The Dead of Winter Part 20

On down they went, the light of Siveni's spear burning bluer and brighter. The sound of moaning and screaming grew less distant. G.o.ddess or not, Mriga shook.

The voices were lifted less in rage or anguish than in a horrible dull desperation. They sounded like beasts in a trap, destined to the knife, but not for ages yet-and knowing it. A horrible place to spend eternity, Mriga thought.

For a moment she was filled with longing for her comfortable, dirty hut in heaven, or even for the real thing of which it was the image-the rough hut in the Stepsons' barracks, and her own old hearth, and Harran busy on the other side of it. At least one of us will get out of here, Mriga thought. The sunlight for him, if for no one else.... , Siveni glanced over at Mriga with a curious look and opened her mouth, just as Ischade glanced lazily over her shoulder at them. "We're close to the ferry,"

she said. "I trust you brought the fare?"

Mriga shook her head, shocked. Her omniscience hadn't warned her of this. But Siveni's mouth quirked. She went rummaging about in her great oversized tunic and came out with a handful of money: not modern coin, but the old Ilsigi golden quarter-talent pieces. One she handed to Ischade with exaggerated courtesy, and one to Tyr, who took it carefully in her teeth; another went to Mriga. Mriga turned the quarter over, looked at it, and shot her sister an amused look. The coin had Siveni's head on it.

Ischade took the coin with a courteous nod, drew her cloak about her, and continued down the path. "They will be thick about here," she said as they descended, and the darkness opened out around them. "The unburied may not cross over."

"Neither would we, if we'd left all the preparations to you," Siveni said.

"Trying to make things more 'interesting,' madam?"

"Mind the slope," Ischade said, stepping downward into the shadows and putting her hood up.

The ground was ditch-steep for a few steps, and they came down among shadows that moved, like the struggling sc.r.a.ps of darkness they had swallowed. These shadows, though, strode and slunk and walked aimlessly about, cursing, whining, weeping. Their voices were thin and faint, their gestures feeble, their faces all lost in the great darkness. Only here and there the blue-burning lightnings of Siveni's spear struck sparks from some hidden eye; and every eye turned away, as if ashamed of light, or ashamed to beg for it.

They made their way through the crowd, having to push sometimes. Tyr ranged ahead, her gold piece still in her mouth, snuffing the ground every now and then, peering into this face or that one. Following her, Mriga shuddered often at the dry-leaf brush of naked, unbodied souls against her immortal's skin. No wonder the G.o.ds hate thinking about death, she thought, as the ground leveled out. It's an ... undressing ... that somehow shouldn't happen. It embarra.s.ses them. Embarra.s.ses us....

"Careful," Ischade said. Mriga glanced down and saw that just a few steps would take her into black water. Where they stood, and other souls milled, the sour cold earth slanted down into a sort of muddy strand, good for a boat-landing.

The water lapping it smoked with cold, where it hadn't rimed the bank with dirty ice. Tyr loped down along the riverbank, pursuing some interesting scent. Mriga looked out across the black river, and, through the curls of mist, saw the boat coming.

It was in sorry shape. It rode low, as if it were shipping a great deal of water-believable, since many of the clinker-boards along its sides were sprung.

Steering it along with the oar that is also a blade, was the ferryman of whom so many songs circ.u.mspectly sing. He was old and gray and ragged, fierce-looking: too huge to be entirely human, and fanged as humans rarely are. He was managing the blade-oar one-handed. The other held a skeleton cuddled close, its dangling bones barely held together by old, dried strings of sinew and rags of ancient flesh. The ferryman sculled his craft to sh.o.r.e and ran it savagely aground. Ice cracked and clinker-rivets popped, and Mriga and Siveni and Ischade were pushed and crushed together by the press of souls that strained, crying out weakly, toward the boat.

"Get back, get back," the boatman said. He lisped and spat when he talked: understandable, considering the shape his teeth were in. "I've seen you lot before, and you none of you have the fare. And what's this? Na, na, mistress, get back with your pretty eyes. You're alive yet. You're not my type."

Ischade smiled, a look of acid-sweet irony that ran icewater in Mriga's bones.

"It's mutual, I'm sure. But I have the fare." Ischade held up the gold quarter talent.

The ferryman took it and bit it. Mriga noticed with amus.e.m.e.nt that afterward, as he held it up to stare at it, the coin had been bit right through. "All right, in you get," he growled, and tossed the coin over his shoulder into the water.

Where it fell ripples spread for a second, then were wiped out by a wild boiling and bubbling of the water. "Always hungry, those things," grumbled the ferryman, as Ischade brushed past him, holding her dark silks fastidiously high. "Get in, then. Mortals, why are they always in such a hurry? Coming in here, weighing down the boat, has enough problems just carrying ghosts. Nah, then! No G.o.ds!

Orders from her. You all come shining in here, hurt everyone's eyes, tear up the place, go marching out again dragging dead people after you, no respect for authority, ghosts and dead bodies walking around all over the earth, shameful!

Someone ought to do something ..."

Mriga and Siveni looked at each other. Siveni glanced longingly at her spear, then sighed. Standing in the bows of the boat, Ischade watched them, silent, her eyes glittering with merriment or malice.

"... Never used to be that way in the old days. Live people stayed live and dead people stayed dead. You look at my wife now!-" and the ferryman bounced the skeleton against him. It rattled like an armful of castanets. "Wha'd'ye think of her?"

Siveni opened her mouth, and closed it. Mriga opened her mouth, and considered, and said, "I've never met anyone like her."

The ferryman's face softened a little, fangs and all. "There, then, you're a right-spoken young lady, even though you do be a G.o.ddess. Some people, they come up here and try to get in this boat, and they say the most frightful rude things about my wife."

"The nerve," Siveni said.

"True for you, young G.o.ddess," said the ferryman, "and that's it for them as says such things, for they're always hungry, as I say." He glanced at the water.

"Never you mind, then, you just put your pretty selves in the boat, you and your friend, and give me your hard money. She don't really care what goes on out here, just so you be nice and don't tear things up, you hear? Speak her fair, that's the way. They do say she's a soft heart for a pretty face, remembering how she came to be down here; though we don't talk about that in front of her, if you take my meaning. In you get. Is that all of you?"

"One moment," Mriga said, and whistled for Tyr; then, when there was no answer, again. Tyr appeared after a moment, her gold piece still held in her teeth, and trotted to the boat, whining at it softly as it bobbed in the water. "Come on, Tyr," she said. "We have to go across. He's on the other side."

Tyr whined again, looking distrustfully at the boat, and finally jumped in.

"The little dog too?" said the ferryman. "Dogs go for half fare."

Tyr stood on her hind legs to give the ferryman the coin, then sat down on the boat's middle seat, grinning, and barked, thumping her tail on the gunwale.

"Why, thank you, missy, that's a kindness and so I shall," said the ferryman, hastily pocketing the second half of Tyr's coin, which he had bitten in two.

"They don't overpay us down here, and times are hard all over, eh? It's much appreciated. Don't put your hands in the water, ladies. Anyone else? No? Cheap lot they must be up there these days. Off we go, then."

And off they went, leaving behind the sad, pushing crowd on the bank. Mriga sat by the gunwale with one arm around Tyr, who slurped her once, absently, and sat staring back the way they'd come, or looking suspiciously at the water. The air grew colder. Shuddering, Mriga glanced first at Siveni, who sat looking across the wide river at the far bank; then at Ischade. The necromant was gazing thoughtfully into the water. Mriga looked over the side, and saw no reflection ... at first. After a little while she averted her eyes. But Ischade did not raise her head until the boat grounded again; and when she looked up, some of that eternal a.s.surance was missing from her eyes.

"There are the gates," the ferryman said. "I'll be leaving you here. Watch your step, the ground's much broken. And a word, ladies, by your leave: watch yourselves in there. So many go in and don't come out again."

Looking at the dark town crouching behind brazen gates, Mriga could believe it.

h.e.l.l looked a great deal like Sanctuary.

One by one they got out of the boat and started up the slope. Siveni was last out, and so busy looking up at the rocky ground that she missed what was right under her feet. She lost her footing and almost fell, just managing to catch herself with her spear. "h.e.l.l," she said, a bitter joke: The spear spat lightnings.

The ferryman, watching her, frowned slightly. "We don't call it that here," he said. "Do we now, love?"

The bones rattled slightly. "Ah well. Off we go then...." And they were alone on the far sh.o.r.e.

The gates were exactly like those of the Triumph Gate not far from the Governor's Palace, but where those were iron, these were brazen, and locked and mightily barred. The four stood together, hearing more strongly than they had yet the sounds of lamentation from inside. It was beginning to sound less threatening, the way a horrible smell becomes less horrible with exposure.

"Well," Siveni said, "what now? Is there some spell we need?"

Ischade shook her head, looking mildly surprised. "I don't normally use this route," she said. "And the few times I've bothered, h.e.l.l's gates have been open.

Very odd indeed. Someone has been making changes ..."

"Someone who's expecting us, I'll wager," Siveni said. "Allow me." She lifted up the spear, leaned back with it like a javelin-thrower, and threw it at the gates. For that moment, lightning turned everything livid and froze everything still. Thunder drowned out the cries of the d.a.m.ned inside. Then came a few seconds of violet afterimages and ears ringing; then the darkness, in which by the tamer light of Siveni's spearhead they could see h.e.l.l gates lying twisted and shattered on the paving. Siveni picked up her spear, then swept through the opening and past the wreckage, looking most satisfied.

"She does that rather well," Ischade said as she and Mriga and Tyr followed after.

"Yes, she always has been good at tearing things up," Mriga said. She looked over her shoulder at the gates and willed them back in place, as she'd done earlier with Ischade's wards. To her great distress, they didn't reappear.

"We're on other G.o.ds' ground now," Ischade said as they turned away from the gates, moving past the shadows of empty animal pens and around the spur of the great wall that sheltered the Bazaar. "Nearly all powers but theirs will be muted here, I fear. If your otherself tries that stunt again inside, I suspect she'll be in for a surprise, for she was still outside h.e.l.l while she did it this time."

Mriga nodded as they made their way through the streets that led to the Bazaar.

Almost everything was as it should be-the trash, the stink, the garbage in the gutters, the crowds. But the dark shapes moving there had a look about them of not caring where they were-an upsetting contrast to those stranded on the far side of the river, who seemed to know quite well. Looking across the city for evidence of h.e.l.lfire, Mriga found nothing but the same scattered plumes of smoke and the smouldering reek that prevailed in the Sanctuary of the daylit world.

Yet the overhanging clouds were underlit as if with many fires.

As they walked further, Mriga got a chance to see why, and came to understand that there was a difference here between the dead and the d.a.m.ned. Many of the dark people going by carried their own h.e.l.lfires with them- bright conflagrations of rage, coal-red frustrations, banked and bitter, the hot light sucking darknesses that were envy and greed, the blinding fire-shot smokes of l.u.s.t and hunger for power that fed and fed and were never consumed. Some few of the pa.s.sersby bore evidence of old burning, now long gone. They were burnt-out cinders, merely existing, neither living nor dead. But worst of all, to Mriga's thought, were those many, many dead who had never even lived enough to burn a little, who had given up both sin and pa.s.sion as useless. They walked dully past the flaming d.a.m.ned, and past G.o.ddesses, and neither h.e.l.lfire nor the cold clean light of Siveni's spear found anything in their eyes at all.

She soon enough found worse. There were places that seemed d.a.m.ned as surely as people; spots where murders or betrayals had taken place, and where they took place again and again, endlessly, the original partic.i.p.ants dragging the pa.s.sing dead in to re-enact the old horrors. Some shapes walking there were less dark than others, but wore their torments differently-serpents growing from their flesh and gnawing at it; animal heads on human bodies, or vice versa; limbs that went gangrenous, rotted, fell off, regrew, while their owners walked about with placid looks that said nothing was wrong, nothing at all- Harran is down here now, Mriga thought. How will we find him? Roasting in his desire for Siveni, eaten away by his guilt over the way he used me once? Or were those pa.s.sions so recent that they never quite took root in his soul-so that we might find him like one of the dull ones who don't care about anything? Suppose he... doesn't want to come back....

The four of them pa.s.sed through the Bazaar. They went hurriedly, for they found it peopled with beasts that milled about with seeming purpose, crying out to one another in animals' voices, neighs and roars and screams. But the wares being hawked there were human beings, chained, dumb, with terrible pleading eyes. The four went quickly out into the south road that followed the walls of the Governor's Palace. "Since all this is mirroring Sanctuary somewhat," Siveni said, peering around her by the light of her spear, and looking harrowed, "I would suppose that the one we're looking for is in the Palace."

"So would I," Ischade said, quite calm. "The south gate is closed."

Mriga noticed that on Ischade's far side Tyr had dropped back to pace beside her, gazing up at her with a peculiar expression.

"What exactly is your arrangement with her?" Mriga said, as softly as she could and still be heard above the constant low rumor of pain that filled the streets.

"You must have one."

Ischade was silent. "Please pardon me," Mriga said. "I shouldn't have asked.

Power is a private thing."

"You need not come with us," Siveni said, without turning around, from ahead of them. "You've already fulfilled your part of the bargain. Though we haven't paid you yet-"

Ischade didn't stop walking, but there was a second's hard look in her eyes that was more than just the reflection of Siveni's lightnings. "Don't project your fears on me, young G.o.ddesses," she said, the voice silken, the eyes dark and amused. "I have no reason not to see her."

Mriga and Siveni both most carefully held their peace. Tyr, though, whined once and wagged her tail, and for the rest of the walk never once left Ischade's side. Ischade appeared not to notice.

"See," she said. "The gate."

The south gate looked much as it did in Sanctuary, and made it plain that some pa.s.sions had not entirely died out here; the posts were splashed with PFLS and gang graffiti. But there were no guards, no Stepsons, nothing but iron gates that stood open. The great courtyard inside was drowned in shadow, and the wailings of h.e.l.l seemed subdued here. On the far side of the courtyard lay what had looked like the Palace from a distance, but here proved itself to be an edifice not even Ranke in its flower could have built: all ebony porticoes and onyx colonnades, smoke-black pillars and porches, ma.s.sive domes and shadowy towers, halls piled on mighty halls, rearing up in terrible somber grace till all was lost in the lowering overcast. Ischade never paused, but went right in toward the great pile-a graceful, dark-robed figure, small against the great expanse of dark, dusty paving: and trotting beside her went the little dog.

There on the threshold Siveni glanced at Mriga. "Mriga, quick," she said, "do all of us a favor. Let me do the talking in there."

Mriga stared. "Sister, what're you thinking of?"

"Prices," Siveni said. "Just as you are. Look. You've enough power to pay her off afterward-"

"And where are you planning to be?"

"Don't start," Siveni said, "we're losing her." And she went after Ischade.

Mriga went after Siveni, her heart growing cold. "Anyway, this is my priest we're talking about," Siveni was saying.

"'Your'-T. Siveni, don't you dare-"

The great steps up to the Palace loomed, and Ischade was a third of the way up them by the time the G.o.ddesses caught up with her and Tyr. Silently they went up the rest of the stairs together, and Mriga was aware of her heart beating hard and fast, not from the climb. They pa.s.sed over a wide porch, floored in jet, and a doorway loomed up before them, containing great depths of still, blackness, silent, cold. Against that dark Siveni's spearhead sizzled faint and pitiful, the smoking wick of a lamp of lightnings, drowning in the immensity of night.

They slipped in.

Far, far down the long hall they had entered-miles and years down it-some pale light seethed, a sad ash-gray. It came from three sources, but details took much longer to see. The four of them had walked and walked through that silence that swallowed every sound and almost every thought before Mriga realized that the ashen light came from braziers. It was a long time more before the two onyx thrones set between two broad tripod-dishes became apparent. A few steps later Mriga's mouth turned dry, and she stopped, her courage failing her ... for there was a shape seated in the right-hand throne.

It was not as if Mriga was unprepared for the one she knew would be sitting there-the sweet young mistress of spring, who fell in love with the lord of the dead, and died of her love, the only way to escape heaven and rule h.e.l.l by his side. But all Mriga's preparation now proved useless. Of all things in h.e.l.l, only she wore white: a maiden's robe, radiant even in the sad light of the braziers. Beneath the maiden veil her beauty was searing, a fire of youth, a thing to break the heart, as Siveni's was-but there was no healing in it for the broken one afterward. h.e.l.l's Queen sat proud in the throne, cool, pa.s.sionless, and terrible. She held a sword across her lap, but it was black of blade from much use; and the scales lay beside the throne, thick with dust. h.e.l.l had apparently made its Queen over in its own image, depriving her even of the pa.s.sion that was the reason she had come ... and, like those she ruled, she was resigned to it. Mriga suddenly understood that the frightful resignation on ghost-Razkuli's face was a family resemblance.

Mriga looked over at Ischade. The necromant stood quite composed with Tyr beside her, and gracefully, slowly bowed to the still woman on the throne. The gesture was respectful enough, but the air of composure still smelled of Ischade's eternal cool arrogance. Even here there's no dominating her, Mriga thought, annoyed, and admiring Ischade all over again.

"Madam Ischade," said h.e.l.l's Queen. Her voice was soft and somber, a low voice and a rich one. There was no believing it had ever laughed. "A long time it is since you last came visiting. And you never before brought friends."

"They are on business, madam," Ischade said, her bearing toward the Queen as frank and straightforward as to anyone else she perceived as peer. "Siveni Gray Eyes, whom you may remember. And Mriga, a new G.o.ddess- perhaps the same as Siveni: They're working it out." A secret smile here. "And Tyr."

Tyr sat down, her tail thumping, and looked with interest at the Queen of h.e.l.l.

She did not say "Welcome." She said, "I know why you've come. I tried to stop you, several times, through one or another of my servants. Whatever happens to you now is on your own heads."

She looked at them, and waited.

Mriga swallowed. Beside her Siveni said, "Madam, what price will you ask for Harran's soul?"

The Queen gazed gravely down at her. "The usual. The one my husband demanded of the G.o.ds for my return, and the G.o.ds refused to pay. The soul of the one who asks to buy."

Mriga and Siveni looked at each other.

"The law is the law," she said. "A soul for a soul, always. No G.o.d would trade his life for my freedom. And it's as well, for I did not want to leave."

Ischade's mouth curved ever so slightly.

"Why would I, after I went to such trouble to come here?" said the Queen. "I gave up being spring's G.o.ddess in favor of something more worthwhile. Shipri handles spring now." She was still a moment. "Besides, even Death needs love,"

said the Queen at last.

Mriga could think of nothing to say.

"So." She looked down at them, grave, patient. "Choose. Will you pay the price?

And which of you?"

"I will," said Siveni and Mriga simultaneously. Then they stared at each other.

"Best two falls out of three," Mriga said.

"No! You cheat!"

"You mean, I fight all-out!"

Siveni swung angrily on the Queen of h.e.l.l. But anger could not survive that gaze. After a second of it, Siveni turned and said to Ischade, "This is all your fault!"

Ischade said nothing.