Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

Within the waking city, horns were droning like undertakers. Drums howled more urgently, and edgy soldiers loosed arrows at the moons.

“Over spars!” Ta-hoding bellowed. “Over spars!” echoed his mates. The Slanderscree’s sails came around, there was a whiplike crack, sheets plumped out like the prow of a woman September had once known, and the icerigger began to move ahead, picking up speed with every second.

Her crew was much too busy to shout with joy. Both moons were high adrift in a cloudless sky. The sextuple crags of Poyolavomaar’s circling islands cast quilted shadows across the harbor as the foremast lookout yelled a warning. “Pilot raft ahead!”

Ta-hoding looked grimly at Ethan. “Small pleasure would it be if Valsht the harbormaster, excrement in Trannish form, were to be aboard it.”

Seconds later Ethan heard a faint crunching sound and rushed to the edge of the helmdeck. Shards of cut wood were sliding beneath the ship. The rear runners further reduced them to splinters. His gaze shifted aft, to show tumbling bits of wood and softer fragments strewn in the wake of the icerigger.

“The gate is closed!” shouted the lookout again. Ta-hoding stood his place, simply reminding the helmsmen of their course. They held a touch tighter to the wheel, as everyone else on board braced himself as best he could for the expected collision.

Ethan imagined disapproving, forbidding faces frowning down at them from the flanking mountain-tops. He fell to one knee as the deck shimmied beneath him. Then they were through, and he rushed back to the railing for a look astern.

Angry lights danced futilely on the walls linking the two isles. A pair of huge wooden gates lay smashed and fragmented on the moonlit ice. Four huge blocks of stone bounced lightly in the icerigger’s wake, their unbroken pika-pina cables still firmly secured to each.

Damage reports came back from the bow. The Slanderscree would have to do without a bowsprit for awhile. If their maneuverability was slightly impaired, their speed was not. They were flying across the ice now, the powerful westwind shoving them with a giant’s hand from behind, their first attempt at initiating a union of Tran island-states a dismal failure that receded rapidly astern.

“YOU MUST GO AFTER them, your highness.” Calonnin Ro-Vijar filled his voice with urgency as he addressed Rakossa of Poyolavomaar.

Crowded around him in the Landgrave’s personal quarters were the high knights and generals of the city. Most of them would rather have been anywhere but within verbal range of their storming, blood-thirsty ruler.

Rakossa seemed not to hear his royal counterpart. “They must have her! Her body is not in the dungeon or on the ice, not in the hell place or the tunnel—the tunnel wrested by the devil-weapons she stole.”

A subordinate officer, in charge of the castle’s armory, was not present to confirm or deny what most in the room knew to be true. For his laxity in allowing himself to be seduced and then knocked unconscious by the absent royal consort, he had already been returned to his family. As the officer’s family was scattered about five of Poyolavomaar’s seven isles, it was necessary for him to be returned in the equivalent number of pieces.

“When we catch her this time, we will…” Rakossa unreeled a long list of imaginative and shuddersome proposals. While doing so he waved his longsword about with complete disregard for where it might impact, much to the discomfort of those officials in the forefront of the attending crowd.

“It seems incredible, my lord, that they dared travel out through the old bore,” the chief jailer observed, wondering why he had not enjoyed the same fate as the armory guard.

One of the knights safely concealed near the back of the group murmured, “’Tis unwise to pursue those who can kill demons in Hell.”

“She will wish she stayed her hand from aiding them!” Rakossa swung his sword, destroying a priceless ivory carving adorning the back of a chair. “We are through playing with this one.” He showed gleaming fangs. “She shall not return to embarrass us further. We will make a hell for her she will not have to climb down to, a new hell every day, different and stimulating!”

“Would it not be simpler, my lord,” asked the same knight who’d spoken a moment ago, “to take a new and more willing consort?”

“Who speaks? Who tells Rakossa what to do and how to judge?” The knight did not answer, bent his knees to sink a little lower into the crowd.

“No sheslug defies us or gains our better. We will instruct her in the meanings of Hell.”

Another official whispered that after serving as consort to the Landgrave for several years, the vanished woman no doubt knew the meanings of hell already. Fortunately, Rakossa did not hear or he might have been inspired to begin a mass murder of all assembled merely to insure the disposal of his single insulter.

“It is only just that you pursue her—and them,” said a comfortingly acquiescent Ro-Vijar. Rakossa’s anger subsided somewhat, the Mad which had held him fully let clearer thoughts have room in his twisted brain.

“That is truth, friend Ro-Vijar. We must follow her and those who aided her.” How neatly, thought Ro-Vijar with distaste, he changes things in his mind to fit his mind’s bent. Now it is the escapees who are guilty of assisting the woman, not the other way around. Then he grew tense, aware that the madman was eyeing him coldly.

“We have taken your word in much of this, Landgrave of Arsudun. Of the three offworld devils’ intentions and of their Tran friends.”

“I tell only the truth, sire, of what needs doing. You defend all of us. Your name will be remembered as mighty.”

“We wonder,” Rakossa muttered calculatingly, while Ro-Vijar strove to appear unaffected by his ferocious stare, “just whose purposes are truly being served in this.

“However,” he said more briskly, taking his gaze from the silent Ro-Vijar, “We will have that witch back. As she is served by those you believe need be destroyed, it seems to pursue one we must pursue all.”

“They are devils and destroyers, Lord Rakossa.”

“Devils they are. Destroyers seek destruction, not escape. Yet only a few died in trying to prevent their flight. We wonder—we will have her back!”

He turned on a stiffly posed officer. “Talizeir, ready the fleet for pursuit. All ships, all officers, all crew to the ready, for we leave by first light.”

“As my Landgrave commands,” the tall, dignified Tran replied. He pushed through the others toward the door.

“You are dismissed,” Rakossa told the rest. “Those who are to chase, prepare yourselves.”

“We will have her back,” he murmured, alone now in the ornate chamber. “And we will have that ship, that magnificent ice ship for our own, though this strange Landgrave Ro-Vijar wishes it for himself.”

As for the outworld devils, perhaps when they were recaptured he would listen a little more to their words and a little less to those of the Landgrave of Arsudun. He was older, this Ro-Vijar, more experienced, his words as devious as his true aims. His purposes clashed somehow with his speech.

Blood and bone awash in a sea of shrieks inundated his thoughts, and he thought again only of the consort Teeliam Hoh, as the thick blood bubbled from her laughter.

Wind howled mournfully across the deck of the Slanderscree. Ethan blinked behind his face mask as he emerged on deck, shutting the cabin door tightly behind him. Elfa, Hunnar, and September stood conversing near the mizzenmast. As he drew nearer he saw Teeliam among them, hidden partly by September’s bulk.