Goddess of the Ice Realm (77 page)

“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 that she had lived.

The vagabond Kenset brought Ilna to Barca's Hamlet as an infant, but divine parentage already shone 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 that 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 that 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.

The net that'd held them the way winter ice coats a gargoyle dissolved. Garric, free to move again, saw Ilna fall backward. He sheathed his sword with a skill that'd become unconscious when he awakened the spirit of King Carus in his mind and caught Ilna with both hands. She was a solid weight to arms fatigued by the brutal fighting, but Garric figured he could carry her as far as he needed to go.

The glow in the cavern walls suddenly dimmed. Garric could see men in silhouette, but the floor strewn with corpses and debris was in darkness.

Garric turned his head.
The door we entered by is
—

As the thought leaped through his mind, the trail of light Tenoctris had sent to guide them brightened to a fierce blue glare. Now it lit the route instead of just indicating it.

“Cashel, hold your sister!” Garric said, swinging Ilna toward his friend.

The steps up the throne were twice the normal height; he jumped rather than stepping. Behind he heard Ilna say, “I'm perfectly all right! I just slipped!”

That was doubtless true—Garric doubted Ilna even understood why anybody would
want
to lie—but he hadn't had time to check. Tenoctris's blazing guide ended above the seat, quivering like a plucked lute string. Garric turned and set one leg to either side of the light. Through a megaphone of his hands he bellowed, “Go back! Get out of here fast!”

A cornicene somewhere in the chamber blew “Retreat” on his coiled horn. Garric was happier to hear that sound than he'd have been if a priest assured him that the Lady would fold his soul to her bosom when he died. He didn't trust priests—

And he
sure
didn't trust this warren of chambers and tunnels. He could hear the ice groaning, louder with each passing moment. More than the strength of the material had kept Her palace from collapsing; and though Garric was very glad that Her power had drained away when she died, he'd prefer not to be buried in the heart of a glacier.

The cornicene repeated his call. Many of the soldiers were already turning. There was nothing about this frozen darkness that made men want to remain if they were offered an excuse to leave. For a moment Garric thought he heard an echo; then he realized that a signaler back down the tunnel was relaying the call on a trumpet. All the humans in the chamber, Her throne room, were following the guide back to their own world.

Thought of his men made Garric look around the hall in sudden concern. The things that were
not
men, Her minions—where were they? Retreating in near darkness could be more dangerous than—

“They're running, lad,”
said Carus, whose experience had let him see more through Garric's eyes than Garric himself had.
“As soon as She went into the drink, they took off for the exits. Running or crawling, if they were the sorts that crawl. I'd say a lot of those creatures had a good notion of what was going to come to them next if something hadn't happened to Her instead.”

Garric glanced down beside him reflexively. The water was generally as black as the ice that had covered it, but it roiled. Occasionally fangs glinted above the surface as a latecomer or perhaps just an optimist snapped at the diluting blood.

“It wasn't your friend,”
Carus said softly.

Someone was jogging toward the center of the hall, against the flow of soldiers heading for the exit. Garric touched his hilt, uncertain in the halflight; then he saw a shimmer as the figure sheathed his curved sword: Chalcus.

Garric relaxed. Ilna stepped forward and embraced the sailor.

No,
agreed Garric.
It wasn't my Ilna. It couldn't have been her.

It could have been me,
Ilna thought. She trembled with fear of what hadn't quite happened.
It was me, She was me!

“Dear heart?” said Chalcus. “I've been cut more times than ever so great a scholar could count, but the truth is I've never learned to like it. If you must prick me, prick away; but otherwise . . .?”

“Oh!” said Ilna. She stepped back and slipped her blade into its case, then returned the little tool to her sleeve. She didn't ordinarily think of a knife as a weapon; her instinct was for the noose, but that was shriveling in a pool of sulfur on a world she hoped never to revisit. She'd completely forgotten that she held the blade in her hand when she threw her arms around Chalcus's neck.

Garric climbed down from the ice throne, stepping as awkwardly as an ox descending a steep bank instead of the catlike grace with which he'd mounted. Ilna smiled in her mind. Many things were easier to do when you didn't have time to think about them.

The rod of light shone from above, throwing pools of shadow over men's feet and turning their faces into grotesque masks. Garric looked at his friends and said, “We need to get moving too. As a matter of fact, the rest of you go on ahead and I'll—”

“We'll stay with you, Garric,” Cashel said. He didn't raise his voice more than required by the sound of the ice in its dying agony, but the fact he interrupted was itself enough to surprise those who knew him.

“Yes,” said Ilna. “We've been apart long enough.”

“Now that we've decided we're going to stick together . . .” said a grizzled soldier at Garric's side. He had the heavy breastplate and sword of a regular infantryman, but for some reason he was carrying a pikeman's shield. “Can we maybe do it a little closer to the way out of this place?”

He nodded to where the guide disappeared into a tunnel. Nearby stood another soldier who'd have been his near
double even if they hadn't both been drenched in blood. He'd lifted his helmet to scratch the bald spot in the middle of his scalp. “Why wouldn't we stick together, Prester?” he asked as he settled the helmet back in place. “There's no loot
here
worth having; and anyway, I never minded sharing with somebody who'd watch my back.”

“Right, let's get on,” Garric said, nodding to the soldiers shuffling toward the exit. They were already some distance away, though they weren't moving fast. “And Pont? You and Prester aren't going to lack for drinking money for the rest of your lives, if that's what you're thinking about.”

“To tell the truth, your princeship . . .” said the man who must be Prester. “There were times today I thought I had enough coin for the rest of my life in my purse already . . . and all of that was a lead groat!”

Chalcus was the first to laugh, but they all joined in as they started forward. The laughter and companionship were better than sunlight in this place; though Ilna'd be glad to reach sunlight also.

Where the centipede's body narrowed the tunnel to one person at a time, Sharina followed Cashel and Gondor was immediately behind her. Garric and his entourage—Attaper and the two veterans—brought up the rear.

The first time Sharina'd passed the centipede, she'd scraped herself on the bristles sprouting from a leg joint. The break in the skin had begun to fester. She moved carefully now instead of scrambling over the chitinous obstacles with the haste her instincts urged. She really wanted to be out of this place!

Though the huge corpse still twitched, men passed it without the bunching and hesitation Sharina had seen when they were going the other way. Maybe that was because the vivid light that guided the troops hid rather than illuminated the legs pressing against the dark ceiling; and maybe it was just that they were leaving. These were brave men or they'd never have come this way at all, but leaving didn't require that they struggle against their hope of survival at every step.

“We didn't drink Her blood,” murmured the axe in a faint, musical tone, “but we drank deep, blood and brains and souls. What will happen now to poor Beard, though?”

What would happen to any of them?
Sharina thought with a stab of longing for her placid existence as a girl. Now she lived in a world where she might get up in the middle of the night because of a funny light and find herself dragged into a place ruled by a wizard for Her own evil purposes. . . .

“It's the same world, mistress,” the axe said. “You just understand what you didn't understand when you were younger. Perhaps you'd rather be ignorant?”

Sharina smiled wryly. “No,” she said. “I'd rather know the truth. I just wish the truth was different, sometimes.”

“And because you do know the truth, mistress, and act on what you know . . .” said the axe. “The truth becomes a little different, a little better, for other people. And Beard drinks his fill for a time, a brief time.”

Sharina was holding the axe in her right hand. With the fingers of her left she stroked the helve, then the steel head. Beard chuckled as if from deep in his throat. The sound trembled through Sharina's fingertips, reminding her of a cat purring; a very large cat.

She laughed and reached forward to touch Cashel's shoulder. Together they entered the rotunda where she'd first rejoined her friends and the army.

There were still many people here, but nothing like the crowd there'd been when Sharina arrived. The exit corridor was broad enough to let the soldiers march in squad ranks, and there wasn't a monster's corpse along the route to narrow it. Even so the rotunda's human contents didn't drain quickly. Sharina hadn't believed how long it took a large body of troops to march off in column until she'd seen the process twice: the second time to convince her that something hadn't gone horribly wrong on the first occasion.