by David Drake
She must have been under water a long time if Neal had been able to lift the stone. She smiled faintly. I must have been under water as long as it felt.
“Get back,” she said. “I’m all right.”
Scoggin continued to tug; Neal was reaching down also.
“Stop that!” Sharina said. She hadn’t thought she had enough energy to get angry, but she’d been wrong; Beard twitched hopefully in her hand, though he didn’t speak. “I’m going down again! I know where the key is, now.”
“Mistress, you shouldn’t...,” Neal said, then straightened back abruptly. The axe had lifted without Sharina’s conscious volition.
“You’ve seen it?” Alfdan said eagerly, turning toward her. “You can get it up, then?”
Sharina lay on her side, fully in control of her body again. Franca held her shoulder, but he was shivering violently and seemed barely able to keep himself above the surface now. He was the one they ought to be pulling onto the raft....
“It’s on the bottom, just lying there,” Sharina said. “I just need to be in the right place. Beard, will you guide me?”
“I will guide you, mistress,” said the axe. “I think they’re afraid of Beard. They haven’t come quite close enough; but perhaps when you take the key they will.”
“Well, friend axe,” Sharina said, “we both have something to look forward to. Though it’s not the same thing.”
She looked up at Neal. “Bring the rock around to me,” she said. “I’m ready to go down. And then get Franca up before he freezes to death!”
Sharina didn’t feel cold. In truth, she didn’t feel much of anything. She viewed her body as she might have viewed a horse, considering the work it had done this day and deciding how much longer it’d be able to go on before it dropped in the traces.
Long enough, she thought. Long enough.
Neal straddle-walked across the raft with the stone in his arms; the wooden fabric wobbled and groaned at each step. He squatted at the edge. Alfdan, startled into awareness of his immediate surroundings, gave a sharp cry and hopped to the other side as the raft tilted.
Sharina reached up and caught the netting in her left hand. “Ready!” she said, drawing in a deep breath.
Neal shoved the weight outward into the water. It streamed downward, trailing bubbles and Sharina’s lithe body.
She was no longer conscious of the water. In her mind she flew down canyons of planes joined at right angles. Creatures squeezed out of the cracks where they’d been hiding while Sharina was on the surface. Other creatures, mountainously huge, continued up from the depths of time toward her.
Beard trilled a warsong that sliced through the water like the point of an arrow. Sharina could see the things poise—things of no shape or a thousand shapes, filled with the mindless malevolence of spiders. But they did not, would not, dared not launch themselves onto her while the axe sang.
The stone weight crunched onto the bed of the fjord. Beard tugged her to the right again.
Sharina breaststroked over the quartz. The key congealed into focus from a distant blur; it was gold and ornate but not large, no longer than her little finger. She snatched it in her left hand and kicked upward.
The metal tingled against her palm. She wondered if the key was burning into her, and clutched it more firmly so that she wouldn’t drop it if it was.
A thing came at her, dropping like a jumping spider at the end of a train of its own substance. Sharina twisted and slashed out with Beard. There was no water to resist the blow; the place they fought in was not the fjord whose icy depths enfolded her body.
The axe slid through the creature and beyond, dragging a gelatinous trail behind the steel. The creature folded in on itself. Sharina brought the axe back around in a figure-8. Her head broke the surface and she was sucking in cold, clean air again.
The water about her was clear. There was no sign of the crystal canyons nor the monsters which infested them, but Beard was caroling in delighted triumph.
***
Cashel got up slowly and carefully. He ached all over, but the bird actually hadn’t touched him. The way he felt was entirely what he’d done to himself.
“That would cover most people’s problems,” the toad said. “I think.”
Cashel frowned as he considered. “I just meant I’d pushed pretty hard while I was fighting the bird,” he explained. “I’m feeling the strain.”
He paused. “You must have been hearing me think,” he said.
The toad sniffed. “If you want to call it thinking,” she said. “And yes, you made a great effort, physically as well. What do you do when your greatest effort isn’t enough, master?”
Cashel frowned again, thinking back as carefully as he could. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t remember that ever happening. I just don’t know.”
“Well, pick me up,” said Evne, “and I’ll take you to another chance to find out. Life with you is certainly more colorful than it had been for the previous seven thousand years.”
Obediently Cashel put his right palm flat on the ground in front of the toad. She hopped onto his fingers and he lifted her to his shoulder again.
“Thanks for drawing the bird’s eyes off me, Mistress Evne,” he said. “It helped a lot. And it was a brave thing to do.”
“It would only have been brave,” said the toad with her usual tartness, “if I’d thought you might be too slow to deal with the phoenix before she snapped me up. I’m not that unobservant.”
Evne pointed with her left hind foot, a gesture that made Cashel grin with surprise. He had to squint to see her, so close to his eyes as she was. “Cross this bog and go through the belt of fir trees. I’ll show you what to do then.”
Cashel resumed his way over the meadow with his staff out before him. The ripples were disconcerting at first, but they spread in a rhythm. By the third step he’d suited his pace to how the bog was going to react. It gave him no trouble from then on, though he was still glad to reach firm ground.
That meant forcing his way through the prickly, steep-sloping branches of firs growing too close together for their own good, though. He edged through with his right side leading so he wouldn’t risk brushing Evne off. The toad shifted closer to his neck, but she didn’t seem terribly concerned.
It struck Cashel that he didn’t hear birds among these trees. There was a funny buzzing sound, something like swarms of cicadas at a great distance. It was the wrong season for cicadas, though, and besides—
He pushed through the last of the firs. It wasn’t a wide belt, probably no more than he could’ve spanned with his staff laid out twice, but it’d been so dense that he was beyond the trees before he realized they were ending. Before him shimmered a purple dome covering everything for as far as he could see to right or left. A belt of bare ground, no wider than he could reach across with his arm, bordered the dome and separated it from the firs.
“If you touch the barrier,” the toad said, “it will kill you. It’ll probably kill me too, as I deserve for serving a fool.”
“I won’t touch it, then,” Cashel said politely. “That’d be a poor way to repay a friend who’s been so much help, Mistress Evne.”
The toad snorted. “Walk to your left along the barrier,” she said. “We’ll come to a slough shortly.”
Cashel walked carefully; his shoulders were broad enough that he’d bump the dome on his right if the fir branches didn’t scrape their dark green needles along his left arm. Evne walked to the front of his collar and clung there, a clammy bump against his throat. He didn’t say anything.
The buzzing sound came from the dome. Cashel thought he could see things inside it, but that might just have been the play of the sun falling on a solid surface through patches of mist.
The shiny violet color gave him a nasty feeling, and the hair on his right arm prickled. He probably wouldn’t have touched it even without the toad’s warning.
A furlong from where he’d started, Cashel saw open w
ater in front of him. The water was brown/black under a gray film of dust and pollen; it sizzled where the base of the dome cut across it. Just as the fir trees grew only so close to the violet curve, the water’s surface within an finger’s breadth of it was clear of scum.
“Now,” said Evne, “set me down and swim under the barrier just as I do. It’s no thicker than one of your Sharina’s hairs, but it’ll fry you to ash if you come up beneath it. Do you understand?”
Cashel squatted at the edge of the still water and lifted the toad from his shoulder. “I understand, mistress,” he said. “But I can’t swim.”
“Well then crawl, you fool!” the toad snarled. “The water’s barely deep enough to float a rowboat! Or if you prefer, jump straight into the barrier and blast your huge gross body to atoms!”
“Crawling sounds fine, mistress,” Cashel said quietly. He probed the slough with his left hand instead of using his quarterstaff. The water was warm—blood warm, it seemed—and he was pushing his fingers into soft mud before half his forearm was wet.
“Then do it,” snapped Evne. She leaped, a clumsy, splay-footed motion. For a moment she paused beneath the water’s grimy surface; then her long hind legs kicked again and she vanished beneath the edge of the dome.
Cashel settled himself carefully in the water, on his belly after taking time to consider it. He didn’t like the thought of squirming under the dome without seeing for sure how close he was, but he guessed he’d have an easier job digging down into the mud if he went face first.
Cashel slid his staff forward, keeping it well down in the muck. The last thing he wanted was to have it burned out of his hands before he even got close to the Visitor. He figured things were going to be tough enough as it was.
The staff was under the barrier. He pushed it with the heels of his hands, then sloshed his head under and hauled himself forward using his hands and elbows both. He didn’t like water and he hated not being able to see, but nobody’d forced him to be here. Anyway, he wasn’t one to complain about his work.
Cashel crawled till he couldn’t hold his breath any longer. At last he jerked his head up, blowing the air out of his lungs and gasping in more. He shook himself violently, then rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand to clear some of the mud away before he opened them and looked around.
The place where he’d crossed under the dome was twice his length behind him, marked by the trail of mud spreading back to it. Evne was behind him also. His quarterstaff floated just above the surface, and she sat in the middle of it.
“Have you decided to come back for me and your staff?” she asked. “Or are you going to swim to the center of the Visitor’s lair on your own? I don’t recommend that, but you’re the master.”
“I wouldn’t care to be without either one of you, mistress,” Cashel said as he sloshed to the toad.
The landscape on this side of the dome was a bit different from what Cashel’d come through to reach it. On the dry land there was grass, mostly blue-stem, instead of trees. Reeds grew in the water. The air was clear instead of warm, gray fog, and the light had just the least bit of something strange. Rather than a color, there was an odd sharpness to objects. He didn’t see anything like the great glowing hill that’d flown over Manor Bossian while he’d been dining there.
When Cashel looked back the way he’d come, he was scarcely aware of the dome. The air shimmered the way it might do above a hot rock in the summer sun; that was all.
With Evne back on his shoulder, Cashel wiped down his quarterstaff. The wallet’s waxed leather kept its contents dry under any conditions short of floating alongside a dead whale, and the lanolin in the wool shed water anyway.
“There!” said the toad with satisfaction. She was peering at a perfectly ordinary patch of air, so far as Cashel could tell. “I was beginning to think that we’d have to get in by our own efforts.”
She swiveled her little head toward him. “I don’t say we wouldn’t have done so,” she said. “But I prefer to avoid the labor if I can. We’ll have plenty of use for our strength later on.”
Cashel squeezed the wool dry and put it away. He’d need it again, he figured, if things worked out.
The air just beyond his staff’s reach started to twist and turn gray. Images were forming in it. Cashel had the feeling that he was looking at a rolled tapestry where both the base and the figures were woven in transparent thread. He could almost see what was there....
He stepped onto firm ground, a better place to use his staff. It also put him closer to where the air was changing: not much closer, but enough.
“Do you want to get down, Evne?” he asked, his voice husky.
“No,” she said. “We’ll need to move quickly in a moment.”
“You’re right about that,” said Cashel.
The distortion vanished; a man in white robes stood in its place. He was over the water, but his gilded sandals didn’t dimple the surface. In his right hand was an athame, a wizard’s knife. His was forged from metal of the same violet hue as the dome seen from the outside; words of power in the Old Script wrapped around the blade in bands.
Cashel smiled in pleased surprise. “You’re Ansache!” he cried. “Did you come to get your daughter free too?”
“I am Lord Ansache, seneschal to the Visitor,” the man said, obviously startled. “I have no daughter, and as for why I came here—”
He raised his athame so that it pointed straight up.
“I came to cleanse the Visitor’s park of the monkey that crawled in under the barrier!”
Cashel thrust the butt of his staff at Ansache’s face.
“Iaththa” Ansache cried. A bolt of red wizardlight sprang at Cashel from the peak of the dome. It met a bubble of blue fire expanding from the tip of his staff and vanished.
Cashel staggered, then thrust again. Ansache screamed and flung himself backward. He turned and ran, changing angle to Cashel with every step.
“Follow!” Evne shouted. “Don’t let him get away!”
“He’s not,” Cashel grunted as he stumbled after the running man. “He won’t!”
He wasn’t in the marshy landscape any more. He ran down a tunnel with mirrored walls, seeing himself on all sides and multiple copies of Ansache in front of him. The reflections crowded him, constantly warning that somebody was coming at him with a quarterstaff from the corners of his eyes.
Cashel’s arms tingled all the way back to the shoulder. They felt like he’d slammed his staff into a cliff face instead of having it stop in a flash of wizardlight. His legs didn’t work quite the way they should’ve; he rocked from side to side as he ran, as if he’d been carrying a heavy stone all the past hour.
Ansache wasn’t in good shape either, though. He staggered like a drunk, flailing his arms. The purple athame seemed to be dragging him to the right. Wizardry, even failed wizardry like Ansache’s, took a lot out of the fellow using it.
Ansache disappeared. Cashel was in a grove of fruit trees. An animal that looked like an armored possum stood on its hind legs to lick branches clean with a long tongue. It was as big as an ox. When it saw Cashel, it turned and raised its forepaws with blunt, black claws as long as Cashel’s fingers. It uttered a hissing squeal.
“Through it!” Evne cried. “That’s the pathway!”
Cashel sprang toward the beast, his staff slantwise across his body to beat aside the claws when they swung toward him. The scene—the beast and the grove both—vanished.
Cashel was in the mirrored corridor again. Ansache gave a cry of horror and despair, then lurched another step onward and disappeared.
Cashel followed. He’d follow till he died. It wasn’t a conscious decision any more, it was just the way things were going to be till the business ended one way or the other.
He stepped onto ice and skidded. He chopped his staff down; the ferrule gouged a purchase from the slick black surface. It was blazingly cold, freezing his feet because his calluses had been softened by tramping through the bog. T
he only light came from the sullen red flare that silhouetted ruined buildings on the horizon.
The ice was clear. Beneath it, staring up at Cashel through fans of stress marks, was the face of a giant. His mouth, large enough to swallow Cashel whole, opened in a bellow that made the world vibrate.
“Down his throat!” said Evne. “You’ll have to break the ice!”
Cashel swung the staff in a half arc. An azure glitter trailed the ferrules the way sparks stream from a quickly-spun torch. The opposite buttcap slammed into the ice in a silent, mind-numbing blue glare. A thousand tiny cracks shivered across the surface, clouding the face beneath it.
The mouth shouted again. The ice blew apart like seafoam shredded by a gale. Cashel jumped or fell—he wasn’t sure which, just that he’d managed to get through—down the roaring tunnel beneath him.
He was in the hall of mirrors again. Ansache, sobbing with terror, stabbed his athame into the wall beside him. Instead of shattering as Cashel expected it to do, the world itself curled back from the point like a sheet of isinglass touched by a hot spark. An edge of reality coiled over the wall and the wizard together, leaving a different universe expanding into the place where the corridor had been.
Cashel stood on a hot, windswept plain. In all directions were hills eroded from the yellow, chalky earth. He raised his left arm to breathe through the sleeve of his tunic and filter out the dust.
“Which way is Ansache?” he said to the toad on his shoulder.
“Ansache doesn’t matter any more,” Evne said. “To save himself he opened a passage for you onto the ship. Now we’ll find the Visitor.”
***
Hutena was on the port tiller; Kulit in the bow as lookout again. The other four crewmen were on the oars, pulling hard. They wore the set expressions of men who knew that they’ll be at the task for a long time—but that the faster they worked, the better off they’d be.
Rincip knelt facing sternward, his wrists and ankles bound to the bitts holding the mainstay. Chalcus had stripped him, cutting his tunics off with long strokes of his dagger. It would’ve been as simple to undress the prisoner normally, but Ilna supposed the dagger—and the nudity itself—was for its effect.
