David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

Two surviving icemen approached him, splotches of red and blue as Cashel's blurry eyes tried to focus. He tried to heave himself to his feet. He couldn't move.

There was additional movement; Cashel's vision cleared. The young officer who'd gasped to Garric a tale of unstoppable monsters stood behind this remaining pair of them. He held the butt portion of a pikestaff which had broken at the handgrip; it was thicker and filled with lead to balance the weight of the front two-thirds of the long shaft.

The youth swung the club over his head. He smashed first one, then the other iceman into light and shards as cold as death.

More men ran past the young officer, grasping Cashel's arms and helping him up. One of them tried to take the quarterstaff. "No!" Cashel said in a snarl that was scarcely human.

The youth dropped his broken pike and held out his right arm to Cashel. "Milord," he said. His voice was a croak. "Milord!"

Cashel shrugged off the hands of well-meaning soldiers trying to support him. He took a step forward on his own, feeling strength start to return as he moved.

He took his right hand from the quarterstaff and clasped arms with the youth who'd saved his life. The boy was slender as a reed and trembling with fear and reaction; it was like holding a sparrow.

There was a great shout from the rotunda. "C'mon, milord," Cashel said in a rusty, hesitant voice. "They need us there. Our job's not done yet."

Ilna saw the hole growing, not in the sky but in the world itself. Layers peeled back so that a pulsing absence of light replaced the open air with its view of clouds scudding over a background of chalky blue. When she judged the passage was open-a matter of only a few heartbeats from when the rupture appeared; the Rua were as skillful in their arts as Ilna was in her own-she nodded approvingly and said to Chalcus, "All right. Let's go."

"Dear heart?" he said, meeting her eyes with a worried expression. "Go where? I don't see…"

He waggled his sword. To him the point danced in air as empty as it was before the winged men wove their patterns in the sky.

Ilna smiled crisply and extended her right hand to his left. "Come," she said. "I'll lead."

She stepped forward, into a textured emptiness which she understood; and Chalcus came with her, into something he couldn't even see. He'd have done the same thing, she knew, if she'd jumped off the cliff instead. All the more reason not to fail him… but then, Ilna had never been able to understand people who considered failure an acceptable choice.

Ilna moved through the passage much as she'd have walked across a familiar room in the darkness. The Rua had cut an opening between their world and another, not so much by art as with the same dogged skill that a beetle uses to bore through wood. It followed paths of lesser difficulty rather than taking the shortest route through the cosmos.

Ilna wasn't sure that she could have created the pattern herself-her different skills didn't lend themselves to a task of this sort-but she could understand it as easily as she understood how to breathe. She moved forward, feeling nothing under her feet but moving anyway. Chalcus' fingers tightened minutely, an extra pressure she wouldn't have noticed except that she knew how perfectly controlled his movements usually were.

She saw and heard nothing. She could feel Chalcus' hand, but she touched nothing of this world or place or not-place they moved through. When she turned slightly to the left-as she did-or pausing for a moment-as she did also, not out of indecision but because the way wasn't yet clear-she made easy, natural choices.

After an uncertain length of time, she stepped into light and cold; a real world, solid to a fault and less welcoming than the featureless dark through which the Rua had gnawed their passage. She stood at the juncture of three high tunnels in the ice. Two of them had walls of red light; the third was blue. The ice where they joined was a sullen mauve, pulsing with the slow rhythm of a snake's throat contracting to drag down its latest victim.

Chalcus was beside her, looking in all directions. He detached his hand from Ilna's andflick/flick ed his sword through the air. He was just proving that his muscles worked the way they should, she supposed; though being Chalcus, he might have decided to slash some dust mote in half as well.

"So, dear one…," he said. "Did our winged friends tell you which way we go from here?"

He continued to scan their surroundings, but with less urgency. When Chalcus first reappeared beside her, he'd thrashed about like a dog being swarmed by hornets. The three long, straight passages were empty for as far as Ilna could see. That didn't mean danger couldn't threaten them at any instant, but it made it less likely that itwould .

"No," said Ilna, her lips pursing as she looked at the ice about her. "You heard everything they said to me. But…"

Things were frozen in the walls-tiny fish, no more than a finger's length long, with bits of weed and other flotsam like what the sea threw up on the beach of Barca's Hamlet; but fragments of corpses as well. Some of the pieces came from men or maybe men, but others couldn't possibly have been human.

"Chalcus," she said, "we need to go down this blue tunnel. I'm sure we do."

"Aye," he said, smiling like a brilliant sunrise; his cheerful humor was never more welcome than in a grim setting like this. "I knew you'd find the route, dear heart. Whatever the pattern is, you can see it."

"Perhaps, but that's not what I mean," said Ilna, irritated despite herself at flattery when there wasn't time for it. There was never time for flattery… though of course what Chalcus had said was true, or at least she'd be surprised to learn it wasn't true.

"Chalcus, I recognize this place." She gestured with her right hand. "I've never seen it before, but Iremember it, I remember watching it being built."

"In a vision you mean, dearest?" he said. His eyes never rested on her longer than they did on any other thing about him, but his voice was warm with real concern. "A dream, perhaps?"

"Nothing," snapped Ilna. "I don't recall ever seeing this, any of this, before. But I rememberit, do you see? And I don't know how!"

"Then let's go on," said Chalcus with a faint, hard smile. "The sooner we've come to the end of this business, the sooner we'll never have to think about the place again. For though I won't say I've never been in a place that less appealed to me, dearest-"

Chuckling, he waggled his sword as a curved pointer.

"-I will say I've never been in a place that less appealed to me an' I was sober enough to remember."

Ilna nodded coldly. "Yes," she said. "Let's go."

But before she stepped forward, she touched Chalcus' left hand again with her fingertips. He twisted his palm upward to squeeze her in turn.

They both wore shoes which they'd put on aboard theBird of the Tide to walk the cobblestone streets of Terness and the passages of Lusius' castle. Ilna didn't like shoes, but now the thick leather soles kept her feet from freezing as might've happened otherwise. The cold wasn't the worst of the discomfort, but it was a discomfort.

Her footsteps and those of Chalcus beside her were lost in the creaks and groaning which she supposed were the ice working. She'd heard similar sounds on the very coldest winters while she was growing up, when the shore of the Inner Sea froze out toward the eastern horizon.

She wasn't sure that was what she was hearing, though, because sometimes she thought she saw movement in the clear, glowing ice. That might have been a trick of the light or distortion from unseen fractures as she glanced while walking past, but in this place there were other possibilities. She remembered sheets of wizardlight acting as warp and woof, weaving tunnels out of open water. Things had begun to grow in it at once, the way weevils appear in meal left uncovered…