"I'll take over here, your highness!" said Lord Waldron, glancing back over his shoulder to judge how many troops had arrived. It looked to Garric like several score, a mix of Blood Eagles and regular infantry from Lord Mayne's regiment; the passage from the palace garden was packed with more men. "One quick charge'll sweep these scum away!"
"By the Shepherd, lad!" Carus snarled in Garric's mind. "Don't let that bloody cavalryman throw them away!"
Nor shall I, Garric thought. Aloud he said, "No, milord. I haven't time to explain my strategy here-"
Carus guffawed. Garric's only strategy was to keep from spreading his force into a maze of corridors where the unknown numbers of enemies would have all the advantages. Simple though the plan was, it was a considerable improvement on Lord Waldron's notion of hurling his troops at the enemy in heroic disregard of what might be in ambush behind these gleaming walls.
He stepped in front of the soldiers and turned his back to the army of monsters. "Soldiers of the Isles!" he shouted. "Form ranks five abreast. We'll advance at a walk. The front two ranks will throw spears on my command, the rest of you keep yours till we know more about the situation."
Things would've been disorganized even if all the men had been from the same unit. As it was, besides the Blood Eagles and Mayne's regiment, there were members of half a dozen other commands who'd been in the palace for one reason or another. They'd rushed to follow their prince when it looked like action.
This was exactly what good soldiersshould do, of course, but it turned confusion into chaos. Every man in earshot of Garric, some thirty or forty of them, pushed forward to get into the front rank.
"Fellow soldiers!" Garric bellowed. "Save your shoving for the enemy or you'll be cleaning latrines for the rest of your army careers! If any of us live long enough to have careers, which we won't if you don't stop acting like schoolboys. There'll be plenty of fighting for all of us this day, as sure as I love the Isles."
The commotion settled into a reasonable array, though Garric noticed that there were six men, not five, in each rank. That'd be a hindrance for good sword work, but with the enemy channeled straight ahead by the ice walls it might be as well as not to have more weight up front.
Waldron laid his hand on a Blood Eagle's shoulder to move the man back and take his place. "Milord!" Garric said, stepping between Waldron and the soldier. "I need you to stay here where the, the passage enters this ice world. Make sure everyone coming through knows to follow the men in front of them and not go down other corridors. They can fight if they're attacked from the flanks, but they'renot to leave the path that I've chosen."
The path that Tenoctris had chosen, of course, but there was no need for technicalities. The old wizard's thin crimson line continued to stretch back to Carcosa and the sunshine of late spring. A similar trace of blue wizardlight now curled from the triangle also and gleamed down the corridor filled with oncoming beastmen.
"No, your highness," Waldron said with an angry wave of his left hand to brush the notion away. "Mayne can handle that, or-"
"No, Lord Waldron!" Garric said, with King Carus' iron in his voice. "My army commander will take charge of the matter. For the moment that means you. Are you resigning rather than take an order framed for the kingdom's good?"
"Faugh, you're a boy!" Waldron shouted. He slammed his long sword back in its scabbard. "But you'll never say a bor-Warriman didn't do his duty!"
He stalked back to where the passage through nothingness opened into the ice world, every inch a man. "And a soldier besides, rather than just a warrior," said Carus thoughtfully. "Which is a harder task than many realize, and a task I failed at more often than I care to remember."
Officers were bellowing the troops into order as they stepped onto the ice. Invariably the men's set expressions warmed into relief as they left the passage. These corridors weren't like home-Garric smiled with black humor; at least not home to anybody in the royal army-but ice was a natural thing compared to the glowing nothingness they'd crossed to get here.
Garric and the king in his mind both blinked in a surge of pride. In training and discipline, these were the best troops the Isles had seen in a thousand years; and in courage they were the equal of any men who'd ever lived!
Garric pushed his way toward the front of his force as it tramped up the corridor, filling the corridor as a piston does the cylinder of a pump. Men cursed when he bumped them, but they let him by when they realized who he was. Lord Mayne was in the front rank; Garric halted behind him, squeezing between two veterans-both of them noncoms from Mayne's regiment.
One man muttered, "You hadn't ought to be here, sir."
The other nodded but said, "Aye, though it's an honor to see your highness this way. Wait till I tell my grand-nephews that I stood beside Prince Garric hisself when we sent all them demons back to Hell!"
"They're a bit beforehand on that," said the image of Carus with a gust of laughter. "But a soldier who thinks that way's generally worth two of the other kind!"
"By your leave, your highness?" called Lord Mayne, cocking his head but keeping an eye on the squadrons of monsters ahead. "We'll shortly be in javelin range."
Mayne was a pudgy fellow, the younger son of a family of wealthy Valles merchants. He hadn't been raised to hunting and other rural sports like the nobles from Northern Ornifal who provided most of the officers in the royal army. Bringing his regiment double-time from the camp had winded him, whereas Lord Waldron-twice Mayne's age and more-had run back and forth between the palace and the Temple of the Shepherd without signs of effort.
But Mayne was in the front rank, thinking about the practical questions of war instead of his fears or hope of honor. He held his rank by Lord Tadai's recommendation; for which Tadai deserved the thanks of his prince and the kingdom.
The hostile army wasn't of demons, but it looked a formidable enough crew regardless. Garric wasn't sure any two of the enemy were the same, nor were any of them human. He saw something that looked like a stork, but it stood ten feet tall and had two heads with long bills. Beside it tramped a squat figure wearing half-armor and a closed helmet; it had four arms, each holding a double-bitted axe, and it walked on a pair of legs like a sow's. Beside that was a goat with the head of a great cat. Beside that-but it didn't matter: they'd all die, or Garric would die and the Isles with him.
"You may give the order, milord!" Garric said.
The leading ranks canted back the eight-foot spears in their right arms. Some of the soldiers were probably left handed. In this as in all other things, the needs of the army overrode personal preference: the shieldmust be on the left arm to keep an even front in closed ranks, so the spear and sword were always in the right.
"Leading ranks, ready spears!" Mayne said, his voice suddenly a cricket chirp. The troops had prepared when they heard Garric, but discipline required that their own officer give the command. "Loose!"
The army of monsters was a hundred and fifty feet away, much closer than usual for the volley of javelins that opened a battle. The corridor's ribbed ceiling-though high for a building-prevented the soldiers from arching their spears high for maximum range. Even so, the missiles crashed into the beasts and halfmen with devastating effect.
The goat-lion spun, biting and kicking in mad fury at the spear wobbling in its haunches. Other creatures fell under the beast's sudden onslaught or slashed in response when their instinctive rage overwhelmed the control of the wizard directing them.
While the troll in half-armor was in mid-stride, a spear clanged on his helmet. He toppled and the chaotic rush of his fellows swept over him. The troll's axes chopped mindlessly, lopping pieces off the creatures stumbling past him.
The legs of the two-headed stork kicked in the air, occasionally visible over the throng of its fellows. A spear had punched through the base of its double neck and thrown the creature over on its back.
The creatures that met the swordsmen of Garric's first line were already bleeding from wounds their fellows had inflicted. The Blood Eagle on the right edge of the line thundered, "Gut'em, boys!" an instant before contact.
"Haft and the Isles!" Garric cried. Everybody in the royal army was shouting, but the sum of their voices was a wordless snarl more terrible than the screams and whistling that came from the mob of monsters.
Claws tore at heavy shields, while short swords cut and thrust through flesh in a score of inhuman forms. A manlike figure with a two-handed sword and the head of a blue-feathered hawk shrieked as he went down under quick chops by a pair of soldiers; their hobnails trampled the body as they passed on. The creature's big sword had notched a shield but done no other damage.
Lord Mayne, who didn't have a shield, was battling what looked like a lizard on its hind legs wielding butcher knives in both hands. Mayne held the thing's right wrist in his free hand, but the other knife was blocking his sword and the long jaws were reaching for his throat. Garric judged his moment and thrust over Mayne's right shoulder, piercing the lizard's brain through an eye socket. His blade sparkled; the creature's scales were iron or something equally hard.
A scorpion the size of an ox scrabbled down the corridor. In place of eyes it had a curved crystalline bowl from which two wizened manlike figures peered. The beast's pink body was gashed and dripping ichor from the ruck of injured, maddened monsters it'd had to fight through to reach its intended enemy.
A pincer with jaws the length of a forearm reached for Garric over the wall of shields. He brought his long sword in an overhead arc, his left hand on the pommel to add strength to his right arm. His blade crunched through chitin, severing the pincer's hooked upper jaw. The muscle within was bright yellow.
The scorpion's weight hit the human line. Garric, off-balance from the sword stroke, lost his footing when the soldiers ahead staggered backward. He fell onto the ice, holding his dripping sword straight up. All he could see was bulging calf muscles and the metal-studded leather kilts of men slashing at a horrific enemy.
A spear flew overhead. Garric wasn't in a position-literally-to say it was a bad idea, though by the Shepherd! itseemed like a bad one.
The struggle with the scorpion ended. Garric regained his feet as fresh troops from the rear ranks pushed forward to take the place of the men who'd killed the creature. Swords had chopped off the scorpion's pincers and four pairs of legs, then repeatedly driven through the body's hard pink casing.
The crystal head was shattered. There was no sign of the two miniature figures Garric had glimpsed.
The mob of beasts had become a pile of corpses, more untidy even than the wrack of battle usually was. Blood and ichor of a score of shades stained both the twitching bodies and the equipment of the troops who'd cut them to bits.
There'd been human casualties too, some of them fatal even though the troops wore heavy armor. Lord Mayne was dead, his throat torn out by the barbels of a creature that looked like a catfish on six legs. A Blood Eagle captain had taken the legate's place, reforming the front ranks with men whose swords hadn't been dulled by battle.
"Here sir, we'll get you up there!" growled one of the noncoms who'd flanked Garric a moment before. He grabbed Garric firmly by the left biceps and pulled him forward.
"Make way for his highness, you bloody fools!" shouted his fellow, using his spear butt as a baton to separate the men in the rank ahead. The veterans had not only survived, they'd retrieved spears from the slaughtered monsters. The irons were straight though smeared with purple ichor. The two seemed to have adopted Garric
"Not the worst thing that could happen to a commander, lad," said Carus. Because the ghost lacked a physical presence he hadn't felt the dizzy wave of exhaustion that'd swept over Garric, but a lifetime of remembered battles left his image as tense as Garric had ever seen him. "Nothing against your Blood Eagles, but soldiers who've gotten as old as those fellows have in the front ranks know something about more than being brave."
The royal army was advancing again; the corridor ahead was empty. Soldiers grunted as they speared monstrous bodies that already looked dead. These men were veterans, and they knew a quick thrust was the cheapest insurance there was.
Garric squirmed through the second rank. "Captain-" he said.
"Degtel," said Carus, filling in the name that Garric must've heard but hadn't remembered.
"-Degtel," Garric continued, as smoothly as if the name had been on the tip of his tongue. Carus chuckled in his mind. "We'll proceed, following the line of light. Keep the pace down to that of a route march as you've been doing. Hurrying's likely to get us somewhere we want to avoid."
They'd reached a rotunda from which seven corridors branched. The walls quivered: some with crimson light, others with azure. Tenoctris' gleaming guide bent to follow a red one. Garric knew he should be glad of any illumination, but his heart would've preferred blackness to this wizardlight.
"May I ask your highness where wedo want to go?" Degtel asked over his shoulder. He was a young man, quite handsome, and-judging by the quality of the gold inlays on his black armor-from a very wealthy family.
There were-there seemed to be-shapes frozen into the walls, and the floor was so clear that Garric could see things moving beneath the ice. Once the movement was accompanied by a flash of teeth, any of which was as long as a man.
"We're going to the place Lady Tenoctris' art tells us will bring an end to the business," Garric said. He grinned at a sort of humor he wouldn't've have known if he didn't share his mind with a warrior like Carus. "Or to Hell, of course, if we get there first."
Degtel, as surely a warrior as the ancient king, barked laughter.
"If it's Hell," said the veteran on Garric's right, "then we'll bring an escort with us like the Sister never saw before!"
"That'sthe bloody truth!" agreed his partner on the left.
Garric laughed with the others. There were no longer any questions or vexed decisions. The task was quite simple, and the only doubt was whether their swordarms were strong enough to accomplish it.
Something far down the corridor was coming toward them. Quite simple…
The direction ofdown changed more times than Cashel could count. Light flickered the way lightning stutters between cloud tops instead of crossing in a single bolt. Cashel didn't move, so he kept his balance when the shifting stopped.
The whirlpool of wizardlight vanished and with it the sensation of movement. Cashel's feet were planted on firm ground-a little damp, mossy rather than grass-covered. He was standing under a pear tree in a garden; part of the Count's palace, he guessed, though not a part he'd seen before. There was any number of soldiers coming through the door in the building, but a pair of cavalry officers from Lord Waldron's staff were there to keep the newcomers from crowding in too fast.
Cashel must've just popped out of the air so far as the soldiers tramping past were concerned, but nobody said anything or even looked surprised. As a matter of fact, they didn't really lookat him, even the men whose eyes were turned in his direction.
The line coming out of the palace led to a narrow stone table at the back wall of the garden. Behind it, mostly where the brick wall ought to be, was a shimmering purple oval. Soldiers climbed steps made from lengths of pillars set on end, then jumped through the disk of light. An officer in high boots stood at the base of the steps, using his sword like a baton to keep men from rushing up before the fellow ahead was through the disk.
There were three steps: a section of column not much thicker than Cashel's thigh; a taller section that was also about twice as big around; and another of the little columns set on top of another big one. They didn't have a proper foundation, so a Blood Eagle noncom squatted beside the double step to brace it.
Beside the table lay a dead man, opened up like a fish for frying. There was blood all over the stone and the ground around it, which explained why the corpse's skin had the pale yellow look of beeswax. Cashel hoped he'd deserved it; but he didn't know what you'd have to do to deserve what happened tothat fellow.
"What's happening?" Cashel said to a man in line. The fellow kept shuffling forward, so Cashel walked along with him. "Where're you going?"
"We're going to Hell to fight demons," the soldier muttered. He didn't look up as he spoke. "Some demon grabbed Prince Garric and the whole army's supposed to go get him back. That's whatI heard, anyhow."
"We're going to Hell, that's no rumor!" said the man ahead over his shoulder. "Look at that thing we're supposed to jump through! It's wizard work!"
"Just sitting down to dinner and the trumpet sounds," said the first man. "We don't even get to die on a full stomach. May the Sister take all wizards!"
"Well, there's some good ones," Cashel said mildly. He frowned. "One good one, anyhow."
He'd met his share of wizards since Tenoctris washed ashore in Barca's Hamlet, but even if pushed he couldn't think of another that he'd really call "good." There's been no fewpowerful wizards, which was a different thing; and the Sister was welcome to every one of them so far as Cashel was concerned.
He and the two soldiers were nearing the base of the steps up to the purple disk. Neither man seemed frightened, for all they said they expected to die. They weren't happy, but they kept shuffling forward as fast as the line allowed. The man Cashel'd started talking to snugged up a buckle on his breastplate that he'd missed in his hasty departure from camp.
Cashel nodded in understanding. He guessed that was what he looked like when he went out to the byre in a rainstorm to calm the sheep. He knew he'd be cold and miserable, and the folks who owned the flock wouldn't bother to thank him. It was his job, though, and somebody had to do it.
"I think the sheep appreciate it," Cashel said aloud. The soldiers were lost again in their thoughts. They probably didn't hear what he said, and if they had they wouldn't have understood it.
"Hold it!" snapped the officer at the base of the steps as the first of the two soldiers who'd been talking with Cashel started up. He stuck his long sword out. The man ahead was still climbing.
"I'll go up ahead of them, sir," Cashel said politely to the officer. He wished he'd had room to give his staff a trial spin, but this garden with the trees and all the soldiers in it was just too tight for that. "I'm a friend of Garric's."
Cashel put his foot on the bottom step. The officer's face went red. He grabbed the throat of Cashel's tunic with his left hand and raised his sword. "You peasant scum!" he shouted. "You'll get out of here now or I'll feed you to the dogs in pieces!"
"Lord Artis!" said the Blood Eagle who'd been chocking the steps. He straightened, holding his hands up toward the staff officer. His blackened-bronze helmet had its crest crosswise instead of front and back; that meant he had some rank also, though Cashel had never tried to keep that sort of thing straight. "He really is a friend of his highness! That's Lord Cashel!"
"I don't care of he's King Valence the Third!" the officer shouted. "Civilians haven't any business in this affair!"
"Garric's friends do, though," said Cashel in a growl that he could barely understand himself. He hadn't realized how angry he was that something'd happened to Garric while he was off in a place where he rightly didn't have any business.
The officer was nervous too and probably angry that orders kept him back here and not up with the fighting. At another time Cashel might've sympathized with him.
But not now.
Cashel rapped the officer's right hand with his quarterstaff; the man shouted and dropped his sword. Cashel grabbed him by the throat and took a step toward the back wall. The fellow'd lost his grip on Cashel's tunic when the staff numbed his other hand; his face, red to start with, bulged and turned purple.
Cashel cocked his right arm, then straightened it in something between pushing and throwing. The officer flew over the brick wall. It wasn't a clean toss-his heels caught on the coping and flipped him into what would probably be a complete somersault when he landed on the other side-but it was enough to get the fellow out of Cashel's way.
"I'm going to find Garric now," Cashel said to the Blood Eagle in a husky voice. He was breathing hard.
"So are the rest of us, milord," said the Blood Eagle, gesturing toward the lens of purple light. "Just don't hold the line up, if you please."
"Right," said Cashel. He climbed the steps deliberately, planting his feet with care because he knew that somebody his weight'd push the steps over if he came down skew. With the staff angled in front of him, he stepped into the disk.
"Bloody wizard's work!" muttered the soldier following on his heels.
"Master Alfdan's gone!" cried Werbeg, a big man who'd been a wine merchant before She came. "What'll we do! We can't run!"
"We'll fight, of course," said Sharina, raising her voice to be heard though she didn't shout. "Line up to either side of me. I've got the axe and I'll, I'll try…"
Werbeg's panic disgusted Sharina. She was very frightened. Her legs shook. She watched the portal open to spew hellspawn in the certainty that she was about to die; but she was human and this was evil, soof course she'd fight.
"Oh, many more lives!" Beard chortled. "Rivers of blood for Beard to drink, blood and lives and hot, steaming brains!"
The men had wadded a buffalo robe into a plug for the hole by which they'd entered the cavern; wind-swirled ice crystals had set it in place. There was probably ice inches thick over it now. They could break it clear, but not instantly, and what kind of escape would the glacial desert of the surface provide?
Neal looked around the company, holding an arrow between two fingers to his bow's handgrip. He seemed to have recovered from his shock at losing Alfdan. "You other archers," he said in a commanding voice. "Nock an arrow and get ready. Dalin, your bow's not strung! String it, man! Do you want to die?"
The rim of violet light rotated slowly like a bit boring through wood. The center of the circle remained gray, but it was becoming paler and increasingly translucent even as the edge solidified into what looked like shimmering purple metal.
Old Burness knelt and started whimpering. He had a hunting spear with a broad engraved head and a crossbar below it to keep a maddened boar from running his body up the shaft and gutting the man who'd speared him. Even rusty it was an effective weapon-but not in Burness' hands.
Neal must've thought the same thing. He caught Sharina's eye, then snapped, "Franca, trade that spear you've got with Burness. Quick now!"
Franca's spear was actually the head and two feet of shaft from a weapon broken in the fight with the fauns. The youth looked startled. He started toward Burness, then paused in doubt.
"Burness!" Neal said. "Now! Give your spear to somebody who'll use it!"
"Franca, take it," Sharina said. "I need you by me."
In her heart she didn't feel she needed anything: she was about to die, and there wasn't room for any other awareness. Franca hesitated no longer; he snatched away the boar spear and pressed the stub shaft of his own into Burness' hand. The older man stood up, hugging the exiguous weapon. He continued to sniffle, but at least he looked willing to defend himself.
The center of the disk of light had become soap-bubble thin. Figures waited beyond it, some of them beasts and the others bestial at least from the distortion.
The membrane vanished as though it never was. "Kill!" screamed Sharina as she lunged forward. She hadn't had the least intention of giving that battlecry until she and the moment merged.
A thing with the forequarters of a lion and lizard haunches leaped to meet her. It wore iron gauntlets whose tips were knives.
"Kill!" cried Beard and Sharina together, and their mutual stroke split the creature's flat skull like an eggshell. It arched its back as violently as a catapult releasing, lifting Sharina into the air. An arrow from behind her grazed her left calf, then vanished down the gullet of the froglike creature waiting with its huge jaws open. That was probably chance, but it was a lucky chance for her…
Sharina came down in the midst of monsters. She wouldn't have been able to stand upright were it not for the crowd of enemies. She swung-Beardswung; the steel killer's own volition guided it-right and left. The edge ripped apart an octopus on human legs, and the axe in recovering spiked the temple of a faun like the ones who'd attacked Alfdan's band on the shore of Barca's Hamlet.
In the space cleared by the falling monsters, Sharina spun widdershins on the balls of her feet, using Beard's narrow blade like a scythe. There was a shower of sparks as the axe sheared through scales, fangs, and the iron carapace of a creature that looked like a giant helmet walking on crabs' legs. She felt no resistance to the blow. Blood and ichor gouted as monsters collapsed or fell apart.
Beard laughed like a demon. The axewas a demon, as horrible and far more deadly than the thing with a hedgehog's face and hands like balls of needles which he beheaded at the end of his circular sweep. Beard washer demon for now, and at this juncture she'd willingly take him against all the saints who ever lived.
"Save the mistress!" cried Franca in a voice as squeaky as a six-year-old's. He rammed his boar spear into the throat of a snake crawling on hundreds of tiny legs as it struck at Sharina. The creature writhed onto its back, fanged jaws working convulsively and spraying a mist of saffron poison.
Men and monsters battled behind Sharina. Toward her came a spider the size of a haywain. It walked on long glass legs; its body was either clear or dazzling with prismatic reflections, depending on the angle of the light. Its mandibles clicked against one another, dripping green venom from their tips.
"Blood and brains!" Beard shrieked. "Blood and-"
Sharina swung the axe high, using the full length of her arms and both hands on the helve. The reasoning part of her mind wondered if Beard wouldn't shatter on the glittering thing the way an ordinary axe would break if driven into a granite cliff.
Reason didn't control Sharina's actions at this instant. She was filled with the same bloodlust that Beard caroled as his bright steel face shed ropes of blood. As the spider reached for her with its forelegs, she smashed the axe into the middle of the creature's flat face.
A flash of crimson wizardlight pierced the ice in all directions. It illuminated both the sea bottom and cloud-huge bladders with dangling tentacles which swam through the sky above the ceiling of coruscance. The spider disintegrated into shimmering dust finer than jeweler's rouge.
The corridor ahead was empty save for a small man or woman sauntering toward them from a furlong away. Sharina looked behind her, at carnage. Half the band was down, dead or crippled, and all the survivors except her were bleeding.
Burness was dead; his blackened, bloated body was almost unrecognizable. He'd lost his grip on the half-spear in his final convulsions. The man-sized creature that killed him, a black-and-red striped wasp walking on its hind legs, lay nearby. The short shaft stuck out of its faceted right eye.
Scoggin and Franca were both alive, though the older man had been stabbed or bitten through the left shoulder. Franca'd packed the wound with a portion of Burness' silk sash and was wrapping it with the rest of the sash to hold the wad in. The youth showed a deft hand for basic wound dressing.
Sharina reached down to rub the inside of her right calf, then looked at what she was doing and giggled. She was bleeding after all, though not badly. The arrow'd broken the skin and the cut itched like fury.
Her giggle became a loud chuckle. If the wound were worse-if the arrow'd smashed a bone, say-she'd have been in shock and wouldn't feel any discomfort.
"What do we do now, mistress?" Neal asked. Blood matted the left side of his scalp, but his eyes focused and his voice was firm. Instead of his bow he held a sledge hammer, its shaft forged from the same piece of iron as the head. Sharina hadn't seen the weapon before; one of the slaughtered monsters must have carried it.
"We'll continue up this corridor," Sharina said, speaking firmly to give the impression she knew what she was doing. Though in a manner of speaking, shedid know: either they went on or they went back, and 'back' meant an ice desert where the only life was hostile to men. "I think we'd better get going at once, before She sends something else against us."
"She's already sent something, mistress," said Beard in a dreamy, sated voice. "See him coming? His name's Tanus."
Sharina turned again to the figure she'd discounted in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Tanus was now within fifty feet, a pale youth with short blond hair and a supercilious grin.
Sharina's eyes narrowed. She couldn't be sure ofhow close Tanus was because the tabard he wore over his tunics was woven in a pattern that didn't allow her eyes to focus. In his right hand was a curved knife with a silvery blade. It looked like a ceremonial tool, but the blood smearing it was so fresh that it still dripped.
"You're one of Count Lascarg's children, aren't you?" Sharina said. She recalled the face, but without Beard's identification she'd have had to guess whether the androgynous features were male or female. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm here to kill you," Tanus said in a thin, childish voice. "I'm going to kill you all."
"Tell the Sister that!" said Werbeg on a rising intonation. He took two steps forward and flung his javelin at Tanus' chest with all his strength. When the missile left his hand the point was almost in contact with the youth. It missed, clattering down the ice corridor.
Tanus laughed. He slashed at Werbeg, cutting his throat in the middle of a scream of terror.
Neal snarled and brought the hammer around in a horizontal stroke that should have torn Tanus in half. The force of the blow saved Neal's life by jerking him to the side when the sledge didn't connect. The youth's knife opened the skin over his back ribs instead of gutting him.
Sharina moved without thinking, swinging Beard high. Tanus faced her with an expression of ecstasy. She saw his moon-bladed knife sliding toward her belly. The axe twisted in her hands, keen edge slanting away from the grinning face of the youth who was about to kill her.
The thunk! of contact surprised her. Beard had split the youth's skull down to the bridge of his nose.
Sharina waggled the helve in a reflex she'd learned since she came to this world. The axe came free, slobbering joyfully. Tanus crumpled to his knees and fell backward. When his tabard rucked up, she could see him clearly; but not until then.
"Oh, it's been a long time since Beard fed on wizard brains!" the axe said. "Oh, mistress, you're so good to Beard!"
Sharina felt a wash of dizziness as if her mind were a flag in the breeze. The things that'd just happened didn't touch her-now. But they would. She'd done things before which came back to her in the third watch of the night, when dawn was a distant hope and past horrors ruled the darkness.
A slim, blond youth was dead and she'd killed him. She didn't regret what she'd done, but she regretted very much what she'd had to do.
"Lady, may the soul of Tanus find peace in You," she whispered. "And may the souls of those who kill in Your name find peace as well."
"Mistress?" said Neal, his face contorted with pain as Franca bandaged his shallow wound. "Down there, the way the, this one-"
His boot spurned Tanus' body; it was already rigid because of the way Beard had split the youth's brain.
"-came at us. There's more people."
Sharina looked up. She squinted, but even so she couldn't tell more than that there were figures. They didn't seem far away, but the rippling azure light within the walls of this corridor distorted vision.
"All right," Sharina said, slanting Beard's helve over her shoulder for the time being. Her arms were tired, her soul was tired, but she knew the axe would be ready to strike no matter how she carried him. "We'll deal with them next."
Some of Beard's personality was entering hers. For the present, that was desirable-and she no longer believed in a personal future.
Sharina started forward, resigned to death but unconcerned about it. She and her demon companion had more strokes to give the forces of Evil before that happened.
Roaring blue wizardlight left Ilna blind and deaf, but she could still feel. The winged men's fingers were short but as strong as whalebone; they held her arms like crabs' pincers, hard enough to cut the skin. Then the creatures released her and she fell.
She threw out her hands to catch herself, wondering as she did whether the Rua had dropped her into the pool of boiling sulfur or if there was a worse place than that. At this instant Ilna couldn't imagine a more unpleasant death than the sulfur, but she'd seen enough of the world to know that it could always get worse.
The globe of blue light surrounding her sucked in and vanished. Her feet landed inches below, on bare rock at the edge of a dead volcano. The slope stretched down before her, its red-brown surface pitted and gullied by the rain. The shallow sea ran up on the shore and spewed foam. The water was the ultramarine hue of yarn dyed with eggplant peel.
Chalcus dropped beside her, his sword lifted and his left arm thrown back for balance. He crouched, sweeping his head right and left, taking in all his surroundings.
The Rua who'd dragged Ilna through the topaz lens hovered just beyond the rim of the cliff, their translucent vans bowed to catch the updraft. Chalcus thrust at the nearer of the pair; she canted her wings a trifle and ballooned up beyond reach of the curved sword.
"We are allies, Ilna os-Kenset!" cried her mate. His voice was squeaky and piercing, but perfectly understandable even over the moan of the wind.
Hundreds of the winged men soared and wheeled in the sky overhead, some of them so high that the wispy clouds blurred their shrunken outlines. Ilna looked behind her. The cone's outer slope was a harsh cliff only spotted with vegetation, but grass and gnarled shrubs with gray leaves covered the far side of the crater's sheltered interior.
"Take us back to where we belong, then!" Ilna said. She grimaced to hear the words, then quickly corrected herself with, "Take us back to where we were."
She knew by now that she didn't belong anywhere. This windswept cliff hadn't much to recommend it, but considered by itself it was an improvement on Gaur's stinking dungeon.
"We will return you to your world, sister," said the female Rua, sliding sideways through the air so that she hung closer to Ilna but remained well beyond reach of Chalcus' blade. "But first we must talk."
"The only right you have to ask that is that we're completely in your power, not so?" said Chalcus in a ringing voice.
He laughed and sheathed his sword in a curving gesture as graceful as a fish leaping, then went on, "Which is a right I've asserted too often myself to deny to another. If Mistress Ilna will bear with me, I'm interested to hear what you winged folk have to say."
"All right," said Ilna. "I don't mind having the smell of Gaur's den washed out of my nose. But we have business in the place we came from."
She pointed to the ground beside her. "Come," she said. "Land. You may be comfortable fluttering out there, but I'm not comfortable watching you. And besides, I want to get out of this wind!"
The noose that served Ilna also as a sash had burned in a pool of sulfur with Gaur. The updraft would lift her tunics completely over her head if she didn't fight them down. In addition to distracting her, the loss of dignity made Ilna furious-the more so because she realized how absurd the concern was under the circumstances.
The Rua landed in perfect concert, the male on the other side of Chalcus and the female beside Ilna. With their wings folded to their sides they looked like walking skeletons, though they were nearly the height of the human pair.
"You brought us here to talk," Ilna said, backing from the cliff edge and smoothing her tunics. Three steps toward the interior of the crater there was still wind, but it was no longer an uprushing torrent. "Talk then."
She supposed she sounded curt and unfriendly, but she'd never been good at pretense. The Rua had brought her here for their own reasons. Those might be perfectly good reasons, but the fact didn't require that Ilna pretend an affection for the winged men that she didn't feel.
"You killed the wizard Gaur, mistress," the female said. "He was your enemy and our enemy as well. Will you now kill Her? She is a greater enemy to your world and our world and all worlds of the cosmos!"
"Who do you mean by Her?" Ilna said. She was on edge both from fatigue and the emotions seething through her during the struggle with the wolfman. "If you can't make sense, then send us back!"
She deliberately turned and walked toward the opposite slope to look into the crater. When she looked down at a slant the inner wall looked as green as a meadow, though Ilna knew that the vegetation was actually quite sparse. It grew only where dirt collected in pockets of the rock. There were beehive-shaped dwellings with windows of some translucent material in walls of shaped stone, but there were no fields or grazing animals. This would be good country for goats…
"She is a great wizard, mistress," said the male Rua. "Her world is freezing because of the power She drains from it with her wizardry."
"She is reaching into our world and yours, mistress," said the female. "She will destroy both worlds and destroy all worlds, unless you stop Her."
Ilna turned to them again, scowling in frustration. "But why are you telling me this?" she snapped. "You're the wizards. I suppose we'll help-I'll help, that is-"
"We both will help as we can, indeed," said Chalcus with a little bow to the female. The Rua were almost hairless; the female's breasts were flat, distinguishable only because they softened the ridges of the flight muscles so prominent on the male. "But I think that Mistress Ilna will be far the greater help; and the pair of you think so as well."
"We are wizards, yes," the male chirped in perfectly formed syllables. "But we could not overcome Gaur. How could we hope to overcome Her?"
"She moved the shoals where the belemites grow from our world to yours, mistress," continued the female, "to bring wealth to her disciple Gaur. Without the shell, the wings of our kits-"
Both Rua spread their wings. They unfolded like fans, narrow strips of skin as fine as sea foam alternating with struts of denser material that shimmered like nacre in the sunlight. Ilna remembered the belemites' similar rainbow hues.
"-do not harden."
"We could not wrest our shoals back from Her grip," said the male. As he spoke, his struts clicked together in sequence, folding and stretching the skin between each pair. Ilna nodded in appreciation of the muscular control required to do that. "We could only open a gateway to your world so we could continue to hunt the shell our kits must have. And for our strength, even holding the gateway open was a struggle."
"Dear heart…?" said Chalcus. Instead of pointing, he nodded outward. The Rua looked toward the sea also, turning their heads without moving their torsos. Ilna could understand the importance of so flexible a neck to a flying creature, but it was disconcerting to watch.
She sniffed in irritation at herself and let her eyes follow the line of Chalcus' gaze to a monster undulating through the sea. Only the top of its great head showed above the surface, but because the pale water was so clear she could see the whole line of the creature's snakelike body. It was as long as a warship. When it turned its flat head toward the land and opened its jaws, Ilna could see individual teeth.
"The thing that attacked Garric's ship," she said. "The whale."
"She sent that creature's mate to your world to aid minions of Hers," the male Rua said.
"Not Gaur but others," added the female. "Your enemies but not ours, save that all who serve Her are the enemies of all who do not."
"It seems, dear heart," said Chalcus with a lifted eyebrow, "that whoever She may be, She's brought us into this fight."
Ilna sniffed. "And you were going to walk away from it otherwise?" she said coldly.
"Aye, you have me there, my love," Chalcus said, smiling in wicked merriment. "It's not my habit to walk away from fights, that is so."
"No," said Ilna crisply. "Nor is it mine."
She looked from one Rua to the other. "What needs to be done to…?"
She turned her palms up. "To overcome her, you say. To kill Her, I suppose."
"We do not know," said the male. "But we have watched you, mistress."
"We could not overcome Gaur," said the female, "but we saw you slay him."
Ilna grimaced. "From what you say, Gaur's mistress will be a worse knot to untangle," she said. "And Gaur wasn't an easy one."
She shrugged. "Still, we said we'll do what we can. How do we reach Her?"
"We will open a gateway for you, mistress," said the Rua together. They turned and plunged off the cliff edge, rising on the updraft like dandelion seeds.
Ilna watched, frowning in puzzlement as the Rua spiraled to join their kin in the high skies. The air before her took on a faint opalescence in the same shape as the mirror of blue topaz in Gaur's den.
"Ah!" she said. "Chalcus, the pattern of their flight-all of them together? Do you see what they're weaving?"
"No, my heart," the sailor said in a tone as silvery as thesring! of his sword against the scabbard as he drew it. "But I think shortly there may be use for the things Ido understand."