Goddess of the Ice Realm (51 page)

“Aye, lads,” said Chalcus. “It's now that we earn our pay, I'm thinking.”

Azure wizardlight flared again, this time as a continuous solid bowl pulsing across the sky directly above the
Bird of the Tide.
It pulsed, and Ilna felt herself falling though nothing around her changed.

For a moment she heard Pointin's terrified screams. Then the roar of wizardry overwhelmed every other sound.

T
he mechanical birds trilled tunes as golden as their own flashing wings. That was the only soothing thing going on in the audience room this morning.

Garric sat grim-faced at the head of the conference table. Lord Tadai, Lord Waldron, and Master Reise (“representing the Vicar”) were arguing over the size, makeup, siting, and especially the funding of the garrison that would remain in Haft when the royal army accompanied Prince Garric to Sandrakkan, the next stage of his progress. The army commander was heated, the acting chancellor was suave, the former palace servant was self-effacing—and none of the three of them would move a hairbreadth from his initial mutually-exclusive position.

“There's no perfect decision!”
Carus said. Garric was dizzy with silent frustration but the ancient king was in a livid rage.
“You should just do it, do
anything,
and be done!”

Before Garric could make any response beyond the first
twitch of a smile, Carus realized what he'd said and guffawed loudly.
“Aye, lad,”
he said.
“You should decide by throwing knucklebones and let the kingdom go smash. The way I did, because I wouldn't spend time on anything that didn't involve a sword.”

Each of the principals had several aides carrying document cases. A staff captain and one of Tadai's section heads, both junior members of the Ornifal nobility, snarled at one another beside the silver birdcage; if they'd been allowed to carry swords in the presence of the prince, they'd have been using them. The pair of Blood Eagles on duty watched with superior smiles.

Liane sat demurely beside Garric with a waxed notepad in her hand and a rank of part-opened scrolls laid on the table before her. To look at her she was wholly focused on her documents, oblivious of the discussion going on. Garric was quite sure that if asked, Liane could repeat verbatim any portion of the argument and counterarguments; which was more than
he
could do, and he'd been trying to follow it.

The door opened. A guard outside whispered to one inside, then a nondescript man entered. He walked around the room against the wall to Liane, then stooped and whispered to her lowered head. Garric smiled again. He didn't know the details—yet—but he knew that if the fellow'd been allowed in now, something more important than a council meeting was about to occur.

Liane nodded to the messenger—one of her spies, obviously—and stood expectantly. Nobody but Garric paid any attention.

Garric stood also and slapped the table. Everyone jumped; Lord Waldron reached reflexively for the hilt of the sword, which he wasn't wearing.

“Gentlemen,” said Garric. His tone and expression were stiff, just short of angry. “Lady Liane has an announcement.”

“An emergency requiring Prince Garric's presence with troops has arisen at the Shrine of the Sister,” Liane said. As she spoke, she set her scrolls back each into its place in her traveling desk, then closed the inlaid lid over the cavity.

“Right,” said Waldron, no longer angry. To an aide he went on, “Alert Lord Tosli. We'll take the whole palace regiment,
so go next to the camp and tell Lord Mayne or whoever's on duty in his headquarters to bring his regiment at once to replace Tosli's men.”

“But about the point we're discussing . . . ?” said Tadai.

“For the time being . . .” Garric said. “That is, until I give different orders, Lord Insto's regiment—” which had the highest number of sickness-related casualties; they'd suffered badly on the voyage from Valles and hadn't recovered yet “—will be billeted on the northern arm of the harbor—” which the troops could easily fortify with a short wall across the base of the peninsula before they had time to build a proper fort. “They'll cause less irritation to ordinary citizens there than if they were living in the middle of the city. They'll be concentrated, but they can deploy either by land or sea to wherever they're needed.”

Reise nodded; Waldron shrugged, impatient to get moving. Garric knew from Liane's phrasing that this wasn't an emergency in which seconds counted, so he could use the summons as a way to finish a discussion that would go on for many further hours if merely adjourned.

“But the source of the regiment's pay hasn't been decided,” Tadai said. “I—”

“If I may?” Liane said sharply, looking toward Garric. She reopened her notebook but didn't glance down at it.

“Speak,” said Garric, curtly formal.

“Two-thirds of the regiment's pay might come from the Vicar's revenues,” Liane said, “with the remainder from the royal treasury in acknowledgment of your right to withdraw the troops without notice should the need arise.”

“Done,” said Garric. “Lord Tadai, prepare the decree for my signature. Lord Insto will be under the command of the Vicar until and unless I recall the regiment to the royal army.”

“I don't like the idea of my legates taking orders from civilians, your highness!” Waldron said, frozen in the middle of his stride toward the door.

“My
legates, if you please, Lord Waldron,” Garric said coldly. “And I prefer that system to having two competing authorities in one jurisdiction.”

He broke the chill rebuff with a smile. “Since the Vicar,
Lord Uzinga, is your wife's nephew and the man you recommended for the post, Waldron, I think you ought to be able to work things out. Now, let's get moving.”

“Well, but there's the principle . . .” Waldron was muttering as he and Garric stepped into the hall together. It was a silly enough comment that the old warrior choked off the rest of the thought before he embarrassed himself further.

His aides and Garric's—Lord Lerdain was carrying Liane's traveling desk; from what Garric could tell the youth was besotted with Liane, but he was too much in awe of her to get himself into trouble by saying the wrong thing—were right behind them. The rest of the guard detachment formed around them in the hallway. The captain on duty handed Waldron his sword; during military operations the rules changed, even for the Blood Eagles.

The door slammed, leaving Reise and Tadai behind to wrestle with the problem of converting Garric's decision into the legally appropriate arrangement of words. The whole entourage started down the corridor in an echoing crash of hobnailed boots and jangling armor.

“Your highness!” Liane said, shouting to be heard.

“Eh?” said Garric, gesturing her forward into the space between him and Lord Waldron. “What is it that's going on at the Shrine of the Sister?”

“Nothing, your highness,” Liane said, not quite so shrilly as before. “I want to call on the Temple of the Shepherd of the Rock, but I didn't want to say that in the room with the mechanical birds in it.”

“The birds?” Garric said, frowning. “The present from the priests of the Shepherd, you mean?”

“Yes, in a way,” said Liane. “But it occurred to me that just as Lord Anda didn't know about the urn, so the birds you were given in the name of the Shepherd may not have been what Lady Estanel and her colleagues thought they were sending you. I've just received information that my guess was correct. That doesn't tell me why someone wanted to put that cage of birds close to you, but one of the possibilities is that they were listening to what was said in their presence.”

“Can't say I'm sorry,” snapped Lord Waldron, who'd
heard as well. “I don't need anything to do with the Sister except send the kingdom's enemies to greet her!”

“Can't say I do either,” agreed Garric. And, as they burst out of the side entrance to the courtyard where the duty regiment was already drawn up, he lifted Liane with his left arm alone and kissed her.

Cashel looked about the windblown waste to get his bearings. To tell the truth, that didn't put him much ahead of where he'd been at the start. The sun was a bright blur beyond veils of fine yellow dust. Since he didn't know the time of day, all that told him was which direction wasn't north.

“Walk toward that boulder on the right,” Evne said in a muffled voice, crouching on a fold inside his inner tunic. This must be an awful place if you were a toad. It wasn't a good one even for Cashel, who'd gotten used to most kinds of weather.

Cashel obediently turned and started walking, though he couldn't see any boulder. He was headed into the wind now, so he had to close his eyes to slits to see anything.

“This doesn't seem much like a ship, Evne,” he said.

“The Visitor doesn't use a ship of the sort humans build when he goes from world to world,” the toad said. “His device, if you prefer that word, already exists in all of the places where he makes his home. He merely changes his present reality to appear in one place or another.”

She paused, then added, “Well, I see you haven't understood a single word that I've said.”

“Ma'am,” corrected Cashel, “I understood all the words, I think. I just don't see how they fit together; but that's all right because you understand.”

He didn't see the boulder till he was just short of clacking it with the ferrule of his staff, slanted out in front of him. “Where do we go now, Evne?” he asked.

A thing with a hard gray carapace and many legs stood up on the other side of the boulder. It was far the biggest thing in the landscape. For a moment it towered motionless over Cashel; then a jointed proboscis with two savage fangs at the tip unfolded toward him.

“It's an illusion!” warned the toad. “Touch the boulder with your bare hand. If you back away, you'll never be able to leave this place, nor will I!”

Cashel pressed his left palm against the warm, wind-scoured limestone. The creature's fangs sure looked real. They were as white as old bone, and the ends had a slight corkscrew shape.

The rock didn't so much give way as suck him in, turning inside out and engulfing Cashel. He gasped with surprise; the part of his mind that he didn't control had been expecting the fangs, so the shock of sudden change seemed like the fatal stroke. Realizing how he'd tricked himself, he burst out laughing.

“I'm glad you're so pleased,” Evne said sourly as she crawled out onto his shoulder again.

Cashel looked around. They were on a rocky slope. Besides tufts of short grass, there were bushes and some good-sized pine trees scattered among the outcrops. The wind was noticeably cool, though not enough to be a problem, and wisps of clouds trailed across the pale blue sky.

Cashel shook his tunics out as much as he could, sending a pall of yellow dust downwind. He blew his nose with his fingers. That helped him breathe, but the back of his throat still tasted like alkaline mud.

“Well, this is a nicer place to be than where we just left,” he said reasonably.

“Do you think so?” said Evne.
“That
isn't an illusion.”

Ah! She meant the cat that had risen from the shelter of a ledge half a furlong up the slope from her and Cashel. Its coat had a mottled black-on-gray pattern. Cashel's first thought was that Ilna'd really like to see the creature . . . and could you turn the fur into yarn?

The cat flattened. Rather than relaxing out of the wind, it faced Cashel and pressed against the rock like a bolt in a cocked crossbow. Its tail began to twitch; the tip was a tuft of black.

“Where is it we want to go from here, Evne?” Cashel asked. The outcrop behind him looked exactly the same as the one he'd seen in the yellow wasteland, except that this
one had gray-green lichen growing on it and blowing dust had scrubbed the other clean.

He rotated the quarterstaff in a slow figure eight before him, working kinks out of his muscles. If the cat charged, he'd want to meet it with one ferrule and then the other.

“You see the ledge the cat is standing on?” the toad said. “You'll need to touch the rock face below her. Or not, of course, if you want to stay here for the rest of your life.”

“No, that's not what I want,” said Cashel with a sigh. He'd hoped that all he'd need to do was turn around and push against the rock behind him, leaving the cat to its—to her, apparently—own devices. He'd
hoped
that, but he hadn't expected it.

He started toward the outcrop. It was one step uphill for every two steps forward, and the footing wasn't the best either because of loose rock. He didn't guess it'd slow the cat down much, though; she must be used to it.

She watched Cashel coming toward her with tilted green eyes. Her head twisted; then she opened her jaws wide and screamed. The sound was metallic and so loud it waked echoes from the slopes for a mile down the canyon.

The cat's long fur made her look bigger than she was, but Cashel had lifted enough animals out of trouble on his shoulders to know that she
was
big. He judged she'd weigh more than a ram though probably less than a yearling bull; as much as two men of Cashel's own size, which wasn't very many men.

Her eyeteeth were longer than his index fingers. They'd stab to his vitals if once they closed on his torso.

“You're just going to walk straight up to her, master?” said the toad. “That's your whole plan?”

“Yes'm,” Cashel agreed. “I'm surely not going to turn my back, and I don't see any gain in waiting for her to decide how she wants to best work things.”

The cat jumped to the slope beneath her ledge. Cashel's staff quivered. Part of his mind judged the path she'd trace to his throat: a leap to
there,
and a second leap—spraying back pebbles and an uprooted clump of grass, arrow straight, black claws splayed out before her—