David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

The room stank like a tanyard. The light slits ventilated it, but even so the stench of death and rotting blood squeezed Ilna's lungs like a pillow over her face. More than just the smell went into the oppressive atmosphere; foul things had happened here. Utterly foul.

Chalcus started edging sunwise around the periphery, the sword in his right hand waggling like a snake's questing tongue. Ilna remained where she was, waiting for the pattern to change.

A slab of basalt lay in the middle of the room. Crude tools had shaped it more or less into a rectangle. There was a groove down the center and a hole in the stone floor beneath it for a drain. Blood coated the slab and the floor both. The latest outpouring gleamed in the faint light; it looked fresh enough to be tacky to the touch, which Ilna had no intention of testing.

She saw no sign of the bodies of the sacrificial animals. Human sacrifices, she supposed.

Two thin, mirror-polished sheets of stone-one of banded agate, the other something bluish and translucent, perhaps topaz-stood upright on either side of the basalt. Ilna frowned, trying to determine what waswrong with the stone mirrors. She felt there was movement in them, but her eyes saw them only as stone.

Chalcus neared one of the piles of furs. He was grinning faintly. His right foot slid forward in another slow step. Without warning he lunged instead, his curved sword stabbing down like the sting of a spider-killing wasp. The point clicked against the stone floor and withdrew as smoothly as it had gone in.

Chalcus shook his head, still smiling. He resumed his slow shuffle.

Ilna had turned her head minusculely when Chalcus thrust; she saw the change in the agate mirror at the corner of her eye. From this slightly different angle she was looking at the hellworld theBird of the Tide had dropped into. A pool of molten sulfur, yellow as bile, bubbled beneath the window of stone; she thought she could see one of the pincer-armed monsters hunch between spikes of rock in the near distance.

"Chalcus," she said in a quiet voice. "These plates are doors of some kind. Gaur may not be-"

Gaur stood up from the heap of furs and bullhides to her right, across the room from Chalcus. The wizard was taller than she'd remembered, raw-boned and powerful. For an instant she thought he was wearing animal skins hair-side out, but that was a trick of the dim light: Gaur was nude and covered with fur like a beast. He growled softly.

Chalcus shifted his stance to face the wizard. Gaur was unarmed, but so big a man could be dangerous regardless. He'd sent a ship and crew from this world to another, though. That would be exhausting for even a very powerful wizard, and from the look of him Gaur hadn't had time to fully recover.

Ilna dropped her knotted pattern back into her sleeve. There wasn't enough light down here for her to trust its effect.

Chalcus sidled toward the wizard, his sword advanced and his left hand not far from the hilt of the slender dagger. Gaur hunched, his eyes fixed on the swordsman. He growled louder, then Gaur's body slumped inward, not shrinking as Ilna first thought but changing: the face flattened into long jaws, the chest grew deeper, and the arms formed into forelegs. For a heartbeat Gaur crouched on his bed of skins as a huge black-furred wolf; then he sprang at Chalcus' throat.

Ilna arched her noose over the thick beast neck, tightening as she pulled with all her strength. The wolf outweighed her by twice or more, but even so she jerked its head around even as the beast snatched her off her feet.

Chalcus' sword slipped in behind the wolf's shoulder blade, grating on ribs as it sliced through and out the other side. Gaur crunched sideways onto the stone floor. Chalcus tugged his blade free; there was a gush of blood.

Ilna'd fallen onto her knees and left hand. She started to rise, still holding the noose tight. The beast was twitching.

The wolf rolled, getting its legs under it again. This time it glared at Ilna. The wound through its chest had closed, though a flag of blood still matted the dark fur.

Gaur snarled and leaped. Ilna threw herself backward, knowing there was no escape. Chalcus caught the wolf's hind leg with his left hand and hacked at the beast's neck, using his edge rather than the point this time.

Gaur twisted in the air and slammed onto the floor again. The inward-curving sword had cut deep into his spine. Still holding the wolf's ankle, Chalcus lifted his sword to repeat the blow; a line of blood drops curled off the blade.

The gaping wound started to close as soon as the steel withdrew. Gaur turned his head toward Chalcus and snarled loud enough to make the stone mirrors vibrate.

Ilna lunged backward, pulling on the noose with both hands. She tripped over the basalt slab and sprawled, doubling her knees up to her chest.

Gaur leaped at her, his beast strength pulling his hind leg through Chalcus' grasp. Chalcus gave a cry of fury and stabbed, driving his point up through the wolf's diaphragm into its chest, but the beast completed its pounce. Its forepaws, each the size of Ilna's hands with the fingers spread, jolted her shoulders down on the basalt.

The pattern was complete.

Ilna kicked upward as she rolled in a backwards somersault. She couldn't have lifted Gaur's weight but she didn't have to: the wolf's own inertia carried him over and past her, through the sheet of agate sullen with the light of another world. The growl turned midway into a scream.

Ilna looked into the agate window. Gaur, his head and torso again a man's, plunged into the pool of boiling sulfur. The thick fluid plopped as it closed over the body and then blasted outward. The wizard's flesh had cooked to vapor in an instant.

Ilna ducked as a blob of molten sulfur spat from the pool to splash over the basalt. It hardened into a thin sheet whose dry reek cut through the stench of old blood.

Ilna straightened, breathing hard. The agate was a smooth mirror again; only from one narrow angle was it a gateway to Hell.

"I lost my noose," she said in a shaky voice. "I've had it for a long time."

"Dear heart, dear love," Chalcus said. He was ignoring Gaur's blood drying on his sword, though he usually kept the steel as scrupulously clean as the bright curve of the waxing moon. "There'll be a thousand cords, there'll be all the silk on the island of Seres now that you're safe. I almost lostyou."

Ilna walked around the upper end of the slab, wiping her hands on her tunic. "I didn't think…," she said. "All the strands had to be placed just so…"

She smiled weakly at Chalcus. "That's true of any pattern, of course. But when it's yarn, the strands don't fight your placement."

As Ilna stepped past the sheet of blue topaz, she caught the hint of movement again. She glanced to the side. What she'd thought was clear stone had shadows in it: man-sized, growing Chalcus shouted. She tried to draw back but she was too late. The clawed fingers of a pair of Rua, fine-boned but strong as steel, closed on her upper arms, pulling her toward them into the topaz mirror.

As Ilna fell, she heard Chalcus shout again.

"I'll take over here, your highness!" said Lord Waldron, glancing back over his shoulder to judge how many troops had arrived. It looked to Garric like several score, a mix of Blood Eagles and regular infantry from Lord Mayne's regiment; the passage from the palace garden was packed with more men. "One quick charge'll sweep these scum away!"

"By the Shepherd, lad!" Carus snarled in Garric's mind. "Don't let that bloody cavalryman throw them away!"

Nor shall I, Garric thought. Aloud he said, "No, milord. I haven't time to explain my strategy here-"

Carus guffawed. Garric's only strategy was to keep from spreading his force into a maze of corridors where the unknown numbers of enemies would have all the advantages. Simple though the plan was, it was a considerable improvement on Lord Waldron's notion of hurling his troops at the enemy in heroic disregard of what might be in ambush behind these gleaming walls.