The Anvil of Ice (48 page)

The others were gathered on the stairs. "Who is she?" demanded Kermorvan. "Can we trust…" He met Elof's eyes, and said no word more.

Roc nodded. "I've seen her, once, and I know A—Elof. If he trusts her, why should not we?"

"Fair question!" asserted Ils. "She is this Louhi's and not yours, that much I heard. Remember, our lives and many others depend on it. If he is not up there, if mean-while she raises the alarm, then we are cut off. We cannot fly off this tower!"

"He is there!" said Elof coldly, and gazed about him. "I should never have doubted it, I felt it on the stairs. The very stones cry out in protest, every metal fastening rings alarm in my mind. She warned me, wishing me to escape."

Kermorvan eyed Elof anxiously. "You grow strange to me, in this strange place. I would not trust what that lithe little creature said, with the bonds that lie on her soul. But I fear we have no choice. We must venture it now." Ils bowed her head. "Yes, you are right. We are at her mercy, then. Lead on!"

The night hung deep across the last staircase, for the moon had set now. Elof clambered on, step after step, and the warning of the forest rang over and over in his mind,
Something more
! Something he would know when most he needed it. Fear, the chill fear of failure, fanned the dying ember at his heart.
Tapiau, Raven, you unknowns, you mocking powers, when else will I most need it, if not now? I am within my enemy's walls, he holds the girl I love in thrall, I go to face him with a weapon he may brush aside in scorn—when if not now
?

He rounded the last corner, and stepped up into sudden light.

It was no ordinary light of lamp or fire, no healthy glow but a bluish sea-deep gloom, the daylight of drowned men. It came spilling down the stairs through the wide ceiling trap in which they ended, fantastically shadowed by the wrought railing to either side. He stepped cautiously up till his eyes were level with the floor above, and peered quickly around. The apartments here stretched the whole width of the tower, a great central chamber leading out onto a wide curved balcony. Around the walls of the chamber, behind a circle of carved pillars, were various other doors, all closed, and there seemed to be nobody visible. The chamber itself was a mess, a clutter of old furnishings and dusty hangings like the tower below, but intermingled with newer things that lay strewn in heaps about, rich things for the most part, vessels of precious metals, rich garments and hangings, arms and armor well decorated, bright jewels and ornaments, carvings, paintings. By the balcony, against a pillar, stood a robed statue of some white stone, a hideous mask of Ekwesh fashion tilted casually atop it. A chest of coin stood open against the far wall, and above it a faceted globe of glass in a curiously wrought stand, from which the strange light came. And everywhere lay books, heaps of books, stacked scrolls and bound boards laid in eccentric piles. Trenchers of food lay here and there atop them, half-eaten. The air was heavy and stale, with a hint of foulness, as if some beast had laired there awhile. But in all the confusion nothing stirred.

Slowly, carefully, Elof mounted the last steps, and Ker-morvan behind him. The warrior's face darkened with anger as he took in the scene; the creamings, this, of the loot of the city, the small part so far captured. Elof knew the warrior must be seeing not only the worth of it, but the bloodshed, the shattered homes and ruined lives that were the price each piece bore. Kermorvan looked around and nodded jerkily, clearly thinking this a likely enough lair for the Mastersmith. So too did Ils, by her face. But Roc dared to whisper a doubt that mirrored Elof's own. "He was ever so damned particular! Would he dwell in such a sty now?"

"Kara said he had changed! Perhaps this is what she meant…"

"Perhaps indeed!" said a thin smooth voice, though they had scarcely breathed their words in each other's ears. As one they turned to look across the room, to the black gap of the balcony. And there the statue, too, as they had all thought
it
, turned to face them. "But I am sorry if you find fault! These are the hardships of a campaign among allies largely uncivilized. Though I confess I grow more forgetful of the common things of every day, the temporary impurities of life, the fouled soil in which thought must for the moment grow."

Elof and Roc, who had known the man before, could only gape. The voice, once resonant, had thinned to a dry metallic edge, and the rest of him had withered to match it. The skin
on his
hands was white and featureless as the smooth swath of gown he wore, the strands of his hair, once lustrous black and curling, could now have been the fibers from which the gown was woven, lying lank about his face. And as they watched he tilted back the long-beaked mask of the Thunderbird from his face, and it too was white, the beard shrunk to blanched wisps. Even now it might still have been a statue's face, or more properly a death mask, for the same placid calm rested upon the closed eyelids and faintly smiling mouth. Then the eyes snapped open, and they also were white, clouded and milky behind lashless lids.

"Looks like a cave-slug!" muttered Ils. "Slimy, pale and eyeless, never a drop of red blood in him!"

But the Mastersmith smiled courteously to her, and to each of them in turn, as if to demonstrate that he was not blind. "Welcome, Lady Ils, Lord Keryn Kermorvan. And to you, my boys, Roc and Elof, who is yet the Alv I knew. You see, I know you all. Your coming was not unheralded." Ils glared at Elof. "Not by Kara," he said quickly. "She did not know who was with me, or our names. This comes from within the city."

"Not unheralded, as I said. You are an innocent, boy, adrift in a world you do not comprehend, the play of forces beyond your perception, and beyond your childish concepts of good and evil, of rights and wrongs. Does not the storm drown many a mariner? And yet the selfsame wind will drive the ships of many more to safe and prosperous haven. You cannot have one without the other, a fair wind in one corner of the ocean must be fierce in the other. The world is a single great interplay, a linked chain you cannot even begin to envisage, of which even I have only been permitted to grasp a small portion. If great suffering is occasioned here, yet it is only in the cause of ridding life of all its merely animal horrors, that the rule of pure mind be restored in a world cleansed, a fair monument wiped clean of filth scrawled on it by fools, purified by the power of the Ice."

Kermorvan snarled something and pushed forward, but Elof held him back. "Throughout my growing years I heard this and much like it from you. Fine words! Fine enough, almost, to dignify a lust for wealth and power, bought even at the expense of your own humanity, I see. Almost, but not quite. The snare that caught me then, I will not step into a second time. But even if all you said were true, I still would prefer my childish notions, and my duty to those who have befriended me. I will never sacrifice them to some invisible future good, some fair wind elsewhere. Where the storm threatens, let it beware!"

The Mastersmith's blank face twisted a moment. "You have sacrificed them anyway. They who would fight the storm must endure its wrath!" And reaching swiftly among the heavy folds of the robe, he caught hold of a scabbard and hilt. So it was that out of the deeps of the years, the most fell work of Elof s own hands arose to confront him.

It gleamed in the wintry light, that sword, its flowing, enigmatic patterns bright as the day when he had deemed his work done, and exulted without a thought for what might thereafter befall. And as it shone before his eyes it seemed to him independent of he who brandished it. He saw it more as he would his own face distorted in a mirror crazed and shattered, a facet of himself malformed and twisted. It was in revulsion only that he thrust the gauntlet up to blot it from his sight, but that served him well. For no greater fear or horror descended upon him, yet Ker-morvan, barely within the blade's influence, was convulsed as by a bolt of lightning. The gray-gold sword twisted aimlessly in his hand. His limbs jerked, his spine snapped rigid, arching his head back, and from wide-stretched lips he shrieked aloud, terribly loud, a racking, tearing sound of animal terror and agony. He stumbled back, clutching at his head as if hot metal ran through it, utterly unmanned; he blundered into the wall and rebounded against Ils and Roc, so perhaps shielding them somewhat, though they cowered away as one would from the sudden opening of a furnace door. But they caught the tall man as he fell, bore him up swiftly and dragged him kicking back to the steps. His scream had done its work, nonetheless, for from the dark below echoed shouts, slamming of doors, the ring of steel-shod feet upon the stair.

The sword shifted its direction, wavered away from Elof and toward his friends, Kermorvan gray-faced and furi-ous, struggling to rise. But Elof sprang forward after it, keeping himself between it and them, and shouted back over his shoulder, "Get you below, and him with you! You might yet make the door—"

"No chance!" shouted Ils. "They come! We will help you—"

"
You cannot
! Hold the stair, cut your way out if you can! This is for me alone!" He saw her nod and swing herself down the steps, Kermorvan stumbling after her, and from below there came the sound of blade on blade, and Roc's angry bellow.

Now the sword swung no longer, but pointed straight at Elof, and he felt the sheer power of it pour about him as if it were a rapid he was fording, ever threatening to sweep him off his feet. Desperately he closed his fingers in an attempt to catch it in, but there was too much, too strong a flow, it spilled between his fingers and poured its frothing waves of fear and horror into him. His hair bristled, his heart hammered, it seemed that the floor split at his feet and an abyss gaped there, himself swaying on its brink, hearing the shrieks that echoed upward. He struggled against the current, gasping, choking like a drowning swimmer, and his sight began to dim. Images of terror swirled up before his eyes, shapeless at first, then shadows that gathered and coalesced, flying at him like dark wings riding a stormwind.

He flung his own sword up against them, and for a moment it too became a thing of horror in his hand, dripping with marsh-slime that became the foulness of a corpse split open, rotting and reeking down across his hand, pooling about his ankles, bogging down his steps. But only for an instant. Another image rose up around the marsh-blade, the hand that had first wielded it and clutched it down into a mighty death, that hand no longer blackened and shrivelled but strong, fell, resolute, the hand of a man hewing foes down in droves before him even as his life ebbed and the marsh ensnared his limbs. Elof had taken that blade as his, set himself within it, and with it he had, all unknowing, taken on him its weighty inheritance. He could not now dishonor it by doing less.

He fought forward, thrusting himself into the heart of the terror he faced. He dimly heard the sounds echoing in the stairwell, hoarse shouts, the dull hammering of arms, the harsh rasping gargle of a life flowing away. All the black dreams he had dreamed came flooding back against him then, all the visions his fever had conjured up, sweating there among the soot of his forge upon the Marshlands—the clawed fingers, the bodies in the wagon, Ingar crumbling away under his hand, Kara a mocking wraith, all mingling into one fearful shape of death and decay, and endless liquescence of life.

He felt as if he could endure no more, as if his heart and mind and will were tendons in a tortured hand, stretched to their limits and beyond, only waiting the last vicious twist to snap in consummate agony. But in none of the fearful things did he find that final force. They came not new to him, as they might have. In his trials and suffering he had faced them, and the worst of him they embodied, once before. And though they still clawed at the very depths of him, yet he found he could face them now. In grief and regret he leaned forward against them as he might into a gale, and like leaves they scattered around him, stuck a moment and were whirled away. He could acknowledge the guilt that was in him, and balance it against what else he found there. He could guess at a price to be paid, make a clear decision. He was sure of himself at last.

Something more?

He struck forward still like a swimmer, on, on, and felt the rush of horror falter an instant, the darkness ebb. His eyes cleared suddenly, and he found himself staring almost into the Mastersmith's face. Beneath the weird mask's frame it was its own gray mask of fear, that Elof should win so close. The pale man staggered back, waving the sword wildly to fend him off, and then in a paroxysm of utter panic and desperation he swung up the patterned sword and struck with all the force in his smith's arm, straight at Elof's unshielded body below his breastbone's end. And thrust him through.

Elof folded forward around the surge of icy, incredible agony, staring foolishly down at the thing that invaded his body. Detached by pain, his mind floated free, watching his own red blood spill out along the blade as an idle spectacle, an interesting exercise, seeing it flow among the patterns he himself had set there, linking them, uniting them at last into a script he could read, a pattern he could understand, that leaped fully formed into his mind. He knew at last the whole meaning of the symbols he had set in the sword.

And dimly, through his roaring ears, he heard an exultant yell from the stairs, a cry of sheer joy from Ils's powerful lungs, and the sound of a body clattering down steps. Roc too was shouting, and above all there rose like a vengeful trump the bitter cry "
Morvan morlanhal
!"