David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

She must have been under water a long time if Neal had been able to lift the stone. She smiled faintly. I must have been under water as long as it felt.

"Get back," she said. "I'm all right."

Scoggin continued to tug; Neal was reaching down also.

"Stop that!" Sharina said. She hadn't thought she had enough energy to get angry, but she'd been wrong; Beard twitched hopefully in her hand, though he didn't speak. "I'm going down again! I know where the key is, now."

"Mistress, you shouldn't…," Neal said, then straightened back abruptly. The axe had lifted without Sharina's conscious volition.

"You've seen it?" Alfdan said eagerly, turning toward her. "You can get it up, then?"

Sharina lay on her side, fully in control of her body again. Franca held her shoulder, but he was shivering violently and seemed barely able to keep himself above the surface now. He was the one they ought to be pulling onto the raft…

"It's on the bottom, just lying there," Sharina said. "I just need to be in the right place. Beard, will you guide me?"

"I will guide you, mistress," said the axe. "I think they're afraid of Beard. They haven't come quite close enough; but perhaps when you take the key they will."

"Well, friend axe," Sharina said, "we both have something to look forward to. Though it's not the same thing."

She looked up at Neal. "Bring the rock around to me," she said. "I'm ready to go down. And then get Franca up before he freezes to death!"

Sharina didn't feel cold. In truth, she didn't feel much of any thing. She viewed her body as she might have viewed a horse, considering the work it had done this day and deciding how much longer it'd be able to go on before it dropped in the traces.

Long enough, she thought. Long enough.

Neal straddle-walked across the raft with the stone in his arms; the wooden fabric wobbled and groaned at each step. He squatted at the edge. Alfdan, startled into awareness of his immediate surroundings, gave a sharp cry and hopped to the other side as the raft tilted.

Sharina reached up and caught the netting in her left hand. "Ready!" she said, drawing in a deep breath.

Neal shoved the weight outward into the water. It streamed downward, trailing bubbles and Sharina's lithe body.

She was no longer conscious of the water. In her mind she flew down canyons of planes joined at right angles. Creatures squeezed out of the cracks where they'd been hiding while Sharina was on the surface. Others creatures, mountainously huge, continued up from the depths of time toward her.

Beard trilled a warsong that sliced through the water like the point of an arrow. Sharina could see the things poise-things of no shape or a thousand shapes, filled with the mindless malevolence of spiders. But they did not, would not, dared not launch themselves onto her while the axe sang.

The stone weight crunched onto the bed of the fjord. Beard tugged her to the right again.

Sharina breaststroked over the quartz. The key congealed into focus from a distant blur; it was gold and ornate but not large, no longer than her little finger. She snatched it in her left hand and kicked upward.

The metal tingled against her palm. She wondered if the key was burning into her, and clutched it more firmly so that she wouldn't drop it if it was.

A thing came at her, dropping like a jumping spider at the end of a train of its own substance. Sharina twisted and slashed out with Beard. There was no water to resist the blow; the place they fought in was not the fjord whose icy depths enfolded her body.

The axe slid through the creature and beyond, dragging a gelatinous trail behind the steel. The creature folded in on itself. Sharina brought the axe back around in a figure-8. Her head broke the surface and she was sucking in cold, clean air again.

The water about her was clear. There was no sign of the crystal canyons nor the monsters which infested them, but Beard was caroling in delighted triumph.

Cashel got up slowly and carefully. He ached all over, but the bird actually hadn't touched him. The way he felt was entirely what he'd done to himself.

"That would cover most people's problems," the toad said. "Ithink."

Cashel frowned as he considered. "I just meant I'd pushed pretty hard while I was fighting the bird," he explained. " I'm feeling the strain."

He paused. "You must have been hearing me think," he said.

The toad sniffed. "If you want to call it thinking," she said. "And yes, you made a great effort, physically as well. What do you do when your greatest effort isn't enough, master?"

Cashel frowned again, thinking back as carefully as he could. "I don't know," he said at last. "I don't remember that ever happening. I just don't know."

"Well, pick me up," said Evne, "and I'll take you to another chance to find out. Life with you is certainly more colorful than it had been for the previous seven thousand years."

Obediently Cashel put his right palm flat on the ground in front of the toad. She hopped onto his fingers and he lifted her to his shoulder again.

"Thanks for drawing the bird's eyes off me, Mistress Evne," he said. "It helped a lot. And it was a brave thing to do."

"It would only have been brave," said the toad with her usual tartness, "if I'd thought you might be too slow to deal with the phoenix before she snapped me up. I'm not that unobservant."

Evne pointed with her left hind foot, a gesture that made Cashel grin with surprise. He had to squint to see her, so close to his eyes as she was. "Cross this bog and go through the belt of fir trees. I'll show you what to do then."

Cashel resumed his way over the meadow with his staff out before him. The ripples were disconcerting at first, but they spread in a rhythm. By the third step he'd suited his pace to how the bog was going to react. It gave him no trouble from then on, though he was still glad to reach firm ground.

That meant forcing his way through the prickly, steep-sloping branches of firs growing too close together for their own good, though. He edged through with his right side leading so he wouldn't risk brushing Evne off. The toad shifted closer to his neck, but she didn't seem terribly concerned.

It struck Cashel that he didn't hear birds among these trees. There was a funny buzzing sound, something like swarms of cicadas at a great distance. It was the wrong season for cicadas, though, and besides He pushed through the last of the firs. It wasn't a wide belt, probably no more than he could've spanned with his staff laid out twice, but it'd been so dense that he was beyond the trees before he realized they were ending. Before him shimmered a purple dome covering everything for as far as he could see to right or left. A belt of bare ground, no wider than he could reach across with his arm, bordered the dome and separated it from the firs.

"If you touch the barrier," the toad said, "it will kill you. It'll probably kill me too, as I deserve for serving a fool."

"I won't touch it, then," Cashel said politely. "That'd be a poor way to repay a friend who's been so much help, Mistress Evne."

The toad snorted. "Walk to your left along the barrier," she said. "We'll come to a slough shortly."

Cashel walked carefully; his shoulders were broad enough that he'd bump the dome on his right if the fir branches didn't scrape their dark green needles along his left arm. Evne walked to the front of his collar and clung there, a clammy bump against his throat. He didn't say anything.

The buzzing sound came from the dome. Cashel thought he could see things inside it, but that might just have been the play of the sun falling on a solid surface through patches of mist.

The shiny violet color gave him a nasty feeling, and the hair on his right arm prickled. He probably wouldn't have touched it even without the toad's warning.