sea. Debris floated between the vessels, mostly bodies and body parts. Our Brother swam in tight circles, his tail lashing from side to side. The pike shaft slanted up from his neck, waving in counterpoint to the movements of the tail.

  “And now, Commander Lusius,” Chalcus said in a bantering tone, “we’ve some questions about your tame wizard and his lair. I hope you’ll choose to answer them, because—”

  Chalcus laughed. The sound was as ominous as the clop of the reptile’s jaws when they took Lusius’ leg off.

  “—I believe your seawolf friend has already eaten as much as is good for him. I wouldn’t want to give him indigestion by sending the rest of you to join your leg!”

  ***

  Sharina’d been lying with her head over the bow of the Queen Ship, peering into the depths. The water was gray but clear, like the sky before the first color of dawn.

  She could see to the bottom, miles below. On it crawled monsters, and through the water swam greater monsters. The teeth of the creature peering out of a deep trench must themselves have been as long as the ship; its ribbon-shaped body pulsed with azure and crimson wizardlight.

  “Oh, they’re real,” Beard said, answering a question that hadn’t gotten beyond the surface of Sharina’s mind. “You’re not seeing them with your ordinary eyes, of course. Although those eyes would show you the ice sheet ahead.”

  “Mistress?” said Scoggin. She jerked her head around. Scoggin and Franca wore worried looks, their eyes flicking from her to the horizon.

  “What’s...?” Scoggin went on, gesturing with the hand he’d stretched out to touch Sharina’s shoulder if she hadn’t responded. “That we’re coming to?”

  The men of Alfdan’s band, all those who weren’t sleeping, stared toward the dark line ahead also. The wizard himself stood in a capsule of his art, speaking words of power through his tight lips.

  “Beard says we’re coming to the ice sheet,” Sharina said, turning again and sitting up so that she could look at what she’d just identified to the others. A jagged boundary separated the pale gray sea from the sky washed with wizardlight. It was the charcoal shadow of a vertical edge where the ice met open water.

  To the north were humps and hillocks and glitter, white except where ice threw back the sky’s reflections in a form harsher than the original. The sullen sea was almost as still as the frozen waste beyond, but bits of debris moved in slow circles at its margin.

  “What’ll we do now, Mistress Sharina?” Layson asked, speaking with the touch of belligerence that meant he was nervous.

  “Do?” repeated Beard with a metallic sneer. “Why don’t you do exactly what you’re doing now, my man? Nothing! Squatting on your haunches, waiting for the Great Wizard to call a halt. This ship makes no more matter of sailing over ice that it does over water—or over the heads of fools like you, I suppose!”

  Layson grimaced, but he didn’t look too put out by Beard’s insult. The men seemed to regard the axe and Sharina herself as their best hope of survival. They might be right... which was either frightening or amusing, depending on the mood Sharina was in when the thought recurred to her.

  She glanced at Alfdan in the stern. Neal stood nearby, but the wizard didn’t need anyone to support him at the moment. He’d been gaining strength as the Queen Ship coursed northward.

  Despite the power of Alfdan’s art, he provided only temporary respite, not long-term hope, for the men gathered around him. To the wizard they were only tools to help him achieve his ends; and those ends were as ultimately trivial as those of a child picking up shells on the seashore.

  The ship had seemed to sail just above the swells of the sluggish sea. Without appearing to rise the bow slid over the sheer edge of the icepack
, though it was a yard or more higher than the water at the point the keel crossed. Men murmured to one another, looking out nervously.

  “It’s awful,” Franca said quietly. “It’s empty, it’s just a desert.”

  “It’s the same sea,” Sharina said. “Freezing didn’t make it real land.”

  “Or make it a desert,” said Beard. The axe had been cheerful in his waspish fashion ever since they set out for Her residence. “There’s life here too, you know. In the ice and beneath it.”

  “What?” said Sharina. She lay flat again, looking down as she had previously. For a moment all she saw was white and the evil shimmer of the sky, picked out occasionally by a tree trunk or some other flotsam that the ice had engulfed. Then, slowly, she began to see deeper.

  “Franca!” Sharina said. “Scoggin? What do you see...?”

  She pointed with her left hand. She was holding Beard tight against her chest with the other, as if he were a kitten instead of an axe.

  The two men leaned close, peering at the ice. Sharina looked from one to the other; both wore puzzled expressions.

  “Mistress?” said Franca. “I see ice. Is that what you mean?”

  Sharina swallowed. “No,” she said, gazing into the depths again. “But it doesn’t matter. I thought I saw animals below the ice, that’s all.”

  She knew she saw animals below the ice. The ship passed over an ammonite, one of the Great Old Ones who’d been Gods before there were men to worship them. The coiled shell of this one was the size of Count Lascarg’s palace. Rather than eight arms like an octopus or the ten of a squid, the ammonite waved more tentacles than Sharina could count in her brief glimpse. They interwove like a tangle of brambles, forming a pattern that was obviously evil even though it had no meaning for her.

  “Beard?” Sharina whispered. She didn’t want the others to hear her; she was afraid she was going mad. “What is it? Why am I seeing things when the others don’t?”

  “Did the others dive for the Key of Reyazel?” the axe asked ironically. “Why no, I don’t suppose they did! And you weren’t diving through water, mistress. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” Sharina said, clutching the axe more tightly. “I guess I do.”

  “It changed you,” Beard said. He giggled. “You should be thankful: you see the truth where others see only the surface.”

  Sharina stared at a school of fish, their bodies bright with bands of wizardlight. No one of them was as long as her arm, but there were hundreds in the school. They moved together like the scales of a snake, and their teeth were like daggers.

  The Queen Ship was a world of its own, neither hot nor cold; the air was motionless though always breathable. Outside in the world through which the ship voyaged, however, winds swirled snow so hard it carved the ice into shapes from nightmare.

  Alfdan muttered words of command. The vessel changed course slightly, taking it up a valley where the ice had lifted in long ridges to either side. The wizard seemed to be keeping his part of the bargain. It would’ve been nice if he’d been a person Sharina could like or even respect, but—she grinned—she’d learned long before leaving Barca’s Hamlet that you couldn’t expect that in life.

  Her smile faded. She’d been looking at the gleaming surface but found her vision entering the crumpled ridges. Great worms gnawed tunnels through the ice; their jaws were like the toothed bronze rams of warships. Black armor covered their segmented bodies, but Sharina saw their long coils of intestine pulsing as the worms digested something....

  “Algae grows in the ice,” Beard said in his mockingly superior tone. “Algae of a sort, that is. And the worms eat it.”

  “There’s enough light here for algae?” Sharina said, frowning.

  “Light?” said the axe. “Of course there’s light! Look at the sky.”

  “Oh...,” said Sharina, glancing up reflexively. The washes of evil color were so constant and vivid now that they hid the stars completely. For an instant she began to see shapes in the wizardlight, but she looked away quickly. What she saw in the water and ice was bad enough.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that sort of light would make things grow,” she whispered.

  “Make those things grow?” Beard said with a laugh. “Oh, yes, mistress. There are many things that flourish in this light and this place. They just aren’t things that have any use for men.”

  Sharina sat up. Franca and Scoggin were on either side, watching her with concern. They hadn’t broken in on her dialogue with Beard, but they must have heard at least part of it.

  “I’m seeing things beneath the surface,” she said to them in a deliberate voice. “I hope this won’t go on forever.”

  Beard laughed again. “Never fear, mistress,” he said. “Not even I will go on forever.”

  Scoggin forced a smile. Neither man spoke.

  The wizard muttered another command in a harsh, clipped tone like that of a squirrel complaining. The ship slanted to the right and mounted the ice ridge without slowing. In the distance ahead gleamed orange-red light, a harsh color but a natural one in contrast to the sheets of crimson covering the sky.

  Layson pointed. “A volcano!” he said. “We saw volcanoes on the coast of Laut when Alfdan was getting that medallion.”

  “We’re nearing the Ice Capes,” said a man. His left cheek and forearm were tattooed in a complex spiral pattern, but Sharina didn’t know his name. “Where they used to be, I guess. That must be Mount Yanek.”

  The Queen Ship raced over the ice field, now banded with stretches of black ice where leads had opened and refrozen. Once Sharina thought she saw eyes staring at her from the solid mass; the head of a monstrous thing, motionless but not dead. Perhaps it had been an illusion, shadows distorted by the rippling ice.

  Beard laughed. She didn’t ask him why.

  The volcano grew from a lump and glow on the horizon into a mountain streaked with orange flame. Tentacles of lava touched the ice encircling its base. Great bubbles of steam rose and whirled southward on the wind.

  The ship began to slow; the tone of its progress changed to a deep thrumming instead of a scream like that of chorus frogs in springtime. Sharina and the men glanced back at Alfdan. The wizard began to sway, so Neal quickly gripped him by the shoulders.

  The Queen Ship touched the ice with a skirling vibration. Azure wizardlight crackled about them in an egg-shaped pattern, the broader end toward the bow. Mt Yanek covered the northern horizon, though its slopes were still a half mile distant. The volcano’s rough stone absorbed the rippling glare of the sky instead of reflecting it the way the ice did; Yanek stood as a black wedge detailed only by its own savage orange veins.

  “Mistress?” Layson said, his voice rising between the syllables. “Why is it we’re stopping here? There’s no shelter!”

  Nor was there. The ship coasted to a halt and overbalanced onto its right side. When the vessel lost way, the wind ripped across them. The flecks of snow that’d merely given the gusts visual presence to those inside the cocoon of Alfdan’s wizardry now cut like a sandstorm.

  Sharina tugged the bearskin close, but the wind lashed her legs and the rabbitskin sandals were little protection against the ice underfoot. She and the others dropped to the ground and hunched in the lee of the Queen Ship. It was slight protection but there was nothing else in this landscape.

  Neal lifted Alfdan from the ship. The wizard was mumbled. Neal, bending his ear close to Alfdan’s lips, frowned in incomprehension. Alfdan waved or pointed to the east.

  “What he’s trying to say...,” Beard said in a loud, piercing tone. “Is that if you dig into the dip there in front of you, you’ll find that it’s a hole filled with windblown snow that you can go through in time not to freeze. It leads to a tunnel in the ice that’ll shelter you for the night.”

  The axe laughed. “Assuming that the beetle who dug the hole doesn’t come back, of course,” he added. “The grubs eat the algae, as you saw—but the adults need more nourishing fare
to breed.”

  Sharina stamped across the frozen terrain. Even with her feet numbing, she could feel the change from solid ice to the crunch of grains barely cemented by contact and the pressure of the driving wind.

  “Here, start digging!” she shouted. “Neal, get them digging!”

  Scoggin and Franca had come with her. They bent and chopped at the ground with their spearpoints, sending ice up to sail away on the wind in flurries. The rest of the band joined immediately, except for Neal who—holding the wizard in one arm like a half-empty grain sack—took charge.

  “Moster, Dalha, and Toldus!” he said, raising his voice against the wind. “Lay your capes on the ground. The rest of you, dump the spoil on the cloth. Dalha you idiot, lay your cape on the downwind side!”

  Sharina nodded approval. The band didn’t have proper digging equipment, so without an expedient like the one Neal’d chosen they’d just shove the ice around in the hole rather than removing it. The men he’d told to take off their warm coverings had done so without argument. They trusted Neal to act in all their benefit.

  And they trusted Sharina as well, because they were men with a desperate need to trust somebody. They hadn’t lost their faith in God, exactly, but it was all too clear that She was against them.

  “Wah!” Burness shouted as he and another man slid out of sight. The rest of those in the pit either scrambled out or thrust whatever they were digging with into the side to hold them steady.

  “Hey, we’re in a tunnel!” Burness cried, his voice a deep echo of its normal self. Those outside the pit bent over the edge to listen, while the men clinging to the sloping walls cocked their heads. “Hey, there’s a house down here!”

  “If you all plan to stand here and end your miserable lives by freezing,” said Beard loudly enough for the whole band to hear him distinctly, “then I won’t try to change your minds. But otherwise, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to get under cover now that you’re able to?”

  Sharina pointed to the hole with the butt of the axe. “Franca!” she said. “Go.”

  The youth’s jaw dropped slackly, but he jumped into the hole without hesitating. She expected him to go feet-first, but instead he dived with his arms out before him as if he were entering the water.