by David Drake
To the north were humps and hillocks and glitter, white except where ice threw back the sky's reflections in a form harsher than the original. The sullen sea was almost as still as the frozen waste beyond, but bits of debris moved in slow circles at its margin.
"What'll we do now, Mistress Sharina?" Layson asked, speaking with the touch of belligerence that meant he was nervous.
"Do?" repeated Beard with a metallic sneer. "Why don't you do exactly what you're doing now, my man? Nothing! Squatting on your haunches, waiting for the Great Wizard to call a halt. This ship makes no more matter of sailing over ice that it does over water-or over the heads of fools like you, I suppose!"
Layson grimaced, but he didn't look too put out by Beard's insult. The men seemed to regard the axe and Sharina herself as their best hope of survival. They might be right… which was either frightening or amusing, depending on the mood Sharina was in when the thought recurred to her.
She glanced at Alfdan in the stern. Neal stood nearby, but the wizard didn't need anyone to support him at the moment. He'd been gaining strength as the Queen Ship coursed northward.
Despite the power of Alfdan's art, he provided only temporary respite, not long-term hope, for the men gathered around him. To the wizard they were only tools to help him achieve his ends; and those ends were as ultimately trivial as those of a child picking up shells on the seashore.
The ship had seemed to sail just above the swells of the sluggish sea. Without appearing to rise the bow slid over the sheer edge of the icepack, though it was a yard or more higher than the water at the point the keel crossed. Men murmured to one another, looking out nervously.
"It's awful," Franca said quietly. "It's empty, it's just a desert."
"It's the same sea," Sharina said. "Freezing didn't make it real land."
"Or make it a desert," said Beard. The axe had been cheerful in his waspish fashion ever since they set out for Her residence. "There's life here too, you know. In the ice and beneath it."
"What?" said Sharina. She lay flat again, looking down as she had previously. For a moment all she saw was white and the evil shimmer of the sky, picked out occasionally by a tree trunk or some other flotsam that the ice had engulfed. Then, slowly, she began to see deeper.
"Franca!" Sharina said. "Scoggin? What do you see…?"
She pointed with her left hand. She was holding Beard tight against her chest with the other, as if he were a kitten instead of an axe.
The two men leaned close, peering at the ice. Sharina looked from one to the other; both wore puzzled expressions.
"Mistress?" said Franca. "I see ice. Is that what you mean?"
Sharina swallowed. "No," she said, gazing into the depths again. "But it doesn't matter. I thought I saw animals below the ice, that's all."
Sheknew she saw animals below the ice. The ship passed over an ammonite, one of the Great Old Ones who'd been Gods before there were men to worship them. The coiled shell of this one was the size of Count Lascarg's palace. Rather than eight arms like an octopus or the ten of a squid, the ammonite waved more tentacles than Sharina could count in her brief glimpse. They interwove like a tangle of brambles, forming a pattern that was obviously evil even though it had no meaning for her.
"Beard?" Sharina whispered. She didn't want the others to hear her; she was afraid she was going mad. "What is it? Why am I seeing things when the others don't?"
"Did the others dive for the Key of Reyazel?" the axe asked ironically. "Why no, I don't suppose they did! And you weren't diving through water, mistress. You know that, don't you?"
"I guess," Sharina said, clutching the axe more tightly. "I guess I do."
"It changed you," Beard said. He giggled. "You should be thankful: you see the truth where others see only the surface."
Sharina stared at a school of fish, their bodies bright with bands of wizardlight. No one of them was as long as her arm, but there were hundreds in the school. They moved together like the scales of a snake, and their teeth were like daggers.
The Queen Ship was a world of its own, neither hot nor cold; the air was motionless though always breathable. Outside in the world through which the ship voyaged, however, winds swirled snow so hard it carved the ice into shapes from nightmare.
Alfdan muttered words of command. The vessel changed course slightly, taking it up a valley where the ice had lifted in long ridges to either side. The wizard seemed to be keeping his part of the bargain. It would've been nice if he'd been a person Sharina could like or even respect, but-she grinned-she'd learned long before leaving Barca's Hamlet that you couldn't expect that in life.
Her smile faded. She'd been looking at the gleaming surface but found her vision entering the crumpled ridges. Great worms gnawed tunnels through the ice; their jaws were like the toothed bronze rams of warships. Black armor covered their segmented bodies, but Sharina saw their long coils of intestine pulsing as the worms digested something…
"Algae grows in the ice," Beard said in his mockingly superior tone. "Algae of a sort, that is. And the worms eat it."
"There's enough light here for algae?" Sharina said, frowning.
"Light?" said the axe. "Of course there's light! Look at the sky."
"Oh…," said Sharina, glancing up reflexively. The washes of evil color were so constant and vivid now that they hid the stars completely. For an instant she began to see shapes in the wizardlight, but she looked away quickly. What she saw in the water and ice was bad enough.
"I wouldn't have thought that sort of light would make things grow," she whispered.
"Makethose things grow?" Beard said with a laugh. "Oh, yes, mistress. There are many things that flourish in this light and this place. They just aren't things that have any use for men."
Sharina sat up. Franca and Scoggin were on either side, watching her with concern. They hadn't broken in on her dialogue with Beard, but they must have heard at least part of it.
"I'm seeing things beneath the surface," she said to them in a deliberate voice. "I hope this won't go on forever."
Beard laughed again. "Never fear, mistress," he said. "Not even I will go on forever."
Scoggin forced a smile. Neither man spoke.
The wizard muttered another command in a harsh, clipped tone like that of a squirrel complaining. The ship slanted to the right and mounted the ice ridge without slowing. In the distance ahead gleamed orange-red light, a harsh color but a natural one in contrast to the sheets of crimson covering the sky.
Layson pointed. "A volcano!" he said. "We saw volcanoes on the coast of Laut when Alfdan was getting that medallion."
"We're nearing the Ice Capes," said a man. His left cheek and forearm were tattooed in a complex spiral pattern, but Sharina didn't know his name. "Where they used to be, I guess. That must be Mount Yanek."
The Queen Ship raced over the ice field, now banded with stretches of black ice where leads had opened and refrozen. Once Sharina thought she saw eyes staring at her from the solid mass; the head of a monstrous thing, motionless but not dead. Perhaps it had been an illusion, shadows distorted by the rippling ice.
Beard laughed. She didn't ask him why.
The volcano grew from a lump and glow on the horizon into a mountain streaked with orange flame. Tentacles of lava touched the ice encircling its base. Great bubbles of steam rose and whirled southward on the wind.
The ship began to slow; the tone of its progress changed to a deep thrumming instead of a scream like that of chorus frogs in springtime. Sharina and the men glanced back at Alfdan. The wizard began to sway, so Neal quickly gripped him by the shoulders.
The Queen Ship touched the ice with a skirling vibration. Azure wizardlight crackled about them in an egg-shaped pattern, the broader end toward the bow. Mt Yanek covered the northern horizon, though its slopes were still a half mile distant. The volcano's rough stone absorbed the rippling glare of the sky instead of reflecting it the way the ice did; Yanek stood as a black wedge detailed only by its own savage o
range veins.
"Mistress?" Layson said, his voice rising between the syllables. "Why is it we're stopping here? There's no shelter!"
Nor was there. The ship coasted to a halt and overbalanced onto its right side. When the vessel lost way, the wind ripped across them. The flecks of snow that'd merely given the gusts visual presence to those inside the cocoon of Alfdan's wizardry now cut like a sandstorm.
Sharina tugged the bearskin close, but the wind lashed her legs and the rabbitskin sandals were little protection against the ice underfoot. She and the others dropped to the ground and hunched in the lee of the Queen Ship. It was slight protection but there was nothing else in this landscape.
Neal lifted Alfdan from the ship. The wizard was mumbled. Neal, bending his ear close to Alfdan's lips, frowned in incomprehension. Alfdan waved or pointed to the east.
"What he's trying to say…," Beard said in a loud, piercing tone. "Is that if you dig into the dip there in front of you, you'll find that it's a hole filled with windblown snow that you can go through in time not to freeze. It leads to a tunnel in the ice that'll shelter you for the night."
The axe laughed. "Assuming that the beetle who dug the hole doesn't come back, of course," he added. "The grubs eat the algae, as you saw-but the adults need more nourishing fare to breed."
Sharina stamped across the frozen terrain. Even with her feet numbing, she could feel the change from solid ice to the crunch of grains barely cemented by contact and the pressure of the driving wind.
"Here, start digging!" she shouted. "Neal, get them digging!"
Scoggin and Franca had come with her. They bent and chopped at the ground with their spearpoints, sending ice up to sail away on the wind in flurries. The rest of the band joined immediately, except for Neal who-holding the wizard in one arm like a half-empty grain sack-took charge.
"Moster, Dalha, and Toldus!" he said, raising his voice against the wind. "Lay your capes on the ground. The rest of you, dump the spoil on the cloth. Dalha you idiot, lay your cape on the downwind side!"
Sharina nodded approval. The band didn't have proper digging equipment, so without an expedient like the one Neal'd chosen they'd just shove the ice around in the hole rather than removing it. The men he'd told to take off their warm coverings had done so without argument. They trusted Neal to act in all their benefit.
And they trusted Sharina as well, because they were men with a desperate need to trustsome body. They hadn't lost their faith in God, exactly, but it was all too clear that She was against them.
"Wah!" Burness shouted as he and another man slid out of sight. The rest of those in the pit either scrambled out or thrust whatever they were digging with into the side to hold them steady.
"Hey, we're in a tunnel!" Burness cried, his voice a deep echo of its normal self. Those outside the pit bent over the edge to listen, while the men clinging to the sloping walls cocked their heads. "Hey, there's ahouse down here!"
"If you all plan to stand here and end your miserable lives by freezing," said Beard loudly enough for the whole band to hear him distinctly, "then I won't try to change your minds. But otherwise, don't you think it'd be a good idea to get under cover now that you're able to?"
Sharina pointed to the hole with the butt of the axe. "Franca!" she said. "Go."
The youth's jaw dropped slackly, but he jumped into the hole without hesitating. She expected him to go feet-first, but instead he dived with his arms out before him as if he were entering the water.
As soon as Franca had disappeared, the rest of the band slid or scrambled to follow him. Shouts and complaints reverberated. Sharina, Scoggin, and Neal holding the comatose wizard were the only ones who remained in the wind.
"Go!" Neal said to her. "Scoggin, you follow and I'll hand Alfdan to you through the hole, all right?"
Sharina set her bearskin on the ice and slid to the bottom of the slope. She spread her feet to either side of the opening to catch herself, then dropped through holding Beard overhead. She didn't want to open somebody up when she hit the ground.
Actually, she landed on Layson, on all fours and trying to get up. He snarled a curse, then realized who it was. "Here, mistress!" he said and whisked her out of the way before Scoggin dropped where she'd been.
The roof of the tunnel was about six feet high. The floor was stone, an ancient lava flow; it was warm beneath the skin of water trickling over it. The frozen walls shone azure and crimson in concert with the sky; instead of filtering the wizardlight, the ice seemed to amplify the glow into evil brilliance.
At the inland end of the tunnel was a house, just as Burness had said. It was a low, dome built from the rib bones of whales; feathers of baleen chinked the interstices. It must have dated from well before She came: a shelter for whalers trying out their catch on shore and perhaps wintering over if they were caught when the seas skirting the Ice Capes froze early.
"The ground's warm!" one of the men said. He must only now have noticed it. "Why's that?"
"The volcano, Bayber," Layson snapped as he helped Scoggin bring Alfdan up the tunnel. They transported the wizard with with his arms over their shoulders. His toes dragged. "There's a vein of lava under the rock here, I shouldn't wonder. What we saw up on of the mountain had to come from somewhere, right?"
"You mean we're sittingon lava?" a short, shaggy man demanded. "Hey! What if it breaks out?"
"If you had nothing worse to worry about than the volcano," said Beard in a clear, cutting tone, "then you'd live longer than I expect to be the case."
The axe chortled metallically and added, "But oh, it will be a splendid time! Thelives Beard and his mistress will drink, oh! Splendid!"
"Can't you shut him up?" Burness muttered, but it wasn't a serious complaint. Sharina recalled that he'd been with Alfdan the longest, which meant he'd seen more of the wizard's companions die than anybody else in the band. The others might pretend to themselves that Alfdan would save them, but Burness couldn't do that.
"Hush, Master Beard!" Sharina said in the crisp voice she'd have used to an affectionate drunk when she was serving drinks in her father's taproom. "You're discourteous."
The axe sniffed, but he subsided.
Several of the men had already entered the building. It was fairly large, twenty feet by ten on the long and short axes. "Hey, there were people here," Offlan said. "The ashes in the hearth still have the shape of the wood!"
"That's not wood," said Beard. "There's no wood here. They were burning bones, and of those there's no lack "
Looking at the edges of the tunnel, Sharina saw that the bottom of the ice had been chiseled out for some distance along the former shoreline. The strand would've been covered by the debris the whalers had left. The bones' fatty marrow would make them excellent fuel once they'd been chopped from the ice.
"Where'd they go, then?" Neal said. He'd followed Scoggin and Layson, nervous about leaving Alfdan in their care but unwilling to insist that they let him carry the wizard instead. "There's nowhere but the other way in the tunnel, is there?"
"There's down a beetle's belly," said Beard. "Which is where they went, all three of them, and only last night. They'd lived here ten years, ever since She came and the ice locked in their boat; and now they're gone. Mostly."
"Oh," said Sharina, glancing at something glistening in the water, half hidden where the ice had been dug out. It was a right foot, shoeless and filthy looking, severed raggedly at the ankle. "I see what you mean."
"The tunnel goes down to the water," called one of the pair of men who'd gone in the other direction without anybody telling them to. "There's a trotline out to sea on driftwood floats."
"All right," said Neal, forceful again once the wizard had been laid on the stone floor wrapped in a sheepskin robe. "We'll stay here tonight. There's room in the hut for all of us, I think. In the morning… when Alfdan gets his strength back, anyway, we'll go on. I guess were pretty close by now to where we're going."
Sharina looked at the building. Its
sturdy door had been fashioned of ships' timbers, but it'd been smashed off its jamb; the splintered wood was still fresh. The sealskin latchcord still dangled from a hole near the top of the panel.
"The beetle dug down through the ice," Beard said, "but its body was too large for the tunnel. It extended its jaw-it's hinged, you see-and plucked them out of the house one and one and the third. And then it went away… for a time."
"I think…," said Sharina, looking around her. The stone was wet everywhere, but that was true within the hut as well as outside it; and the water wasn't cold, not really. "I think I'll sleep out here. The rest of you can have the hut, if you like."
"Don't you like the decor, mistress?" Beard asked mockingly. "I think it's quite attractive, in its way."
"I don't," said Sharina, squatting to pat the rock where a natural hollow looked like it might cradle her hip.
Sharina didn't fear death, but she'd never regarded it as her friend, either. The dismembered foot proved that the house of bones was no protection… and the structure was too clear a symbol of this world that She ruled for Sharina to want to sleep in its false shelter.
Chapter 20
Cashel sat on a dried tussock, polishing his quarterstaff and watching airboats from many different manors arrive. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen so many people in one place before, even when Garric was addressing the biggest crowds that could hear him in Valles. They just kept coming in, boat after boat from all directions.
Kotia'd taken charge of things. Every time a new group arrived, the lord of the manor came over and talked to her before doing anything else. Nobody at all came near where Cashel sat, but every time he looked around he saw eyes staring at him.
"That's Lady Raki," said Evne, perched as usual on Cashel's shoulder. She was rubbing herself down with one hind leg, then the other; grooming, Cashel guessed, though it wasn't a subject he wanted to get into with a toad. "She's mistress of Manor Rakon on the north side of the basin. It's suspended on threads over the Frozen Sea."
Initially Cashel'd been worried about whether Kotia was going to have trouble being surrounded by her world's most powerful people. He relaxed almost at once. Kotia didn't need his support to take care of those folk or anybody else.