Goddess of the Ice Realm Read online

  “Mistress?” said the balista captain as he bent to grab her hand. “Princess, I mean! Let me—”

  “No!” Sharina said. As if she didn’t have enough problems already!

  She dropped to the deck with no problem except that her robes flew up. She smoothed them and looked around to see if anybody was laughing at her. They weren’t, of course: quite apart from her being Princess Sharina of Haft, everybody aboard the Shepherd was too shaken to laugh at anything for the moment.

  Tenoctris had a hand on the railing, but she’d recovered to her normal state of indomitable fragility. She said, “Your Cashel is really quite remarkable. What he did just now was....”

  She shook her head, then grinned wryly and added, “Our friend Cashel, and very definitely the world’s friend Cashel. The wizard who made that attack won’t have expected anyone to be able to block it. Quite remarkable.”

  “Yes, he is,” Sharina said, a smile of contentment spreading over her face. She hadn’t had time to be frightened till it was all over. Before she hopped down from the tower, she’d seen Cashel catch his sister’s line. Now with the Flying Fish at a wobbly halt beside the monster, there was nothing to worry about.

  “Was it a demon, Tenoctris?” she added, then frowned. “Is it, I mean. It’s still there, after all.”

  “Not a demon,” Tenoctris said, shaking her head. “It’s an animal, but one that doesn’t belong in this world or time. The wizard who could bring such a thing so far could have opened the way for a demon, of course; but demons are hard to control. Generally impossible to control. Though there’s no end of fools with more power than sense who might have tried it anyway.”

  The old wizard smiled with a mixture of humor and disdain for those who had the great powers which she lacked, but who themselves lacked her judgment and knowledge. Sharina stepped close and hugged Tenoctris. She was inexpressibly glad to have a friend who understood the powers which were threatening to overwhelm the Isles.

  The forces which turned the cosmos were neither good nor bad; but when they were at their peak, human evil and human error had an immense capacity for causing destruction. Mistakes as much as malice had shattered the Old Kingdom; similar mistakes and malice could grind the slowly-rebuilt civilization of the present too deep into the mud to ever revive.

  “Sharina?” Tenoctris said, touching the back of the girl’s wrist.

  Sharina came to herself again; her fingers had knotted so tightly that her nails were cutting the backs of her hands. “Sorry!” she said with a bright smile. “I was thinking about things that we’re not going to let happen.”

  “No, we’re not,” agreed Tenoctris approvingly. She patted Sharina’s wrist again before looking over the scene around them.

  The fleet that’d been arrayed like pieces on a chess board was now clumped like a crowd watching a street fight. At least a dozen warships were close enough that Sharina could’ve flung a stone aboard them. Officers shrieked to their own crews and to the Sister-cursed idiots! on other vessels. She heard oars break as ships fouled one another, and the chance of accidental ramming must be making the sailing masters scream.

  Sharina gave faint smile. She was an excellent swimmer; needs must, she could strip off her robes and make it to shore. She smiled even more broadly. If she had to pull Tenoctris along with her, she could manage that too.

  Horns and trumpets began to call, issuing orders instead of just adding to the noisy chaos. Flutists blew time to the rowers, and on a trireme from Third Atara—not all the royal fleet was from Ornifal—a drummer beat a similar rhythm. The clot of ships edged apart, their prows pointing again toward the harbor mouth.

  Big as quinqueremes were, they carried more of their weight above the waterline than a merchant captain would think was safe or even sane. The Shepherd’s deck wobbled when Garric and his entourage of Blood Eagles started forward. He grinned as Sharina raised her hand in greeting.

  “We’re heading for the harbor along with the whole First Squadron,” Garric said conversationally, nodding toward the Admiral Zettin’s flagship. “I don’t know that we’ll be any safer with ten other ships around us than when we were going to enter in lonely majesty—”

  He grinned again. For the moment he was the brother Sharina’d grown up with, not the prince ruling the Isles with a quick mind and hard hand. Garric was both those things, of course; but when he was being a boy, Sharina could let herself be somebody younger and perhaps happier than the princess in court robes.

  “—but Admiral Zettin made it clear that the only way I’m going to get rid of my escort is to sink every one of them. He’s a former Blood Eagle, you know.”

  “And he’s got the right bloody idea,” the captain of the bodyguards aboard the Shepherd muttered out of the side of his mouth.

  Garric glanced at the man, paused, then smiled. “Yes, I think maybe he does,” he said.

  The Shepherd got under way again. The five banks of oars stroked together to get the rhythm, their blades barely rippling the sea’s surface. On the next stroke they bit deeper and the vessel shuddered, though Sharina wouldn’t have been able to say that it’d resumed forward motion.

  “There won’t be another attack today,” Tenoctris said with a nod of certainty. “No matter how powerful the wizard who attacked you may be, he won’t be able to follow that very easily. Though he is powerful. He is, or she is, or it is. And clever as well.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Garric said, in the absent fashion that people mouth pleasantries that aren’t going to change their behavior in the least. “That there won’t be another attack for a while, I mean.”

  He touched the pommel of his sword, and Sharina smiled brightly because at the same moment her fingers were outlining the hilt of the Pewle knife beneath her robe. They were brother and sister, and their instincts were the same. “Of course it leaves the ordinary business of dealing with Count Lascarg and the factions in Carcosa. That’ll be unpleasant enough.”

  The Shepherd was moving at a walking pace; other warships stayed close by either flank. The harbor mouth drew rapidly closer. The sailing master shouted to the starboard vessel, “Watch yourselves, Capsana! We don’t have a portside rudder any more!”

  “Should we be leaving Ilna and Cashel?” Sharina said, bending over the rail to look toward the patrol vessel still wallowing beside the monster’s carcase. Its oars had just begun to move again. “Are they damaged?”

  “The Flying Fish’s in fine shape, better than we are,” Garric said. “Master Chalcus, who appears to have taken command—”

  There was cynical humor in his smile. Sharina judged that Chalcus would take almost anything he chose to, and apparently her brother shared that opinion.

  “—has decided that he wants to bring the whale to the quay in order to amaze folk. He’s something of a showman, that fellow, but I think he’s earned the right.”

  Garric’s expression sobered. “As have you, sister,” he added. “You saved my life when you shot. And Cashel’s too.”

  “The crew—” she said, nodding her head to indicate the men in the fighting tower above “—cocked and aimed. But they were afraid they’d hit you. I was afraid too, but I knew that if I didn’t take the chance....”

  Garric nodded, grim and far older than his nineteen years. “Yes,” he said. “The risk you don’t take is the most dangerous one of all.”

  He cleared his throat, looking toward the harbor. The Shepherd and its consorts were passing through the entrance, the lighthouse and its time-wrecked twin were to the left and right of them. The crowds on the mole had fallen silent when the monster attacked; now they resumed cheering. The docks of the inner harbor were covered with spectators wearing their brightest and most expensive garments.

  “Well,” Garric said, hitching up his sword belt. “Count Lascarg won’t try to swallow me whole. But I don’t mind telling you, sister, that I’d be happier if Liane were here to keep me from making some terrible blunder in etiquette. Father gave us a w
onderful education in the classics, but he didn’t teach us how to behave when meeting counts.”

  “No,” said Sharina. “But I doubt that matters. Lascarg will know how to behave when his king comes with twenty thousand soldiers at his back.”

  And as she spoke, she realized that Garric wasn’t the only one who’d changed. That wasn’t the observation of Sharina os-Reise, the girl who’d grown up in a village inn.

  She gave her brother a smile—of a sort.

  ***

  Carcosa’s harbor was huge, more a lake than an anchorage to Garric’s eyes. Barca’s Hamlet had only a rocky, steeply sloping beach. Above that stood a seawall, built during the prosperity of the Old Kingdom and the only reason winter storms hadn’t washed the village away during the past thousand years.

  This harbor was magnificent: stone quays framed slips where merchant vessels of a thousand tons could lie. To the south were stone ramps where the crews of warships could drag their fragile vessels out of the water and pillared sheds to house those same warships safe from the weather.

  “It’s a ruin!” King Carus said, the thought despairing and out of keeping for a spirit to whom wrath and laughter were common but sadness almost never. “Oh, lad, I did this with my haste and my anger. Would I’d never been king so I wouldn’t have to see this!”

  As Carus spoke, Garric saw the harbor through his ancient ancestor’s eyes. The harbor should’ve been thronging with merchant ships from every port in the Isles; instead there were less than fifty—

  “Thirty-nine,” snapped Carus. He had a warrior’s eye for numbers and location.

  —vessels above the size of a rowboat. Half of what had been harbor was now a marsh, silted in where the Olang River entered the bay from the north; it hadn’t been dredged in a thousand years.

  And why should it have been? Even constricted, the harbor had room to anchor many times the present traffic. The sheds that had sheltered half a thousand triremes, the fleet that had scoured pirates and usurpers from the Inner Sea, were half fallen; not one retained its roof of red tiles.

  The city beyond, rising in terraced steps up the hills surrounding the harbor, was a half-populated wasteland to eyes that remembered Carcosa when it ruled the Isles. This Carcosa looked as though it had been sacked by an enemy... and so it had, Garric knew from Gostain and Wylert and the other historians of the Dark Age that had succeeded the Old Kingdom. The city had been sacked a score of times, but the worst of the damage that’d thrown Carus into despair was caused by time, not human enemies: a thousand years, overpowering the hand and will of men.

  “We’ll build it again,” Garric whispered under his breath. “Or our grandchildren will.”

  “Garric?” Sharina asked, not so much concerned as... interested. She knew Garric shared his mind with his ancestor, though he doubted she understood how complete the intertwining of soul with soul was.

  “I was just thinking about how much work we have before Carcosa’s back to what it once was,” he said, telling the truth if not quite the whole truth.

  Count Lascarg and the chief folk—the most richly dressed, at any rate—of Carcosa stood six feet above the level of the docks which lowlier residents thronged. “Did they build a reviewing stand?” Sharina asked, her eyes narrowing.

  Garric viewed the scene superimposed with Carus’ memories. “No,” he said. “That was the base for the statues of the Twelve Nymphs who guided King Car to the place the Lady had blessed for his new colony.”

  He smiled without humor. “The statues were bronze,” he added. “I suppose after the Collapse, some warlord or another decided he needed coinage more than he needed art—or the Lady’s blessing either one.”

  The Shepherd slowed as the sailing master and his petty officers snarled orders to the crew. Only one bank of oars was still moving and even those stroked slowly, just to keep steerage way. The rest of the squadron held station; the nearest ships were so close that Garric found it hard to tell who was shouting what.

  “Are they all so angry?” Sharina said. She’d wrapped her arms around her torso, hugging herself unconsciously. “They sound as if they were.”

  Garric put an arm around his sister’s shoulders. The gesture’d probably raise eyebrows among the spectators used to the formality of court etiquette. Nobody’d say anything to Garric—and if they did, they’d find themselves swimming in the harbor faster than they might think possible.

  “They care about their duties,” he said. “The officers, I mean, though the men do too. They’re nervous that things’ll go wrong, and the Shepherd knows how much there is to go wrong maneuvering like this.”

  Sharina reached up to squeeze his hand, then relaxed. They eased apart. “They’re pretending to be angry because they’re frightened?” she said with a grin. “Well, I guess that’s a good choice for soldiers. Fighting men.”

  Blood Eagles from the trireme which’d entered the harbor ahead of the rest of the fleet had cleared the quay below where Lascarg’s party waited. The black-armored guards stood facing the crowd with their shields locked. Gilded wooded balls turned their spearheads into batons for the occasion, but when the monster attacked Garric had seen how quickly how quickly the blunts could come off.

  “Hold up there!” a man bellowed from the water. “Don’t let this ship dock till you’ve taken me aboard! Do you hear me?”

  The petty officer conning the quinquereme from the bowsprit looked down, spat, and said, “Keep clear of Prince Garric’s ship, pretty boy, or you’ll swim back to land where you belong.”

  Sharina understood at the same time Garric did. “That’s—” she said.

  “Right!” said Garric, squeezing between two sailors and the stanchions bracing the butt of the bowsprit. He grabbed a rope coiled from the railing and bent over the side. Lord Attaper, the Blood Eagles’ commander, stood in a skiff which two paddlers—armored infantrymen like himself—were trying desperately to balance.

  Garric snubbed his end of the rope and tossed the coil. Attaper caught it, then dragged himself and the skiff six feet across open water to the quinquereme’s bow. As he started to climb the ship’s side, the lead oar swung forward and swatted his legs away; he dangled like a toy on a string, pulling himself up hand over hand.

  Two of the guards on the Shepherd hauled their commander aboard; Attaper was cursing with a fury Garric wouldn’t have expected in the man. Planting himself on the deck before Garric, Attaper said, “What happened here? I heard there was an attack! I knew I shouldn’t have gone ashore! Didn’t I tell you that?”

  Lord Attaper was a stocky man in his forties, taller than most, and extremely fit for someone whose duties were largely administrative. All the Blood Eagle officers were nobles, generally younger sons from minor houses, but they and the men they commanded were also veterans who’d been promoted to the royal bodyguard as a reward for exceptional service in the regular regiments.

  Garric sometimes wondered how much of a reward it really was. The Blood Eagles got higher pay, fancy armor, and the right to swagger in any military company... but their casualty rate was several times that of the other regiments, especially now that they had to guard a prince who was determined to lead from the front. There was no lack of recruits to fill vacancies, though.

  “And after all, boy,” whispered the image of Carus in his mind, “you’re no more the man to tell them they’re fools to go where it’s hottest than I was. Good soldiers like to serve with a leader they can respect, and these are some of the best.”

  “Good morning, Lord Attaper,” Garric said. He kept his tone mild—he wanted to shout back, a natural reaction like the snarling anger of the ship’s nervous officers—but he knew this was a time to quietly remind Attaper who was the prince and who was the servant. “We went fishing on our way into harbor; Master Chalcus is following with the catch. Now I have business with local dignitaries, so—”

  “It’s too dangerous for you to go ashore here if there’s already been one attack!” Attaper said. “
We’ll—”

  “Lord Attaper!” Garric said. “My duties as prince require me to greet local dignitaries. Hold your tongue now, or you’ll find your duties will involve running the Valles city administration five hundred miles from here.”

  Attaper paused, his face blank. Then he gave Garric a grim smile and an officer’s salute, crossing his right forearm over his chest with the fist clenched. A regular soldier would clash his spear against his shield face instead. “I understand, your majesty,” he said.

  The Shepherd of the Isles bumped against the dock. The starboard rowers had shipped their oars to keep from breaking the shafts, and the deck crew had hung straw-stuffed leather fenders between the outrigger and the stonework. Despite the crew’s skill, Garric heard the ship’s timbers complain. Lightly-built warships weren’t intended to be tied up against stone quays; every extra ounce had been pared from the Shepherd’s hull to increase her speed and the endurance of her oarsmen during battle.

  “If you’re agreeable, your majesty,” Attaper said in a formal voice, “my men will conduct the locals past you as you stand on the dock, rather than you climbing the plinth to join them.”

  Garric smiled with a mixture of humor, amusement, and pride. “Thank you for the suggestion, Commander,” he said with equal formality. “I believe your plan will be more consonant with the dignity of the Prince of Haft.”

  A pair of Blood Eagles on the dockside were struggling to a makeshift boarding bridge between the quay and the quinquereme’s deck. It’d started life as a door and wasn’t long enough to reach the deck safely because of the outrigger for the upper banks of rowers.

  Instead of waiting for the soldiers to figure out an answer, Garric stepped on the outrigger and hopped up to the dock. The ship shuddered, rolling to boost his departure. Sharina had Tenoctris to look after, so she stayed where she was.