David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

At another point-before? after?-he'd slashed through the foreleg of a white-furred monster, then jumped to the right as it rolled over the missing limb. He didn't know what'd happened to the wounded animal afterwards. He'd been past it, using both arms to swing his sword. His blade had met the neck of the wolf bounding toward him, shearing it in a broad diagonal.

There'd been blood before. When Garric opened the throat of the great wolf looming over him, the whole world became a sticky red torrent. He'd struck the ice on his shoulder and rolled to his feet in the same motion. After that he could see the things about him normally again, because he'd had nothing more to kill.

For the moment.

The figure on the throne raised hands like suet puddings. In concert with Her gesture, wisps of wizardlight spun like dust devils before Garric and his companions.

"Wizardry!" snarled the ghost of King Carus. "May the Lady smite all wizards down for their sins!"

That's our job, not the Lady's, thought Garric. The whirling funnels of light drained into the ice; only a glow remained. Then the hard surface shattered, erupting like mud when frogs crawl to the surface of a dried pond during the first rains. Skeletons clothed in wizardlight rose from their icy graves, holding swords and spears with rust-pitted blades.

The wizard on the throne continued to weave. The whole surface between Garric and the throne was breaking open. Some of the skeletons were of bone so old it was splitting, while others still had not only ligaments but flesh clinging to them.

"Haft and the Isles!" Garric shouted, shocked despite himself at the sight. He wasn't sure that anyone but Cashel would follow him into the dreadful array.

"Hey, the dumb barbarians haven't got armor!" bellowed Pont.

"Let's get stuck in, boys!" cried his partner Prester. "It's party time!"

I'll make them nobles for that bit of bravado! thought Garric joyfully. Then peasant caution made him add, If any of us survive.

"It's not bravado," Carus explained. "They mean it. And they're right!"

A skeleton ran at Garric holding a spear over its right shoulder in both fleshless hands. Whatever was animating the corpse must be powerful, but it hadn't had even rudimentary weapons training…

Instead of waiting to side-step the awkward thrust, Garric backhanded his sword through the skeleton's right elbow. The spear twitched sideways and Garric's edge crunched deep in the naked spine. The creature folded backwards.

Garric snatched the spear from the twice-dead thing's nerveless grip, then used the shaft to parry the cleaver-like blade which another skeleton swung at him from the left. He thrust his own sword through the creature's chest cavity, both edges grating on bone.

The haze of crimson light which clothed the creature dissipated as suddenly as a reflection vanishing when the angle changes. The skeleton collapsed onto the ice, already starting to disarticulate.

Garric saw movement to his right and was whirling to deal with it when Pont stepped past. The veteran crushed skeletal ribs with the upper edge of his shield, struck the skull of a second creature with the edge of his short, heavy sword-ancient bone powdered at the impact-and broke a third's knee and the thighbone above it with the hobnailed sole of his boot. When it fell, he smashed the thing's chest with the other boot.

To Garric's other side Prester proceeded in much the same fashion, though he was using a pikeman's lighter shield: there was never a moment that one limb or another wasn't moving and never a motion that wasn't lethal. It was like watching pistons working in pump shafts, inexorably shoving everything before them.

"Haft and the Isles!" somebody cried over the tumult.

Garric strode forward between the two veterans. He didn't have a shield to strike with, but his longer arm and longer blade helped him keep even with the older men.

His left hand stabbed the spear he'd appropriated through the thin nasal bones of a skull. The creature behind that one hacked at Garric's extended arm with a sword so dull it bruised worse than it cut. Garric didn't quite drop the spear, but he was clumsy when he lunged and with a half cut, half thrust, lopped off the head of the creature that'd wounded him.

Another of the things drove its spear upward into Garric's breastplate, banging deeply enough through the bronze to draw blood as well as knocking his breath out. The stroke would've gone deeper yet if the spearpoint hadn't broken.

The creature pulled the weapon back for a finishing thrust. Garric stood, paralyzed from the blow to his diaphragm. Pont, almost absently, shattered the skeleton's pelvis with the lower edge of his shield. When it fell, he drove the heel of his boot like a battering ram into its neck.

Garric got his breath back. He stepped forward, his sword raised.

"Yeah, and I'll bugger your sisters, too!" Prester shouted as he thrust and chopped and continued to advance. He didn't move quickly, but neither did he halt or even pause. It was like watching sap drip on a warm spring day.

Cashel's quarterstaff struck right and left with the regularity of a waterclock, smashing a skull or a fleshless ribcage with every blow. Whenever an animate skeleton thrust at him, a ferrule batted the weapon back and crushed the thing wielding it. What'd been an army of hideous monsters as numerous as stalks in a barley field, was going down as surely as that barley at harvest time.

The footing became as much of a danger as the creatures themselves. In rising from their frozen tombs, the skeletons had left craters of shattered ice. Garric set his boot on a hole filled with treacherous fragments. Only instincts he'd honed while following sheep into bogs warned him not to rest his weight on that foot.

A skeleton swung a double-bitted axe down at him. Garric caught the helve with the point of his upraised sword and skidded the axe to the side, then flicked his blade to the right to lift the skull from the neck vertebrae. If he'd carried through with the lunge he'd intended, his leg would've sunk beneath him. The creature's blow would've split him up the back like a sheep butterflied for roasting.

Sharina's axe wove figure-8s before her, clearing a space as broad even as Cashel's quarterstaff. The axe was shouting or singing in the sort of joy displayed at coronations and for sudden windfalls; its edge clipped through whatever it met-wood or bone or rusty iron. Garric didn't know how long his sister could keep up the effort, but by now there was little more need for it. A single rank of skeletons separated him and his immediate companions from the figure on the ice throne.

Garric chose his final opponent, the skeleton of a man who when alive ages previously must've been seven feet tall. It raised its sword for a vertical chop; instead of the deliberate swordsmanship he'd demonstrated till this moment, Garric did the same.

They swung down at one another, their blades crossing in a clanging tocsin. Sparks flew. Wizardry gave the skeleton's limbs enormous strength, but the salt-pitted sword snapped on the watered steel of Garric's blade.

Garric thrust through the creature's mouth, scattering teeth like hailstones and lifting the top of the bare skull. The skeleton flew backward, the broken sword dropping from its right hand as its left arm came loose at the shoulder.

Garric had reached the foot of the great throne; he looked up for the first time since the skeletons began to rise from the ice. The wizard seated above him must have weighed as much as a full-grown ox. Her body was a mushroom of fat on legs whose drooping calves swaddled tiny feet the way rich cloth drapes an altar. Her arms were so monstrous they appeared to have no elbows; Her fingers, though thick as sausages, seemed delicate by contrast with the bloated palms.