Goddess of the Ice Realm (71 page)

She'd known the Tree in Hell—a year ago or a lifetime, depending on how you counted time. In exchange for Ilna's soul, the Tree had taught her to weave as only Gods and demons could, and she'd used her new skill to the Tree's ends.

There'd been no more effective minion of evil than Ilna os-Kenset—till Garric had freed her. Neither Garric nor anything else could free Ilna from the memory of what she had done in those months when she fed the Tree's tendrils.

Ilna reached another intersection. She was barely conscious of it. The floor here bore footprints crossing left to right. They looked human, but whatever had made them was so heavy that its feet had sunk into the ice, stressing it white in blotches around each print.

Ilna walked on. A figure ahead sauntered toward them.

“Chalcus,” she said, “there's an enemy coming, a girl.”

“I see her,” Chalcus said appraisingly. “I couldn't have told her for a girl, though, at this distance.”

“Her name is Monine,” said Ilna. It no longer bothered her that she remembered what she hadn't seen. “She's a wizard and very dangerous.”

“Danger?” said Chalcus. He laughed. “In this place, what else would we find?”

His sword cut a tight figure eight, making the cold air whistle.

“I'll lead, shall I, dear one?” he said, stepping past Ilna with the sword slanted out to his side. Its point quivered like the nose of a hound straining as it waits for its leash to be slipped.

“Chalcus, be careful,” Ilna said. “She's not what she seems.”

“Ah,” Chalcus said, his low voice as eager as his blade. “But I
am
what I seem, dear heart.”

They neared the sexless figure walking down the center of the tunnel. Monine's lips curved in a bloodless smile. Her knife echoed the curve, and there was blood enough for any number of smiles on its blade.

“So, Mistress Monine,” Chalcus called. “Have you business
with us? If not, then my friend and I are willing to pass by and forget we've met.”

“I have the business of killing you,” said Monine. She laughed, a high, glittering sound like jade wind chimes. “But I've always found killing more pleasure than business, and it will be a particular pleasure this time.”

“Chalcus, the cloth of her tabard!” Ilna said. No eye but hers could've traced the pattern woven in brilliant colors, but even Ilna was helpless against it. The fabric was a net, catching eyes—even Ilna's—and snatching them away from their intent as surely as a fisherman draws his catch from the sea. “You won't be able to see her! She won't—”

Chalcus slashed, a blow as quick and smooth as the play of light on a dewdrop. His sword touched nothing. Monine's knife came up arrow-swift; swifter yet, Chalcus's dagger blocked the stroke with the ring of steel on steel.

He hopped back, his mouth open and his breath a cloud before him in the still, cold air. He lunged, his sword a curved extension of his right arm. His steel punctured emptiness, and again Monine stabbed for his heart. Her blade sang on the slim dagger, locking it guard to guard. Sparks showered and Chalcus jumped back again.

Ilna held her cords ready but she didn't knot a pattern because it'd be useless—the tabard would trap her art as surely as it trapped her eyes and the eyes of as good a swordsman as had ever been born. Instead she backed, giving Chalcus space to retreat—as he did again when his sword flicked and missed, and the bloody knife sought him.

Chalcus had shown himself able to anticipate the knife even if his eyes couldn't find the wielder; perhaps he and Ilna could back all the way to where they entered this maze. But if they were going to retreat to where they entered, then they might as well have stayed with the Rua or better still in their own world. In this place, there was more than a likelihood of something coming from the other direction to find them if they didn't move ahead quickly.

Chalcus struck—low this time, aiming at the sexless wizard's feet but glancing along the stone-hard ice.
Stab/clash
as sacrificial knife met dagger, but this time the edge
stopped close enough to mark Chalcus's tunic with a line of blood from some other victim's lungs. He jumped back flat-footed, so Monine's second stroke cut the air instead of severing his ribs at mid-chest.

The slender wizard seemed tireless. Her smile never faltered, her steps and slashes were as steady as the beat of a millstone driven by the stream's relentless force. If—

Chalcus laughed and closed his eyes. He stepped forward, his curved sword singing in a short arc.

Monine screamed and collapsed. Ilna thought the sound continued to echo long after the wizard's severed head had spun and danced to a halt far down the tunnel of ice. Blood spouted, then dribbled from the neck stump. As it soaked into Monine's rumpled tabard, her corpse took on clearer lines against the floor.

Chalcus toed the knife out of the wizard's hand. “I've seen sickles that'd be less clumsy in a knife fight,” he mused aloud, “and the blade's heavy enough for a trireme's ram. But for all that it nearly did for me, did it not?”

“There's nearly,” said Ilna in a terse voice, “and there's what she is. Dead. Nearly will do.”

Chalcus jerked a sleeve off Monine's tunic and wiped his blade clean of her blood. “She could fool my eyes,” he said in the soft lilt that he'd have used to describe Ilna's hair or the curve of her neck. “But not my hand, I thought; and I was right.”

“What if she'd struck at you when you closed your eyes?” Ilna asked mildly.

Chalcus snorted; he lifted an edge of the tabard with his sword point, then let it flop down again. “Strike?” he said. “When she saw her death coming on my sword edge? No love, not that one.”

He grinned at her. “She's not you, you see.”

“Apparently not,” Ilna said, looking down the tunnel. Monine's head had come to rest on the stump of her neck. The shock of decapitation had lifted the corners of her mouth; from a distance the rictus looked like a mocking grin.

“Not yet, at least,” Ilna added. “Come, then. We have a little farther yet to go.”

Sharina led the way down the corridor. Franca was on her right, Scoggin on the left. Either man was a little behind her and far enough to the side to be safe when she began to swing the axe. The remainder of the band, eight men and some of them limping along with wounds, spread to either side.

The glowing walls made Sharina feel as though she were walking in a tunnel of light. She'd thought at first she might get used to it, but she'd been wrong. Faint though the glow was, it jabbed into her consciousness like the brush of nettles on her skin; every step, every heartbeat.

The figures at the other end of the tunnel shimmered as if seen across an expanse of sunlit desert, but she could see that there were many of them, far more than her band had killed on entering this realm. The points of their weapons winked like the stars on a winter night.

Beard had been singing softly. Now in a regretful voice he said, “I don't mind if we kill the ones waiting for us ahead. Not me, not Beard; blood is blood. But
you
might want to know that those are your friends, mistress.”

Ah.
Now that she'd been told, Sharina saw that the shields of the figures ahead were the familiar long ovals of the royal army, and that the ranks showed a degree of order that she'd never seen among the minions of chaos.

“These are friends!” she shouted, turning her head to the right, then left to make eye contact with her men. “I'll talk to them when we get closer. There'll be an officer who recognizes me, I'm sure.”

Actually, she
wasn't
sure. Nobody in the royal army had seen Princess Sharina dressed in a bearskin over the remnants of her sleeping shift, carrying an axe at the head of a band as ragged as she herself was. And what her hair must look like!

In an undertone she went on, “Thank you, Beard. For telling me they were friends.”

“Oh, you'd have figured it out before we killed anybody, mistress,” the axe said. He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “And anyway, there'll be more blood for Beard to drink. Much more, don't you think?”

“I'm sure there will be,” said Sharina. But less sure that she wouldn't have gone tearing into Garric's army, oblivious of everything except for the fact that they were in front of her.

“Mistress?” said Beard. “All I think about is what I'm going to get a chance to kill next; that's the way Beard is, how Beard was made to be. But you humans aren't supposed to be like that.”

She'd forgotten that the axe heard her thoughts. . . .
“You're right, Beard,” Sharina said. “And we humans especially shouldn't become focused on how we're going to die. It's good to have friends who warn us when we get off the right road.”

“Humph!” said the axe, a kind of metallic snort. “
I
drink blood.”

They'd come within a hundred feet of the royal line. One of the men in the front row was a Blood Eagle, but judging from shield facings the other troops were a mixture of two or three regular regiments. Had there been a disaster?

“Ready!” called an officer, slanting his sword forward. The spears of the men in the front ranks came back, ready to throw.

“Wait!” cried Sharina. She gripped Beard just below the head and waved the butt in the air, hoping that looked pacific. The axe was giggling. “Wait, we're friends!”

A big, barrel-chested man in gold-chased black armor forced his way to the front of the formation. Lord Attaper, and a welcome sight.

“That's Princess Sharina, you fools!” Attaper cried. “Platt, are you blind or have you gone mad? Lower your spears!”

Sharina trotted forward, wobbling for the first couple steps. She was suddenly aware that she'd almost been killed by her friends. Garric would've been very angry when he heard about it.

The axe giggled again; so did she.

“Lord Attaper,” Sharina gasped as she reached the line. Scoggin and Franca were with her, and despite what she'd said the rest of the band was close behind. “These are my friends. We've come to kill the wizard who's destroying this world. Ah,
Her.”

The royal troops looked either puzzled or embarrassed. The officer who'd been about to order Sharina killed stood rigid, facing straight ahead so that he wouldn't have to meet her eyes.

“I'll get you to the prince,” Attaper said. “He'll be glad you're safe.”

“Safe,” echoed Beard. “Safe? Oh, what marvelous jesters these soldiers are! But there'll be enough blood for everyone, for Beard and these soldiers and more besides than all of us can drink!”

Attaper looked first at Sharina, then down at the axe. His eyes widened; then he looked away, toward the men following her. He gestured with his chin and said, “Is this lot with you, your highness?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice sharper than she'd really intended because of what she heard as an implied insult. These men had followed her here—to Hell!—because she'd asked them to. “These are my companions. They'll come with me to see my brother.”

“Right,” said Attaper, gesturing with both arms to clear a passage through the close-packed troops. “We need to get them inside so that Captain—”

He looked with hard eyes at the stiff, flushing officer.

“—Platt doesn't have another brainstorm!”

Sharina turned to her men. “Follow me and keep close!” she ordered.

She clutched Beard to her chest so she wouldn't slash somebody as she squeezed between the soldiers. “As if they were going to do anything else,” said the axe. “You're the only thing in this place that they trust. Why, you're the only thing in this place they're not terrified of!”

Attaper led them into a huge domed chamber, larger than any of the similar junctions Sharina and her band had seen on their way through the ice maze. It was full of milling soldiers.

Here and there officers were trying to organize their units, causing greater confusion than there would have been without their efforts. Except for the commander of the Blood Eagles leading them, Sharina didn't suppose she and her band could possibly have gotten through—even with Garric himself,
standing on a pedestal, shouting to them at the top of his lungs.

“It's not a pedestal,” Beard said. “Your brother's standing on the shoulders of a man named Cashel or-Kenset. Is this possibly of interest to you, mistress?”

“Cashel!” Sharina cried. “Cashel!”

She started to slip past Attaper—she could have, slim and strong and because she was female likely to be treated with deference that these nervous armed men would never have given another of their own. But she'd have had to leave behind the band who'd followed her,
her
men.

Sharina smiled. Cashel could wait a few minutes. He'd understand if anyone alive would understand.

Garric jumped to the ground as Attaper wove Sharina and her companions closer. He vanished for a moment behind the wall of troops, then reappeared in front of Attaper with Cashel at his side. They moved like whales bellying through a sea of armed men. Liane followed closely, and a pair of noncoms trailed her, looking bemused. They were apparently attached to Garric though they weren't Blood Eagles and Sharina didn't recall seeing them before.

Sharina hugged Cashel awkwardly because both of them had something in their right hands. He was used to doing things while holding the quarterstaff, but she had to remind herself that Beard had sheared everything he'd touched save the metallic monster Alfdan had fed himself to.

Cashel was a mountain, a tower against everything hostile. Holding him and being held brought order to the cosmos. It was the first peace Sharina had known since the urn in her bedroom had sucked her into the world She ravaged.

She patted Cashel once more between the shoulder blades, then leaned back and broke the embrace. She took a deep breath.