Ilna walked through the tunnels at a deliberate pace. She didn't run because she wasn't good at running; and besides, there was no need: she'd get where she was going soon enough, and possibly sooner than that.
Behind her Chalcus sang in an undertone, "I've seen the fruits of rambling, I know its hardships well…" Ilna was aware of his presence, but he was part of a world that had ended when she entered these frozen halls.
"'I've crossed the Southern Ocean, rode down the streets of Hell…'"
Ilna's personal memories were fading. In their place she remembered how She had built this palace beneath the ice to channel the powers on which the cosmos turned. As Ilna walked, she saw the necessity of each angle, of every knob or divot in the walls.
It was a work of the greatest craftsmanship; but craftsmanship alone wouldn't have made the place the focus that it was. That had required materials and the willingness to use them.
"'…been up above the Ice Capes, where the shaggy giants roam
…"
Through Her eyes Ilna looked down on the sea of faces staring up at Her on the ice throne. They were cut-throats, pirates, killers; bad men before She enlisted them in Her army, and since then become worse. There was no act too vile for them to commit for Her, and few that they had not committed already. Now they would do one further thing: She raised Her hands.
"'I tell you from experience, you'd better stay at home."
Ilna turned right, into a tunnel lower and narrower than the others had been. At its end was a slab of blank ice which alone of the walls in this place wasn't filled from within by wizardlight. Ilna saw herself reflected from a surface as blackly perfect as polished obsidian.
"Dear one…?" said the voice from behind her. She made a silent, brushing motion with her left hand, the sort of gesture she'd have used to flick away a fly.
In a memory not Ilna's, Her hands began to weave in the air. The brutal faces below watched in frightened fascination. Most bore scars-brands and cropped ears as frequently as knife slashes; teeth smashed out or rotted out during lives as savage as those of wild beasts. They were bound to Her by fear of Her power and fear of the revenge those they had wronged would take if ever they left Her protection; but Her art, even if used to help them, frightened them also.
Ilna's lips gave a smile as cold as the black reflection. She'd killed in the past and would kill again soon if she was able to. She'd have had no more mercy for the men who stared at Her than she would for a chicken she needed for dinner; no more mercy than they were about to receive…
Wizardlight streamed from Her hands in gossamer splendor, crossing and interweaving in a pattern that none of those watching beneath the great ice dome could appreciate. The men fidgeted, fingering weapons and glancing covertly at their fellows. The light rippled like gauze as it spread above them. Its color was too subtle for words to describe or eyes to grasp.
Her pattern finally reached the curving walls of the chamber. For a moment nothing happened save that the light pulsed the way breath throbs in the throat membrane of a waiting lizard.
The fabric settled.
The gang of killers tried to flee, screaming curses in a score of languages. They had no more chance than minnows within a closing purse net. Palpable light drifted over them, coating those it touched the way oil spreads over still water.
At first contact, men froze where they stood. The net shimmered, as beautiful as the rainbow hues of a snake's eye, and it continued to sink.
A few of the band, shorter than the others or quicker thinking, dropped to their hands and knees to crawl toward the corridors feeding the great hall. Some slithered on their bellies at the end-crying, praying, or shouting curses depending on their temperaments-but the wizardlight settled onto them also.
Ilna reached the end of the narrow passage. She looked into the black reflection of her own eyes, remembering a past which those eyes had never seen.
The glowing net began to congeal the way pudding sets. Its color deepened and became more saturated without changing hue. The forms trapped beneath it blurred and lost definition. Their flesh and souls together dissolved. Light began to spreadthrough the walls of ice which had been dark with the gloom of polar winter.
Still clutching their weapons, the corpses settled into the ice, shrinking to skeletons. The floor engulfed them. Above, looking out into the world Her art ruled, She wove the cosmos into patterns of devastation and inexorable doom.
Ilna smiled.
"So, dear heart, shall we try another tunnel?" said Chalcus with false, lilting brightness.
Ilna took the bone-cased knife from her sleeve. The blade of worn steel was only finger-long, but it sufficed for all her tasks: trimming selvage, gutting rabbits, and slicing swatches of cowhide into laces for Cashel's winter boots.
Instead of chipping at the ice, Ilna turned the knife over in her hand, still cased. She paused, letting her mind locate the nexus in what the eyes of her body saw as a blank, smooth wall.
She tapped with the bone hilt. The slab of ice disintegrated into crystals smaller than snowflakes, smaller even than the dust motes that float in beams of sunlight.
Chalcus gave a cry of wonder. He stepped through the sudden opening, his sword and dagger poised. Ilna, smiling like a coiled spring, followed.
Cashel watched Sharina's slender body shrink as she strode into the yellowish light. She seemed to be flying away with each step, not just walking.
Cashel held his quarterstaff in both hands. He didn't squeeze it out of frustration, just held the smooth hickory with the grip he'd use to put a ferrule through the skull of anyone or anything that tried to hurt Sharina-if he could. She was so tiny, now; a little poppet he could've held in his hand.
Her axe glittered brightly. Cashel hoped and prayed that Sharina knew what she was doing, the way he'd told Garric she did; but he didn't doubt at all that the axe knewits business.
The distant doll of Sharina turned and slashed over her head. There wasn't anything near her. She reversed the stroke without hesitation, bringing the spiked end of the axe around.
Cashel'd used an axe in his time, felling trees for his neighbors and shaping the logs; he nodded in pleased approval as he watched. Sure, that narrow-bladed war axe was a different thing from the heavy tools he'd worked with, but motions like Sharina'd just made took wrists and shoulders that few men could boast of. Oh, she was afine girl!
The air above her went red as a smear of blood. Cashel shouted and strode forward, his staff crossways in front of him. He didn't know or care what dangers Sharina might be facing, just that right now he'd rather die than let her face them alone.
The wall of light collapsed inward before Cashel stepped through it. Sharina was just ahead, full-sized and toppling onto the ice.
There wasn't blood in the air or on the floor below, but there was a stink as bad as anything Cashel'd ever smelled. It reminded him of the time a great shark washed up on the beach of Barca's Hamlet. The fish had been so rotten that its gill rakers hung as tatters of cartilage, but even so this was worse.
It didn't matter. It wouldn't have mattered if there'd been a wall of pike points between him and Sharina: Cashel was going through. He scooped her in the crook of his left arm. Her lips moved, though if she was saying anything Cashel couldn't hear the words.
She held the axe in both hands. It was talking enough for both of them, chortling, "Two Elementals, two of them, oh Beard never dreamed he would serve a master who would feed him Elementals!"
The axe didn't stop there but it didn't say anything new either, so Cashel ignored the rest like he would a breeze whispering through the trees. Garric, Lord Attaper, and the two soldiers with Garric had come running up only a heartbeat behind Cashel.
Garric put two fingertips on his sister's throat and nodded with relief. "Her heart's beating fine!" he said. "She's just-"
His voice didn't so much trail off as simply stop, because he didn't have any better notion of what'd happened to Sharina than Cashel did. He guessed she was exhausted. Two swipes with the axe weren't much for a healthy girl, but Cashel knew from his own experience that when you got in with wizards and their art it took more out of you than it seemed like it ought to've done.
"She's strong and well," the axe said. "She'll soon bring Beard to more blood and souls! Oh, what a fine mistress!"
It wasn't the sort of talk that generally appealed to Cashel, but hearing that the axe thought Sharina would be all right made it a pleasure this time. He felt her stir, twisting her head against his chest. He could probably set her down on her feet shortly, though he wasn't sure he would.
"Your highness?" said Master Ortron, about the only officer Cashel'd met that he liked as a person. Ortron was an ordinary fellow, not a noble, and he'd been happy to show Cashel how to handle a pike in return for lessons with a quarterstaff. "Are we to hold here, or…?"
"Duzi, no!" Garric said. "We'll resume-"
He paused, looking sharply at his sister, then Cashel. "Cashel?" he continued. "Can you-"
"Sure," said Cashel, rocking Sharina gently in his arm the way he'd have soothed a baby. Ofcourse he could carry Sharina.
He noticed that a couple of the soldiers had picked up the officer who'd been knocked silly for his own good. Cashel was glad of that. The fellow didn't have any more sense than a sheep did, but Cashel'd spent so much of his life looking after sheep that he couldn't help feeling sorry for the man.
"All right, Master Ortron, resume your advance," Garric said. He quirked a smile and added, "We'll go on till we get where we're going."
"Your highness!" called somebody from the back of the formation. Cashel wasn't tall enough to see past the mass of soldiers; he didn't think even Garric was, not with them wearing helmets like they were. "The passage has closed behind us! Let me through, you fools! I have to report to Prince Garric!"
"There's something up ahead of us, too," said one of the soldiers with Garric. "Looks to me like it's a solid wall up there."
Cashel had a clear field of view ahead. There was no doubt about it: the tunnel had closed off since after Sharina made the light come back the way it was down here: not normal, maybe, but normal for this place. As for being solid, though…
"The wall at the end's coming toward us," Cashel said, loud enough for the others to hear him if they'd wanted to. Everybody was looking instead at the officer who'd just come through the formation. He was an older fellow with curled, hennaed moustaches; a regimental commander, though not somebody Cashel knew by name.
Garric did, though. "What happened to the passage, Lord Portus?" he said.
"Behind me!" Portus said, gesturing with a flourish back the way he'd come. "I heard a shout and saw that sheets of ice were growing from either side of the wall. There were several men following closely, but they were cut off from me when the ice joined. They began to attack it with their weapons, but it continued to thicken until I couldn't even see them through it."
Portus took off his gilded helmet and wiped his forehead with the wad of cambric he kept between the leather straps that suspended the bronze above his scalp. "I came on at once. I, ah…
"I thought the ice was following me," he said into the hollow of his helmet. He looked up to meet Garric's eyes. "Your highness, I think itis following me. The wall is growing toward us!"
"Garric, so's the one in front of us," Cashel said, this time loud enough that theyhad to listen. He pointed with his quarterstaff. "There!"
He wasn't exactly angry-he was used to people not paying attention to what he said since he generally let the words stand for themselves. You had to put a lot of fuss and flailing about into the way you said the words to get sheep and most people to listen, and Cashel only did that when he had to.
"Oh, well," said one of the soldiers who'd been looking after Garric. "Maybe her ladyship'll chop a hole in it with her axe, do you think?"
"She's not a ladyship, Prester," the other man said. "She's a princess!"
"And Beard," said the axe sharply, "is not a navvy's pick! Try to cut ice with me, Squad Leader Prester, and you'll find just how quickly I bounce back and empty your skull of what passes for brains!"
"If we advance behind the pikes, as many of them as we've still got…?" Master Ortron said. He didn't sound real confident, showing that he was the sensible man Cashel had always taken him for.
"Garric," said Cashel, "hold Sharina for me. She's coming around fine, but…"
He passed Sharina to her brother without waiting to see if Garric had an opinion. Cashel needed both hands and somebody needed to watch over Sharina for a little while yet; there wasn't anything to discuss.
Cashel stepped forward, balancing his staff before him in both hands. "Anything I can do to help, Cashel?" Garric said.
"I think this one's for me," Cashel said as he began to spin the staff. "I haven't been doing much since I got here."
Cashel wasn't too proud to let somebody help, especially not a friend like Garric, but he didn't see much anybody else could do. It wasn't certain he could do much either, but he figured him and his quarterstaff had the best chance going.
The thin blue thread that Tenoctris had sent out for a guide disappeared into the plug that'd grown across the tunnel since Sharina cleared the other thing out of the way. The new wall of ice didn't move fast, not even as fast as Cashel ambled toward it at a sheep's pace. The ice didn'thave to be quick to do what it was planning-or anyway what the wizard behind it planned. Cashel appreciated the value of steady over fast as well as any man living.
He spun the staff in a slant before him, first high on his right side and then doing a tricky crossover that brought the left side high instead. He kept on walking, reversing the spin from sunwise to widdershins by changing hands again behind his back.
None of this had anything to do with how he planned to use the quarterstaff when he got to the wall, but Cashel knew in his heart that there was more going on than just him loosening up his muscles before he needed them for real. He wasn't exactly showing off for the watching soldiers, but Well, if this was the last time he was able to put his staff through its paces, he wanted it to be a display he and the familiar hickory could be proud of. And it might very well be the last time.
The quarterstaff's ferrules sparkled with wizardlight, then streamed a dazzling blue disk encircling Cashel as he walked on. His skin prickled; he didn't recall starting to smile, but he was smiling now and he guessed he would till this was over one way or the other.
The ice wall was close. The roof of these tunnels was twice as high as Cashel could reach with the staff held up in one hand, but the barrier right in front of him looked higher even than that. It was like facing a mountain that reached all the way to the stars, though there wouldn't be any stars where it was, just black ice on forever.
When Cashel had entered the Visitor's ship, he'd been trapped like a bug in hot sap. This business might end the same way, with the ice before him squeezing hard against the ice and Cashel part of a red mush that included Sharina and all the soldiers. So far, though, he had plenty of room to swing his staff.
He kept the iron-capped hickory spinning as rapidly as he could control it-which was a good deal faster than anybody else he knew could, even Garric. Cashel didn't move forward but the ice did, in a more delicate step than a human could manage.
The staff's whirling ferrule brushed the sheer black face. Instead of the tinyclick that Cashel expected to feel but not hear, the world exploded in a crash of blinding blue wizardlight. His arms went numb to the shoulders. He felt as he had the day when, too young to know better, he'd been clinging to a tree during a thunderstorm and lightning struck the next tree but one.
He was Cashel or-Kenset: he didn't drop his staff, and though he lost the rhythm of the spin for a moment he still brought the other ferrule around in a straight-on slam. The blow would've put his staff a hand's breadth deep into a sea wolf's thick skull.
Touching the ice had brought a thunderbolt. This time the shock threw Cashel to the ground, deaf and blinded to everything but orange and purple afterimages that alternated faster than his heart was beating.
He didn't feel the floor as he hit it, but when instinct drove him to reverse his stroke he found he was sitting on the ice and twice his own length back from the wall. He got up without thinking-there was no time to think, this was afight -by crunching one end of the staff down beside him and poling himself up as much by the strength of his shoulders as with his legs.
Cashel stepped forward. He supposed the men behind him were shouting, but he wouldn't have paid attention even if he could hear anything beyond the roar of that last impact.
He could see now, but his vision was focused down to a circle of the wall right in front of him. At the edges even that started to gray out; beyond the space he could've spanned with his arms spread, Cashel's world just didn't exist. All he saw-all he cared about for as long as this fight lasted, whether he lived or died-was the target for his next blow.
He spun the quarterstaff overhead, keeping its momentum up. He took another step and a third. The wall wasn't where it'd been when he got up and started for it again, but Cashel was used to opponents retreating when he came at them. He was moving faster than it was. As he took a fourth long stride he turned the staff's rotation into forward motion. He punched a butt cap into the ice with all his weight and strength thrusting it.
Wizardlight held Cashel in a sphere of lightning-cored needles, each of them stabbing into the marrow of his bones. It would've been agony if he could really feel, but the pain was so intense that his mind floated above it. He marveled that his flesh didn't blacken and slough away.
He was sitting on the ice again. Men were running past him, their mouths open with shouts that Cashel couldn't hear. Sharina knelt at his side. He couldn't hear her either, but her left hand stroked his cheek. Warmth and feeling returned to his body, the pain draining away as though Sharina's gentle fingers had lanced a boil.
Cashel lurched to his feet. In the wall of icewas gap he could've driven a yoke of oxen through. The edges still sizzled as azure light ate them away. Garric and his soldiers were clambering through the opening to the chamber beyond.
"Cashel?" Sharina said. "Can you walk?"
"I can run," growled Cashel, and he started forward again.
Sharina's heart leaped as she watched a sphere of nothingness engulf Cashel as he drove his staff into the center of the ice. It looked black because it had neither hue nor reflection, an absence of anything.
The emptiness vanished; maybe it'd been an illusion. Cashel flew back as though something huge had kicked him, but he still held his quarterstaff.
Sharina ran to him. She had a funny, detached feeling. She didn't hurt nor even feel tired, but she wasn't sure that it was her own strength that moved her limbs. Beard was more than an axe-she'd known that from the moment she picked him up and he started shouting-but she was beginning to wonder howmuch more than an axe he was.
"Beardserves his mistress," the axe sang, his voice ringing through the echoing cacophony. "Beard would never treat his mistress the way the Augenhelm did Alfdan, the Great Fool of a Wizard!"
Sharina felt cold terror stab through her mind as she recalled Alfdan's last moments; then she laughed. "Beard," she said, "without you, all my friends would be dead and the kingdom dying too. If that means you destroy me-well, I won't be happy about it, but I'd have done the same if I'd known ahead of time."
She knelt beside Cashel, stroking his cheek with the hand that didn't hold the axe. He'd smashed a huge hole in the ice. Instead of the corridor they'd been following, there was a vast domed hall on the other side of the gap. Cashel had opened more than a mere physical barrier.
Garric and his immediate companions climbed through the opening, but the ordinary soldiers were hesitating when they realized that a blue quiver of wizardlight continued to eat the gap still wider. Cashel made a rumbling sound in his throat; he blinked and his face flushed away the frozen pallor of a moment before. He rose to his feet, an awkward, inexorable movement like that of an ox rousing from sleep, and bunched his great shoulder muscles.
"Mistress, there's great danger for your friends beyond!" said Beard urgently. He tittered and went on, "Much danger for them, and much blood for Beard to drink!"
"Cashel?" Sharina said. Master Ortron had lashed the men of his phalanx into motion with a tongue rough as chipped lava, and the regular infantrymen were moving also out of embarrassment to lag behind troops they felt were their social inferiors. "Can you walk?"
"I can run," growled Cashel. He started forward, holding his quarterstaff up at a slant before him.
"Let us by!" Sharina cried, because she wasn't sure whether Cashel was aware of anything beyond the fact that hewas going through, whoever or whatever happened to be in the way. Maybe he wasn't ready to face the dangers on the other side of the opening, but Sharina didn't want to leave him behind. Even without Beard's prodding she wouldn't have stayed back herself.
Besides, she'd never seen a time that Cashelwasn't ready to face what was before him.
The soldiers made way. As Sharina danced through the opening, moving like a breeze beside Cashel's avalanche, she heard Master Ortron snarl, "There, you pansies! Will you let a wisp of a girl go where you're afraid to?"
"Wisp of a girl!" Beard chortled. "Mymistress, a wisp of a girl?"
The hall within seemed empty at first glance only because it was huge beyond the standards of enclosed space. The entire royal palace in Valles, scores of separate buildings spreading across many acres, would've been lost beneath the huge dome. Here as elsewhere in these caverns the ice shone with a core of wizardlight, but the ceiling and walls were so distant that the figures within were dim shadows.
The floor was clear as diamond. Plankton in the water beneath shone faintly red or blue instead of the yellow-green of the sea off Barca's Hamlet in springtime. Through the glowing water swam monsters that were large even by the standards of this place. Their teeth gleamed as their platter-sized eyes stared longingly at the creatures above them.
Garric, Attaper and the two soldiers with them were in a tight circle surrounded by a pack of Hunters like the ones Sharina had killed when she'd been sucked into this world. There must've been seven of the gangling giants to begin with, but one was down with a javelin sticking up from an eyesocket and another staggered in tight circles trying to pull out the similar missile imbedded to the wood in her breastbone. It was amazing that she was still alive since the iron must be through her heart, but she was no longer a danger to the men.
The remaining five were. One raised a club made from a whale's shoulderblade to swing at Garric. Cashel stepped close with quick right and left blows from his quarterstaff. The Hunter gave a guttural cry and toppled backward, his knee joints smashed.
"Blood!" shrilled Beard as Sharina rushed the Hunter whose great iron sword threatened the soldier to Garric's right. "Blood! Blood! Blo-"
Sharina swung, cutting the Hunter's left hamstring. The creature fell, twisting toward the injury.
The soldier lunged forward, thrusting into the Hunter's thigh as Sharina ducked under the falling body to reach the next enemy. When he withdrew his short blade, a column of blood spouted high from the wound: he'd sliced the Hunter's femoral artery. From the way the soldier moved, that stroke had been no more of an accident than the way he'd thrown his javelin through a previous Hunter's eye.
A Hunter crashed his club, a section of tree trunk, down at Lord Attaper. The Blood Eagle didn't carry a shield. His long sword slashed, not in a vain attempt to block the stroke but trying rather to skew it to the side enough to miss.
He was almost succesful, but the wood brushing his left shoulder flung him sprawling; the thigh-thick club splintered without marking the ice. A fish scraped teeth the length of a man across the bottom of the crystalline barrier, trying to get at either combatant.
Sharina leaped over Attaper and swung high, shearing the throat of the stooping Hunter. Its blood sprayed in a steaming torrent over the ice.
"Blood and brains!" said the axe.
The other soldier of Garric's entourage jabbed the edge of his shield into a Hunter's groin, doubling his opponent up, while the point of its great spear skidded on the ice where the soldier had been a moment before. That put the creature's skull within Sharina's reach. She buried Beard's edge in the Hunter's temple, then twisted it free. Her victim bounded away like a headless chicken.
The remaining Hunter was staggering backwards, making wordless cries and waving its arms above its head like a pair of bloody fountains. Garric crouched, gasping as he used a swatch of his tunic to wipe the blade which had just lopped off the creature's hands.
Additional monsters lumbered toward them, Hunters and things still more terrible. Sharina saw a pair of beetles with iridescent wing cases; they picked their way across the ice on legs the size of trees. But more troops were pouring through the opening as well, their weapons and armor catching highlights from the cold purple glow.
Garric straightened, throwing down the rag. He looked back at the soldiers entering the hall, then slanted his sword forward.
"Follow me!" he called. He jogged toward the center of a room so large that his shout didn't echo.
The difference between what Garric was doing and the nobleman's identical order to charge the Elemental was that this was the right time for it. A headlong assault might not succeed, but no other means could possibly succeed.
Garric was measuring his stride, leading his troops but not running away from them. Cashel followed, though for him it was probably his best speed. Sharina paused instead of going off with them immediately; she sucked in deep breaths and took a good look at the situation.
"Nothing lefthere to kill," Beard fumed, but he knew as well as she did that she could catch up with the others before there was more fighting. And there certainly would be more fighting.
Skeins of crimson and azure wizardlight wove upward from the middle of the hall. Their patterns were as breathtakingly complex as the iridescence of a soap bubble. The tapestry of light had the searing perfection of the surface of the sun.
"Much blood!" the axe said. "Much more blood though not Her blood, not even with this fine mistress… but oh! if wecould drink Her blood…"
The lines and ribbons and cables of light spread from a nub raised from the floor. Just a bump of ice, Sharina thought, denying what her eyes suggested.
"You know better!" Beard cackled. "You know it's a throne, mistress; and you know who sits on the throne!"
Itwas a throne, of ice so clear that only surface reflections limned its form. On it a great white blob quivered in concert with the pulsing wizardlight.
"To drink Her blood!" said the axe. "Oh, if only Beard could drink Her blood!"
Lord Attaper had gotten to his feet, but when he took a step his face went white and he stumbled. Despite the pain, a broken collarbone if not worse, he continued to shuffle forward.
One of the common soldiers who'd accompanied Garric set his right heel on the head of the javelin he'd pulled from the Hunter's eye and lifted the shaft judiciously to straighten the iron. The head back of the point wasn't hardened, so it would bend in an enemy's shield and prevent him from pulling it out to throw back. This veteran obviously had experience with field expedients.
The chest-speared Hunter had finally collapsed face upward. The other soldier was trying to free his javelin from the corpse. The missile had penetrated so deeply that the point was probably in the creature's spine.
"Leave it, Pont!" the first soldier cried. "Time's a-wasting!"
The pair broke into a lumbering jog. "That's all right for you to say, Prester," Pont muttered, "but I notice that you waited till you had yours loose!"
Sharina loped along with them. A segmented worm that looked like a glacier squirmed toward the invaders, but despite its size at least the leading company of soldiers would be past before it could block the route to the throne. No point in fighting needlessly; there'd be more than enough that couldn't be avoided.
"We got the princess with us, Pont," Prester said.
"And a bloody good thing it is, too," his partner agreed. "Thanks, your highness. You saved my ass back there, I shouldn't wonder."
"Your highness!" somebody shouted in a breathy voice. "I'm coming!"
Sharina glanced over her shoulder and saw Gondor, the Blood Eagle who'd gotten her into the corridor to begin with, running across the ice to catch up. He'd lost his spear somewhere.
She felt a momentary pang at having abandoned a man who'd been of significant help. But-the men who'd attached themselves to her after Alfdan's death hoped she'd be their salvation. Gondor in contrast regarded her as a child he had to protect. While the Blood Eagle's concern was no less real than that of the civilians, it wasn't something Sharina needed to worry about while matters were in their present state.
"You needn't worry about civilians either, mistress," the axe said in an excited chant. "Only worry about feeding Beard; the rest will come!"
That was close enough to the truth that Sharina smiled. Beard couldn't save the kingdom by himself, but by putting the axe in the places that best suited it Sharina would be performing the best service to the kingdom that was withinher power.
She and the soldiers joined Garric, who nodded, and Cashel, who smiled. Cashel ran with his quarterstaff crosswise in front of him. So far as Sharina could tell he'd fully recovered from the effort of smashing open Her sanctum, but in a fight Cashel focused on his opponent alone.
Half a dozen others, members of the phalanx who'd lost their pikes, were already with Garric. To allow them to handle their heavy primary weapon, pikemen wore linen corselets instead of metal body armor. Their light shields were supported by a neck strap and they carried long daggers rather than proper swords. Without their pikes they were much more agile than regular infantrymen burdened by full armor.
More troops followed, alone and in small groups as they emerged through the wall of the chamber. Sharina felt a stab of despair. They seemed so very few against the size of this enormous hall.
"Better hold up, your princeship!" Prester called. "We want to take this lot in close order!"
"Take his right, Prester," Pont said. "You keep between us, your highness. We got shields, you see."
This lotwas a pack of wolves the size of heifers, loping across the ice. Their coats would've been white under normal light; here they had an evil violet shimmer. Their eyes glowed yellow-orange and had no pupils.
"Halt, we'll fight them here!" Garric ordered. He took three strides, each shorter than the one before, so he didn't fall. This ice gave good footing, but slowing on a hard surface was always risky. "You men watch my back. I don't have a shield so I'll be out in front where I can do some good."
"Stay behind me, your highness!" Gondor said to Sharina. "I'll try to keep them off you!"
"Keep out of my way," Cashel said, stepping forward as Garric did. He moved to the left so that even if he extended his staff full-length in one hand, the outer ferrule wouldn't touch his friend.
"Mistress, we must be in front!" Beard said. "Mistress, you mustn't keep Beard back from his food!"
"Of course not," Sharina agreed. She glanced at the Blood Eagle and said sharply, "File Closer Gondor, keep anything from getting behind me but stay far enough back that you don't foul my axe. If I kill you by accident I'll regret it; but Beard will not, I assure you."
Gondor looked shocked, but he closed his mouth with his protest unspoken. Sharina stepped past the line of soldiers and placed herself as far to her brother's right as Cashel was to his left. Beard took up a lot of room in a hot fight…
The wolves were on them, a loose vee led by a brute nearer the size of an ox than a heifer. Its mouth was open; slaver dripped through teeth as long as a man's fingers. It bunched its huge body to leap on Garric.
A javelin struck the point of its right shoulder at an angle that took the head through the beast's heart and the blood vessels leading from it. Instead of leaping, the wolf twisted in the air and somersaulted, its jaws splintering the spear shaft in dying fury.
Sharina stepped forward, swinging Beard in a slanting overhead stroke. She used the strength of both arms with her right hand leading on the helve. The axe screamed, "Kill!" but she screamed also. "The Isles!" she thought it was, but she was barely a spectator of her own actions at this moment.
Beard's narrow edge crunched just behind the left orbit of the wolf coming at her,. The beast's thunderous snarl turned into a yelp. The eyes' inner light winked out as the animal skidded past in a flaccid heap, dragging Sharina around as she tugged her axe loose.
She felt rather than saw a second wolf as large as the one she'd killed leap toward her. Gondor was between it and her, his shield raised. The beast knocked him backward and slammed him onto the ice with forepaws each the size of a soup plate.
As the wolf's jaws opened to snap off the pinioned Blood Eagle's head, Sharina brought Beard around to bury his spike where the spine entered the back of the wolf's great head.
The wolf convulsed, arching backward. Sharina jerked her axe free; the beast gave a spastic leap that flung it thirty yards sideways.
There were no more wolves in front of her. Sharina turned. All of them were down. A pikeman sat astride the neck of a beast which still thrashed though its legs had collapsed under it. He clung to its left ear and stabbed its throat repeatedly, apparently unaware that its eyes were empty and its tongue lolled onto the ice.
Cashel got to his feet, pulling out the wool from his wallet. He wiped blood and brains from one butt-cap of his quarterstaff. His face had an expression of perfect calm, as though he were currying an ox after they'd spent the day plowing. He felt Sharina glance at him and gave her a smile.
Garric tried to rub his eyes with the back of his left hand. He'd been drenched with blood; it dripped from him and his sword to the ice. Either Prester or Pont-they were as bloody as Garric, and Sharina couldn't tell them apart-handed him a rag he'd carried in the hollow boss of his shield. A wolf's teeth had reduced the shield itself to splinters, though it was made of thick cross-laminated birch.
Garric stepped around a wolf quivering in its death throes. He'd cut through its throat with what must have been a single stroke. More men had run up during the fight, replacing the casualties-but there'd been many casualties.
Garric wiped the patterned steel of his sword, then slanted the blade again toward the throne. They were within bowshot now.
"Haft and the Isles!" he shouted as he started forward again, stumbling for the first step but getting his feet properly under him by the second.
"Haft and the Isles!" Sharina croaked as she shambled after him.
"Kill them all and drink their blood!" cried Beard; and that was a good war-cry too.
Within bowshot, Garric thought as he jogged toward the throne. He was a good archer-he'd been a good one, anyway, in the days when he minded sheep. Archery required constant practice to keep the muscles toned as well as the skill to know what to do in the first place.
It wasn't really very long since he'd been a boy in Barca's Hamlet though it felt like a lifetime. He could probably put two arrows out of three through the center of the blob seated on the ice throne… if he had a bow.
And if pigs had wings, they could fly. Which wasn't a result anybody wished who knew more about pigs than that they liked the taste of pork.
King Carus laughed with Garric, then said, "Don't worry, lad. It'll be more satisfying to do the job with your sword."
The battle with the wolves was hazy in Garric's mind. His eyes had only seen what his ancient ancestor's instincts told them to focus on: shapes blurred except where Carus saw a chance to strike or a need to dodge. At one point in the fight he'd buried his dagger in a wolf's eye, so deeply that he had to release the hilt as the beast bounded away snapping at the air. Though the steel had destroyed the wolf's brain, its muscles still burned with bloodlust.
At another point-before? after?-he'd slashed through the foreleg of a white-furred monster, then jumped to the right as it rolled over the missing limb. He didn't know what'd happened to the wounded animal afterwards. He'd been past it, using both arms to swing his sword. His blade had met the neck of the wolf bounding toward him, shearing it in a broad diagonal.
There'd been blood before. When Garric opened the throat of the great wolf looming over him, the whole world became a sticky red torrent. He'd struck the ice on his shoulder and rolled to his feet in the same motion. After that he could see the things about him normally again, because he'd had nothing more to kill.
For the moment.
The figure on the throne raised hands like suet puddings. In concert with Her gesture, wisps of wizardlight spun like dust devils before Garric and his companions.
"Wizardry!" snarled the ghost of King Carus. "May the Lady smite all wizards down for their sins!"
That's our job, not the Lady's, thought Garric. The whirling funnels of light drained into the ice; only a glow remained. Then the hard surface shattered, erupting like mud when frogs crawl to the surface of a dried pond during the first rains. Skeletons clothed in wizardlight rose from their icy graves, holding swords and spears with rust-pitted blades.
The wizard on the throne continued to weave. The whole surface between Garric and the throne was breaking open. Some of the skeletons were of bone so old it was splitting, while others still had not only ligaments but flesh clinging to them.
"Haft and the Isles!" Garric shouted, shocked despite himself at the sight. He wasn't sure that anyone but Cashel would follow him into the dreadful array.
"Hey, the dumb barbarians haven't got armor!" bellowed Pont.
"Let's get stuck in, boys!" cried his partner Prester. "It's party time!"
I'll make them nobles for that bit of bravado! thought Garric joyfully. Then peasant caution made him add, If any of us survive.
"It's not bravado," Carus explained. "They mean it. And they're right!"
A skeleton ran at Garric holding a spear over its right shoulder in both fleshless hands. Whatever was animating the corpse must be powerful, but it hadn't had even rudimentary weapons training…
Instead of waiting to side-step the awkward thrust, Garric backhanded his sword through the skeleton's right elbow. The spear twitched sideways and Garric's edge crunched deep in the naked spine. The creature folded backwards.
Garric snatched the spear from the twice-dead thing's nerveless grip, then used the shaft to parry the cleaver-like blade which another skeleton swung at him from the left. He thrust his own sword through the creature's chest cavity, both edges grating on bone.
The haze of crimson light which clothed the creature dissipated as suddenly as a reflection vanishing when the angle changes. The skeleton collapsed onto the ice, already starting to disarticulate.
Garric saw movement to his right and was whirling to deal with it when Pont stepped past. The veteran crushed skeletal ribs with the upper edge of his shield, struck the skull of a second creature with the edge of his short, heavy sword-ancient bone powdered at the impact-and broke a third's knee and the thighbone above it with the hobnailed sole of his boot. When it fell, he smashed the thing's chest with the other boot.
To Garric's other side Prester proceeded in much the same fashion, though he was using a pikeman's lighter shield: there was never a moment that one limb or another wasn't moving and never a motion that wasn't lethal. It was like watching pistons working in pump shafts, inexorably shoving everything before them.
"Haft and the Isles!" somebody cried over the tumult.
Garric strode forward between the two veterans. He didn't have a shield to strike with, but his longer arm and longer blade helped him keep even with the older men.
His left hand stabbed the spear he'd appropriated through the thin nasal bones of a skull. The creature behind that one hacked at Garric's extended arm with a sword so dull it bruised worse than it cut. Garric didn't quite drop the spear, but he was clumsy when he lunged and with a half cut, half thrust, lopped off the head of the creature that'd wounded him.
Another of the things drove its spear upward into Garric's breastplate, banging deeply enough through the bronze to draw blood as well as knocking his breath out. The stroke would've gone deeper yet if the spearpoint hadn't broken.
The creature pulled the weapon back for a finishing thrust. Garric stood, paralyzed from the blow to his diaphragm. Pont, almost absently, shattered the skeleton's pelvis with the lower edge of his shield. When it fell, he drove the heel of his boot like a battering ram into its neck.
Garric got his breath back. He stepped forward, his sword raised.
"Yeah, and I'll bugger your sisters, too!" Prester shouted as he thrust and chopped and continued to advance. He didn't move quickly, but neither did he halt or even pause. It was like watching sap drip on a warm spring day.
Cashel's quarterstaff struck right and left with the regularity of a waterclock, smashing a skull or a fleshless ribcage with every blow. Whenever an animate skeleton thrust at him, a ferrule batted the weapon back and crushed the thing wielding it. What'd been an army of hideous monsters as numerous as stalks in a barley field, was going down as surely as that barley at harvest time.
The footing became as much of a danger as the creatures themselves. In rising from their frozen tombs, the skeletons had left craters of shattered ice. Garric set his boot on a hole filled with treacherous fragments. Only instincts he'd honed while following sheep into bogs warned him not to rest his weight on that foot.
A skeleton swung a double-bitted axe down at him. Garric caught the helve with the point of his upraised sword and skidded the axe to the side, then flicked his blade to the right to lift the skull from the neck vertebrae. If he'd carried through with the lunge he'd intended, his leg would've sunk beneath him. The creature's blow would've split him up the back like a sheep butterflied for roasting.
Sharina's axe wove figure-8s before her, clearing a space as broad even as Cashel's quarterstaff. The axe was shouting or singing in the sort of joy displayed at coronations and for sudden windfalls; its edge clipped through whatever it met-wood or bone or rusty iron. Garric didn't know how long his sister could keep up the effort, but by now there was little more need for it. A single rank of skeletons separated him and his immediate companions from the figure on the ice throne.
Garric chose his final opponent, the skeleton of a man who when alive ages previously must've been seven feet tall. It raised its sword for a vertical chop; instead of the deliberate swordsmanship he'd demonstrated till this moment, Garric did the same.
They swung down at one another, their blades crossing in a clanging tocsin. Sparks flew. Wizardry gave the skeleton's limbs enormous strength, but the salt-pitted sword snapped on the watered steel of Garric's blade.
Garric thrust through the creature's mouth, scattering teeth like hailstones and lifting the top of the bare skull. The skeleton flew backward, the broken sword dropping from its right hand as its left arm came loose at the shoulder.
Garric had reached the foot of the great throne; he looked up for the first time since the skeletons began to rise from the ice. The wizard seated above him must have weighed as much as a full-grown ox. Her body was a mushroom of fat on legs whose drooping calves swaddled tiny feet the way rich cloth drapes an altar. Her arms were so monstrous they appeared to have no elbows; Her fingers, though thick as sausages, seemed delicate by contrast with the bloated palms.
She was looking at Garric. Her cheeks were so puffy that Her eyes seemed to be set at the bottom of deep tunnels, but Garric recognized Her nonetheless.
He was looking at his childhood friend, Ilna os-Kenset.
And as he realized that, the net of wizardlight that She had woven in the air dropped onto Garric, freezing him in his tracks.
As Ilna entered the huge domed hall which she'd seen so recently through Her eyes, the net of wizardlight drifted down over her. Ilna's expression was colder than the winter stars.
The Tree growing from the enthroned figure dominated the vast chamber. Its trunk was deceptive, as thin and supple as a willow's at first glance. At the back of Ilna's mind she had the impression that the Tree was too thick for even this huge room to hold. Its leafless limbs squirmed on currents of wizardlight, brushing over every peak and valley of the world; branching and spreading to branch again.
Chalcus saw Her net falling. He threw up his left hand to keep it from tangling him, but that touch froze him. The net continued to settle, draping his head and shoulders. Ilna stepped around him and continued toward the center of the hall.
The Tree in its full splendor looked as it had when Ilna first saw it in Hell. What she'd brought back with her to the waking world had been a relatively slight thing, but it would have grown.
Grown to look like this towering monster, visible only to her of all those in this chamber.
Soldiers were gathered in the center of the room; more men had been running toward them from an entrance close to where Ilna had shattered her own door in the wall. In a scene much like the one she'd just viewed through Her memory, a net of wizardlight had locked most of the men stiffly. A few were trying to crawl away; none of them would succeed.
The chamber held inhuman creatures of more sorts than Ilna had fingers to count them. Her net had trapped those as well; it would convert them to Her purposes in the same fashion, if nothing prevented that from happening.
Ilna smiled like light dancing from a sword blade. Something would prevent it.
She walked forward, feeling a faint tingle from the wizardlight eddying about her. The net was at shoulder level now and dropping lower.
Nearby crouched a thing whose body was a great cat's but whose eagle's head was crowned with great green feathers. A group of soldiers braced themselves to receive it, their shields raised; two of the men had javelins cocked to throw. The encounter had become a tableau when Her net had fallen across it. In their concern with each other, neither monster nor men had been aware of what was settling on them.
Ilna detoured around the corpse of a giant with a brow that jutted like a warship's ram to protect its single central eye. It lay on its back with three pikes, two broken and one whole, sticking up from its chest. Judging from how deep the pikes were driven in, the creature must have run itself onto the points and continued struggling forward on pillar-like legs until death finally caught up with it.
Ilna sniffed. That massive skull must hold a brain no bigger than a squirrel's. Of course there were plenty of ordinary men she'd say the same about.
Garric and Cashel were where she expected to find them, in the middle of the front line. Sharina was there too, her blond hair draped about her shoulders like a shroud. She'd been swinging an axe when the net halted her in mid-stroke.
As white as a slug and fatter than Ilna had believed a human could become, She sat on the throne looking out over the frozen soldiers. Of course She wasn't human any more; Her soul was merely the soil in which the Tree had sprouted to spread its tendrils across the world.
The net of light reached the floor, locking Garric and his whole army beneath its spell. From the throne Her hands wove power in subtle patterns; those hands and Ilna herself were the only things moving in the huge room.
She turned Her head toward Ilna. Her fat white fingers twisted; crimson wizardlight looped out to knot around Ilna like a snake throttling a vole.
The coil slipped through Ilna as if her body were water; she felt only the quivering chill she'd get from a draft when a winter storm rattles the shutters. She walked on, looking up and smiling more broadly. She met the deep-set eyes of the thing she hadn't allowed herself to become.
"Who are you?" shouted the thing on the throne.
"I'm Ilna os-Kenset," said Ilna. "I'm who you used to be, when you were human."
This close to the throne, Ilna had to choose her footing with care. The ice was broken into chunks, and everywhere lay the skeletons of the men who'd followed Her until she tore out their blood and souls to feed her wizardry.
"I have power over you!" She cried from the throne. Her fingers writhed again, molding forces into a tool and sending them curling toward Ilna as an azure noose. "I have power over all things!"
Ilna shrugged through this coil as she had the first one, as she had the net that held the others in the chamber. "You don't have any power except what the Tree allows you," she said calmly. "And the Tree has no power over menow -since I broke away from it."
Ilna looked up at the round face and bloated white body. "As you did not in your world," she said. "And as you can't ever do now."
"Ilna?" said a voice Ilna knew well. "I'm so glad you've come back!"
It was not Her voice. It was the voice of the friend Ilna never had, the one who understood her and cared about her, as nobody had ever cared about Ilna os-Kenset.
It was the voice of the Tree.
"You have no business with me," Ilna said. "Not any longer."
She wasn't sure her lips were moving. The huge ice hall faded to flickers at the edge of her awareness. She stood in a gray limbo with neither light nor texture. Before her was the Tree, its sinuous branches weaving a slow dance of mastery and evil.
Ilna smiled; and if it was a grim expression, there was pride in it nonetheless. Not mastery over me. Not any longer.
"None of them understand you, Ilna," said the Tree; its voice was soothing, loving. "I'll make sure that you get what you deserve."
"You have no-" Ilna shouted, but the remainder of the words froze on her lips. Time stopped, then flowed down a channel different from the one which she had lived.
The vagabond Kenset brought Ilna to Barca's Hamlet as an infant, but divine parentage already shown from her face. As a child she never lacked for anything. Barca's Hamlet became known as a paradise on earth where winters were moderate and crops bountiful. This blissful series of events was rightly credited to the presence of the Divine Ilna.
Some of those in the borough found the pain of their own inadequacy too much to bear in the light of the Divine Ilna. Her uncle Katchin and his slattern wife swam out to sea one night; their bodies were never recovered. The next day Garric's shrewish, self-important mother Lora hanged herself in the panty of the inn. Neighbors regarded the deaths as part of the blessings Ilna brought on the community.
Ilna allowed Garric to attend her. It pleased her to see the light of adoration in his eyes. He never presumed to touch her, of course, realizing that no human was worthy of the Divine Ilna. She was whole in herself, a fit subject for worship but unmoved by it as by all else around her.
Around Her; She was divine.
Realizing the inadequacy of their resources, the folk of the borough carried Her in state to Carcosa. The ancient capital received Her with fitting enthusiasm, rebuilding the Old Kingdom palace for Her. Delegations arrived from Sandrakkan and Ornifal, from Blaise and from rocky islets too small to have a name recognized by any but the handful of fishermen inhabiting them.
The rich and powerful brought gold and jewels and sometimes tapestries; She looked with amused contempt on the finest fabric which humans could weave. The poor could offer only their worship, but that they gave Her unstintingly.
On every isle, in every home, voices rose in praise for the Divine Ilna. What had been a kingdom became a temple, as a new and eternal Golden Age came to the Isles.
"What you deserve…," the voice whispered affectionately.
Ilna laughed, a harsh, bitter sound that shattered the illusion. She stood among the frozen figures beneath the great dome again. "What I deserve," she said as the Tree swayed in a vain, desperate attempt to touch her, "is to die-because of the harm I did when I listened to you before. Never again."
She stepped forward. She'd reached the line of soldiers and squeezed between them, sometimes ducking under an outstretched blade or a thrusting shield. The men were in tight ranks, but Ilna was a slender woman.
Garric stood with his sword raised and his right foot lifting from the ice to lunge toward the creature above him. Ilna touched her friend's shoulder in a protective gesture. She smiled at Her, thinking with a rare surge of pride, Despite the evil which I did and can never repay, I didn't become that; and I might have.
"You have no power over me either!" She said. "However great your art, you can't touch me!"
"Is that what you think?" said Ilna. She chuckled and slipped her little knife from its bone sheath. The keen steel edge winked like a demon's tongue. "What I think is that I'll reach a vein with this eventually, even if I have to dig for a while."
She mounted the lowest step, grinning like a cat.
The creature on the throne screamed in warbling terror. I didn't become a coward, either, Ilna thought, and climbed the next step.
The throne trembled. She was straining to stand, channeling forces to lift a body too massive for human muscles to move.
"You can't run from me!" Ilna said. "You can't run from yourself, Ilna os-Kenset!"
The Tree shuddered as its bed shifted, rocking like the surf in a storm. Ilna struggled onto the third step despite the rippling violence.
The vast white form screamed again; then She toppled sideways, unable to balance the mass on Her tiny feet. She struck the floor with the weight not only of Her body but also the load of trembling evil which grew from it.
There was a soggy crash, then a roar. The ice, already weakened when the dead climbed out of it, broke open.
Water just warmer than the ice fountained from the hole, then dropped back. A second geyser, this time tinged with blood, followed an instant later. The things swimming beneath the chamber were feeding.
Wizardlight began to fade from the walls the way sparks do after they've been flung onto a stone hearth. Ilna swayed; then the throne pitched with greater violence and she fell backward.