Godess of the Ice Realm loti-5

by David Drake

  The breastplates of the men in each rank slammed against the backplates of the men directly ahead. Instead of fighting as a hundred soldiers, the phalanx was a single unit with sharp steel fangs. Their combined weight and the thrust of all their powerful legs together stabbed the pike points into the centipede.

  The pikes were of close-grained ash or hickory. Even so the strain bowed, then snapped, several of them. The men whose shafts had broken continued to jab the splintered ends at the monster. The ragged wood couldn't penetrate undamaged armor, but when it lodged in the thinner, flexible fabric covering the joints it sometimes gouged their way into the flesh beneath.

  The infantry who'd been trapped between the centipede and the multiple bulk of the phalanx had to duck or be thrown to the floor when the two collided. Now that the centipede's forequarters had lifted, they either stood or scuttled forward under the long body to hack at its leg-joints.

  Lord Escot had lost his helmet. His long red hair swirled with the violence of the strokes as his long sword hacked forehand and backhand. "Escomann and Ornifal!" he cried in a high tenor voice. "Escomann over all!"

  Something between a smile and a grimace quirked Garric's lips. It wasn't the most satisfactory battle cry from the kingdom's viewpoint, but under the circumstances he guessed he'd allow the Ornifal noble his whims.

  Pont and Prester must've thought much the same thing. "Huh!" said Prester, his eyes narrowing as he watched Lord Escot. "He's still a silly twit, but…"

  "Yeah," agreed his mate. "If I had him for two weeks in my section, I might be able to make something out of him regardless."

  Despite the size of the rotunda, it'd begun filling with troops when the men in the lead couldn't advance any farther because the centipede blocked the way. Garric no longer had unobstructed vision down the other corridors. If the route wasn't cleared quickly-and he didn't see how it could be, since even dead the centipede's corpse would fill half the corridor-the crush of men would become dangerous.

  If only there were something he could stand on to "Prester!" he said aloud. "Can you lift me onto your shoulders? I'll yell to the men at the entrance corridor to halt in place. Maybe they'll obey if they can see me."

  "I'll lift you, Garric," said a familiar voice. There, pushing through the soldiers as though they were blades of oats in a field, was the massive form of Cashel or-Kenset.

  And never more welcome!

  ***

  Cashel didn't mind the press of men the way he had when he'd first entered a big city, though that hadn't been so very long ago. He'd found if he just pretended all the people were sheep, it was the same as shearing time in the spring. He'd always liked shearing time. Of course sheep didn't wave swords and spears as they milled about.

  "Cashel!" Garric cried. From a distance you'd never take this nobleman in gilt and silvered armor for the boy Cashel'd grown up with in Barca's Hamlet, but when he smiled-Cashel smiled in response-thatwas Garric. "Right, I'll stand on your shoulders. Just like old times!"

  Cashel laid his staff crosswise in front of him, his arms slanting down. There wasn't room for him to do that without bumping people out of the way, so he bumped them out of the way.

  A glittering officer pitched forward when the staff whacked him in the small of the back; he bleated angrily and turned. One of the pair of old soldiers standing with Garric poked a spearbutt at the fellow's face and said, "Mind what you say to the Prince here, cap'n!"

  The officer looked like he still might've argued the matter, but Liane stepped in front of him. "Do you dare jostle his highness, my man?" she said in a voice as cold as the floor underfoot. That seemed to take care of the problem.

  Garric set his right boot on the staff like it was a fence rail. As he pushed off with his left leg Cashel lifted his arms, bringing his friend's weight up so that Garric just stepped over, one foot on either of Cashel's shoulders.

  Holding firm as a statue, Cashel turned his staff vertical and clashed the ferrule down on the ice. With three points to brace him, he figured he could stand here even if he had to support the ceiling instead of just Garric. The thought made him smile.

  One of the old soldiers rubbed his chin with the knuckles of the hand gripping his spear. "They grow many more your size back where you come from, lad?" he asked.

  "They grow better than that," Cashel said, letting his smile spread in pride. "They grew Garric in Barca's Hamlet too!"

  "Lord Menzis!" Garric shouted. Through a megaphone of his hands, Cashel supposed, though standing underneath his friend and facing the other way there wasn't any way he could tell for sure. "Halt the flow for the moment! Send word back to hold in place!"

  Herding sheep gave you good lungs, not that sheep were much more likely to heed you than trees were. Shouting at least made you feel like you were doing something as you pounded across the meadow hoping to reach the ewe that'd mire herself sure if she took one more step into the marsh…

  Cashel had a pretty good view of what was happening down the tunnel where a huge centipede was trying to bull through a solid mass of pikemen. Had been trying, rather thanwas, because by now the monster writhed like a worm on a hook. Any number of hooks, in fact, because there were more pikes punched through its yellow armor than Cashel could count on both hands.

  The men kept shoving forward. By now the folks in the front rank, those whose pikes hadn't broken anyhow, must've had their points halfway into the creature's vitals. It was either trying to escape or else it was just curling up to die the way centipedes of the usual size did.

  "Cashel, turn left!" Garric said, sharply but not in a bellow meant to be heard across the huge domed room. "I'm going to shift some men down the other corridors to give us some room in here."

  Cashel obediently shuffled partway around, careful to keep his shoulders level. He was pretty sure that Garric could balance even if the fellow under him broke into a dead run, but that wasn't a reason for Cashel to do his own job badly.

  The adjustment put Cashel looking down one of the blue tunnels while Garric shouted to an officer on the other side of the room. There was fighting going on in that tunnel, too, and-Cashel frowned-it didn't look like it was going very well. Plenty of soldiers were trying to crowd in, but the sounds coming out of the tunnel were screams, not battlecries. Cashel couldn't see what they were fighting because it didn't tower over the soldiers the way the centipede did, but besides the screams he could hear an off-key clinking/clattering. It wasn't quite right for either metal or stone but seemed a bit of both.

  "Garric?" he said, making sure his friend was going to hear him. He'd herded far more sheep than Garric had. "You'd better look at this on my-"

  He felt Garric's weight shift as he twisted to look over his shoulder.

  "-side," Cashel went on. "I'm turning some more."

  A fellow squeezed out of the crowd at the tunnel mouth and staggered toward Garric. He was an officer-a nobleman, anyway, and that meant an officer-because his breastplate was molded with a design of people and gods. The metal, bronze under the gilding, had been slashed in strips, deep enough that blood dribbled out of the cuts. The officer, just a boy really, had lost his sword and his helmet besides.

  "Steady!" called Garric. He jumped down, landing squarely. Cashel put out the hand that wasn't on his quarterstaff to brace his friend, but Garric didn't need the help.

  "Your highness!" the boy bleated. "We can't stop them! They're not alive, they're just ice, and our swords only chip them without doing any harm! They'll kill us all if we don't get away!"

  "Do we have hammers?" Garric said. "Maybe the men can use their shields for clubs. We can't cut ice, but if we break it up-"

  "I'll see what I can do, Garric," Cashel said. He lifted his staff overhead and gave it a trial spin, the only way he could do that without knocking down any number of people in these cramped quarters. The hall was a lot like a sheep byre on a winter night.

  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 tobe 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 andflick/flick ed 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 itwould .

  "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 Iremember 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?"