Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

Kakoral straightened; and, straightening, vanished.

  “Oh!” said Cashel. He cleared his throat, then ran a hand along the rim of the cauldron. It wouldn’t be hard to get enough purchase to lift it again.

  “Ah?” he said. Evne and Kotia were still looking upward. “Would you like me to lift—”

  “Not unless you want us all to die,” said the toad.

  “You’d better cover your eyes,” said Kotia. She closed hers and folded the crook of her elbow over them. Cashel did the same.

  The world beyond the walls of the cauldron went crimson. The light was as cold as the depths of the sea, streaming through Cashel’s flesh and soul together.

  Thought stopped, everything stopped. Cashel didn’t know how long the light lasted; the flooding glare had the feel of eternity. He was squeezing the quarterstaff; if nothing else existed, that did and Cashel or-Kenset did while he held it.

  Kotia touched his wrist. “It’s over,” she said. Her voice came from far away. “The power that drained into this basin over the ages has been voided back to where the Visitor came from.”

  Cashel opened his eyes. He, Kotia, and the toad on his shoulder were in the middle of what’d been bog like what he’d seen on his way to the Visitor. The rushes were sere now, and tussocks stood up from cracked mud rather than marsh.

  “The process involved heat,” said Evne. She gave a grim chuckle. “Not nearly as much heat as on the other end of the channel, though. I don’t think there will be more Visitors to trouble us.”

  Kotia turned to Cashel. He couldn’t read her expression. “Now, if you would please lift the cauldron again, milord?” she said. “We’ll have callers shortly.”

  She saw his expression and quirked a smile. “No, not that kind,” she said. “The display will summon folk from all the manors to see what has happened. Airboats can safely fly into the basin now.”

  Cashel handed the girl his quarterstaff again, politely this time because he wasn’t in a hurry to get them all under cover. He squatted and positioned his hands under the curve of the rim.

  “I wonder if Lord Bossian will be among those arriving?” the toad said.

  “Yes,” said Kotia. “I’ve been wondering that too.”

  They both laughed. It was the sort of sound that made Cashel glad the two of them weren’t his enemies.

  ***

  “Nobody’s entered the Count’s wing since Lady Liane sent the warning, your highness,” Attaper said as he and a company of Blood Eagles met Garric at the west entrance to the palace. “A few servants came out on normal business, but we’re holding them as ordered.”

  “As ordered?” said Garric, frowning in surprise. “Lady Liane?”

  “Yes, her messenger arrived with your orders that nobody should enter or leave Count Lascarg’s quarters,” Attaper said, frowning in turn. “By the Shepherd, your highness! Were the seal and signature forgeries?”

  “No, milord!” Liane herself said as she hopped from her sedan chair. Her bearers must’ve run all the way from the temple: they were covered in sweat but grinning. The coins Liane spun them winked gold. “Say rather that Prince Garric was too busy to be aware of all the details he was taking care of in the crisis.”

  Garric grinned. That was a charitable way of putting it. In truth it hadn’t crossed his mind to send someone ahead to put a discreet guard on Monine and Tanus. Well, he didn’t have to think about that sort of thing. He had Liane, praise be the Shepherd!

  Garric took the steps two treads at a time. Guards trotted ahead of him. Lord Mayne, the legate commanding the regiment that’d just arrived from the camp on the harbor, had linked arms with Lord Waldron to exchange information as they both pounded along immediately behind. A pair of palace ushers holding silver-banded wands high led the procession down the branching corridors. The household staff was no longer the proper concern of Master Reise, the Vicar’s advisor... but as he ran past, Garric saw his father watching alertly from an alcove, pressed between the wall and a statue where he wouldn’t interfere with the Prince’s haste.

  The double doors to the wing of the palace which Count Lascarg still occupied were closed. In the vaulted hall outside waited a squad of Blood Eagles instead of a doorkeeper from the count’s household.

  “Get us in!” Garric ordered as the guards straightened to attention. He hoped the raid would take Monine and Tanus by surprise, but there was no time to waste.

  The non-com of the guard detail pushed at the panels where they joined, seeing whether they were barred from the inside. They didn’t give.

  Four men of Garric’s escort were already carrying an ancient statue from a niche down the hall. It’d been a caryatid, a woman’s torso with a fish-scaled base, which might once have supported the roof of a loggia in an Old Kingdom water garden. As the non-com stepped clear, the men carrying the statue jogged forward and with a collective grunt smashed its flat head into the door.

  The panels sprang open; the heavy oaken bar ripped out of its staples and crashed to the floor. The right-hand panel banged into the servant dozing on a stool at the side. He fell off with a cry of pain.

  “This way!” cried one of Liane’s spies, charging through the anteroom and down the corridor to the right. He wasn’t the man who’d led the way into the Temple of the Shepherd. Soldiers, Garric, and Lord Waldron—who’d kept up just as he’d said he would—clashed after the spy in their cleated boots. A group of female servants—three or four of them—gossiping in a side hall squealed and ran the other way.

  Lascarg’s rooms looked dingy and had a smell of neglect. Garric wondered if that was a change or if the rest of the building had also been dirty and rundown before his own staff took over. He’d been too busy to care, but thinking back he remembered squads of servants working in the hallways with stiff brushes and buckets that breathed the biting tang of lye.

  It wasn’t just dirt creating the oppressive atmosphere, though. One side of this corridor gave onto a courtyard, but shuttered blinds closed the portico despite the pleasant weather. Only through cracks between warped panels did Garric see sunlight or foliage.

  A servant in tawdry finery—his tunics stained but hemmed with cloth of gold—heard the crashing footsteps and peered from a doorway. He stared for an instant at what was coming toward him, bleated, and ran down the hall in the other direction. He carried a writing case until it brushed the wainscoting and flew free, scattering documents, quills, and rushlights unnoticed on the floor.

  Garric didn’t blame the fellow. He supposed Lord Mayne’s entire regiment was following down the hallway. Maybe the whole army was; Duzi knew how Lord Waldron’s orders might have been garbled!

  The spy reached the door the servant had run from and jumped inside. Garric followed, slamming a hand against the door jamb so that he didn’t skid on the worn stone flooring. He wasn’t wearing hobnails like the regular soldiers, but his boots had hard soles.

  Count Lascarg sat at a table with a top of colored marble on massive wooden legs. Before him was a mixing bowl, a water pitcher, and an ornate gold cup whose stem was in the form of a couple making love. The pitcher was full: Lascarg had been drinking his wine undiluted, and drinking it in considerable quantity from the look of him.

  A servant—a girl of no more than twelve years—stood beside him with a wine dipper. She stared at the doorway, her eyes so open they seemed to fill her white face. The dipper shook violently in her hand.

  “You’ve come to kill me!” Lascarg said, lurching to his feet. His tunic hadn’t been changed in days, perhaps longer. He fumbled at his side where the hilt of a sword would’ve been if he were wearing one. He wasn’t.

  “Where’s your children?” Garric said. “Where’s Monine and Tanus?”

  “Go on then, just do it!” Lascarg said. He swayed and fell forward, knocking over the bowl and pitcher. Clinging to the table, he began to cry.

  The girl pointed her dipper toward the small arched door in an alcove. Garric thought it was to a service staircase. The n
earest soldier took two strides and kicked it down, staggering backward at the impact. Garric lunged through the opening.

  He hadn’t been conscious of drawing his sword, but it was out in his hand. The image of Carus watched through Garric’s eyes, grinning and poised.

  Garric grinned back. With a friend like that sharing his mind, he never need worry about being unprepared for battle.

  He’d burst into an overgrown garden: the garden of his dreams, his nightmares. To the right was a pavilion which ivy was taking over; that was the building the ape men had shambled from. Seen by daylight, the altar was an ancient stone bench supported by stone barrels from a fallen pillar.

  Moisin, the priest who’d brought the urn to Garric, lay naked across the altar. His back was to the stone. His wrists and ankles were tied to the barrels so that his chest arched.

  Behind the altar, two chanting teenagers poised silvery knives over the priest. Their dark hair was cut to shoulder length, and their faces were identically androgynous.

  The tabard of the twin on the left showed a hint of breasts, so that was probably Monine. Tanus wore a similar garment, embroidered in colored swirls. Garric could see the twins’ faces clearly, but something about the tabards blurred his vision when he tried to place the figures in context with their surroundings.

  “Samanax asma samou!” Monine and Tanus shouted together. They drove their knives down, Monine slashing Moisin’s throat while her brother ripped his blade through the cartilage joining the victim’s ribs to his breastbone. Blood gushed in fountains that seemed too huge to come from a single human being.

  “Keep back, your highness!” somebody behind shouted as Garric ducked under a tree branch on his way toward the altar. The pears were done blooming, but the fruit hadn’t set yet.

  Moisin jerked against his bonds and fell back, his eyes staring and his mouth slackly open. A lens with an icy purple rim formed where previously there’d been only the brick wall at the back of the garden. The opening was big enough to drive a wagon through. Within it, muted walls of the same color as the rim shimmered.

  The twins turned toward the lens. Garric slashed at their backs: honor had no more place in this business than it did in dealing with ticks and leeches. The tip of his patterned steel blade zinged against the bricks well to the side of where he’d been sure Monine was standing. Those tabards....

  The twins stepped through the lens. They remained faintly visible as they ran down the tunnel of light beyond.

  “Get them, lad!” shouted King Carus, but Garric didn’t need anybody prodding him to follow. He leaped to the top of the altar, the ball of his foot on the stone but his boot touching the priest’s flaccid corpse.

  “Your highness!” a soldier behind him cried. “Don’t—”

  Garric leaped into the lens. He felt a shock as though he’d dived through a hole in a frozen river. Monine and Tanus were ahead of him, their figures shrinking more than a few seconds of distance should have caused.

  From behind in the waking world Garric heard, “Follow your prince!” He didn’t know how much use a regiment—or the whole army—would be in whatever business there was on this side of the gateway, but Prince Garric had lost the right to object to other people’s decisions when he jumped into the portal alone.

  He raised his sword high and shouted, “Carus and the Isles!” He wasn’t sure if his men could hear his words, but they made him feel better and that was worth something.

  “Garric and the Isles!” cried other distance-muted voices. “Forward!”

  ***

  For an instant Ilna felt herself suspended in the crackling blue limbo. Then the Bird of the Tide slapped water thunderously, sloshing from side to side. The hatch cover which they’d deliberately left askew jounced half off its frame.

  Nabarbi snarled, “Sister take it!” and reached up to grab the cover.

  “Leave it!” Chalcus said. He continued more mildly, “The Defender’s not so tall a ship that we need worry that they’ll be peering down on us as they approach. Hutena, you and Ninon ready the jug if you will. Or perhaps I—”

  “No, we’ll do it!” the bosun said, though he didn’t look happy. Well, there was little enough to be happy about in the present situation; save that it was the one that Ilna and her companions had worked very hard to bring about.

  Hutena and the seaman together swung back the lid of the iron-bound chest. The odor of camphor flooded the hold. Ilna turned to Chalcus and said in a conversational voice, “You brought reef snakes from Sidras’ store.”

  “We brought all the reef snakes from Sidras’ store, dear heart,” Chalcus said with a grin fit for a crocodile. “Seventeen of them; and I have great hopes for the result when they go to join the Commander’s crew.”

  When the Bird wallowed to starboard, Ilna could see the patrol vessel thrashing toward them with both layers of oarsmen rowing. She supposed the Defender’d reached this stretch of sea not long after Gaur’s wizardry had sent the Bird into his fire-shot Hell. Lusius would’ve lain to until his prey returned to the waking world so he and his gang could loot it.

  Ilna smiled as she ran her noose between her fingers. The night was too dark for her to be confident that her patterns would be effective, but a silken cord tight around an enemy’s neck was always effective.

  Muttering insructions to one another, Hutena and Ninon gripped the rim of the stoppered ceramic jug nestled in a bed of sand and camphor within the strongbox. The jug had a line of holes at the neck—so that the serpents within could breathe, Ilna realized, but a man with small hands like the late Master Pointin might have stuck his fingers through them when he tried to empty the chest so he could hide. The camphor fumes had kept the snakes relatively sluggish during the voyage, but the jouncing and heat of their translation to the Hellworld must’ve aroused them enough to respond when the supercargo offered them his fingers.

  The sailors lifted the jug out of the box. They kept as clear of the openings as they would’ve done so many live coals.

  The Bird of the Tide had steadied after it splashed back into the waking world. Now the vessel began to roll again on the bow wave of the approaching Defender. “Back water!” shouted a hoarse voice with an Ornifal accent.

  The Bird rocked more violently; a pair of grappling irons thumped onto her deck. “Snub them up!” ordered Lusius’ voice. “Casadein, get that pitch ready. After we’ve seen what they were carrying in their hold, we’ll burn her to her waterline!”

  Chalcus rotated his head to meet the eyes of everyone in the hold with him. He grinned and said, “Now!” emphatically but without shouting.

  Tellura and Kulit threw the hatch cover back the rest of the way. Chalcus, Shausga, and Nabarbi leaped up onto the deck; Chalcus had his sword and dagger both ready, while the ordinary seamen leaned back into the hold and grasped the rim of the jug Hutena and Ninon were raising to them.

  A Sea Guard with a sword in one hand and a lantern in the other had just jumped from the Defender’s deck to the Bird’s. He screamed with angry frustration at the men coming out of the hold. Chalcus thrust through his eyesocket and into his brain.

  The Sea Guard sprang backwards convulsively, toppling over the gunwale as the ships recoiled from their first contact. As he fell, Shausga and Nabarbi hurled the jug onto the patrol vessel with all their strength. It shattered among the oarsmen rising from their benches.

  Ilna followed the men, holding her noose slack in both hands. Many of the Defender’s crew held lanterns as they prepared to board. In the bow stood a pair of Guards with a large wooden bucket and a flaring torch: the pitch Lusius had mentioned, ready to destroy the Bird of the Tide as soon as his men had looted her.

  A pair of Sea Guards wobbled on the patrol vessel’s railing, swords in their hands. Nabarbi snatched the boat pike from its socket on the mast. As the nearer of the Guards jumped, Nabarbi thrust him through the chest, shoving him back into his comrade.

  Both Guards fell into the sea. Our Brother rose in a fount
ain of spray to meet them. The big seawolf’s jaws clopped shut, tossing an arm which still clutched a sword back aboard the Defender.

  At least a dozen Sea Guards screamed simultaneously, sounding like they were being disemboweled. The lower rank of oarsmen wouldn’t normally have risen until their fellows in the upper rank had cleared the walkway. Now the deck lifted like the ground during an earthquake as men lunged upward to escape the death slithering down through the ventilators onto them.

  Chalcus jumped aboard the Defender, his sword and dagger gleaming in the lanternlight. The men with the bucket and torch went down, as suddenly dead as if they’d been lightningstruck. The torch fell to the deck; Chalcus kicked the bucket of pitch over beside it, then sprang backwards onto the Bird. He moved with the formal grace of a peasant dancing with ram’s horns bound to his feet at a borough fete. The pitch roared into flame, spreading as it burned.

  Hutena hacked at a grappling iron with his axe. The leader was chain, but a clean blow using the Bird’s gunwale as a chopping block parted it in a shower of sparks. The vessels began to swing apart, though the grapnel farther astern still bound them.

  “We’re afire!” a Sea Guard screamed. “We’re afire! Oh Lady help us!”

  Ilna noted that she hadn’t heard Rincip’s voice. Perhaps Lusius hadn’t bothered to pick up his former second-in-command in his haste to run down the Bird of the Tide. That might have been the best luck yet in Rincip’s whole miserable life....

  A group of Sea Guards—more than a handful; in the confusion and scattered light, numbers were even more doubtful than usually—leaped from the patrol vessel to the Bird. Chalcus and his crew met them. Ilna stayed back, letting the fight weave into her consciousness. When the pattern required her action, she would act.

  Shausga and Ninon were cutting at the remaining grappling iron. Their cutlasses didn’t have the authority of the axe and, they were getting in each other’s way besides. At least one of the would-be boarders missed his footing and went straight into the sea boiling with the blood-maddened violence of Our Brother.