Goddess of the Ice Realm (68 page)

She turned her palms up. “To overcome her, you say. To kill Her, I suppose.”

“We do not know,” said the male. “But we have watched you, mistress.”
“We could not overcome Gaur,” said the female, “but we saw you slay him.”

Ilna grimaced. “From what you say, Gaur's mistress will be a worse knot to untangle,” she said. “And Gaur wasn't an easy one.”

She shrugged. “Still, we said we'll do what we can. How do we reach Her?”

“We will open a gateway for you, mistress,” said the Rua together. They turned and plunged off the cliff edge, rising on the updraft like dandelion seeds.

Ilna watched, frowning in puzzlement as the Rua spiraled to join their kin in the high skies. The air before her took on a faint opalescence in the same shape as the mirror of blue topaz in Gaur's den.

“Ah!” she said. “Chalcus, the pattern of their flight—all of them together? Do you see what they're weaving?”

“No, my heart,” the sailor said in a tone as silvery as the
sring!
of his sword against the scabbard as he drew it. “But I think shortly there may be use for the things I
do
understand.”

The corridor ahead forked; for the seventh time, Garric thought, though he doubted he could recall the particular pattern of the branchings that'd get them out of this place by the portal they'd entered through. He supposed there was still a solid line of men behind him, marking the route better than the white pebbles of the folktale.

Carus grinned in his mind. Right, worrying about getting back could wait till they'd survived getting to where they were going.

Tenoctris's trail of light bent to the right, down the branch whose walls glowed red like those of the corridor Garric was in at present. In the middle distance the sullen crimson became a dot of purple.

“Prester?” he said to the noncom on his right; he'd learned the men's names as they marched together into frozen Hell. “How far do you guess we've come? It must be miles.”

“That's Pont you want, your highness,” Prester said. He leaned forward and called to his partner on Garric's left, “Pont! The Prince here wants t' know how far we come.”

“Three thousan seven hunnert fiffee three,” Pont said. “Paces. Four, five . . .”

“Got it, Pont,” said Garric, breaking in on what was likely to be a very long sequence as Pont called out a number every time his right heel came down.

“Pont was in the engineering section back when he was a nugget,” Prester explained with a proprietorial nod. “His job was route measurer. The habit's stuck with him all these years.”

A thousand double paces equaled a mile, so they'd come three and three-quarters miles. Garric had no way of guessing how much farther they had to go. Maybe he should've made commissary arrangements before he went charging through that hole in the world. . . .

“Your highness, there's something in the tunnel ahead of us!” called the Blood Eagle who'd taken charge of the front rank. He pointed his spear forward.

“Right,” said Garric, peering past the shields and helmets of the men ahead of him. He was taller than the pair directly in front, but they'd both slipped their horsehair crests into the slots on top of their helmets during the past half hour of uneventful march. Their care was commendable, but at the moment Garric wished he'd had a less-obstructed view. Not that what he saw was anything he looked forward to meeting.

There hadn't been any fighting since they'd killed the giant scorpion. Garric hadn't consciously expected that to be the last, but when he saw the creature ahead he realized that emotionally he'd hoped that everything would be peaceful. Now reality clattered toward him on more legs than he could count. He felt as though he'd been dropped into ice water.

“Your highness,” said Lord Escot, turning to look back at Garric past the cheek piece of his silvered helmet. Escot was commander of the second regiment to enter this ice world.

He'd trotted up through the column to the front to take the place of Lord Mayne. “It's time for you to retire.”

He was a landholder from Northern Ornifal, cut from the same cloth as Lord Waldron though thirty years younger. He wasn't an officer Garric had ever warmed to; so far as he could recall, Escot had never said a word about anything but horses save in response to a direct question.

“Aye, lad,”
agreed Carus in his mind.
“He's thick as two short planks. But he's here where he belongs, and how smart do you have to be to stand in the front rank in a business like this?”

Point taken,
agreed Garric. Aloud he said, “Carry on with your duties, milord. I will do the same—from here, where I can see what's going on.”

“Oh, aye, lad,”
said Carus with a savage grin.
“And I suppose you'll take off your sword now and give it to one of the fellows who're fighting while we stand by and watch?”

I've too much of your blood for that,
thought Garric as he grinned in response to his ancient ancestor. Escot took the expression as meant for him and blinked in surprise. “Of course, as you say, your highness,” he blurted and faced front again.

“Silly twit,” said Prester in an undertone.

“He'll do to stop a spear, though,” replied Pont. Apparently counting paces was so ingrained that it didn't interfere with him carrying on a conversation—or fighting, for that matter. “Bloody officer.”

From the way the two noncoms talked, Garric decided they'd promoted
him
to line soldier . . . and that
was
a promotion, so far as Pont and Prester were concerned.

What had been a purple blur when Garric's column entered this corridor became a circular volume beneath a dome whose surface was ribbed for strength. Eight corridors merged in it, including the one the troops were in.

The rotunda was about thirty double paces across, and as best as Garric could tell in a quick glance the room's ceiling was the same height as the diameter. Threads of red and blue light twisted about one another at the core of the walls and of the piers framing the arched corridor mouths, turning the ice violet. The ice floor beneath must have been feet or even
scores of feet thick, but again Garric saw monsters twisting in the phosphorescent water.

The creature coming down the corridor directly across the rotunda was more like a centipede than anything else Garric had seen, and more like a nightmare than anything alive. It had side-hinged mandibles and a chitinous maw whose interior was a mass of jagged plates rotating against one another like millstones.

The thin azure guideline passed through the monster. The only way to where Garric needed to go was by the same route: through the monster.

“Double time!” he shouted. He and his troops might be able to block the centipede before it got to the rotunda where each of its pincer-tipped legs was a deadly weapon.

“Charge!” cried Lord Escot, slanting his sword forward and breaking into a run. As Carus said, Escot was bright enough for his present position.

The troops were happy to run also. The ranks spread to either side as the column entered the rotunda where there was room. The clear floor was so hard that hobnails skidded instead of digging in. It was much like running on stone, because the extreme cold also meant the footing was dry and not nearly as slippery as ice normally would be.

The blended wizardlight had an oppressive weight. The huge room seemed dimmer than the corridors feeding it, though that was an illusion: Garric could see the men around him more clearly than he had before.

He could also see deep into the ice walls. The vast pillars supporting the dome were hollow. Within them were plants whose roots grew through the ice floor in broad nets to reach the sea beneath. Their twisted stems and the leaves spreading against the inner walls of their enclosures struck Garric with a pathos that he couldn't understand until he caught a glimpse of a flower that wasn't hidden by the foliage. It was shaped like the red mouth of a woman screaming, and the petals moved as he looked at them.

The center of the rotunda allowed Garric to look down all eight corridors. He had his sword out, but as much as he wanted to kill something to wipe the image of the plants from his mind he knew he needed to act as commander
rather than swordsman for the time being. His men depended on him, and so did the kingdom.

“Hold up!” he shouted to his informal bodyguards. Prester and Pont obediently halted, facing back with their shields outthrust to fend away the troops pouring into the rotunda at a dead run. If the noncoms had an opinion about what Garric was doing, they kept it to themselves.

Glittering figures marched toward the rotunda down the second corridor to the left of Garric's column. They were too distant for him to see details beyond the fact that the walls' blue glow sparkled on scores of sharp points.

“Well, you didn't think they were going to send dancing girls to greet us, did you?”
laughed Carus.
“Mind, I remember places where I lost more troops to what they caught from the women than I did to the spears of the men.”

A junior officer was running past. He was armed in Blaise fashion and affected flaring mustachios that he had to fill out with a fall because he was too young to grow proper ones himself.

“Ensign!” Garric said. He pointed to the startled youth, then the approaching enemy. “Yes, you! Take a hundred men and block that blue corridor. Don't go any distance down it, just far enough that you've got a little room to retreat without letting them into this rotunda.”

“Sir?” said the ensign, gaping like a cod at a fishmonger's.

Swearing silently, Garric looked around for another officer in the rush of troops. Prester shouted, “Suter! Get your ass over here to his highness!”

A husky warrant officer trotting past—he must have been fifty if not older—turned in mid-stride. “Who do you think
you
are giving me orders, Prester?” he said.

“Prince Garric here wants you to help the young gentleman—” Prester nodded to the blinking ensign “—organize a company to block that tunnel there.”

“Sister take me!” Suter said. He slapped his spear against his shield boss in salute to Garric. “Yes
sir,
your highness!”

Turning to the stream of troops, Suter stretched out his spear as a baffle and bellowed, “All right, soldiers! We got a job to do! Vedres, start'em down that corridor. I'll be up with
you quick as I can. Sir—” to the ensign “—you just follow Vedres there and he'll put you right.”

The ensign turned and jogged off with the file closer who was presumably named Vedres. The youth looked immeasurably relieved to be getting out of Prince Garric's presence.

“Silly twit,” muttered Pont, eyeing the ensign's back. Suter was shunting the incoming stream of soldiers toward the corridor where Vedres formed them in ranks about a hundred feet down from the rotunda. The ensign—whatever his name was—struck a pose in the front rank, which was actually quite a useful thing to do. A young officer like that had no real purpose except to be brave and thereby to provide a spiritual anchor to the line soldiers who'd be doing the fighting.

“Yeah, but he'll serve to stop a spear,” said Prester with a complacent smile. “And if that bunion Suter stops another one, well, that's cream with my strawberries.”

Garric tried to swallow his smile. Then deciding that this was as good a place for humor as any in the world, he let his grin spread. When the noncoms grinned back at him, he laughed out loud while in his mind Carus laughed just as merrily.

Lord Escot and his troops met the centipede a short spearcast before the creature reached the rotunda. “Loose!” called the Blood Eagle in the front rank, his voice echoing over the crash of boots and the centipede's pincered feet.

The spears flew in a ragged volley, wobbling because they were thrown by running men. Even so most struck their target because the centipede's armored body nearly filled the tunnel. Some glanced off, but half-a-dozen missiles cracked the monster's headplate and penetrated deeply enough to dangle.

The centipede continued forward with the relentless certainty of water gushing through a pipe. The creature towered over the men as they charged home with drawn swords.

“We'll need to—” Garric said, his stomach suddenly knotting.

They'd have to meet the centipede in the rotunda and attack it from all sides, because it was obvious that no number of men could stop the creature in a head-on encounter. The
casualties from that—the men torn to pieces by the pincers and flung across the rotunda—would be in the hundreds.

“Garric!” Liane called from behind him.

Garric spun, his face going coldly blank to hide the horror in his heart. He'd known that one of those bodies the centipede mangled might be his, but that was part of his job. Liane would be back where she and Tenoctris could return through the portal if things went disastrously wrong. She'd be
safe.

But instead here she was, running toward him at the head of a forest of pikes. “I brought a company of the phalanx!” she explained, gasping for breath as she clasped arms with him. “The s-soldiers made an aisle for me so that I could get them through. I thought you might need them!”

“By the Shepherd! we do,” Garric said. He glanced over exactly what Liane had brought him.

Master Ortron, commander of half the phalanx, stood facing the other way as he formed his men into ranks in the rotunda. Ortron was a commoner who knew that the officers and men of the older regiments looked down on his men. The pikemen doubled as oarsmen in the fleet, and they'd been recruited from farm laborers and the urban poor instead of the yeoman farmers who made up the heavy infantry.

Ortron and the men under him were convinced that their phalanx could cut the heart out of any army in the Isles; and on the proper terrain, they were right. This might be an even better opportunity to test the effectiveness of their twenty-foot pikes than against human enemies.