The Ruin (12 page)

She laughed, assisted him, and the garment fell away. She was bare underneath, her silky alabaster skin painted with gray and white sigils.

He saw they were diamonds with snowflakes inside. Emblems of Auril, malevolent goddess of winter, ice, and cold. That too failed to extinguish his ardor.

He guided her to the bier, or perhaps she led him. They writhed atop it, tangled together, first kissing, then caressing, and finally joined.

Chill soaked into the core of him, but the sensation was pleasant, an aspect of the tide of passion lifting him high. The only unpleasant thing in his universe was the amulet brushing and bumping against his chest. It felt too hot, as if someone

had dangled it over a flame. It almost made him want to toss it away.

His hands and arms altered, becoming a glassy blue-white, perhaps even translucent. It reminded him of the moment when Kara began her shift from human to song dragon, and he realized he too was undergoing a transformation. It frightened him, but the fear didn’t matter. It was feeble compared to the urgency of his desire.

Something faded and frayed inside him. At first, he didn’t know what it was. Then he realized his mystical bond with Lathander was attenuating.

Pavel’s earliest memory was of gazing at a rose-and-gold sunrise above the steeply pitched roofs of Heliogabalus, and feeling as one with the power behind it. He’d adored his god his whole life long. Their communion anchored him and defined him. He could sacrifice his will, his very humanity, perhaps, but the thought of losing his priesthood was intolerable.

Iyraclea kissed him, twined around him, held him tight and close in every way a woman could embrace a man, and another surge of rapture threatened to drown his newfound desperation. He silently cried to the Morninglord for aid, and likewise groped for the sun amulet. Iyraclea reached to capture his hand, but, not quite quickly enough. His fingers closed on the garnets and gold plating.

The pendant burned him like metal fresh from the forge, but denying the pain, he gripped it tightly. He sought for Lathander once again. This time, the deity’s response was unmistakable. An inner light warmed Pavel’s heart, driving out the chill.

He was still too drunk with passion to channel that infusion of strength into the precise articulations of a spell. But he could cast it forth in the same sort of raw blast sufficient to wither and repulse the undead. Maybe a servant of the Frostmaiden would find it similarly obnoxious.

He released the power, and the flash painted Iyraclea’s ivory skin gold. She cried out. The spell of love she’d cast

on him shattered, and she seemed but an enemy clutching at him to do him harm, and he only wanted to stop her. He pulled back his fist, preparing to strike.

Hands grabbed him and pulled him away. Their strength was prodigious, and he struggled helplessly in their grip, meanwhile looking about to see what had taken hold of him. Whatever it was, it was invisible, some infernal or elemental spirit. No doubt it had hovered protectively around Iyraclea the whole time.

It dangled him over the balustrade of ice. It would be a long fall to the snowy courtyard below. Standing, Iyraclea glared at him.

“If your lackey drops me,” he said, “I’ll no longer be able to ‘enlighten’ you.”

“l have your companions to interrogate.”

“Suit yourself. I understand the wrath of a spurned woman. Not that I’ve spurned many myself. I certainly could never have found it in my heart to say no to a lady as beautiful as you, if you’d been content to couple and let it go at that.”

“Your faith is strong,” she said. “In time, you could grow into a truly accomplished priest. Since my deity is at war with yours, that gives me all the more reason to kill you. But I suspect that you, with your learning, may understand things the other prisoners don’t.”

The spirit dumped Pavel back on the roof. He still couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there, and he could feel the ogresized bulk of it floating in the air behind him.

“Tell me who you are and why you came to the glacier,” Iyraclea continued, “and perhaps you’ll survive the night.”

“As you probably know,” he said, “Raryn, one of my companions, was born in the village where the ice dwarves poisoned us. He simply wanted to visit his kin—”

The spirit gripped his forearms with all its strength. He gasped in pain.

“You have one last chance,” Iyraclea said. “What do you know about Sammaster and his schemes?”

He studied her. “I’m surprised to hear you mention that name, and suddenly very curious to hear what you know.”

“You’re not here to question me!” She sighed in an exasperated way that, just for an instant, made her appear a hair less cruel and imperious. “But perhaps if I explain, it will show you it’s pointless to lie.”

20 Eleasis-17 Marpenoth, the Year of Rogue Dragons

Iyraclea contemplated the wizard standing before her throne. His white face, composed as it was of living ice, was stiffer and less expressive than features made of flesh. Still, as he sensed the depth of her displeasure, his colorless eyes widened in dread.

He expected punishment, and well he might. Though she’d shackled his will, his mastery of magic and a measure of his intelligence remained intact. With the troops she’d placed at his disposal, he should have proved capable of defeating a tribe of frost giants. Yet the creatures had driven him away.

Perhaps if she had him whittled into a shape more painful and less convenient, it would incline him to try harder. She drew breath to order one of the Icy Claws to see to it, then felt mystical force pulsing through the air. The sunlight streaming through the round-arched windows dimmed.

The members of her court—a miscellany of human tribesmen, giants, devils, transformed magicians, and others—babbled in surprise. Iyraclea rose, strode to the nearest window, and peered upward.

A huge shadow in the shape of a dragon floated in the sky to dim the sunlight. It was already fraying at the edges, and she inferred it was simply a harmless, albeit impressive, illusion.

It still angered her, though. In light of recent problems, she took it for a taunt. She looked around, looking for the impudent wretch responsible.

She couldn’t see him yet. Pale, icy spires and battlements were in the way. But she could hear the cries of gelugons buzzing from the direction of the castle’s primary gate.

She wished herself there, and the fortress obeyed. The window dilated, and the patch of floor beneath her feet swelled and thrust itself forward, carrying her out into the open air. Still lengthening, arching and twisting as necessary, the extrusion hurtled across the fortress to fuse itself with the wall-walk above the barbican.

She stepped onto the platform atop the massive fore-gate. Then, confident her wards would protect her from any potential threat, she advanced to the battlements to view the scene below.

Staff in hand, hooded brown cloak and robe whipping in, the frigid, howling wind, a man stood on the ice. Two of the Icy Claws were down there too, and had leveled their lances to spit him. Yet he hadn’t assumed any sort of fighting stance. Something about his casual posture suggested he was simply talking to the devils, through Iyraclea couldn’t catch the words at such a distance.

His nonchalance piqued her curiosity. Whatever he’d done to rouse the Claws’ ire—it didn’t take much—perhaps she ought to command them to hold off. But before she could give the order, the ice devils drove in.

The hooded man vanished and reappeared in a different spot a few paces farther from the fore-gate. The gelugons’

spears stabbed through the empty space he’d just vacated.

The Icy Claws whirled, orienting on him anew. Iyraclea had the sense he was still talking to them, still trying to avoid taking aggressive action.

The hulking devils glared at him with their bulbous, faceted eyes. Fist-sized hailstones materialized in midair to hammer down on the stranger’s head and shoulders. The barrage staggered him and his cowl slipped back, revealing withered skin. Whoever he was, he was undead. Probably a lich, a spellcaster who’d assumed his unnatural condition to cheat the grave.

The gelugons had their own power to translate themselves through space, and they used it to pounce at him. Probably they assumed the hailstones had hurt him, and meant to finish him off before he could shake off the shock.

The lich brandished his staff, and two bursts of bright yellow flame flared into being to engulf the devils. The spellcaster himself stood in the space where the explosions overlapped, but evidently had no fear of them.

Its pearly carapace blackened, one Claw collapsed. The other, though also bearing ghastly burns, managed to stay on its feet and ram its lance through the lich’s torso.

The dead man stumbled and had to catch his balance, but otherwise the stroke scarcely seemed to affect him. He raised his staff and tapped the icy Claw’s brow. The gentle-looking contact smashed the pallid beetle head like a melon, and the baatezu dropped. The magician then ran a skeletal fingertip along the ivory lance impaling him, and the weapon crumbled into dust.

Iyraclea’s fists clenched. The Icy Claws were valuable servants. Even more importantly, they were emblems of her power, and the Frostmaiden’s. It was an affront for anyone to defeat even one of them, let alone two, especially with half the castle watching.

She looked up and down the battlements, at those who’d assembled to deal with the disturbance. “Destroy that thing!” she called.

Her barbarians flung spears and shot arrows, and frost giants hurled their own gigantic weapons. The lich planted the butt of his staff on the ice, stood still, and suffered them to do their worst. The missiles broke against, or rebounded from, some invisible barrier in the air.

But when the three ice wizards started conjuring, the lich swept one hand through a mystic pass. A high, chiming sound split the air, loud enough that folk made of flesh winced or covered their ears. The transformed mages cracked and shattered into pieces.

On the Great Glacier, the warlocks Iyraclea captured, altered, and enslaved were even harder to come by than gelugons. Truly furious, she chanted in a voice like a shrieking blizzard, then thrust out her hand.

A blue-white beam streaked from her fingertips to strike the lich in the breastbone. It should have frozen him solid, but he simply shrugged, as if to convey that it hadn’t discomfited him in the slightest.

She howled words of power, sketched glowing sigils with slashes of her hands. A bright, ragged rift opened in midair and spewed an immense, streaming wave of snow, an artificial avalanche to crush and bury the cloaked, cadaverous figure in its path. But he raised his hand and the onrushing mass divided, rumbling past to either side but leaving him untouched.

Iyraclea silently spoke to the castle. The barbican heaved itself up, tearing away from the rest of the fortress and reshaping itself into a colossal and vaguely humanoid form. Most of the folk who’d been standing in their mistress’s vicinity hunkered down and hung on desperately. A few slipped off and fell screaming.

Iyraclea sent the giant lumbering at the lich. The fused, oversized fists at the ends of its long arms swung up and smashed down, jolting and breaking the surface of the glacier, and surely annihilating the spindly figure of old brittle bone and decay caught in between.

Finally she bade the giant stop the attack, so she could

verify the results. But on first inspection, she couldn’t see anyone lying amid the broken chunks of rime.

“I’m about to reveal myself,” whispered a calm, oddly accented baritone voice. “When I do, have the construct pick me up.”

Startled, Iyraclea cast about. No one had sidled up next to her, and it was plain from the oblivious attitudes of her retainers that they didn’t hear the voice.

“I didn’t want to fight,” the whisperer continued, “but the gelugons insisted—vicious brutes, aren’t they?–I was obliged to defend myself, and the situation deteriorated from there. I realize that at this point, with your vassals watching, the confrontation can’t end unless you win it. Any other outcome might undermine your authority. So win it you will, but by capture, not slaughter, then we’ll palaver. Agreed?”

She hesitated. His condescension rankled, but thus far, his confidence appeared justified, and as a practical matter, it might indeed be wise to bring this public spectacle to an expeditious conclusion. Besides, she was still curious about who he was and what he wanted.

Accordingly, she’d take him into the castle, which was likewise her temple, the sacred ground where she was strongest. Then, if she didn’t care for what he had to say, she’d destroy him there.

“Show yourself,” she whispered. She separated the giant’s right fist into three fingers and a thumb.

The lich shimmered into view at the construct’s feet. Iyraclea instructed the colossus to scoop him up.

“l yield,” the dead man said. “I plead for mercy.”

Iyraclea had him, and she felt tempted to tell the giant to squeeze and squash him in its grip. But she had the unpleasant feeling that might not incapacitate him, either, or else he likely wouldn’t have risked such a betrayal.

“First we’ll speak,” she declared. “Once I take your measure, I’ll deal with you as you deserve.”

It took a little while to relieve the lich of his staff, conjure chains of ice to secure his wrists and ankles, turn the giant

back into a barbican, and conduct the prisoner to the roof of the highest keep, where they could converse in private. The undead wizard endured it all patiently, but as soon as the guards withdrew, he gave his arms a little shake, and the frozen manacles shattered.

“This has all been more trouble than I anticipated,” he said, “but I trust that when we’re done, we’ll both feel it was worth it. I’m told folk call you ‘the Ice Queen,’ so I assume I should address you as Your Majesty.”

“And who are you?” she asked, trying to remain impassive. Up close, his shriveled, crumbling features and faint stink of dry rot were disgusting, even disquieting. She might serve one of the so-called powers of darkness, might even create undead herself when it suited her purposes, but she still shared the common human loathing for the things.