David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

"I'mwelcome to stay wherever I choose, girl," Evne said. "Don't mistake me for one of those."

She lifted her body on three legs to sweep the right hind leg in an arc across a portion of the spectators rushing off more quickly than they'd arrived.

"There was once one who could gainsay me," the toad continued. She spoke with certainty and an absolute lack of emotion. Again she reminded Cashel of his sister when she was very, very angry. "But not, I think, for seven thousand years."

Kotia stared at her, balancing the disk in her palm. "Yes, I believe you're correct," she said, as calmly as the toad. "But I don't intend that we should ever become certain."

She smiled. "Lord Cashel?" she continued in a wholly different tone. "If you're ready, we can proceed."

"Sure," said Cashel. He cleared his throat. "Ah, do we have to find a mirror?"

"Yes," said Evne. She extended her hind leg again. There was aspat ! of blue fire. A circle of grass and dried mud nearby became as smooth and clear as the surface of a dew drop.

"Stand in the center, if you would, Lord Cashel," Kotia said quietly. "Mistress Toad, what is your will?"

Evne walked down Cashel's forearm to the back of his hand. "I'll accept your offer of hospitality, girl," she said. "I expect it to be interesting. If not-"

She turned her head to look up at Cashel.

"-quite as interesting as the past two days."

Kotia stretched out her left hand. Evne hopped to it. The toad looked graceless in the air with her four legs splayed in different directions, but she landed precisely in Kotia's palm and tucked herself back together.

Cashel cleared his throat again. "I guess I'll be going, then," he said. He nodded-twice, once to each of them, though with them both together it didn't make much difference. He stepped carefully onto the circle. He expected it to be slick because it was perfectly smooth, but his feet didn't slide at all. He felt like he was standing in empty air, but the surface was faintly warm as well as being solid.

Cashel turned, holding his staff crosswise. You never knew what you were going to run into when you were dealing with wizards.

"I'm ready!" he said, meeting the two sets of eyes. Kotia and Evne looked as cold and hard as crags in the winter sea. It was a really good thing they weren't his enemies.

"Ene psa enesgaph," they said, speaking together. "Selbiouth sarba…"

Cashel's surroundings began to spin, though he himself didn't move. Evne and Kotia faded from sight, all but their eyes; their eyes remained fixed like the constellation of the Seven Oxen in the northern sky.

"Thaoos sieche thur…," the voices said. Blue fire danced soundlessly about Cashel, concealing everything else but the eyes. "Spanton kwilm!"

Cashel was falling into himself. Everything vanished, light and sound and feeling.

In his mind someone whispered, "Farewell, Lord Cashel." He wasn't sure, but he thought it might be both women speaking together.

Garric's steps had been soundless from the moment he entered the lens of light in the garden; now his boots clacked on ice so cold and hard that it was dry. He saw the twins running ahead of him-or perhaps it was only one of them, his/her figure multiplied by reflection in the ice walls.

The ceilings were as high as those of the audience chamber in the royal palace in Valles, ribbed and coffered with ice. Ropes of blue and red wizardlight twined in helixes at the core of each beam and plate; at any distance the ice looked purple.

The walls were sometimes clear, sometimes mirrors that might throw back either a perfect image or a distorted mockery of the original. When the man-shaped monster shambled out of a side-aisle Garric hadn't seen till that moment, his first thought was that he was seeing the reflection of a man, perhaps even himself.

The creature gave a high-pitched laugh and raised its club, the trunk of a fir tree split and slain by a frost beyond what even its cold-adapted fibers could bear. High as the ceiling was, the tree struck it: the monster was real and just as huge as it seemed.

"Haft and the Isles!" Garric shouted, rushing before the creature could come to terms with what for it were narrow confines. Its forehead sloped sharply from thick brow ridges. It was naked except for a coat of coarse reddish hair, incrementally thicker on its scalp and in a mane along its spine; and it was almost twenty feet high.

The creature swung a slanting blow at Garric. He flattened against the wall. The club struck the ice behind him and rebounded, scattering a haze of splinters. Garric cut upward, catching the monster's wrist with the sweet spot of his sword just a hand's breadth from the tip. His steel crunched through cartilage and small bones.

The monster jerked its arm back. When the fingers lost strength, the club slipped and flew against the opposite wall of the corridor. Garric hacked at the inside of the creature's right ankle, cutting deep again.

The creature screamed, grabbed at Garric with its left hand, and toppled forward when its leg gave way. It twisted in the air, still trying to seize him, but Garric jumped past, beyond the creature's reach.

He looked down the range of gleaming, branching corridors. It would've been a maze even without the reflection, but as it was…

He couldn't see the twins. Another of the gangling monsters came down the corridor toward him, doubled by the mirroring walls. It raised its weapon, a crudely-forged iron trident. The reflection was carrying a simple spear, point down as if preparing to gig frogs.

There were two of the creatures, each as tall as the first. There'd be more following them, and still worse things besides. Garric looked over his shoulder for the soldiers who'd come through the portal with him.

The creature he'd crippled was squirming after him on its belly. Beyond it a tunnel of light twisted toward the world Garric came from. He remembered how the distance between him and the twins had seemed greater than it should have been. The portal wasn't a simple hole in space, and there wasn't a regiment of infantry rushing to their prince's support.

But Tenoctris was there, and also Liane supporting the old wizard with her left arm while holding the satchel of paraphernalia in her right. Tenoctris seated herself cross-legged on the ice. Liane dropped the bag beside her and ran on, reaching into her sleeve.

"Watch-" cried Garric, starting back to deal with the monster he'd thought he could leave for the soldiers behind him. It reached out with its uninjured left arm; its fingernails were blunt and black, like a dog's claws.

Liane grabbed the shock of hair at the peak of the creature's scalp and drew her right hand and little dagger around its throat. The arc of the blade was as quick as a ripple shimmering on a pond. The ghost in Garric's mind gave a shout of delight.

Blood, brighter than a man's, gushed out. It steamed as it pooled on the ice. Liane's dagger had an ivory hilt and a gold-chased blade no longer than Garric's index finger, but the steel was so good that it held a wire edge even when slicing corded muscles. The great veins and arteries near the surface of the creature's neck let its life out even faster than a thrust through the heart could have done.

Tenoctris dribbled a triangle of black dust-powdered charcoal or maybe iron filings-on the ice before her. She began chanting even before she'd completed the figure.

"She'll guide the troops through!" Liane said, gasping for breath. Her right forearm and her tunic from the waist down were covered in orange-red blood. "We have to hold back the Hunters a few minutes more!"

"Right," said Garric, turning to face the things that Liane called Hunters. He supposed that Tenoctris had named the creatures; they were nothing Liane would've found in the classical literature that was one of the joys that the two of them shared. "We'll hold."