Goddess of the Ice Realm (50 page)

“Through it!” Evne cried. “That's the pathway!”

Cashel sprang toward the beast, his staff slantwise across his body to beat aside the claws when they swung toward him. The scene—the beast and the grove both—vanished.

Cashel was in the mirrored corridor again. Ansache gave a cry of horror and despair, then lurched another step onward and disappeared.

Cashel followed. He'd follow till he died. It wasn't a conscious decision anymore, it was just the way things were going to be till the business ended one way or the other.

He stepped onto ice and skidded. He chopped his staff down; the ferrule gouged a purchase from the slick black surface. It was blazingly cold, freezing his feet because his calluses had been softened by tramping through the bog. The only light came from the sullen red flare that silhouetted ruined buildings on the horizon.

The ice was clear. Beneath it, staring up at Cashel through
fans of stress marks, was the face of a giant. His mouth, large enough to swallow Cashel whole, opened in a bellow that made the world vibrate.

“Down his throat!” said Evne. “You'll have to break the ice!”

Cashel swung the staff in a half arc. An azure glitter trailed the ferrules the way sparks stream from a quickly-spun torch. The opposite buttcap slammed into the ice in a silent, mind-numbing blue glare. A thousand tiny cracks shivered across the surface, clouding the face beneath it.

The mouth shouted again. The ice blew apart like sea foam shredded by a gale. Cashel jumped or fell—he wasn't sure which, just that he'd managed to get through—down the roaring tunnel beneath him.

He was in the hall of mirrors again. Ansache, sobbing with terror, stabbed his athame into the wall beside him. Instead of shattering as Cashel expected it to do, the world itself curled back from the point like a sheet of isinglass touched by a hot spark. An edge of reality coiled over the wall and the wizard together, leaving a different universe expanding into the place where the corridor had been.

Cashel stood on a hot, windswept plain. In all directions were hills eroded from the yellow, chalky earth. He raised his left arm to breathe through the sleeve of his tunic and filter out the dust.

“Which way is Ansache?” he said to the toad on his shoulder.

“Ansache doesn't matter anymore,” Evne said. “To save himself he opened a passage for you onto the ship. Now we'll find the Visitor.”

Hutena was on the port tiller; Kulit in the bow as lookout again. The other four crewmen were on the oars, pulling hard. They wore the set expressions of men who knew that they'll be at the task for a long time—but that the faster they worked, the better off they'd be.

Rincip knelt facing sternward, his wrists and ankles bound to the bitts holding the mainstay. Chalcus had stripped him, cutting his tunics off with long strokes of his dagger. It would've been as simple to undress the prisoner
normally, but Ilna supposed the dagger—and the nudity itself—was for its effect.

That seemed scarcely necessary; Rincip was terrified, both of what had happened and of what he feared would be next. He looked ready to offer his mother's soul if his captors demanded it. But Chalcus wasn't a man to take unnecessary chances, probably because his life had involved so many risks that he
hadn't
been able to avoid.

Pointin had gotten out of the hold, for the first time since the
Bird of the Tide
came in sight of Terness Harbor after his rescue the night before. He sat against the starboard gunwale and stared at the captive Sea Guard. His face showed no emotion, no expression at all.

“So, Master Rincip . . .” Chalcus said. He sat cross-legged facing the captive. As he spoke, he stropped his curved dagger on the ball of his callused foot. “I've some questions for you. If you answer them promptly and honestly, we'll put you into your skiff and you can wait for your friends to pick you up when they come chasing us . . . as they surely will and as surely will fail, for in the hours it takes the Commander to get a crew together, I'll have the
Bird
across shoals where your
Defender
can't follow without ripping her bottom out.”

“You're lying,” Rincip whispered through dry lips. “You'll kill me whatever I do.”

Despite the words, Ilna thought she heard hope in the Sea Guard's tone. Until Chalcus made the offer, Rincip hadn't even imagined that he might survive this night.

Chalcus laughed merrily. “I've killed too many men to count, my friend,” he said. “Men, and it might be women and children too; I was a hard fellow when I was younger. I don't need to add to the number, though it won't bother me greatly if that happens. Regardless, we're towing your little boat behind us, which we would not do except I'm willing to set you free on it.”

“Ship your oars and raise sail!” Hutena shouted. The four rowers lifted the sweeps from the oarlocks and pulled them aboard.

Ilna glanced over her shoulder. The castle's watchtower was now below the horizon, but she'd seen it a few minutes
earlier when she last looked. She didn't doubt that it'd take at least an hour before Lusius could muster enough of a crew to take the patrol vessel out, but that didn't matter. Everybody aboard the
Bird of the Tide
knew that Lusius would choose wizardry rather than swords to solve this problem. That way it couldn't be traced back to him.

“If you don't talk willingly,” Chalcus continued in the same playfully cheerful tone, “Mistress Ilna here will weave you a pattern that brings the words out regardless. Then too you'll go over the side; but bound as you are and without the skiff. You may be floating when your friends arrive; but you won't, I think, be in any different state than if I'd slit your throat to give you a quick end . . . which I will not.”

“What do you want to know?” Rincip asked in a guarded, hopeful tone. “I'm not . . . I mean, the Commander plays things pretty close. I don't know much.”

“But you know that Lusius is behind the attacks on shipping, do you not?” Chalcus said. “The
Queen of Heaven
and others before her, a dozen ships or so?”

“Yeah, he must be,” Rincip said.
Admitted
would've been the wrong word to use since the Commander's deputy was so determinedly separating himself from the business. “He knows to take us out in the barges before anything happens. But it's that demon Gaur who does it and I don't know how. He stays back in the castle, down in his rooms where the dungeons were. I'm not sure even Lusius knows what Gaur does.”

Nabarbi loosed a line; the sail slatted down. Ninon and Shausga drew it taut by adjusting the foot ropes. Ilna hadn't noticed enough change in the breeze to justify switching to sail now, but she wasn't a sailor and these men certainly were. Sure enough, the
Bird
continued on its way; as fast or perhaps a trifle faster than the oars had driven it.

Rincip licked his lips and glanced longingly at the skin of wine that the crewmen were passing around now that their hands were free of the oars. Ilna said, her voice harsher than she'd expected, “We said we'd spare your life. We didn't say that we'd treat you as a friend. Tell us about the attacks!”

“All right, all right,” Rincip muttered. “It's always the same. Lusius knows where to go. We wait; the sea's empty,
there's nothing there, and then there's a flash and the ship is on the sea rocking and stinking of sulphur. Always the same.”

He closed his eyes, moving his head side to side as if he was trying to clear something from it. “I try not to look when I know the light is going to come, but it doesn't help,” he said. “It comes right through you. You see it in your brain even if your eyes're covered.”

“And when the ship appears . . .” said Chalcus mildly, ignoring Rincip's trembling terror. “Do you board and slay the crew?”

The captive laughed harshly. “There's no crew!” he said. “There's nobody, not a soul alive ever till that one there—”

He jerked his chin toward Pointin since his hands were tied behind him.

“—hid in the iron chest just now. There's parts of bodies, torn parts and chewed like shrews that a cat brings back. We throw them in the sea to Our Brother, but it's not us who kills them.”

“You've been training the seawolf for the whole time, then?” Chalcus said with a broad, hard smile. “A clever man, our Lusius.”

“You don't know the half of it,” said Rincip. “Did you think it was chance the beast is named Our Brother?”

“Go on,” said Chalcus; still smiling, his right index finger playing with the eared pommel of his inward-curving sword.

“Lusius and his twin Ausius bribed Lascarg to send him here as Commander of the Strait,” Rincip explained. “They were as much a pair as your two hands are. The first night Ausius fell into the sea and a seawolf ate him before we could get a line over to draw him up. Ever since then the seawolf's followed whenever Lusius puts out, in the
Defender
or the barges either one. And Lusius never goes aboard one of the fishing boats, because Our Brother is big enough to capsize them . . . and he thinks that's what he'd do.”

“Did Lusius throw his brother to the beast?” Ilna said. “Stab him and throw the body in?”

Rincip shrugged. “It was night,” he said. “They were in the far bow of the
Defender.
Lusius says his brother leaned
over holding a stay to look at the seawolf and his hand slipped. Maybe that's what happened.”

He scrunched up; if his hands had been free, he'd have been covering his eyes with them, Ilna was sure. He said, “I wish I'd never got into this. We're all afraid, we'd all like to quit. I think the Commander's as scared as the rest of us, but what can we do?”

“You can get very rich, I'm thinking,” said Chalcus pleasantly. “From the shell alone, a tidy sum; and with what comes out of the bellies of the ships you loot—richer yet. I know better than most how quickly that gold flows away, but having it means a fine time while it lasts.”

“You don't know,” Rincip said, shaking his head miserably. “Sure, I've seen bodies before, but just pieces, always pieces . . . And I kept thinking, what if it gets loose? What if it comes after me?”

“What
it?”
Ilna said. “What's the thing that does the killing?”

“I don't know,” Rincip said, his voice rising. “I don't know, I don't want ever to know. But I'm afraid!”

Which surely was the truth, given that where he was
now
didn't frighten him as much as Gaur's monster did. If the thing was Gaur's at all . . .

“What do you think, dear one?” Chalcus asked her.

Ilna pursed her lips but it was a moment before she decided how to speak. At last she said, “He's telling the truth, surely, but I don't see that he's any further use to us. Except as a witness, I suppose, but you said we'd let him go.”

Chalcus grinned and pulled his dagger from his sash. “So I did,” he said. He reached out; Rincip flinched as far away as the cords twisted from his own silk tunic allowed, but Chalcus slipped the dagger behind him.

The bonds parted; Rincip sprawled on the deck, dragging tags of severed cord. Chalcus had cut him loose without seeing the knots or touching the prisoner's skin.

He sheathed his dagger and grinned at Ilna. She grinned back. His was a personality very different from hers, but he showed an equal attention to craftsmanship.

“Get in your skiff, Master Rincip,” Chalcus said, gesturing
toward the painter tied to a stern bitt. “Go over the side and I'll cast you off. There's oars in the boat, but you may as well wait for the Commander to come by.”

“It wouldn't bother me to knock him in the head first,” said Hutena, speaking for the first time as his hands gripped the tiller fiercely. He glared at the man who'd talked so casually about aiding in the slaughter of hundreds of sailors much like Hutena himself.

“Nor would it bother me, bosun,” Chalcus said with a merry laugh, “but we'll not do that, not just now.”

He gestured to the cowering Rincip with the finger that a moment before had been playing with his sword hilt. “Get over the side, my man,” he said. “I won't make the offer a third time.”

Scrambling and looking back toward Hutena, Rincip tripped over the low railing. He bellowed with shock and fear in the moment he splashed into the water. He must have caught the painter, though, for it jerked violently.

Chalcus cut the skiff loose with a single swift motion of his sword. He sheathed the weapon and said, to Hutena and perhaps to more than the few souls aboard the
Bird of the Tide,
“If every man were hanged who deserved it, friend bosun, I greatly fear that you'd be serving a different captain now.”

“You're not like Rincip, Captain,” Hutena growled. “He's not a man, he's a jackal without the balls to kill for himself. But I guess we can leave him for others if you say so.”

Chalcus looked back over the stern, his lips in a hard, bright smile. Ilna followed his gaze; the skiff was almost lost in the slow swells in the
Bird
's wake.

“They'll be following in the
Defender,”
Chalcus said musingly. “The barges'll still be loaded with what they took from the
Queen of Heaven.
And they know the
Defender
can't catch us before we make the shoals where she can't follow. . . .”

“I just want to get away,” said Pointin, staring at the deck between his knees. “I don't care where. Just away!”

There was a cyan flicker in the night sky. If Ilna hadn't known what it really was, she might have guessed it was heat lightning.

“And so we shall, I do hope,” said Chalcus. “But first we'll make a detour to a place Master Gaur wishes us to see.”

“Captain?” called Kulit from the bow. The sailor's face was carefully composed to hide the fear inside. All the men held weapons, but they clearly shared Ilna's doubt as to how useful that would be.