Through the Ice (23 page)

"That was great, Vidav!" Seth exclaimed. "Only your strength could have done it!"

"It was little enough, after you saved me from the Sateon poison," Vidav replied. "I knew you had risked your lives for me, and endured much discomfort, and were suffering the agony of the flame with me, giving me your strength. I had to give you mine, and the debt is far from repaid."

"I wonder how Nefarious knew to send this particular scourge to this place at this time," Rightwos said as they walked back toward the castle. "You had gone to such an extreme to elude his spy in the elf village, yet he knew precisely where to strike to take out not only you, but me. That cannot be coincidence."

"The Emperor said that Nefarious can detect those who use magic," Rame said. "We four were Chosen because we have no inherent magic; we use magic objects, but that is not the same, and he can't detect that."

"True," Rightwos agreed. "He knows where I am, because of my magic. He would have destroyed me long ago, except that I am now harmless to him, and he prefers to revel in my humiliation. He lets me play with my golems and work my little enchantments as if I were still a great wizard, knowing that I know how far these tokens fall short of my prime. He can't detect what I do in here, but it doesn't matter; he knows its limits. He should not be able to detect the invocations of your objects, unless—" He broke off, looking thoughtful.

"Unless what?" Seth asked, getting an ugly notion of the answer.

"Unless he planted them!" Rame exclaimed. "The spies Tirsa spotted at the capital—they could have put magic tags on those artifacts! Did you check for that, Tirsa?"

"No, I didn't think to," she confessed. "The whole situation was so new, that I just identified them and watched them, without delving further into their memories. How stupid of me!"

"None of us thought of it," Seth said quickly. "We were so busy training, after being wrenched from our home planes, or home forest in Rame's case, that we couldn't explore every possibility."

They arrived at the castle. "I will inspect all your artifacts, and determine whether any have the stigmata of Nefarious," Rightwos said. "This much I can readily do; I am long conversant with the stink of his works."

Inside, they got to work on it, after Rightwos found a tunic for Vidav, to replace the clothing he had lost in the flame. The three others had not actually burned; it had been only sensation. The magic tassel on Seth's sword was clean, as it should be; it was Rame's gift. Rame's whistle was clean. The gifts of Wen Dell the Hermit were clean: Rame's medallion that warned of non-physical danger, Tirsa's medallion that identified lying, and their four rings for seeing in the darkness. That reminded Rame to present Vidav's to him. They could not check the magic tent and stove, for they had been lost in the raging river. That left their boots. Vidav's were gone, but the other three were wearing theirs.

The boots had the stigmata of Nefarious: all three pairs.

"So wherever we went, he knew!" Seth exclaimed in disgust. "We avoided his spies, only to have him send new ones! He knew when you arrived here, Rame; he waited only to see what you were up to, and punish Rightwos for trying to help us!"

"It is his way," Rightwos agreed. "He derives pleasure from watching cornered rats scurry here and there in futile efforts to escape before he destroys them. You may be sure that something nasty will lurk for you the moment you leave the protection of this castle."

"He may have outsmarted himself," Seth said.

"How so? I can protect you here, but only within the castle, which is a bastion against hostile magic. I can give you charms against particular threats, but nothing which Nefarious could not readily overpower. I fear this is a trap for you that will effectively nullify your mission."

"Because he thinks he's got us bottled up—and he doesn't," Seth said. "By the time he realizes his mistake, we'll be far away, and he won't know where."

Tirsa cocked her head. "Do you know something we don't?"

"No, I've just thought it through a step ahead of you," Seth said. "And, with luck, two steps ahead of Nefarious. Look, he can't track us, just our magic boots, right? So if we take those off, we lose him."

"I think you have omitted a detail," Vidav said gruffly. "His minions will be watching this castle."

"And when those boots leave it, they'll follow," Seth agreed. "And when, after toying with the fugitives for a while, they close in for the kill, they'll find those boots being worn by walking golems—while under the cover of that distraction, we will have escaped unnoticed and be on our way."

Tirsa's jaw dropped. "Why, I believe it could work!"

"Can you provide us with boots like these?" Rame asked Rightwos, removing his as if they were unclean.

"Not as good as those, but without the stigmata, yes," the wizard agreed. "The boots I fashion will take you only ten paces for one."

"That will do!" Rame said. "Ten paces undetected is better than thirty that give us away!"

"But if the minions of Nefarious are watching the castle, they should see us depart it anyway," Vidav said. "They would not be so stupid as to stop watching Rightwos just because his guests depart."

"I can help you there!" the wizard said eagerly. "I have a spell to make you undetectable. Invisible, inaudible, unsmellable—for a time. It would not be effective against Nefarious himself, of course, but his minions are lesser creatures, and relatively stupid. It would fool them, if they believed you had already left anyway. By the time it wears off, you will be well away."

"He will know we are coming, but he won't know how or when," Vidav said with gusto. His spirit had returned with his strength, and he was his old self again.

"Aren't we forgetting something?" Tirsa asked.

Seth looked at her. Her striped hair was shining with its original luster, and she was beautiful. "What?"

Yet again you belabor the obvious!
She thought in response to his appreciation. But she also responded verbally. "Nefarious will know where we started from—here—and where we are going—there. He should have no trouble checking the most expedient routes between, and his minions will set traps along all of them. Escaping this castle would be but a temporary reprieve; we would surely be snared again, long before we posed a threat to him."

The others nodded gravely. They had allowed their enthusiasm to overwhelm their common sense. Tirsa was right: it was apparent that they could not even get close to Nefarious, let alone do anything to him.

But Seth was youthfully stubborn, and who cared how Tirsa saw him? "There has to be a way!"

I love it
—
and you care.
"There is surely a way," she said. "We have but to find it."

Vidav looked at them. "I follow your words, but your thoughts are obscure. Did something happen while I was ill?"

We are considering whether to love each other,
Tirsa thought, sharing the thought with them all.
He is enthralled by a pretty body, while I am intrigued by youth.

"Oh." Vidav obviously wasn't quite satisfied with that explanation, but let it pass. "Is there any feasible route that Nefarious would not be watching, or have his minions on?"

"One," Rightwos said. "But you would not care for that one."

"If it's a good route, that's safe for us, we're interested!" Seth said. "What is it?"

"Through the ice."

Seth stared at him, feeling a chill reminiscent of that ice. What could the wizard be talking about?

"Nefarious's castle is in the northern reaches," Rightwos explained. "It is protected by a glacier so massive it is called the Mountain of Ice. It is considered impassable; storms are almost continuous, and the terrain constantly shifts as the ice moves. The only access is a road from the south, kept clear of ice by the sorcerer's magic. Beside it are many bounteous fields that yield excellent harvests, but it is known that at any moment the whim of Nefarious could bury those fields in snow and ice, and all attending peasants with them. All who approach along that road are verified by magic; no enemy of the sorcerer can pass unless in chains or worse."

"Or worse?" Tirsa asked.

"Some are blinded or stripped of their limbs, or otherwise restrained. Some are put under horror spells that make them long for death. No potentially dangerous enemy is allowed near Nefarious."

Seth gulped. "How is it that Emperor Towk sent us out without telling us this?"

"That is an interesting question. Surely he had some reason."

"Decoy!" Vidav exclaimed. "Here we are talking of using decoys to distract the sorcerer's minions from us; we must be decoys to distract Nefarious from the Emperor's real attack!"

"But who would be fool enough to go along with that?" Seth asked. Then, immediately, he answered his own question. "People from other planes, or the backwoods, who don't know the situation. Innocents who believe what they are told."

"The Emperor gave us no truth-medallion," Tirsa agreed. "Yet I fathomed his mind, and found no such deception there."

"Maybe he didn't know," Seth said. "The best decoys are those who think they're the real thing. So if the Empire strategists tell the Emperor one thing, and plan another, that keeps him honest, and maybe leads the spies astray too. The Emperor has what on my plane is called 'deniability.' If something goes wrong, he knows nothing about it."

"I was never quite sure about the Empire," Vidav growled. "Now I think I know why."

"The Empire is imperfect," Rightwos said. "Yet it is better than what Nefarious plans. It is better to support it."

Seth looked again at Tirsa's medallion, where it hung on her bosom. It remained bright. No lies, here. "So what do we do?" he asked. "Go on and be good decoys, until Nefarious catches us and tortures us to death? Or quit now?"

"I do not like the Empire much," Vidav said. "But I like quitting less."

Seth agreed wholeheartedly with that! "So why don't we go ahead and astound everyone by completing the mission? Maybe the Empire's other thrust will turn out to be the decoy, and we'll be the one that succeeds."

"But to do that, to even make the attempt," Rame said, "we have to come at Nefarious from the one direction he won't anticipate, because it's impassable. The north."

"But how can
we
pass it?" Tirsa asked.

"I have no experience with ice," Vidav said. "But after facing the fire, I have no fear of the opposite! I could forge through it at an excellent rate."

"The distance you would have to travel is approximately five thousand kilometers," Rightwos said. "Even with the boots multiplying your speed tenfold, you could make only three hundred or three hundred and fifty a day, because of the violence of the terrain, and storms would slow you further. It would take you at least fifteen days to get there, and Nefarious would know that, and be waiting for your arrival."

"But you said he would not expect that!" Tirsa protested.

"I said he would not be watching that route," Rightwos corrected her. "Because he has no need to. He knows that you will come from the south, which is the most direct and navigable route, and that if you try the north you will either perish in the effort or take longer than two weeks to get there, which means he need have no concern."

"No concern?" she asked, irritated. "Does it matter when we arrive, so long as we surprise him?"

"Two weeks from now he will have made his move to nullify the Teuton Empire, so that there will be no barrier to his assumption of power on the plane," Rightwos explained. "Thereafter your effort will be irrelevant. Emperor Towk will be dead and the Empire will answer to new leadership. Even if you killed Nefarious, you would not be able to reverse the damage; you would only hasten the onset of the anarchy and chaos that will destroy all four planes."

Tirsa paled. "But if we cannot make it in time through the ice, and not at all by the southerly route, how can we accomplish our mission?"

"By being good decoys," Rame said. "We'll have to hope that while Nefarious is watching us, the real Chosen are getting through."

"If we can't, how can they?" she demanded.

Rightwos nodded. "An excellent question, to which I have no satisfactory answer."

"We
have to
do it!" Seth exclaimed. "I don't care if we were supposed to be dupes, the only way we can be sure of saving our frames is by doing it ourselves."

"But if the only way is through the ice, and that's too slow—"

"I know how to make it faster."

She gazed at him. "But your phobia—"

Seth gulped. "Yes. But Vidav walked into the fire, and I can walk into the ice." Yet he wasn't sure he could.

We will be with you,
her thought came, echoed by the others.
You helped me, and Rame, and Vidav; we will help you similarly.

Seth hoped that would be enough. He dreaded the notion of heading into five thousand kilometers—that would be about three thousand miles—of arctic wilderness, though before his death he had enjoyed winter sports of all types. He could ski well, and skate well, and had tried his hand at ice-boating. That was how to make it faster: to use the tools of winter sports to speed up their traveling.

"But we don't know how to do those things," Tirsa said, picking up his thoughts and speaking for the rest of them.

"You can do it—if you link minds with me while I do it," he said. "That way I can teach you instantly."

"Why not teach me," Rame said, "and I will carry the rest of you in my whistle, until I arrive? That way you need have no fear of the ice."

"Because you couldn't make it three thousand miles alone, even with boots," Vidav said gruffly. "You will need my strength and endurance. I have not been much in snow, but I know this: it is like mountain climbing, in that you need more than one person, tied together by a rope, so than when one falls, the other saves him."

"True," Seth said. "And several are better than two. I can teach you to ski and skate, but there is expertise I cannot teach because I won't know what is required until I see the situation. I must go too, even if I wish I could avoid it."