by David Drake
She held the axe in both hands. It was talking enough for both of them, chortling, “Two Elementals, two of them, oh Beard never dreamed he would serve a master who would feed him Elementals!”
The axe didn’t stop there but it didn’t say anything new either, so Cashel ignored the rest like he would a breeze whispering through the trees. Garric, Lord Attaper, and the two soldiers with Garric had come running up only a heartbeat behind Cashel.
Garric put two fingertips on his sister’s throat and nodded with relief. “Her heart’s beating fine!” he said. “She’s just—”
His voice didn’t so much trail off as simply stop, because he didn’t have any better notion of what’d happened to Sharina than Cashel did. He guessed she was exhausted. Two swipes with the axe weren’t much for a healthy girl, but Cashel knew from his own experience that when you got in with wizards and their art it took more out of you than it seemed like it ought to’ve done.
“She’s strong and well,” the axe said. “She’ll soon bring Beard to more blood and souls! Oh, what a fine mistress!”
It wasn’t the sort of talk that generally appealed to Cashel, but hearing that the axe thought Sharina would be all right made it a pleasure this time. He felt her stir, twisting her head against his chest. He could probably set her down on her feet shortly, though he wasn’t sure he would.
“Your highness?” said Master Ortron, about the only officer Cashel’d met that he liked as a person. Ortron was an ordinary fellow, not a noble, and he’d been happy to show Cashel how to handle a pike in return for lessons with a quarterstaff. “Are we to hold here, or...?”
“Duzi, no!” Garric said. “We’ll resume—”
He paused, looking sharply at his sister, then Cashel. “Cashel?” he continued. “Can you—”
“Sure,” said Cashel, rocking Sharina gently in his arm the way he’d have soothed a baby. Of course he could carry Sharina.
He noticed that a couple of the soldiers had picked up the officer who’d been knocked silly for his own good. Cashel was glad of that. The fellow didn’t have any more sense than a sheep did, but Cashel’d spent so much of his life looking after sheep that he couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man.
“All right, Master Ortron, resume your advance,” Garric said. He quirked a smile and added, “We’ll go on till we get where we’re going.”
“Your highness!” called somebody from the back of the formation. Cashel wasn’t tall enough to see past the mass of soldiers; he didn’t think even Garric was, not with them wearing helmets like they were. “The passage has closed behind us! Let me through, you fools! I have to report to Prince Garric!”
“There’s something up ahead of us, too,” said one of the soldiers with Garric. “Looks to me like it’s a solid wall up there.”
Cashel had a clear field of view ahead. There was no doubt about it: the tunnel had closed off since after Sharina made the light come back the way it was down here: not normal, maybe, but normal for this place. As for being solid, though....
“The wall at the end’s coming toward us,” Cashel said, loud enough for the others to hear him if they’d wanted to. Everybody was looking instead at the officer who’d just come through the formation. He was an older fellow with curled, hennaed moustaches; a regimental commander, though not somebody Cashel knew by name.
Garric did, though. “What happened to the passage, Lord Portus?” he said.
“Behind me!” Portus said, gesturing with a flourish back the way he’d come. “I heard a shout and saw that sheets of ice were growing from either side of the wall. There were several men following closely, but they were cut off from me when the ice joined. They began to attack it with their weapons, but it continued to thicken until I couldn’t even see them through it.”
Portus took off his gilded helmet and wiped his forehead with the wad of cambric he kept between the leather straps that suspended the bronze above his scalp. “I came on at once. I, ah....
“I thought the ice was following me,” he said into the hollow of his helmet. He looked up to meet Garric’s eyes. “Your highness, I think it is following me. The wall is growing toward us!”
“Garric, so’s the one in front of us,” Cashel said, this time loud enough that they had to listen. He pointed with his quarterstaff. “There!”
He wasn’t exactly angry—he was used to people not paying attention to what he said since he generally let the words stand for themselves. You had to put a lot of fuss and flailing about into the way you said the words to get sheep and most people to listen, and Cashel only did that when he had to.
“Oh, well,” said one of the soldiers who’d been looking after Garric. “Maybe her ladyship’ll chop a hole in it with her axe, do you think?”
“She’s not a ladyship, Prester,” the other man said. “She’s a princess!”
“And Beard,” said the axe sharply, “is not a navvy’s pick! Try to cut ice with me, Squad Leader Prester, and you’ll find just how quickly I bounce back and empty your skull of what passes for brains!”
“If we advance behind the pikes, as many of them as we’ve still got...?” Master Ortron said. He didn’t sound real confident, showing that he was the sensible man Cashel had always taken him for.
“Garric,” said Cashel, “hold Sharina for me. She’s coming around fine, but....”
He passed Sharina to her brother without waiting to see if Garric had an opinion. Cashel needed both hands and somebody needed to watch over Sharina for a little while yet; there wasn’t anything to discuss.
Cashel stepped forward, balancing his staff before him in both hands. “Anything I can do to help, Cashel?” Garric said.
“I think this one’s for me,” Cashel said as he began to spin the staff. “I haven’t been doing much since I got here.”
Cashel wasn’t too proud to let somebody help, especially not a friend like Garric, but he didn’t see much anybody else could do. It wasn’t certain he could do much either, but he figured him and his quarterstaff had the best chance going.
The thin blue thread that Tenoctris had sent out for a guide disappeared into the plug that’d grown across the tunnel since Sharina cleared the other thing out of the way. The new wall of ice didn’t move fast, not even as fast as Cashel ambled toward it at a sheep’s pace. The ice didn’t have to be quick to do what it was planning—or anyway what the wizard behind it planned. Cashel appreciated the value of steady over fast as well as any man living.
He spun the staff in a slant before him, first high on his right side and then doing a tricky crossover that brought the left side high instead. He kept on walking, reversing the spin from sunwise to widdershins by changing hands again behind his back.
None of this had anything to do with how he planned to use the quarterstaff when he got to the wall, but Cashel knew in his heart that there was more going on than just him loosening up his muscles before he needed them for real. He wasn’t exactly showing off for the watching soldiers, but—
Well, if this was the last time he was able to put his staff through its paces, he wanted it to be a display he and the familiar hickory could be proud of. And it might very well be the last time.
The quarterstaff’s ferrules sparkled with wizardlight, then streamed a dazzling blue disk encircling Cashel as he walked on. His skin prickled; he didn’t recall starting to smile, but he was smiling now and he guessed he would till this was over one way or the other.
The ice wall was close. The roof of these tunnels was twice as high as Cashel could reach with the staff held up in one hand, but the barrier right in front of him looked higher even than that. It was like facing a mountain that reached all the way to the stars, though there wouldn’t be any stars where it was, just black ice on forever.
When Cashel had entered the Visitor’s ship, he’d been trapped like a bug in hot sap. This business might end the same way, with the ice before him squeezing hard against the ice and Cashel part of a red mush that included Sharina and all the
soldiers. So far, though, he had plenty of room to swing his staff.
He kept the iron-capped hickory spinning as rapidly as he could control it—which was a good deal faster than anybody else he knew could, even Garric. Cashel didn’t move forward but the ice did, in a more delicate step than a human could manage.
The staff’s whirling ferrule brushed the sheer black face. Instead of the tiny click that Cashel expected to feel but not hear, the world exploded in a crash of blinding blue wizardlight. His arms went numb to the shoulders. He felt as he had the day when, too young to know better, he’d been clinging to a tree during a thunderstorm and lightning struck the next tree but one.
He was Cashel or-Kenset: he didn’t drop his staff, and though he lost the rhythm of the spin for a moment he still brought the other ferrule around in a straight-on slam. The blow would’ve put his staff a hand’s breadth deep into a sea wolf’s thick skull.
Touching the ice had brought a thunderbolt. This time the shock threw Cashel to the ground, deaf and blinded to everything but orange and purple afterimages that alternated faster than his heart was beating.
He didn’t feel the floor as he hit it, but when instinct drove him to reverse his stroke he found he was sitting on the ice and twice his own length back from the wall. He got up without thinking—there was no time to think, this was a fight—by crunching one end of the staff down beside him and poling himself up as much by the strength of his shoulders as with his legs.
Cashel stepped forward. He supposed the men behind him were shouting, but he wouldn’t have paid attention even if he could hear anything beyond the roar of that last impact.
He could see now, but his vision was focused down to a circle of the wall right in front of him. At the edges even that started to gray out; beyond the space he could’ve spanned with his arms spread, Cashel’s world just didn’t exist. All he saw—all he cared about for as long as this fight lasted, whether he lived or died—was the target for his next blow.
He spun the quarterstaff overhead, keeping its momentum up. He took another step and a third. The wall wasn’t where it’d been when he got up and started for it again, but Cashel was used to opponents retreating when he came at them. He was moving faster than it was. As he took a fourth long stride he turned the staff’s rotation into forward motion. He punched a butt cap into the ice with all his weight and strength thrusting it.
Wizardlight held Cashel in a sphere of lightning-cored needles, each of them stabbing into the marrow of his bones. It would’ve been agony if he could really feel, but the pain was so intense that his mind floated above it. He marveled that his flesh didn’t blacken and slough away.
He was sitting on the ice again. Men were running past him, their mouths open with shouts that Cashel couldn’t hear. Sharina knelt at his side. He couldn’t hear her either, but her left hand stroked his cheek. Warmth and feeling returned to his body, the pain draining away as though Sharina’s gentle fingers had lanced a boil.
Cashel lurched to his feet. In the wall of ice was a gap he could’ve driven a yoke of oxen through. The edges still sizzled as azure light ate them away. Garric and his soldiers were clambering through the opening to the chamber beyond.
“Cashel?” Sharina said. “Can you walk?”
“I can run,” growled Cashel, and he started forward again.
***
Sharina’s heart leaped as she watched a sphere of nothingness engulf Cashel as he drove his staff into the center of the ice. It looked black because it had neither hue nor reflection, an absence of anything.
The emptiness vanished; maybe it’d been an illusion. Cashel flew back as though something huge had kicked him, but he still held his quarterstaff.
Sharina ran to him. She had a funny, detached feeling. She didn’t hurt nor even feel tired, but she wasn’t sure that it was her own strength that moved her limbs. Beard was more than an axe—she’d known that from the moment she picked him up and he started shouting—but she was beginning to wonder how much more than an axe he was.
“Beard serves his mistress,” the axe sang, his voice ringing through the echoing cacophony. “Beard would never treat his mistress the way the Augenhelm did Alfdan, the Great Fool of a Wizard!”
Sharina felt cold terror stab through her mind as she recalled Alfdan’s last moments; then she laughed. “Beard,” she said, “without you, all my friends would be dead and the kingdom dying too. If that means you destroy me—well, I won’t be happy about it, but I’d have done the same if I’d known ahead of time.”
She knelt beside Cashel, stroking his cheek with the hand that didn’t hold the axe. He’d smashed a huge hole in the ice. Instead of the corridor they’d been following, there was a vast domed hall on the other side of the gap. Cashel had opened more than a mere physical barrier.
Garric and his immediate companions climbed through the opening, but the ordinary soldiers were hesitating when they realized that a blue quiver of wizardlight continued to eat the gap still wider. Cashel made a rumbling sound in his throat; he blinked and his face flushed away the frozen pallor of a moment before. He rose to his feet, an awkward, inexorable movement like that of an ox rousing from sleep, and bunched his great shoulder muscles.
“Mistress, there’s great danger for your friends beyond!” said Beard urgently. He tittered and went on, “Much danger for them, and much blood for Beard to drink!”
“Cashel?” Sharina said. Master Ortron had lashed the men of his phalanx into motion with a tongue rough as chipped lava, and the regular infantrymen were moving also out of embarrassment to lag behind troops they felt were their social inferiors. “Can you walk?”
“I can run,” growled Cashel. He started forward, holding his quarterstaff up at a slant before him.
“Let us by!” Sharina cried, because she wasn’t sure whether Cashel was aware of anything beyond the fact that he was going through, whoever or whatever happened to be in the way. Maybe he wasn’t ready to face the dangers on the other side of the opening, but Sharina didn’t want to leave him behind. Even without Beard’s prodding she wouldn’t have stayed back herself.
Besides, she’d never seen a time that Cashel wasn’t ready to face what was before him.
The soldiers made way. As Sharina danced through the opening, moving like a breeze beside Cashel’s avalanche, she heard Master Ortron snarl, “There, you pansies! Will you let a wisp of a girl go where you’re afraid to?”
“Wisp of a girl!” Beard chortled. “My mistress, a wisp of a girl?”
The hall within seemed empty at first glance only because it was huge beyond the standards of enclosed space. The entire royal palace in Valles, scores of separate buildings spreading across many acres, would’ve been lost beneath the huge dome. Here as elsewhere in these caverns the ice shone with a core of wizardlight, but the ceiling and walls were so distant that the figures within were dim shadows.
The floor was clear as diamond. Plankton in the water beneath shone faintly red or blue instead of the yellow-green of the sea off Barca’s Hamlet in springtime. Through the glowing water swam monsters that were large even by the standards of this place. Their teeth gleamed as their platter-sized eyes stared longingly at the creatures above them.
Garric, Attaper and the two soldiers with them were in a tight circle surrounded by a pack of Hunters like the ones Sharina had killed when she’d been sucked into this world. There must’ve been seven of the gangling giants to begin with, but one was down with a javelin sticking up from an eyesocket and another staggered in tight circles trying to pull out the similar missile imbedded to the wood in her breastbone. It was amazing that she was still alive since the iron must be through her heart, but she was no longer a danger to the men.
The remaining five were. One raised a club made from a whale’s shoulderblade to swing at Garric. Cashel stepped close with quick right and left blows from his quarterstaff. The Hunter gave a guttural cry and toppled backward, his knee joints smashed.
“Blood!” shril
led Beard as Sharina rushed the Hunter whose great iron sword threatened the soldier to Garric’s right. “Blood! Blood! Blo—”
Sharina swung, cutting the Hunter’s left hamstring. The creature fell, twisting toward the injury.
The soldier lunged forward, thrusting into the Hunter’s thigh as Sharina ducked under the falling body to reach the next enemy. When he withdrew his short blade, a column of blood spouted high from the wound: he’d sliced the Hunter’s femoral artery. From the way the soldier moved, that stroke had been no more of an accident than the way he’d thrown his javelin through a previous Hunter’s eye.
A Hunter crashed his club, a section of tree trunk, down at Lord Attaper. The Blood Eagle didn’t carry a shield. His long sword slashed, not in a vain attempt to block the stroke but trying rather to skew it to the side enough to miss.
He was almost succesful, but the wood brushing his left shoulder flung him sprawling; the thigh-thick club splintered without marking the ice. A fish scraped teeth the length of a man across the bottom of the crystalline barrier, trying to get at either combatant.
Sharina leaped over Attaper and swung high, shearing the throat of the stooping Hunter. Its blood sprayed in a steaming torrent over the ice.
“Blood and brains!” said the axe.
The other soldier of Garric’s entourage jabbed the edge of his shield into a Hunter’s groin, doubling his opponent up, while the point of its great spear skidded on the ice where the soldier had been a moment before. That put the creature’s skull within Sharina’s reach. She buried Beard’s edge in the Hunter’s temple, then twisted it free. Her victim bounded away like a headless chicken.
The remaining Hunter was staggering backwards, making wordless cries and waving its arms above its head like a pair of bloody fountains. Garric crouched, gasping as he used a swatch of his tunic to wipe the blade which had just lopped off the creature’s hands.
Additional monsters lumbered toward them, Hunters and things still more terrible. Sharina saw a pair of beetles with iridescent wing cases; they picked their way across the ice on legs the size of trees. But more troops were pouring through the opening as well, their weapons and armor catching highlights from the cold purple glow.