Sworn To Conflict: Courtlight #3 (15 page)

As the sun’s glare caused her to squint her eyes, she couldn’t help but feel a shiver. She thought to discount it, but the shiver had been different. Not one of cold, although she certainly was cold, but a shiver that the others liked to call a mage shiver. One of warning. She fought to keep from panicking at the thought. Carefully, Ciardis opened her mage sight and reduced the barriers protecting her mage core. She pushed out her powers into the empty air. All she felt in return were the cores of the mages in her surrounding party. The more powerful the gift, the easier it was for her to respond to the bearer. Sebastian’s was so close to her own that she knew it without even thinking about it. Next, General Barnaren’s fiery mix of lightning and fire called to her the loudest, with Vana coming in a close second, and, to her surprise, Lady Serena’s sphere of influence a close third. She wanted to look at Serena’s power more; she was just a projector, how could she amass such a gift with such a small talent? But she focused on her priority first: looking for a mage gift outside of those who rode with her. She didn’t see anything else, not a whisper or a hint. She closed her sight reluctantly, thinking it must have been a mistake.

Kane rode up beside her. “What is it?”

She glanced at his face. “What is what?”

“Your back is stiffer than a porcupine’s quills. What do you see?”

Ciardis bit her lip and said, “It could be nothing.”

“And it could be everything.” Privately she agreed with him, but she wasn’t about to tell him that she had felt a mage shiver when she couldn’t discern a hint of it now. Instead she went with another subject that was giving her growing unease.

“The land is too still. No noise breeches its silence. No animals cross its grounds.”

Kane stiffened beside her and cast his warrior’s gaze around them. “You’re right.”

He whistled sharply. Every soldier’s head in front of them turned toward them. Kane kicked his horse forward as the major turned around to meet them. Ciardis felt her stodgy mare suddenly gain some energy and trot to catch up with Kane’s. She felt like a lumpy sack of potatoes on a wheelbarrow as she bounced up and down.

And then the snow began to shift underneath her mare’s hooves. And it wasn’t just her mare, either. Ciardis struggled to keep her seat as the mare skidded while trying to gain traction, and she watched in horror as horses reared up all around her while the riders of her party tried to calm them. But they couldn’t calm their steeds, and she had a fair idea why. As far as her eye could see the snow was buckling across the snowy white plain. Ciardis watched in horror as the land caved in below them and she felt her and her horse’s body drop.

The screams of the horses, the shouts of the humans, the roars of the frost giants, and the silence of the land around them pressed against her ears as she prayed to the gods. Then they were dropping through the snow beneath the horses’ hooves and through the hole as the earth split asunder and a gaping mouth opened to receive them.

As Ciardis fell she felt her body physically disconnect from the mare below her, her heart was in her throat. She thought she would die. Fear and regret raced through her. She regretted a lot of things she’d left unsaid. And then her body straightened and her descent slowed. Not enough to stop, but enough to land softly enough that she didn’t break bones. Around her she heard shouts of wonder from the men and frost giants as they, too, abruptly stopped their descents.

But the horses didn’t stop. Their plummets ended in a wet, sickening
crunch
that echoed in the surrounding cavern with their terrified neighs. She breathed hard and knelt down. She still couldn’t see anything, but she could feel. Cautiously, on her hands and knees, she felt around. The first thing she noticed was that the surface she knelt on felt cold—as cold as ice, and wet. And then she heard a shout from far to her right.

“Don’t step off! There’s a ledge!”

“A ledge?” shouted another voice.

“Get us out of here.” That high-pitched voice belonged to Serena.

“How much further down is the bottom?” came a call from farther up.

“Can you see?” said a frost giant’s deep voice.

“
Silence
,” said the general in a roar.

In a more normal tone, he continued, “Prince Heir Sebastian, are you with us?”

“I am,” said voice from her left. She started breathing again. She hadn’t even known she’d stopped.

“Ciardis? Warlord Inga?”

“Here,” confirmed Ciardis, shaken.

“I am. As are all of my people,” said Inga. Her voice sounded disgusted. Ciardis wasn’t sure if it was because of the predicament they found themselves in or because they had all been caught unawares.

“Roll call,” ordered the general. Every soldier was present, including a lone female whose voice Ciardis recognized as Vana’s as she sounded off a number.

Then light began to spread throughout the chasm. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere until the darkness was pushed back and Ciardis could see that they were in a cavern. The walls were made of ice—sheets of it hundreds of meters thick. The light bounced off of the reflective walls of ice as she looked up in wonder. Slowly she stood, stiff with apprehension. The light not only revealed that they all stood in an ice cavern but that each person stood on an individual pedestal. Some pedestals were higher than others, like stepping stones in a river, but all of them were made of pillars of solid ice. Sebastian stood on a pillar to her far left and General Barnaren stood on the pillar closest to her, which allowed him to look down on her from six feet above.

She breathed out slowly, watching her breath frost in the cold air, and slowly took a step forward toward the edge of her pedestal. She could see now that its diameter was twice her size, maybe ten feet total. Enough room for her to maneuver but not nearly enough that she felt safe. Falling off the edge wasn’t an option. She took one fearful look and scrambled back. Fifty to forty feet below them lay the crushed forms of all of their horses. Each one a distinct mass of blood and crumbled body fallen far apart from the other.

It was a curious thing, their fall. They stood on pedestals of ice that were cold but not slick enough for its inhabitants to slip off. Even more curious was their appearance on said pedestal, distanced from their fallen mounts with each individual alone on their own column of ice.

It was clear they were stuck, and as she turned around to see her companions she saw that they knew it, too.

Minutes passed as they all waited in silence.

Finally a soldier called, “Sir?”

“Yes,” answered Barnaren.

“I believe I have an idea, sir.”

“Let’s hear it, then,” said Warlord Inga with a sneer in her tone. She lay reclined on her pedestal, her face in her hand and a dark mood on her face. She was still pissed about being surprised. Her pedestal was also quite a bit bigger than all the others. They ranged in size from barely two feet wide to a thick column upon which frost warriors could stand two abreast.

The man didn’t comment.

“State your idea, soldier.” That was General Barnaren.

“I have rope, sir,” said the soldier.

“Enough to get down?” Prince Sebastian queried.

“Yes, I’ve done a measure of my column. I’m only about twenty feet off the ground.” The column height differences were larger than Ciardis had previously thought. But if he could get to the ground from his, then they had hope. Hope of not starving to death on the top of these massive ice columns.

“And how did you plan on anchoring this rope?” said Warlord Inga. Her tone was dry.

Ciardis saw her point. All of the ice columns had smooth, sharp edges. The tops were sheared off perfectly with no raised bumps or stalactites to clip a rope on and climb down to the base.

The same soldier answered with a sharp tone, “My men will do it. I can loop the rope, knot it, and throw it to them.”

A lingering snort was the only answer that the warlord deigned to give.

Ciardis thought it wasn’t a bad idea. If he could reach his fellow soldiers.

Vana spoke up. “That would normally work, but...”

“But what?” General Barnaren demanded she paused.

Vana reluctantly continued, “The pillars are guarded.”

At that the major replied, “Guarded by what?”

Ciardis imagined Vana shrugging. She couldn’t see her, but it would be a typical Vana response.

“There’s magic in the air,” Vana told him. “Enough to fry anyone who tried to override it.”

“How do you know this?” said the general.

“Call it a hunch,” was the cool response.

Ciardis dipped into her mage sight; she had to see this. When she turned her eyes to take in the cavern, she saw that the sunlight itself was magical. It lit up the cavern in a way she had only seen once before: the myriad of rainbow lights that had lit the Northern Mountains when she’d first arrived. Colors upon colors made up the light in a never-ending and changing pattern. It was too beautiful to stare directly at for long, but before she closed her mage sight she saw something curious. The same thing that Vana had warned of—the protection spells in the air. Each pedestal and column was surrounded by a tunnel of swirling, multi-colored light.

“I think she’s right,” Ciardis ventured.

Suddenly a metal bracer sailed through the air to hit the area just above the valet’s head. She hadn’t seen who had thrown it. It hit an invisible barrier just outside the column, where Ciardis knew the swirl of rainbow lights surrounded the column, and burst into flames in midair.

“Looks like she was right.” The Major didn’t sound happy about it, either.

“Damn,” said another man. That summed up the opinions of all those present.

T
he cavern began to rumble. The walls shook and the columns swayed. Everyone dropped first to their knees and some moved to lie flat on their stomachs. Anything to stay on top of their shaking columns. Inga was lucky she hadn’t rolled off the edge, as close to it as she was.

A sound like a thousand rocks rumbling together echoed in the distance. It came closer and closer, like an avalanche bearing down on them.

“If anyone has any bright ideas,” yelled Vana, “now is the time to speak.”

Sebastian swore. Ciardis clutched her shaking pedestal and prayed. Kane stood up on his pedestal and unsheathed his sword. At least she thought he had. The movement was too erratic for her to get a direct look.

And then it stopped. The sounds. The shaking. The noise.

A few sighs of relief echoed around and then the wall in front of them began to move. A line appeared in the center of the ice, and like a doorway the two edges came apart. The ice was frosted but translucent. Put that together with an otherworldly glow and mist pouring from the opening in the walls, and she could barely make out the forms that moved beyond the opening in the center of the wall. As they came closer, she could see that behind the slowly opening doorway were shadows cloaked in frost and ice. She could make out nothing but moving ice with two bright red eyes placed on top of a rough triangle that served as a head. The three forms came forward and Ciardis realized that their legs were a mash-up of gravel, ice, and rock. It was those legs that were making the sounds of the avalanche.

The beings were as tall as the pedestals of medium height, which meant they were right at Ciardis’s eye level. She shrank back. Fortunately the shaking of the pedestals had stopped. The creatures—their movements the cause of the shaking—were coming ever closer. Like true lumbering giants, the Old Ones moved forward into the cavern of their own making.

Before any of her waiting party could speak, the voices of Old Ones came forth. Not out of any mouth or orifice that Ciardis could see on the bodies that stood before her, though. No, these crags of moving ice were silent except for their small, red eyes that continuously moved. It was the walls of the cavern surrounding them that spoke with their voices. It was disconcerting, to the say the least. As if the very mountains in the distance were speaking to them.

They spoke still, and Ciardis listened.

“The North Has Come,” said one voice.

“To Us” said another voice slightly softer in its existence.

“We Hear Its Call. We Hear Its Plea,” said the third.

A pause.

General Barnaren bellowed into the icy cold winds of the cavern, his voice echoing weirdly, “The Old Ones have allied with Algardis for generations. Why do you turn from us now?”

“We Hear Its Call. We Hear The Plea,” all three voices chanted.

Ciardis felt her shoulders slump in disappointment. Well, that hadn’t gotten them anywhere.

General Barnaren tried again. The same answer was spoken.

And then Prince Sebastian stepped forward on his pedestal. The red, beady eyes of the three ice crags turned toward him with disturbing synchronization.

“What call? What plea?” he said with a calm exterior. His breath frosted in the air before him. As Ciardis watched him, she was aware that she and her party were legitimately shivering. The air around them was too cold. All but the frost giants were perilously close to a side of death that she didn’t want to see.

The three crags didn’t answer him. They continued to stare, as if waiting.

Prince Sebastian turned uncertainly to General Barnaren, but in his movement his body angled toward Ciardis, who stood on the same level as him and just below General Barnaren’s pedestal. Ciardis didn’t have any idea why, but the crags had taken offense, or perhaps they finally saw what needed to be done.

Their voices echoed in union, “The Plea Must Be Heard.”

The cavern shook and all the pedestals trembled. But Prince Heir Sebastian’s pedestal did more than that. It swayed and a crack formed. The crack became a dark hole. Almost like a pestilence in the side of his column. Ciardis could see it clearly. Before she could shout to warn him, the crack filled in with ice. Black ice. That ice shot out of the side of the column and arced over the empty air to pierce Ciardis’s own column with a loud
crack
. She stumbled, and she knew she had one moment to make a decision. Run across the ice bridge or wait.