Goddess of the Ice Realm (58 page)

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.”

Cashel opened his eyes. He, Kotia, and the toad on his shoulder were in the middle of what'd been a bog like what he'd seen on his way to the Visitor. The rushes were sere now, and tussocks stood up from cracked mud rather than marsh.

“The process involved heat,” said Evne. She gave a grim chuckle. “Not nearly as much heat as on the other end of the channel, though. I don't think there will be more Visitors to trouble us.”

Kotia turned to Cashel. He couldn't read her expression. “Now, if you would please lift the cauldron again, milord?” she said. “We'll have callers shortly.”

She saw his expression and quirked a smile. “No, not that kind,” she said. “The display will summon folk from all the
manors to see what has happened. Airboats can safely fly into the basin now.”

Cashel handed the girl his quarterstaff again, politely this time because he wasn't in a hurry to get them all under cover. He squatted and positioned his hands under the curve of the rim.

“I wonder if Lord Bossian will be among those arriving?” the toad said.

“Yes,” said Kotia. “I've been wondering that too.”

They both laughed. It was the sort of sound that made Cashel glad the two of them weren't his enemies.

“Nobody's entered the Count's wing since Lady Liane sent the warning, your highness,” Attaper said as he and a company of Blood Eagles met Garric at the west entrance to the palace. “A few servants came out on normal business, but we're holding them as ordered.”

“As ordered?” said Garric, frowning in surprise. “Lady Liane?”

“Yes, her messenger arrived with your orders that nobody should enter or leave Count Lascarg's quarters,” Attaper said, frowning in turn. “By the Shepherd, your highness! Were the seal and signature forgeries?”

“No, milord!” Liane herself said as she hopped from her sedan chair. Her bearers must've run all the way from the temple: they were covered in sweat but grinning. The coins Liane spun them winked gold. “Say rather that Prince Garric was too busy to be aware of all the details he was taking care of in the crisis.”

Garric grinned. That was a charitable way of putting it. In truth it hadn't crossed his mind to send someone ahead to put a discreet guard on Monine and Tanus. Well, he didn't have to think about that sort of thing. He had Liane, praise be the Shepherd!

Garric took the steps two treads at a time. Guards trotted ahead of him. Lord Mayne, the legate commanding the regiment that'd just arrived from the camp on the harbor, had linked arms with Lord Waldron to exchange information as they both pounded along immediately behind. A pair of
palace ushers holding silver-banded wands high led the procession down the branching corridors. The household staff was no longer the proper concern of Master Reise, the Vicar's advisor . . . but as he ran past, Garric saw his father watching alertly from an alcove, pressed between the wall and a statue where he wouldn't interfere with the Prince's haste.

The double doors to the wing of the palace that Count Lascarg still occupied were closed. In the vaulted hall outside waited a squad of Blood Eagles instead of a doorkeeper from the count's household.

“Get us in!” Garric ordered as the guards straightened to attention. He hoped the raid would take Monine and Tanus by surprise, but there was no time to waste.

The noncom of the guard detail pushed at the panels where they joined, seeing whether they were barred from the inside. They didn't give.

Four men of Garric's escort were already carrying an ancient statue from a niche down the hall. It'd been a caryatid, a woman's torso with a fish-scaled base, which might once have supported the roof of a loggia in an Old Kingdom water garden. As the noncom stepped clear, the men carrying the statue jogged forward and with a collective grunt smashed its flat head into the door.

The panels sprang open; the heavy oaken bar ripped out of its staples and crashed to the floor. The right-hand panel banged into the servant dozing on a stool at the side. He fell off with a cry of pain.

“This way!” cried one of Liane's spies, charging through the anteroom and down the corridor to the right. He wasn't the man who'd led the way into the Temple of the Shepherd. Soldiers, Garric, and Lord Waldron—who'd kept up just as he'd said he would—clashed after the spy in their cleated boots. A group of female servants—three or four of them—gossiping in a side hall squealed and ran the other way.

Lascarg's rooms looked dingy and had a smell of neglect. Garric wondered if that was a change or if the rest of the building had also been dirty and rundown before his own staff took over. He'd been too busy to care, but thinking back he remembered squads of servants working in the hallways
with stiff brushes and buckets that breathed the biting tang of lye.

It wasn't just dirt creating the oppressive atmosphere, though. One side of this corridor gave onto a courtyard, but shuttered blinds closed the portico despite the pleasant weather. Only through cracks between warped panels did Garric see sunlight or foliage.

A servant in tawdry finery—his tunics stained but hemmed with cloth of gold—heard the crashing footsteps and peered from a doorway. He stared for an instant at what was coming toward him, bleated, and ran down the hall in the other direction. He carried a writing case until it brushed the wainscoting and flew free, scattering documents, quills, and rushlights unnoticed on the floor.

Garric didn't blame the fellow. He supposed Lord Mayne's entire regiment was following down the hallway. Maybe the whole army was; Duzi knew how Lord Waldron's orders might have been garbled!

The spy reached the door the servant had run from and jumped inside. Garric followed, slamming a hand against the doorjamb so that he didn't skid on the worn stone flooring. He wasn't wearing hobnails like the regular soldiers, but his boots had hard soles.

Count Lascarg sat at a table with a top of colored marble on massive wooden legs. Before him was a mixing bowl, a water pitcher, and an ornate gold cup whose stem was in the form of a couple making love. The pitcher was full: Lascarg had been drinking his wine undiluted, and drinking it in considerable quantity from the look of him.

A servant—a girl of no more than twelve years—stood beside him with a wine dipper. She stared at the doorway, her eyes so open they seemed to fill her white face. The dipper shook violently in her hand.

“You've come to kill me!” Lascarg said, lurching to his feet. His tunic hadn't been changed in days, perhaps longer. He fumbled at his side where the hilt of a sword would've been if he were wearing one. He wasn't.

“Where's your children?” Garric said. “Where's Monine and Tanus?”

“Go on then, just do it!” Lascarg said. He swayed and fell
forward, knocking over the bowl and pitcher. Clinging to the table, he began to cry.

The girl pointed her dipper toward the small arched door in an alcove. Garric thought it was to a service staircase. The nearest soldier took two strides and kicked it down, staggering backward at the impact. Garric lunged through the opening.

He hadn't been conscious of drawing his sword, but it was out in his hand. The image of Carus watched through Garric's eyes, grinning and poised.

Garric grinned back. With a friend like that sharing his mind, he never need worry about being unprepared for battle.

He'd burst into an overgrown garden: the garden of his dreams, his nightmares. To the right was a pavilion that ivy was taking over; that was the building the ape men had shambled from. Seen by daylight, the altar was an ancient stone bench supported by stone barrels from a fallen pillar.

Moisin, the priest who'd brought the urn to Garric, lay naked across the altar. His back was to the stone. His wrists and ankles were tied to the barrels so that his chest arched.

Behind the altar, two chanting teenagers poised silvery knives over the priest. Their dark hair was cut to shoulder length, and their faces were identically androgynous.

The tabard of the twin on the left showed a hint of breasts, so that was probably Monine. Tanus wore a similar garment, embroidered in colored swirls. Garric could see the twins' faces clearly, but something about the tabards blurred his vision when he tried to place the figures in context with their surroundings.

“Samanax asma samou!”
Monine and Tanus shouted together. They drove their knives down, Monine slashing Moisin's throat while her brother ripped his blade through the cartilage joining the victim's ribs to his breastbone. Blood gushed in fountains that seemed too huge to come from a single human being.

“Keep back, your highness!” somebody behind shouted as Garric ducked under a tree branch on his way toward the altar. The pears were done blooming, but the fruit hadn't set yet.

Moisin jerked against his bonds and fell back, his eyes staring and his mouth slackly open. A lens with an icy purple
rim formed where previously there'd been only the brick wall at the back of the garden. The opening was big enough to drive a wagon through. Within it, muted walls of the same color as the rim shimmered.

The twins turned toward the lens. Garric slashed at their backs: honor had no more place in this business than it did in dealing with ticks and leeches. The tip of his patterned steel blade zinged against the bricks well to the side of where he'd been sure Monine was standing.
Those tabards . . .

The twins stepped through the lens. They remained faintly visible as they ran down the tunnel of light beyond.

“Get them, lad!”
shouted King Carus, but Garric didn't need anybody prodding him to follow. He leaped to the top of the altar, the ball of his foot on the stone but his boot touching the priest's flaccid corpse.

“Your highness!” a soldier behind him cried. “Don't—”

Garric leaped into the lens. He felt a shock as though he'd dived through a hole in a frozen river. Monine and Tanus were ahead of him, their figures shrinking more than a few seconds of distance should have caused.

From behind in the waking world Garric heard, “Follow your prince!” He didn't know how much use a regiment—or the whole army—would be in whatever business there was on this side of the gateway, but Prince Garric had lost the right to object to other people's decisions when he jumped into the portal alone.

He raised his sword high and shouted, “Carus and the Isles!” He wasn't sure if his men could hear his words, but they made him feel better and that was worth something.

“Garric and the Isles!”
cried other distance-muted voices.
“Forward!”

For an instant Ilna felt herself suspended in the crackling blue limbo. Then the
Bird of the Tide
slapped water thunderously, sloshing from side to side. The hatch cover that they'd deliberately left askew jounced half off its frame.

Nabarbi snarled, “Sister take it!” and reached up to grab the cover.

“Leave it!” Chalcus said. He continued more mildly, “The
Defender's
not so tall a ship that we need worry that they'll be peering down on us as they approach. Hutena, you and Ninon ready the jug if you will. Or perhaps I—”

“No, we'll do it!” the bosun said, though he didn't look happy. Well, there was little enough to be happy about in the present situation; save that it was the one that Ilna and her companions had worked very hard to bring about.

Hutena and the seaman together swung back the lid of the ironbound chest. The odor of camphor flooded the hold. Ilna turned to Chalcus and said in a conversational voice, “You brought reef snakes from Sidras's store.”

“We brought
all
the reef snakes from Sidras's store, dear heart,” Chalcus said with a grin fit for a crocodile. “Seventeen of them; and I have great hopes for the result when they go to join the Commander's crew.”