Goddess of the Ice Realm (23 page)

Beyond the tunnel mouth was a courtyard full of people in gorgeous colors, though none quite so brilliant as Bossian himself. The walls and pavement were golden—were pure
gold, Cashel would've said from a distance, but close up he could see it was transparent crystal just like the rest.

Instead of shouting, the folk in the courtyard pressed up to Bossian, clasping hands with him while bowing and simpering to Kotia. Other people looked down and smiled from the balconies terraced back from the foundations of the surrounding buildings.

Bossian waved away the mob of greeters and turned to Cashel. “Does the Visitor prey on the regions you come from, sir?” he asked in a friendly enough tone. “I ask because we see portents of his return, and I thought your presence might be connected.”

“What are you saying, Lord Bossian?” said Kotia in a voice that could break rocks. “Do you think that I'd have brought a harbinger of the Visitor into our world?”

“Of course not, my dear!” Bossian said, sounding like he was surprised. Maybe he was—though if he hadn't expected Kotia to go for his throat if he played games with words that
might
be insults, he didn't know her as well as Cashel did already. “I just thought we should explore whether he might be a portent, that's all.”

The ground started to rise.

Cashel brought his staff over his head, the only place he could hold it crosswise and not bash a lot of people. Even so his left elbow jabbed a solid-looking fellow who caromed back with a shout of amazement. The crowd stopped chattering and stared at Cashel instead.

“Cashel?” Kotia said, calmly but with an artificially blank expression.

The ground—the plate of golden crystal, it wasn't ground!—continued to rise. One edge remained in contact with the tall, smooth-sided cone across from the gateway. The plate curved around the cone and settled into place on the opposite side, several stories higher than it'd been when Cashel first walked onto it.

“I'm sorry, mistress,” Cashel said. He lowered his staff, making a little nod of apology to the fellow he'd elbowed. “I just wasn't expecting that to happen.”

Then, as the locals started chattering and Bossian mouthed false regrets for not having explained what was going
to happen, Cashel said, “And as for the Visitor, I've never heard of anybody who goes by that as a title. If my coming here has something to do with him, it's without me knowing about it. Who is he?”

He thought for a moment and added, “Or she, I guess.”

“We'll take the Linden Walk, I think,” Bossian said. He looked disconcerted. “Unless you . . . ?”

Cashel gestured brusquely with his left hand toward the broad path bordered with what he would've called basswood trees. “Walking's fine,” he said.

Cashel was tired and hungry, and Bossian seemed set on playing tricks on him. He'd have turned around and left if he had any better place to be, and he was just about ready to do that anyway.

Kotia said something sharply into Lord Bossian's ear, then stepped back and took Cashel's arm instead. “Manor Bossian's trees are famous,” she said in a coolly cheerful tone. “At Manor Ansache, our parks have a prairie theme.”

Her smile was as hard as Ilna's might have been. She added, “And my mother had an extensive fungus garden in the cellars, though Ansache had it grubbed up after she disappeared.”

Cashel cleared his throat as they walked along the boulevard. Lord Bossian was a step ahead, talking with several locals and being very careful not to look over his shoulder. There was a little cocoon of open space separating Cashel and Kotia from the others, which suited Cashel fine. He wasn't used to crowds. He said, “Thank you, mistress.”

Kotia patted his arm with her free hand. “Is there anything you'd like to see while you're here, Master Cashel?” she said. “There's no reason that you have to rush off, you know.”

Cashel noticed Lord Bossian hunch as though somebody'd just hit him on the back of the head. Grinning—Kotia was a
lot
like Ilna, which was a fine thing if you were on her side—he said, “No, mistress, there's people waiting for me back where I was. But thank you.”

He'd wondered where the fields supplying this huge building were, but he saw them as he walked along—on roofs and terraces covering the whole manor. As the tree-bordered
road curved around a huge tower, Cashel noticed to the north a many-layered pyramid that seemed to be of plantings at every level.

The slopes Cashel'd hiked over for the past day weren't green enough to pasture sheep, so he wondered whether the rainfall was enough for the melons and squash he'd seen among the rows of maize. People who made courtyards move could pump water from deep wells, he supposed.

The slimly-handsome man and woman now walking to either side of Lord Bossian talked about the Visitor in airy voices. Neither of them believed he was coming—or at any rate, they denied they believed that. Bossian made neutral comments. He could've been too high-minded to trouble himself with the matter, but Cashel got the impression that Bossian was afraid to speak clearly, for fear whichever choice he made would bring the Visitor down on him.

“Ah, Kotia?” Cashel said. “Who's the Visitor? I really don't know anything about him.” He paused, then added, “At least under that name.”

A magnificent waterfall poured from the cleft between two towers—one rosy and decorated with turrets stuck to the sides, the other green and stark, without so much as window ledges to mark its smooth sides. The stream gurgled under the road, twisted, and vanished into a hulking silvery mass whose colonnades seemed to have been spun from cobweb. There was no sign of where so much water could have come from.

“For as far back as history records,” Kotia said quietly, “a being has come down from the sky, stayed for a time, and then vanished in the same way as he appeared. We call him the Visitor. Sometimes there's a generation between his visits, sometimes longer than that. While he's here, he does as he wishes—he has that much power.”

She turned to meet Cashel's eyes. Without raising her voice she added, “The Visitor remains for varying lengths of time, generally a month or a few months. About a thousand years ago, the Visitor stayed for five years. Everything that happened before then is lost to us now, because civilization ended at that time.”

Cashel frowned. “You fight him when he comes?” he said.

Kotia shrugged. “Some have fought,” she said. “Some flee. And there have always been some who tried to serve him. The Visitor does as he wishes.”

They'd arrived at an array of tables and chairs on half-round terraces. They were set with food and drink, and servants in white tunics were poised discreetly to add more.

Lord Bossian gestured Cashel and Kotia to the circular table at the lowest level. The couple who'd been walking with him took places there also, but they remained standing till Bossian gave them leave.

The male of the pair looked at Cashel and said, “Really, you mustn't get worked up about the Visitor, you know. There's always somebody talking about omens and portents and doom in the stars. It always turns out to be fancy.”

“If you've looked at the night sky in the past month, Farran,” Kotia said in a voice that was too disgusted to be angry, “you'd have noticed that the stars themselves are different. The constellations in the southeast have changed their alignments! That's no more fancy than sunrise is.”

“Ah,” said the fellow, turning to the woman with him. “Are you planning to attend Lady Tilduk's gala, Syl?”

Lord Bossian pulled out his own chair; the whole gathering followed his lead, seating themselves in a rush that filled every place on the terraces. Cashel sat carefully, as he always did when he wasn't sure how sturdy his chair would be.

As Kotia settled beside him, she muttered, “The Visitor does as he wishes.”

But as she spoke, she eyed Cashel.

Ilna sat with her back to the little cabin and the sun on her left side. Nabarbi was at the steering oar on the opposite railing, so she was as much out of the way as she could be on a small vessel.

She was working on the hand frame in her lap, weaving a cartouche that could become part of a tapestry or set off a garment as need arose. Its measured curves drew the eye and left the beholder feeling marginally more optimistic. Ilna
smiled grimly as she worked: the design had a positive effect even on her.

Because the
Bird of the Tide's
hold was nearly empty, Ilna could've carried any loom she wanted. She couldn't possibly use anything larger while they were at sea, though, and they'd be returning immediately to Carcosa when they'd dealt with this trouble in the Strait.

If they survived, of course. She smiled again. She
was
feeling optimistic.

Their bow was chopping into the sea, a change from the first day out when slow swells from astern lifted the
Bird
in long, queasy arcs. Ilna didn't like the chop, but she hadn't liked the swells either. In all truth she didn't like ships, which put them in the same category as most people and most things. And because of the way she was feeling, she grinned even wider at
that
thought.

“You're a cheerful one today, lass,” said Chalcus in a tone of pleased puzzlement. He'd come around the cabin from where he'd been talking to Nabarbi. “I'd feared that bucking the current would've made you uncomfortable.”

As compared to what?
Ilna thought, but because she was feeling positive—and because she liked to see the pleasure that brought into Chalcus's eyes—she said, “It's not so very bad. I can work—”

She tilted the hand frame as a gesture.

“—and so long as I can work, nothing disturbs me very much.”

Chalcus nodded in understanding, though she caught a flash of regret in his expression also. “Most of the northbound traffic takes the Haft Channel and hugs the mainland,” he explained, gesturing to starboard. “That's how the current flows, so even if the wind's from the northeast you can make headway.”

He grinned. “If you know what you're doing,” he added, “and you're not sailing a pig, which our
Bird
here assuredly is not.”

Chalcus patted the railing. He was dressed in tunic and sash, ordinary garb for the captain of a small vessel who expected to help the crew in a crisis; but the sash was bright red silk matching the fillet that confined his hair, and his curved
dagger wasn't an ordinary seaman's working blade. Chalcus wasn't a man to pass unnoticed in any company, so he didn't bother trying.

“Ships bound for Carcosa take the Outer Strait and pass north of the Calves,” Chalcus continued, “riding south on a current that comes all the way from the Ice Capes. It's those ships that the Rua take, or anyway somebody takes—”

He gave her another grin; Ilna nodded coldly.

“—so we'll be calling in to see Commander Lusius in Terness on the north coast of Corse, that's the northeast island of the Calves. To get there we're slipping between the other two islands, Betsam and Bewld; and that means fighting the current.”

“I'd noticed the air was cooler,” Ilna said, tying off the completed design. She rose to her feet, looking at the sea for the first time since she'd placed herself against the cabin. The railing wasn't particularly high, but seated on the deck she could see only the sky over it. The water was a murky green as though it was mixed with powdered chalk.

“We'll dock in Terness before the middle of the afternoon, I'd judge,” Chalcus said, eyeing the land ahead of them. Ninon stood in the far bow, his right hand on a stay, watching also. “Barring the untoward happening, which is no more a certainty on shipboard than it is with the rest of life, eh, lass?”

“Chalcus,” said Ilna. She pointed to the sky high to the northeast. “Are those birds, o r . . . ?”

“Ah, you've good eyes, my dear,” said Chalcus, following her gaze. “Indeed, it's the
or
of your question, I would say. They're no birds of my acquaintance, for all that they're surely flying.”

There were three of them, dipping and swooping in the clear air. Ilna couldn't estimate the distance closer than “many miles away,” but that was enough to prove that the creatures were huge. In a sudden simultaneous rush they vanished again over the horizon.

“Shausga and Ninon,” Chalcus called. “Go string your bows, I think. Likely we'll not need them, but . . . have them ready regardless. Kulit, take over the lookout.”

Chalcus grinned at Ilna with a wolfish good humor that
had nothing funny in it. “And for me, my dear, I think I'll have my sword about me till we dock. Not that we'll need that either, but. . .”

“We'll need it before this voyage is over,” said Ilna, folding a swatch of coarse fabric over the hand frame to protect it when she packed it in the hold. “That's why we're here, after all.”

She was smiling also. It struck her that there probably wasn't much difference between her expression and that of Chalcus.

And because Ilna really was in a positive mood, she laughed at the thought.

“We should've come double-time,” Attaper muttered to Garric as they reached the plaza in front of the Temple of the Lady of the Sunset. “My boys could've taken the gates and held them till the regulars came up.”

Ten Blood Eagles were ahead of them; seventy more—companies in the bodyguard regiment were badly understrength because of recent fighting—were behind. Rosen's regiment followed, filling the street eight abreast and singing a Blaise war chant.

The hut beside the temple steps was empty, though the watchman's lighted lantern hung from the hook over his open door. The gates to the compound behind the temple were closed and barred; that might have been normal for the hours before dawn, but an alarm was ringing within and torchlight shimmered behind the walls.