Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  “May I ask your highness where we do want to go?” Degtel asked over his shoulder. He was a young man, quite handsome, and—judging by the quality of the gold inlays on his black armor—from a very wealthy family.

  There were—there seemed to be—shapes frozen into the walls, and the floor was so clear that Garric could see things moving beneath the ice. Once the movement was accompanied by a flash of teeth, any of which was as long as a man.

  “We’re going to the place Lady Tenoctris’ art tells us will bring an end to the business,” Garric said. He grinned at a sort of humor he wouldn’t’ve have known if he didn’t share his mind with a warrior like Carus. “Or to Hell, of course, if we get there first.”

  Degtel, as surely a warrior as the ancient king, barked laughter.

  “If it’s Hell,” said the veteran on Garric’s right, “then we’ll bring an escort with us like the Sister never saw before!”

  “That’s the bloody truth!” agreed his partner on the left.

  Garric laughed with the others. There were no longer any questions or vexed decisions. The task was quite simple, and the only doubt was whether their swordarms were strong enough to accomplish it.

  Something far down the corridor was coming toward them. Quite simple....

  ***

  The direction of down changed more times than Cashel could count. Light flickered the way lightning stutters between cloud tops instead of crossing in a single bolt. Cashel didn’t move, so he kept his balance when the shifting stopped.

  The whirlpool of wizardlight vanished and with it the sensation of movement. Cashel’s feet were planted on firm ground—a little damp, mossy rather than grass-covered. He was standing under a pear tree in a garden; part of the Count’s palace, he guessed, though not a part he’d seen before. There was any number of soldiers coming through the door in the building, but a pair of cavalry officers from Lord Waldron’s staff were there to keep the newcomers from crowding in too fast.

  Cashel must’ve just popped out of the air so far as the soldiers tramping past were concerned, but nobody said anything or even looked surprised. As a matter of fact, they didn’t really look at him, even the men whose eyes were turned in his direction.

  The line coming out of the palace led to a narrow stone table at the back wall of the garden. Behind it, mostly where the brick wall ought to be, was a shimmering purple oval. Soldiers climbed steps made from lengths of pillars set on end, then jumped through the disk of light. An officer in high boots stood at the base of the steps, using his sword like a baton to keep men from rushing up before the fellow ahead was through the disk.

  There were three steps: a section of column not much thicker than Cashel’s thigh; a taller section that was also about twice as big around; and another of the little columns set on top of another big one. They didn’t have a proper foundation, so a Blood Eagle noncom squatted beside the double step to brace it.

  Beside the table lay a dead man, opened up like a fish for frying. There was blood all over the stone and the ground around it, which explained why the corpse’s skin had the pale yellow look of beeswax. Cashel hoped he’d deserved it; but he didn’t know what you’d have to do to deserve what happened to that fellow.

  “What’s happening?” Cashel said to a man in line. The fellow kept shuffling forward, so Cashel walked along with him. “Where’re you going?”

  “We’re going to Hell to fight demons,” the soldier muttered. He didn’t look up as he spoke. “Some demon grabbed Prince Garric and the whole army’s supposed to go get him back. That’s what I heard, anyhow.”

  “We’re going to Hell, that’s no rumor!” said the man ahead over his shoulder. “Look at that thing we’re supposed to jump through! It’s wizard work!”

  “Just sitting down to dinner and the trumpet sounds,” said the first man. “We don’t even get to die on a full stomach. May the Sister take all wizards!”

  “Well, there’s some good ones,” Cashel said mildly. He frowned. “One good one, anyhow.”

  He’d met his share of wizards since Tenoctris washed ashore in Barca’s Hamlet, but even if pushed he couldn’t think of another that he’d really call “good.” There’s been no few powerful wizards, which was a different thing; and the Sister was welcome to every one of them so far as Cashel was concerned.

  He and the two soldiers were nearing the base of the steps up to the purple disk. Neither man seemed frightened, for all they said they expected to die. They weren’t happy, but they kept shuffling forward as fast as the line allowed. The man Cashel’d started talking to snugged up a buckle on his breastplate that he’d missed in his hasty departure from camp.

  Cashel nodded in understanding. He guessed that was what he looked like when he went out to the byre in a rainstorm to calm the sheep. He knew he’d be cold and miserable, and the folks who owned the flock wouldn’t bother to thank him. It was his job, though, and somebody had to do it.

  “I think the sheep appreciate it,” Cashel said aloud. The soldiers were lost again in their thoughts. They probably didn’t hear what he said, and if they had they wouldn’t have understood it.

  “Hold it!” snapped the officer at the base of the steps as the first of the two soldiers who’d been talking with Cashel started up. He stuck his long sword out. The man ahead was still climbing.

  “I’ll go up ahead of them, sir,” Cashel said politely to the officer. He wished he’d had room to give his staff a trial spin, but this garden with the trees and all the soldiers in it was just too tight for that. “I’m a friend of Garric’s.”

  Cashel put his foot on the bottom step. The officer’s face went red. He grabbed the throat of Cashel’s tunic with his left hand and raised his sword. “You peasant scum!” he shouted. “You’ll get out of here now or I’ll feed you to the dogs in pieces!”

  “Lord Artis!” said the Blood Eagle who’d been chocking the steps. He straightened, holding his hands up toward the staff officer. His blackened-bronze helmet had its crest crosswise instead of front and back; that meant he had some rank also, though Cashel had never tried to keep that sort of thing straight. “He really is a friend of his highness! That’s Lord Cashel!”

  “I don’t care of he’s King Valence the Third!” the officer shouted. “Civilians haven’t any business in this affair!”

  “Garric’s friends do, though,” said Cashel in a growl that he could barely understand himself. He hadn’t realized how angry he was that something’d happened to Garric while he was off in a place where he rightly didn’t have any business.

  The officer was nervous too and probably angry that orders kept him back here and not up with the fighting. At another time Cashel might’ve sympathized with him.

  But not now.

  Cashel rapped the officer’s right hand with his quarterstaff; the man shouted and dropped his sword. Cashel grabbed him by the throat and took a step toward the back wall. The fellow’d lost his grip on Cashel’s tunic when the staff numbed his other hand; his face, red to start with, bulged and turned purple.

  Cashel cocked his right arm, then straightened it in something between pushing and throwing. The officer flew over the brick wall. It wasn’t a clean toss—his heels caught on the coping and flipped him into what would probably be a complete somersault when he landed on the other side—but it was enough to get the fellow out of Cashel’s way.

  “I’m going to find Garric now,” Cashel said to the Blood Eagle in a husky voice. He was breathing hard.

  “So are the rest of us, milord,” said the Blood Eagle, gesturing toward the lens of purple light. “Just don’t hold the line up, if you please.”

  “Right,” said Cashel. He climbed the steps deliberately, planting his feet with care because he knew that somebody his weight’d push the steps over if he came down skew. With the staff angled in front of him, he stepped into the disk.

  “Bloody wizard’s work!” muttered the soldier following on his heels.

  ***

  “Maste
r Alfdan’s gone!” cried Werbeg, a big man who’d been a wine merchant before She came. “What’ll we do! We can’t run!”

  “We’ll fight, of course,” said Sharina, raising her voice to be heard though she didn’t shout. “Line up to either side of me. I’ve got the axe and I’ll, I’ll try....”

  Werbeg’s panic disgusted Sharina. She was very frightened. Her legs shook. She watched the portal open to spew hellspawn in the certainty that she was about to die; but she was human and this was evil, so of course she’d fight.

  “Oh, many more lives!” Beard chortled. “Rivers of blood for Beard to drink, blood and lives and hot, steaming brains!”

  The men had wadded a buffalo robe into a plug for the hole by which they’d entered the cavern; wind-swirled ice crystals had set it in place. There was probably ice inches thick over it now. They could break it clear, but not instantly, and what kind of escape would the glacial desert of the surface provide?

  Neal looked around the company, holding an arrow between two fingers to his bow’s handgrip. He seemed to have recovered from his shock at losing Alfdan. “You other archers,” he said in a commanding voice. “Nock an arrow and get ready. Dalin, your bow’s not strung! String it, man! Do you want to die?”

  The rim of violet light rotated slowly like a bit boring through wood. The center of the circle remained gray, but it was becoming paler and increasingly translucent even as the edge solidified into what looked like shimmering purple metal.

  Old Burness knelt and started whimpering. He had a hunting spear with a broad engraved head and a crossbar below it to keep a maddened boar from running his body up the shaft and gutting the man who’d speared him. Even rusty it was an effective weapon—but not in Burness’ hands.

  Neal must’ve thought the same thing. He caught Sharina’s eye, then snapped, “Franca, trade that spear you’ve got with Burness. Quick now!”

  Franca’s spear was actually the head and two feet of shaft from a weapon broken in the fight with the fauns. The youth looked startled. He started toward Burness, then paused in doubt.

  “Burness!” Neal said. “Now! Give your spear to somebody who’ll use it!”

  “Franca, take it,” Sharina said. “I need you by me.”

  In her heart she didn’t feel she needed anything: she was about to die, and there wasn’t room for any other awareness. Franca hesitated no longer; he snatched away the boar spear and pressed the stub shaft of his own into Burness’ hand. The older man stood up, hugging the exiguous weapon. He continued to sniffle, but at least he looked willing to defend himself.

  The center of the disk of light had become soap-bubble thin. Figures waited beyond it, some of them beasts and the others bestial at least from the distortion.

  The membrane vanished as though it never was. “Kill!” screamed Sharina as she lunged forward. She hadn’t had the least intention of giving that battlecry until she and the moment merged.

  A thing with the forequarters of a lion and lizard haunches leaped to meet her. It wore iron gauntlets whose tips were knives.

  “Kill!” cried Beard and Sharina together, and their mutual stroke split the creature’s flat skull like an eggshell. It arched its back as violently as a catapult releasing, lifting Sharina into the air. An arrow from behind her grazed her left calf, then vanished down the gullet of the froglike creature waiting with its huge jaws open. That was probably chance, but it was a lucky chance for her....

  Sharina came down in the midst of monsters. She wouldn’t have been able to stand upright were it not for the crowd of enemies. She swung—Beard swung; the steel killer’s own volition guided it—right and left. The edge ripped apart an octopus on human legs, and the axe in recovering spiked the temple of a faun like the ones who’d attacked Alfdan’s band on the shore of Barca’s Hamlet.

  In the space cleared by the falling monsters, Sharina spun widdershins on the balls of her feet, using Beard’s narrow blade like a scythe. There was a shower of sparks as the axe sheared through scales, fangs, and the iron carapace of a creature that looked like a giant helmet walking on crabs’ legs. She felt no resistance to the blow. Blood and ichor gouted as monsters collapsed or fell apart.

  Beard laughed like a demon. The axe was a demon, as horrible and far more deadly than the thing with a hedgehog’s face and hands like balls of needles which he beheaded at the end of his circular sweep. Beard was her demon for now, and at this juncture she’d willingly take him against all the saints who ever lived.

  “Save the mistress!” cried Franca in a voice as squeaky as a six-year-old’s. He rammed his boar spear into the throat of a snake crawling on hundreds of tiny legs as it struck at Sharina. The creature writhed onto its back, fanged jaws working convulsively and spraying a mist of saffron poison.

  Men and monsters battled behind Sharina. Toward her came a spider the size of a haywain. It walked on long glass legs; its body was either clear or dazzling with prismatic reflections, depending on the angle of the light. Its mandibles clicked against one another, dripping green venom from their tips.

  “Blood and brains!” Beard shrieked. “Blood and—”

  Sharina swung the axe high, using the full length of her arms and both hands on the helve. The reasoning part of her mind wondered if Beard wouldn’t shatter on the glittering thing the way an ordinary axe would break if driven into a granite cliff.

  Reason didn’t control Sharina’s actions at this instant. She was filled with the same bloodlust that Beard caroled as his bright steel face shed ropes of blood. As the spider reached for her with its forelegs, she smashed the axe into the middle of the creature’s flat face.

  A flash of crimson wizardlight pierced the ice in all directions. It illuminated both the sea bottom and cloud-huge bladders with dangling tentacles which swam through the sky above the ceiling of coruscance. The spider disintegrated into shimmering dust finer than jeweler’s rouge.

  The corridor ahead was empty save for a small man or woman sauntering toward them from a furlong away. Sharina looked behind her, at carnage. Half the band was down, dead or crippled, and all the survivors except her were bleeding.

  Burness was dead; his blackened, bloated body was almost unrecognizable. He’d lost his grip on the half-spear in his final convulsions. The man-sized creature that killed him, a black-and-red striped wasp walking on its hind legs, lay nearby. The short shaft stuck out of its faceted right eye.

  Scoggin and Franca were both alive, though the older man had been stabbed or bitten through the left shoulder. Franca’d packed the wound with a portion of Burness’ silk sash and was wrapping it with the rest of the sash to hold the wad in. The youth showed a deft hand for basic wound dressing.

  Sharina reached down to rub the inside of her right calf, then looked at what she was doing and giggled. She was bleeding after all, though not badly. The arrow’d broken the skin and the cut itched like fury.

  Her giggle became a loud chuckle. If the wound were worse—if the arrow’d smashed a bone, say—she’d have been in shock and wouldn’t feel any discomfort.

  “What do we do now, mistress?” Neal asked. Blood matted the left side of his scalp, but his eyes focused and his voice was firm. Instead of his bow he held a sledge hammer, its shaft forged from the same piece of iron as the head. Sharina hadn’t seen the weapon before; one of the slaughtered monsters must have carried it.

  “We’ll continue up this corridor,” Sharina said, speaking firmly to give the impression she knew what she was doing. Though in a manner of speaking, she did know: either they went on or they went back, and ‘back’ meant an ice desert where the only life was hostile to men. “I think we’d better get going at once, before She sends something else against us.”

  “She’s already sent something, mistress,” said Beard in a dreamy, sated voice. “See him coming? His name’s Tanus.”

  Sharina turned again to the figure she’d discounted in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Tanus was now within fifty feet, a pale youth with short b
lond hair and a supercilious grin.

  Sharina’s eyes narrowed. She couldn’t be sure of how close Tanus was because the tabard he wore over his tunics was woven in a pattern that didn’t allow her eyes to focus. In his right hand was a curved knife with a silvery blade. It looked like a ceremonial tool, but the blood smearing it was so fresh that it still dripped.

  “You’re one of Count Lascarg’s children, aren’t you?” Sharina said. She recalled the face, but without Beard’s identification she’d have had to guess whether the androgynous features were male or female. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to kill you,” Tanus said in a thin, childish voice. “I’m going to kill you all.”

  “Tell the Sister that!” said Werbeg on a rising intonation. He took two steps forward and flung his javelin at Tanus’ chest with all his strength. When the missile left his hand the point was almost in contact with the youth. It missed, clattering down the ice corridor.

  Tanus laughed. He slashed at Werbeg, cutting his throat in the middle of a scream of terror.

  Neal snarled and brought the hammer around in a horizontal stroke that should have torn Tanus in half. The force of the blow saved Neal’s life by jerking him to the side when the sledge didn’t connect. The youth’s knife opened the skin over his back ribs instead of gutting him.

  Sharina moved without thinking, swinging Beard high. Tanus faced her with an expression of ecstasy. She saw his moon-bladed knife sliding toward her belly. The axe twisted in her hands, keen edge slanting away from the grinning face of the youth who was about to kill her.

  The thunk! of contact surprised her. Beard had split the youth’s skull down to the bridge of his nose.

  Sharina waggled the helve in a reflex she’d learned since she came to this world. The axe came free, slobbering joyfully. Tanus crumpled to his knees and fell backward. When his tabard rucked up, she could see him clearly; but not until then.

  “Oh, it’s been a long time since Beard fed on wizard brains!” the axe said. “Oh, mistress, you’re so good to Beard!”