Spellbreakers (37 page)

Eventually, the hound emerged from a patch of
blood-spattered, trampled ice, shaking snow out of his fur and growling.

The growl was low, almost quiet, yet scarier than the
loud baying had been.

And then two more dogs rose from the snow beside him.

There had been one huge dog writhing in the snow.
Only black fur and flailing paws.
And now there were three.
All three had blood gushing from their throats, but there was no sign of
Ljung’s arrow.

“What the...?” said Daria.

Ljung pulled another arrow from his quiver.

“No!” shouted Leal. “If you shoot one of them, it will
just be worse. Hell hound, three heads. I get it. It’s a trick. I think I know
what must be done!”

She flung her back pack to the ground. The three
hounds were coming on slowly, head low, a deep, deep growl coming from all
three throats, almost too deep for human hearing. Ljung and Daria took slow,
deliberate steps back. Leal rummaged furiously in her pack, until deep under
all her furs, blanket, spare smallclothes, parcels of provisions, night mittens
and scarf, and a mound of other items, her hands closed on the old cloth bag
she had been given in the Elders’ Ring, all those days back, in Elverhjem. She
pulled it out and opened it in a hurry. The moldy smell of ancient bread filled
her nostrils.

“Ick,” she said, but she pulled out the loaf and stood
in front of the advancing dogs. The dogs growled and growled. They were closing
in on her. She broke the loaf in two, then one half in two again. There were
old blackened raisins in the bread, or at least something like raisins.
Rowan
bred,
sang Geir’s voice in her head.
Rowan.
Country folk, even in Escarra, believe that rowan is a protection from witchery,
and the Evil Eye.
Of course.

She smiled to the hounds. It is never a good idea to
let a dog know you are afraid. She took a step forward and threw one of the
smaller pieces of bread to the left-hand dog. It seized on it ravenously, and
as suddenly as it had turned up, it vanished. Leal threw the second small piece
to the right-hand dog, and it dissolved, too.

“So you are the real one, eh?” said Leal to the
remaining animal. She tossed it the largest piece of the loaf, and the dog
approached it suspiciously. He sniffed at it, took it in its bloody jaws, let
it fall. Then he picked it up again, shot Leal a sly, sideways look, and padded
away quickly with his head low and a look of vague relief in his face. Even as
it ran, it shrank to the size of an ordinary wolfhound, a huge dog, sure, but
nothing monstrous.

“Well, I never,” said Ljung. He aimed an arrow at the
departing dog. “Well done, you! I think it will stay dead this time,” he said.

Leal put a hand on his arm. “I think the poor beast is
nothing but happy to be rid of whatever enchantment he had on it. Let it be. He
won’t bother us again.”

Ljung shot her a doubtful glance, but he lowered the
arrow and bowed.

“As you wish, princess.
Well, let us move on, shall we.”

They marched on for perhaps a hundred yards. The
terrain was getting treacherous, with drifts of soft snow suddenly giving way
to stretches of bare ice. It was hard to walk in the deep snow, and even harder
to stand on the ice. Without crampons it might have been impossible to negotiate
this terrain. Even so, it was altogether wretched going. Even Ljung had to
thread with painstaking care.

Which was why they were so flabbergasted by what
happened next.

There was a fierce, trumpeting neigh, and out of a
taller drift of snow exploded another dark shape.

“What now?” asked Ljung wearily, putting his arrow
back to the string.

The tall dark figure, covered in scattered snow, shook
and snorted, pawing the ground.

“Holy crap from above, it’s a bloody horse!” said
Daria with a perfectly astonished gasp.

It was not a pony, but a hugely tall horse, maybe
eighteen hands, with long black featherings around his hooves, and a huge tail
and mane. It was ebony black all over, glittering with ice crystals. But all
that was aside. Daria and Leal stared at the horse’s head. Right in the middle
on his black forehead, neatly parting the long forelock,
rose
a single horn. Not the pretty straight ivory horn of the heraldic unicorns in
the tapestries back home, but a knuckled,
 
knobby black horn curving like a scimitar, bristly at the base, polished
towards the tip.
Probably polished by being violently and
repeatedly shoved into people’s innards
, thought Leal with a shudder.

“Oh dear, oh dear, I never knew they were real,” said
Daria in a reverent whisper. “He’s mine. Do not stir, please, lady, gentleman.
If it’s not some twice damned magic, he’s mine.”

She stepped forward. The unicorn snorted again, a loud
trumpeting snort of challenge. He pawed the ground, shattering ice and throwing
snow all round, and then, without another sound, he charged.

There was no way such a tall horse, or any horse,
really, could gallop so easily over blue ice, but this one did, raining smashed
rime all round. He came on in a shower of glittering crystals, and in the last
few yards lowered his dark head, his neck a high crest of mane and muscle. He
would have run Daria bodily through with his horn if she had not vaulted aside
at the last moment. The unicorn came to a skidding halt some twenty yards down
the slight slope, wheeled, pranced, neighing and snorting, and charged her
again. Leal and Ljung retreated hastily out of the way.

“Will she be all right?” asked Ljung, half in awe,
half in horror.

“If someone can catch a wild horse, horn or not, it’s
she. But this beast is worse than wild. I hope she knows what she is doing!
She’s braver than she’s wise!”

Ljung nodded, but before he could comment, the girl
and the unicorn had met in their deathly dance again. Daria had moved aside
just one moment too late this time and had caught a glancing blow from those
high muscly shoulders. She held her ground, but barely. However she did not
look scared, but wildly gleeful.

“Come on!” she called as the unicorn cantered over the
ice and halted. He turned, flung his mane around and charged again. This time
Daria had the elvren rope in her hands. Leal suddenly remembered that Daria had
never stowed the rope in her pack, but carried it in a neat coil hanging from
her parka’s belt. She was paying out coils of rope, and quickly knotting it,
without looking down. Daria, who had worked in the mews and stables since she
was a small child, could make and unmake knots in the dark with the same ease
as in daylight. When the unicorn came racing down on her the third time, she
jumped sideways as gracefully as a cat, let it pass, turned and cast a coil of
rope to his head. It didn’t go down round his neck, but caught onto the curved
horn. The coil snatched tight as the rope was pulled taut, and then both horse
and woman went down in a flurry of snow. There were oaths from Daria, and
frantic grunts and neighing from the unicorn fast on the other side of the
rope.

Daria got on her feet first, having fewer legs to
muster. The unicorn, struggled, tossing his head, and then he got his front
hooves under him, sat, and then bounded up, shaking snow from his shining black
flanks. He pranced and tossed his head again, with a deafening neigh, but the
rope, however thin and weedy, had dampened his spirit somewhat.

“Get going, you
chumps,
don’t
just stand there like two mooncalves! I can handle him!”

Ljung and Leal exchanged a quick glance, then nodded
and hurried on towards the ice palace.

“Is that beast real?” asked Leal, panting, as they
stomped on. “Not a trick like the hell-hound?”

“No idea. I sure never saw a unicorn, least of all a
black one. But where do all the legends come from? I guess he might well be
real.
That
is certainly real.
Oh dear.”

That
was a vast
darkness under the ice between them and the palace. There was no sound, just
yet, just an immensity of living shadow quivering under the surface of the
glacier. The ground shook under their feet, once, twice.

The blackness turned suddenly to brittle white. Ljung
grabbed Leal’s elbow and pulled her hastily back as the ice cracked under their
feet.

Whatever slept under the glacier shook once more and
broke free, shattering the blue purity of the ice into a myriad of refracting
crystals which mounted and then fell off a huge scaly back.

An enormously deep intake of breath sucked the air out
of Leal’s ears.

“What
is that?” she
asked stepping further back so suddenly that she slid and fell on her butt.

She missed Ljung’s reply as the enormous breath was
repeated, once, twice. The third breath changed into an enormous rustling
crackle, like a bellows blowing over a lit forge, but a thousand times deeper.
The dark shape grew even taller, unfolding and shaking snow off its shiny hide.
The fourth breath came on as a roar of such immense volume that avalanches fell
from the mountainsides all around, blurring all horizons with clouds of
powdered snow, and then a lance of steam shot up towards the sky. Enormous
wings flapped. An impossibly long snake-neck unfolded, scales of jet, a crest
of night-black leather, and then fiery eyes blazing, and a sharp long snout
ending in a hooked, black bill over gaping, steaming jaws.

“A freaking dragon?
Really?
Really?”
Leal slowly got to her feet, but all hope had gone out of her.

The dragon breathed deeply once more, gazing at the
sky. Never had Leal imagined anything so majestic or so dreadful. Its hide was
black, but the living iridescent black of a magpie wing. Shattered ice was
melting on his body and evaporating in clouds of sizzling steam.

The dragon preened his flanks and wings for a minute, and
then its next breath came out as brilliant orange flames, the hot color
startling in that blue and white world.

The dragon shook his wings one last time, and then,
incredibly, for such a vast creature, took to the air in two ponderous,
earth-shaking wing beats.

Leal and Ljung, seventy yards away, were flung to the
ground by the turbulence of the air.

“What now?” asked Leal, turning laboriously on her
belly.
She had dealt well with the hound, she knew that. It
had been an ordinary hound, changed by magic, and she had seen through the
trick. The unicorn had shaken her confidence somewhat. But the dragon was
beyond incredible. She felt she had walked into a land of legend where anything
was possible, however improbable, and how could she fight her way through such
a crazy world as this?
Hell, I came to save a warrior who has slept under
the ice for a century. I should hardly be amazed by a dragon.

But she was.

“I am not sure,” said Ljung. He observed at the dragon
intently as the beast flew slowly above them. “It never even glanced at us, did
you notice? I don’t think it can see properly. It looks ... old.”

“Old?”

“Yes. Rather decrepit, actually. Look at the size of
it! Dragons never really stop growing you know? But look at those ragged wings.
Look at its tail. It’s in tatters. The Ice Queen got this one cheap at auction,
I’d wager, or else she got swindled. You can never trust a dragon dealer, it’s
a fact.”

Leal stared at him in a sort of horrified awe. How
could he crack jokes at a time like this?
He’s the perfect match for
Daria, that
he is. Well, that is something at least. I have
my damned royal duties. And they—they’ll have each other.

“What do we do about it? Old or no, it is freakish
big, and probably starving, and certainly angry as hell!”

“Let’s move on slowly. Keep on the snow patches as
much as possible. We hide better on snow. I think he might still pick out
moving shapes. I hope Tuula has the good sense not to try and tackle this old
bird.”

Leal didn’t see much of a chance for two people moving
on a flat glacier to stay invisible for long. Even in their silvery-white-blue
parkas, they still cast long shadows on the luminous icy ground. But she had no
better suggestions, so they started crawling slowly towards the palace, trying
to keep low in the drifts of wind-piled snow. But it didn’t help. The dragon
circled in the air, again and again, screaming, so low that its ponderous
wing-beats sent gusts of tepid wind on them at every passage. The third time it
passed overhead, Leal and Ljung lay low in the snow, barely breathing, yet even
so the dragon screeched louder still, banked hard and passed them again,
spitting fire and death.

Ljung yelled as a tongue of flame swept right over his
head. He rolled deep into a drift of wind-piled snow and crouched there,
panting. Leal threw herself in the snow beside him.

“Are you all right?” she asked, in a shout, over the
screeching and shrieking of the circling dragon.

“Yes, yes! Few singed ends, is all. Look, I think I
know now what we need to do!” he said, shrugging awkwardly out of his back
pack.