The Hammer of the Sun (21 page)

It was true; where Gorthawer had struck, the skin was milky white, unmarked, unmarred, glossed with a faint sheen of perspiration. She drew his fingers over the spot, and down over the curve of her breast, the robe falling away before them. Colour surged beneath the skin, and she breathed quickly through parted lips; her blue eyes were half hooded by their fluttering lids. Her breast jutted firm and damp into his cupped hand, and he traced the nipple with coursing fingers; her other hand reached out, touched his neck and quivered there an instant, then moved on to caress his neck and ear, his throat and chest. She gasped slightly, throwing back her head, and caught his hand to her. Only then did he try to snatch it away; but she was as strong as he was. Then she relaxed, slid it down across her ribs, the taut plane of muscle at her waist and down, pulling her sash away and parting her robe, down till it slid over soft curls and pressed in between her thighs. Abruptly she pulled away and rose, and stood a moment with parted robe clinging to her damp body, fixed in his gaze, gazing at him with an intensity that blazed like the North-Lights. Suddenly the air was heavy with a scent, whether
it
rose from the water or from her, that stirred his thoughts into a blurred confusion. "Hate if you will, Elof!" she said softly, almost chanting her words. "Only hate fiercely! They are the great twins, Mastersmith, the great unities - Hate and Love, Ice and Fire. And when the force of the stars themselves is spent, when rights and wrongs alike are forgotten and darkness claims all things, they shall lie down together, and become one…"

Loss and misery, drowning in the beauty of her, foundered in her gaze. Then she shrugged the robe from her shoulders and peeled it away, and stood naked and fair as the vision of her true self amid rivers of falling stars. Yet fairer still than that vision she seemed, for she was present and real, though her skin shone translucent as milky ice. When she padded to the steps and down, thigh-deep into the lapping water, Elof caught his breath, as if the heat might melt her away. But the hand that touched him, that coursed along his body and encircled him in its caress, was warmer even than the water, and the lips that pressed on his flared like fire, traced burning trails of it along him as he floated, catching flame in his turn. The arms he closed about her encircled glowing heat, his fierce caress unleashed its flows. And as she pressed closer to him, flung thigh across him and drew him close, he remembered what he had once been told; that deep within the Ice the fires of the earth might still burn, a furnace contained that could burst out with searing force. They closed, and within the furnace she drew him, and as one they burned.

After a time, when the seething water grew still, she led him by the hand from the bath and across the room to the alcove where she had sat, and drew back the heavy hangings there to reveal a carven door. It opened onto suffocating luxury, a wide galleried bedchamber hung all around in gold and saffron yellow, save where a tall narrow window gleamed upon blackness. Against the far wall was set a great bed of silken cushions and counterpanes. Upon a side table stood a pitcher and goblets; she poured him a glass of thick yellow wine, honey-scented and strong, and slipped back into the bathchamber a moment ere she came to join him. Together, sipping their wine, they walked hand in hand to the bed, and there as she lay down he poured a trickle of wine across her breasts, and kissed it away. Among the cushions, as time passed, they twined and thrashed and sweated to their shuddering conclusions, each contesting the other's limits, till they fell at last to the dalliance of exhaustion, and from that sighed down entwined into sleep.

After some time Elof shifted, as the heaviest sleepers may; but his hand fell idly free. Some time later, as he stretched comfortably, his leg slid gently from under the other's, but he made no move, and his breathing soon grew still. It might have been half an hour before he moved again, and that slowly, flexing the hand she had trapped between her thighs, gently, insistently, till she herself shifted and flexed. Then, though he might have slipped away, he lay still beside her, listening intently to her breathing. Another quarter-hour or so he lay still before beginning to inch his way over the cushions and onto the thick carpeting below; once there, he did not get up, but moved on ail fours, reflecting wryly that he would have distrusted his legs anyway, so tremulous they felt.

The door opened as silently as he had hoped, but only when it was shut behind him did he pull himself to his unsteady feet by the frame and draw a deep, shuddering breath. Relief and revulsion surged through him with such force he almost vomited; and they were made all the worse by the inescapable memory of how he had responded to her. His clothes lay where they had been torn from him. He gathered them up and forced himself into them, binding them about him as best he could shuddering; they were half-soaked with slops from the agitated bath, and none the better for it. Then, gathering his wits, he padded swiftly over to the small table. She had extinguished all but one light, and it lay in deep shadow; he reached out gingerly, and touched only bare marble. Panic shook him, but he forced it down; she had been gone only a moment, so unless some servant had removed them… He began to twitch the hangings aside, and behind the one directly opposite he encountered a plain blank door with the look of an aumbry about it. But it was locked, and he could find neither the key nor the means to make a pick. In desperation he plucked loose the heavy belt that had borne Gorthawer, forced the strong buckle between door and frame and began to pry them apart, leaning on the hangings to muffle the creaking and snapping of the wood, and forcing his fingers in between. In seconds he had a gap through which he could thrust his hand, and he managed to grasp the crumpled hide of his pack. Drawing it out through the narrow gap was less easy, but fear drove him; he did it, and when he had rummaged through his possessions he clutched it to his heart in deep relief. As he had hoped, Louhi in her haste had simply scooped all the smaller items into it. Gauntlet, anklets, they were there - and even the two halves of the arm-ring, one still on its chain. That left Gorthawer, and his hammer; by dint of much straining he had the sword, and with it he could just touch the haft. If he could only hook it towards him; if the gap were that fraction wider…

He forced his broad arm into the gap, feeling the wood quiver, thrust further - and fell sprawling among the hangings as, with a crack like a blow in the face, the whole door snapped across and swayed from its hinges. He struggled free and, still on his knees, tore the sagging door aside; the hammer spilled from a dislodged shelf onto the floor, but even as he snatched at it the inner door crashed back, and Louhi stood there before him.

"
So!"
she said, and the very sound of her voice, controlled and calm as it was, chilled him rigid. Still unclad, still fair, she was no less a sight of terror, her blue eyes glinting like the sunken Ice, her lips drawn dead-white and snarling. "A beast returning to his vomit. A sacred trust is shattered for this, for this deathless Taounehtar abases herself! She opens the treasures of this body her temple to an animal, accepts the degradation, undergoes the pollution, the foulness…" Loathing contorted her like a serpent; her voice sank into hissing incoherence, and a ribbon of saliva ran unregarded from one corner of her working lips. Elof shrank back, afraid as he had seldom been of anything; for a moment she seemed wholly inhuman, a moving window onto a landscape bleaker even than the material Ice, yet alive with a blazing wrath. She looked ready to spring at his throat.
Before his eyes, his own hair bristling, he saw hers
, palest silken blonde, rise straight up into the white mane of a fiend.

Against that tide of inhuman fury the blade in his hand seemed an irrelevance; flight filled his mind to the exclusion of all else, a frantic, feral panic. But he could not forget the hammer, and made one wild grab. Louhi, though she was out of reach, stooped even more swiftly, and touched her fingers to the wet floor. It was as if a window were thrown open onto a winter storm. With a shock that hurt Elof s panting lungs all the warmth was blasted from the air, and in the blink of an eye a white film raced like ground glass over hanging and tapestry around the alcove. Over the marble the water from their bath and their bodies crackled to solid ice. The hammer did not move; it was frozen solid to the floor. Elof cried out at the agony in his knees as the ice enmeshed them, and barely in time tore free and fell aside, against the wall. The floor was drier there, and the ice did not follow; but Louhi clenched the steam-sodden hangings, and they stiffened to stinging glass above him. On all fours he scrambled back, feeling the sodden clamminess of his clothes, knowing she had only to touch him and he would suddenly be encased in a cast of burning ice; enough, perhaps, to freeze his blood, or stop his heart by the shock alone. Now he saw that she had chosen her ground even more carefully than he had guessed, and how subtly she had put him at her mercy; that bath had made him vulnerable in body as well as mind. She paced forward now with the measured pad of a snow-tiger, and he could not even rise properly, his feet slipping on black ice beneath him as he scrabbled towards the door.

Suddenly she cried out, a piercing summons, and from outside came the rattle of feet and harsh cries in answer. The door quivered under a blow and flew open, and the gap filled with Ekwesh guards. Against them Elof could lift his sword, but knew it was no use; there were too many, and some had bows. He moved slowly back, scanning the room for some faint advantage, and they made no move, content to bar his way for their mistress. Now the wall was at his back, and all avenues of escape blocked… all? Something jutted against his hunched shoulder, that must be, had to be, the edge of a window arch; but a window to where, opening upon what? It hardly mattered, when swift death was the alternative. He seized the chill hangings, bunching his fists in them, and with reckless strength he hurled himself against what lay behind.

He had a brief glimpse of narrow leaded panes that gleamed with a hundred jewelled hues, before his shoulders, shielded by the rime-stiff velvet, crashed against them and through. Over the frame he rolled and out, clinging to the hangings as he kicked about, feeling them begin to give under his weight. Edged stone scraped against his leg, and he looked down to find a foothold.

Emptiness roared beneath him, the very shock of it like thunder in his ears; like a blow it dashed his breath out of his breast, strangled a cry in his throat. A fly enwebbed, he dangled and kicked upon the outermost walls of that fortress mountain, and beneath him the abyss gaped and growled, its depths a dizzying, smoky blur as he spun. The sudden sweat on his palms stung against the ice-caked cloth, and he slipped down a span, caught himself with a jerk and felt the rending in the material. Swallowing hard, he kicked out to reach the ledge he had felt, and found it, barely wider than his boot; be braced his leg against it to stop him swinging and reached up desperately with his swordhand for some hold above. All he found was a narrow lip of masonry, barely wide enough for his fingers to clutch, no more. With the care of desperation he caught at it and pulled himself up, gasping, against the cold stone. The hangings billowed suddenly and collapsed, falling past him into nothingness; he clung to the stone lest they pull him loose. Some hand above had severed them, only just too late; he could only have been dangling there the space of a heartbeat, though it had seemed like hours. He looked up, and found himself below a lip of masonry; he could neither see the window nor be seen from it. It must be deep in a recess, as proof against weather perhaps. But he could hear guttural shouts and guessed that they knew he had not fallen; at any rate, they would hardly take it on trust. They had only to throw something down on him; water, even…

He struggled to repress the sweat that made his fingers slippery, and began to inch his way along the ledge and out from directly underneath the window, sliding foot and fingers along a careful turn. Gorthawer seemed to weigh tons in his fingers, yet he dared not try to thrust it through his belt, lest it trip or dislodge him; after a few minutes he rested it by its hilt on the ledge and pulled it along in stages, little by little, as he moved. After a few minutes his breathing steadied, and he felt able to risk a look along the ledge to see where it might lead him. To his astonishment he found himself looking at the shadowy outlines of trees, leaden in the first grey light, upon a steep hillside no great distance away. With great care he turned his head, rolling it back so it would not force him from the wall, and saw the same. Then he understood; this was the far side of the fortress, rising not in imperious stages but in a single sweeping wall, and much narrower. He yearned to turn and see what lay behind, but did not dare; time enough when he was off this terrible perch. Then movement caught his eye, and he saw what must be a rope come snaking down from the window recess, and a moment later a lean figure scrambling down it, apparently barefoot, but with a sword slung across his shoulders. The Ekwesh reached the ledge and clung tight with fingers and toes. The sight of it almost unnerved Elof, so precarious did it look; it brought home to him his own plight. The moment the first man was free of the rope, another came slithering down, and after him a third. But the third, perhaps overconfident, or weaker in the fingers, lost his handhold, clawed frantically for balance, and then with a scream that sickened Elof's stomach he toppled out into emptiness. His shriek seemed to go on for ever, and Elof had to steel himself not to look down after him. Another warrior came sliding down the rope, as if quite unconcerned by his fellow's fate, and joined the others; above his head one more appeared. Setting his teeth in his lower lip, Elof began to snuffle along, as fast as he dared; there was more effort in this controlled, cramped movement than in a mad dash, and he felt his much abused leg-muscles beginning to tremble. But the sentinels were gaining, and the leader was already freeing a hand to draw the long sword from his back, the others readying their stabbing spears; Elof realised there was no way he could turn to bring his right hand to bear on them. Gorthawer felt strange in his left hand, that usually bore the gauntlet, but he had no choice. He inched along with only his right hand for support; the leader came within reach, and as Elof had hoped he swung out and cut at Elof with a great sweeping stroke. He brought Gorthawer crashing down in parry, a blow that moved outward from the wall, so that as the blades clashed he was pressed closer against it; but the Ekwesh was driven outward by the impact, his grip slid and faltered, and he too dropped shrieking into the deep. Even as he toppled a spear stabbed past Elof's shoulder, close against the wall; but the black sword was closer, swung up from beneath and slashed open its wielder's arm. The spear flew wide, and its wielder after it. Now Elof took the offensive, two shuffling steps back and a straight thrust that ducked under the next blade and took its wielder between the ribs; he cried out and dropped his spear, but clung there gasping, blocking the way for his fellows. Elof was appalled to see the next one lift his spar and callously dash the wounded man loose; but in falling he caught the other's leg and drew them both from the wall. The warrior behind stared after them, then made the cleverest move, hurling his spear along the wall; but Gorthawer struck it aside. Then, though he bore an axe at his belt, the thrower made no move to advance, nor did those behind press him. Elof, with a sudden surge of confidence, went shuffling along at what seemed like a great speed, and soon left them behind.