Godess of the Ice Realm loti-5

by David Drake

  That last was the simple truth, and why Chalcus made her say something as obvious as sunrise was beyond her. "Men!" she was tempted to say; but it wasn't men, she'd heard women as often being fools in the same way.

  As for the ship-The Bird of the Tidehad a deck, which was something, and a single short mast in the middle of it holding a yard that was longer than the vessel itself. At sea the yard would be raised at a slant to spread the triangular sail to the wind. There was a tiny cabin in the stern, enough to hold a tile hearth but no shelter for the crew. In bad weather Ilna supposed they'd all need to be on deck anyway, doing things with sail and ropes and anchors.

  TheBird was indeed old, so old that the grain of the deck stood out in ridges above the softer, paler sapwood. Four oak planks ran the length of the vessel's sides, sticking out from the pine hull. They were there to rub against stone docks, as they were doing now. They'd been patched at several places with fresh timbers, but the patches were themselves badly worn by now.

  And the ship stank. The Bird of the Tide had carried generations of men and cargo. They'd left residues which had decayed into her timbers and still remained as faint, foul ghosts. But Ilna didn't have a delicate sense of smell-few peasants do, not with firewood too dear to waste heating bath water four months of the year-and this stench, though unfamiliar, wasn't a matter of concern.

  "Oh, Ilna," Merota said. She was clinging to Ilna's hand like a child much younger than she was. "I do wish I could come with you. Really, I wouldn't get in the way."

  "Ah, child," said Chalcus, stroking the girl's hair gently with a hand whose calluses were like sharkskin. "When Mistress Ilna and I finish our business in the Strait, I'll sail you clear around Haft in this fine vessel as a treat. But for now, it's us alone and you with our friend Liane till we return."

  "I just wish…," Merota said sadly, but she wasn't arguing. The child had a right to wish for things, but she was already enough of a lady that she didn't whine and embarrass herself trying to change Ilna's mind.

  Ilna rarely argued. If the decision was hers to make, she made it; and if not, she accepted the choice someone else made-or fate made, often enough.

  "Come aboard and I'll introduce you to the crew, milady," Chalcus said. Now at low tide the deck was more than Ilna's height below the level of the quay, but instead of going down the ladder Chalcus hopped aboard.

  He turned and raised his hands. Before Ilna could protest, Merota gave a squeal of delight and leaped into Chalcus' arms.

  Frowning as much at what she was doing as what Merota had done, Ilna pinched the sides of her tunic at mid thigh and jumped lightly to the deck. She told herself she was proving to the crew that she wasn't a lady whom they had to coddle, but a part of her mind was afraid she was showing off. Nobody else would think less of her if shedid show off, of course, but she wasn't somebody who needed other people to censure her.

  "Mistress Ilna," Chalcus said, "let me introduce the crew to you. Our bosun's Hutena, he was a file commander in the Third Regiment until today."

  Hutena bowed. He was short and stocky, nearly bald though probably only in his mid-thirties. His limbs were so hairy that the dragon winding up his right arm from wrist to shoulder seemed to be crawling through thickets.

  "Nabarbi, Tellura, and Kulit," Chalcus continued. "They're cousins, Blaise fishermen originally but for this past year they've been deck crew on the triremeStaff of the Shepherd."

  The cousins bowed. They were tall men whose weather-beaten complexions had originally been pale. Kulit wore a fluffy blond moustache; the others were clean shaven.

  "And maybe you remember Shausga and Ninon from theFlying Fish?" Chalcus said. Ilna did remember them, their faces anyway, from the voyage north on the patrol vessel. Ninon had been the lead oarsman, she was pretty sure.

  "Boys," Chalcus said to the crew, "all the cargo's aboard, so we'll be sailing before dawn with the tide. Up to three of you at a time can go ashore if you need to wrap up your affairs-"

  "We don't," said Hutena. "We can sail now if you need us to."

  Chalcus nodded approvingly. "I shouldn't wonder if a time came on this voyage when we did need to get under weigh in a fingersnap," he said, "but not tonight. I'll be back aboard with my gear in an hour, and Mistress Ilna will follow…?"

  He cocked his head toward her with an eyebrow raised.

  "I'll come aboard with you," Ilna said. "I have nothing more to bring but a heavy cloak, and I could do without that if I needed to."

  She was showing the sailors she was one of them, just as quick an adaptable as they were; or perhaps she was bragging again. Like so many things, it was a matter of how you viewed it.

  "Then in an hour, lads," Chalcus said. He lifted Merota to his right shoulder and, holding her there with one hand, climbed the vertical ladder to the dock as the child laughed happily.

  Ilna followed with what was for her a warm smile. Chalcus was bragging also, but doing it with a verve that she could never imagine in herself. And it was a good thing to tell a crew of strong, skilled men that their new captain was even stronger andmore skilled.

  Over Merota's protests, Chalcus set the girl down on the pavement and sent her a few steps ahead in the company of Mistress Kaline. "So, dear heart…," Chalcus said with a sidelong glance at Ilna. "Do you have any questions before we set off on the tide?"

  "I'm surprised at the crew," Ilna said frankly. "I'd expected…"

  She paused to search for a word. Chalcus laughed merrily beside her and said, "Cut-throats and pirates, bloody-handed killers with one eye and an evil leer?"

  Ilna laughed also, but with a touch of embarrassment. "Well, not that, exactly; but something closer to that sort than to the men there."

  Sobering, Chalcus said, "Those are hard men, dear one, men who've given strokes and taken them in their time. But they'll take orders when they've agreed to, and they'll do their duty because it's their duty, not when it suits them. I sailed with pirates when I was a pirate, but now that I serve a prince, I want men with me as sure of their duty as that prince himself is."

  He laughed again and put his arm around her waist. As a rule Ilna didn't like that sort of display in public, but at the moment it seemed appropriate.

  "We're honest folk doing the kingdom's business, dear one," Chalcus said. "That strikes me as a more wonderful thing than perhaps it does you, but if it means I can sleep nights without worrying about my bosun cutting my throat-it may be that I can get used to it!"

  ***

  The balconied windows of Sharina's large bedroom overlooked a courtyard with a large cedar tree and stone planters which had been allowed to grow up in weeds. In the center of her suite was a reception room, it opened onto the inner hallway and also to stairs from the courtyard. The maid's cubicle was curtained off from the reception room and had its own door to the hall.

  When Sharina first awakened, she thought she was home in Barca's Hamlet and a hungry puppy was whimpering. When her head cleared, she realized she was hearing the maid.

  "Beara?" Sharina called, feeling for the sandals she kept at the side of the bed. "Are you all right?"

  Her bedroom had a real wooden door instead of a curtain. The lamp in the reception room leaked light around the panel, but it took a moment for Sharina's eyes to focus through the veil of sleep. She opened the door.

  The cryolite urn sat on a claw-footed bronze stand between the windows of the reception room, replacing the black-figured Old Kingdom vase which had been there previously. Hanging from the room's ceiling was a triangular lamp whose corners were molded into grotesquely sharp-chinned faces. A wick lay on each extended tongue; normally one provided a night-light after Sharina had gone to bed.

  Tonight a lamp flickered within the urn instead, suffusing the stone's gray-on-gray pattern. It lit the wall paintings showing scenes from the Shepherd's wooing of the Lady. Under its illumination the murals became journeys through Hell: bleak, cynical, and inexorable.

  The Shepherd leaned on his staff, his f
ace twisted in demonic glee as he contemplated the future. The sheep around him were pustulent and as terrified of the certainty of their death as so many pox-ridden harlots.

  In the next painted cartouche, the Lady reclined on a divan in Her garden. The fruits hanging above were surely poisonous; the doves on her fingertips whispered envious gossip about the whole world else; and the Lady's face was a mask of lust so fierce that neither man nor beast could hope to slake it.

  The final panel should have been the couple's holy marriage. Sharina was neither prudish nor more of an innocent than any other peasant raised in daily contact with nature. Even so she felt her breath suck in when she saw the scene as lighted through the stone.

  Beara stood by the urn, hiding her face with her raised left arm and trying to reach down inside with the other hand to snuff the lampwick. It was too deep for her to reach. The girl sobbed bitterly as her arm flailed.

  Sharina closed her eyes. The patterns on the ice stone were soothing when the sun lit them from the outside, but they had a wholly different significance when light streamed through them from within. She felt the mottled patterns eating away her flesh like huge cancers.

  "Push it over!" she cried. She grabbed the urn's rim and twisted, trying to roll the urn off its stand. In her present hysteria she should've been able to lift the urn overhead and smash it down on the floor in a thousand harmless fragments, but it didn't move. It was as rigid as an iron post driven down to the center of the earth.

  Sharina looked for a tool, a spear or a poker that would reach farther into the urn than a human arm. There was nothing in the reception room. She ran back into her bedroom, thinking that the tongs on the charcoal brazier there might serve her need.

  The bedroom was decorated with a frieze of birds and vines on a trellis. The light flickering through the open doorway touched them as it had the decoration of the reception room. Sharina felt her stomach tense as she glimpsed what had been a pleasant design: now it made her feel like a corpse watching as the crows and vultures descend.

  She reached for the tongs from the cold grill, but they were too short to reach the flame. She could throw them down at the lamp No, much better! On the bedside table was a clear glass water pitcher, etched on the inside with a hunting scene. Sharina grabbed it and ran back into the reception room.

  The evil glare from the urn repelled her like the door of an open lime kiln, but she'd faced other hard things in her life. Flinging away the tumbler upended to cover the pitcher, Sharina shouted, "Get out of the way, Beara!"

  The maid, frightened beyond hope of reasoning, continued to whimper and vainly grope. Sharina grabbed her left shoulder and half-lifted, half-pulled, the girl out of the way. She smashed the pitcher into the mouth of the urn, shattering the glass and releasing its contents in a single gout.

  The flood of water shattered the hot earthenware lamp and lifted the oil up the sides of the urn. For an instant there was darkness and peace in the suite. Then a spark from the glowing wick ignited the thin sheet of oil in a flash thousands of times brighter than the original flame.

  The light enveloped Sharina. She hung suspended in a chamber of ice that sucked all warmth and all life from her body. Cold squeezed her to a spark and began drawing that into itself.

  Sharina thought she heard the maid screaming through the gray hellfire, but perhaps she was screaming herself. Then she was gone.

  Chapter 9

  The cryolite urn had been even more delicate than Garric thought: the pieces shattered on the tile floor were eggshell thin. Liane knelt in the debris, supporting Sharina's weeping maid with one arm and holding up a rushlight in the other hand. The tallow-soaked reed pith burned with a pale yellow flame; Liane carried a bundle of them as reading lights in her document case.

  "We broke in quick as we could, I swear we did!" said the officer of the guard. "When we heard the screaming, we put our backs to it. I figured if it was just the lady having a good time, well, I'd rather go back to following a plow than make a mistake the other way."

  The hall door had been of sturdy beechwood. The overlay of bronze filigree, though meant for decoration, would've slowed the troops who were trying to break in. They'd splintered the panel, half of which still hung from the hinges. The bronze was a lacy tatter trailing into the room.

  "You were correct, ensign," Garric said, his hand clenching and unclenching on his swordhilt. "What did you see?"

  The guards had brought their lantern with them; that and the rushlight were the only illumination in the reception room. Soldiers and servants were squeezing in from the hall, and troops from the courtyard hammered on the outer door now that they realized there was something wrong.

  The screams hadn't been loud enough to alert them. It'd been the sound of soldiers battering down the door with their spear butts that'd warned Garric something was wrong, though his suite was adjacent.

  "Just the girl there crying on the floor and the vase all in pieces," the ensign said. "To tell the truth, I thought the girl'd broke the thing and was afraid she'd be whipped to an inch of her life, but then I saw the bed empty-"

  He gestured toward the bedroom with the sword in his right hand. The point almost skewered the under-housekeeper who'd run in to see if her staff was the cause of the commotion.

  "-and I said, 'Where's your mistress?' to the silly bint, and she starts crying louder than she'dbeen doing, which is plenty loud."

  Liane rose to her feet with a supple motion; the maid immediately sank back into the sobbing puddle as she'd been when Garric followed the guards into the room. She'd come from Valles in Reise's entourage, chosen by him and therefore as trustworthy as human judgment could determine.

  "Beara said a servant she didn't recognize put a lamp inside the urn," Liane said, speaking loudly enough for Garric to understand over the increasing volume of noise. Lords Waldron and Attaper arrived together from opposite corners of the palace, both trying to take charge. "In the middle of the night she woke up because there was something wrong with the light coming through her curtain."

  Liane nodded to the patterned muslin hanging that shadowed the maid's alcove from the rest of the suite.

  "She said it was awful," Liane continued with the dry humor that was so much a part of her, even in a crisis. "She can't explain what she means, but judging from her state I'm willing to accept the assessment. She tried to put out the lamp and couldn't, then Sharina did something-"

  "Poured water onto it," said Garric, pointing with his bare toe. Fragments of etched glass were mixed with the urn's ice-stone shards.

  "Yes, of course," said Liane approvingly. "Sharina poured in water. The urn broke, and Beara says it sucked Sharina somewhere as it did so."

  She frowned with concentration and cocked her head toward the door. Garric heard the familiar voice also, barely a chirp among the raucous, angry men.

  "Waldron and Attaper!" he roared, determined to be understood. "Bring Lady Tenoctris to me at once, if you please!"

  There was a stir by the door. Soldiers moved aside quickly, cursing their fellows who kept them from getting out of the officers' way. The commanders walked Tenoctris the two steps from the doorway, one to either side of the frail old woman. Without their bulk and angry authority, she might as well have been on the other side of the moon for all her chances of reaching Garric.

  "Tenoctris," Garric said, so coldly furious that there was no emotion at all in his voice. "Sharina's been attacked or taken away by this urn. Can you learn anything about it here, or is there someplace you might better be?"

  "I can possibly determine something here," the old wizard said. "Though…"

  She looked around doubtfully. "Not, I think," she went on, "while there's so many people around."

  "Right," said Garric calmly. In a bellow that rattled the windows he went on, "Clear the room! I want all the soldiers out and all the servants except the girl on the floor. Now!"

  There was an immediate shuffle and whispering, then a shift toward the door.
It couldn't be called a stampede, but he was being obeyed. That was good, because he was in no mood to be balked…

  He looked at Liane. "Will you stay here with Tenoctris, please?" he said. "Help her as she requires?"

  "Yes, of course," Liane said. She lit the overhead lamp with her rushlight, then said to Tenoctris, "You left your equipment in your room? I'll fetch it and be right back."

  Garric watched Liane slip out with the last of the Blood Eagles. Many amazing things had happened to him in the past year; Liane was both the most amazing and the most wonderful.

  "Lord Attaper," Garric said. "I'll take two companies of the Blood Eagles. Lord Waldron, I want whichever regiment is on standby to come with me also."

  "That's Lord Rosen's regiment, your highness," said Waldron with a frown. "They're a Blaise regiment, though."

  "Are you saying they're not to be trusted, Waldron?" Garric snapped. Tendons in his throat stood out with his fury.

  "What?" said Waldron. The commander of the royal army had spent most of his long life fighting or in preparation to fight. He was stiff-necked, arrogant, and extremely competent. "Of course I trust them, or they wouldn't be on duty!"

  "Then I don't care if they're bloody demons from Hell and the Sister commands them!" said Garric. "They'll come with me to the Temple of the Lady of the Sunset. I'm going to turn the place upside down until I get answers about this urn they sent-and I learn what they've done with Sharina!"

  ***

  Sharina lay on the floor, trembling from a chill greater than that of any winter wind. Her eyes were closed, though it was a moment before she realized that and opened them. She'd been close to death; she'd thought shewas dead.

  She was wearing the shift in which she'd gotten out of bed. It was night and the air was bitter, but even so she was warm by contrast with the place she'd been. She turned her head slowly, afraid that a quick movement would cause the tangled rubble around her to shift and crush her.