Godess of the Ice Realm loti-5

by David Drake

  "It's my job to be here!" Lusius said. He didn't reach for his sword; the cabin was too cramped for sword work, and he'd seen what Chalcus' dagger could do in less time than a victim could blink. "You don't claim that I did this, do you?"

  The commander thrust his boot under the bunk and hooked out the severed hand. "We saw the light, same as you did, and came to it as quick as possible. We were too late to save the crew, just as I warned the fools would happen if they didn't take my guards on board."

  He didn't mention that his troops were looting the merchantman's holds. In all fairness, Ilna didn't suppose she'd met ten men in her lifetime who'd have passed up a valuable cargo whose owners had been reduced to a scatter of body parts.

  "And your wizard Gaur?" Chalcus asked. "Where would he be, Commander?"

  Lusius shrugged. "Back in his bed, I suppose," he said. "Gaur doesn't leave the castle often, and he never goes aboard a ship."

  Ilna stood silent with her hands cupped over the fabric of cords that she would display if she needed to. Getting out of the cabin would be possible if not easy; getting down the side of theQueen of Heaven with a troop of hostile soldiers above them… that would be another matter, a problem to solve when they must.

  The Commander's look hardened and he drew himself up. "Now, Captain," he said, "there's the matter of howyou came to be here. For the time being I'm willing to accept your story, though many folk would find it unlikely that any man went unbidden into wizardry unless his duty required him. What I say is this: get back to your ship, and get back to Terness-now. By my order as Commander of the Strait."

  Ilna sneezed again from the brimstone in the air. Bits of a pattern connected in her mind. While Lusius spoke in an increasingly louder voice and Chalcus faced him with his hands on his hips, Ilna bent forward and grasped the sword on the floor of the cabin.

  "Watch her!" Rincip shouted, grasping Ilna's shoulder; she wriggled free. Chalcus caught Rincip's neck in one hand and jerked him away.

  Ilna used the sturdy sword as a pry bar, her left hand reversed on the grip and her right on the pommel. She rammed the point into the seam of the strongbox' latch, then levered upward. After a moment's resistance the lid flew open.

  The supercargo, Pointin, crouched like a hare in her forme within. He leaped up screaming, blind with fear. The iron straps protecting the chest were held on with large rivets. Pointin had used a silk sleeve from his sleeping tunic to tie together mushroomed rivet-heads on the side and lid of the chest.

  "By the Sister!" Lusius swore.

  "Don't!" cried Chalcus, holding Rincip back with his right hand, his left poised.

  The Sea Guard who'd come in with Lusius grasped his sword hilt. Ilna brought the Blaise sword around in a short arc. The back of the blade wasn't sharpened, but it broke the soldier's wristbones with a crunch. He screamed and dropped the lantern in his other hand. Oil spilled but didn't catch fire for the moment.

  "You're human!" Pointin cried. He'd been shoving away the air; now he lowered his hands. "Wha… where are the demons? Have they gone?"

  Chalcus punched Rincip in the stomach, then kneed him in the jaw as he doubled up. Lusius' deputy thumped to the floor and lay still, groaning and bleeding from the mouth.

  "Now, Commander Lusius…," Chalcus said. His eyes hadn't moved from the Commander's during the moments it'd taken him to put Rincip out of the way. "We'll leave theQueen of Heaven to you and your fellows to deal with, as you demand. But for safety's sake, you'll come as far as the deck of theBird of the Tide with us. We'll climb down the netting with you on the side of my dagger hand."

  Chalcus spoke pleasantly enough, but Ilna noticed he hadn't worded the statement as a question even for the sake of conventional politeness. Lusius glared, gathering his thoughts for a response.

  Before he could make one, Ilna said, "No, the Commander will climb down after you so that if anything's thrown over the side it'll land onhis head."

  Chalcus opened his mouth for a protest. "And as he climbs," Ilna said, loosing the silken rope that served her for a sash, "he'll have my noose around his neck-"

  She tossed the running loop. Lusius bellowed in surprise and jerked his head back. The noose slipped over his head anyway and settled to his shoulders. Ilna tugged the soft rope tight-but not stranglingly tight-before Lusius got his hand up to throw it off. His lips twisted in a snarl, but he was smart enough to take his hand away before Ilna choked him to the floor, gasping and helpless.

  "-to remind him that his duty is to escort us clear."

  "Right," said Chalcus with the quick decisiveness that was the difference between life and death when time was short and the risks uncertain. "Pointin, going out of the cabin you'll follow Mistress Ilna and the Commander, and I'll bring up the rear."

  Ilna put a finger's weight of pressure on the noose. Lusius grimaced and started for the cabin door.

  "But where are you taking me?" the supercargo demanded in a tone that started high and ended as a falsetto.

  "Some place other than the belly of a seawolf with what's left of your friends," Ilna snapped. "If that's not reason enough, I've got enough cord here to put a loop in the other end too and drag you along with the Commander!"

  Pointin's face registered shock; he didn't respond for a moment. Chalcus took him by the shoulder and headed him toward the door. Pointin raised his feet high enough to clear the side of the box in which he stood, but he moved in a slack-mouthed daze.

  Ilna curled her lips under in irritation with herself. She had years of experience in telling people unpalatable truths, and never once had it seemed a good idea afterwards. If she kept doing it nonetheless, she must be as great a fool as most of the rest of humanity.

  The air outside was cool enough to be a surprise. She'd expected to see the Sea Guards waiting with their weapons drawn, but the interplay inside the cabin had gone unnoticed by most of those aboard. They had their own concerns, hauling heavy fabrics from the ship's several holds and disposing of the remnants of the vessel's crew.

  Splashes and the swirling attacks of Our Brother sounded unabated. Whatever had killed the crew was a messy eater. The scattered fragments reminded Ilna of what was left of a chicken devoured by rats-feathers and feet and perhaps the head after the back of the skull was gnawed open to lick out the brain.

  "Hutena, you lead," Chalcus said. "Quickly, man."

  The bosun was over the railing like a great, squat spider. He continued to hold the hatchet instead of slipping the helve through his belt to free the other hand.

  "Say, Commander, how many of these rolls are we supposed to bring up?" asked a soldier who'd seen Lusius and hadn't noticed anything wrong. "We'll never empty her in one night-nor three if I'm a judge."

  Ilna smiled tightly and pulled with the care she'd have taken to place a thread in her weaving. "Later!" Lusius growled.

  "But look-"

  "Later, Dover!" Lusius shouted. "Do you want to feed Our Brother, is that it?"

  The Sea Guard snarled a curse and backed away. Chalcus prodded Pointin to the railing; when the supercargo simply stood there, Chalcus lifted him one-handed and dangled him over the side. Only then did Pointin grasp the ropes and begin descending, clumsily but with increasing speed.

  Ilna climbed the rail, paying out a little more line as she did so. The boarding net was an old friend by now, a brief transport to a dry place without the slurp/clop! of a seawolf gobbling human tidbits. Lusius followed with the speed of long practice.

  When the Commander was well over the side and unable to change his mind, Chalcus dropped like an ape leaping from a tree. He caught the net halfway down, swung himself beneath Ilna, and dropped the rest of the way to the barge to join Hutena and Pointin.

  The crew of the barge had recovered from the shock Ilna'd given them, but they weren't ready for more. One of them cried out when he saw her; all of them backed into the relative darkness of the bow.

  "What did you do to them, mistress?" Hutena murmured wonderingly as he grippe
d the Commander's shoulder.

  Ilna whipped off her noose as easily as she'd caught Lusius in it. "I made their heads spin," she said, doubling and redoubling the rope before she looped it back around her waist. "That's all."

  And if she'd wanted, she could've knotted another pattern that would make those who viewed it leap into the sea to quench the flames they felt blazing from their eyesockets… but there'd been no need, and Ilna was trying to learn a sense of proportion in the punishments she paid out to those who opposed the right as she saw it.

  But it was very hard. They all deserved to die; and Ilna os-Kenset deserved to die also, as she well knew…

  She hitched up the drape of her modestly-long tunic and jumped aboard theBird of the Tide. Some day she'd receive the justice she deserved; but until then she'd live and continue to make amends in the best way she could.

  "Cast off!" Chalcus ordered, but the crew was already shoving them clear of the barge. Lusius stood glaring after them. "You're free to return to your investigations, Commander. And no doubt we'll meet again in good time, after you've returned to Terness, not so?"

  Chalcus laughed as the oarsmen pulled hard for the harbor. Ilna did not. The sound of the seawolf slapping the water again and again as it leaped for morsels could be heard for miles against the quiet sea.

  ***

  'There's some wine in the cup here," said a voice in Cashel's ear. "You'll feel better if you can drink it."

  Cashel opened… well, no, his eyes were already open. They suddenly focused, though. He blinked twice, clearing them, and thought about getting up. He tried to raise his head first, then thought better of moving at all for at least a little while.

  It was late evening. He could tell that because he faced west as he lay on the mound at the base of the marble tank, and so he saw the sun setting. If he hadn't been looking that direction, he'd have just had to guess about the time of day.

  Evne waddled around Cashel's head to face him. "Of course if you prefer to lie here feeling sorry for yourself…," she said.

  Cashel started to laugh. It was just what he needed to do, though the first wracking gulps of air almost killed him, His bruised chest bounced again and again on the ground, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  He finally got his laughter enough under control to sit up. It was a good thing he'd landed on the mound rather than digging a trench with his nose across the stony plain. He felt dizzy for a moment and closed his eyes, then realized that was a bad idea and opened them again. When he didn't have the horizon to look at, he got vertigo.

  "You knew I'd get mad if you said I was feeling sorry for myself," Cashel said. "And then I'd see how you'd fooled me, so I'd laugh and that'd bring me around. You're really smart, Evne."

  "Yes, I am," the toad said. "Now the wine."

  Cashel looked down at her affectionately. "I don't like-" he said.

  "I didn't ask if you liked it," the toad said. "I said you'd feel better for drinking it. Though of course-"

  Cashel took the cup waiting beside where his right hand had been holding the quarterstaff. Duzi, he'd really bruised the knuckles; though he didn't suppose that was such a terrible thing, given what might've happened when he came down.

  The cup was crystal and as clear as the air around it. He drank the pale green liquid in three gulps. There weren't any bubbles in it, but it prickled like there were.

  "Oh!" he said wonderingly. "That's wine, Evne? It doesn't taste like any wine I've had before."

  "No," said the toad. "I don't suppose it does."

  Cashel looked around him, which saved him asking where the wine-and the cup-came from. There were any number of folk, both in bright clothing and in servants' garb, standing among the ruins below the tank and staring up at Cashel. Near each handful of people was a curvy, boatlike thing with a long stem and sternpiece-sort of milkweed pods grown to giant size.

  "Where didthey come from?" he asked amazed. And as rough as the slopes had been even for him, how did this lot of soft-living folk from the manors manage to get here near as quick as he had and carry those boats with them besides?

  "Some are from Manor Bossian, I believe," said the toad, "but mostly they fled from Manor Ansache when the Visitor destroyed it. And there may be a few-"

  She moved her head in a series of short twitches rather than a smooth arc as she eyed the crowd below them.

  "-from other places as well, running before they're forced to run."

  The toad paused, rubbing the back of her own neck with her long right leg. She added, "They flew here in their airboats when they learned you'd killed the dragon. They're afraid, you see, and they're looking for somebody strong to protect them."

  "I'm not…," Cashel said. He didn't know how to continue the sentence, so he let his voice trail off. "Should I do something, Evne? I mean, about them?"

  The toad sniffed. "You're not required to do anything," she said. "And at the moment, master, I don't see that you'reable to do very much. Including stand up."

  Cashel cleared his throat. "Yeah, that had better wait for a time," he agreed. Because he didn't want to think aboutall those people watching him and expecting him to do-something, whatever-he turned his head to the side and saw the dragon for the first time since he'd awakened after the fight.

  "Duzi!" he said. The little herdsman's God of Barca's Hamlet didn't seem a grand enough deity to name as he looked on the thing he'd been fighting, so he added, "May the Shepherd help me, Evne. I couldn't have beatenthat!"

  "Really?" said the toad. "Then my eyes must have gone bad while I was imprisoned in that block of coal. It's not surprising after seven thousand years, I suppose, but I very distinctly saw you hammering the creature to death."

  The dragon was a long sagging bronze tube. Some of the scales had dropped off, leaving gaps through which Cashel saw what seemed to be a web of wires. The body stretched from the top of the mound to well out into the plain, plus however how much of its length was still in the tank. Black smudges on pedestals of rocky soil showed where tufts of silkgrass had burned when the creature rolled over them during its flaming death throes, and it'd seared a broad wedge of the slope's juicier vegetation as well.

  "Evne," Cashel said, "I couldn't have stopped it any better than I could've stopped a herd of oxen if they'd stampeded at me. It's just too big, itweighs too much. I'm strong, sure, but nobody's that strong."

  "That might have been so if it'd been a real snake," the toad said, "but it wasn't-it was wizard's work. So you fought it as one wizard to another, and you were the stronger. It certainly gives the lie to those who claim intelligence and erudition are prerequisites for wizardry, doesn't it?"

  Cashel sighed. He didn't know what either erudition or prerequisites were, but intelligence was a word he understood. He could figure out what the toad meant easily enough.

  He ran the quarterstaff through his hands, letting his fingertips check the hickory for damage that his eyes couldn't see. The iron buttcaps were now rainbow colored from the energy they'd channeled during the battle, but the staff itself was unmarked. It remained the same straight, smooth friend as it'd been since he turned it out of a branch.

  The closest spectators to Cashel were well-dressed folk in a group at the bottom of the mound. One of them was Syl, the woman who'd sat at Bossian's table during dinner, though the men didn't include the Farran who'd been with her. Cashel didn't recognize the others, which wasn't surprising; but seeing Syl made him wonder uneasily about Kotia.

  "I told the refugees that I'd summon them in the event you deigned to grant them an audience," Evne said in a cool tone. "Otherwise they should keep their distance or it'd be the worse for them."

  Cashel grinned. "They took orders from a little toad?" he said.

  Evne rotated her head to put him in the middle of her two bulging eyes. "They may have thought," she said, "that so great a wizard as yourself would have a familiar who could herself blast them to ashes. And they may have been right."

  Two o
f the men were arguing with Syl; one put a hand on her shoulder, turning her so that she faced the mound "Lord Cashel?" she called.

  "Shall I order them away?" the toad said with no emotion at all.

  "No, no," Cashel muttered. "That's all right."

  Loudly to Syl he said, "Mistress, you can come up if you like. But I don't think I can help you."

  He hadn't meant for the whole group of them-six, a handful and the thumb of his other hand-to come, but they all did. That was maybe a good thing: two of the men carried a crystal hamper between them. More of that wine and some food-Cashel's stomach rumbled in excitement-would go down a treat.

  Manor Ansache destroyed, the toad had said, and Syl here from Manor Bossian. Well, it wasn't his world and these folksure weren't his friends.

  Their clothing was just as fine as it'd been at the banquet the night before, but it'd now seen harder use than it was meant for. The tall, blond man who'd been most insistent about Syl calling to Cashel had lost the sleeve of his tunic; there was even a scratch on his bare shoulder. The rest were tousled looking, and the long aquamarine gown of the other woman-older than Syl by quite a lot-was seared across the train.

  "My master will accept your gift of further viands," Evne said. Listening to her voice you'd think she was looking down her nose as spoke, but she didn't have a nose. "And scraps of chopped meat for his loyal servant wouldn't come amiss… though the pair of damselflies that fell my lot as he rested will suffice if they must."

  The men with the hamper immediately set it down; it started to slide. Cursing, the blond man blocked it with his foot and jerked the lid open.

  "Lord Cashel…," Syl said. She hadn't been injured, but she looked like she'd been dragged through a drain pipe. Her eyes flicked nervously, and there was nothing in her expression to remind Cashel of the haughty, elfin girl she'd been when he met her. "We didn't realize that Lord Bossian had summoned you to destroy the Visitor. If we seemed less than attentive previously-"

  "If you seemed like a nitwit who was more worried about the shade of her hair ribbon than the fact her world was ending, you mean," said Evne. "As of course you were."