David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

"What'll we do now, Mistress Sharina?" Layson asked, speaking with the touch of belligerence that meant he was nervous.

"Do?" repeated Beard with a metallic sneer. "Why don't you do exactly what you're doing now, my man? Nothing! Squatting on your haunches, waiting for the Great Wizard to call a halt. This ship makes no more matter of sailing over ice that it does over water-or over the heads of fools like you, I suppose!"

Layson grimaced, but he didn't look too put out by Beard's insult. The men seemed to regard the axe and Sharina herself as their best hope of survival. They might be right… which was either frightening or amusing, depending on the mood Sharina was in when the thought recurred to her.

She glanced at Alfdan in the stern. Neal stood nearby, but the wizard didn't need anyone to support him at the moment. He'd been gaining strength as the Queen Ship coursed northward.

Despite the power of Alfdan's art, he provided only temporary respite, not long-term hope, for the men gathered around him. To the wizard they were only tools to help him achieve his ends; and those ends were as ultimately trivial as those of a child picking up shells on the seashore.

The ship had seemed to sail just above the swells of the sluggish sea. Without appearing to rise the bow slid over the sheer edge of the icepack, though it was a yard or more higher than the water at the point the keel crossed. Men murmured to one another, looking out nervously.

"It's awful," Franca said quietly. "It's empty, it's just a desert."

"It's the same sea," Sharina said. "Freezing didn't make it real land."

"Or make it a desert," said Beard. The axe had been cheerful in his waspish fashion ever since they set out for Her residence. "There's life here too, you know. In the ice and beneath it."

"What?" said Sharina. She lay flat again, looking down as she had previously. For a moment all she saw was white and the evil shimmer of the sky, picked out occasionally by a tree trunk or some other flotsam that the ice had engulfed. Then, slowly, she began to see deeper.

"Franca!" Sharina said. "Scoggin? What do you see…?"

She pointed with her left hand. She was holding Beard tight against her chest with the other, as if he were a kitten instead of an axe.

The two men leaned close, peering at the ice. Sharina looked from one to the other; both wore puzzled expressions.

"Mistress?" said Franca. "I see ice. Is that what you mean?"

Sharina swallowed. "No," she said, gazing into the depths again. "But it doesn't matter. I thought I saw animals below the ice, that's all."

Sheknew she saw animals below the ice. The ship passed over an ammonite, one of the Great Old Ones who'd been Gods before there were men to worship them. The coiled shell of this one was the size of Count Lascarg's palace. Rather than eight arms like an octopus or the ten of a squid, the ammonite waved more tentacles than Sharina could count in her brief glimpse. They interwove like a tangle of brambles, forming a pattern that was obviously evil even though it had no meaning for her.

"Beard?" Sharina whispered. She didn't want the others to hear her; she was afraid she was going mad. "What is it? Why am I seeing things when the others don't?"

"Did the others dive for the Key of Reyazel?" the axe asked ironically. "Why no, I don't suppose they did! And you weren't diving through water, mistress. You know that, don't you?"

"I guess," Sharina said, clutching the axe more tightly. "I guess I do."

"It changed you," Beard said. He giggled. "You should be thankful: you see the truth where others see only the surface."

Sharina stared at a school of fish, their bodies bright with bands of wizardlight. No one of them was as long as her arm, but there were hundreds in the school. They moved together like the scales of a snake, and their teeth were like daggers.

The Queen Ship was a world of its own, neither hot nor cold; the air was motionless though always breathable. Outside in the world through which the ship voyaged, however, winds swirled snow so hard it carved the ice into shapes from nightmare.

Alfdan muttered words of command. The vessel changed course slightly, taking it up a valley where the ice had lifted in long ridges to either side. The wizard seemed to be keeping his part of the bargain. It would've been nice if he'd been a person Sharina could like or even respect, but-she grinned-she'd learned long before leaving Barca's Hamlet that you couldn't expect that in life.

Her smile faded. She'd been looking at the gleaming surface but found her vision entering the crumpled ridges. Great worms gnawed tunnels through the ice; their jaws were like the toothed bronze rams of warships. Black armor covered their segmented bodies, but Sharina saw their long coils of intestine pulsing as the worms digested something…

"Algae grows in the ice," Beard said in his mockingly superior tone. "Algae of a sort, that is. And the worms eat it."

"There's enough light here for algae?" Sharina said, frowning.

"Light?" said the axe. "Of course there's light! Look at the sky."

"Oh…," said Sharina, glancing up reflexively. The washes of evil color were so constant and vivid now that they hid the stars completely. For an instant she began to see shapes in the wizardlight, but she looked away quickly. What she saw in the water and ice was bad enough.

"I wouldn't have thought that sort of light would make things grow," she whispered.

"Makethose things grow?" Beard said with a laugh. "Oh, yes, mistress. There are many things that flourish in this light and this place. They just aren't things that have any use for men."

Sharina sat up. Franca and Scoggin were on either side, watching her with concern. They hadn't broken in on her dialogue with Beard, but they must have heard at least part of it.

"I'm seeing things beneath the surface," she said to them in a deliberate voice. "I hope this won't go on forever."

Beard laughed again. "Never fear, mistress," he said. "Not even I will go on forever."

Scoggin forced a smile. Neither man spoke.

The wizard muttered another command in a harsh, clipped tone like that of a squirrel complaining. The ship slanted to the right and mounted the ice ridge without slowing. In the distance ahead gleamed orange-red light, a harsh color but a natural one in contrast to the sheets of crimson covering the sky.

Layson pointed. "A volcano!" he said. "We saw volcanoes on the coast of Laut when Alfdan was getting that medallion."

"We're nearing the Ice Capes," said a man. His left cheek and forearm were tattooed in a complex spiral pattern, but Sharina didn't know his name. "Where they used to be, I guess. That must be Mount Yanek."

The Queen Ship raced over the ice field, now banded with stretches of black ice where leads had opened and refrozen. Once Sharina thought she saw eyes staring at her from the solid mass; the head of a monstrous thing, motionless but not dead. Perhaps it had been an illusion, shadows distorted by the rippling ice.

Beard laughed. She didn't ask him why.

The volcano grew from a lump and glow on the horizon into a mountain streaked with orange flame. Tentacles of lava touched the ice encircling its base. Great bubbles of steam rose and whirled southward on the wind.

The ship began to slow; the tone of its progress changed to a deep thrumming instead of a scream like that of chorus frogs in springtime. Sharina and the men glanced back at Alfdan. The wizard began to sway, so Neal quickly gripped him by the shoulders.

The Queen Ship touched the ice with a skirling vibration. Azure wizardlight crackled about them in an egg-shaped pattern, the broader end toward the bow. Mt Yanek covered the northern horizon, though its slopes were still a half mile distant. The volcano's rough stone absorbed the rippling glare of the sky instead of reflecting it the way the ice did; Yanek stood as a black wedge detailed only by its own savage orange veins.