David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

The change in light was just ahead. Some of the pikes reached into it; their shafts seemed to kink slightly as though they'd been thrust into water. As though they were reaching into the water covering the Key of Reyazel…

She hadn't come herenot to act. Sharina stepped through the insubstantial barrier.

She didn't look over her shoulder, but she knew the world behind her had vanished. She was in the fjord again, and the enfolding chill penetrated her soul. Planes of light jutted up, intersecting and interpenetrating one another. They had no color, but their textures differed as surely as walls of sandstone and granite and shale.

Sharina drifted onward, downward, instinctively holding her breath. If she took this place into her body, she would never return.

She couldn't see the thing that was waiting for her. It was like walking through a nighted forest, watched from the darkness but unable to see anything herself. Beard tugged like a leashed hound. She couldn't hear him in this wilderness of planes and soul-numbing cold, but the helve trembled in her hand as the steel mouth laughed.

Someday Sharina would die. Perhaps this was the day she would die forever, her soul devoured by a force that was alien to all life. She felt the chill and she felt the presence of hidden doom; and she continued onward because that was what she'd come to do.

She'd lost track of direction. There were no more walls and floor than there'd been when she sank through the waters of the fjord.

Her lungs began to ache. She knew that they'd shortly be ablaze with white fire but shecouldn't breathe, didn't dare to breathe.

The axe twisted in her hand. Sharina looked upward and it was there, rippling down onto her like a mass of silk in the summer when the young spiders balloon off on the breeze. She struck or Beard struck in her hand. The Elemental divided to either side of the blow, untouched by the steel. It came on undeterred, spreading around her to right and left the way the tide rises on a narrow isthmus.

Sharina backhanded her weapon. The spike parted the Elemental's tenuous form like smoke, its substance leaking like honey oozing from a comb dropped on hot stone.

Beard screamed in triumph. The planes of non-light, non-color fell into shards that crumbled in turn to specks too small for sight, then evaporated.

Sharina slumped forward. She heard Cashel cry, "Shar-" but the remainder of her name was lost as a sea of darkness surged over her mind. She knew she'd hit the floor, but she didn't feel the impact.

Ilna walked through the tunnels at a deliberate pace. She didn't run because she wasn't good at running; and besides, there was no need: she'd get where she was going soon enough, and possibly sooner than that.

Behind her Chalcus sang in an undertone, "I've seen the fruits of rambling, I know its hardships well…" Ilna was aware of his presence, but he was part of a world that had ended when she entered these frozen halls.

"'I've crossed the Southern Ocean, rode down the streets of Hell…'"

Ilna's personal memories were fading. In their place she remembered how She had built this palace beneath the ice to channel the powers on which the cosmos turned. As Ilna walked, she saw the necessity of each angle, of every knob or divot in the walls.

It was a work of the greatest craftsmanship; but craftsmanship alone wouldn't have made the place the focus that it was. That had required materials and the willingness to use them.

"'…been up above the Ice Capes, where the shaggy giants roam

…"

Through Her eyes Ilna looked down on the sea of faces staring up at Her on the ice throne. They were cut-throats, pirates, killers; bad men before She enlisted them in Her army, and since then become worse. There was no act too vile for them to commit for Her, and few that they had not committed already. Now they would do one further thing: She raised Her hands.

"'I tell you from experience, you'd better stay at home."

Ilna turned right, into a tunnel lower and narrower than the others had been. At its end was a slab of blank ice which alone of the walls in this place wasn't filled from within by wizardlight. Ilna saw herself reflected from a surface as blackly perfect as polished obsidian.

"Dear one…?" said the voice from behind her. She made a silent, brushing motion with her left hand, the sort of gesture she'd have used to flick away a fly.

In a memory not Ilna's, Her hands began to weave in the air. The brutal faces below watched in frightened fascination. Most bore scars-brands and cropped ears as frequently as knife slashes; teeth smashed out or rotted out during lives as savage as those of wild beasts. They were bound to Her by fear of Her power and fear of the revenge those they had wronged would take if ever they left Her protection; but Her art, even if used to help them, frightened them also.

Ilna's lips gave a smile as cold as the black reflection. She'd killed in the past and would kill again soon if she was able to. She'd have had no more mercy for the men who stared at Her than she would for a chicken she needed for dinner; no more mercy than they were about to receive…

Wizardlight streamed from Her hands in gossamer splendor, crossing and interweaving in a pattern that none of those watching beneath the great ice dome could appreciate. The men fidgeted, fingering weapons and glancing covertly at their fellows. The light rippled like gauze as it spread above them. Its color was too subtle for words to describe or eyes to grasp.

Her pattern finally reached the curving walls of the chamber. For a moment nothing happened save that the light pulsed the way breath throbs in the throat membrane of a waiting lizard.

The fabric settled.

The gang of killers tried to flee, screaming curses in a score of languages. They had no more chance than minnows within a closing purse net. Palpable light drifted over them, coating those it touched the way oil spreads over still water.

At first contact, men froze where they stood. The net shimmered, as beautiful as the rainbow hues of a snake's eye, and it continued to sink.

A few of the band, shorter than the others or quicker thinking, dropped to their hands and knees to crawl toward the corridors feeding the great hall. Some slithered on their bellies at the end-crying, praying, or shouting curses depending on their temperaments-but the wizardlight settled onto them also.

Ilna reached the end of the narrow passage. She looked into the black reflection of her own eyes, remembering a past which those eyes had never seen.

The glowing net began to congeal the way pudding sets. Its color deepened and became more saturated without changing hue. The forms trapped beneath it blurred and lost definition. Their flesh and souls together dissolved. Light began to spreadthrough the walls of ice which had been dark with the gloom of polar winter.

Still clutching their weapons, the corpses settled into the ice, shrinking to skeletons. The floor engulfed them. Above, looking out into the world Her art ruled, She wove the cosmos into patterns of devastation and inexorable doom.

Ilna smiled.

"So, dear heart, shall we try another tunnel?" said Chalcus with false, lilting brightness.

Ilna took the bone-cased knife from her sleeve. The blade of worn steel was only finger-long, but it sufficed for all her tasks: trimming selvage, gutting rabbits, and slicing swatches of cowhide into laces for Cashel's winter boots.

Instead of chipping at the ice, Ilna turned the knife over in her hand, still cased. She paused, letting her mind locate the nexus in what the eyes of her body saw as a blank, smooth wall.

She tapped with the bone hilt. The slab of ice disintegrated into crystals smaller than snowflakes, smaller even than the dust motes that float in beams of sunlight.