Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  There was a lord or lady at the head of each group, but they weren’t doing the work of carrying things. Well, Cashel hadn’t expected they would be.

  “I guess I’m ready to go, mistress,” Cashel said. He raised an eyebrow. “Unless there’s more I need to do here?”

  “No, we may as well get on with it,” Kotia said. “The lingering ambiance of the ship will aid the process—not that it should be very difficult.”

  She looked at the assembly. The gold disk she’d taken before the Visitor’s defeat was in her right hand. Cashel hadn’t seen it there a moment ago, but he wasn’t sure whether it’d appeared, enlarged from a seed of itself, or if he just hadn’t noticed it.

  “Return to your manors for the time being,” Kotia said. The disk spun, lifting out of her hand. She didn’t raise her voice, but Cashel heard her words echoing back faintly from the circle of distant hills. “I’ll invite you back when it’s safe to come, but right now I have work to do. What’s about to happen will seriously endanger anyone who’s too close to it and who lacks the power to protect himself.”

  “Which means all of you,” said Evne. As with Kotia—but without any help from the disk—she was speaking to the whole huge crowd. “That’s especially true for you who fancy yourself as wizards. Don’t stay around or you may not even have time for regrets.”

  No question about everybody being able to hear the two, well, females. Even at the back of the crowd, ordinary people ran for the airboats. The lords and ladies with their courtiers started out being more dignified about their leaving, but the panic spread like fire in dry grass. Lady Raki running with her skirts hiked up was as comical as a fat lamb gamboling in springtime, and some of the other nobles were even funnier.

  “I know you would’ve avoided them when you raised your manor, girl,” Evne said, looking at Kotia. “But I wanted to see them scamper.”

  Kotia ran her left index finger over the rim of the disk, now at rest in her hand again. “Do you know that?” she said nonchalantly. “Perhaps you’re right, then.”

  She looked up, nodding to Cashel but then focusing her hard gaze on Evne. “You’re welcome to stay with me, you know, Mistress Toad,” she said.

  “I’m welcome to stay wherever I choose, girl,” Evne said. “Don’t mistake me for one of those.”

  She lifted her body on three legs to sweep the right hind leg in an arc across a portion of the spectators rushing off more quickly than they’d arrived.

  “There was once one who could gainsay me,” the toad continued. She spoke with certainty and an absolute lack of emotion. Again she reminded Cashel of his sister when she was very, very angry. “But not, I think, for seven thousand years.”

  Kotia stared at her, balancing the disk in her palm. “Yes, I believe you’re correct,” she said, as calmly as the toad. “But I don’t intend that we should ever become certain.”

  She smiled. “Lord Cashel?” she continued in a wholly different tone. “If you’re ready, we can proceed.”

  “Sure,” said Cashel. He cleared his throat. “Ah, do we have to find a mirror?”

  “Yes,” said Evne. She extended her hind leg again. There was a spat! of blue fire. A circle of grass and dried mud nearby became as smooth and clear as the surface of a dew drop.

  “Stand in the center, if you would, Lord Cashel,” Kotia said quietly. “Mistress Toad, what is your will?”

  Evne walked down Cashel’s forearm to the back of his hand. “I’ll accept your offer of hospitality, girl,” she said. “I expect it to be interesting. If not—”

  She turned her head to look up at Cashel.

  “—quite as interesting as the past two days.”

  Kotia stretched out her left hand. Evne hopped to it. The toad looked graceless in the air with her four legs splayed in different directions, but she landed precisely in Kotia’s palm and tucked herself back together.

  Cashel cleared his throat again. “I guess I’ll be going, then,” he said. He nodded—twice, once to each of them, though with them both together it didn’t make much difference. He stepped carefully onto the circle. He expected it to be slick because it was perfectly smooth, but his feet didn’t slide at all. He felt like he was standing in empty air, but the surface was faintly warm as well as being solid.

  Cashel turned, holding his staff crosswise. You never knew what you were going to run into when you were dealing with wizards.

  “I’m ready!” he said, meeting the two sets of eyes. Kotia and Evne looked as cold and hard as crags in the winter sea. It was a really good thing they weren’t his enemies.

  “Ene psa enesgaph,” they said, speaking together. “Selbiouth sarba....”

  Cashel’s surroundings began to spin, though he himself didn’t move. Evne and Kotia faded from sight, all but their eyes; their eyes remained fixed like the constellation of the Seven Oxen in the northern sky.

  “Thaoos sieche thur...,” the voices said. Blue fire danced soundlessly about Cashel, concealing everything else but the eyes. “Spanton kwilm!”

  Cashel was falling into himself. Everything vanished, light and sound and feeling.

  In his mind someone whispered, “Farewell, Lord Cashel.” He wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be both women speaking together.

  ***

  Garric’s steps had been soundless from the moment he entered the lens of light in the garden; now his boots clacked on ice so cold and hard that it was dry. He saw the twins running ahead of him—or perhaps it was only one of them, his/her figure multiplied by reflection in the ice walls.

  The ceilings were as high as those of the audience chamber in the royal palace in Valles, ribbed and coffered with ice. Ropes of blue and red wizardlight twined in helixes at the core of each beam and plate; at any distance the ice looked purple.

  The walls were sometimes clear, sometimes mirrors that might throw back either a perfect image or a distorted mockery of the original. When the man-shaped monster shambled out of a side-aisle Garric hadn’t seen till that moment, his first thought was that he was seeing the reflection of a man, perhaps even himself.

  The creature gave a high-pitched laugh and raised its club, the trunk of a fir tree split and slain by a frost beyond what even its cold-adapted fibers could bear. High as the ceiling was, the tree struck it: the monster was real and just as huge as it seemed.

  “Haft and the Isles!” Garric shouted, rushing before the creature could come to terms with what for it were narrow confines. Its forehead sloped sharply from thick brow ridges. It was naked except for a coat of coarse reddish hair, incrementally thicker on its scalp and in a mane along its spine; and it was almost twenty feet high.

  The creature swung a slanting blow at Garric. He flattened against the wall. The club struck the ice behind him and rebounded, scattering a haze of splinters. Garric cut upward, catching the monster’s wrist with the sweet spot of his sword just a hand’s breadth from the tip. His steel crunched through cartilage and small bones.

  The monster jerked its arm back. When the fingers lost strength, the club slipped and flew against the opposite wall of the corridor. Garric hacked at the inside of the creature’s right ankle, cutting deep again.

  The creature screamed, grabbed at Garric with its left hand, and toppled forward when its leg gave way. It twisted in the air, still trying to seize him, but Garric jumped past, beyond the creature’s reach.

  He looked down the range of gleaming, branching corridors. It would’ve been a maze even without the reflection, but as it was....

  He couldn’t see the twins. Another of the gangling monsters came down the corridor toward him, doubled by the mirroring walls. It raised its weapon, a crudely-forged iron trident. The reflection was carrying a simple spear, point down as if preparing to gig frogs.

  There were two of the creatures, each as tall as the first. There’d be more following them, and still worse things besides. Garric looked over his shoulder for the soldiers who’d come through the portal with him.

&nbs
p; The creature he’d crippled was squirming after him on its belly. Beyond it a tunnel of light twisted toward the world Garric came from. He remembered how the distance between him and the twins had seemed greater than it should have been. The portal wasn’t a simple hole in space, and there wasn’t a regiment of infantry rushing to their prince’s support.

  But Tenoctris was there, and also Liane supporting the old wizard with her left arm while holding the satchel of paraphernalia in her right. Tenoctris seated herself cross-legged on the ice. Liane dropped the bag beside her and ran on, reaching into her sleeve.

  “Watch—” cried Garric, starting back to deal with the monster he’d thought he could leave for the soldiers behind him. It reached out with its uninjured left arm; its fingernails were blunt and black, like a dog’s claws.

  Liane grabbed the shock of hair at the peak of the creature’s scalp and drew her right hand and little dagger around its throat. The arc of the blade was as quick as a ripple shimmering on a pond. The ghost in Garric’s mind gave a shout of delight.

  Blood, brighter than a man’s, gushed out. It steamed as it pooled on the ice. Liane’s dagger had an ivory hilt and a gold-chased blade no longer than Garric’s index finger, but the steel was so good that it held a wire edge even when slicing corded muscles. The great veins and arteries near the surface of the creature’s neck let its life out even faster than a thrust through the heart could have done.

  Tenoctris dribbled a triangle of black dust—powdered charcoal or maybe iron filings—on the ice before her. She began chanting even before she’d completed the figure.

  “She’ll guide the troops through!” Liane said, gasping for breath. Her right forearm and her tunic from the waist down were covered in orange-red blood. “We have to hold back the Hunters a few minutes more!”

  “Right,” said Garric, turning to face the things that Liane called Hunters. He supposed that Tenoctris had named the creatures; they were nothing Liane would’ve found in the classical literature that was one of the joys that the two of them shared. “We’ll hold.”

  The Hunters came toward him at a loose-limbed gait, giggling and apparently unaware of each other’s presence. They didn’t seem to be hurrying, but their long legs covered a considerable distance with each stride.

  Garric drew his dagger with his left hand. For the most part the shorter blade was only there on his belt to balance the weight of his sword, but this time it might be useful. “Keep back,” he muttered to Liane. “I may have to move—”

  The creature with the trident cocked his arm back. Liane gripped her cuffs and spread her outer tunic wide, shouting, “Here! Here!”

  Garric sprang forward as both Hunters thrust at Liane. The one holding the spear was on the left, nearer him, so he cut through the back of the creature’s wrist. The spear came loose from the Hunter’s nerveless fingers and clattered down the corridor. It ripped Liane’s tunics, nicking her right thigh as she sprang back to safety from the expected spear thrust.

  The Hunters collided with one another and recoiled, grunting in surprise. Garric sank his dagger into the knee of the creature he’d already wounded. As it bent to grab him, he leaped upward, using the imbedded dagger like a climbing iron to give his outstretched sword a few extra inches of reach. He stabbed the Hunter in the belly and jerked the blade back as he fell. When the point withdrew, coils of intestine and dark, stinking fluid spilled onto the ice.

  The creature gave a despairing wail and batted Garric into the wall with its good hand. His head hit the ice; his ears rang and he could see things only in black and white. The Hunter reached for him again but vomited a great flag of blood and slowly collapsed on the ice.

  The uninjured Hunter had chopped the ground where Liane stood taunting it. It raised its trident again and stamped toward her. Garric tried to get between the creature and Liane but his foot didn’t rise as much as he intended it to; he stumbled on the faintly-twitching arm of the Hunter he’d killed. Liane poised between the slavering monster and Tenoctris. She was unable to move without exposing the old wizard—and therefore unwilling to move.

  “Hah!” grunted the Hunter. There was a meat-axe thwock! The creature arched backward. A spear-shaft stuck up from the middle of its face; the steel head had penetrated the thin bones at the bridge of the nose and grunched into the back of the skull.

  “Garric and the Isles!” Lord Waldron said, holding his long cavalry sword high as he ran past Liane and Tenoctris. He hadn’t thrown the spear; that had come from the Blood Eagle skirting the women on the other side. The soldier was tugging his own shorter blade from its scabbard.

  A line of crimson fire led from Tenoctris’ drawing and down the twisting tunnel. Scores of soldiers, a mixture of the bodyguard regiment and regular infantry, packed the opening between worlds, following the light the old wizard had sent to guide them.

  “Your highness!” Waldron said. “I sent Lord Valser back to the camp with orders. The whole army will report to the palace and follow Mayne’s regiment through that wall of light. Was that right?”

  Garric looked down corridors shimmering in a pattern as complex as that of the veins of a hazel leaf. The Hunters were dead; soldiers had just finished hacking the one he’d crippled early into a mass as bloody and shapeless as a cow’s afterbirth. But in the distance, from a score of mirrored branchings, came an army of half-men and not-men; some with swords, some with fangs and claws as long as daggers.

  “Yes, milord,” said Garric. He wiped his blade clean with the skirt of his tunic because the monsters he’d slain with it didn’t have clothing he could use for the purpose. “That was a very good idea indeed. And I only hope that they don’t waste time in getting here!”

  ***

  “Now will you wake, mistress?” Sharina dreamed Beard was saying to her in a cave of glowing ice.

  Sharina came alert, throwing off the bearskin and raising the axe to strike in whichever direction danger appeared. She was breathing hard, shocked to have slept so soundly and frightened by the threat that lowered over her unseen.

  The night was as peaceful as night ever was in this world. The ice walls glowed with wizardry and from far down the tunnel the sea moaned, but at least there was no wind in the cave.

  Several of the band besides Scoggin and Franca were sleeping outside. The others were in the bone cabin, but the rasp of snoring through the open doorway indicated that all was well there too. Nothing moved but the wizardlight, and its pulses were as slight and sluggish as the steps of an old man.

  “What...?” Sharina began in puzzlement.

  “The reason you should be concerned,” said the axe waspishly, “is that Alfdan removed the Key of Reyazel from your sash and has re-entered the world it unlocks. Unless you find this an attractive place to spend the rest of your life, you might consider fetching him back.”

  Sharina stood, weighing the axe in her hand. She was coldly furious. The cabin door had been lying on the stones where the beetle’s violence had flung it. Now it leaned against the bone wall, and the ground which it’d covered was a hole into the sandy beach.

  Sharina started for it. “I don’t see how I could’ve missed him taking the key away,” she said.

  “He is a wizard, mistress,” said Beard, “and one of his toys is the eyestone of a sloth. It let him cast a sleep spell deeper than even I could wake you from until he’d taken himself away. Did you suppose all these folk were sleeping naturally—that none of them would be wakeful in this place?”

  Sharina hadn’t thought the cabin door had a keyhole; nor did it in the ordinary sense, but the flange of the gold key stuck up from the notch through which the latch cord had been led. She glared as she paused at the doorway in the ground; but there’d be time enough to decide how to deal with the key for once and for all after she retrieved Alfdan.

  The sun was setting on the beach beyond. Beard said, “If you’re afraid to enter, then you may as well go back to sleep, mistress. You’ll need your strength for when the beetle
comes or something worse does.”

  Sharina stepped into the sunset. She didn’t bother responding to the axe’s gibe. He was right, after all.

  Alfdan stood at the tide line; the oval sun threw his shadow far up the sand. The sea had drawn back, but a great swell was lifting beyond the jaws of land.

  “Alfdan!” Sharina called. She started toward him. The air felt warm and the dry sand was very warm in contrast to the ice cave. “Wizard!”

  The sea rolled into the narrow bay, curling and foaming. Sharina didn’t suppose Alfdan could’ve heard her calling over the sound of the surf, much less that he’d have returned if he had. She began to run, her feet sinking deeper as she reached sand that hadn’t been compacted with clay.

  Beard pumped back and forth in her hand. She’d have to be careful when she reached Alfdan lest she slice the wizard open in an accident that her anger wouldn’t completely regret.

  The surf carved another curving slice across the strand, washing Alfdan’s legs and springing up in droplets of spray. As it withdrew, the wizard bent and lifted something large from the sand.

  “Alfdan!” Sharina shouted. “Leave it!”

  The wizard heard her and turned. The object in his hands was a helmet whose rim spread into fanciful flares. The metal shone in the sunset like fresh blood.

  “Leave it!” Sharina repeated, still twenty feet away. She felt Beard rise in her hand, but whether that was by her will or by the axe’s she couldn’t be sure.

  Alfdan set the helmet over his head, just as she’d known he’d do. The flaring rim framed his narrow face. He took his hands from the metal and his eyes brightened in beatific delight. “This is...,” he said. “I can see everything from the beginning of—”

  Sharina halted. She was within arm’s length of the wizard. His eyes suddenly lost their focus though he didn’t look away. “That’s odd,” he said. “It’s almost as if....”