The Warding of Witch World

40 The Ice Palace, North

Audha floated in and out of the world through which she slipped and slid. Around her, she was dimly aware, were walls of dark ice within which shadowy things loomed now and then. Yet she was not conscious of cold. That drawing was fast upon her, and nothing mattered but that she finish this journey.

All which had been her earlier life faded and no longer had any meaning. She could not even remember now the faces of her shipmates, nor of those with whom she had recently traveled, even though now and then she had a moment or two when she glanced from one ice wall to the other expecting faintly to see forms she knew.

One thing she had not lost in this journey, and that was the avid need to see what waited at the end of it. She fell over bad footing, rose again to keep on.

Now she began to sense that she was not alone after all—yet who or what accompanied her was beyond her range of sight. She felt fear once or twice, and then that was wiped from her as a cloth might soothe her sweating face.

She hungered and thirsted, and now and then she absently picked at the ice of the wall and sucked at it. Still whatever drew her kept her going. She had brought no pack or supplies with her, only the spear which served her as a support and a staff, and the knife at her belt.

How long she walked in that daze within the crevice she did not know. The dusky light always appeared the same, as if it clung about her to give her sight, after a fashion.

Then the crevice began to narrow, until at last her shoulders were brushing walls and the footing was slanting more and more sharply upward. At length she drew her knife and dug in as best she could to draw herself forward, and at last floundered weakly into the open once again.

Vaguely she knew that to remain where her exertions had brought her was to fall prey to the cold, but she wanted nothing more than to remain where she was, to let the dullness close down upon her mind and forget all which lay behind, or might wait on her ahead.

Yet that compulsion would not release her. With the spear as a steadying staff, somehow Audha got to her knees and then hauled herself to her feet. Then she looked around.

The plain of the glacier stretched about, but, not too far ahead, a rocky rise split the ice flow. And to Audha’s blinking eyes there appeared a strange glow at one side—almost the reflection of a fire. Though how could such be here?

It must be more of this eerie weaving of thought patterns which suggested such a thing. However, because she had no other real goal, she started for that, taking one shaky step at a time, unable to keep going without digging in the spear.

The glow did not disappear. In fact, it was growing brighter. The girl almost believed she could feel a gentle warmth in the air.

Audha pulled herself around the edge of a rock pile and was met by warmth but not by any flames. She slumped rather than seated herself so she could hold out her mittened hands toward what stood there.

Her thoughts began to move again, as if they also had been frozen, and she was curious. Sitting on a flat base was a cone perhaps as high as her waist were she standing. The light from it did not flicker as would flame, but it appeared to Audha to be of some kind of metal, and iridescent lines crawled around its bulk.

She felt that this was no thing of Power on the level that the talented knew Power. Rather, like a ship, it was something built for a purpose. Yet she had never heard of any such form of light and heat before.

Who had set it here to succor her? Those she traveled with spoke always of the Dark in hiding ahead. And—memory was beginning to return with more force—the icebergs had herded her ship to the foul destruction of Dargh.

“You are a she…”

Audha started; her knife was out. Those words seemed to issue from the cone.

“I am Audha, wavereader.” She held on to what she could of her control. “Yes”—she was guessing at the meaning of what she had heard—“I am a woman.”

“She—woman,” the voice repeated as if learning new words. “You come to kill.” There was almost a disdainful note in that. “Kill—kill.”

The anger which filled Audha and had brought her on this mission might have been released by the heat. Once more her mind was swarming with broken memories of Dargh and their escape—and the death of those others, shipmates all.

“I am oathed by blood.” What was she doing, sitting here in the ice talking to a cone of metal? Perhaps it was only a death vision, as were sometimes said to be seen by those dying, and she really lay back in the crevice near the last Great Gate with no friend-hand to hold at her going.

“Kill—always—kill. Long—so long—to wait, and now kill—kill again!”

There was a strangeness to the voice. Audha’s awakened rage seemed too much to expend upon a voice and a bit of metal.

“Who are you?” she demanded now. She was sure that the cone was only a device for some Power and she must face the thing behind it for the sake of her own sanity.

A word was spoken in reply, but so tangled did it sound that Audha could neither have spoken it nor understood. It could be a name—or a rank—or an office. She hesitated and then tried again.

“I am a woman—what are you?”

There was no swift reply. Perhaps the other was either measuring Audha in some way or else did not quite understand.

“I am female,” the answer came at last. “Once I was—!”

Again a gabble the girl could not translate. Though somehow she received a strong impression of the sea—almost as if for a moment she had stood on board with a fair wind filling sails over her head. Sea… her memory made a small jump. Thar—that thing frozen in the ice—it was, the Power had told them, of the sea. “Female? Frozen there?”

“Not xagoth-slog!” The voice now echoed anger of an insult. “I am…

This time the answer came one word at a time. The cone voice might be attempting to pick out of Audha’s own mind the proper words.

“Ship—wind power—all obey.”

“Officer—or perhaps even a shaman,” the Sulcar girl guessed. But what they hunted was evil. Was she now confronted by some creature of the full Dark who could strike with blasting energy?

“Lost—ship caught—in ice. I will Power to hold me safe until they come—my mates and young—to set me free. Ice holds—I sleep—long and long and long. Then comes a great wave of power—not Stiffli power”—Audha thought she got that word right this time—“but it broke apart all bonds laid to protect. I rise—still there is ice. And when I use the sight there is a ship—a ship of the killers. I have nothing—only the ice—and here the ice obeys my power. I send it to kill—

“To kill my ship, my shipmates!” Audha’s knife was free in her hand. But her arm would no longer obey her; it would not rise from her side. And how she could have slain the cone, she had no idea.

“Now others come. They hold Power known to this world.” The voice was continuing in spite of Audha’s rage, and she found herself forced to listen. “They will be drawn even as you were drawn, slog female, and I shall use their power to win free and back to the world which is mine.”

The girl was breaking through that which held her quiescent, usable to this thing.

“Be not so sure.” She found she was able to control her knife hand now, but still saw no way she could turn its point against this alien thing. “There are those in this world who can make mountains walk and can close such gates to other places with ease.” She built upon her bluff as speedily as she could.

“Yes.” To her astonishment the thing readily agreed to that. “But then I have… you!”

Against every fraction of will Audha could summon, the compulsion snapped down upon her again. She stood up, not by a willing of her own. The cone whirled so that its color flow gave her vertigo, and she closed her eyes.

“Come!”

Her body, her eyes, were no longer under her own command. She looked and saw that the whirling cone had somehow collapsed into a ball. It did not quite rest upon the rock, but rather floated purposefully forward. Then Audha discovered that she could do nothing but follow it.

Her body ached with fatigue and she was so hungry her stomach seemed shrunken into a tight knot, but still she followed, chained by that other’s will.

It wove a way among more and more of the rocky outcrops. At least it continued to project some of its saving warmth to keep her stumbling feet moving. Dark rocks.

Then—

Once more the ball was whirling. From its substance there spun a strip of near-invisible stuff—glass or clear ice—or some substance Audha had no knowledge of. It grew wider, and slanted upward, clearly visible among the rocks because of its continued play of color.

“Come!”

The order brought her forward in spite of all the force of her own will she raised to fight it. The girl felt her foot set on that half-seen way, her body tense with strain and the bite of fear.

It was lifting her up as easily as a leaf caught in a wind gust. She ached to hold still, afraid of losing her balance and railing to those rocks steadily growing smaller below her. Then she began to realize that she was encased in something as stiff as the ice from which she had come, as much a prisoner as any chains could bind her.

Dizzy, she closed her eyes—then opened them quickly again, fearing that she might miss some important change in this unbelievable transport.

Though she was well above the ground now, the rocks still loomed about her. And it seemed to her that they turned ugly, wind-worn faces to leer at her as she swung by them. She summoned what strength she had for a question.

“Where—?” but she got no further. Now that commanding force had even seized upon her tongue. She could see snow shifting from the breath of wind in the heights, yet that lash of cold did not reach her, even when they passed through what seemed a small blizzard.

This was indeed Power, and such as she had never heard described before. The length of light on which she was anchored swept around another tall spire of rock. They were heading straight for the mountainside, she thought sickly, foreseeing her helpless body dashed against that unyielding wall.

But no, there was an opening and the ball which provided her passage headed straight for that. They came under an arch of a snow bridge to voyage across a plateau, and on that stood…

Audha was so weakened by her ordeal that now she saw what she could not possibly believe. Yet, though she blinked and blinked again, and firmly told herself not to be captured by any glamorie, that continued to stand foresquare and the ball was starting an easy curve of descent to bring her to it.

The Sulcar girl had seen Es City, the oldest and greatest of the works of humankind (plus perhaps the talents of the adepts) on the eastern continent. She had walked the streets of all the major Dales ports. This… was far beyond the labors which had brought such into being.

It seemed to be fashioned of the same strange material as produced the cone ball, and the colors which played across it were even richer in hue. Yet there were towers which were not opaque but like glass or the clearest of ice. And, strangest of all, in spite of where it stood—in the midst of this most desolate and barren land—there was a space beyond its outer walls which was carpeted with green. She caught a glimpse of flowers among the low-growing plants.

The ball which had brought her was at ground level now, approaching the castle which towered over her. And the closer Audha was carried, the more differences she noted in its building compared with what she knew. The edges of roofs curled outward and slightly upward and here and there along them were what she first took to be the heads of sentries, small though they seemed to be.

Then she knew them for carvings of creatures which certainly looked humanoid, not monstrous, but who wore expressions of sadness and despair.

Only a very large carving placed over the main entrance lacked that doleful touch. It was the head of what could only be a woman, her hair free and loosed about as if the wind itself were caught in it. Human—and yet was it so?

The forehead was high and wide, with unusually thick brows over eyes. Then the head narrowed to a very pointed chin beneath a small mouth. The nose was low-bridged, nearly flat, and wide of nostril. As Audha stared up at that face there appeared sparks of orange, almost like the tips of flames, in those eyes only for an instant, and then her captor swept her on under the archway.

She was instantly aware of the warmth which closed about her, stronger than that given off even by the cone. They did not cross any courtyard but were instantly in a great hall.

But an empty one. Here was none of the coming and going of servants one saw even in a Dales hold. No guards stood by the four curtained doorways—two on either side—past which she was swept.

Nor was there any dais to lift above the general servants and guests the ruler of this place. Instead, as the hall came to a halt, she was left firm-footed on the floor by the disappearance of that trail which had carried her, to discover she was facing something with the appearance of a broad but clouded mirror. She could see something of her own body reflected there, but also there appeared, farther in, dark in which she could not even distinguish any true shape.

“You have a choice, female of this world,” the voice which had been in the cone again rang out. “I can set you—so—”

Instantly Audha was encased in a pillar of ice. And with that about her, her mind seemed to dull; that which she truly was shrank smaller and smaller.

“Or”—so she could still hear the voice—“you can serve me.”

Audha shivered. She had heard all her life of bargains with the Dark and that no one ever won such. The end was always worse than even the stupid fool who fell to the wiles of evil could imagine.

“Serve you how?” She tried to play for time, to learn just how deeply she was now enmeshed with the black power.

“You will give me the use of your body. I do not know what you mean by the ‘Dark’ your kind seem to fear so much. Who judges what is wrong and what is right? I have been caught in a trap and held away from all my kind. To return to them I use what I can of the Powers I know.

“I would learn more of those with you who have Powers of your own. If they are greater than I—then so be it. But if I can summon more and achieve what I would—then who can judge that I am evil ?

Logical enough, but Audha remembered Dargh.

After a moment of silence the voice continued. “So you have ties with others of your kind and you would avenge them. Do you not understand even yet it was because of your hate and anger you opened the door to me? Yes, I loosed the ice upon your ship. That was an enemy—the kind I followed across the Vors Sea before I was trapped. My blood died also in that battle. Your anger I have known, and have learned the folly of it. But it was those of your own kind who brought death to your shipmates. No order from me set it so. My Power moved as I tested it after many years. I saw a ship like unto those which had driven me here to linger alone—and so I shall send them off and away from me.”

“There were other killings,” Audha said hotly. “The camps of the trappers overrun.”

“Power calls and there was something here which was ready to answer my call, though I did not know the nature of it. But enough of this balancing of good and evil. What will you? Remain sealed in the ice for all time, or give me the use of your body that I may safely contact those of Power with whom you travel?”

“So that you can slay them, having learned enough?” demanded the girl.

“Quick thinking, female—but inclined to be stupid. Trust is hard to come by. I have none for those of your kind who manned the ships that drew me here. But…” There was a long silence, and then she spoke again, “Who is the greatest of Power among you?”

Audha wanted nothing more than to deny any answer to that, but suddenly she found that the truth could be pulled out of her whether she wished or not.

“Frost is a witch of Estcarp. No one truly knows the extent of their Power.”

“Then it is she with whom you and I will deal. I wait no longer. If you refuse me entrance, I can force it. Then you shall become as the slogs, a thing to be used only as tool.”

She was right: in her innermost thought the girl knew it. And she also realized that the choice between the pillar and being a slave had been only a choice. One she no longer had time to make even if she chose.

Out of that mirror expanse before her came a thrust of light which struck her full in the face. Before she could even cry out she was whirled into a darkness so deep it was like being smoothed in the very depths of the earth.