Goddess of the Ice Realm (36 page)

He gripped one of the dwarf birches rooted in the rock to help him up the last step to what he thought was a broad ledge. It was a flat-topped ridge instead. Filling the broad valley beyond was a jumble of shattered marble. From it grew pines, cottonwoods, and clumps of spiky silkgrass waving stalks of yellow-white flowers.

“Oh!” he said. “I guess we're here.”

“Brilliant,” said the toad. “Do you guess the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning too?”

Cashel smiled broadly as he surveyed the vast ruins. Portmayne must have been as large as Manor Bossian, but its walls had been built of vari-colored marbles instead of crystal. There'd been a central tower whose stone was brilliantly white with a blue undertone. It must've been higher than any tree gets, because when it toppled it reached almost to where Cashel stood.

He eyed the fragments carefully. The tower had shattered when it hit the stony ground, but it seemed to have been all
one piece till then—like an eggshell rather than a building constructed from carved blocks. Lightning had burned a ragged line down the side of the tower, turning the stone a powdery white like a leper's skin. The bolt had torn its way from the battlements to the ground; maybe that was what threw the tower down.

“The tank is there to the north,” Evne said. “Just beyond where the travertine wing collapsed.”

It wasn't just the tower, of course: the whole manor was flattened as thoroughly as a stomped-on anthill. He'd done that when he was younger; stepped on anthills. . . .

“Yes, ma'am,” Cashel said. “Where the sedges are growing, you mean. I just wanted to get a look at things before I went wandering down into them, you know; in case.”

He gave his quarterstaff a spin, then reversed its direction. It felt good to swing the iron-shod hickory, Duzi
knew
it did. Cashel wasn't a lazy man, but he walked from necessity rather than pleasure. It seemed like walking was most of what he'd been doing since Kotia brought him to this place, so using his arms and shoulders for a bit was a special treat.

“Far be it from me to tell my master what to do,” the toad said tartly. “Though I did consider that there might be insects around the tank, and that it's been some while since I last ate.”

“Right, we'll head on now,” said Cashel, suiting his action to his words by starting down the slope with long strides. The soil was different on this side of the ridge; instead of being red clay, it was more of a yellowish brown with shiny, silvery chunks of galena ore in it.

“Don't let me put you out,” said the toad, but she didn't say it very loudly. “After all, I've waited at least seven thousand years; what difference would another few weeks make?”

Cashel wondered about the utter ruin, how it'd happened. Lightning might've struck a high tower easy enough, but that didn't explain all the rest of the buildings. Well, that'd been a long time ago. He didn't guess it mattered anymore.

Birds chirped and fluttered in short hops among the trees. Cashel saw a wren with fluff in its beak and a number of other little gray fellows he might not have identified for sure
even if they'd been flitting in a hedgerow back in Barca's Hamlet where the animals were familiar.

Sheep wouldn't have been happy in this country. There was too much stone, and the silkgrass would cut their lips as they grazed. Goats would've done well enough, but Cashel didn't like goats. They had minds of their own, more than sheep did; but they weren't really any smarter than sheep. Being contrary, they managed to get into more trouble as well as not being as nice to be around.

Cashel grinned and spun his quarterstaff overhead for the fun of it. There were plenty of people who reminded him of goats too.

He wished Garric was here to play his pipes as they walked through the rubble of the fallen manor. Or Sharina; either of his friends could've told Cashel things about the broken stones, what the buildings'd looked like originally and what the reliefs cut into them meant.

“Or you could ask me,” said the toad unexpectedly. Had he spoken aloud? “I'd tell you that the frieze we just passed shows the first Lady Portmayne receiving eternal wisdom from figures representing Sky, Earth, and Sea. Those folks shown ankle height around her are her adoring subjects.”

“Oh!” said Cashel. “I hadn't been thinking about you, Evne.”

“Given how rarely you seem to think of anything, I won't feel insulted,” the toad said. “And as for those adoring subjects, I daresay they or their equally adoring descendents wished Lady Portmayne had received some other form of eternal wisdom—perhaps that of cabbage worms. Because what she did receive didn't help the folk of Portmayne in the least when the Visitor arrived and threw down their walls.”

Cashel walked past a fallen colonnade; the shafts were of deep red stone with white seashells embedded, but the bases and capitals had been black and had green veins. It must have been lovely, once upon a time.

“Would cabbage worms have been able to stop the Visitor, Evne?” he asked.

“Faugh, you're a fool!” she said. Then in a different tone—a tone very like the one that Ilna used when she was being careful to say no more than she was sure of, “The Visitor
would claim, I believe, that no one and no thing could stop him. Thus far he's had no reason to change his opinion.”

The tank was of white marble, carved all around with columns that were part of the same block as the rest of the structure. A gently sloped mound raised the bottom some distance above the surrounding plain. The slope must originally have been sodded—a few tufts of real grass still grew there—but now dark green sedge covered it. Sedges need a lot of water, and if they were getting it around here the tank must leak.

Cashel stood at the base of the mound and eyed the structure. It was as broad as he could've thrown a stone and more than twice as long. The marble sides were sheer and double Cashel's height, which could be a problem. He figured he'd climb onto the base and see if he could lift himself from there to get a grip on top of the cornice. If that didn't work, well, he'd try something different.

“You think the hardest part of this business will be to get to the top of the tank?” the toad said quietly.

“Well, yes, but it shouldn't be too hard,” Cashel said. “I think I can—”

“You're wrong about that being the hard part,” the toad said. “There was a dragon sleeping in the tank. It's awakened now, and it plans to eat you.”

“Oh,” said Cashel, looking up again. A broad snout rose over the cornice; above it were a pair of wide-set eyes, staring at Cashel through slit pupils.

The dragon's head was not only bronze colored, it had the sheen of metal in the afternoon sun. It lifted out of the marble tank and began to flow down toward Cashel like a river of dark honey. The head looked a little like a crocodile's, but the snakelike body walked on more pairs of short, bowed legs than Cashel had fingers to count them on. It was as thick as he was through the chest, and he couldn't be sure how long it was because it was still coiling out of the tank. Water gleamed on its bronze scales.

“Evne,” Cashel said. He scooped the toad into his cupped left hand and put her down in a patch of grass. “I'm going to
move to the right, I think. You go the other way so you don't get trampled, all right?”

“You could run, Master Cashel!” the toad said.

“I don't think I could,” said Cashel. “Anyway, I'm not going to try.”

He knew what the little image of Kakoral had meant about being sorry if they didn't hike down to the river instead of searching for the water here at Portmayne; though Cashel wasn't sure that was true. In a place like this, there'd likely have been trouble waiting at the river too; and anyway, how would he have gotten a decent reflection from flowing water?

Anyway, he'd made his choice and he'd live with it. Or not, he supposed.

Cashel started moving to his right the way he said he'd do. He eased back a little from the base of the mound also. No point in letting the dragon use the higher ground to spring on him. Not that it looked like springing was part of its usual act, but you could never tell.

As Cashel sidled backward, he began spinning his quarterstaff. It made a low thrum, a familiar sound and a soothing one.

He wondered what the creature ate when people didn't come along. He hadn't seen any animals bigger than the few doves, and there weren't buzzards circling in the pale blue sky either. If there wasn't food here for a buzzard, he didn't see how you could feed a dragon that seemed to be the size of a trireme.

The slope had been backfilled with clean dirt, but when the dragon's forequarters reached the natural soil its claws began to click on stones. Once Cashel saw a spark when a claw ticked a half-buried chunk of quartz.

Cashel swept his surroundings with quick jerks of his head, never losing the dragon from at least his peripheral vision. A sprawled jumble of pink marble—the remains of a tower once nearly as tall as the manor's central spire—would shortly keep him from retreating any farther. That meant he'd either have to wait or attack himself, and he figured attacking—

The dragon, three double paces distant, lifted its head on a sinuous curve of its forebody. Cashel, spinning the quarterstaff sunwise before him, strode forward. The dragon struck down. Cashel met it with his staff end-on; the dragon recoiled in a flash of blue wizardlight.

Cashel's body tingled; he couldn't hear anything but the whirring in his ears. He reversed the staff and struck with the other ferrule—half a swing, half a battering ram punch with his shoulders behind it. There was another flash. The dragon rolled away from the blow, its scales black and dinted where the iron had smashed them. The air stank of brimstone.

The dragon opened its mouth and roared like a mill grinding without grain between the stones, a rasping, terrible sound. Each canine tooth was as long as Cashel's whole hand, and the interlocking side teeth weren't much smaller.

Cashel stepped forward again and struck with his left hand leading. A blast of azure light blinded him; he couldn't feel anything. He struck again, right hand foremost. He was moving on instinct and the skill of long practice, swinging a staff he couldn't feel into an enemy he couldn't see.

Light flared, piercing him bone-deep. This shock threw his surroundings into focus in stark black and white. The dragon's left eyetooth spun into the bright heavens. Hot fog surrounded the beast: the water slicking its scales boiled off like drops from the sides of a heated cauldron.

The dragon roared again, a sound Cashel felt though he still couldn't hear. Its jaws were big enough to swallow a man in one gulp, even a man as big as Cashel. The creature's breath stank like a smithy, not a slaughterhouse.

He stepped forward and rammed the quarterstaff like a spear into the dragon's palette, crushing through the light bones. The creature jerked back, lifting its forebody while Cashel still clung to the staff deep in its skull. He could see the ground as clearly as he could the ridged grain of his quarterstaff: every pebble, every sprig of sage, every bird track. It seemed to be far below him.

The dragon writhed into a tight knot. Blue-white flames jetted from its maw and outlined the individual scales of its squirming body; sedge sizzled and blackened at the creature's touch.

Cashel was flying free. He held his quarterstaff.
Nothing else in the world mattered.

Sharina faced the archers above her, hesitating when the answer was obvious to anybody. Scoggin tossed his spear onto the shingle at his feet and looked at her with a desperate expression.

“Throw down the axe, woman!” he cried. “Throw it down or they'll kill us all!” Sharina didn't
like
Beard, and she'd lived all her previous life without owning a talking axe . . . but that didn't mean anybody had a right to take it away from her. She wondered what Cashel would do, or her brother Garric?

The truth was that they'd drop the axe without question. They didn't need to prove their courage to anybody—

And neither did she. She bent over and set Beard down gently. As a fine tool alone she owed the axe better than to be tossed onto hard stone.

“Wait, mistress!” the axe cried. “We're being attacked! I promised I'd warn you!”

“I know we're being attacked!” Sharina said in fury. “They're standing all around us with bows aimed. I'm giving you up.”

“Not them, mistress,” said Beard. His metal voice was as pure and piercing as the note of a bell. “The men are no danger, now that the fauns have come back!”

“What?” said Alfdan, looking over his shoulder. He gave a cry of angry wonder and pointed his staff in the direction of the hamlet. He began to chant in a high singsong voice, then choked to a halt. He swayed, on the verge of collapse. He must be exhausted from the wizardry involved in keeping his ambush concealed until Sharina walked into it.

“I can fight them, mistress!” Beard said. “I can drink their blood too, just like men's.”

Sharina couldn't see anything from where she stood at the base of the seawall. One of Alfdan's men shot toward the new danger. He gave a shout of horror, tried to nock another arrow, and dropped it in nervousness.

“Come on!” Sharina cried, running up the steep slope
more easily than she'd descended it. Emotions fired her now; emotions and the delighted, shrieking bloodlust of the axe in her hands.

Four or five archers were shooting; the others either scuttled down the seawall or stood in terror with their bows half-drawn. Sharina reached the top; Franca was with her but Scoggin hadn't followed.

Five creatures covered in lustrous blue fur were coming from the ruins of Barca's Hamlet. They were in a line spread from north to south, converging on Alfdan's band. They were somewhat taller than men, but much more of their height was in their legs; their thighs were as hugely muscled as a grasshopper's. Tiny curling horns grew at the top of their foreheads, and their faces had the calm majesty of ivory statues.