The Lady of the Snowmist (War of the Gods on Earth Book 3)

by Andrew J Offutt

  Jilain’s eyes widened and her mouth came open. Near the far wall of the chamber, Metanira had drawn back a curtain to reveal a niche with smooth walls of pale yellow. Within the niche was a sunken place in the floor. It was faced with sky-colored god-metal or something similar and impossible, all smooth and shiny. Jarik tried not to look at Metanira’s backside while she bent over the long oval depression. He knew what she was doing, though he had no idea how it was effected or accomplished. He knew too that it would give Jilain a start. Jutting from the wall above the sunken area was the arching neck and head of an eider, wrought in burnished copper that was like gold. From its open beak water now commenced to gush! From the wall!

  “Oh!”

  Jarik smiled at Jilain’s unconscious little exclamation. Metanira did not turn but supervised the noisy gushing of clear water into the sunken tub. He remembered how before he had tried so hard to seem sophisticated; to accept. Now he felt so, for Jilain was become the naive barbarian who could only stare at this awesome yet not intimidating sorcery of a god.

  The tub was filling rapidly with the noisy gush. Metanira turned.

  “It will soon be full, and is neither hot nor cold. Shall I bathe you?”

  Jilain’s hand reached back blindly. “Jarik — ”

  “As you wish. Please enjoy it. I will be near. No one means us harm here, Jilain.” I think. I hope. Only I came here intending harm — I hope. But not to you, O my Jilish!

  She clamped his hand in hers. “Jarik — stay. Please stay. There is room for twa. See?”

  “Our.two naked bodies will not be in that tub together, Jilain.”

  “But — ” She broke off, tried another tack: “Then stay, then. Stay, while one … washes herself. One will not mind — one will be happier!”

  “I will not,” Jarik said firmly, and extricated his hand from hers.

  Coward, he told himself. Send at me a score of warriors or even demons, and I am ready to face them. But I fear this woman I love — no; it is Jarik I fear, not her. I fear for her because I do love her. I will not, not! We must not … unite.

  Metanira terminated the water’s flow. Water stood in the tub to a height of mid-calf, or nearly.

  “Lady,” she said, “please. The water is neither hot nor cold. Please undress. Shall I bathe you?”

  “No!” Jilain swung to face Jarik — and he was gone. Staring at the doorway, a high esthetically delightful arch edged in pink and silver, she felt a stinging pressure behind her eyes. There lay his armor coat, she noticed. The Black Sword was gone. Oh yes. He loves it above anything or anyone, that blighty soord! Then, lips firm and head high, she turned to Metanira. “Yes.”

  Metanira made no comment on that swift change of this guest’s wish, and her features maintained their serenely equable expression. She aided or “aided” Jilain in removing weapon belt and tunic — staring at the ruby called llanket without remarking on that remarkable part of Jilain’s body — and tried to aid the other woman in stripping off the leggings. Jilain was even less accustomed to such cloying gear than to clothing on her upper body, for she had worn the leggings but twenty-four hours — for the first time in her life. In her attempt to get them off she staggered and realized that she had better sit down, or give conscious concentration to balance.

  “Oh go,” she said angrily. “Go and help Jarik! This one will see to her own needs. Who needs you? Who needs him?”

  Without demurrer or indeed any sort of reply, dullvoiced Metanira left her.

  *

  Jarik had taken his weapon belt when he left that chamber because he was not comfortable without it; without the Black Sword. And because he was mindful of his true mission. He was agent of the Iron Lords, and the controlling bracers were gone from his wrists.

  They had turned right into the chamber where he now left Jilain and Metanira. Accordingly he turned left on leaving. He walked up that corridor between pastel walls.

  Several minutes later he came to the corridor’s end; a wall of living stone. But this was not possible! Frowning, he pushed, strained, tugged, patted about the stone, peered at it. It was true rock. Yet he was sure it had not been here before, that they had turned rightward to enter that chamber where the bath awaited … No. He must be mistaken. He retraced his steps, still wearing the frown. How could it be that they had come that way and now he could not return in the same wise in that same direction? How was it that now immovable stone barred the way?

  I must be mistaken. That’s all. And back he went. The thoughts would not stop coming, though; they brought another answer, possible because it was impossible. Because I am in the keep of a god, he thought. No one knows what limits there are to the powers of gods. Even those limits I think I know may be false, and not limits at all. Have the Iron Lords, gods, lied to me? Has She?

  He remembered words; were they words of the Guide? “If a man should make exception and contend that his statements and opinions are capable of admitting contrary qualities, his contention is unsound.” Yes, he remembered that, and it affected him and his thinking and comprehension. Yet he also remembered another statement, from the same occasion: “There are intermediate hues between the contrarieties of black and white.”

  Then some things might be so and not so? Then good could shade into bad? A good person (or god!) was capable of doing bad — without being bad? Could there be so and nearly so; truth and not-quite-truth? Truth that shifted into falsity?

  Then what about open corridors that became closed?

  Did the Iron Lords try to slay me out there on the sea, or did they perhaps not know I was on the ship? Is the White

  Rod more important to them than I am, so that for it they were willing to kill me? Or … did they seek the death of someone else aboard Seadancer? Jilain? How could they possibly know of her? (Did gods know everything — No; he was sure that they did not.) Kirrensark, perhaps? (I am thy brother, murderer.) Perhaps, though it was hard to see the importance of Kirrensark, even in Kirrensark-wark. Perhaps Coon, Jarik thought with a smile. Delath? (I am thy brother, murderer.)

  By now it seemed to Jarik that he had been walking a long while between these pastel walls that made the corridor seem broader than it was. He frowned, and paused to glance back.

  Fifteen paces behind him Jarik stared at a blank wall of living stone, in grey and sienna.

  He wheeled. A few paces away, directly ahead, was another stone wall. It had not been there when he paused to look back. Just as fear grasped him and threatened to metamorphose into panic, he saw the leftward turn in the corridor. Feeling light-headed, he hurried to it and turned. Now the pale-walled hallway stretched out and out before him, an arrow-line luminously lit by no visible source or even central source that he could see. The distance was so great that the walls and floor and ceiling seemed to come together, so that the corridor’s far end could be blotted from sight by his lifted palm.

  He had not buckled on the weapon belt, and now he made sure the grip of his left hand was firm on his long scabbard. Though there was nothing to fight, certainly he was in the midst of ensorcelment, god-magic, and menaced. He would be ready.

  Meanwhile he would continue walking. What other choice was there? Now he had somehow lost Jilain!

  Well, he would not panic. He was being given a message: In the keep of the godf do not wander.

  He paced along that corridor. Its floor was some sort of moss-imitating carpet, in a delicate orangey-green. Constantly he checked the wall on either side for doors or curtained doorways; consistently he found no sign of any break. The walls were blank and smooth, seemingly flowing beside him and out ahead. Apprehension was his companion and fear hovered, seeking to join him and pave the way for panic. He paced and paced, finding no door. He was sure that in trying to return to Jilain and Metanira he had walked six times as far as he had done in leaving them. God-sorcery was at work. This place was a maze. And yet how could that be, when he moved along a corridor straight as a spear?

  That thought made him pivot
on his leading foot and swing to look back the way he had come — the way he had now walked many paces.

  Twelve or thirteen paces behind him the corridor ended in a blank stone wall. It was there; it had not been there. He heard nothing. The barrier did not frown at him; it seemed to sneer. Not even a fleck of mica twinkled on that rugged wall of grey in several shades, veined with a bit of sienna shading into red.

  This is not possible.

  What shall I do? Walk on, and on, while walls appear behind me and ahead of me yet never truly seek to trap me?

  Now he held his left hand close to his belly, his right on the hilt of the Black Sword. Perhaps on impulse, perhaps in fear, he began to walk backward. Two paces. Three. He heard no sound save that of his movements. The soft coming down of his heel after his toe; the faint jing of metal on his weapons belt. His own breathing — his own heartbeat!

  “Jarik?”

  He whirled and his blade was most of the way out of the sheath by the time he was around. From a doorway to his right Metanira emerged. She looked at the sword, which he shoved angrily back into its scabbard with a chok sound. He saw no wet patches on her long clingy garment.

  “Will you come this way?”

  She walked toward him, past him, and when he turned he saw an open corridor. No stone wall, where one had been only a few heartbeats before. Was this illusion, or could the god shift reality; shift the interior stone of the mountain to form immediate walls that kept him pent — him, or any other who might invade Snowmist Keep? (How could anyone invade the place, though? It was high and high up Cloudpeak. Nor did he have any idea if there was a normal means of ingress or not; three times gods had taken him to two keeps of gods, and each time it had been by their sorcerous method. Here-not here-there, all in a rush and a few instants.)

  He looked up and around. Was he being watched? Was that possible? Following Metanira, he wondered if he would ever know answers to any of these questions. Truthful answers, mind; he felt now that not all he had heard from the Iron Lords was truth, as he knew that Snowmist had hardly answered all his questions. The Iron Lords had. Glibly? Did they reply so swiftly to his queries because he was after all only a mortal man, and not deserving of truth?

  … dirt-grubbing hands of those stupid villagers …

  He would not diminish himself or admit anything by speaking, by seeking answers of this mere servant of a god. In silence and telling himself he was not awed, Jarik followed her. In no more than a dozen of her paces, she turned left. She passed through the center meeting of a twinned arras of some soft, almost furry fabric and held it back for him. Its color was that of pine trees.

  Warily, he entered a chamber that surely had not been here minutes ago, when he had passed along a corridor bare of doorways. At first he thought he was in the same chamber. Then he noticed the amphora beside which stood a goblet of beaten silver indited with odd stick-like figures or designs unknown to him. The amphora in this chamber was of red, brown, and two shades of green.

  “Does that contain the drink that is not ale?”

  “Yes. Wine.” A moment later she was handing him a goblet practically brimming and dancing with the golden-white liquid. A minute later he was handing back the goblet, empty. She filled it again. Abruptly Jarik recalled his previous sojourn here. The Lady of the Snowmist had urged him to drink wine. At last, suspicious, he had asked if it were drugged. And she had said simply, “Yes.”

  He was weary. He had fought a battle before breakfast and still had not eaten. And now he had emptied two cups of the wonderful wine of Snowmist. Despite a growing hunger, Jarik fell asleep in that room’s tub, which was faced and floored in the god-metal or something like, the color of new doeskin leggings.

  If Torsy would just talk to me, he found himself thinking, I could worry about her a little and not have to worry about me. Being brave and a man is very hard when you’re all by yourself and not even eight years old.

  He reflected on how he had been whiter than anyone else in Oceanside, or pinker rather, and not as big either.

  They had called him puny, some of them. Chairik’s puny, that’s what they said. He had learned not to fight because when he did he got beat up.

  After having to fight him to pull Jarik and Torsy out of the sea, though, Strode said, “That’s the bravest boy I ever saw. He’da fought us all.” Jarik heard those words, and he remembered. He would have fought them all too, but now on their ship he was hungry and hurting and he was gulping and sobbing and he and Torsy were all right, all right, and he seemed to spin through space, and through time, amid mists of red and grey and misty snow and

  “Put down your sword, Jarik.”

  “I will not. I am cutting this tree with it.” And that was in truth just what he had been doing, when Stath came to sneer at him some more. By now that late, late spurt had caught up with him, and Jarik’s size had caught up with that of others, and passed them.

  “Put down your sword or raise it against me, twice-foundling, doubtless bastard son and part-brother to a witling sow.”

  Everything Stath said was meant to insult, even indicating that Torsy was a sow, not a shoat, which meant that she was no maiden. Jarik’s face went dark and he turned to face the other youth. His sword was in his hand and their eyes stared each into the other’s. Jarik saw Stath swallow, saw him draw his sword with its hilt set with a carbanean, or bloodstone. The sword was shiny and well forged, the sword of the son of the firstman of Ishparshule-wark. The pommel of the sword Jarik held was the plain iron of the tang that, covered with wood and leather, was the grip. The guard was made of the horn of an elk — the elk Jarik had slain, alone in winter — and the blade, which had often been bent, was notched. He had indeed been chopping a tree, in anger against Stath, for he knew he could not attack him or fight him. Not the firstman’s son. And Stath had followed him here, into the woods at the edge of the wark. Stath would not leave him alone.

  “I am here to chop this tree, Stath.” Jarik’s voice trembled. So did his arm, and his face worked.

  “Will you take it to your witling sister in trade for her favors?”

  Stath had succeeded in his goading. No man could hear such words and walk again with his head up unless he received apology or blood. Jarik charged, though neither of them had a buckler, the stout wooden shields of the men of Lokusta.

  Stath struck away Jarik’s blade in a ring of iron, and on the vicious backswing he sought to slash open Jarik’s chest. That failed, for Jarik pounced back light as a spotted pup. Suddenly his blue eyes were glittering. They did not watch the sword flash across, its point only just missing him. He was not staring in concentration. He was not thinking. He was fighting. For the first time an armed Jarik faced an armed man — or youth; both were years from being twenty — and his brain stood aside to watch. Jarik had gone morbrin.

  Swiftly he stepped back in and his own back-slash took Stath in the neck. The blade hewed into the ring-bones of the youth, and smashed one, so that Stath Ishparshule’s son fell down dead in his blood and with his eyes staring.

  That swiftly did life change again for Jarik, for he was exiled.

  “And no one has ever taken up the Black Sword?” Jarik looked at it, that rustless sword standing above Blackiron Stone in the center of the fishers’ wark called Blackiron.

  “No one has had to,” Turibark told him with his maddening patience. “There has been no need for the Sword, for any sword, in Blackiron.”

  “I would take it up,” Jarik said; Jarik ever Outlander and ever rebellious and resistant to mandates. And so unsure, while he Sought and Sought.

  “Do not even think such, Jarik!” he was told, for all around him were shocked. “It is forbidden!”

  “You are all fools,” Jarik snapped, and went from them. Doubtless they talked of slaying him or driving them from them, that day in Blackiron. But they swallowed it, and he stayed.

  I am a god on the earthy (something) son Jarik, the Guide said.

  “What have I seen, Gu
ide?”

  It is your birthright and your conception, Jarik. You saw two that were as one, and when they became one they shattered and were nothing. You are a twoness that must be a oneness, and that can come about only by your taking on a third part, which will unify you into one.

  “I do not understand!”

  It will be agony to you that you do not understand, the Guide told him, and are two both at once, (something)son Jariky and for that I am sorry. Yet the agony will continue when you are whole — three as oney though it will be a different sort of agony and you will know happiness. Some happiness.

  *

  Jarik left Blackiron to go looking for Nevre and Torsy, who was his sister and yet who was not. He found them, in the woods. They were all over blood, both of them. They lay in blood, for they had been chopped with iron blades. Torsy lay on her back with her eyes open and Jarik saw the fly that walked on her cheek and trod on her eyeball, and Jarik saw that she did not blink. There was no need of Oak. There was nothing a healer could do for those two. Jarik went back to Blackiron and got the Black Sword, plucked it forth as easy as that, and no one dared say him nay. When he came upon Torsy’s killers, over a day later, those three warriors were as half a man against him and the Black Sword chopped them all in their blood and they lay dead in their blood to a ravening maniac.

  (No wait, this is wrong; this must be a dream; they were men, just men, not the Iron Lords. I could not kill the Iron Lords!) So the three got up and repaired themselves and they talked, the Iron Lords, with the outlander called Jarik. No eyes showed within the eyeslits of those foreboding iron masks. Nothing showed anywhere, except shining black iron. Some of it was chain and some of it was plate and curving great bosses, and all of it was black.

  You are too wise, Jarik was told, and the voice was metallic and hollow, ringing dully within that iron mask under the iron helm.

  Jarik said, Then those of Blackiron were slain because I took the Sword.

  Had the sword been there, Strodeson Jariky it would have summoned us at the first sign of true danger.