David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

He stepped onto ice and skidded. He chopped his staff down; the ferrule gouged a purchase from the slick black surface. It was blazingly cold, freezing his feet because his calluses had been softened by tramping through the bog. The only light came from the sullen red flare that silhouetted ruined buildings on the horizon.

The ice was clear. Beneath it, staring up at Cashel through fans of stress marks, was the face of a giant. His mouth, large enough to swallow Cashel whole, opened in a bellow that made the world vibrate.

"Down his throat!" said Evne. "You'll have to break the ice!"

Cashel swung the staff in a half arc. An azure glitter trailed the ferrules the way sparks stream from a quickly-spun torch. The opposite buttcap slammed into the ice in a silent, mind-numbing blue glare. A thousand tiny cracks shivered across the surface, clouding the face beneath it.

The mouth shouted again. The ice blew apart like seafoam shredded by a gale. Cashel jumped or fell-he wasn't sure which, just that he'd managed to get through-down the roaring tunnel beneath him.

He was in the hall of mirrors again. Ansache, sobbing with terror, stabbed his athame into the wall beside him. Instead of shattering as Cashel expected it to do, the world itself curled back from the point like a sheet of isinglass touched by a hot spark. An edge of reality coiled over the wall and the wizard together, leaving a different universe expanding into the place where the corridor had been.

Cashel stood on a hot, windswept plain. In all directions were hills eroded from the yellow, chalky earth. He raised his left arm to breathe through the sleeve of his tunic and filter out the dust.

"Which way is Ansache?" he said to the toad on his shoulder.

"Ansache doesn't matter any more," Evne said. "To save himself he opened a passage for you onto the ship. Now we'll find the Visitor."

Hutena was on the port tiller; Kulit in the bow as lookout again. The other four crewmen were on the oars, pulling hard. They wore the set expressions of men who knew that they'll be at the task for a long time-but that the faster they worked, the better off they'd be.

Rincip knelt facing sternward, his wrists and ankles bound to the bitts holding the mainstay. Chalcus had stripped him, cutting his tunics off with long strokes of his dagger. It would've been as simple to undress the prisoner normally, but Ilna supposed the dagger-and the nudity itself-was for its effect.

That seemed scarcely necessary; Rincip was terrified, both of what had happened and of what he feared would be next. He looked ready to offer his mother's soul if his captors demanded it. But Chalcus wasn't a man to take unnecessary chances, probably because his life had involved so many risks that hehadn't been able to avoid.

Pointin had gotten out of the hold, for the first time since theBird of the Tide came in sight of Terness Harbor after his rescue the night before. He sat against the starboard gunwale and stared at the captive Sea Guard. His face showed no emotion, no expression at all.

"So, Master Rincip…," Chalcus said. He sat cross-legged facing the captive. As he spoke, he stropped his curved dagger on the ball of his callused foot. "I've some questions for you. If you answer them promptly and honestly, we'll put you into your skiff and you can wait for your friends to pick you up when they come chasing us… as they surely will and as surely will fail, for in the hours it takes the Commander to get a crew together, I'll have theBird across shoals where yourDefender can't follow without ripping her bottom out."

"You're lying," Rincip whispered through dry lips. "You'll kill me whatever I do."

Despite the words, Ilna thought she heard hope in the Sea Guard's tone. Until Chalcus made the offer, Rincip hadn't even imagined that he might survive this night.

Chalcus laughed merrily. "I've killed too many men to count, my friend," he said. "Men, and it might be women and children too; I was a hard fellow when I was younger. I don't need to add to the number, though it won't bother me greatly if that happens. Regardless, we're towing your little boat behind us, which we would not do except I'm willing to set you free on it."

"Ship your oars and raise sail!" Hutena shouted. The four rowers lifted the sweeps from the oarlocks and pulled them aboard.

Ilna glanced over her shoulder. The castle's watchtower was now below the horizon, but she'd seen it a few minutes earlier when she last looked. She didn't doubt that it'd take at least an hour before Lusius could muster enough of a crew to take the patrol vessel out, but that didn't matter. Everybody aboard theBird of the Tide knew that Lusius would choose wizardry rather than swords to solve this problem. That way it couldn't be traced back to him.

"If you don't talk willingly," Chalcus continued in the same playfully cheerful tone, "Mistress Ilna here will weave you a pattern that brings the words out regardless. Then too you'll go over the side; but bound as you are and without the skiff. You may be floating when your friends arrive; but you won't, I think, be in any different state than if I'd slit your throat to give you a quick end… which I will not."

"What do you want to know?" Rincip asked in a guarded, hopeful tone. "I'm not… I mean, the Commander plays things pretty close. I don't know much."

"But you know that Lusius is behind the attacks on shipping, do you not?" Chalcus said. "TheQueen of Heaven and others before her, a dozen ships or so?"

"Yeah, he must be," Rincip said. "Admitted" would've been the wrong word to use since the Commander's deputy was so determinedly separating himself from the business. "He knows to take us out in the barges before anything happens. But it's that demon Gaur who does it and I don't know how. He stays back in the castle, down in his rooms where the dungeons were. I'm not sure even Lusius knows what Gaur does."

Nabarbi loosed a line; the sail slatted down. Ninon and Shausga drew it taut by adjusting the footropes. Ilna hadn't noticed enough change in the breeze to justify switching to sail now, but she wasn't a sailor and these men certainly were. Sure enough, theBird continued on its way; as fast or perhaps a trifle faster than the oars had driven it.

Rincip licked his lips and glanced longingly at the skin of wine which the crewmen were passing around now that their hands were free of the oars. Ilna said, her voice harsher than she'd expected, "We said we'd spare your life. We didn't say that we'd treat you as a friend. Tell us about the attacks!"

"All right, all right," Rincip muttered. "It's always the same. Lusius knows where to go. We wait; the sea's empty, there's nothing there, and then there's a flash and the ship is on the sea rocking and stinking of sulphur. Always the same."

He closed his eyes, moving his head side to side as if he was trying to clear something from it. "I try not to look when I know the light is going to come, but it doesn't help," he said. "It comes right through you. You see it in your brain even if your eyes're covered."

"And when the ship appears…," said Chalcus mildly, ignoring Rincip's trembling terror. "Do you board and slay the crew?"

The captive laughed harshly. "There's no crew!" he said. "There's nobody, not a soul alive ever till that one there-"

He jerked his chin toward Pointin since his hands were tied behind him.

"-hid in the iron chest just now. There's parts of bodies, torn parts and chewed like shrews that a cat brings back. We throw them in the sea to Our Brother, but it's not us who kills them."

"You've been training the seawolf for the whole time, then?" Chalcus said with a broad, hard smile. "A clever man, our Lusius."

"You don't know the half of it," said Rincip. "Did you think it was chance the beast is named Our Brother?"