Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  “Mistress,” said Beard. “You should get out of this place. Now.”

  “I don’t—” said Alfdan. His face went pale; then he screamed like a hog when the butcher clamps its nose for slaughter. He grabbed the helmet with both hands and tried unsuccessfully to lift it.

  “Alfdan!” Sharina said, seizing the broad rim with her free hand. It burned her; she jerked her fingers away, leaving bits of skin sticking to the metal.

  “Mistress, get out,” the axe said with an urgency that she’d never heard in his steely voice before. At the moment she was too concerned with the wizard to appreciate Beard’s tone. “Get out now. He’s already dead!”

  Alfdan lowered his hands. His expression was blank. Though his eyes were open, the corneas had become featureless and silvery.

  “Help me!” the wizard screamed. He stuck out his tongue but it wasn’t a tongue, wasn’t flesh: a tendril of shimmering metal waggled toward Sharina.

  “Get out, mistress!” Beard shrieked as Sharina swung at the extending tentacle, gripping the helve with both hands. Beard’s edge had sheared bone like butter, but it glanced off the tongue without marking it. The shock threw Sharina backward onto the sand, her arms numb to the elbows.

  Alfdan—the thing that had been Alfdan—took a tottering step toward her. The metal tongue continued to lengthen, moving with the circular, questing motion of an ivy shoot but immeasurably faster.

  Sharina scuttled backward on her feet and left hand. When she’d lengthened the distance between her and the creature enough to risk it, she got up and ran. She didn’t look over her shoulder; that would’ve slowed her down—and besides, she was afraid of what she might see.

  Only when Sharina jumped through the portal with a cry of triumph did she look back. The creature was staggering after her. As best as Sharina could tell in silhouette against the red sun, the helmet had closed over Alfdan’s face. The tendril continued to elongate; by now it stretched half the remaining distance to the opening.

  Sharina slammed the door flat on the wet stone. The echoing crash roused sleeping men with shouts of fear and surprise. She reached for the key winking in the wizardlight, but as her fingers closed on the flange she paused.

  “Mistress!” cried Neal, his bow strung and an arrow nocked. “Where’s Master Alfdan? I can’t find him!”

  Instead of withdrawing the Key of Reyazel from the door notch, Sharina pushed it inward. It shouldn’t have moved; there was nothing on the other side of the thick panel but a slab of smooth rock. Nevertheless the key slipped downward and vanished.

  “Where’s Alfdan?” Neal shouted. “Where?”

  He was a big man, holding a weapon and utterly distraught. At another time he would have frightened Sharina.

  Not now. Neal was merely human.

  “I suppose Alfdan’s in Hell,” she said calmly. “He was so determined to go there that I couldn’t stop him.”

  “But...,” said Neal, staggering back as though she’d stabbed him through the body. “But how...?”

  “Then we’re marooned here,” said Burness, hugging his broad-bladed spear to his chest. “We’ll never leave. We’ll freeze or we’ll starve, but we’ll never leave!”

  Franca began to whimper. He extended the hand that didn’t hold his dagger, pointing toward the wall of the cave. A lens of violet light was forming in the ice.

  Sharina watched the opening, waggling the axe to make sure that her hands had their strength back. They seemed to be all right, though her left fingertips burned like the fire itself.

  “I don’t think we’ll freeze or starve either one,” she said with cold detachment. “We can’t go to Her without Alfdan’s art, but it seems that She is coming to us.”

  “Many lives to drink,” whispered Beard, shivering in her hands with anticipation.

  ***

  Ilna settled her tunics neatly as the Bird of the Tide brushed to a halt against the stone quay. The watchman in the tower had vanished as soon as he was sure that the Bird had entered Terness Harbor alone, not in company with the Defender.

  Hutena and Shausga jumped to the quay with ropes while the oarsmen stowed their long sweeps. “I guess they’ll be waiting for us, eh, captain?” said Ninon, careful not to look at Chalcus because he was afraid his concern would show.

  “You mean because I waved to the watchman, lad?” Chalcus said with a grin. He set a tip of his bow on the deck and bent it with his knee, then slid the thick cord into the upper notch. “Ah, no, we couldn’t help him seeing us, could we? What I was doing was giving what few folk are left in the castle, servants most like, time to vacate before our arrival. I don’t think they’ll want to greet us, especially when they hear their Commander’s bound to our mast.”

  He gave Lusius an appraising glance. “Most of their Commander, that is.”

  The sailors laughed. “Hey, Kulit would’ve jumped in and got the Commander’s leg back from that seawolf, wouldn’t you, Kulit?” Nabarbi said, ruffling his friend’s curly hair. “You should’ve asked him.”

  Ilna smiled coldly as she stepped onto the quay and looked back at Lusius. He was unconscious; in shock, she supposed, and very likely to die... but he’d die shortly in any case. They’d never promised Lusius his life, only that they wouldn’t feed him to the seawolf; and that was more of a concession than he’d granted to his brother, after all.

  “Master Bosun?” Chalcus said to Hutena as he hooked a quiver of arrows onto his sash. “I’m leaving the rest of the lads here while Mistress Ilna and I visit the castle, but I’d be grateful if you’d come along with us with the maul. I don’t expect to meet anybody there till we get into the cellars, but it may be there’s locked doors in the way.”

  He hefted the powerful bow with a grin. “I may have my hands full, you see.”

  “I can carry the maul,” Ilna said with a frown.

  “Your hands, dear heart,” Chalcus said with an edge in his voice, “may be a great deal fuller than mine. Not so?”

  Ilna nodded, her lips tight with irritation at herself. When she’d left Barca’s Hamlet for the wider world, she’d often found men who treated her as though she couldn’t do real work because she was a slim girl. That wasn’t a mistake anybody’d made in the borough; nor made twice nowadays either, but Ilna was always on edge expecting what to her was an insult.

  This was Chalcus. And even if it hadn’t been—if some foppish courtier had made the comment—there wasn’t time now to feel insulted!

  “Sure, I’ll go,” the bosun said, his voice calm if not precisely eager. He patted the head of his axe to make sure the helve was thrust firmly under his belt, then leaned down into the hold and came up with the maul Ilna’d used to set the mast wedges. The massive head was from the root of a white oak, banded around both faces with iron.

  “Captain?” said Ninon. “We’ll all go. You know that!”

  “I know you would, indeed,” Chalcus said with his easy smile, “but this time you’ll serve me and our prince better for waiting here by the ship. Who knows how quickly we’ll need to put off again, eh, lads?”

  “Aye, that’s not half the truth,” said Kulit. He’d taken another bow from the deckhouse and was stringing it. As he spoke, he looked up the hill toward the castle.

  “Dear heart and bosun?” said Chalcus. His left index finger tapped his quiver, the hilt of his dagger, and last his sword. “Shall we be off?”

  “Yes,” said Ilna, striding up the street and wishing it was dirt rather than cobblestone, even though she’d worn boots. She hated stone....

  She smiled. Reminding herself how much she hated stone was a better thing to do than worrying about what they’d find in the dungeons of Lusius’ castle; and what might find them there.

  “Stone’s hard for feet used to a deck,” Hutena said, putting words to Ilna’s thought. He slanted the maul’s shaft over his shoulder, then changed his mind and carried the big tool in both hands. He was on the right side as they walked up the twisting street abreast; Chalcus wa
s on the left and Ilna, smiling broader and letting her fingers knot the pattern they found appropriate, was in the middle.

  Nobody was out on the street. Occasionally Ilna caught a glimpse of eyes through the crack in a shutter. A baby cried desperately behind the counter of a used clothing shop as they passed, but neither it nor the mother hushing it were visible.

  “What’re they afraid of?” Hutena said, frowning with anger and frustration.

  The same thing you are, Ilna thought, but instead of that she said, “They don’t know what’s going to happen any better than we do. The difference is that they’ve decided to hide and let it happen to them, whereas we’re choosing to deal with it on our own terms.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” the bosun muttered. He gave her an appreciative smile and hefted the maul. “I’d rather be us.”

  “Yes, me too,” said Ilna with a wintry smile of her own. Perhaps she was learning to tell the truth in a way that other people didn’t find offensive. That’d be a useful skill, though she’d use it to supplement her instinctive responses rather than replace them.

  The street grew steeper and switched back; the only buildings this high up the hill were three-story structures whose upper floors were laid back along the slope. The castle loomed like part of the crag. The outer gate was open.

  “Do you know, ‘The Single Girl,’ Master Bosun?” said Chalcus cheerily, his right middle and index fingers touching the nock of the arrow on his bow string. “When I was single, I went dressed so fine....”

  “Aye, I know it,” said Hutena. “But we’ll sing another time if you please, sir.”

  Chalcus laughed. They’d reached the gate. Nothing moved but the wind.

  Chalcus slipped through the gateway, drawing the bow to his cheek in the same sweeping motion. A cat yowled and sprang from a trash pile. The bow string went back to Chalcus’ ear; then he relaxed with a gust of embarrassed laughter.

  “I’m not the man I once was if a little cat makes me jump,” he said as Ilna and the bosun joined him. He was smiling, but the comment wasn’t altogether a joke.

  “We’re none of us the people we wish we were,” Ilna said, sharply because she understood perfectly the thing Chalcus hadn’t been willing to put in words. “We never were. As for what matters—you’ll do for this.”

  She smiled, coldly because in a crisis she was always cold; but with enormous affection. “And you’ll do for me.”

  Chalcus set the bow against the inner side of the curtain wall, dropped the arrow back into his quiver, and set the quiver beside the bow. He drew his sword, keeping his left hand free. “I think from here on I’ll not worry about what there might be beyond the reach of my blade,” he said with a grin.

  The buildings around the ancient watchtower were empty—abandoned, not just closed around their cowering inhabitants. “I figured there’d be servants still,” Hutena said. “Are they that scared of us?”

  “It’s not us they’re worried about,” Chalcus said. “It’s what they think we’ll let loose that scares them, eh?”

  Ilna sniffed. “Then we’ll have to be careful not to let it loose,” she said.

  The tower’s outer door was closed. Hutena raised his maul in anticipation, but when Chalcus pulled on the great iron ring, only its weight resisted. The interior was dank and spartan, a military post whose thick walls filled most of what seemed from the outside to be interior space.

  A stone staircase ran around the walls. Every fifth step—the thumb of Ilna’s hand—was broader and had an arrow slit. The only light came from the slits and from the open trap door that gave onto the roof platform.

  Set into the base of the staircase was a small, heavy door with a peaked arch. Chalcus tried it with his left hand; the panel had no more give than the stone jambs that held it. Chalcus moved back and nodded to the bosun.

  Hutena stepped to the side of the doorway and eyed it for a moment as he waggled the maul to work his shoulder muscles loose. The panel was hung to open inward. There were staples for a bar on this side from the days the cellars were a dungeon, but they’d rusted to nubs.

  “Huh!” the bosun said as he swung, stepping into the blow so that his whole body drove the massive oak head. It crashed into the lock, smashing the plate loose and splintering the internal bolt out of the panel.

  Hutena backed away, breathing hard. Chalcus shoved the door open with the toes of his left foot. Air puffed out, chill and stinking of ancient slaughter. The stairs leading down were lighted faintly from below.

  “I’ll lead,” Chalcus said, speaking quietly. He drew his dagger.

  Ilna looked at Hutena. The bosun had leaned the maul against the jamb and was trying to slide the short axe from his belt. His hands trembled and his eyes were fixed on a damp patch of wall across the circular room.

  “Master Hutena,” she said crisply. “I’d like you to wait here and keep people from coming at us from behind. I don’t like stone walls, and I certainly don’t want to be blocked into this place while I’m busy with—”

  She smiled with about as little humor as she felt; she wasn’t joking about her dislike of stone.

  “—other matters.”

  “Sir?” the bosun said. He tried to keep a strait face, but his relief was obvious to anyone.

  “Aye, and I should’ve thought of it myself,” Chalcus said, shaking his head in feigned irritation. “Indeed, that’s all we’d need—locked in a dungeon with no company but a dead wizard.”

  To Ilna, in a faintly thinner voice, he went on, “Ready, dear heart?”

  “Yes,” she said; and she followed her man down the narrow steps.

  The staircase was steep, but its flights were straight and reversed at landings instead of spiralling like those of the tower above. The treads had been cut from the rock of the hillside, and they were so old that the feet of those passing up and down them had worn them concave.

  Ilna couldn’t imagine what would have justified such an amount of traffic. Perhaps these steps were much older than the tower built over them, though it dated to the Old Kingdom of a thousand years ago.

  There were two handsful of steps in each flight. Looking over Chalcus’ shoulder as she turned onto the third flight, Ilna saw a doorway at the bottom. The iron door hung askew; the upper hinge had rusted away, and the lower one was a red mass which would’ve crumbled if anybody tugged hard enough to swing the door closed.

  Chalcus paused three steps up from the bottom. Ilna could hear the wind whispering, and a slight breeze traced her ankles.

  “Eh?” murmured Chalcus. He didn’t turn his head.

  “Go on,” said Ilna, also in a quiet voice. Smashing down the door’d made enough noise to wake the dead, but it still didn’t seem right to talk loudly.

  The pattern Ilna’d woven was in her left hand, the silk lasso in her right. She didn’t know which she’d need—or if either would help—but she was as ready as she could be.

  Chalcus jumped a double pace into the room below, as smooth as water flowing down the steps but much, much faster. He poised, motionless except for quick movements of his head.

  “I’m behind you!” Ilna said sharply, halting an arm’s length back of Chalcus. Her eyes swept the circular room beyond.

  Its width was four or five times her height. Its illumination came from slots in the upper walls which must’ve been cut through the crag on which the tower stood. Ilna wouldn’t have guessed that any useful amount of light could trickle through such long narrow passages, but in what otherwise would’ve been total darkness her eyes quickly adapted to see shapes if not colors. Nothing was moving.

  The ceiling had been hollowed into a natural dome. The builders had trusted the strength of the living rock without adding supporting pillars. Ilna smiled faintly. Given how old this room must be, they’d been right.

  There was no furniture except chests of wood and metal around the walls. Some were covered with animal skins to make adequate benches, and other furs and skins were heaped in several places
on the floor.

  The room stank like a tanyard. The light slits ventilated it, but even so the stench of death and rotting blood squeezed Ilna’s lungs like a pillow over her face. More than just the smell went into the oppressive atmosphere; foul things had happened here. Utterly foul.

  Chalcus started edging sunwise around the periphery, the sword in his right hand waggling like a snake’s questing tongue. Ilna remained where she was, waiting for the pattern to change.

  A slab of basalt lay in the middle of the room. Crude tools had shaped it more or less into a rectangle. There was a groove down the center and a hole in the stone floor beneath it for a drain. Blood coated the slab and the floor both. The latest outpouring gleamed in the faint light; it looked fresh enough to be tacky to the touch, which Ilna had no intention of testing.

  She saw no sign of the bodies of the sacrificial animals. Human sacrifices, she supposed.

  Two thin, mirror-polished sheets of stone—one of banded agate, the other something bluish and translucent, perhaps topaz—stood upright on either side of the basalt. Ilna frowned, trying to determine what was wrong with the stone mirrors. She felt there was movement in them, but her eyes saw them only as stone.

  Chalcus neared one of the piles of furs. He was grinning faintly. His right foot slid forward in another slow step. Without warning he lunged instead, his curved sword stabbing down like the sting of a spider-killing wasp. The point clicked against the stone floor and withdrew as smoothly as it had gone in.

  Chalcus shook his head, still smiling. He resumed his slow shuffle.

  Ilna had turned her head minusculely when Chalcus thrust; she saw the change in the agate mirror at the corner of her eye. From this slightly different angle she was looking at the hellworld the Bird of the Tide had dropped into. A pool of molten sulfur, yellow as bile, bubbled beneath the window of stone; she thought she could see one of the pincer-armed monsters hunch between spikes of rock in the near distance.

  “Chalcus,” she said in a quiet voice. “These plates are doors of some kind. Gaur may not be—”

  Gaur stood up from the heap of furs and bullhides to her right, across the room from Chalcus. The wizard was taller than she’d remembered, raw-boned and powerful. For an instant she thought he was wearing animal skins hair-side out, but that was a trick of the dim light: Gaur was nude and covered with fur like a beast. He growled softly.