David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

Some of Beard's personality was entering hers. For the present, that was desirable-and she no longer believed in a personal future.

Sharina started forward, resigned to death but unconcerned about it. She and her demon companion had more strokes to give the forces of Evil before that happened.

Roaring blue wizardlight left Ilna blind and deaf, but she could still feel. The winged men's fingers were short but as strong as whalebone; they held her arms like crabs' pincers, hard enough to cut the skin. Then the creatures released her and she fell.

She threw out her hands to catch herself, wondering as she did whether the Rua had dropped her into the pool of boiling sulfur or if there was a worse place than that. At this instant Ilna couldn't imagine a more unpleasant death than the sulfur, but she'd seen enough of the world to know that it could always get worse.

The globe of blue light surrounding her sucked in and vanished. Her feet landed inches below, on bare rock at the edge of a dead volcano. The slope stretched down before her, its red-brown surface pitted and gullied by the rain. The shallow sea ran up on the shore and spewed foam. The water was the ultramarine hue of yarn dyed with eggplant peel.

Chalcus dropped beside her, his sword lifted and his left arm thrown back for balance. He crouched, sweeping his head right and left, taking in all his surroundings.

The Rua who'd dragged Ilna through the topaz lens hovered just beyond the rim of the cliff, their translucent vans bowed to catch the updraft. Chalcus thrust at the nearer of the pair; she canted her wings a trifle and ballooned up beyond reach of the curved sword.

"We are allies, Ilna os-Kenset!" cried her mate. His voice was squeaky and piercing, but perfectly understandable even over the moan of the wind.

Hundreds of the winged men soared and wheeled in the sky overhead, some of them so high that the wispy clouds blurred their shrunken outlines. Ilna looked behind her. The cone's outer slope was a harsh cliff only spotted with vegetation, but grass and gnarled shrubs with gray leaves covered the far side of the crater's sheltered interior.

"Take us back to where we belong, then!" Ilna said. She grimaced to hear the words, then quickly corrected herself with, "Take us back to where we were."

She knew by now that she didn't belong anywhere. This windswept cliff hadn't much to recommend it, but considered by itself it was an improvement on Gaur's stinking dungeon.

"We will return you to your world, sister," said the female Rua, sliding sideways through the air so that she hung closer to Ilna but remained well beyond reach of Chalcus' blade. "But first we must talk."

"The only right you have to ask that is that we're completely in your power, not so?" said Chalcus in a ringing voice.

He laughed and sheathed his sword in a curving gesture as graceful as a fish leaping, then went on, "Which is a right I've asserted too often myself to deny to another. If Mistress Ilna will bear with me, I'm interested to hear what you winged folk have to say."

"All right," said Ilna. "I don't mind having the smell of Gaur's den washed out of my nose. But we have business in the place we came from."

She pointed to the ground beside her. "Come," she said. "Land. You may be comfortable fluttering out there, but I'm not comfortable watching you. And besides, I want to get out of this wind!"

The noose that served Ilna also as a sash had burned in a pool of sulfur with Gaur. The updraft would lift her tunics completely over her head if she didn't fight them down. In addition to distracting her, the loss of dignity made Ilna furious-the more so because she realized how absurd the concern was under the circumstances.

The Rua landed in perfect concert, the male on the other side of Chalcus and the female beside Ilna. With their wings folded to their sides they looked like walking skeletons, though they were nearly the height of the human pair.

"You brought us here to talk," Ilna said, backing from the cliff edge and smoothing her tunics. Three steps toward the interior of the crater there was still wind, but it was no longer an uprushing torrent. "Talk then."

She supposed she sounded curt and unfriendly, but she'd never been good at pretense. The Rua had brought her here for their own reasons. Those might be perfectly good reasons, but the fact didn't require that Ilna pretend an affection for the winged men that she didn't feel.

"You killed the wizard Gaur, mistress," the female said. "He was your enemy and our enemy as well. Will you now kill Her? She is a greater enemy to your world and our world and all worlds of the cosmos!"

"Who do you mean by Her?" Ilna said. She was on edge both from fatigue and the emotions seething through her during the struggle with the wolfman. "If you can't make sense, then send us back!"

She deliberately turned and walked toward the opposite slope to look into the crater. When she looked down at a slant the inner wall looked as green as a meadow, though Ilna knew that the vegetation was actually quite sparse. It grew only where dirt collected in pockets of the rock. There were beehive-shaped dwellings with windows of some translucent material in walls of shaped stone, but there were no fields or grazing animals. This would be good country for goats…

"She is a great wizard, mistress," said the male Rua. "Her world is freezing because of the power She drains from it with her wizardry."

"She is reaching into our world and yours, mistress," said the female. "She will destroy both worlds and destroy all worlds, unless you stop Her."

Ilna turned to them again, scowling in frustration. "But why are you telling me this?" she snapped. "You're the wizards. I suppose we'll help-I'll help, that is-"

"We both will help as we can, indeed," said Chalcus with a little bow to the female. The Rua were almost hairless; the female's breasts were flat, distinguishable only because they softened the ridges of the flight muscles so prominent on the male. "But I think that Mistress Ilna will be far the greater help; and the pair of you think so as well."

"We are wizards, yes," the male chirped in perfectly formed syllables. "But we could not overcome Gaur. How could we hope to overcome Her?"

"She moved the shoals where the belemites grow from our world to yours, mistress," continued the female, "to bring wealth to her disciple Gaur. Without the shell, the wings of our kits-"

Both Rua spread their wings. They unfolded like fans, narrow strips of skin as fine as sea foam alternating with struts of denser material that shimmered like nacre in the sunlight. Ilna remembered the belemites' similar rainbow hues.

"-do not harden."

"We could not wrest our shoals back from Her grip," said the male. As he spoke, his struts clicked together in sequence, folding and stretching the skin between each pair. Ilna nodded in appreciation of the muscular control required to do that. "We could only open a gateway to your world so we could continue to hunt the shell our kits must have. And for our strength, even holding the gateway open was a struggle."

"Dear heart…?" said Chalcus. Instead of pointing, he nodded outward. The Rua looked toward the sea also, turning their heads without moving their torsos. Ilna could understand the importance of so flexible a neck to a flying creature, but it was disconcerting to watch.

She sniffed in irritation at herself and let her eyes follow the line of Chalcus' gaze to a monster undulating through the sea. Only the top of its great head showed above the surface, but because the pale water was so clear she could see the whole line of the creature's snakelike body. It was as long as a warship. When it turned its flat head toward the land and opened its jaws, Ilna could see individual teeth.