Heart of Black Ice

CHAPTER 40

The silver whirlwind of the sliph swept Nicci away from Orogang. She had been so desperate to leave, had tried repeatedly to summon the sliph, to no avail. But now she couldn’t leave the city, not in the middle of the battle! If Nicci wasn’t there to help the outnumbered Hidden People, Utros’s army would conquer the ancient capital. All of the people would be slaughtered.

Yet the sliph had her, filled her, carried her along. Nicci struggled to stay where she was, but she couldn’t break free. The molten silver rushed into her mouth and nostrils, plunged into her lungs, abducted her. She didn’t want to go! She felt as ineffective as a small child battering at an adult in frustration.

Nicci lost track of time and distance. She was helpless, and not in gentle hands. This rebellious sliph was malicious. In transit, Nicci experienced the primal fear of suffocating, drowning. She tumbled along, disembodied.

Finally, after an infinite yet unknown amount of time, she hurtled back to the real world, and there was nothing calm about their arrival. The sliph burst out of her well at the temple in Serrimundi, and the metal froth boiled up over the lip, dumping Nicci onto the ground.

She sprawled onto the flagstones, retching to purge the substance from her lungs, mouth, and nose. She scrambled to her knees, glaring back at the well, and shouted, “Why did you take me? I did not wish to travel now!”

Orogang was on the other side of the land. Even without General Utros to lead them, those thousand regimented soldiers would make short work of the gray-clad refugees. She thought of Mrra and her sand panthers against the ancient warriors, and all those poorly trained Hidden People who fought for their lives, defending the ruins of the city that had been their home.

Nicci glared up at the shifting metallic sliph that loomed up from the well. “I called you repeatedly, but you were silent. Why now? Why did you take me when I was needed in Orogang?”

The creature’s expression was like a thunderstorm as it grimaced in anger, and her hair flowed and squirmed like silver lava. With high cheekbones and thin lips, she had been a beauty in life, but now she looked blank and inhuman. “Because I wished to.” The sliph sounded petulant. “I never wanted to taste you again, nor serve you. You are a traitor. You tricked me.”

Nicci rose to her feet and faced the sliph without fear. “I served my own cause, and your cause was long gone, a failure from thousands of years ago.”

“So long as I exist, the cause is not dead.” The sliph’s sculpted metal garment flickered and shifted. The molded silver of her cheeks hardened, and her mouth twisted in a sneer. “Now you will tell me what I need to know. I fulfilled your demand. I brought you to Serrimundi. Tell me about Sulachan!”

The sliph grew more powerful, more terrifying as she drew silvery material from the depths of the well to swell her form. Her metallic locks of hair thrashed like twisted whips.

Seeing her, Nicci remembered the huge carving at the entrance to Serrimundi Harbor, the Sea Mother, protector of the Old World, a hard yet benevolent goddess that many people along the coast revered. The Sea Mother looked exactly like the sliph. No doubt in some forgotten past a superstitious city dweller had seen the sliph, imagined some kind of deity, and created a whole religion around that misconception. But Nicci knew the sliph was just a being that had been altered by ancient wizards, not a goddess.

Nicci kept her gaze locked on the gleaming woman. “I will tell you about Sulachan. I fought him myself, and I helped bring about his downfall, but it was Lord Richard Rahl who finally destroyed him.”

Distraught, the sliph loomed and listened as Nicci told the known history of Sulachan, how he had forged the People’s Alliance and commanded his wizards to create an army of subhumans to fight the New World, and how he was eventually defeated, bottled up behind the great barrier.

As she listened, the silver woman’s expression roiled and her shoulders slumped, but then she straightened with a bitter anger. “If Sulachan was dead three thousand years ago, then how did he return? Why was he not victorious?”

“He was resurrected with some of Richard Rahl’s blood, thanks to a traitor named Hannis Arc. Sulachan returned with an army of soulless half people, but they were all wiped out. Defeated completely.” Obligated to fulfill her promise, Nicci described the last war in the Dark Lands, how the armies of D’Hara had fought against the undead hordes, and how Richard Rahl had finally destroyed Sulachan beneath the Garden of Life in the People’s Palace.

Her voice had an edge of hard satisfaction as she wrapped up the tale. “Sulachan was vanquished, hurled back into the underworld. Lord Rahl was a war wizard. He changed the underpinnings of the world using the language of Creation, and Sulachan was too weak to beat him. He failed completely.” Her voice rose as she found more energy, more anger and satisfaction. Nicci crossed her arms over her chest. “Sulachan is dead, never to return. Your cause, the People’s Alliance, is no more.”

The devastating news was the only weapon Nicci could use to punish the sliph for what she had done. “Your cause is not only ended but it is useless. It was always useless. Sulachan’s plan was doomed to fail from the beginning. You are the only thing that remains of it.”

The sliph cringed at the information, as if the words whipped her with barbed lashes. The quicksilver face stretched, melted, twisted, and then her mouth widened in a distorted and horrific snarl. “You are lying!”

Nicci stood before the well, adamant. “You know I’m not. You hear the truth in my words. You gave up your life for nothing all those years ago.”

The metallic fluid brightened as if it had become white-hot, and the amorphous molten shape changed as the beautiful woman transformed into a ferocious demon. Her body enlarged and her two arms elongated, stretching into tentacles that struck down with hooked claws. Nicci dove to the flagstones and rolled, dodging the blow, but the sliph shifted her entire form, forsaking her human figure. Four more quicksilver tentacles boiled out of her torso.

“Yes, come travel with me and never return!” The hooked tentacles lashed at Nicci. “I will drag you down and keep you within me forever. I’ll drown you and crush your lungs so that you will be as dead as my master Sulachan.”

A silvery arm wrapped around Nicci like a twisted iron bar, but she summoned her gift to flood the silver form with heat until it ran like hot liquid. She broke free of the appendage and ducked under it, pulling herself away. Her black dress was smoking, and the skin on her arms reddened with burns.

Nicci backed away, giving herself just enough time to create wizard’s fire. She threw the blazing sphere at the sliph, but curtains of silver folded around the fire and swallowed the destructive flame. The metal body bubbled and twisted, but somehow absorbed the energy.

Nicci retreated from the sliph well until she reached the wall of the empty temple. The silver tentacles stretched toward her, as flexible as hot wax and as hard as steel. The tentacles slammed down, trying to crush Nicci, but she dodged again. The blow shattered the stones on the temple floor, and the backlash from another appendage struck a figurine of the Sea Mother inside the temple, smashing it into splinters of stone.

The tentacles grew spines as they whipped past Nicci. She called sharp bolts of lightning and blasted the sliph, searing jagged holes through the quicksilver, which shifted and sealed again. A tentacle wrapped around Nicci’s arm and squeezed tighter than a manacle, while another surrounded her waist, winding so tight that she couldn’t breathe. The mass of appendages pulled her back toward the well. “I will drag you down, and you will never breathe again!”

As Nicci fought, the malleable sliph could reshape herself and recover from any damage. She had already used so much of her gift battling Ava and Ruva, and before that the zhiss cloud had weakened her. Nicci was spent, but she had to find strength or she would die. She realized she had only enough power left for a single strike, but she didn’t dare waste her last chance on another failure.

As the tentacles dragged her closer to the well opening, Nicci found a different target and decided to gamble, hoping it would be her best chance to free herself from this monster. She used the destructive energy to make the ground shake and shift, then unleashed a final heavy blast of lightning—but not at the sliph. Instead, she struck the circular stone wall around the well, blocking off the deep hole. The explosion came from several different directions, and the stone blocks tumbled in. The barrier collapsed, and the well opening fell in on itself.

The sliph shrieked as the walls crashed down like an avalanche. The fallen blocks severed the quicksilver tentacles, lopping off three of them, and the metal appendages dropped loose onto the cracked temple floor. Wailing, the main body of the sliph retreated by plunging down into the endless tunnels. More blocks fell in and closed over the top of the well. Breathing heavily, Nicci crawled forward and fused the edges to hold the stones in place.

She dropped to her knees, but she wasn’t done yet. She raised her hand and used her gift to reshape the unstable stone blocks, softening and smoothing them so they formed an impenetrable lid to seal the sliph well forever.

She slumped in utter exhaustion while her thoughts swam.

Something cold and metallic seized her leg like the grasping hand of a dying man. She kicked out to break free. The three severed tentacles flopped about like headless snakes. They were discolored now, no longer bright silver, but tarnished. The twitching slowed, and the writhing tentacles finally fell motionless, no longer metal, but an oily black mucus that oozed between the cracks in the flagstones.

Nicci climbed to her feet again and heaved deep breaths. The pale yellow light of daybreak filtered through the temple of the Sea Mother. She had gotten back to Serrimundi, as she wanted, although she had left Mrra and the Hidden People behind. And now she couldn’t ever get back to Orogang in time to help them. The sliph well was completely sealed, and she knew she would never travel in that manner again. She could not say whether the sliph herself was dead.

Nicci was stranded in Serrimundi. But there was another war to prepare for.

She heard quiet weeping and gasps of misery behind her, and she turned, ready for another battle. Her black travel dress was tattered, her blond hair a tangled, sweaty mess, but she was Nicci, Death’s Mistress, and she could defeat anyone else who threatened her.

Five terrified supplicants stood just outside the temple. They had come at dawn carrying baskets of fruit and fish as offerings, which they had dropped as they watched Nicci battle the frightening silver apparition. Now the supplicants stared at the shattered statue, the collapsed well.

“The Sea Mother,” one of them sobbed. “You killed the Sea Mother!”

“Your Sea Mother was not what you believed her to be.” Nicci hardened her voice and strode to the entryway. “Now, take me to the harborlord.”