David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

The roof trembled like a ship's deck. The whole battered structure was shifting toward collapse.

"-Beard to drink!" cried the axe.

The third creature was trying to crawl over the thrashing body of the one with the split skull. The doorway wasn't big enough to hold both giants. The creature with the dangling arm saw Sharina, screamed, and swung its club at her. Before the awkward blow landed, she leaped down onto the back of the third creature. It lurched, dragging its shoulders out of the doorway and glaring at Sharina with eyes further reddened by the firelight.

"The throat!" screamed the axe. "Let me cut her-"

Sharina brought the axe around in a backhanded arc. She was a strong woman and the axe was scarcely more than a hatchet with an unusually long helve, but even so she marveled at how smoothly it moved. It was like watching light shimmer on smooth water.

"-throat!" the axe said.

Sharina didn't feel the blade touch and slip through the creature's neck, but the gush of blood bathed the wall where the frescoes had weathered off. The gout slowed, then spurted again as the creature rose to its feet, lifting its club overhead. The second creature had retrieved its weapon from the pall of dust and splinters raised when it smashed the roof. The dangling arm seemed to be affecting its balance.

Sharina scrambled sideways around the fire and tripped over a human body trussed with bark cord. She was breathing hard and didn't get her feet under her as easily as she expected. The creature whose throat she'd cut toppled slowly backward into the alcove holding the loot, completing the room's destruction with a crash and a pall of debris.

"Feed me!" the axe cried. "Feed me! Fee-"

Swinging the axe with both hands, Sharina leaped toward the only creature still standing. Its left-handed club blow wobbled past like a treelimb whirled in a windstorm. Even stretching to her full height Sharina couldn't reach the creature's skull, but she buried the axe to the helve at the top of the breastbone where the biggest blood vessels lift from the heart.

She dragged her weapon out with a sucking sound and a geyser of blood. The creature cried out and swiped its club sideways. Sharina jumped but the club caught her anyway, lifting her onto the ruin of the room from which she'd emerged. She lay stunned, choking on the dust but unable to move.

The creature dropped its club and staggered forward, clutching the gurgling hole in its chest. Blood welled from between its massive fingers and foamed through its yellow tusks, choking the cries it would otherwise have uttered.

Sharina got her left sleeve over her nose and tried to breathe through it. That didn't help much, but now that she'd started moving she crawled off of the shifting rubble. She still held the axe, though she didn't think she'd be able to swing it.

The creature fell face-down onto the fire, flinging sparks out to the sides. Burning hair added its stench to that of the woman which the trio had been roasting. Sharina worked her way on all fours around the smothered fire, trying to get upwind.

"Help me," a voice whimpered. "Please. Help me."

Sharina opened her eyes; she hadn't been aware that they were closed. Her stomach roiled with the horror of what she'd just done. She kept remembering the startled expression on the face of the creature as her axe sheared its throat, and then the curtain of blood spraying in all directions…

"Please…"

The tied-up figure was a hollow-cheeked youth; moonlight turned his hair and his sallow complexion much the same color. His simple garments were filthy; but then, so was Sharina's sleeping shift, and she hadn't lain bound by maneaters for an unguessibly long time.

"Hold still," she croaked, reaching for the cord binding his wrists and ankles together. "If you squirm, I may cut you."

"He's no use to you, mistress!" said the axe. "Come on, let me finish him for you. Look how his throat is just waiting for Beard to cleave it!"

The captive flinched and began to cry soundlessly. Sharina looked at the axe for the first time since she'd drawn it carefully from the pile of rusty trash. The steel was as bright and clean as plate polished for a palace banquet, though its shaft and Sharina's whole right arm were sticky with congealing blood.

"Be silent," she said in a rasping whisper. She short-gripped the weapon and carefully touched the edge to the rope.

"But Beard is still thirsty, mistress," the axe said. Quivering reflections on the back of the blade looked like a mouth there was speaking; maybe it was. "Please, mistress, let Beard drink his blood!"

The tough bark fibers parted without effort on Sharina's part. Though she knew the axe had just split through heavy bones, the edge remained as keen as thought.

"Axe," she said in a deadly whisper. "If you don't shut up now, I'll give you all the water in Carcosa harbor to drink. Be silent!"

She paused but heard nothing except possibly a…thirsty… so faint that it might have been the wind through the ruined palace. She cut the youth's ankles free, then his wrists.

"You can move now," she said, leaning back. "What's your name?"

Lady help me, it's so cold… But she wasn't sure it was the wind that chilled her as much as her reaction to the few minutes just passed. Only a few minutes.

"I'm Franca," the youth said without meeting Sharina's eyes. He massaged his wrists with the opposite hands; the skin was worn away into a crust of blood. "Franca or-Orrin, but mostly mother called me Franca. And now she's gone."

He started to cry again. His hands stopped rubbing and he clamped his skinny arms tight to his chest.

"Your mother was…?" Sharina said, nodding toward where the fire had been; the woman's feet stuck out from beneath the dead monster's body. Franca's eyes were closed, so she said, "The monsters killed your mother?"

"Of course the Hunters killed the silly woman!" said the axe in a clear, piping voice. "She and her whelp here came right down into Carcosa where the Hunters know every hiding place. But you killedthem , mistress! Ah, those were fine strokes!"

Sharina looked sourly at the axe, but it was giving her more information than the weeping boy so she didn't snarl again. She needed to learn a lot more if she was to survive, let alone get back to where she belonged.

"Get up, Franca," she said. "We'll roll this Hunter out of the way and then bury your mother."

"Bury mother?" the boy said. He stared in horror at the creature with the severed arm, then looked squarely at Sharina for the first time. "But why?"

"Because we're human beings," she said, "and that's what people do!"

She set the axe on the base of a fallen column where she could grab it quickly if she had to. It was mumbling to itself, recalling with gusto the slaughter just completed.

All three of the creatures-the Hunters, Sharina now knew to call them-were females. The one she had to move weighed as much as a heifer, but Sharina threw her weight against one of its long arms to roll it off the human corpse. Franca helped without complaint; he was stronger than he looked.

The Hunters had run a broken pike the long way through their victim for a spit. Sharina thought about the situation and decided to leave the shaft where it was.

They carried Franca's mother down into what had been the garden in Sharina's world. Debris choked it, but she'd seen a hollow where they could lay the body and mound a cairn over it. They didn't have the tools to dig even a shallow grave.

"We had to come to the city," Franca muttered, finally responding to the axe's gibe. "Hail flattened our crop and there was nothing to scavenge in Penninvale. Mother thought that maybe in Carcosa there'd be something left, because it was the first place destroyed when She came."