Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  Garric straightened, throwing down the rag. He looked back at the soldiers entering the hall, then slanted his sword forward.

  “Follow me!” he called. He jogged toward the center of a room so large that his shout didn’t echo.

  The difference between what Garric was doing and the nobleman’s identical order to charge the Elemental was that this was the right time for it. A headlong assault might not succeed, but no other means could possibly succeed.

  Garric was measuring his stride, leading his troops but not running away from them. Cashel followed, though for him it was probably his best speed. Sharina paused instead of going off with them immediately; she sucked in deep breaths and took a good look at the situation.

  “Nothing left here to kill,” Beard fumed, but he knew as well as she did that she could catch up with the others before there was more fighting. And there certainly would be more fighting.

  Skeins of crimson and azure wizardlight wove upward from the middle of the hall. Their patterns were as breathtakingly complex as the iridescence of a soap bubble. The tapestry of light had the searing perfection of the surface of the sun.

  “Much blood!” the axe said. “Much more blood though not Her blood, not even with this fine mistress... but oh! if we could drink Her blood....”

  The lines and ribbons and cables of light spread from a nub raised from the floor. Just a bump of ice, Sharina thought, denying what her eyes suggested.

  “You know better!” Beard cackled. “You know it’s a throne, mistress; and you know who sits on the throne!”

  It was a throne, of ice so clear that only surface reflections limned its form. On it a great white blob quivered in concert with the pulsing wizardlight.

  “To drink Her blood!” said the axe. “Oh, if only Beard could drink Her blood!”

  Lord Attaper had gotten to his feet, but when he took a step his face went white and he stumbled. Despite the pain, a broken collarbone if not worse, he continued to shuffle forward.

  One of the common soldiers who’d accompanied Garric set his right heel on the head of the javelin he’d pulled from the Hunter’s eye and lifted the shaft judiciously to straighten the iron. The head back of the point wasn’t hardened, so it would bend in an enemy’s shield and prevent him from pulling it out to throw back. This veteran obviously had experience with field expedients.

  The chest-speared Hunter had finally collapsed face upward. The other soldier was trying to free his javelin from the corpse. The missile had penetrated so deeply that the point was probably in the creature’s spine.

  “Leave it, Pont!” the first soldier cried. “Time’s a-wasting!”

  The pair broke into a lumbering jog. “That’s all right for you to say, Prester,” Pont muttered, “but I notice that you waited till you had yours loose!”

  Sharina loped along with them. A segmented worm that looked like a glacier squirmed toward the invaders, but despite its size at least the leading company of soldiers would be past before it could block the route to the throne. No point in fighting needlessly; there’d be more than enough that couldn’t be avoided.

  “We got the princess with us, Pont,” Prester said.

  “And a bloody good thing it is, too,” his partner agreed. “Thanks, your highness. You saved my ass back there, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Your highness!” somebody shouted in a breathy voice. “I’m coming!”

  Sharina glanced over her shoulder and saw Gondor, the Blood Eagle who’d gotten her into the corridor to begin with, running across the ice to catch up. He’d lost his spear somewhere.

  She felt a momentary pang at having abandoned a man who’d been of significant help. But—the men who’d attached themselves to her after Alfdan’s death hoped she’d be their salvation. Gondor in contrast regarded her as a child he had to protect. While the Blood Eagle’s concern was no less real than that of the civilians, it wasn’t something Sharina needed to worry about while matters were in their present state.

  “You needn’t worry about civilians either, mistress,” the axe said in an excited chant. “Only worry about feeding Beard; the rest will come!”

  That was close enough to the truth that Sharina smiled. Beard couldn’t save the kingdom by himself, but by putting the axe in the places that best suited it Sharina would be performing the best service to the kingdom that was within her power.

  She and the soldiers joined Garric, who nodded, and Cashel, who smiled. Cashel ran with his quarterstaff crosswise in front of him. So far as Sharina could tell he’d fully recovered from the effort of smashing open Her sanctum, but in a fight Cashel focused on his opponent alone.

  Half a dozen others, members of the phalanx who’d lost their pikes, were already with Garric. To allow them to handle their heavy primary weapon, pikemen wore linen corselets instead of metal body armor. Their light shields were supported by a neck strap and they carried long daggers rather than proper swords. Without their pikes they were much more agile than regular infantrymen burdened by full armor.

  More troops followed, alone and in small groups as they emerged through the wall of the chamber. Sharina felt a stab of despair. They seemed so very few against the size of this enormous hall.

  “Better hold up, your princeship!” Prester called. “We want to take this lot in close order!”

  “Take his right, Prester,” Pont said. “You keep between us, your highness. We got shields, you see.”

  This lot was a pack of wolves the size of heifers, loping across the ice. Their coats would’ve been white under normal light; here they had an evil violet shimmer. Their eyes glowed yellow-orange and had no pupils.

  “Halt, we’ll fight them here!” Garric ordered. He took three strides, each shorter than the one before, so he didn’t fall. This ice gave good footing, but slowing on a hard surface was always risky. “You men watch my back. I don’t have a shield so I’ll be out in front where I can do some good.”

  “Stay behind me, your highness!” Gondor said to Sharina. “I’ll try to keep them off you!”

  “Keep out of my way,” Cashel said, stepping forward as Garric did. He moved to the left so that even if he extended his staff full-length in one hand, the outer ferrule wouldn’t touch his friend.

  “Mistress, we must be in front!” Beard said. “Mistress, you mustn’t keep Beard back from his food!”

  “Of course not,” Sharina agreed. She glanced at the Blood Eagle and said sharply, “File Closer Gondor, keep anything from getting behind me but stay far enough back that you don’t foul my axe. If I kill you by accident I’ll regret it; but Beard will not, I assure you.”

  Gondor looked shocked, but he closed his mouth with his protest unspoken. Sharina stepped past the line of soldiers and placed herself as far to her brother’s right as Cashel was to his left. Beard took up a lot of room in a hot fight....

  The wolves were on them, a loose vee led by a brute nearer the size of an ox than a heifer. Its mouth was open; slaver dripped through teeth as long as a man’s fingers. It bunched its huge body to leap on Garric.

  A javelin struck the point of its right shoulder at an angle that took the head through the beast’s heart and the blood vessels leading from it. Instead of leaping, the wolf twisted in the air and somersaulted, its jaws splintering the spear shaft in dying fury.

  Sharina stepped forward, swinging Beard in a slanting overhead stroke. She used the strength of both arms with her right hand leading on the helve. The axe screamed, “Kill!” but she screamed also. “The Isles!” she thought it was, but she was barely a spectator of her own actions at this moment.

  Beard’s narrow edge crunched just behind the left orbit of the wolf coming at her,. The beast’s thunderous snarl turned into a yelp. The eyes’ inner light winked out as the animal skidded past in a flaccid heap, dragging Sharina around as she tugged her axe loose.

  She felt rather than saw a second wolf as large as the one she’d killed leap toward her. Gondor was between it and her, his shield raised
. The beast knocked him backward and slammed him onto the ice with forepaws each the size of a soup plate.

  As the wolf’s jaws opened to snap off the pinioned Blood Eagle’s head, Sharina brought Beard around to bury his spike where the spine entered the back of the wolf’s great head.

  The wolf convulsed, arching backward. Sharina jerked her axe free; the beast gave a spastic leap that flung it thirty yards sideways.

  There were no more wolves in front of her. Sharina turned. All of them were down. A pikeman sat astride the neck of a beast which still thrashed though its legs had collapsed under it. He clung to its left ear and stabbed its throat repeatedly, apparently unaware that its eyes were empty and its tongue lolled onto the ice.

  Cashel got to his feet, pulling out the wool from his wallet. He wiped blood and brains from one butt-cap of his quarterstaff. His face had an expression of perfect calm, as though he were currying an ox after they’d spent the day plowing. He felt Sharina glance at him and gave her a smile.

  Garric tried to rub his eyes with the back of his left hand. He’d been drenched with blood; it dripped from him and his sword to the ice. Either Prester or Pont—they were as bloody as Garric, and Sharina couldn’t tell them apart—handed him a rag he’d carried in the hollow boss of his shield. A wolf’s teeth had reduced the shield itself to splinters, though it was made of thick cross-laminated birch.

  Garric stepped around a wolf quivering in its death throes. He’d cut through its throat with what must have been a single stroke. More men had run up during the fight, replacing the casualties—but there’d been many casualties.

  Garric wiped the patterned steel of his sword, then slanted the blade again toward the throne. They were within bowshot now.

  “Haft and the Isles!” he shouted as he started forward again, stumbling for the first step but getting his feet properly under him by the second.

  “Haft and the Isles!” Sharina croaked as she shambled after him.

  “Kill them all and drink their blood!” cried Beard; and that was a good war-cry too.

  ***

  Within bowshot, Garric thought as he jogged toward the throne. He was a good archer—he’d been a good one, anyway, in the days when he minded sheep. Archery required constant practice to keep the muscles toned as well as the skill to know what to do in the first place.

  It wasn’t really very long since he’d been a boy in Barca’s Hamlet though it felt like a lifetime. He could probably put two arrows out of three through the center of the blob seated on the ice throne... if he had a bow.

  And if pigs had wings, they could fly. Which wasn’t a result anybody wished who knew more about pigs than that they liked the taste of pork.

  King Carus laughed with Garric, then said, “Don’t worry, lad. It’ll be more satisfying to do the job with your sword.”

  The battle with the wolves was hazy in Garric’s mind. His eyes had only seen what his ancient ancestor’s instincts told them to focus on: shapes blurred except where Carus saw a chance to strike or a need to dodge. At one point in the fight he’d buried his dagger in a wolf’s eye, so deeply that he had to release the hilt as the beast bounded away snapping at the air. Though the steel had destroyed the wolf’s brain, its muscles still burned with bloodlust.

  At another point—before? after?—he’d slashed through the foreleg of a white-furred monster, then jumped to the right as it rolled over the missing limb. He didn’t know what’d happened to the wounded animal afterwards. He’d been past it, using both arms to swing his sword. His blade had met the neck of the wolf bounding toward him, shearing it in a broad diagonal.

  There’d been blood before. When Garric opened the throat of the great wolf looming over him, the whole world became a sticky red torrent. He’d struck the ice on his shoulder and rolled to his feet in the same motion. After that he could see the things about him normally again, because he’d had nothing more to kill.

  For the moment.

  The figure on the throne raised hands like suet puddings. In concert with Her gesture, wisps of wizardlight spun like dust devils before Garric and his companions.

  “Wizardry!” snarled the ghost of King Carus. “May the Lady smite all wizards down for their sins!”

  That’s our job, not the Lady’s, thought Garric. The whirling funnels of light drained into the ice; only a glow remained. Then the hard surface shattered, erupting like mud when frogs crawl to the surface of a dried pond during the first rains. Skeletons clothed in wizardlight rose from their icy graves, holding swords and spears with rust-pitted blades.

  The wizard on the throne continued to weave. The whole surface between Garric and the throne was breaking open. Some of the skeletons were of bone so old it was splitting, while others still had not only ligaments but flesh clinging to them.

  “Haft and the Isles!” Garric shouted, shocked despite himself at the sight. He wasn’t sure that anyone but Cashel would follow him into the dreadful array.

  “Hey, the dumb barbarians haven’t got armor!” bellowed Pont.

  “Let’s get stuck in, boys!” cried his partner Prester. “It’s party time!”

  I’ll make them nobles for that bit of bravado! thought Garric joyfully. Then peasant caution made him add, If any of us survive.

  “It’s not bravado,” Carus explained. “They mean it. And they’re right!”

  A skeleton ran at Garric holding a spear over its right shoulder in both fleshless hands. Whatever was animating the corpse must be powerful, but it hadn’t had even rudimentary weapons training....

  Instead of waiting to side-step the awkward thrust, Garric backhanded his sword through the skeleton’s right elbow. The spear twitched sideways and Garric’s edge crunched deep in the naked spine. The creature folded backwards.

  Garric snatched the spear from the twice-dead thing’s nerveless grip, then used the shaft to parry the cleaver-like blade which another skeleton swung at him from the left. He thrust his own sword through the creature’s chest cavity, both edges grating on bone.

  The haze of crimson light which clothed the creature dissipated as suddenly as a reflection vanishing when the angle changes. The skeleton collapsed onto the ice, already starting to disarticulate.

  Garric saw movement to his right and was whirling to deal with it when Pont stepped past. The veteran crushed skeletal ribs with the upper edge of his shield, struck the skull of a second creature with the edge of his short, heavy sword—ancient bone powdered at the impact—and broke a third’s knee and the thighbone above it with the hobnailed sole of his boot. When it fell, he smashed the thing’s chest with the other boot.

  To Garric’s other side Prester proceeded in much the same fashion, though he was using a pikeman’s lighter shield: there was never a moment that one limb or another wasn’t moving and never a motion that wasn’t lethal. It was like watching pistons working in pump shafts, inexorably shoving everything before them.

  “Haft and the Isles!” somebody cried over the tumult.

  Garric strode forward between the two veterans. He didn’t have a shield to strike with, but his longer arm and longer blade helped him keep even with the older men.

  His left hand stabbed the spear he’d appropriated through the thin nasal bones of a skull. The creature behind that one hacked at Garric’s extended arm with a sword so dull it bruised worse than it cut. Garric didn’t quite drop the spear, but he was clumsy when he lunged and with a half cut, half thrust, lopped off the head of the creature that’d wounded him.

  Another of the things drove its spear upward into Garric’s breastplate, banging deeply enough through the bronze to draw blood as well as knocking his breath out. The stroke would’ve gone deeper yet if the spearpoint hadn’t broken.

  The creature pulled the weapon back for a finishing thrust. Garric stood, paralyzed from the blow to his diaphragm. Pont, almost absently, shattered the skeleton’s pelvis with the lower edge of his shield. When it fell, he drove the heel of his boot like a battering ram into its neck
.

  Garric got his breath back. He stepped forward, his sword raised.

  “Yeah, and I’ll bugger your sisters, too!” Prester shouted as he thrust and chopped and continued to advance. He didn’t move quickly, but neither did he halt or even pause. It was like watching sap drip on a warm spring day.

  Cashel’s quarterstaff struck right and left with the regularity of a waterclock, smashing a skull or a fleshless ribcage with every blow. Whenever an animate skeleton thrust at him, a ferrule batted the weapon back and crushed the thing wielding it. What’d been an army of hideous monsters as numerous as stalks in a barley field, was going down as surely as that barley at harvest time.

  The footing became as much of a danger as the creatures themselves. In rising from their frozen tombs, the skeletons had left craters of shattered ice. Garric set his boot on a hole filled with treacherous fragments. Only instincts he’d honed while following sheep into bogs warned him not to rest his weight on that foot.

  A skeleton swung a double-bitted axe down at him. Garric caught the helve with the point of his upraised sword and skidded the axe to the side, then flicked his blade to the right to lift the skull from the neck vertebrae. If he’d carried through with the lunge he’d intended, his leg would’ve sunk beneath him. The creature’s blow would’ve split him up the back like a sheep butterflied for roasting.

  Sharina’s axe wove figure-8s before her, clearing a space as broad even as Cashel’s quarterstaff. The axe was shouting or singing in the sort of joy displayed at coronations and for sudden windfalls; its edge clipped through whatever it met—wood or bone or rusty iron. Garric didn’t know how long his sister could keep up the effort, but by now there was little more need for it. A single rank of skeletons separated him and his immediate companions from the figure on the ice throne.

  Garric chose his final opponent, the skeleton of a man who when alive ages previously must’ve been seven feet tall. It raised its sword for a vertical chop; instead of the deliberate swordsmanship he’d demonstrated till this moment, Garric did the same.