by James Maxey
“I’ll help her however I can,” I said. “But –”
Before I could get out my next word, a thunderous CRACK rang out from the ice dome above me. Half a second later, the whole dome collapsed and the flames all around me were instantly snuffed. I stood amid the wreckage unharmed, my phantom body glowing faint red beneath a coat of fine ash, as if I were metal pulled fresh from a forge. This glow slowly faded, restoring my ghostly shell to its ordinary translucence. Judging from the crowd of ogres that gathered to gawk at the fallen dome, I deduced I remained invisible. None even glanced at me as I waved my hand and said, “Awk!”
My status quo as a phantom wasn’t such a horrible thing. I was free to move about again, and proceeded to do so. The burnt-hair-and-dead-fish stink of burnt seal pelts was a good incentive to move on.
Goal one: Find Infidel.
I felt for the tug of her wedding band. Nothing.
I looked down at my ring finger. My braided ring was gone, consumed by the spiritual flames Greatshadow had used to restore me.
So instead I searched for the pull of the bone-handled knife, once as powerful as gravity. I couldn’t sense it. Of course, when it had been in the spirit world with me, it had never felt like anything other than an ordinary knife. It had only affected me when it had been a bridge across dimensions, a gate between life and not-life. What had happened to it when I’d left it in Infidel’s grasp? When her spirit had fused once more with her body, had the knife been pulled back into the material world? Or had it simply tumbled from her grasp, an immaterial thing, now lost forever on the artic wind?
I flew toward the temple. The ogres were busy chopping a trench in the ice around Slor Tonn. The whale was still alive; I could see his breath as great puffs of steam from his blow hole. His wound had been stitched up and sealed beneath a poultice of oily jelly with a vibrant green hue. The ogres jumped back as a slab of ice around Slor Tonn’s head snapped loose, sending tall fountains of water jetting up through the gaps around it. The whale flopped like a fish on a bank as the water washed over it, sending further cracks through the ice. With a powerful full-body thrash, the whale pulverized the weakened ice beneath it sufficiently to open a hole. Slor Tonn slid into the frigid waters below. I wondered if he’d regain the strength to fly.
I hovered before the cliff, studying it closely. There were at least a dozen possible entrances. The lowest and largest was a cave at the level of the bay; the ice continued inside for as far as I could see. It looked big enough to sail a boat into. I floated down, and found that the entrance was partially blocked by a mound of severed ogre heads, some little more than skulls, others looking freshly frozen. Their dead eyes stared at me with looks of indignation. Far beyond them, I saw faint lights. I decided to begin my investigation here.
Within the chamber, I found a medium-sized schooner lifted from the frozen waters and supported by what can only be described as a dry dock of ice. The ship appeared to be in good condition. Closer inspection showed that the ship was the Relentless; having spent my adult years in conversation with sailors from around the world, I knew that this ship belonged to King Brightmoon’s Judgment Fleet. The king had empowered these ships to serve as floating courts. They enforced the law at sea, with their captains serving as judge, jury, and executioner. The judge-captains kept a commission from the ships they seized to pay for their expenses; the rest was sent to the king. Even minor infractions were enough to justify seizing a ship, cargo and crew, which could only be released after payment of substantial fines.
In Commonground, it was noted that most people who functioned under a similar business model were labeled pirates and hung from gallows in civilized ports, where the judges were revered as champions of the law. Of course, a judge would face a fate far less dignified than hanging if he dared sail into Commonground. Everywhere you look in this world, there’s symmetry.
I hadn’t come here looking for symmetry, but for my wife. Unfortunately, I felt no connection pulling me. A score of corridors led off from this frozen underground bay. Which to follow?
As I contemplated my next move, I spotted a light from a tunnel near the Relentless. Shadows danced out over the frosted wooden surface of the ship, and a robed man emerged from the hall. I guessed from his drab garb that he was a friar of the Church of the Book. Unlike the monks I’d been raised among, who rarely strayed from the grounds of their cloister, friars were nomadic holy men, traveling the world. I use the term ‘holy men’ loosely; while they were respected members of the church, they lacked the direct connection to the One True Book demonstrated by Truthspeakers, and, unlike monks, they took no vows of meekness. Most of the assassins who’d shown up in Commonground looking for Infidel had been friars.
This friar carried a bundle wrapped in a large sealskin. He looked quite agitated. While friars did share vows of poverty with monks and priests, this one was sporting a rather eye-catching bit of wealth; a signet ring on the middle finger of his right hand was inset with a facetted glorystone, casting a light bright as a lantern.
The friar headed up a set of gangplanks to the deck of the Relentless. His loud footsteps on the beams caused the door of the aftcastle to be thrown open. A large man in a heavy coat stepped out and said, “Be quiet, brother. The judge is already in bed.”
“Wake him at once,” the friar said, shaking the bundle of skins he carried. “He must see this.”
“There’s nothing in those pelts that can’t wait until tomorrow,” said the guard.
The friar dropped to his knees and whipped the seal skin forward, unfurling it like a blanket. Within was the Immaculate Attire, from boots to collar. A lump formed in my throat.
“Blade’s armor?” the guard asked, completely befuddled. “What’s he doing back here?”
“Blade wasn’t wearing it,” said the friar. “It was taken off a woman. A woman with platinum hair and silver eyes.”
The guard’s breath caught in his throat. He whispered, “The Infidel?”
“She fought Tarpok using Lord Tower’s Gloryhammer,” said the friar. “She survived being crushed by Slor Tonn, though she’s been injured. The ogresses are tending to her wounds.”
“What?” the guard exclaimed. “If she’s wounded, she should be finished off!”
“I know!” said the friar. “The ogresses say that her death would be wasteful. They say she’s more valuable to them alive.”
“Did you warn them of –”
“They have no respect for my words,” the friar snapped. “This alliance is madness! Judge Stern must intervene!”
Judge Stern? The judge who’d hanged his own mother? Sorrow’s father?
The guard shook his head, then said, “Wait here.”
I was disinclined to wait. I flew down the tunnel the friar had emerged from, hoping to find Infidel. Instead, ten yards in, the tunnel forked. On a whim, I chose the right branch. It forked again. Flying back, I chose the left branch. It led to a polished dome of ice where murals of whale hunts had been painted on the walls with frozen blood. A half-dozen corridors led from here.
With a thought, I was back at the ship. My best hope at finding Infidel was that Judge Stern would demand to see her. I’d follow him, and then what? If he tried to execute Infidel, how could I stop him?
Judge Stern emerged from the aftcastle a moment later, dressed in a thick woolen nightgown. He wasn’t a terribly imposing figure, of medium height and build, with a wrinkled face that sagged on his skull. His hair was thinning, but enough remained to pull back into a frazzled braid. He had bushy mutton chops and eyebrows so thick they looked like fuzzy gray caterpillars crawling on his liver-spotted brow.
“Tell me everything you know, Brother Will,” said Stern.
I learned nothing new from the testimony that followed.
“What became of the Gloryhammer?” the judge asked.
“The heathen Tarpok claimed it as his prize,” said Brother Will.
The judge grunted his disapproval. “A sacred relic of the c
hurch cannot remain in the hands of such a beast,” he said. “We’ll deal with that matter at another time. For now, we need the ogres to guide us across the Great Sea Above if we’re to complete our mission.”
This would have been a handy time for Brother Will to ask, “And what is our mission, exactly?” so that I could have learned what the hell they were planning. Alas, he had already been briefed.
“If the Gloryhammer and Immaculate Attire are here, then the quest to kill Greatshadow must have succeeded, since these assets were deployed there,” said Judge Stern. “The guiding hand of the Divine Author has brought these items to us on the eve of our final journey.”
“Or else the mission failed,” said Brother Will. “Could it be that the most sacred champions of the church have been slain by the Infidel, and she’s come here to stop us?”
Judge Stern scratched his stubbled chin with his neatly trimmed nails. He nodded slowly, drew a deep breath, then said, “At present, all we have is speculation. Perhaps it’s a lucky thing the woman was taken alive. I’m greatly interested in hearing her testimony. Brother Will, go inform the ogresses I shall visit the prisoner as soon as I’m dressed.”
“At once, sir,” the friar said, before spinning around and scuttling back down the gangplank. I followed, frustrated by how slowly he walked, though in truth I suspect his pace would have winded me if I’d still been alive. After following him for five minutes, I was grateful to have a guide; the underground passageways were a labyrinth. They were also curiously empty. I had yet to spot an ogress. Instead, I spied a dozen human men in a long hall, who sat eating from bowls filled with gelatinous lumps of whitefish cooked in a thin gray broth. They were a rough-looking bunch, no doubt the sailors from the Relentless. They looked well fed. I thought about the ogres in the village, so hungry they’d fought over whale vomit.
At length, we reached a cavern carved from solid ice. The place was large enough you could have fit the Grand Cathedral of the Silver City inside it. Starlight filtered down from the translucent ice roof, casting ghostly shadows all about. The front and side of the room was ringed with large ice stalagmites, matched below by stalactites; the way they jagged together almost reminded me of teeth.
The undulating floor could have passed for a giant tongue. The spiritual hairs on the back of my phantom neck began to tingle.
Brother Will hurried across the cavern, toward a gap in the ice teeth that led once more into a corridor of stone. To reach this, he passed three large boats covered in hide, similar to the ones that had turned up in Commonground, albeit lacking dragon heads.
I remembered something Aurora had said in passing, back during the hunt for Greatshadow, something I’d paid little attention to at the time: “We’d sail from the dragon’s jaws into the Great Sea Above.”
Despite Brother Will’s brisk pace, I felt I had time to check out my hunch without losing him. I tilted my head skyward and bid my spectral body to rise. I shot into the ice, then through it, rising into the starry sky above. I flashed a mile into the air at the speed of thought before looking down.
The landscape beneath me was all white on white; the starlight provided little in the way of contrasting shadows. Off to the west about a mile away, I could make out the edge of the cliff and, beyond it, the frozen bay studded with ice-houses.
Directly beneath me was nothing but snow-covered hills leading off to the west in a succession of serpentine ridges. As my eyes adjusted, the truth slowly emerged: The ridges of the hills were formed from the spine of a dragon.
I was flying directly above the motionless form of Hush. Brother Will had just walked through the cavern of her open jaws.
Perhaps I was growing jaded. Since my death, I’d witnessed four primal dragons – Abyss, Greatshadow, Rott, and now Hush. I was no longer astonished by their sheer size. It was difficult to judge Hush’s true length given that she lay with her body curled, but I would roughly calculate that from snout to tail tip she was a good five miles long. But despite her glacial size, one couldn’t help but notice that she was frozen stiff and had apparently not moved in a very long time. She was more landscape than lizard.
I’d been gone long enough. I dove back down, passing straight through her snout into her cavernous mouth, quickly spotting the passage Brother Will had been shuffling toward. I flew in that direction, catching up to the friar a few seconds later.
He was descending a winding stone stairwell. Frost sparkled on the walls, lit by his glorystone ring. To my surprise, the passageway came to an abrupt dead end at a wall formed of ice. He rapped the ice with his ring. The space beyond was obviously hollow.
An ogress stepped through the ice-wall, passing through its solid surface as if had been merely a sheet of flowing water. She could have been Aurora’s sister for all I knew; her walrus coat, hair, and skin tone were identical, though she may have stood a few inches taller.
“What do you want?” the ogress asked gruffly.
“Judge Stern wants to interview our prisoner. Is she awake?”
“She is,” said the ogress. “But she’s our prisoner, not yours. She attacked our villagers. She was bested by our champion. Your judge has no authority over her.”
“She was carrying holy relics of our church,” said Brother Will.
“We’ve already given you the armor. If your judge wants the hammer, I suggest he argue his case with Tarpok. In any event, you have no need to speak to the prisoner.”
“I beg to differ,” said Brother Will. “We’ve every reason to think that this woman is a great enemy of our church.”
“We are great enemies of your church,” said the ogress, in an impatient tone one might use speaking to a particularly dull-witted child. “Purity is an even greater threat to all you hold dear. Your argument isn’t terribly convincing.”
“Listen to me!” Brother Will said, waving his finger in her face. “Your prisoner has devoured the enchanted blood of the primal dragon Verdant! It gives her strength beyond imagining. She can bend steel with her bare hands. The sharpest blades are blunted when they strike her invulnerable skin! You don’t know the danger she poses!”
“You’re obviously mistaken about the identity of our captive,” said the ogress. “We were able to stitch her wounds with a bone needle; her skin is no tougher than any other of your race. And if she can bend steel with her bare hands, why does she struggle so helplessly when we’ve bound her limbs with mere leather?”
Brother Will furrowed his brow, obviously stumped by this revelation.
I saw no reason to stand in the hall and listen to these two argue. I ghosted through the ice and found myself in circular stone cell about seven feet across. Infidel was alone, leaning against the wall, her body covered by a sealskin pelt. Her bare arms lay before her, bound at the wrists by tight loops of leather. To my astonishment, she held my bone-handled hunting knife in her left hand.
The room was stuffy, even warm, despite the wall of ice that sealed the door. Only a few gaps in the stone allowed air to flow; Infidel looked dazed and drowsy, and I wondered if she was suffocating in this nearly air-tight space. On the other hand, despite the glazed look in her eyes, the color had returned to her cheeks. Save for the numerous bruises around her shoulders, and a stitched gash on her chin, she looked not too shabby for someone who’d been crushed by a whale.
She looked up as I drifted near her.
“Stagger?” she whispered.
“You can see me?” I asked, my ghost heart freezing. Was she so close to death’s door?
“And hear you,” she said, keeping her voice low as she glanced at the ice wall. The light from Brother Will’s glorystone cast the ogress’s shadow on the ice in stark outlines. Infidel winced as she rose to meet me. Beneath her seal skin, she was wrapped from armpits to upper thigh with tight white bandages. Her feet were bound together by leather loops that let her move her feet only a few inches apart. She leaned back against the wall to steady herself. Her breathing sounded shallow.
“
You’re not dead?” I asked.
“I’m too sore to be dead.”
“Why did they let you keep my knife?” I asked. It seemed very odd to leave a prisoner with a weapon, and for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how she could have hidden it.
“The ogres don’t see the knife,” she said. “Only I can see it and feel it; it was stuck to my hand by dried blood. But even when they stitched up my palm, it never fell from my grasp. They ran needles through it as if it wasn’t even there.”
“It must still be halfway between the spirit realm and the real world,” I said. “Maybe it’s letting you see me.”
“I wish it was letting me cut these cords,” she said, placing the knife in her teeth and trying to stab the leather at her wrist. The blade slid right through, like vapor.
“You’re in the middle of the ice-ogress temple,” I said. “You’d have a hard time getting out of here even if you weren’t tied up. To make matters worse, one of the Judgment Fleet is here, the Relentless. Judge Stern is on his way to interrogate you to find out of you’re the Infidel.”
“Stern?” Infidel said, spitting the knife back into her palm. “Sorrow’s father?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“That’s a pretty big coincidence, isn’t it?” she asked.
“The monks used to say that what we think of as coincidences are all part of the Divine Author’s master plot.”
“And that plot would be?”
I shrugged. “From what I can gather, just as King Brightmoon allied himself with the Black Swan to slay Greatshadow, he must have struck a deal with either Tarpok or Purity to help kill Glorious. Judge Stern is here representing the king’s interests. Maybe. There are lots of gaping holes in my information. But, we don’t have time to figure things out, because Stern’s coming here to see you. You need to figure out a cover story, quick, so he won’t learn who you really are.”
“Or I tell him who I really am,” said Infidel. “Maybe I can convince him that my father will reward him handsomely for my safe return.”
