David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

Cashel shook his tunics out as much as he could, sending a pall of yellow dust down wind. He blew his nose with his fingers. That helped him breathe, but the back of his throat still tasted like alkaline mud.

"Well, this is a nicer place to be than where we just left," he said reasonably.

"Do you think so?" said Evne. "Thatisn't an illusion."

Ah! She meant the cat that had risen from the shelter of a ledge half a furlong up the slope from her and Cashel. Its coat had a mottled black-on-gray pattern. Cashel's first thought was that Ilna'd really like to see the creature… and could you turn the fur into yarn?

The cat flattened. Rather than relaxing out of the wind, it faced Cashel and pressed against the rock like a bolt in a cocked crossbow. Its tail began to twitch; the tip was a tuft of black.

"Where is it we want to go from here, Evne?" Cashel asked. The outcrop behind him looked exactly the same as the one he'd seen in the yellow wasteland, except that this one had gray-green lichen growing on it and blowing dust had scrubbed the other clean.

He rotated the quarterstaff in a slow figure-8 before him, working kinks out of his muscles. If the cat charged, he'd want to meet it with one ferrule and then the other.

"You see the ledge the cat is standing on?" the toad said. "You'll need to touch the rock face below her. Or not, of course, if you want to stay here for the rest of your life."

"No, that's not what I want," said Cashel with a sigh. He'd hoped that all he'd need to do was turn around and push against the rock behind him, leaving the cat to its-to her, apparently-own devices. He'dhoped that, but he hadn't expected it.

He started toward the outcrop. It was one step uphill for every two steps forward, and the footing wasn't the best either because of loose rock. He didn't guess it'd slow the cat down much, though; she must be used to it.

She watched Cashel coming toward her with tilted green eyes. Her head twisted; then she opened her jaws wide and screamed. The sound was metallic and so loud it waked echoes from the slopes for a mile down the canyon.

The cat's long fur made her look bigger than she was, but Cashel had lifted enough animals out of trouble on his shoulders to know that shewas big. He judged she'd weigh more than a ram though probably less than a yearling bull; as much as two men of Cashel's own size, which wasn't very many men.

Her eyeteeth were longer than his index fingers. They'd stab to his vitals if once they closed on his torso.

"You're just going to walk straight up to her, master?" said the toad. "That's your whole plan?"

"Yes'm," Cashel agreed. "I'm surely not going to turn my back, and I don't see any gain in waiting for her to decide how she wants to best work things."

The cat jumped to the slope beneath her ledge. Cashel's staff quivered. Part of his mind judged the path she'd trace to his throat: a leap tothere, and a second leap-spraying back pebbles and an uprooted clump of grass, arrow straight, black claws splayed out before her The cat stopped and screamed again. It was an awful sound, worse than the cry of a rabbit in a leg snare. She turned, as supple as a great gray-furred serpent, and bounded back uphill. She'd vanished over the crest before Cashel had time to let out the breath he'd been holding without knowing it.

"Well, I'm glad to see that," he said as he continued to walk up the slope, breathing more normally now. Mind, he wasn't letting down his guard.

"She could have killed you, you know," Evne said sharply. "You're strong, but she's stronger still, and she has claws and fangs."

"Yes'm," Cashel said. "I was worried about the way things were going to work out."

"Why did you just go walking on, then?" the toad demanded.

"Well, Mistress Evne…," Cashel said, frowning as he tried to understand the question. "She was between us and where we were going. I had to keep on."

The toad laughed shrilly. After a moment she said, "My first thought was that so complete a simpleton wouldn't remember to breathe. Then I recalled that you had, after all, taken the correct course and that 'simple' isn't necessarily the same as 'simpleton.'"

Cashel couldn't see anything useful to say, so he said nothing. Evne hadn't asked a question, after all.

As he came to the outcrop, he saw where the cat had been sharpening her claws on the pine tree a little way to the side. She'd torn the bark into fuzzy russet shreds for near as high up the trunk as Cashel could've reached with his quarterstaff. He guessed she'd been bigger even than he'd thought.

"Do I push on this the way I did the other one, mistress?" he asked, standing a little back from the rock and looking around him instead of staring in front. A slab of limestone wasn't ordinarily much of a threat, but other things in the valley besides the cat might be.

"Yes, touch the patch of white lichen," said Evne. "These are all worlds-"

Cashel set his palm on the blotch; it looked like a face. The world folded in and spat him out the other side of it, just as it had before.

"-where the Visitor dwells part of the time."

Cashel was standing in a forest of moderate-sized hardwoods. The trees were nowhere near as thick as the biggest ones in the common forest of Barca's Hamlet-he could've circled the largest of these with his spread arms-but a tap with his staff confirmed what he'd guessed: the wood was very dense, probably as hard as dogwood.

He looked behind him. Instead of a natural outcrop, he was in front of an ancient stone wall built from squared blocks without mortar. A patch of lichen much like the one he'd seen before spread across two layers.

Cashel frowned. "Evne?" he said. "There at the first place, in the dust; did the Visitor put that mirage there to scare off people like me?"

"Are there other people like you?" the toad said in a mocking tone. Then, answering the question, she said, "No, the race that used to live there used the illusions to drivetheir enemies away from nexi of power. It didn't work with the Visitor, of course; but it angered him."

"Ah," said Cashel. That explained what she meant by 'the race thatused to live' here.

Cashel judged it was early spring, though it felt as warm as summer in the borough. The trees hadn't leafed out enough to stunt the lush undergrowth. There were grasses, but lots of soft-leafed plants as well.

Sheep would love this forage, though woods were apt to hide dangers. Hide them from the shepherd, that is; if there was anything so obviouslydangerous that a sheepwouldn't walk into it, Cashel hadn't found it.

"In a moment!" Evne said peevishly, though Cashel hadn't gotten the question, "Which way do we go now?" beyond the tip of his tongue. "This is a maze, a very complex maze, and neither of us want me to misjudge."

Cashel smiled faintly. It wasn't the first time he'd been snapped at for asking a question somebody else wasn't ready to answer. Though it might have been the first time anybody'd snapped at him for what he hadn't gotten around to saying.

Instinct or maybe the sound made Cashel look to his left. For a moment there was nothing to see; then a clump of small-leafed stems growing from a common base disappeared. Where the clump had been was a round head near as big as a horse's, attached to a body covered with brown fur. It was a good-sized creature, though it didn't have any legs Cashel could see. It chewed sideways.

"Yes, in that direction, I believe," the toad said. She sounded-not hesitant butguarded, extremely careful in what she said. "Past that family of herbivores. Be careful; they can be dangerous."

At the sound of her voice half a handful of other brown heads rose through the undergrowth like sheep when they're alarmed. They didn't look like any animals Cashel had seen before. They reminded him a bit of huge caterpillars, but they had hides like cows.