Goddess of the Ice Realm (25 page)

“There!” cried Anda. “There—don't break it, you fool!”

The last comment was to the armsman reaching one-handed for a crystal globe padded with silken tunics. It wasn't the smartest thing to say to somebody with a hooked sword bare in the other hand, but Garric understood.

“I'll take it,” he said, pausing a moment between Anda and the soldier before bending over to lift the globe from its swathing. He raised it carefully. Though larger than a man's head, the crystal was as thin as a soap bubble. In the light of swinging lamps and handheld lanterns Garric couldn't really view the pattern etched
inside
the crystal, but the detail was obvious.

“That was what Moisin was to bring you, your highness!” Anda said. “I swear it was!”

What does a false priest swear by that would make anybody trust him?
Garric wondered; but for all that, he didn't doubt that Anda was telling the truth. This globe was worth the throne of Haft to anyone who could appreciate its wonder . . . as Garric certainly could.

“Moisin should be here,” Anda said, desperation returning to his voice. “I don't know where he's gone or what he's been playing at. I swear it!”

“Your highness?” said Lord Rosen, tapping the flat of his sword on his thigh. “What would you like us to do now?”

Garric wanted to rub his eyes, but he was afraid to put the globe down in a room crowded with restive soldiers. “Everybody out!” he said after a moment's thought. “Clear the room!”

As the troops filed out, pushing later arrivals ahead of them, Garric set the globe back in its nest and closed the lid. To the trailing pair of Blood Eagles he said, “Carry this, and don't on your lives drop it! Carry it as if it held my soul!”

Then, to Lord Rosen who remained stiffly behind—wondering if he'd been insulted and wondering further how to react if he had been—Garric continued, “Milord, you and I will return to the palace with the Blood Eagles. I'll leave Attaper here to secure the compound and question everybody about where Moisin might have gone.”

Now he rubbed his eyes. Smiling grimly he said, “I'm going to see what Tenoctris may have learned about Sharina. And I pray to the Shepherd that she's learned something!”

Sharina poised on the pile of rubble, analyzing the situation for a heartbeat. If she tried to crawl through the roof, the creature already hunching in the skewed doorway would grab her ankle with a hand the size of a bear ham and drag her back for a club stroke. Instead she twisted like a cat and leaped down, swinging the axe overhand.

“Blood!” screamed the steel mouth. “Bio—” and the edge sheared through the heavy-browed skull as easily as sunlight penetrates crystal. The rest of the word choked off in a gurgle.

Sharina landed with her feet under her. The axe moved easily; it was balanced like a dream. The creature whose skull she'd split convulsed violently, flinging its arms out to its sides; the club smashed into a sidewall hard enough to shatter into a fibrous broom.

A second creature stuck its arm down through the laths of the roof. Sharina pivoted, almost without thinking, and slashed through the creature's humerus. The bone was thicker than her own whole forearm, but the axe sliced it like gossamer.

“Yes, that's the way to feed Beard!” the axe cried in a throaty treble. “More blood! More blood for—”

The creature jerked back, tearing a barrel-sized hole in the latticework. The lower portion of its arm flailed on the triceps muscle that the narrow axe-blade hadn't severed. The roof beams shifted with a squeal. Sharina leaped, catching a beam in her left hand and pulling herself up.

The roof trembled like a ship's deck. The whole battered structure was shifting toward collapse.

“—Beard to drink!” cried the axe.

The third creature was trying to crawl over the thrashing body of the one with the split skull. The doorway wasn't big enough to hold both giants. The creature with the dangling arm saw Sharina, screamed, and swung its club at her. Before the awkward blow landed, she leaped down onto the back of the third creature. It lurched, dragging its shoulders out of the doorway and glaring at Sharina with eyes further reddened by the firelight.

“The throat!” screamed the axe. “Let me cut her—”

Sharina brought the axe around in a backhanded arc. She was a strong woman and the axe was scarcely more than a hatchet with an unusually long helve, but even so she marveled at how smoothly it moved. It was like watching light shimmer on smooth water.

“—throat!” the axe said.

Sharina didn't feel the blade touch and slip through the creature's neck, but the gush of blood bathed the wall where the frescoes had weathered off. The gout slowed, then spurted again as the creature rose to its feet, lifting its club overhead. The second creature had retrieved its weapon from the pall of dust and splinters raised when it smashed the roof. The dangling arm seemed to be affecting its balance.

Sharina scrambled sideways around the fire and tripped over a human body trussed with bark cord. She was breathing hard and didn't get her feet under her as easily as she expected.
The creature whose throat she'd cut toppled slowly backward into the alcove holding the loot, completing the room's destruction with a crash and a pall of debris.

“Feed me!” the axe cried. “Feed me! Fee—”

Swinging the axe with both hands, Sharina leaped toward the only creature still standing. Its left-handed club blow wobbled past like a tree limb whirled in a windstorm. Even stretching to her full height Sharina couldn't reach the creature's skull, but she buried the axe to the helve at the top of the breastbone where the biggest blood vessels lift from the heart.

She dragged her weapon out with a sucking sound and a geyser of blood. The creature cried out and swiped its club sideways. Sharina jumped but the club caught her anyway, lifting her onto the ruin of the room from which she'd emerged. She lay stunned, choking on the dust but unable to move.

The creature dropped its club and staggered forward, clutching the gurgling hole in its chest. Blood welled from between its massive fingers and foamed through its yellow tusks, choking the cries it would otherwise have uttered.

Sharina got her left sleeve over her nose and tried to breathe through it. That didn't help much, but now that she'd started moving she crawled off of the shifting rubble. She still held the axe, though she didn't think she'd be able to swing it.

The creature fell facedown onto the fire, flinging sparks out to the sides. Burning hair added its stench to that of the woman, which the trio had been roasting. Sharina worked her way on all fours around the smothered fire, trying to get upwind.

“Help me,” a voice whimpered. “Please. Help me.”

Sharina opened her eyes; she hadn't been aware that they were closed. Her stomach roiled with the horror of what she'd just done. She kept remembering the startled expression on the face of the creature as her axe sheared its throat, and then the curtain of blood spraying in all directions. . . .

“Please. . . .”

The tied-up figure was a hollow-cheeked youth; moonlight
turned his hair and his sallow complexion much the same color. His simple garments were filthy; but then, so was Sharina's sleeping shift, and she hadn't lain bound by man-eaters for an unguessibly long time.

“Hold still,” she croaked, reaching for the cord binding his wrists and ankles together. “If you squirm, I may cut you.”

“He's no use to you, mistress!” said the axe. “Come on, let me finish him for you. Look how his throat is just waiting for Beard to cleave it!”

The captive flinched and began to cry soundlessly. Sharina looked at the axe for the first time since she'd drawn it carefully from the pile of rusty trash. The steel was as bright and clean as plate polished for a palace banquet, though its shaft and Sharina's whole right arm were sticky with congealing blood.

“Be silent,” she said in a rasping whisper. She short-gripped the weapon and carefully touched the edge to the rope.

“But Beard is still thirsty, mistress,” the axe said. Quivering reflections on the back of the blade looked like a mouth there was speaking; maybe it was. “Please, mistress, let Beard drink his blood!”

The tough bark fibers parted without effort on Sharina's part. Though she knew the axe had just split heavy bones, the edge remained as keen as thought.

“Axe,” she said in a deadly whisper. “If you don't shut up now, I'll give you all the water in Carcosa harbor to drink. Be silent!”

She paused but heard nothing except possibly a. . .
thirsty
. . . so faint that it might have been the wind through the ruined palace. She cut the youth's ankles free, then his wrists.

“You can move now,” she said, leaning back. “What's your name?”

Lady help me, it's so cold . . .
But she wasn't sure it was the wind that chilled her as much as her reaction to the few minutes just passed. Only a few minutes.

“I'm Franca,” the youth said without meeting Sharina's eyes. He massaged his wrists with the opposite hands; the
skin was worn away into a crust of blood. “Franca or-Orrin, but mostly mother called me Franca. And now she's gone.”

He started to cry again. His hands stopped rubbing and he clamped his skinny arms tight to his chest.

“Your mother was . . . ?” Sharina said, nodding toward where the fire had been; the woman's feet stuck out from beneath the dead monster's body. Franca's eyes were closed, so she said, “The monsters killed your mother?”

“Of course the Hunters killed the silly woman!” said the axe in a clear, piping voice. “She and her whelp here came right down into Carcosa where the Hunters know every hiding place. But you killed
them,
mistress! Ah, those were fine strokes!”

Sharina looked sourly at the axe, but it was giving her more information than the weeping boy so she didn't snarl again. She needed to learn a lot more if she was to survive, let alone get back to where she belonged.

“Get up, Franca,” she said. “We'll roll this Hunter out of the way and then bury your mother.”

“Bury Mother?” the boy said. He stared in horror at the creature with the severed arm, then looked squarely at Sharina for the first time. “But why?”

“Because we're human beings,” she said, “and that's what people do!”

She set the axe on the base of a fallen column where she could grab it quickly if she had to. It was mumbling to itself, recalling with gusto the slaughter just completed.

All three of the creatures—the Hunters, Sharina now knew to call them—were females. The one she had to move weighed as much as a heifer, but Sharina threw her weight against one of its long arms to roll it off the human corpse. Franca helped without complaint; he was stronger than he looked.

The Hunters had run a broken pike the long way through their victim for a spit. Sharina thought about the situation and decided to leave the shaft where it was.

They carried Franca's mother down into what had been the garden in Sharina's world. Debris choked it, but she'd seen a hollow where they could lay the body and mound a cairn over it. They didn't have the tools to dig even a shallow grave.

“We had to come to the city,” Franca muttered, finally responding to the axe's gibe. “Hail flattened our crop and there was nothing to scavenge in Penninvale. Mother thought that maybe in Carcosa there'd be something left, because it was the first place destroyed when She came.”

“We'll set her here,” Sharina said, wincing as blackberry canes scratched her calves. “Who's the She you say came?”

The night noises were only half-familiar, but the Hunters had probably kept other dangers at a distance. Unless the male of the pack had been off on his own for the night. . . .

“She's God,” Franca said. “She came to the world ten years ago. Now She rules everything.”

“Everything is better now!” called the axe from the ruined palace above them. “Beard was scarcely alive before She came. Now there's so much more for him to drink!”

“Start covering her,” Sharina said, looking around. Most of the roof tiles had poured into the garden when the palace collapsed, and there were manageably larger chunks of rubble as well. She picked up a stone barrel from one of the slim paired columns that had framed the window of her reception room.

“We heard about Her from the people fleeing Carcosa,” Franca said. “Horrible monsters tearing down buildings and eating people. We didn't know what to do, so we stayed in Penninvale and for a year everything was all right. Except the winter storms were bad, very bad.”

He used a pole, part of a casement, to lever tiles and a decade of windblown dirt over the body. The rotten wood cracked before he'd made much headway.

“The storms will get worse!” the axe called. “The storms will last longer until there's no longer a thaw and the whole world freezes. But until then there'll be plenty of blood for Beard to drink!”

“There was an early storm that fall,” Franca said, lifting handfuls of debris over the corpse. He worked steadily though without enthusiasm. “Out of it came a creature bigger than three houses, all covered with armor, and a pack of Hunters. Mother and I hid in the root cellar and the monster smashed our house down over us. We couldn't see what was happening, but we heard things. And after a week we couldn't hear anything more, so we dug ourselves out.
Everyone was gone, except for the bits that the birds and foxes were eating.”

Franca squatted. Sharina thought he was about to lift a larger block, but instead he put his face in his hands and resumed crying. She pivoted a length of stone transom without speaking. It was too heavy for her to lift, but when it shifted, dirt and broken tile cascaded down to cover the woman's face. It wasn't a real burial, but Sharina hoped it was enough for decency in this hellworld.