by David Drake
They swung down at one another, their blades crossing in a clanging tocsin. Sparks flew. Wizardry gave the skeleton’s limbs enormous strength, but the salt-pitted sword snapped on the watered steel of Garric’s blade.
Garric thrust through the creature’s mouth, scattering teeth like hailstones and lifting the top of the bare skull. The skeleton flew backward, the broken sword dropping from its right hand as its left arm came loose at the shoulder.
Garric had reached the foot of the great throne; he looked up for the first time since the skeletons began to rise from the ice. The wizard seated above him must have weighed as much as a full-grown ox. Her body was a mushroom of fat on legs whose drooping calves swaddled tiny feet the way rich cloth drapes an altar. Her arms were so monstrous they appeared to have no elbows; Her fingers, though thick as sausages, seemed delicate by contrast with the bloated palms.
She was looking at Garric. Her cheeks were so puffy that Her eyes seemed to be set at the bottom of deep tunnels, but Garric recognized Her nonetheless.
He was looking at his childhood friend, Ilna os-Kenset.
And as he realized that, the net of wizardlight that She had woven in the air dropped onto Garric, freezing him in his tracks.
***
As Ilna entered the huge domed hall which she’d seen so recently through Her eyes, the net of wizardlight drifted down over her. Ilna’s expression was colder than the winter stars.
The Tree growing from the enthroned figure dominated the vast chamber. Its trunk was deceptive, as thin and supple as a willow’s at first glance. At the back of Ilna’s mind she had the impression that the Tree was too thick for even this huge room to hold. Its leafless limbs squirmed on currents of wizardlight, brushing over every peak and valley of the world; branching and spreading to branch again.
Chalcus saw Her net falling. He threw up his left hand to keep it from tangling him, but that touch froze him. The net continued to settle, draping his head and shoulders. Ilna stepped around him and continued toward the center of the hall.
The Tree in its full splendor looked as it had when Ilna first saw it in Hell. What she’d brought back with her to the waking world had been a relatively slight thing, but it would have grown.
Grown to look like this towering monster, visible only to her of all those in this chamber.
Soldiers were gathered in the center of the room; more men had been running toward them from an entrance close to where Ilna had shattered her own door in the wall. In a scene much like the one she’d just viewed through Her memory, a net of wizardlight had locked most of the men stiffly. A few were trying to crawl away; none of them would succeed.
The chamber held inhuman creatures of more sorts than Ilna had fingers to count them. Her net had trapped those as well; it would convert them to Her purposes in the same fashion, if nothing prevented that from happening.
Ilna smiled like light dancing from a sword blade. Something would prevent it.
She walked forward, feeling a faint tingle from the wizardlight eddying about her. The net was at shoulder level now and dropping lower.
Nearby crouched a thing whose body was a great cat’s but whose eagle’s head was crowned with great green feathers. A group of soldiers braced themselves to receive it, their shields raised; two of the men had javelins cocked to throw. The encounter had become a tableau when Her net had fallen across it. In their concern with each other, neither monster nor men had been aware of what was settling on them.
Ilna detoured around the corpse of a giant with a brow that jutted like a warship’s ram to protect its single central eye. It lay on its back with three pikes, two broken and one whole, sticking up from its chest. Judging from how deep the pikes were driven in, the creature must have run itself onto the points and continued struggling forward on pillar-like legs until death finally caught up with it.
Ilna sniffed. That massive skull must hold a brain no bigger than a squirrel’s. Of course there were plenty of ordinary men she’d say the same about.
Garric and Cashel were where she expected to find them, in the middle of the front line. Sharina was there too, her blond hair draped about her shoulders like a shroud. She’d been swinging an axe when the net halted her in mid-stroke.
As white as a slug and fatter than Ilna had believed a human could become, She sat on the throne looking out over the frozen soldiers. Of course She wasn’t human any more; Her soul was merely the soil in which the Tree had sprouted to spread its tendrils across the world.
The net of light reached the floor, locking Garric and his whole army beneath its spell. From the throne Her hands wove power in subtle patterns; those hands and Ilna herself were the only things moving in the huge room.
She turned Her head toward Ilna. Her fat white fingers twisted; crimson wizardlight looped out to knot around Ilna like a snake throttling a vole.
The coil slipped through Ilna as if her body were water; she felt only the quivering chill she’d get from a draft when a winter storm rattles the shutters. She walked on, looking up and smiling more broadly. She met the deep-set eyes of the thing she hadn’t allowed herself to become.
“Who are you?” shouted the thing on the throne.
“I’m Ilna os-Kenset,” said Ilna. “I’m who you used to be, when you were human.”
This close to the throne, Ilna had to choose her footing with care. The ice was broken into chunks, and everywhere lay the skeletons of the men who’d followed Her until she tore out their blood and souls to feed her wizardry.
“I have power over you!” She cried from the throne. Her fingers writhed again, molding forces into a tool and sending them curling toward Ilna as an azure noose. “I have power over all things!”
Ilna shrugged through this coil as she had the first one, as she had the net that held the others in the chamber. “You don’t have any power except what the Tree allows you,” she said calmly. “And the Tree has no power over me now—since I broke away from it.”
Ilna looked up at the round face and bloated white body. “As you did not in your world,” she said. “And as you can’t ever do now.”
“Ilna?” said a voice Ilna knew well. “I’m so glad you’ve come back!”
It was not Her voice. It was the voice of the friend Ilna never had, the one who understood her and cared about her, as nobody had ever cared about Ilna os-Kenset.
It was the voice of the Tree.
“You have no business with me,” Ilna said. “Not any longer.”
She wasn’t sure her lips were moving. The huge ice hall faded to flickers at the edge of her awareness. She stood in a gray limbo with neither light nor texture. Before her was the Tree, its sinuous branches weaving a slow dance of mastery and evil.
Ilna smiled; and if it was a grim expression, there was pride in it nonetheless. Not mastery over me. Not any longer.
“None of them understand you, Ilna,” said the Tree; its voice was soothing, loving. “I’ll make sure that you get what you deserve.”
“You have no—” Ilna shouted, but the remainder of the words froze on her lips. Time stopped, then flowed down a channel different from the one which she had lived.
The vagabond Kenset brought Ilna to Barca’s Hamlet as an infant, but divine parentage already shown from her face. As a child she never lacked for anything. Barca’s Hamlet became known as a paradise on earth where winters were moderate and crops bountiful. This blissful series of events was rightly credited to the presence of the Divine Ilna.
Some of those in the borough found the pain of their own inadequacy too much to bear in the light of the Divine Ilna. Her uncle Katchin and his slattern wife swam out to sea one night; their bodies were never recovered. The next day Garric’s shrewish, self-important mother Lora hanged herself in the panty of the inn. Neighbors regarded the deaths as part of the blessings Ilna brought on the community.
Ilna allowed Garric to attend her. It pleased her to see the light of adoration in his eyes. He never presumed to touch her, of cours
e, realizing that no human was worthy of the Divine Ilna. She was whole in herself, a fit subject for worship but unmoved by it as by all else around her.
Around Her; She was divine.
Realizing the inadequacy of their resources, the folk of the borough carried Her in state to Carcosa. The ancient capital received Her with fitting enthusiasm, rebuilding the Old Kingdom palace for Her. Delegations arrived from Sandrakkan and Ornifal, from Blaise and from rocky islets too small to have a name recognized by any but the handful of fishermen inhabiting them.
The rich and powerful brought gold and jewels and sometimes tapestries; She looked with amused contempt on the finest fabric which humans could weave. The poor could offer only their worship, but that they gave Her unstintingly.
On every isle, in every home, voices rose in praise for the Divine Ilna. What had been a kingdom became a temple, as a new and eternal Golden Age came to the Isles.
“What you deserve...,” the voice whispered affectionately.
Ilna laughed, a harsh, bitter sound that shattered the illusion. She stood among the frozen figures beneath the great dome again. “What I deserve,” she said as the Tree swayed in a vain, desperate attempt to touch her, “is to die—because of the harm I did when I listened to you before. Never again.”
She stepped forward. She’d reached the line of soldiers and squeezed between them, sometimes ducking under an outstretched blade or a thrusting shield. The men were in tight ranks, but Ilna was a slender woman.
Garric stood with his sword raised and his right foot lifting from the ice to lunge toward the creature above him. Ilna touched her friend’s shoulder in a protective gesture. She smiled at Her, thinking with a rare surge of pride, Despite the evil which I did and can never repay, I didn’t become that; and I might have.
“You have no power over me either!” She said. “However great your art, you can’t touch me!”
“Is that what you think?” said Ilna. She chuckled and slipped her little knife from its bone sheath. The keen steel edge winked like a demon’s tongue. “What I think is that I’ll reach a vein with this eventually, even if I have to dig for a while.”
She mounted the lowest step, grinning like a cat.
The creature on the throne screamed in warbling terror. I didn’t become a coward, either, Ilna thought, and climbed the next step.
The throne trembled. She was straining to stand, channeling forces to lift a body too massive for human muscles to move.
“You can’t run from me!” Ilna said. “You can’t run from yourself, Ilna os-Kenset!”
The Tree shuddered as its bed shifted, rocking like the surf in a storm. Ilna struggled onto the third step despite the rippling violence.
The vast white form screamed again; then She toppled sideways, unable to balance the mass on Her tiny feet. She struck the floor with the weight not only of Her body but also the load of trembling evil which grew from it.
There was a soggy crash, then a roar. The ice, already weakened when the dead climbed out of it, broke open.
Water just warmer than the ice fountained from the hole, then dropped back. A second geyser, this time tinged with blood, followed an instant later. The things swimming beneath the chamber were feeding.
Wizardlight began to fade from the walls the way sparks do after they’ve been flung onto a stone hearth. Ilna swayed; then the throne pitched with greater violence and she fell backward.
Chapter 24
The net that’d held them the way winter ice coats a gargoyle dissolved. Garric, free to move again, saw Ilna fall backward. He sheathed his sword with a skill that’d become unconscious when he awakened the spirit of King Carus in his mind and caught Ilna with both hands. She was a solid weight to arms fatigued by the brutal fighting, but Garric figured he could carry her as far as he needed to go.
The glow in the cavern walls suddenly dimmed. Garric could see men in silhouette, but the floor strewn with corpses and debris was in darkness.
Garric turned his head. The door we entered by is—
As the thought leaped through his mind, the trail of light Tenoctris had sent to guide them brightened to a fierce blue glare. Now it lit the route instead of just indicating it.
“Cashel, hold your sister!” Garric said, swinging Ilna toward his friend.
The steps up the throne were twice the normal height; he jumped rather than stepping. Behind he heard Ilna say, “I’m perfectly all right! I just slipped!”
That was doubtless true—Garric doubted Ilna even understood why anybody would want to lie—but he hadn’t had time to check. Tenoctris’ blazing guide ended above the seat, quivering like a plucked lute string. Garric turned and set one leg to either side of the light. Through a megaphone of his hands he bellowed, “Go back! Get out of here fast!”
A cornicene somewhere in the chamber blew Retreat on his coiled horn. Garric was happier to hear that sound than he’d have been if a priest assured him that the Lady would fold his soul to her bosom when he died. He didn’t trust priests—
And he sure didn’t trust this warren of chambers and tunnels. He could hear the ice groaning, louder with each passing moment. More than the strength of the material had kept Her palace from collapsing; and though Garric was very glad that Her power had drained away when she died, he’d prefer not to be buried in the heart of a glacier.
The cornicene repeated his call. Many of the soldiers were already turning. There was nothing about this frozen darkness that made men want to remain if they were offered an excuse to leave. For a moment Garric thought he heard an echo; then he realized that a signaler back down the tunnel was relaying the call on a trumpet. All the humans in the chamber, Her throne room, were following the guide back to the their own world.
Thought of his men made Garric look around the hall in sudden concern. The things that were not men, Her minions—where were they? Retreating in near darkness could be more dangerous than—
“They’re running, lad,” said Carus, whose experience had let him see more through Garric’s eyes than Garric himself had. “As soon as She went into the drink, they took off for the exits. Running or crawling, if they were the sorts that crawl. I’d say a lot of those creatures had a good notion of what was going to come to them next if something hadn’t happened to Her instead.”
Garric glanced down beside him reflexively. The water was generally as black as the ice that had covered it, but it roiled. Occasionally fangs glinted above the surface as a late-comer or perhaps just an optimist snapped at the diluting blood.
“It wasn’t your friend,” Carus said softly.
Someone was jogging toward the center of the hall, against the flow of soldiers heading for the exit. Garric touched his hilt, uncertain in the halflight; then he saw a shimmer as the figure sheathed his curved sword: Chalcus.
Garric relaxed. Ilna stepped forward and embraced the sailor.
No, agreed Garric. It wasn’t my Ilna. It couldn’t have been her.
***
It could have been me, Ilna thought. She trembled with fear of what hadn’t quite happened. It was me, She was me!
“Dear heart?” said Chalcus. “I’ve been cut more times than ever so great a scholar could count, but the truth is I’ve never learned to like it. If you must prick me, prick away; but otherwise...?”
“Oh!” said Ilna. She stepped back and slipped her blade into its case, then returned the little tool to her sleeve. She didn’t ordinarily think of a knife as a weapon; her instinct was for the noose, but that was shriveling in a pool of sulfur on a world she hoped never to revisit. She’d completely forgotten that she held the blade in her hand when she threw her arms around Chalcus’ neck.
Garric climbed down from the ice throne, stepping as awkwardly as an ox descending a steep bank instead of the catlike grace with which he’d mounted. Ilna smiled in her mind. Many things were easier to do when you didn’t have time to think about them.
The rod of light shone from above, throwing pools of shadow over
men’s feet and turning their faces into grotesque masks. Garric looked at his friends and said, “We need to get moving too. As a matter of fact, the rest of you go on ahead and I’ll—”
“We’ll stay with you, Garric,” Cashel said. He didn’t raise his voice more than required by the sound of the ice in its dying agony, but the fact he interrupted was itself enough to surprise those who knew him.
“Yes,” said Ilna. “We’ve been apart long enough.”
“Now that we’ve decided we’re going to stick together...,” said a grizzled soldier at Garric’s side. He had the heavy breastplate and sword of a regular infantryman, but for some reason he was carrying a pikeman’s shield. “Can we maybe do it a little closer to the way out of this place?”
He nodded to where the guide disappeared into a tunnel.
Nearby stood another soldier who’d have been his near double even if they hadn’t both been drenched in blood. He’d lifted his helmet to scratch the bald spot in the middle of his scalp. “Why wouldn’t we stick together, Prester?” he asked as he settled the helmet back in place. “There’s no loot here worth having; and anyway, I never minded sharing with somebody who’d watch my back.”
“Right, let’s get on,” Garric said, nodding to the soldiers shuffling toward the exit. They were already some distance away, though they weren’t moving fast. “And Pont? You and Prester aren’t going to lack for drinking money for the rest of your lives, if that’s what you’re thinking about.”
“To tell the truth, your princeship...,” said the man who must be Prester. “There were times today I thought I had enough coin for the rest of my life in my purse already... and all of that was a lead groat!”
Chalcus was the first to laugh, but they all joined in as they started forward. The laughter and companionship were better than sunlight in this place; though Ilna’d be glad to reach sunlight also.
***
Where the centipede’s body narrowed the tunnel to one person at a time, Sharina followed Cashel and Gondor was immediately behind her. Garric and his entourage—Attaper and the two veterans—brought up the rear.