Frostfire

by Jamie Smith

  Kyran was gone.

  I AM SO SORRY.

  The frostsliver’s faint, wounded voice did not help. This time, it really was her fault. It did not temper her grief to know that his sacrifice was for a reason. She stood, staggering. Pain racked her body, though it was nothing in the face of everything else.

  What she would have done then, Sabira didn’t know. Her emotions were too confused, too raw for thought, and every bit of her, including the frostsliver, hurt. She wasn’t given the chance to decide.

  “You!”

  It was Yupin, climbing to his feet on wobbly legs. His arm was cut, his clothes torn and covered with rock dust. His eyes were still sharp, still cutting. He advanced on Sabira, drawing a long, vicious knife that reflected the frostfire and looked like it had seen blood before.

  “You were on the mountainside when we burned the forest,” he continued, his inner rage spilling over. “Did you intend this, even then? Were you laughing at us even as we thought we were hurting you?”

  What could Sabira say to that? She laughed in his face—a laugh without mirth, a laugh of pure defiance. Fear had no hold on her now.

  “You’re all demons!” the colonel yelled. “Beasts in human form. We’ll cleanse you from this mountain and make things right again, witch. My people will be saved, and justice will come to Aderast, I swear it!”

  Sabira’s rage ignited. “Adranna was your home!” she screamed at him. “Why couldn’t you just leave us be?”

  “Never. Adranna took everything from my family,” he growled. “The city expelled us, condemned my mother to an early grave. My father to a life of misery. I’m here to take what is my right.” His eyes were full of frostfire and blazing, his breath short and furious. The colonel was well beyond reason—he probably had been for a long time. “Enough of this!” he said. “Get out of my way.”

  He rushed her, clearly assuming she was harmless, with the frostsliver so injured. He was wrong.

  Her eyes wide, Sabira stabbed at him with the frostsliver. Yupin swatted aside the hand holding the glowing, fragile icicle. He was so much stronger. But as he closed in, his face already alight with triumph, Sabira lashed out with her other hand.

  His attack turned clumsy, and he knocked her to the ground with a roar of rage. She sprawled out, rolling over and fearing that she had not done enough. She glanced up at Yupin.

  The snow-spine stinger was stuck in his chest, what was left of its venom squeezed into the poisonous man. Yupin was trying to move, but he could not. The rest of his body was a cage for his mind, frozen and useless.

  FOR ADERAST, the frostsliver and Sabira thought in unison.

  His eyes held a desperate light, skittering from side to side in fear and confusion. For a second he stayed upright, but then the stiffness in his legs buckled, and the colonel toppled backward, off the ledge and into the abyss.

  Sabira wheezed a few relieved breaths, barely able to believe what she had done.

  He’s gone, she thought. I’m safe.

  Except that wasn’t true. She wasn’t safe, not with Kyran really gone, forever this time. Sabira wanted to mourn her brother properly, after all of this, but as she looked down at the damaged ice chunk of the frostsliver, she realized she could not.

  The cracks where the heat had wounded the frostsliver were not sealing. The emotion leaking through to her from the frostsliver answered Sabira’s wordless question. The frostsliver had warned her that it was not invulnerable, and she had not listened.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve killed you. Us,” she said, the hammer of her heart irregular and painful.

  The frostsliver replied with difficulty, WE DID THIS TOGETHER. YOU GAVE ME MORE TIME. MORE TIME THAN I DESERVED. ALL OF IT PRECIOUS.

  “You’ve saved me enough times,” said Sabira, wanting very much to cry.

  YOU COULD SAY THAT I WAS BEING SELFISH. THERE IS NO ME WITHOUT YOU.

  “I wish … I wish we could have done more together,” Sabira whispered under the blue light of the glacier as the frostsliver died, and she with it.

  THIS … THIS IS NOT SUCH A BAD END. TSERAH … SHE WOULD HAVE APPROVED, I THINK. MAYBE EVEN SHE COULD BE GLAD THAT I ABANDONED HER.

  That triggered something in Sabira’s mind. Suddenly, she knew what she had to do, though she did her best not to let that thought leak to the frostsliver. She didn’t want it to try to stop what was necessary.

  “Without you, I won’t make it,” she said, “but I transferred your bond to keep you going once before. I can do it again.”

  She spoke to convince herself of what had to be done. She would never reach Adranna. When the frostsliver died, Sabira would go with it. There was only one thing left to do. She had already done everything else her body and mind would allow. Adranna had a chance that they hadn’t before, and Sabira had been given the opportunity to say goodbye to her brother. It was more than she could have hoped for.

  SABIRA, NO. YOU DON’T NEED …

  “Thank you for everything,” Sabira said, cutting her companion off and forcing herself up to stand unsteadily, facing the fractal pillar of the glacier. The place where the frostsliver had been born. The place where Sabira would die. She let her last emotions fill the bond, knowing that it was too late for the frostsliver to intervene.

  Fighting back the fear, she reached out and drove the fractured, burnt splinter that was the frostsliver into the ice column, knowing the sacrifice that she was making. This was going to be her end, down in the dark where no one would ever learn her fate.

  Then the storm was upon her again, the torrent of the glacier in her mind. The thing that made it, the vast thing deep beneath the world, pulled on the one bonded to her, tearing it away with unbelievable force. She wanted to hold on to it, but knew that she could not. Letting the frostsliver go was the only way to save it. Maybe Tserah and her partner would be reunited in the mountain. If so, Sabira would be joining them soon.

  With a last wordless goodbye, the frostsliver slipped away from her, a droplet running back into a lake. Back to the thing that slumbered below. Back to the infinite shoal of other frostslivers. Many of many once more.

  Sabira felt her sense of self fade. The glacier was ripping her apart, or the loss of the frostsliver was destroying her. Nothing made sense except that she was going to end in this primal stream of force.

  Then there was something in that torrent that Sabira recognized, and not the frostsliver she had been bonded with. That cluster of consciousness had faded into the greater swell, with no more than an echo to tell Sabira that she had ever known it.

  Only briefly had Sabira known the other presence before, and then she had brushed against its mind only lightly. Her time with Tserah’s frostsliver had put her mental senses to the whetstone, and she saw now not an unknown sliver of the glacier but one cut from ice by her hand days before.

  It had been there on the mountainside with her as the avalanche fell before it was lost to her and absorbed back into the glacier. Sabira knew now that it had been with her since, flowing back through the current of the Tears of Aderast, a calming presence watching from behind glass as Sabira traveled down into the mountain.

  It came to her, chose her as she chose it—bonded with it, giving up all of herself to the mighty flow of the glacier. All that sensation pushed into her and through her and suddenly, she knew that she was not going to die.

  The rush began to fade, and the world worked its fingers back into Sabira. This wasn’t the blackout harshness that she had experienced the first time, but more like coming up into warm air from freezing water. As the maelstrom of the Tears of Aderast fled from her, a whisper of voices spoke. Tserah. The frostsliver. Kyran. All gave her the same message that she had been told before, and with many times the feeling behind it.

  “Live well, little ash-cat.”

  LIVE WELL, MY PARTNER.

  “Live well,” they told her in unison, and then Sabira sat panting on the ledge once more, dazzled by the brilliance of the glacier column.

>   At her neck, a pleasantly heavy cylinder of ice touched her skin, its caress both warm and cold. Not her partner in this mission through the mountain—that frostsliver was gone, returned to be with the one its bond was strongest with. No, this was her own frostsliver, and with it Sabira felt strong like she never had before. Another time, she might have reveled in it, but after such loss, and with their trial not over, her frostsliver rippled into action.

  Work remained to be done, and they were ready for it.

  HER NEW FROSTSLIVER was not like the old. Tserah’s partner had been wise to the ways of humans, having watched them for years through the cleric’s eyes. This one was raw and wild, full of desire to be one with Sabira.

  It did not appear to understand language, or if it did, it did not yet know how to speak it. Sabira didn’t need words to make her meaning clear. Her emotions were unmistakable.

  She sent her new companion an image of what she needed from it, feeling the strength of the bond that the second, more controlled touch with the glacier had bestowed on her.

  Her frostsliver began spilling from its place at her neck, tendrils of ice spreading rapidly across Sabira’s clothing. It was like the brace, but everywhere. Ice webbed into complicated lattices, like bone and muscle on top of her own but impossibly thin and complex beyond sight, a brilliant, beautiful thing of solid magic.

  Her frostsliver encased her entire body, armoring Sabira against the world. Even her head was protected, in a helm that covered all but her eyes. She felt strong, like a real warrior, despite her armor being thin as paper.

  The power pushed at her, and the sounds of battle called, her injured knee no longer holding her back. She left the wooden ash-cat lying where it was, a token of remembrance for the brother she’d lost, backing away and holding up a hand of goodbye to the glacier, as well as to those she left with it. She broke into a run, found it faster than she had ever known, and made for the ruined wall back to the Ignatians and danger.

  For Mihnir. For Tserah and her frostsliver. For Kyran.

  Sabira leapt from the pit, heart racing. The strength that she now had access to was incredible, though she could still feel the stress it was putting on her body.

  Something truly had changed with that second plunge into the glacier’s power. Maybe she had been doubly charged with magic by the experience, or maybe it was just that Sabira had changed, was far from the girl who had first bonded with Tserah’s frostsliver.

  Her frostsliver hummed through the bond. It had been born in battle and seemed pleased to be obeying Sabira’s commands. She scanned her armored head across the cavern, taking in the state of the fight, her heart pounding like a drum.

  As she watched, her heart sank. Rebellion was in full flow, with conscripts battling officers—and each other—all around. Danlin had done everything he had promised and more, though maybe the chaos of the yeti attack had done just as much to set the Ignatians against each other. But Sabira could see that the effort wasn’t going to be enough.

  The yeti’s numbers had dwindled, brought down by weight of musket shot, and the resistance within the Ignatian ranks was disorganized. It wouldn’t last. Loyal soldiers of the Ignatian army still outnumbered the rebels and yeti combined.

  The battle here might buy Adranna a day or two—maybe even shift the odds a fraction in the defender’s favor, but as long as the loyal Ignatians still had the blasting powder …

  The blasting powder! It was the Ignatians’ strength, but also their weakness, though they didn’t yet know it. She ran for where it was stored, knowing it was Adranna’s only chance.

  Sabira sprinted the distance, effortlessly slicing apart two muskets in passing using a blade extruded from her armor. This was for Adranna. There would be a price, but it needed to be paid—even if the price was her life. And Mihnir’s. And Kyran’s. Her eyes stung with tears. They’d fought so hard to survive, and now …

  She skidded to a halt by the alcove and saw that the space inside was stacked with several dozen barrels, each labeled with the same danger symbol. Sabira didn’t know much about blasting powder, though she had heard enough to guess what this could do. She doubted this was the full amount intended for Adranna’s walls, but it would have to be enough.

  No naked flame burned near the barrels, and even the heavy lanterns were set well away from them, as if the objects could barely stand being in the same space as each other. The real reason, of course, was to eliminate the risk of one being knocked over and creating something cataclysmic.

  Sabira was going to be that cataclysm.

  It wasn’t a good thought. It meant killing who knew how many people to save many more. The idea of so many entombed in the mountain horrified her. On top of that, might this risk another avalanche? Probably not, so soon after the first, but the thought was still a grim one.

  What was worse—to take the risk and doom so many people, or to fail to act and watch many more suffer at their hands?

  Cursing again at having to make the surgeon’s choice, Sabira forced herself to action. This was a decision that was going to haunt her either way, and she would rather make all this death worth something, if it was possible.

  She pushed over a barrel and put a hole in one end with a frostsliver spike, allowing the powder within to spill free. It pooled next to the other barrels, and lengthened into a trail as Sabira used her new strength to drag it along. A musket shot glanced off her armor as she waddled backward out of the cache, and her hands shook, but she did not drop her precious cargo, and everyone was too distracted to stop her.

  She pulled the barrel as far into the battle as she dared, and then gave it a shove to roll it back the way it had come, its purpose served. Now, how to light her fuse? She’d have to go back for one of those lanterns to smash.

  Just as she was about to, a familiar face came running out of the melee. Danlin fired his musket wildly behind him with one hand as he sprinted at her, causing him to drop it. That didn’t slow him down, though, and he kept on going at full pelt.

  “Sabira!” he yelled, leaping her powder trail, and heaving something glowing hot at her. She let out a squeak of fear and then realized what Danlin had delivered to her. Sabira reached out and caught the still-hot branding lash by its handle. It was just a thing now, no longer to be feared. Not when she was about to make use of it like this.

  “You’re going to finish this, right?” he asked, sounding worried. She noticed he had a straight line of blood on his face from a graze above his eye—he’d come a finger’s width from death.

  She nodded and said, “Run—get somewhere safe, if you can!”

  “Give them hell!” Danlin shouted, and sprinted away. Watching his retreating back, she hesitated. Could she survive this? Was she doing the right thing? Would the explosion be enough to destroy this army? Would her actions accidentally harm her people? Would the glacier, even as ancient and powerful as it was, be able to survive the damage? Her frostsliver thrummed with power, and Sabira found strength in it. She hadn’t been given an answer, but she knew it all the same.

  She touched off the apocalypse.

  Sabira dropped the branding lash into the trail and sprinted away, pursued by the angry hiss of burning blasting powder. She had no idea if there was a safe range, let alone how long she had to get to it.

  Chaos was everywhere, the battle slowed but not ended. Pockets of violence assaulted her senses with the cracks of firearms, animal roars, and screams of pain. Most of the yeti had given their lives for the place they had once called home, but some still remained.

  “Run!” Sabira yelled at them, waving her arms. A few followed, and even some of the Ignatians took the hint.

  Seconds later, the mountain turned to ash around her.

  She had expected it to match the deafening roar of the avalanche for volume. It did, and more. Though she had clamped armored hands tightly over armored ears, the blast hit like a hammer blow. The wave of sound was torture on her eardrums.

  A pulse seemed to go t
hrough the stone under her feet as fire bloomed behind her, followed by a cloud of dust. Then the real destruction began, starting with the ground Sabira stood on, which split sideways.

  Part of the ceiling crashed down, and more followed as Sabira stumbled and pushed onward, unable to see beyond her face and hearing nothing but whispered screams and ringing in her ears.

  She caught a glimpse of the still-flowing glacier as she moved, and in a flash wondered if it would still be able to make its way upward through the mountain after this.

  Sabira ran, with no idea where she was going, or if there would be a surface under her feet when she got there. Dust obscured everything. If Danlin and those with him were alive, Sabira had no idea where they were. She feared for them but could do nothing.

  Sabira caught sight of black shapes running in front of her, heading for what she thought might be the main entrance to the cavern. Should she risk following? She had no idea if they were friend or foe.

  She was not given the choice.

  The ground gave way, sending both Sabira and the unfortunate soldiers tumbling into darkness. Rocks thudded painfully into her, with the force to kill someone less armored, and then she was in free fall.

  The void enveloped her until there was nothing except her and her frostsliver armor glowing in the black. Then she bounced off something hard, causing her head to spin. More things hit her, or she them—she didn’t know which—and Sabira heard screams from people faring worse than her.

  Then something smacked into her entire front—the ground, she thought dazedly—and the world stopped moving. Most of it anyway. Rocks ten times her size crashed on top of her, and only through surviving that did she realize that she had lodged into a fissure at the bottom of the hole. She had no idea how far she had fallen, but squirming onto her back hurt enough for it to have been half the height of the mountain.

  It certainly looked as if half of it had come down after her, and the way it was shifting made Sabira worry that it hadn’t finished yet. There were more ominous rumbles, as well as impacts on the rubble that pressed on Sabira’s tiny spot of safety. She raised her arms, as if they might defend her, waiting for the groaning mass of stone to give way. It did not. The rocks settled, eased together, and lay still—at least for the moment.