Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  Garric frowned. “Frankly, I’d rather see Waldron than the vicar,” he said. “I don’t have anything to tell Uzinga except to take Reise’s advice on every matter where Reise makes a recommendation—and that if he doesn’t, he’ll be lucky if he only loses his office as vicar.”

  The doors of the reception room were open, waiting for the start of Prince Garric’s afternoon levee. The presence of the usher standing in the doorway might not have been enough to keep back the would-be petitioners who packed the hall beyond, but those waiting knew that the detachment of Blood Eagles on guard would take up where the usher’s authority left off—with naked swords if necessary.

  “I think it’s necessary that you—that Prince Garric—say just that to Vicar Uzinga,” Liane said. She grinned. “Well, with a little more tact, perhaps.”

  She sobered and continued, “Remember that Lord Uzinga is a noble. No matter what other people have told him, he won’t in his heart believe he’s supposed to do what a commoner like Reise suggests. If you tell him that he’s to obey your father Reise, then there’s a much better chance that you won’t have to remove him from office.”

  Garric grimaced. “Right, Vicar Uzinga during dinner,” he said.

  With a sudden smile he added, “Liane, I’ve suddenly realized something. In any kind of governmental business, the correct choice is always to do the thing you least want to do. Now that I’ve found the formula, perhaps I can hand my duties over to somebody else and do something I’d like to do instead?”

  The crowd in the hallway was noisy. Individually the petitioners spoke in hushed voices, each to his neighbor and supporters. In sum, the noise was like that of gannet rookeries on the spikes of rock off the east coast of Haft. Garric looked at the first hopeful faces in the open doors, sighed, and said, “I suppose we’d better start running them through. The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll finish.”

  Though in his heart he knew he’d never finish, that even if he listened to complaints, prayers, and suggestions till midnight, there’d still be people waiting with more of the same. But he was more afraid of being cut off from the reality of ordinary citizens’ lives the way King Valence had been than he was of being ground down by the minutiae of government.

  “I miss you being able to read Celondre to me in the evenings,” Liane said with a soft smile.

  “I miss being able to get a good night’s sleep,” Garric muttered, rubbing his temples. He’d said what he meant without thinking, and he cringed even as he heard his response to his lover’s gentle romance.

  Acting quickly, he turned to Liane and took her small, shapely hands in his. “Liane,” he said, ignoring the guards and petitioners and officials and everybody else watching. “Tonight I’ll read you Celondre. Maybe getting back into old habits will help me sleep without dreams that tell me to make a fool of myself, besides.”

  Liane looked at him with a shocked expression. What did I say now? Garric thought, frustrated and a little angry that he didn’t seem to be able to do the right thing even when he tried his hardest.

  “Garric?” she said. “You mentioned your dreams. Did you suggest using the Shrine of the Prophesying Sister because of a dream?”

  “Well, not that shrine, I didn’t even know about it,” Garric said, trying to call back the memories. “But yeah, it was a dream that made me think of the Sister at all!”

  He could see where Liane was going—where she’d gotten ahead of him—and excitement had washed away his depressed lethargy of moments before. This was progress, this was a way forward that might lead past the wall between Cashel and his friends!

  Garric stood. The usher at the door watched eagerly, ready to let through the first of the petitioners.

  “Citizens of the Isles!” Garric said in the voice King Carus would have used to bellow orders through the clamor of the battlefield. “I’ve been called away by a sudden opportunity—”

  He’d started to say “emergency” but he’d changed the word as it started to roll off his tongue. A prince can start a panic by an unfortunate choice of phrase.

  “—greatly to the benefit of the kingdom! This audience is cancelled!”

  “Close the doors!” Liane called to the guards. They probably couldn’t hear her over the sudden uproar in the hall, but they got the idea. The usher squeaked, pressed between the door and the petitioners, but the soldiers put their backs into it. They slammed the valves closed, then slid the bronze bar through the staples to make sure they stayed closed.

  Liane had already snapped shut the travel desk in which she carried important papers. She was at Garric’s side as they turned to the door at the back which opened onto the courtyard. “To Tenoctris?” she said, less a question than an affirmation.

  “Right,” said Garric, stepping through the door which one of the guards on the portico had already thrown open. He took the desk out of Liane’s hand into his own, his left. She could carry it, but they were moving fast and to him it weighed almost nothing.

  Keeping his right hand free for his sword was a reflex from King Carus. It came to the surface when Garric was excited, even at times—like this one—when it wasn’t necessary.

  Though you never knew for sure when it would be necessary.

  All the suites around this small garden were held by Garric and his immediate entourage—his friends, not members of the staff. The guards looked surprised but properly held their posts while Garric and Liane ran up the stairs that led to Tenoctris’ suite on the second floor. The six guards from the reception room followed, their equipment belts and studded leather aprons clattering.

  The noise—meant to frighten enemies when the royal army charged—brought Sharina out onto the landing with the Pewle knife in her hand. She and Garric both had learned hard lessons since they left Barca’s Hamlet.

  Garric thought of Ilna and Cashel. They’d changed as well, perhaps even more.

  “It’s all right,” he said, stepping into the study as his sister hopped back from the doorway when she saw who was coming. “Liane had an idea and we need to tell Tenoctris.”

  “Yes?” said the wizard, looking up from the tile floor. She sat on a cushion, probably Sharina’s idea because Garric had never seen Tenoctris pay attention to comfort when she had work to do. She’d drawn a large six-pointed star in cinnabar, then written words of power around its margin. On the floor inside the figure were codices, scrolls, and a few loose manuscripts.

  “Tenoctris,” said Liane, closing the door in the face of the guards following, “it was a dream that led Garric to suggest going to the Shrine of the Sister. I think it was a sending.”

  “I thought it was just...,” Garric said. He was embarrassed because the idea hadn’t occurred to him immediately. “I’d been worried about the two priesthoods and looking like I was taking sides. And I had a dream of the past, a fantasy I know—the sort of Golden Age that Celondre or Rigal would describe, a sunny day and happy peasants worshipping the Great Gods. But the priest of the Sister was there too, and I thought....”

  “There’s only one active temple to the Sister in Carcosa,” Liane said, taking out a notebook that she didn’t need. “Someone who wanted Garric—or Garric’s friends—to enter a temple of the Sister wouldn’t have to specify any particular temple.”

  “Wonderful!” said Tenoctris. She started to get up, then changed her mind and sank onto the cushion again. Leaning forward she started to shift the books out of the hexagram but paused again.

  “I think it would be better for me to do the directional spell from where you were when you had the dream, Garric,” she said. “Could we—”

  “Yes,” said Garric, hoping he didn’t sound curt. “What do you need with you?”

  “Well, my satchel,” Tenoctris said, “and—”

  Garric snatched up the satchel and the pot of cinnabar sitting open beside it.

  “—perhaps Cantorf’s Dream of Scio, which should be—”

  “I have it,” said Sharina, reaching under an ope
n scroll and coming up with the small codex which had been completely hidden beneath it.

  “Then let’s go,” Tenoctris said, rising with Liane’s help. “I wasn’t able to trace the attack, but a wizard of my limited powers should be able to determine the source of the dream.”

  “Power’s the easy part of any job,” said King Carus, watching as Garric jerked open the door to the inner hallway and his own suite beyond. “Directing it to the right point is what wins battles—and saves kingdoms, if our luck’s in!”

  ***

  “The Bird of the Tide,” said Chalcus, beaming at the ship lashed to the quay on which he stood with Ilna and Merota. “She’s old, I grant you, but still tight as you please. In her day they built with pegs and tenons instead of just trenails holding the strakes to the frames. I’d trust the Bird in storms that’d swamp any of the light-built coasters being tacked together on this coast in the past thirty years!”

  Six solid-looking men stood together in the stern. They’d stopped murmuring among themselves when Chalcus and the three females appeared, but none of them had spoken to the visitors. Mistress Kaline stood two paces back in prim disapproval.

  “She looks trim,” said Ilna, which was closer to a lie than she liked to hear come from her mouth. “And of course I trust your judgment on ships as far as I do mine about fabrics, Master Chalcus.”

  That last was the simple truth, and why Chalcus made her say something as obvious as sunrise was beyond her. “Men!” she was tempted to say; but it wasn’t men, she’d heard women as often being fools in the same way.

  As for the ship—The Bird of the Tide had a deck, which was something, and a single short mast in the middle of it holding a yard that was longer than the vessel itself. At sea the yard would be raised at a slant to spread the triangular sail to the wind. There was a tiny cabin in the stern, enough to hold a tile hearth but no shelter for the crew. In bad weather Ilna supposed they’d all need to be on deck anyway, doing things with sail and ropes and anchors.

  The Bird was indeed old, so old that the grain of the deck stood out in ridges above the softer, paler sapwood. Four oak planks ran the length of the vessel’s sides, sticking out from the pine hull. They were there to rub against stone docks, as they were doing now. They’d been patched at several places with fresh timbers, but the patches were themselves badly worn by now.

  And the ship stank. The Bird of the Tide had carried generations of men and cargo. They’d left residues which had decayed into her timbers and still remained as faint, foul ghosts. But Ilna didn’t have a delicate sense of smell—few peasants do, not with firewood too dear to waste heating bath water four months of the year—and this stench, though unfamiliar, wasn’t a matter of concern.

  “Oh, Ilna,” Merota said. She was clinging to Ilna’s hand like a child much younger than she was. “I do wish I could come with you. Really, I wouldn’t get in the way.”

  “Ah, child,” said Chalcus, stroking the girl’s hair gently with a hand whose calluses were like sharkskin. “When Mistress Ilna and I finish our business in the Strait, I’ll sail you clear around Haft in this fine vessel as a treat. But for now, it’s us alone and you with our friend Liane till we return.”

  “I just wish...,” Merota said sadly, but she wasn’t arguing. The child had a right to wish for things, but she was already enough of a lady that she didn’t whine and embarrass herself trying to change Ilna’s mind.

  Ilna rarely argued. If the decision was hers to make, she made it; and if not, she accepted the choice someone else made—or fate made, often enough.

  “Come aboard and I’ll introduce you to the crew, milady,” Chalcus said. Now at low tide the deck was more than Ilna’s height below the level of the quay, but instead of going down the ladder Chalcus hopped aboard.

  He turned and raised his hands. Before Ilna could protest, Merota gave a squeal of delight and leaped into Chalcus’ arms.

  Frowning as much at what she was doing as what Merota had done, Ilna pinched the sides of her tunic at mid thigh and jumped lightly to the deck. She told herself she was proving to the crew that she wasn’t a lady whom they had to coddle, but a part of her mind was afraid she was showing off. Nobody else would think less of her if she did show off, of course, but she wasn’t somebody who needed other people to censure her.

  “Mistress Ilna,” Chalcus said, “let me introduce the crew to you. Our bosun’s Hutena, he was a file commander in the Third Regiment until today.”

  Hutena bowed. He was short and stocky, nearly bald though probably only in his mid-thirties. His limbs were so hairy that the dragon winding up his right arm from wrist to shoulder seemed to be crawling through thickets.

  “Nabarbi, Tellura, and Kulit,” Chalcus continued. “They’re cousins, Blaise fishermen originally but for this past year they’ve been deck crew on the trireme Staff of the Shepherd.”

  The cousins bowed. They were tall men whose weather-beaten complexions had originally been pale. Kulit wore a fluffy blond moustache; the others were clean shaven.

  “And maybe you remember Shausga and Ninon from the Flying Fish?” Chalcus said. Ilna did remember them, their faces anyway, from the voyage north on the patrol vessel. Ninon had been the lead oarsman, she was pretty sure.

  “Boys,” Chalcus said to the crew, “all the cargo’s aboard, so we’ll be sailing before dawn with the tide. Up to three of you at a time can go ashore if you need to wrap up your affairs—”

  “We don’t,” said Hutena. “We can sail now if you need us to.”

  Chalcus nodded approvingly. “I shouldn’t wonder if a time came on this voyage when we did need to get under weigh in a fingersnap,” he said, “but not tonight. I’ll be back aboard with my gear in an hour, and Mistress Ilna will follow...?”

  He cocked his head toward her with an eyebrow raised.

  “I’ll come aboard with you,” Ilna said. “I have nothing more to bring but a heavy cloak, and I could do without that if I needed to.”

  She was showing the sailors she was one of them, just as quick an adaptable as they were; or perhaps she was bragging again. Like so many things, it was a matter of how you viewed it.

  “Then in an hour, lads,” Chalcus said. He lifted Merota to his right shoulder and, holding her there with one hand, climbed the vertical ladder to the dock as the child laughed happily.

  Ilna followed with what was for her a warm smile. Chalcus was bragging also, but doing it with a verve that she could never imagine in herself. And it was a good thing to tell a crew of strong, skilled men that their new captain was even stronger and more skilled.

  Over Merota’s protests, Chalcus set the girl down on the pavement and sent her a few steps ahead in the company of Mistress Kaline. “So, dear heart...,” Chalcus said with a sidelong glance at Ilna. “Do you have any questions before we set off on the tide?”

  “I’m surprised at the crew,” Ilna said frankly. “I’d expected....”

  She paused to search for a word. Chalcus laughed merrily beside her and said, “Cut-throats and pirates, bloody-handed killers with one eye and an evil leer?”

  Ilna laughed also, but with a touch of embarrassment. “Well, not that, exactly; but something closer to that sort than to the men there.”

  Sobering, Chalcus said, “Those are hard men, dear one, men who’ve given strokes and taken them in their time. But they’ll take orders when they’ve agreed to, and they’ll do their duty because it’s their duty, not when it suits them. I sailed with pirates when I was a pirate, but now that I serve a prince, I want men with me as sure of their duty as that prince himself is.”

  He laughed again and put his arm around her waist. As a rule Ilna didn’t like that sort of display in public, but at the moment it seemed appropriate.

  “We’re honest folk doing the kingdom’s business, dear one,” Chalcus said. “That strikes me as a more wonderful thing than perhaps it does you, but if it means I can sleep nights without worrying about my bosun cutting my throat—it may be that
I can get used to it!”

  ***

  The balconied windows of Sharina’s large bedroom overlooked a courtyard with a large cedar tree and stone planters which had been allowed to grow up in weeds. In the center of her suite was a reception room, it opened onto the inner hallway and also to stairs from the courtyard. The maid’s cubicle was curtained off from the reception room and had its own door to the hall.

  When Sharina first awakened, she thought she was home in Barca’s Hamlet and a hungry puppy was whimpering. When her head cleared, she realized she was hearing the maid.

  “Beara?” Sharina called, feeling for the sandals she kept at the side of the bed. “Are you all right?”

  Her bedroom had a real wooden door instead of a curtain. The lamp in the reception room leaked light around the panel, but it took a moment for Sharina’s eyes to focus through the veil of sleep. She opened the door.

  The cryolite urn sat on a claw-footed bronze stand between the windows of the reception room, replacing the black-figured Old Kingdom vase which had been there previously. Hanging from the room’s ceiling was a triangular lamp whose corners were molded into grotesquely sharp-chinned faces. A wick lay on each extended tongue; normally one provided a night-light after Sharina had gone to bed.

  Tonight a lamp flickered within the urn instead, suffusing the stone’s gray-on-gray pattern. It lit the wall paintings showing scenes from the Shepherd’s wooing of the Lady. Under its illumination the murals became journeys through Hell: bleak, cynical, and inexorable.

  The Shepherd leaned on his staff, his face twisted in demonic glee as he contemplated the future. The sheep around him were pustulent and as terrified of the certainty of their death as so many pox-ridden harlots.

  In the next painted cartouche, the Lady reclined on a divan in Her garden. The fruits hanging above were surely poisonous; the doves on her fingertips whispered envious gossip about the whole world else; and the Lady’s face was a mask of lust so fierce that neither man nor beast could hope to slake it.