David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

Herding sheep gave you good lungs, not that sheep were much more likely to heed you than trees were. Shouting at least made you feel like you were doing something as you pounded across the meadow hoping to reach the ewe that'd mire herself sure if she took one more step into the marsh…

Cashel had a pretty good view of what was happening down the tunnel where a huge centipede was trying to bull through a solid mass of pikemen. Had been trying, rather thanwas, because by now the monster writhed like a worm on a hook. Any number of hooks, in fact, because there were more pikes punched through its yellow armor than Cashel could count on both hands.

The men kept shoving forward. By now the folks in the front rank, those whose pikes hadn't broken anyhow, must've had their points halfway into the creature's vitals. It was either trying to escape or else it was just curling up to die the way centipedes of the usual size did.

"Cashel, turn left!" Garric said, sharply but not in a bellow meant to be heard across the huge domed room. "I'm going to shift some men down the other corridors to give us some room in here."

Cashel obediently shuffled partway around, careful to keep his shoulders level. He was pretty sure that Garric could balance even if the fellow under him broke into a dead run, but that wasn't a reason for Cashel to do his own job badly.

The adjustment put Cashel looking down one of the blue tunnels while Garric shouted to an officer on the other side of the room. There was fighting going on in that tunnel, too, and-Cashel frowned-it didn't look like it was going very well. Plenty of soldiers were trying to crowd in, but the sounds coming out of the tunnel were screams, not battlecries. Cashel couldn't see what they were fighting because it didn't tower over the soldiers the way the centipede did, but besides the screams he could hear an off-key clinking/clattering. It wasn't quite right for either metal or stone but seemed a bit of both.

"Garric?" he said, making sure his friend was going to hear him. He'd herded far more sheep than Garric had. "You'd better look at this on my-"

He felt Garric's weight shift as he twisted to look over his shoulder.

"-side," Cashel went on. "I'm turning some more."

A fellow squeezed out of the crowd at the tunnel mouth and staggered toward Garric. He was an officer-a nobleman, anyway, and that meant an officer-because his breastplate was molded with a design of people and gods. The metal, bronze under the gilding, had been slashed in strips, deep enough that blood dribbled out of the cuts. The officer, just a boy really, had lost his sword and his helmet besides.

"Steady!" called Garric. He jumped down, landing squarely. Cashel put out the hand that wasn't on his quarterstaff to brace his friend, but Garric didn't need the help.

"Your highness!" the boy bleated. "We can't stop them! They're not alive, they're just ice, and our swords only chip them without doing any harm! They'll kill us all if we don't get away!"

"Do we have hammers?" Garric said. "Maybe the men can use their shields for clubs. We can't cut ice, but if we break it up-"

"I'll see what I can do, Garric," Cashel said. He lifted his staff overhead and gave it a trial spin, the only way he could do that without knocking down any number of people in these cramped quarters. The hall was a lot like a sheep byre on a winter night.

He strode toward the tunnel mouth, shouldering men out of the way when he needed to. He didn't bother to wait for Garric to agree; he and his quarterstaff were the best choice for the job. Cashel didn't need anybody, even a close friend, to tell him so.

Close up to the tunnel, the soldiers were packed too tight for even Cashel to shove them aside without breaking bones or worse. "Make way!" he said. "Garric sent me! Ah, Prince Garric sent me!"

From where he was now, Cashel could hear the screams even better. Blood sprayed high enough for him to see over the heads of the men ahead, and once a man's arm flew up.

For a moment not much happened. He was about to use his staff as a lever when somebody shouted, "It's the big wizard! Let him through! He can sort'em out!"

Cashel frowned. He wasn't any kind of wizard, but he'd always told himself he didn't care what people called him and this didn't seem the time to get huffy about it.

Sure enough, men peeled away from the back of the crowd. When the ones behind stopped pushing, the soldiers actually facing the enemy broke like the plug squirting from a squeezed waterskin.

Cashel stepped forward, spinning his staff. He saw the enemy for the first time.

They were man-sized and more or less man-shaped, but he wasn't sure he'd have seen they were individual figures if it hadn't been for the wizardlight quivering at their core-some red and some blue. Their arms ended in blades of the same cold, clear ice as their bodies. There was no doubt about the edges being sharp: all those in the front row were gory, and the ground was smeared with the blood, bits of equipment, and severed limbs left behind by soldiers who'd withdrawn into the rotunda.

The icemen stumped along more like hoarfrost spreading across bare dirt than the way men walk, but they had the same purposeful direction as plow oxen. They weren't going to stop; they had tobe stopped.

Well, that's what Cashel had come to do.

He strode into them, swinging his staff sunwise as a feint. An iceman on his right lurched ahead of its fellows, an arm extended toward Cashel. The limb looked more like a spear than a sword held in a human's arm.

Cashel reversed the staff's spin, bringing a buttcap against the iceman's featureless head in a stroke that would've knocked in a thick door. The creature flew apart like an icicle dropped onto stone. The wizardlight filling it flashed out in a crimson thunderbolt.

The blast seemed to stun the rest of the icemen for an instant. Cashel felt only a mild tingling in his hands, nothing that prevented him from slamming the opposite ferrule into the midriff of another creature. It blew itself apart just like the first, rocking the nearest of its fellows the way a flung stone throws ripples across a pond.

Cashel'd intended to strike quickly and back away to judge how effective he'd been; he'd never fought anything like these icemen before, and the first thing you do in a fight is take the measure of the other fellow. There wasn't much doubt that hard, quick blows were the right medicine, and if each time he struck he numbed the survivors too Plenty of people had said that Cashel wasn't very bright, but nobody'd ever doubted he understood how to win fights. He continued forward, striking right and left with the thunderous speed of raindrops in a thunderstorm.

Shards of ice stung and even bruised the bare skin of his face and arms. He ignored that as he ignored the shouts of the men behind him. The quarterstaff wasn't long enough that he could clear the passage as he walked down the middle, so he punched a hole through the glittering creatures. The ones on the sides came at him from behind-but not without him noticing, because he kept his head moving in quick jerks to either side. He saw motion, not figures, at the edges of his vision but that was enough to warn him.

There might be too many of them, before and behind, for him to strike them all before they cut him to collops like the poor dead soldiers whose bodies he shuffled through as he advanced. If that happened, it happened. He'd do what he could till he died.

There were three figures in front of him. Cashel struck right, left, and right. The silent, searing gusts of light left him blinking away afterimages. There was movement behind him. He turned and stumbled to his knees; his legs bent like ivy runners. He slammed down the butt of his quarterstaff and clung to the shaft to keep from sprawling face-first on the ice.