David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

Red wizardlight slashed a knot of crystal curves. Half the structure vanished in glare and molten gobbets; the rest-itself the size of any building in Barca's Hamlet-crashed to the floor not far from Cashel and his companions.

He ducked instinctively. The jagged chunk that would otherwise have brained him sailed overhead.

Kotia stayed at his side without running; she'd picked up the golden disk on her way by. Her long legs scissored as quickly Ilna's fingers moved when she was weaving, but her face retained a look of faint amusement.

Especially, Kotia never looked at Evne. The toad for her own part was singing what sounded like, "Send a flea to heave a tree."

Cashel thought they were both being silly, but it sure beat screaming and carrying on about what was happening the way a lot of people would've done. He hadn't been around toads enough-socially, that is-to know how they usually behaved.

Not all the blows the pair battling downward struck at each other missed. A spear of blue light stabbed Kakoral square in the chest. For an instant the demon gleamed translucent purple; then he was crimson again, carving at the Visitor with blades of hellfire from both clawed hands. The vast room pulsed with the echoing combat.

Cashel reached the cauldron. He could just touch the rim if he stood on his toes, but his weight wouldn't be enough to make it move. It sat on its broad bottom, not on legs.

"I guess then…," Cashel said as he considered the problem. He thrust the quarterstaff out to Kotia without bothering to face her. "Hold this for me."

He squatted, placing his hands under the base where the curved sides met the flat bottom. He was counting on the cauldron to be heavy enough that he wouldn't have to chock the opposite side to keep it from skidding along the floor, but that seemed a safe enough bet…

Something exploded not far overhead. A rain of greenish pebbles cascaded down, rattling on the bronze and making Cashel's skin prickle wherever they touched.

"Now!" he shouted, straightening with the strength of his legs and shoulders both. The cauldron lifted smoothly. Cashel walked forward, placing his hands farther down the bottom as the inertia of the bronze helped to rotate it.

"Yes!" cried Kotia. The cauldron teetered past its far edge and began to fall onto its rim.

The globe rapped out blue spears as quick as a woodpecker taps, striking Kakoral in repeated thunderclaps. Cashel looked up. The demon swelled and thinned into a figure of fiery cloud; the girders of light and dangling objects were clearly visible through his body. The Visitor's globe shrank and shimmered into a ball no bigger than a melon.

The cauldron hit with a bell note so clear and loud that Cashel could hear it through the cataclysm tearing the air apart just overhead. Kotia's lips were moving, but no sound a human throat could make would be audible now.

"Under the cauldron!" Evne said. She didn't shout; instead her words clicked out in pauses of the blasting chaos.

The cauldron's near edge rocked waist high on the inertia that'd carried it over. Kotia ducked under; Cashel followed a half step behind. The bronze lip hung for what seemed a long time, then rang down again. It clanged back and forth repeatedly till finally coming to rest with only a tingling hum to remind Cashel of its presence.

With the cauldron's rim flat on the smooth floor, there was no light at all inside. The roaring battle was a vibrating presence but no longer noise in the usual sense. There was plenty of room inside, so Cashel didn't expect the air to get stuffy till long after something good or bad had happened to change things.

"Shall I provide a view?" Evne said in an arch tone.

"Don't strain yourself!" said Kotia. Her golden disk suddenly appeared in mid air. Its light didn't touch anything else, though: the hollow bronze was just as dark as it'd been before.

"Mecha melchou ael," Kotia said. The disk began to spin, accelerating rapidly. "Balamin aoubes-"

The disk was a shiver of light, a golden reflection instead of a solid object. It made a high-pitched sound-or at least something did, raising the hairs on the back of Cashel's neck.

"Aobar!" said Kotia. Beyond where the disk spun, the bronze became transparent. The crackling flames of the battle lit the interior. Kotia had a pinched look, though she seemed not so much weak as worn to Cashel.

The Visitor stabbed a jagged trident of blue fire, missing Kakoral because the demon was suddenly above the globe. The blast splashed the cauldron, igniting the bronze with quivering brilliance. The flash made Cashel blink, but he didn't feel anything unusual.

"The uses this vessel's been put to over the ages," Evne said, "have… hardened it, let's say. I won't say that it's indestructible, but I don't think anything we'll see today could harm it."

"Did the Visitor make it?" Cashel asked, frowning. He'd gotten out his wad of wool to polish his staff. Touching the hickory always steadied him.

"The Visitor makes nothing!" Evne said. She was angry; Cashel had never heard her angry before. "The Visitor takes and destroys, only that."

"Until now, I think," said Kotia, looking upward with a faint smile. "Until he met my father."

The toad laughed appreciatively.

It didn't look that way to Cashel. No longer did the Visitor jump nervously about the room: his globe was a diamond-bright glitter, hovering and unmoved. By contrast Kakoral had spread into a crimson fog, too thin to have shape. The Visitor's bolts lanced through the demon's substance unhindered, ripping whatever other objects they touched. Many girders had been severed, and the whole structure was beginning to shift around its axis.

"Yes," said Evne. "He has him now."

The red mist sucked down. Being swallowed, Cashel thought, but instead Kakoral coalesced again out of the vapor. For an instant he stood as a giant in whose belly the globe sparkled with evil fury; then the demon shrank again to the size of a man and the solidity of a blazing crimson anvil.

Cashel heard a muffled pop. Kakoral shook with titanic laughter. He raised his head and opened his mouth wide. Flames shot out, momentarily purple but shifting quickly to the same rose red that Cashel saw winking across the valley when the demon first appeared to him.

The jet of fire spread into a channel of Hell-light as broad as a mill flume. The objects suspended throughout the enormous space tumbled downward, untouched themselves but released when the threads supporting them flared away. The walls of the ship began to burn.

Kakoral closed his mouth. He turned and bowed to the overturned cauldron, his arms spread back like a courtier's. Above the demon-unthinkably far above him and racing higher-scarlet flames continued to blaze in the portion of the Visitor's ship that they hadn't yet devoured.

Kakoral straightened; and, straightening, vanished.

"Oh!" said Cashel. He cleared his throat, then ran a hand along the rim of the cauldron. It wouldn't be hard to get enough purchase to lift it again.

"Ah?" he said. Evne and Kotia were still looking upward. "Would you like me to lift-"

"Not unless you want us all to die," said the toad.

"You'd better cover your eyes," said Kotia. She closed hers and folded the crook of her elbow over them. Cashel did the same.

The world beyond the walls of the cauldron went crimson. The light was as cold as the depths of the sea, streaming through Cashel's flesh and soul together.

Thought stopped, everything stopped. Cashel didn't know how long the light lasted; the flooding glare had the feel of eternity. He was squeezing the quarterstaff; if nothing else existed, that did and Cashel or-Kenset did while he held it.

Kotia touched his wrist. "It's over," she said. Her voice came from far away. "The power that drained into this basin over the ages has been voided back to where the Visitor came from."