Goddess of the Ice Realm (34 page)

“Beard,” said Sharina. “Why didn't you tell me about the bear?”

“You killed the bear, mistress,” the axe said with a desperate
brightness. “Oh, nobody could've been quicker than you. Zip! and I was sucking out his brains!”

“Beard,” Sharina said. She stood upright again, swaying only slightly. The weight of the axe in her hands helped her to balance. “You wanted a chance to kill the bear, but you were afraid I wouldn't risk my own life to save a stranger if I'd known what the danger was.”

“Mistress,” said the axe in a subdued voice, “you—”

“Shut up!” said Sharina. She took a deep breath. “I'd have gone. Even for a stranger. He's a human being and I'm human. That's enough.”

The man now peered from the doorway, ready to run back to his upstairs shelter if there were any hint of danger. Anger touched Sharina again. Did the fool think the bear was shamming, lying here with its skull cleft to the neck bones?

“Yes, mistress,” the axe said. “I'll—”

“Shut
up!”
Sharina said. “The other thing to remember is this: if you ever hide the truth from me again, for
any
reason, I will destroy you if I can. Anyway, I'll bury you where you'll never be found till the ice comes. Do you understand?”

“Yes, mistress,” said the axe.

The man who'd been trapped in the mill approached to within ten feet of Sharina, then stopped. From a distance Sharina'd guessed he was in his forties, but close up he was much younger. He had the worn, grayish look of a plow that's spent decades out in the weather, and his breeches were freshly torn. A swipe of the bear's claw had raised a welt on his thigh without quite drawing blood.

“Mistress,” he said, nodding acknowledgment. “My name's Scoggin and I guess I'm in your debt for my life.”

Scoggin had an ordinary peasant's knife in his belt and a spear made by binding a similar knife blade onto a short shaft. His eyes kept flicking to the axe; he carefully stayed beyond its reach.

He grimaced. “Mistress?” he blurted. “Are you human?”

“Of course I'm human!” Sharina said. Franca had returned from the woods and was sidling toward them, keeping Sharina between him and the stranger. “What did you think I was?”

Scoggin gestured toward the dead bear. “Mistress,” he said, “I didn't know.”

Sharina smiled despite herself. “Well, I am,” she said. “I'm Sharina os-Reise. I was lucky and I've got a very sharp axe.”

Franca crept close to Sharina's side, silent and shivering.
How many people had the youth spoken to in the past nine years? Perhaps only his mother and Sharina herself.

She waggled Beard. The inlaid steel head was as bright as though she'd just polished it, though blood and brains smeared the helve—as they did her own forearms.

“I wouldn't say,” she added coldly, remembering how Beard had tricked her into fighting the bear, “that owning this axe was necessarily part of my good luck.”

“Mistress, it'll never happen again,” the axe chirped. “Beard knows you'll feed him. He trusts you, mistress.”

Scoggin stared at the axe in open amazement. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “It talks?” he said.

“Among other things,” Sharina replied crisply. “Now, who else is living in Barca's Hamlet? If you're not sure, I want to search the town before we make further plans.”

At the back of her mind she realized she was taking charge. Would she have done that six months ago, before she became “Princess Sharina of Haft?”

She smiled. There was no way of telling, of course, but if she'd changed it was for the better. Given the shape this world was in, the people who'd been making decisions up till now could use some help.

Instead of answering, Scoggin stared in dawning horror and even backed a step. “Pardon, mistress,” he said in a trembling voice, “but you're Sharina
os-Reise?
That would be the innkeeper's daughter?”

“Yes,” Sharina said. Unexpected hope dawned. “You know my father? Is he—”

“Mistress, he's
dead,”
Scoggin said.
“You're
dead, everybody's dead who was in Barca's Hamlet the day She came! Mistress, who are you? Do you come from Her?”

Sharina sagged. Franca started to whimper and stroked her arm like a frightened kitten cuddling closer to its mother.

A fragment of memory returned to her. She looked at Scoggin and said, “You have a farm in the north of the borough, don't you? On Eiler's Creek?”

Scoggin frowned, but the homely question seemed to relax him. “Aye, I did,” he said. “There's no farms now, just scrape for a meal and hope something bigger doesn't find you first; but that was my farm.”

“Well,” said Sharina, “I'm not the woman you're thinking of; but in another—place, I suppose, or maybe time. Anyway, I was somebody very like the person you mean. I'm not a ghost or a demon, either one.”

She took a deep breath and managed a tremulous smile. “What I particularly
am
now,” she said, “is hungry. I suppose we could cut chunks off this bear, but if you've got something else, Master Scoggin, I'd prefer to leave the bear until I'm a little more distant from awareness of just what
he
ate.”

Scoggin smiled also. “I've a line of snares,” he said. “I make a circuit of the borough from here to my old farm in the course of a year, so I don't hunt anyplace out. I just shifted here last night, so there should be plenty for three.”

He turned and started toward the ruined inn. “I never saw anything like that bear before,” he muttered. “If there's more of them, I don't know what I'll do. Unless you . . . ?”

He looked at Sharina in sudden speculation.

“I don't know what my plans will be until I learn more about this world,” Sharina said in a mixture of amusement and irritation. “I don't think it will involve creeping about eating rabbits and watching the ice grow thicker, though.”

Scoggin looked away in embarrassment and cleared his throat.
A man who'd stayed alive for the past decade by dealing with short-term problems couldn't be blamed for continuing to think that way,
Sharina realized. Aloud she said, “Were you in Barca's Hamlet when She came, Scoggin? If you don't mind telling me.”

“I don't mind,” he said. “You saved my life.” But he didn't answer for several long moments.

The brick wall and gateposts on the south side of the inn yard had fallen inward, but the culvert under the entrance lane remained. Scoggin knelt beside it and fished out a line of willow bark. The rabbit he'd noosed there had already
strangled; he popped it into his game pouch and reset the snare.

“I was coming into town that day,” Scoggin said at last. “From midnight on there'd been lightning, I thought it was, and my sheep wouldn't settle down.”

He looked at her. “It wasn't lightning,” he said. “I know that now. It's in the sky all the time now.”

“Yes,” said Sharina. “But of course you wouldn't have known that. Go on.”

“I set off before dawn,” Scoggin said, squatting at a snare across the mouth of a run through brambles along the fallen wall. This one was empty. “I left the sheep with my cousin and his wife; he owned the farm with me and his wife kept house for both of us. I was going to pick up some ale, that was all; for the house and for me.”

Scoggin moved to the next snare, at the mouth of what had been a window of the inn's foundation course. Though the building had collapsed into a mound of rubble, the opening was still a trackway for small animals.

The set—a noose of twine with willow springs to snatch it tight when tripped—was obviously empty, but Scoggin knelt by it anyway. He was operating by rote while his conscious mind tried to deal with things he'd kept buried during the past long years.

Still kneeling, he turned his face to Sharina and went on in a stronger voice, “I heard the noise when I got to the big sheepfold. You know where that is?”

“Yes,” Sharina said, nodding. The broad stone enclosure on high ground north of the hamlet's first buildings was used to count flocks for drovers taking them out of the borough. It was normally empty.

“I waited there,” Scoggin said. “I didn't know what was happening. It sounded like screams and crashing . . . which I guess it was, but I couldn't believe it then. I waited at the sheepfold, just not
comfortable,
you know?”

“Yes,” said Sharina. She knew very well.

“I couldn't see the houses because the track curves,” Scoggin went on, “but something lifted high enough I could see it. It looked like a beetle grub, only it had a man in its jaws. It was huge, just huge.”

He grimaced and stared at the ground. “I don't know who he was, that man,” he said. “It didn't matter, it was all of them before it was over. It was near over then, I guess, because a pack of things came up the track heading north. I heard them coming and hid in the brush, so they went past. Some were giants and some looked more like men; but they weren't.”

Franca was crying openly now, his head in his hands. Scoggin's description must have been much like what happened in Penninvale a year later. Given the sort of destruction Sharina had seen in Carcosa, events there had followed the same pattern if on a larger scale.

“I started back,” Scoggin said. He licked his lips. “Keeping in the woods. I'd seen the,
them,
going north. I didn't know what to do. They'd been to the farm and gone on by the time I got there. It was—”

He turned his hands up helplessly. “Everything was dead. Everybody was dead.”

Scoggin rose and walked to where the curb in the center of the inn yard had been knocked into the well it was meant to protect. The snare he'd set there had caught another rabbit; it was still struggling.

“Mine!” Beard called, but Scoggin snapped the animal's neck obliviously and bagged it. He was still operating by reflex, though he seemed calmer now than he had when he began speaking.

“I've been hiding in the woods ever since,” Scoggin said. He was limping slightly; perhaps from the bear's swipe, perhaps from older injuries; now that Sharina had been with him for a time, she saw that Scoggin's left arm was crooked where a broken bone had been ill set. “The big packs have gone away—”

His face stiffened. “I thought they had, anyway, because there was nobody left to hunt. The bear, though—that was new. I don't know what it means.”

“How did the Hunters arrive here, do you know?” Sharina asked. Her eyes instinctively searched the rubble for bones. There wouldn't be any, of course; the voles would've gnawed them all away in a single winter, let alone a decade.
What her mind knew was one thing; what her heart feared was another.

“Oh, yes,” Scoggin said. “It was on the shore, a tunnel of light. It was purple but solid. It was there for years after, but it finally faded away.”

“Show me,” said Sharina, walking toward the Old Kingdom seawall that protected the east side of Barca's Hamlet from the winter storms that wracked the Inner Sea. She looked out, expecting the view she'd seen every morning when she awakened in her garret bedroom.

The sea had vanished.

She must have gasped. Scoggin looked at her, misunderstanding the surprise, and said, “Yeah, that was Cranmer; he must've touched the side of the tunnel. He froze so solid that he didn't even start to thaw for years, and there's still his hand and some of his arm left.”

Scoggin meant the piece of debris on the foreshore. Sharina had taken it for the driftwood and dismissed it from consideration.

“But the
sea
,” she said; and then she found it, a glittering line on the horizon. It had drawn back miles from the familiar shore, leaving a waste of shingle, which brush and coarse grasses were beginning to colonize.

“Oh, that,” Scoggin said. “Yeah, it's been drying up ever since She came.”

He shivered. “That's all right with me,” he added. “There were things out in the water the first year or two, huge snakes. The farther away they keep from the land, the better I like it.”

“It's the ice,” said Beard. “It has to come from somewhere, you know. The sea becomes ice and the ice covers the land . . . but first there'll be more blood for Beard to drink, much more blood.”

“What's that?” said Sharina, pointing south toward the glitter just visible beyond the curve of the seawall. She started in that direction, clambering over the rubble of what had been the stables at the back of the inn yard.

“What?” said Scoggin. He leaned outward, learning as Sharina had already realized that he couldn't see much from
where they stood. “It was never here before. It might be danger. . .”

He let his voice trail off and followed. To Sharina it didn't look any more or less hostile than the rest of this horrible place, and it was at least a change from stark ruins.

The seawall sloped back a foot for each of the twelve feet it rose from what had been sea level at a spring tide. At its base, drawn up on the rocky beach, was a framework of crystal rods that gleamed with more light than that of the hazy sun.

“It's a ship!” Sharina said. Though it couldn't be an ordinary ship: the rods outlined a vessel but didn't form solid ribs and bulwarks. The lines were too clear for her to doubt her instinct, though.

“But it's up on land,” said Scoggin. “And I would've seen it if it's been here even last night!”

Sharina sidestepped down the seawall, touching the stone with her left hand in case she slipped. Beard, chuckling merrily to himself, was in her right. Franca crawled down the slope behind her, but Scoggin stayed at the top wearing a worried frown.

Sharina touched a crystal with the butt of the axe. It made a faint
tick,
more like stone than metal. A shimmer of light, too faint to have color, connected the rods like the skin of a soap bubble.