Goddess of the Ice Realm

by David Drake

  He strode toward the tunnel mouth, shouldering men out of the way when he needed to. He didn’t bother to wait for Garric to agree; he and his quarterstaff were the best choice for the job. Cashel didn’t need anybody, even a close friend, to tell him so.

  Close up to the tunnel, the soldiers were packed too tight for even Cashel to shove them aside without breaking bones or worse. “Make way!” he said. “Garric sent me! Ah, Prince Garric sent me!”

  From where he was now, Cashel could hear the screams even better. Blood sprayed high enough for him to see over the heads of the men ahead, and once a man’s arm flew up.

  For a moment not much happened. He was about to use his staff as a lever when somebody shouted, “It’s the big wizard! Let him through! He can sort’em out!”

  Cashel frowned. He wasn’t any kind of wizard, but he’d always told himself he didn’t care what people called him and this didn’t seem the time to get huffy about it.

  Sure enough, men peeled away from the back of the crowd. When the ones behind stopped pushing, the soldiers actually facing the enemy broke like the plug squirting from a squeezed waterskin.

  Cashel stepped forward, spinning his staff. He saw the enemy for the first time.

  They were man-sized and more or less man-shaped, but he wasn’t sure he’d have seen they were individual figures if it hadn’t been for the wizardlight quivering at their core—some red and some blue. Their arms ended in blades of the same cold, clear ice as their bodies. There was no doubt about the edges being sharp: all those in the front row were gory, and the ground was smeared with the blood, bits of equipment, and severed limbs left behind by soldiers who’d withdrawn into the rotunda.

  The icemen stumped along more like hoarfrost spreading across bare dirt than the way men walk, but they had the same purposeful direction as plow oxen. They weren’t going to stop; they had to be stopped.

  Well, that’s what Cashel had come to do.

  He strode into them, swinging his staff sunwise as a feint. An iceman on his right lurched ahead of its fellows, an arm extended toward Cashel. The limb looked more like a spear than a sword held in a human’s arm.

  Cashel reversed the staff’s spin, bringing a buttcap against the iceman’s featureless head in a stroke that would’ve knocked in a thick door. The creature flew apart like an icicle dropped onto stone. The wizardlight filling it flashed out in a crimson thunderbolt.

  The blast seemed to stun the rest of the icemen for an instant. Cashel felt only a mild tingling in his hands, nothing that prevented him from slamming the opposite ferrule into the midriff of another creature. It blew itself apart just like the first, rocking the nearest of its fellows the way a flung stone throws ripples across a pond.

  Cashel’d intended to strike quickly and back away to judge how effective he’d been; he’d never fought anything like these icemen before, and the first thing you do in a fight is take the measure of the other fellow. There wasn’t much doubt that hard, quick blows were the right medicine, and if each time he struck he numbed the survivors too—

  Plenty of people had said that Cashel wasn’t very bright, but nobody’d ever doubted he understood how to win fights. He continued forward, striking right and left with the thunderous speed of raindrops in a thunderstorm.

  Shards of ice stung and even bruised the bare skin of his face and arms. He ignored that as he ignored the shouts of the men behind him. The quarterstaff wasn’t long enough that he could clear the passage as he walked down the middle, so he punched a hole through the glittering creatures. The ones on the sides came at him from behind—but not without him noticing, because he kept his head moving in quick jerks to either side. He saw motion, not figures, at the edges of his vision but that was enough to warn him.

  There might be too many of them, before and behind, for him to strike them all before they cut him to collops like the poor dead soldiers whose bodies he shuffled through as he advanced. If that happened, it happened. He’d do what he could till he died.

  There were three figures in front of him. Cashel struck right, left, and right. The silent, searing gusts of light left him blinking away afterimages. There was movement behind him. He turned and stumbled to his knees; his legs bent like ivy runners. He slammed down the butt of his quarterstaff and clung to the shaft to keep from sprawling face-first on the ice.

  Two surviving icemen approached him, splotches of red and blue as Cashel’s blurry eyes tried to focus. He tried to heave himself to his feet. He couldn’t move.

  There was additional movement; Cashel’s vision cleared. The young officer who’d gasped to Garric a tale of unstoppable monsters stood behind this remaining pair of them. He held the butt portion of a pikestaff which had broken at the handgrip; it was thicker and filled with lead to balance the weight of the front two-thirds of the long shaft.

  The youth swung the club over his head. He smashed first one, then the other iceman into light and shards as cold as death.

  More men ran past the young officer, grasping Cashel’s arms and helping him up. One of them tried to take the quarterstaff. “No!” Cashel said in a snarl that was scarcely human.

  The youth dropped his broken pike and held out his right arm to Cashel. “Milord,” he said. His voice was a croak. “Milord!”

  Cashel shrugged off the hands of well-meaning soldiers trying to support him. He took a step forward on his own, feeling strength start to return as he moved.

  He took his right hand from the quarterstaff and clasped arms with the youth who’d saved his life. The boy was slender as a reed and trembling with fear and reaction; it was like holding a sparrow.

  There was a great shout from the rotunda. “C’mon, milord,” Cashel said in a rusty, hesitant voice. “They need us there. Our job’s not done yet.”

  ***

  Ilna saw the hole growing, not in the sky but in the world itself. Layers peeled back so that a pulsing absence of light replaced the open air with its view of clouds scudding over a background of chalky blue. When she judged the passage was open—a matter of only a few heartbeats from when the rupture appeared; the Rua were as skillful in their arts as Ilna was in her own—she nodded approvingly and said to Chalcus, “All right. Let’s go.”

  “Dear heart?” he said, meeting her eyes with a worried expression. “Go where? I don’t see....”

  He waggled his sword. To him the point danced in air as empty as it was before the winged men wove their patterns in the sky.

  Ilna smiled crisply and extended her right hand to his left. “Come,” she said. “I’ll lead.”

  She stepped forward, into a textured emptiness which she understood; and Chalcus came with her, into something he couldn’t even see. He’d have done the same thing, she knew, if she’d jumped off the cliff instead. All the more reason not to fail him... but then, Ilna had never been able to understand people who considered failure an acceptable choice.

  Ilna moved through the passage much as she’d have walked across a familiar room in the darkness. The Rua had cut an opening between their world and another, not so much by art as with the same dogged skill that a beetle uses to bore through wood. It followed paths of lesser difficulty rather than taking the shortest route through the cosmos.

  Ilna wasn’t sure that she could have created the pattern herself—her different skills didn’t lend themselves to a task of this sort—but she could understand it as easily as she understood how to breathe. She moved forward, feeling nothing under her feet but moving anyway. Chalcus’ fingers tightened minutely, an extra pressure she wouldn’t have noticed except that she knew how perfectly controlled his movements usually were.

  She saw and heard nothing. She could feel Chalcus’ hand, but she touched nothing of this world or place or not-place they moved through. When she turned slightly to the left—as she did—or pausing for a moment—as she did also, not out of indecision but because the way wasn’t yet clear—she made easy, natural choices.

  After an uncertain length of time, she
stepped into light and cold; a real world, solid to a fault and less welcoming than the featureless dark through which the Rua had gnawed their passage. She stood at the juncture of three high tunnels in the ice. Two of them had walls of red light; the third was blue. The ice where they joined was a sullen mauve, pulsing with the slow rhythm of a snake’s throat contracting to drag down its latest victim.

  Chalcus was beside her, looking in all directions. He detached his hand from Ilna’s and flick/flicked his sword through the air. He was just proving that his muscles worked the way they should, she supposed; though being Chalcus, he might have decided to slash some dust mote in half as well.

  “So, dear one...,” he said. “Did our winged friends tell you which way we go from here?”

  He continued to scan their surroundings, but with less urgency. When Chalcus first reappeared beside her, he’d thrashed about like a dog being swarmed by hornets. The three long, straight passages were empty for as far as Ilna could see. That didn’t mean danger couldn’t threaten them at any instant, but it made it less likely that it would.

  “No,” said Ilna, her lips pursing as she looked at the ice about her. “You heard everything they said to me. But....”

  Things were frozen in the walls—tiny fish, no more than a finger’s length long, with bits of weed and other flotsam like what the sea threw up on the beach of Barca’s Hamlet; but fragments of corpses as well. Some of the pieces came from men or maybe men, but others couldn’t possibly have been human.

  “Chalcus,” she said, “we need to go down this blue tunnel. I’m sure we do.”

  “Aye,” he said, smiling like a brilliant sunrise; his cheerful humor was never more welcome than in a grim setting like this. “I knew you’d find the route, dear heart. Whatever the pattern is, you can see it.”

  “Perhaps, but that’s not what I mean,” said Ilna, irritated despite herself at flattery when there wasn’t time for it. There was never time for flattery... though of course what Chalcus had said was true, or at least she’d be surprised to learn it wasn’t true.

  “Chalcus, I recognize this place.” She gestured with her right hand. “I’ve never seen it before, but I remember it, I remember watching it being built.”

  “In a vision you mean, dearest?” he said. His eyes never rested on her longer than they did on any other thing about him, but his voice was warm with real concern. “A dream, perhaps?”

  “Nothing,” snapped Ilna. “I don’t recall ever seeing this, any of this, before. But I remember it, do you see? And I don’t know how!”

  “Then let’s go on,” said Chalcus with a faint, hard smile. “The sooner we’ve come to the end of this business, the sooner we’ll never have to think about the place again. For though I won’t say I’ve never been in a place that less appealed to me, dearest—”

  Chuckling, he waggled his sword as a curved pointer.

  “—I will say I’ve never been in a place that less appealed to me an’ I was sober enough to remember.”

  Ilna nodded coldly. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  But before she stepped forward, she touched Chalcus’ left hand again with her fingertips. He twisted his palm upward to squeeze her in turn.

  They both wore shoes which they’d put on aboard the Bird of the Tide to walk the cobblestone streets of Terness and the passages of Lusius’ castle. Ilna didn’t like shoes, but now the thick leather soles kept her feet from freezing as might’ve happened otherwise. The cold wasn’t the worst of the discomfort, but it was a discomfort.

  Her footsteps and those of Chalcus beside her were lost in the creaks and groaning which she supposed were the ice working. She’d heard similar sounds on the very coldest winters while she was growing up, when the shore of the Inner Sea froze out toward the eastern horizon.

  She wasn’t sure that was what she was hearing, though, because sometimes she thought she saw movement in the clear, glowing ice. That might have been a trick of the light or distortion from unseen fractures as she glanced while walking past, but in this place there were other possibilities. She remembered sheets of wizardlight acting as warp and woof, weaving tunnels out of open water. Things had begun to grow in it at once, the way weevils appear in meal left uncovered....

  They neared an intersection; not a simple Y this time but a joining of five tunnels. The plaza in the middle had high, flat walls, one for each tunnel. Chalcus held up his left hand.

  “We take the second one to the right,” Ilna said.

  “And so we shall, dearest,” Chalcus replied, his dagger now out as well as the sword. “But first I—”

  Chalcus swung into the intersection, his sword and the dagger slashing in opposite directions. He landed flat-footed in the center of the space, his head twitching to either side while his body poised to react to a threat from any direction.

  He relaxed, not that anybody but Ilna would’ve recognized the difference. “Only us, dearest,” Chalcus said, his eyes continuing to search the four tunnels besides the one she was in. “We can go on, I’m thinking... and I’m thinking that the less time we spend in one place, the better off we are.”

  “Yes,” said Ilna. She grimaced. “Chalcus, let me go ahead.”

  “I—” he said, protest in his voice but without turning to face her.

  “There’s as much risk from behind as there is ahead,” she said sharply. “I... I’m remembering things that I’ve never seen, Master Chalcus. I’m afraid that if I’m in the rear, I’ll get lost in what never happened. And I’ll miss what’s creeping up on us.”

  She paused. I can tell him the truth, she thought; and, with a fierce anger blurted, “Chalcus, I hate this! I’m going mad, and I can’t trust my own mind!”

  He gestured her ahead of him with his empty left hand. “I much misdoubt that you’re going mad, dear one,” he said with a grin that only a fool would think amusing. “I think instead that there’s someone very clever in this place who is not our friend; and the quicker we’ve slit that someone’s throat, the better. Not so?”

  “So,” agreed Ilna striding across the intersection and proceeding up a corridor glowing the same deep red as a demon’s eyes. In her memory the roots of a Tree grew through the ice, sucking nourishment out of the world itself. The root that formed this tunnel still filled it, though not in a fashion that the eyes of her body could see.

  She strode on. The Tree’s bark was as smooth as human skin, and its branches waved like serpents, writhed like the tentacles of the great ammonites, the Old Ones of the Deep. There was no evil in the cosmos that a tendril of the Tree’s roots did not touch....

  Ilna came to another intersection and stepped through it without pausing. She no longer feared things that might wait in ambush. Nothing could surprise her in her present state. She smiled; the curve of her lips was as hard and cold as the ice itself.

  She’d known the Tree in Hell—a year ago or a lifetime, depending on how you counted time. In exchange for Ilna’s soul, the Tree had taught her to weave as only Gods and demons could, and she’d used her new skill to the Tree’s ends.

  There’d been no more effective minion of evil than Ilna os-Kenset—till Garric had freed her. Neither Garric nor anything else could free Ilna from the memory of what she had done in those months when she fed the Tree’s tendrils.

  Ilna reached another intersection. She was barely conscious of it. The floor here bore footprints crossing left to right. They looked human, but whatever had made them was so heavy that its feet had sunk into the ice, stressing it white in blotches around each print.

  Ilna walked on. A figure ahead sauntered toward them.

  “Chalcus,” she said, “there’s an enemy coming, a girl.”

  “I see her,” Chalcus said appraisingly. “I couldn’t have told her for a girl, though, at this distance.”

  “Her name is Monine,” said Ilna. It no longer bothered her that she remembered what she hadn’t seen. “She’s a wizard and very dangerous.”

  “Danger?” sa
id Chalcus. He laughed. “In this place, what else would we find?”

  His sword cut a tight figure-8, making the cold air whistle.

  “I’ll lead, shall I, dear one?” he said, stepping past Ilna with the sword slanted out to his side. Its point quivered like the nose of a hound straining as it waits for its leash to be slipped.

  “Chalcus, be careful,” Ilna said. “She’s not what she seems.”

  “Ah,” Chalcus said, his low voice as eager as his blade. “But I am what I seem, dear heart.”

  They neared the sexless figure walking down the center of the tunnel. Monine’s lips curved in a bloodless smile. Her knife echoed the curve, and there was blood enough for any number of smiles on its blade.

  “So, Mistress Monine,” Chalcus called. “Have you business with us? If not, then my friend and I are willing to pass by and forget we’ve met.”

  “I have the business of killing you,” said Monine. She laughed, a high, glittering sound like jade wind chimes. “But I’ve always found killing more pleasure than business, and it will be a particular pleasure this time.”

  “Chalcus, the cloth of her tabard!” Ilna said. No eye but hers could’ve traced the pattern woven in brilliant colors, but even Ilna was helpless against it. The fabric was a net, catching eyes—even Ilna’s—and snatching them away from their intent as surely as a fisherman draws his catch from the sea. “You won’t be able to see her! She won’t—”

  Chalcus slashed, a blow as quick and smooth as the play of light on a dew drop. His sword touched nothing. Monine’s knife came up arrow-swift; swifter yet, Chalcus’ dagger blocked the stroke with the ring of steel on steel.

  He hopped back, his mouth open and his breath a cloud before him in the still, cold air. He lunged, his sword a curved extension of his right arm. His steel punctured emptiness, and again Monine stabbed for his heart. Her blade sang on the slim dagger, locking it guard to guard. Sparks showered and Chalcus jumped back again.

  Ilna held her cords ready but she didn’t knot a pattern because it’d be useless—the tabard would trap her art as surely as it trapped her eyes and the eyes of as good a swordsman as had ever been born. Instead she backed, giving Chalcus space to retreat—as he did again when his sword flicked and missed, and the bloody knife sought him.