The corridor ahead forked; for the seventh time, Garric thought, though he doubted he could recall the particular pattern of the branchings that'd get them out of this place by the portal they'd entered through. He supposed there was still a solid line of men behind him, marking the route better than the white pebbles of the folktale.
Carus grinned in his mind. Right, worrying about getting back could wait till they'd survived getting to where they were going.
Tenoctris' trail of light bent to the right, down the branch whose walls glowed red like those of the corridor Garric was in at present. In the middle distance the sullen crimson became a dot of purple.
"Prester?" he said to the noncom on his right; he'd learned the men's names as they marched together into frozen Hell. "How far do you guess we've come? It must be miles."
"That's Pont you want, your highness," Prester said. He leaned forward and called to his partner on Garric's left, "Pont! The Prince here wants t' know how far we come."
"Three thousan seven hunnert fiffee three," Pont said. "Paces. Four, five…"
"Got it, Pont," said Garric, breaking in on what was likely to be a very long sequence as Pont called out a number every time his right heel came down.
"Pont was in the engineering section back when he was a nugget," Prester explained with a proprietorial nod. "His job was route measurer. The habit's stuck with him all these years."
A thousand double paces equaled a mile, so they'd come three and three-quarters miles. Garric had no way of guessing how much farther they had to go. Maybe he should've made commissary arrangements before he went charging through that hole in the world…
"Your highness, there's something in the tunnel ahead of us!" called the Blood Eagle who'd taken charge of the front rank. He pointed his spear forward.
"Right," said Garric, peering past the shields and helmets of the men ahead of him. He was taller than the pair directly in front, but they'd both slipped their horsehair crests into the slots on top of their helmets during the past half hour of uneventful march. Their care was commendable, but at the moment Garric wished he'd had a less-obstructed view. Not that what he saw was anything he looked forward to meeting.
There hadn't been any fighting since they'd killed the giant scorpion. Garric hadn't consciously expected that to be the last, but when he saw the creature ahead he realized that emotionally he'd hoped that everything would be peaceful. Now reality clattered toward him on more legs than he could count. He felt as though he'd been dropped into ice water.
"Your highness," said Lord Escot, turning to look back at Garric past the cheek piece of his silvered helmet. Escot was commander of the second regiment to enter this ice world. He'd trotted up through the column to the front to take the place of Lord Mayne. "It's time for you to retire."
He was a landholder from Northern Ornifal, cut from the same cloth as Lord Waldron though thirty years younger. He wasn't an officer Garric had ever warmed to; so far as he could recall, Escot had never said a word about anything but horses save in response to a direct question.
"Aye, lad," agreed Carus in his mind. "He's thick as two short planks. But he's here where he belongs, and how smart do you have to be to stand in the front rank in a business like this?"
Point taken, agreed Garric. Aloud he said, "Carry on with your duties, milord. I will do the same-from here, where I can see what's going on."
"Oh, aye, lad," said Carus with a savage grin. "And I suppose you'll take off your sword now and give it to one of the fellows who're fighting while we stand by and watch?"
I've too much of your blood for that, thought Garric as he grinned in response to his ancient ancestor. Escot took the expression as meant for him and blinked in surprise. "Of course, as you say, your highness," he blurted and faced front again.
"Silly twit," said Prester in an undertone.
"He'll do to stop a spear, though," replied Pont. Apparently counting paces was so ingrained that that it didn't interfere with him carrying on a conversation-or fighting, for that matter. "Bloody officer."
From the way the two noncoms talked, Garric decided they'd promotedhim to line soldier… and thatwas a promotion, so far as Pont and Prester were concerned.
What had been a purple blur when Garric's column entered this corridor became a circular volume beneath a dome whose surface was ribbed for strength. Eight corridors merged in it, including the one the troops were in.
The rotunda was about thirty double paces across, and as best as Garric could tell in a quick glance the room's ceiling was the same height as the diameter. Threads of red and blue light twisted about one another at the core of the walls and of the piers framing the arched corridor mouths, turning the ice violet. The ice floor beneath must have been feet or even scores of feet thick, but again Garric saw monsters twisting in the phosphorescent water.
The creature coming down the corridor directly across the rotunda was more like a centipede than anything else Garric had seen, and more like a nightmare than anything alive. It had side-hinged mandibles and a chitinous maw whose interior was a mass of jagged plates rotating against one another like millstones.
The thin azure guideline passed through the monster. The only way to where Garric needed to go was by the same route: through the monster.
"Double time!" he shouted. He and his troops might be able to block the centipede before it got to the rotunda where each of its pincer-tipped legs was a deadly weapon.
"Charge!" cried Lord Escot, slanting his sword forward and breaking into a run. As Carus said, Escot was bright enough for his present position.
The troops were happy to run also. The ranks spread to either side as the column entered the rotunda where there was room. The clear floor was so hard that hobnails skidded instead of digging in. It was much like running on stone, because the extreme cold also meant the footing was dry and not nearly as slippery as ice normally would be.
The blended wizardlight had an oppressive weight. The huge room seemed dimmer than the corridors feeding it, though that was an illusion: Garric could see the men around him more clearly than he had before.
He could also see deep into the ice walls. The vast pillars supporting the dome were hollow. Within them were plants whose roots grew through the ice floor in broad nets to reach the sea beneath. Their twisted stems and the leaves spreading against the inner walls of their enclosures struck Garric with a pathos that he couldn't understand until he caught a glimpse of a flower that wasn't hidden by the foliage. It was shaped like the red mouth of a woman screaming, and the petals moved as he looked at them.
The center of the rotunda allowed Garric to look down all eight corridors. He had his sword out, but as much as he wanted to kill something to wipe the image of the plants from his mind he knew he needed to act as commander rather than swordsman for the time being. His men depended on him, and so did the kingdom.
"Hold up!" he shouted to his informal bodyguards. Prester and Pont obediently halted, facing back with their shields out-thrust to fend away the troops pouring into the rotunda at a dead run. If the noncoms had an opinion about what Garric was doing, they kept it to themselves.
Glittering figures marched toward the rotunda down the second corridor to the left of Garric's column. They were too distant for him to see details beyond the fact that the walls' blue glow sparkled on scores of sharp points.
"Well, you didn't think they were going to send dancing girls to greet us, did you?" laughed Carus. "Mind, I remember places where I lost more troops to what they caught from the women than I did to the spears of the men."
A junior officer was running past. He was armed in Blaise fashion and affected flaring mustachios which he had to fill out with a fall because he was too young to grow proper ones himself.
"Ensign!" Garric said. He pointed to the startled youth, then the approaching enemy. "Yes, you! Take a hundred men and block that blue corridor. Don't go any distance down it, just far enough that you've got a little room to retreat without letting them into this rotunda."
"Sir?" said the ensign, gaping like a cod at a fishmonger's.
Swearing silently, Garric looked around for another officer in the rush of troops. Prester shouted, "Suter! Get your ass over here to his highness!"
A husky warrant officer trotting past-he must have been fifty if not older-turned in mid stride. "Who do you thinkyou are giving me orders, Prester?" he said.
"Prince Garric here wants you to help the young gentleman-" Prester nodded to the blinking ensign "-organize a company to block that tunnel there."
"Sister take me!" Suter said. He slapped his spear against his shield boss in salute to Garric. "Yessir, your highness!"
Turning to the stream of troops, Suter stretched out his spear as a baffle and bellowed, "All right, soldiers! We got a job to do! Vedres, start'em down that corridor. I'll be up with you quick as I can. Sir-" to the ensign "-you just follow Vedres there and he'll put you right."
The ensign turned and jogged off with the file closer who was presumably named Vedres. The youth looked immeasurably relieved to be getting out of Prince Garric's presence.
"Silly twit," muttered Pont, eyeing the ensign's back. Suter was shunting the incoming stream of soldiers toward the corridor where Vedres formed them in ranks about a hundred feet down from the rotunda. The ensign-whatever his name was-struck a pose in the front rank, which was actually quite a useful thing to do. A young officer like that had no real purpose except to be brave and thereby to provide a spiritual anchor to the line soldiers who'd be doing the fighting.
"Yeah, but he'll serve to stop a spear," said Prester with a complacent smile. "And if that bunion Suter stops another one, well, that's cream with my strawberries."
Garric tried to swallow his smile. Then deciding that this was as good a place for humor as any in the world, he let his grin spread. When the noncoms grinned back at him, he laughed out loud while in his mind Carus laughed just as merrily.
Lord Escot and his troops met the centipede a short spear-cast before the creature reached the rotunda. "Loose!" called the Blood Eagle in the front rank, his voice echoing over the crash of boots and the centipede's pincered feet.
The spears flew in a ragged volley, wobbling because they were thrown by running men. Even so most struck their target because the centipede's armored body nearly filled the tunnel. Some glanced off, but half a dozen missiles cracked the monster's headplate and penetrated deeply enough to dangle.
The centipede continued forward with the relentless certainty of water gushing through a pipe. The creature towered over the men as they charged home with drawn swords.
"We'll need to-" Garric said, his stomach suddenly knotting.
They'd have to meet the centipede in the rotunda and attack it from all sides, because it was obvious that no number of men could stop the creature in a head-on encounter. The casualties from that-the men torn to pieces by the pincers and flung across the rotunda-would be in the hundreds.
"Garric!" Liane called from behind him.
Garric spun, his face going coldly blank to hide the horror in his heart. He'd known that one of those bodies the centipede mangled might be his, but that was part of his job. Liane would be back where she and Tenoctris could return through the portal if things went disastrously wrong. She'd besafe.
But instead here she was, running toward him at the head of a forest of pikes. "I brought a company of the phalanx!" she explained, gasping for breath as she clasped arms with him. "The s-soldiers made an aisle for me so that I could get them through. I thought you might need them!"
"By the Shepherd! we do," Garric said. He glanced over exactly what Liane had brought him.
Master Ortron, commander of half the phalanx, stood facing the other way as he formed his men into ranks in the rotunda. Ortron was a commoner who knew that the officers and men of the older regiments looked down on his men. The pikemen doubled as oarsmen in the fleet, and they'd been recruited from farm laborers and the urban poor instead of the yeoman farmers who made up the heavy infantry.
Ortron and the men under him were convinced that their phalanx could cut the heart out of any army in the Isles; and on the proper terrain, they were right. This might be an even better opportunity to test the effectiveness of their twenty-foot pikes than against human enemies.
"Ortron," Garric shouted, "form them by sections-" blocks of nominally a hundred men, eight ranks deep "-and take over from the infantry that's fighting the centipede, the bug over there!"
The passages of this ice maze were higher than those of any palace Garric had seen in his own world, but even so the pikes must've been a close fit when troops jogged down the corridors carrying them upright. Just moving with the long weapons took a great deal of training and coordination; using them effectively in battle was even more difficult. But a fully-trained phalanx was as deadly a weapon as anything under the sun-and perhaps as deadly as anything in this icy hellworld as well.
Garric gestured toward the target he'd set Ortron. As he did so he saw his aide Lord Lerdain burst from the crowd of soldiers. The boy was flushed and his cuirass wasn't properly buckled; he must have been in his quarters asleep when all this broke open.
"Your highness!" Lerdain cried. "I got here as-"
"Yes," interrupted Garric. He pointed to the corridor where swords flashed in the wizardlight as men hacked at the centipede. "Tell Lord Escot or whoever's in charge now-"
Whoever's still alive now.
"-to clear out of the way and give the phalanx their chance."
Lerdain turned without replying and shoved into the crowd battling the centipede. "Prince Garric's orders!" he bawled. "Make way for the pikes! Make way or die like fools with pike-points in your backs!"
Lerdain's father was the autocrat of one of the two-with Sandrakkan-most powerful islands in the kingdom. Another fifteen-year-old might've lacked the self-confidence to deliver Garric's message in a fashion that battling soldiers might listen to, but not Lord Lerdain.
Ortron shouted an order; his men lowered their pikes. The weapons of the first three ranks were horizontal, a hedge of points. The shafts of the remaining five ranks slanted up at the increasing angles necessitated by the tight formation. If the men in front fell or their pikes were broken, those in the rear would step forward to replace them.
"Advance!" Ortron ordered, stepping to the side to watch the dress of the ranks as his men stepped off on their left feet. He walked along, frowning critically as they advanced.
To look at him, Ortron was completely oblivious of the huge monster rippling in his direction… and the impression was probably true: the centipede was the business of Ortron's men; his business was with the men themselves.
"What about Tenoctris?" Garric asked Liane, trying to hide his frown. The line of light they were following shone thin but strong as it vanished into the centipede's armored head, but if the old wizard was left to her own devices as hundreds of armored men rushed past in tight quarters, an accident was almost inevitable.
"A squad leader from the Blood Eagles wrenched his knee fighting the Hunters when we arrived," Liane said, having gotten her breath back in the past moments. "He's helping Tenoctris. He's not afraid of what she does because his grandmother worked spells. And I had to lead the pikemen-the troops in the corridor would've have made way for another soldier."
Garric grinned and gave her shoulder a squeeze. Liane was right. Of course.
For the most part, the regular infantry battling the centipede ignored Lerdain's orders; they were focused on the monster whose advance was slowed more by the time it took to devour the men it killed than anything the survivors were able to do with their swords. They'd have ignored Garric himself if he'd thrown himself among them. He couldn't have done that unless he'd been willing to let the rest of the chaos take care of itself… which it would surely have done, and taken care of all hope for the Kingdom besides.
Ortron barked an order. "Ho!" bellowed the men of the phalanx as they struck home, their points rising slightly to clear the struggling infantry. The shout wasn't as effective from only a hundred or so men as it would've been with the whole eight thousand, but the rotunda's echoing dome gave it a respectable presence.
The centipede might've been deaf for all Garric knew, but it wasn't immune to the crunching impact of a dozen pike points. The giant creature lurched upward, raising its head and several body segments in the air. "Ho!" shouted the phalanx as the section's right feet stamped forward in perfect unison, driving the pikes deeper.
The breastplates of the men in each rank slammed against the backplates of the men directly ahead. Instead of fighting as a hundred soldiers, the phalanx was a single unit with sharp steel fangs. Their combined weight and the thrust of all their powerful legs together stabbed the pike points into the centipede.
The pikes were of close-grained ash or hickory. Even so the strain bowed, then snapped, several of them. The men whose shafts had broken continued to jab the splintered ends at the monster. The ragged wood couldn't penetrate undamaged armor, but when it lodged in the thinner, flexible fabric covering the joints it sometimes gouged their way into the flesh beneath.
The infantry who'd been trapped between the centipede and the multiple bulk of the phalanx had to duck or be thrown to the floor when the two collided. Now that the centipede's forequarters had lifted, they either stood or scuttled forward under the long body to hack at its leg-joints.
Lord Escot had lost his helmet. His long red hair swirled with the violence of the strokes as his long sword hacked forehand and backhand. "Escomann and Ornifal!" he cried in a high tenor voice. "Escomann over all!"
Something between a smile and a grimace quirked Garric's lips. It wasn't the most satisfactory battle cry from the kingdom's viewpoint, but under the circumstances he guessed he'd allow the Ornifal noble his whims.
Pont and Prester must've thought much the same thing. "Huh!" said Prester, his eyes narrowing as he watched Lord Escot. "He's still a silly twit, but…"
"Yeah," agreed his mate. "If I had him for two weeks in my section, I might be able to make something out of him regardless."
Despite the size of the rotunda, it'd begun filling with troops when the men in the lead couldn't advance any farther because the centipede blocked the way. Garric no longer had unobstructed vision down the other corridors. If the route wasn't cleared quickly-and he didn't see how it could be, since even dead the centipede's corpse would fill half the corridor-the crush of men would become dangerous.
If only there were something he could stand on to "Prester!" he said aloud. "Can you lift me onto your shoulders? I'll yell to the men at the entrance corridor to halt in place. Maybe they'll obey if they can see me."
"I'll lift you, Garric," said a familiar voice. There, pushing through the soldiers as though they were blades of oats in a field, was the massive form of Cashel or-Kenset.
And never more welcome!
Cashel didn't mind the press of men the way he had when he'd first entered a big city, though that hadn't been so very long ago. He'd found if he just pretended all the people were sheep, it was the same as shearing time in the spring. He'd always liked shearing time. Of course sheep didn't wave swords and spears as they milled about.
"Cashel!" Garric cried. From a distance you'd never take this nobleman in gilt and silvered armor for the boy Cashel'd grown up with in Barca's Hamlet, but when he smiled-Cashel smiled in response-thatwas Garric. "Right, I'll stand on your shoulders. Just like old times!"
Cashel laid his staff crosswise in front of him, his arms slanting down. There wasn't room for him to do that without bumping people out of the way, so he bumped them out of the way.
A glittering officer pitched forward when the staff whacked him in the small of the back; he bleated angrily and turned. One of the pair of old soldiers standing with Garric poked a spearbutt at the fellow's face and said, "Mind what you say to the Prince here, cap'n!"
The officer looked like he still might've argued the matter, but Liane stepped in front of him. "Do you dare jostle his highness, my man?" she said in a voice as cold as the floor underfoot. That seemed to take care of the problem.
Garric set his right boot on the staff like it was a fence rail. As he pushed off with his left leg Cashel lifted his arms, bringing his friend's weight up so that Garric just stepped over, one foot on either of Cashel's shoulders.
Holding firm as a statue, Cashel turned his staff vertical and clashed the ferrule down on the ice. With three points to brace him, he figured he could stand here even if he had to support the ceiling instead of just Garric. The thought made him smile.
One of the old soldiers rubbed his chin with the knuckles of the hand gripping his spear. "They grow many more your size back where you come from, lad?" he asked.
"They grow better than that," Cashel said, letting his smile spread in pride. "They grew Garric in Barca's Hamlet too!"
"Lord Menzis!" Garric shouted. Through a megaphone of his hands, Cashel supposed, though standing underneath his friend and facing the other way there wasn't any way he could tell for sure. "Halt the flow for the moment! Send word back to hold in place!"
Herding sheep gave you good lungs, not that sheep were much more likely to heed you than trees were. Shouting at least made you feel like you were doing something as you pounded across the meadow hoping to reach the ewe that'd mire herself sure if she took one more step into the marsh…
Cashel had a pretty good view of what was happening down the tunnel where a huge centipede was trying to bull through a solid mass of pikemen. Had been trying, rather thanwas, because by now the monster writhed like a worm on a hook. Any number of hooks, in fact, because there were more pikes punched through its yellow armor than Cashel could count on both hands.
The men kept shoving forward. By now the folks in the front rank, those whose pikes hadn't broken anyhow, must've had their points halfway into the creature's vitals. It was either trying to escape or else it was just curling up to die the way centipedes of the usual size did.
"Cashel, turn left!" Garric said, sharply but not in a bellow meant to be heard across the huge domed room. "I'm going to shift some men down the other corridors to give us some room in here."
Cashel obediently shuffled partway around, careful to keep his shoulders level. He was pretty sure that Garric could balance even if the fellow under him broke into a dead run, but that wasn't a reason for Cashel to do his own job badly.
The adjustment put Cashel looking down one of the blue tunnels while Garric shouted to an officer on the other side of the room. There was fighting going on in that tunnel, too, and-Cashel frowned-it didn't look like it was going very well. Plenty of soldiers were trying to crowd in, but the sounds coming out of the tunnel were screams, not battlecries. Cashel couldn't see what they were fighting because it didn't tower over the soldiers the way the centipede did, but besides the screams he could hear an off-key clinking/clattering. It wasn't quite right for either metal or stone but seemed a bit of both.
"Garric?" he said, making sure his friend was going to hear him. He'd herded far more sheep than Garric had. "You'd better look at this on my-"
He felt Garric's weight shift as he twisted to look over his shoulder.
"-side," Cashel went on. "I'm turning some more."
A fellow squeezed out of the crowd at the tunnel mouth and staggered toward Garric. He was an officer-a nobleman, anyway, and that meant an officer-because his breastplate was molded with a design of people and gods. The metal, bronze under the gilding, had been slashed in strips, deep enough that blood dribbled out of the cuts. The officer, just a boy really, had lost his sword and his helmet besides.
"Steady!" called Garric. He jumped down, landing squarely. Cashel put out the hand that wasn't on his quarterstaff to brace his friend, but Garric didn't need the help.
"Your highness!" the boy bleated. "We can't stop them! They're not alive, they're just ice, and our swords only chip them without doing any harm! They'll kill us all if we don't get away!"
"Do we have hammers?" Garric said. "Maybe the men can use their shields for clubs. We can't cut ice, but if we break it up-"
"I'll see what I can do, Garric," Cashel said. He lifted his staff overhead and gave it a trial spin, the only way he could do that without knocking down any number of people in these cramped quarters. The hall was a lot like a sheep byre on a winter night.
He strode toward the tunnel mouth, shouldering men out of the way when he needed to. He didn't bother to wait for Garric to agree; he and his quarterstaff were the best choice for the job. Cashel didn't need anybody, even a close friend, to tell him so.
Close up to the tunnel, the soldiers were packed too tight for even Cashel to shove them aside without breaking bones or worse. "Make way!" he said. "Garric sent me! Ah, Prince Garric sent me!"
From where he was now, Cashel could hear the screams even better. Blood sprayed high enough for him to see over the heads of the men ahead, and once a man's arm flew up.
For a moment not much happened. He was about to use his staff as a lever when somebody shouted, "It's the big wizard! Let him through! He can sort'em out!"
Cashel frowned. He wasn't any kind of wizard, but he'd always told himself he didn't care what people called him and this didn't seem the time to get huffy about it.
Sure enough, men peeled away from the back of the crowd. When the ones behind stopped pushing, the soldiers actually facing the enemy broke like the plug squirting from a squeezed waterskin.
Cashel stepped forward, spinning his staff. He saw the enemy for the first time.
They were man-sized and more or less man-shaped, but he wasn't sure he'd have seen they were individual figures if it hadn't been for the wizardlight quivering at their core-some red and some blue. Their arms ended in blades of the same cold, clear ice as their bodies. There was no doubt about the edges being sharp: all those in the front row were gory, and the ground was smeared with the blood, bits of equipment, and severed limbs left behind by soldiers who'd withdrawn into the rotunda.
The icemen stumped along more like hoarfrost spreading across bare dirt than the way men walk, but they had the same purposeful direction as plow oxen. They weren't going to stop; they had tobe stopped.
Well, that's what Cashel had come to do.
He strode into them, swinging his staff sunwise as a feint. An iceman on his right lurched ahead of its fellows, an arm extended toward Cashel. The limb looked more like a spear than a sword held in a human's arm.
Cashel reversed the staff's spin, bringing a buttcap against the iceman's featureless head in a stroke that would've knocked in a thick door. The creature flew apart like an icicle dropped onto stone. The wizardlight filling it flashed out in a crimson thunderbolt.
The blast seemed to stun the rest of the icemen for an instant. Cashel felt only a mild tingling in his hands, nothing that prevented him from slamming the opposite ferrule into the midriff of another creature. It blew itself apart just like the first, rocking the nearest of its fellows the way a flung stone throws ripples across a pond.
Cashel'd intended to strike quickly and back away to judge how effective he'd been; he'd never fought anything like these icemen before, and the first thing you do in a fight is take the measure of the other fellow. There wasn't much doubt that hard, quick blows were the right medicine, and if each time he struck he numbed the survivors too Plenty of people had said that Cashel wasn't very bright, but nobody'd ever doubted he understood how to win fights. He continued forward, striking right and left with the thunderous speed of raindrops in a thunderstorm.
Shards of ice stung and even bruised the bare skin of his face and arms. He ignored that as he ignored the shouts of the men behind him. The quarterstaff wasn't long enough that he could clear the passage as he walked down the middle, so he punched a hole through the glittering creatures. The ones on the sides came at him from behind-but not without him noticing, because he kept his head moving in quick jerks to either side. He saw motion, not figures, at the edges of his vision but that was enough to warn him.
There might be too many of them, before and behind, for him to strike them all before they cut him to collops like the poor dead soldiers whose bodies he shuffled through as he advanced. If that happened, it happened. He'd do what he could till he died.
There were three figures in front of him. Cashel struck right, left, and right. The silent, searing gusts of light left him blinking away afterimages. There was movement behind him. He turned and stumbled to his knees; his legs bent like ivy runners. He slammed down the butt of his quarterstaff and clung to the shaft to keep from sprawling face-first on the ice.
Two surviving icemen approached him, splotches of red and blue as Cashel's blurry eyes tried to focus. He tried to heave himself to his feet. He couldn't move.
There was additional movement; Cashel's vision cleared. The young officer who'd gasped to Garric a tale of unstoppable monsters stood behind this remaining pair of them. He held the butt portion of a pikestaff which had broken at the handgrip; it was thicker and filled with lead to balance the weight of the front two-thirds of the long shaft.
The youth swung the club over his head. He smashed first one, then the other iceman into light and shards as cold as death.
More men ran past the young officer, grasping Cashel's arms and helping him up. One of them tried to take the quarterstaff. "No!" Cashel said in a snarl that was scarcely human.
The youth dropped his broken pike and held out his right arm to Cashel. "Milord," he said. His voice was a croak. "Milord!"
Cashel shrugged off the hands of well-meaning soldiers trying to support him. He took a step forward on his own, feeling strength start to return as he moved.
He took his right hand from the quarterstaff and clasped arms with the youth who'd saved his life. The boy was slender as a reed and trembling with fear and reaction; it was like holding a sparrow.
There was a great shout from the rotunda. "C'mon, milord," Cashel said in a rusty, hesitant voice. "They need us there. Our job's not done yet."
Ilna saw the hole growing, not in the sky but in the world itself. Layers peeled back so that a pulsing absence of light replaced the open air with its view of clouds scudding over a background of chalky blue. When she judged the passage was open-a matter of only a few heartbeats from when the rupture appeared; the Rua were as skillful in their arts as Ilna was in her own-she nodded approvingly and said to Chalcus, "All right. Let's go."
"Dear heart?" he said, meeting her eyes with a worried expression. "Go where? I don't see…"
He waggled his sword. To him the point danced in air as empty as it was before the winged men wove their patterns in the sky.
Ilna smiled crisply and extended her right hand to his left. "Come," she said. "I'll lead."
She stepped forward, into a textured emptiness which she understood; and Chalcus came with her, into something he couldn't even see. He'd have done the same thing, she knew, if she'd jumped off the cliff instead. All the more reason not to fail him… but then, Ilna had never been able to understand people who considered failure an acceptable choice.
Ilna moved through the passage much as she'd have walked across a familiar room in the darkness. The Rua had cut an opening between their world and another, not so much by art as with the same dogged skill that a beetle uses to bore through wood. It followed paths of lesser difficulty rather than taking the shortest route through the cosmos.
Ilna wasn't sure that she could have created the pattern herself-her different skills didn't lend themselves to a task of this sort-but she could understand it as easily as she understood how to breathe. She moved forward, feeling nothing under her feet but moving anyway. Chalcus' fingers tightened minutely, an extra pressure she wouldn't have noticed except that she knew how perfectly controlled his movements usually were.
She saw and heard nothing. She could feel Chalcus' hand, but she touched nothing of this world or place or not-place they moved through. When she turned slightly to the left-as she did-or pausing for a moment-as she did also, not out of indecision but because the way wasn't yet clear-she made easy, natural choices.
After an uncertain length of time, she stepped into light and cold; a real world, solid to a fault and less welcoming than the featureless dark through which the Rua had gnawed their passage. She stood at the juncture of three high tunnels in the ice. Two of them had walls of red light; the third was blue. The ice where they joined was a sullen mauve, pulsing with the slow rhythm of a snake's throat contracting to drag down its latest victim.
Chalcus was beside her, looking in all directions. He detached his hand from Ilna's andflick/flick ed his sword through the air. He was just proving that his muscles worked the way they should, she supposed; though being Chalcus, he might have decided to slash some dust mote in half as well.
"So, dear one…," he said. "Did our winged friends tell you which way we go from here?"
He continued to scan their surroundings, but with less urgency. When Chalcus first reappeared beside her, he'd thrashed about like a dog being swarmed by hornets. The three long, straight passages were empty for as far as Ilna could see. That didn't mean danger couldn't threaten them at any instant, but it made it less likely that itwould .
"No," said Ilna, her lips pursing as she looked at the ice about her. "You heard everything they said to me. But…"
Things were frozen in the walls-tiny fish, no more than a finger's length long, with bits of weed and other flotsam like what the sea threw up on the beach of Barca's Hamlet; but fragments of corpses as well. Some of the pieces came from men or maybe men, but others couldn't possibly have been human.
"Chalcus," she said, "we need to go down this blue tunnel. I'm sure we do."
"Aye," he said, smiling like a brilliant sunrise; his cheerful humor was never more welcome than in a grim setting like this. "I knew you'd find the route, dear heart. Whatever the pattern is, you can see it."
"Perhaps, but that's not what I mean," said Ilna, irritated despite herself at flattery when there wasn't time for it. There was never time for flattery… though of course what Chalcus had said was true, or at least she'd be surprised to learn it wasn't true.
"Chalcus, I recognize this place." She gestured with her right hand. "I've never seen it before, but Iremember it, I remember watching it being built."
"In a vision you mean, dearest?" he said. His eyes never rested on her longer than they did on any other thing about him, but his voice was warm with real concern. "A dream, perhaps?"
"Nothing," snapped Ilna. "I don't recall ever seeing this, any of this, before. But I rememberit, do you see? And I don't know how!"
"Then let's go on," said Chalcus with a faint, hard smile. "The sooner we've come to the end of this business, the sooner we'll never have to think about the place again. For though I won't say I've never been in a place that less appealed to me, dearest-"
Chuckling, he waggled his sword as a curved pointer.
"-I will say I've never been in a place that less appealed to me an' I was sober enough to remember."
Ilna nodded coldly. "Yes," she said. "Let's go."
But before she stepped forward, she touched Chalcus' left hand again with her fingertips. He twisted his palm upward to squeeze her in turn.
They both wore shoes which they'd put on aboard theBird of the Tide to walk the cobblestone streets of Terness and the passages of Lusius' castle. Ilna didn't like shoes, but now the thick leather soles kept her feet from freezing as might've happened otherwise. The cold wasn't the worst of the discomfort, but it was a discomfort.
Her footsteps and those of Chalcus beside her were lost in the creaks and groaning which she supposed were the ice working. She'd heard similar sounds on the very coldest winters while she was growing up, when the shore of the Inner Sea froze out toward the eastern horizon.
She wasn't sure that was what she was hearing, though, because sometimes she thought she saw movement in the clear, glowing ice. That might have been a trick of the light or distortion from unseen fractures as she glanced while walking past, but in this place there were other possibilities. She remembered sheets of wizardlight acting as warp and woof, weaving tunnels out of open water. Things had begun to grow in it at once, the way weevils appear in meal left uncovered…
They neared an intersection; not a simple Y this time but a joining of five tunnels. The plaza in the middle had high, flat walls, one for each tunnel. Chalcus held up his left hand.
"We take the second one to the right," Ilna said.
"And so we shall, dearest," Chalcus replied, his dagger now out as well as the sword. "But first I-"
Chalcus swung into the intersection, his sword and the dagger slashing in opposite directions. He landed flat-footed in the center of the space, his head twitching to either side while his body poised to react to a threat from any direction.
He relaxed, not that anybody but Ilna would've recognized the difference. "Only us, dearest," Chalcus said, his eyes continuing to search the four tunnels besides the one she was in. "We can go on, I'm thinking… and I'm thinking that the less time we spend in one place, the better off we are."
"Yes," said Ilna. She grimaced. "Chalcus, let me go ahead."
"I-" he said, protest in his voice but without turning to face her.
"There's as much risk from behind as there is ahead," she said sharply. "I… I'm remembering things that I've never seen, Master Chalcus. I'm afraid that if I'm in the rear, I'll get lost in what never happened. And I'll miss what's creeping up on us."
She paused. I can tell him the truth, she thought; and, with a fierce anger blurted, "Chalcus, I hate this! I'm going mad, and I can't trust my own mind!"
He gestured her ahead of him with his empty left hand. "I much misdoubt that you're going mad, dear one," he said with a grin that only a fool would think amusing. "I think instead that there's someone very clever in this place who is not our friend; and the quicker we've slit that someone's throat, the better. Not so?"
"So," agreed Ilna striding across the intersection and proceeding up a corridor glowing the same deep red as a demon's eyes. In her memory the roots of a Tree grew through the ice, sucking nourishment out of the world itself. The root that formed this tunnel still filled it, though not in a fashion that the eyes of her body could see.
She strode on. The Tree's bark was as smooth as human skin, and its branches waved like serpents, writhed like the tentacles of the great ammonites, the Old Ones of the Deep. There was no evil in the cosmos that a tendril of the Tree's roots did not touch…
Ilna came to another intersection and stepped through it without pausing. She no longer feared things that might wait in ambush. Nothing could surprise her in her present state. She smiled; the curve of her lips was as hard and cold as the ice itself.
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-8, 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 Iam 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 dew drop. His sword touched nothing. Monine's knife came up arrow-swift; swifter yet, Chalcus' 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/clashas sacrificial knife met dagger, but this time the edge stopped close enough to mark Chalcus' 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. Butyou 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, shewasn'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."Idrink 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 shoulderblades, then leaned back and broke the embrace. She took a deep breath.
"Garric?" she said, turning to indicate the band who'd come with her. Franca was glaring at Cashel; Scoggin rested his left hand on the youth's shoulder. The others stood close behind. Some looked ill at ease to be crowded by men in armor, but Neal and Layson in particular stood straight and looked the curious soldiers around them in the eye. "These are my companions. They helped me and fought for me. I'm responsible for them."
"For that they'll be honored as they deserve when we have the leisure to do so," said Garric, glancing about the confusion with a smile that reminded her of the brother she'd grown up with. "Which at present we certainly do not. But-"
"Your highness!" said Lord Lerdain, pushing back through the crowd. "The centipede's dead or dead enough that we can get by! Lord Escot and Master Ortron are advancing!"
Lerdain had gotten a bang on the side of his face; the present puffiness would become a bad bruise in a few hours. He no longer seemed the pudgy fifteen-year-old he'd been a few months before when he became Prince Garric's aide.
"Right!" said Garric, turning toward one of the corridors branching off this great junction. "Tell them I'm coming."
Looking past him Sharina saw the chitinous, pincered leg of an insect large enough that its legs could scrape the high ceiling when it lay on its back. The sight gave her stomach a sudden jolt. But we killed that already! her mind told her; but they hadn't, not this particular creature nor even one exactly like it. And what else was waiting before they reached Her?
"Sharina," Cashel said, "I've to go with Garric. I'll be back when, well, you know."
Garric and his pair of soldiers were already pushing forward; Attaper followed with a set expression and his hand on the ivory hilt of his sword. The bodyguard commander obviously had his own opinion of what was reasonable behavior for his prince, and as obviously he knew to hold his tongue at this juncture.
Sharina hesitated, caught between concern for her ragged followers and her desire to stay with Garric and Cashel now that she'd finally been reunited with them. Though she didn't suppose she had any business fighting now, since there were soldiers with the training and equipment to "Mistress, you must take me to the front!" Beard cried. "Has Beard not been a good servant to you? Will you starve Beard of the blood he deserves?"
"But-" Sharina said. Cashel and Garric were already out of sight beyond the currents of milling soldiers. She couldn't let her whim and an axe's bloodlust take her where a girl without armor would only be in the way of men in a hard battle!
"Do you think they can fight what waits for them, mistress?" Beard said, his voice rising in peevish anger. "They can't, you know. They'll only die when they face an Elemental! But Beard and his mistress, they can drink even that life. Please, mistress!"
"An Elemental…?" Sharina repeated softly.
"Oh, She's a great wizard, the greatest of wizards," the axe crooned. "No one could bind an Elemental! But She bound one and drew it here, and it will swallow all the souls it finds unless Beard drinks its soul instead."
Sharina shuddered as she remembered diving into the fjord to bring up the Key of Reyazel. Her mind had been numb then, so focused on the brutal strain of the dive that the horror of the things guarding the key had slid off her like filth from a wall of ice. Thinking back on the event forced her to understand exactly how foul the things had been-and how unutterably awful it would have been to be engulfed by one of them.
"Neal," Sharina said sharply. "Take charge till I return. Hold the men here. Stay together and don't get in the way of the, the soldiers with better equipment."
"But mistress!" Layson begged.
"Stay here!" she snarled. "Franca, you and Scoggin too!"
"You didn't dive into the fjord with her," said Beard in a piercing, sneering tone. "If you come now you'll die the same way, the very same way, and your souls will die forever!"
Sharina's eyes met Liane's; Liane nodded. Sharina turned sharply. "Neal," she said, "obey Lady Liane here as though she were me. She'll take care of you!"
She turned again and slipped off through the crowd, holding the axe over her head. Behind her, her former companions stood like scarecrows with gaping mouths. They eyed Liane and clutched their weapons like shipwrecked sailors holding spars.
"Make way for Princess Sharina!" Beard cried; his ringing voice cut through the clamor, jerking startled men about and opening gaps that a slim, determined woman could stride through. "Make way for Beard's mistress!"
I'm not abandoning Franca and the rest. I'm giving them a chance to live, which they wouldn't have had if they came with me now. The fact that Sharina knew her litany was objectively true didn't keep her from feeling sick to her stomach at having left behind frightened men who depended on her.
Beard gave a metallic titter. "My mistress doesn't fear anything, of course," the axe said. "She knows that Beard'll drink himself fat on blood before she dies. Oh, fortunate mistress to have such a servant as Beard!"
Which was also objectively true, and Sharina's laughter atthat thought washed away her empty queasiness at the way she'd treated her companions. Anyway, she didn't have any choice but to go. She knew her brother and Cashel would fight the Elemental if she wasn't there, and she didn't doubt Beard's claim that it would devour them.
"We will kill it as we killed its sibling in the deeps," Beard caroled in response. "As we drank the soul of something that'd swallowed a thousand souls. Oh, mistress, Beard will chant your praise till the sun dies!"
The Old Kingdom poet Celondre had claimed his work was more lasting than bronze. Beard was going to outlast Celondre, at least in this place, so Sharina supposed she'd achieved immortality of a sort…
She laughed, wondering if she was becoming hysterical. The axe laughed with her.
She reached the archway where the corridor joined the great rotunda. Here the troops were packed so tightly that even she couldn't squeeze through. "Make way for Princess Sharina!" Beard cried shrilly.
That didn't change anything directly, but a Blood Eagle in the crowd ahead of her looked over his shoulder. Sharina found his face vaguely familiar; he'd probably been in her guard detachment at some point.
"Say, thatis the princess!" he said. "Say! Don't crowd her highness, you dogs! Have you lost all honor?"
Between shouting and prying with the butt of his spear, the Blood Eagle opened a space for her to join him. "Let the princess through!" he bellowed as he started pushing forward through the ruck. "Pass the word up there that Princess Sharina's coming through!"
The Blood Eagle cocked his head toward her again. He was an older man whose nose had been broken at least twice.
"File Closer Gondor, your highness," he said in a respectful voice. "I don't suppose you remember, but-"
"I do indeed, Gondor," Sharina said. That was half a lie, but this wasn't a time for pleasantries. "Carry on."
Which Gondor did, using the side of his shield like a plowshare to carve a furrow through the crowd. Sharina's name alone hadn't been enough to make a path, but her nameand brute force succeeded.
"Brute force, oh yes," said Beard. "Brute force, but especially Beard's fine edge to drink their blood!"
The corridor was half blocked-more than half-by the twisted body of the segmented, many-legged monster. The gigantic corpse still twitched. Its movements and the sulfurous, stomach-roiling stench of the blood leaking from the creature's wounds made even veteran soldiers pause as they reached it, delaying the advance more than the constriction itself did.
"Oh, go on past, File Closer!" Beard said. "The worst that can happen if one of those legs kicks is it'll kill you. Much worse will happen if the Elemental sucks you down, as it surely will if Beard and his mistress don't stop it!"
Gondor lurched forward, clambering over a limb the size of a fallen hickory. The bristles sprouting from its joints were as long as Sharina's arm and as stiff as blackberry canes.
Sharina hadn't seen Gondor hesitate, but she supposed thoughts along those lines must have been going through the soldier's mind. They'd certainly been going through hers; but the axe was right. Shehad to get ahead of Cashel and Garric.
The waving legs cast shadows against the lighted ceiling, a foul echo of the way breeze-blown limbs dapple the sunlight falling on the floor of a forest. Soldiers picked their way through with dogged courage, trying not to look in any direction as they squeezed past obstacles of quivering saffron chitin. They shifted aside to let Gondor and Sharina go by: the Blood Eagle driven by the presence of the girl behind him, while she pressed on out of blind determination.
Sharina'd decided she had to reach the front of the column. Now she was driving onward without allowing herself to think further. She knew there wasn't anything new to consider, nor any thoughts that she wanted to dwell on.
The great centipede's final segments were curled against the ceiling. One of the legs stroked like a metronome, the jaws of its pincers scraping parallel channels. Shavings drifted over Sharina, chilling her more than ice alone should have done. She shook herself, concentrating on what was ahead.
Troops who'd gotten past the centipede moved quickly along the corridor, widening the gap between them and the bulk of the army. The men who'd crossed the obstacle immediately preceding Gondor and Sharina were double-timing to catch up with their fellows.
"Can you keep up if we run, mistress?" Gondor asked.
"Let's see, shall we?" Sharina said distantly. He was being solicitous; he reallydidn't know she'd regularly outrun any of the men in Barca's Hamlet, so it wasn't fair for her to react as if somebody'd just branded her for stealing.
She shrugged off her bearskin-she doubted that she'd be in this place long enough to freeze to death, one way or the other-and broke into a long-legged stride. Her hair streamed back, though smoke-stained and greasy it was more of a clump than the gossamer blond fabric that'd been her pride when she was a girl.
Sharina hadn't been a girl in longer than days or years could express.
The hundred or so troops ahead marched down the corridor in a tight mass, though they weren't so much in formation as a mixture of two formations. Part of the force was regular heavy infantry from several regiments, but half or more were members of the phalanx. Many of the latter'd lost their long pikes. Sharina had already seen the broken shafts, the butt ends littering the ice beneath the dead centipede and the slender points black with ichor dripping from the wounds they'd punched in the creature's armor.
Cashel's quarterstaff showed above the ranks of soldiers, moving to the front like a standard. Garric and the rest of his entourage must be close to him, though Sharina suspected Cashel was leading.
She smiled faintly. Cashel was a very gentle man, but when he pushed, others made way. Her Cashel.
"Princess Sharina to join her brother!" Beard cried as she reached the formation. A man swore, but because Garric and his followers had already disarrayed the ranks Sharina had less difficulty getting through than she'd expected. Gondor was somewhere behind her. Had hereally thought he in his armor could outrun Sharina os-Reise? And yes, he probably had; but he wouldn't think that again.
She worked her way up to Cashel; Garric and the others were to the side, forming a partial rank just behind the front of the formation. "Garric, Cashel!" Sharina said. "You've got to let me through. The thing that's coming won't be harmed by your weapons!"
Garric looked back awkwardly past the cheek flare of his helmet; Cashel turned also, his smile of greeting turning quickly to a troubled frown. "Sharina," Garric said, "this isn't a business for you. I-"
"It's a business for Beard and for no others!" said the axe, causing Garric's eyes to widen. "Any of you can face the Elemental-but you'll die and spend eternity in torment! Beard and his mistress will drink its life instead."
"Look, if the axe is necessary," Lord Attaper said, "I'll take it and-"
"No," said Sharina.
"Out of her cold dead hands!" said Beard. "If you think you can, which you will not-for Beard will eat your brains if you try."
Sharina didn't know why she was so furiously determined that she alone would handle Beard. She and the axe had survived horrors together; perhaps it was that. But beyond that, she'd faced Elementals before. Attaper hadn't, none of the others had.
"Your highness?" called Master Ortron, now marching on the left side of the front rank. A helmetless nobleman was on the right; Sharina could imagine the confusion that would cause if Garric hadn't been present. "There's something funny about the passage ahead. I don't see the light we're following."
Sharina cocked her head toward Garric to see between the shoulders of two men in the front rank. Fifty feet away the deep blue undertone of the present corridor became a murky yellow-gray like nothing she'd seen in these caves. She could still make out the walls and ceiling-or thought she could-but the thread of wizardlight blurred and vanished like a fishline plunging into the sea. The line of troops continued forward at a measured pace.
"The Elemental's waiting," said the axe. "It's waiting to swallow every soul that comes to it, but it isn't waiting for Beard."
"Sir, we're not afraid!" the nobleman cried. "Come on, men!"
"Stop him!" Sharina shouted. The fool could draw the whole force with him unless "Charge!" the noble cried, waving his sword as he broke into a run.
"Knock him down, Herther!" Master Ortron roared. There were three pikemen in the front rank. Two of them-one was presumably named Herther-swung their long shafts sideways, one cracking the nobleman across the temple and the other sweeping his ankles out from under him. He crashed into the wall and flopped to the floor on his back.
"Let me by," Sharina said in a desperate murmur. She didn't raise her voice for fear she'd scream with fear and frustration.
"Sharina…," Garric said with a troubled frown. The troops continued to march toward certain death; the front ranks divided enough to keep from trampling the fallen officer, but the men behind probably couldn't see the poor fellow until they were on top of him. They were nearing the change in light.
"Garric, let her go," said Cashel. "I don't like it, but I trust her. Whatever she says, I trust her."
Garric nodded, his face still furrowed with worry. "Regiment…," he said in a voice that thundered over the clash of boots and jingling equipment. "Halt!"
The boots crashed down one more time. The echoes continued to roll; from farther back in the corridor came the sound of men running to join the main body.
"Sister, I wish it were me," Garric said with a lopsided grin. He turned. "Make room for Princess Sharina!"
"Oh, mistress, Beard will eat again!" the axe trilled as Sharina slipped between soldiers, her shoulder brushing the man on her right. "Oh, mistress, you've brought Beard to such feasting. No one else in this world will hold Beard until you're gone!"
Nice that somebody's happy, Sharina thought. And not for the first time; but she was here not only by her choice but by her insistence. Of course if Beard wasn't just exaggerating as a compliment, there was no other choice that gave anybody a chance at survival.
The change in light was just ahead. Some of the pikes reached into it; their shafts seemed to kink slightly as though they'd been thrust into water. As though they were reaching into the water covering the Key of Reyazel…
She hadn't come herenot to act. Sharina stepped through the insubstantial barrier.
She didn't look over her shoulder, but she knew the world behind her had vanished. She was in the fjord again, and the enfolding chill penetrated her soul. Planes of light jutted up, intersecting and interpenetrating one another. They had no color, but their textures differed as surely as walls of sandstone and granite and shale.
Sharina drifted onward, downward, instinctively holding her breath. If she took this place into her body, she would never return.
She couldn't see the thing that was waiting for her. It was like walking through a nighted forest, watched from the darkness but unable to see anything herself. Beard tugged like a leashed hound. She couldn't hear him in this wilderness of planes and soul-numbing cold, but the helve trembled in her hand as the steel mouth laughed.
Someday Sharina would die. Perhaps this was the day she would die forever, her soul devoured by a force that was alien to all life. She felt the chill and she felt the presence of hidden doom; and she continued onward because that was what she'd come to do.
She'd lost track of direction. There were no more walls and floor than there'd been when she sank through the waters of the fjord.
Her lungs began to ache. She knew that they'd shortly be ablaze with white fire but shecouldn't breathe, didn't dare to breathe.
The axe twisted in her hand. Sharina looked upward and it was there, rippling down onto her like a mass of silk in the summer when the young spiders balloon off on the breeze. She struck or Beard struck in her hand. The Elemental divided to either side of the blow, untouched by the steel. It came on undeterred, spreading around her to right and left the way the tide rises on a narrow isthmus.
Sharina backhanded her weapon. The spike parted the Elemental's tenuous form like smoke, its substance leaking like honey oozing from a comb dropped on hot stone.
Beard screamed in triumph. The planes of non-light, non-color fell into shards that crumbled in turn to specks too small for sight, then evaporated.
Sharina slumped forward. She heard Cashel cry, "Shar-" but the remainder of her name was lost as a sea of darkness surged over her mind. She knew she'd hit the floor, but she didn't feel the impact.