"The food is in the sack behind you. Sit still and eat something." It seemed the easiest way to keep him busy. Tugging the Fool to move with me, we took three steps to the right. This time, I plunged in my pole. I felt what he had told me I would. The crust of snow resisted the pole, and then it shot through into nothingness.

"Peottre"s stakes go right across it," the Fool pointed out.

"It wouldn"t be that hard to move the stakes," I pointed out.

"Whoever moved them would have had to walk right across, though."

"The crust would be more solid at night. I think." I couldn"t decide if we confronted the natural danger of the glacier or if we had followed the line of stakes into a trap. "Let"s move back to the sled," I suggested.

"Seems like a very good idea," the Fool agreed.

So it was that as I led him back from the hidden chasm, we plunged downward through the crust. We sank, I to my knees, the Fool to his hips, both yelling in terror. Then, as we stuck there, I laughed out loud at our fright. It was no more than a soft spot in the snow. "Give me your hand," I said as he floundered, trying to get back onto the top of the crust. He took my proffered grasp, and then, as he floundered toward me, we both broke through the second crust below us and went down.

I had a single glimpse of Thick"s face contorted in terror. Then his wail of dismay was drowned in the downpour of snow and ice that fell with and after us. I clung to the Fool"s hand as I floundered for any sort of solidity anywhere else in the world. There was none. All was white and wet and cold, and we fell in a terrible unending slide of loose snow and ice chunks.

Snow seems a light and fluffy thing when it is falling on a sunlit day. But when it thickens the air to porridge, you cannot breathe it. It flowed inside my clothes like a living thing craving my warmth. It became heavy and relentless. I fought my free hand up to crook my elbow uselessly over my face. We fell still, a slow sliding, and in some part of my mind, I knew that more snow slid down after us. Yet through it all, I held fast to the Fool"s hand, and knew that his free hand did not protect his face but clung in a death grip to the shoulder of my coat. There was no free air to breathe.

And then, as if we had pa.s.sed through the neck of a funnel, we were suddenly falling and sliding more swiftly and freely. I kicked my feet, making vague swimming motions, and felt the Fool likewise struggling alongside me. I felt us sliding to a halt, in cold wet darkness. It terrified me, and I made the final struggle that our bodies demand we make when death clutches us. Then, somehow, against all odds, I was breaking free of the snow. I gasped a breath of almost clear air and floundered toward it, dragging the Fool with me. He came limply and I feared he had already smothered.

All was darkness and cold and cascading snow and ice. I was hip deep, pulling the Fool behind me, and then suddenly the snow let go of me. I waded out of the knee-deep stuff and then blundered clear of it. I heard the Fool take a wheezing gasp of air. I found a breath myself, and then two. Tiny settling crystals of ice still filled the air we breathed, but even so, it seemed such an improvement. We were in darkness.

I shook snow from my hair and dug handfuls of it out of my collar. My hat was gone, and one boot. All was black around us, and the only sounds were the indescribable creaks of settling snow and our own harsh breath. "Where are we?" I gasped, and my little human voice was the m.u.f.fled squeak of a mouse in a bin full of grain.

The Fool coughed. "Down here." We had let go of one another, but still stood close enough for our bodies to touch. He was huddled at my feet, and I felt him doing something, and then a pale, greenish light opened out from his hands. I blinked, at first seeing no more than the glow, and then realizing that it came from a small box in his hands. "This won"t last long," he warned me, his face ghastly in the corpse-light. "At most a day. It is Elderling magic, of the most expensive and rare sort. Not all of my fortune went for gambling and brandy. A good portion of it is right here in my hand."

"Thank the G.o.ds for that," I said heartily. For a fleeting instant, I wondered if that was the sole true prayer that Web had once referred to. Dim as the light was, it was still an immeasurable comfort to me. It was just enough to light both our faces as we looked at one another. The Fool"s hat had stayed on his head. His pack dangled from one strap, the other torn free from him. I was shocked it had stayed with him at all. My sword belt and sword were gone. As I watched him, he strapped his little pack shut again. We did not speak for a moment or two as we shook snow from our clothing, and then lifted our eyes to peer at our surroundings.

We could see nothing of them. Our light was too dim to show us more than the slide of snow we had emerged from and ourselves. We were in an under-ice hollow or cavern, but the Elderling lantern could not reach the walls of it. No light trickled down from above. I decided that the flood of snow that had followed us had resealed whatever crack we had fallen through. Then, "Thick! Oh, Eda, give him the sense to Skill to Dutiful and Chade what has happened. I hope he just stays where he is on the sled. But when night and cold comes, what then for him? Thick!" I suddenly bellowed the word, thinking of the vague little man left sitting alone on a sled in a world of ice.

"Shush!" The Fool reprimanded me sharply. "If he hears you shout, he may get off the sled and come toward the crack. Be quiet. His danger is less than ours, and I"m afraid you must leave him to face it alone. He"ll Skill out, Fitz. His mind is not swift, perhaps, but it works well enough and he will have plenty of time to think what to do next."

"Perhaps," I conceded. My heart felt squeezed. Of all the times to be deprived of my Skill, this was the worst. And then in the next instant, the loss of Nighteyes gutted me again. I missed his instincts and survivor"s outlook. My heart caught in my chest. I was alone.

And drowning in self-pity. The thought was as acid as if it had truly come from Nighteyes. The thought was as acid as if it had truly come from Nighteyes. Get up and do something. The Fool"s survival depends on you, and possibly Thick"s. Get up and do something. The Fool"s survival depends on you, and possibly Thick"s.

I took a deep breath and lifted my eyes. The fickle green light of the little box showed me nothing, but that did not mean there was nothing to see. If there was no other way out, then we must risk causing another cascade of snow by trying to dig up through it. If there was a way out, then we should find it. It was that simple. Standing here whining like a lost cub would not avail me anything. I reached down and pulled the Fool to his feet. "Come. There is no going back up. Let us see where we are. Moving will keep us warmer."

"Very well." He spoke the words so trustingly that they nearly broke my heart.

I would have welcomed one of our snow poles, but there was no guessing where they were buried now. So, the Fool held his little box of light out in front of us, and we groped our way forward.

We encountered nothing. If we stood still and held our breaths, we could hear water dripping and the bone-deep slow breath of the ice around us. Under our feet, the ice was gritty. We could not see a ceiling above us. We were in a starless night, and our only contact with the world was the solidity under our feet and each other. We did not even see the blackness of a wall before us until we blundered against it.

We both stood touching it for a time, saying nothing. In that stillness, I became aware of the Fool shivering and the shuddering of his breath. "Why didn"t you tell me you were that cold?" I demanded of him.

He sniffed, and then laughed weakly. "Aren"t you? It seemed a useless thing to speak of it." He dragged in another chattering breath and asked, "Is that ice or rock?"

"Lift the light." He did. I peered at it. "I still can"t tell. But it"s something we can"t pa.s.s. Let"s follow it."

"It may take us right back to where we came."

"It may, and there"s no help for that if it does. If we go all the way round and come right back to here again, at least we"ll know there is no way out. Here. A moment." I set my hand to shoulder height on the wall, and then reached for my belt knife. It was gone. Of course. The Fool still had his, and I borrowed it to scratch a rough mark on the wall. It seemed a futile gesture.

"Left or right?" I asked him. I had no sense at all of north or south.

"Left," he said, flapping a hand vaguely in that direction.

"A moment," I said gruffly, and unfastened my cloak. He tried to fend me off when I put it around his shoulders.

"You"ll get cold!" he protested.

"I"m already cold. But my body has always warmed itself better than yours. And if you drop from cold, it will not benefit either of us. Don"t worry. If I need it back, I"ll let you know. Just wear it for now."

I only realized how cold he was when he immediately surrendered. He dropped his pack to the floor and handed me the Elderling light while he fastened the cloak. He was shaking as he held it close around him. I lifted the box and decided it was not just the greenish light that made him such an odd color. He gave me a very small smile. "It"s still warm from your body. Thank you, Fitz."

"Thank yourself. That"s the one you gave me when I was acting as your servant. Come on. Let"s get moving." I lifted his pack before he could. "What else is in here?"

"Nothing of much use, I"m afraid. Only a few personal things I wouldn"t wish ever to lose. There"s a little flask of brandy in the bottom. And I think a few honey cakes. I brought them for an emergency, or perhaps a treat for Thick." He gave a strangled laugh. "Emergency. But not this. Even so, I think we should save them as long as we can."

"Likely you"re right. Let"s go."

He did not move to take the light, but kept his arms wrapped around his body. So I held the light and led the way as we followed the black wall beside us. I could tell by the way he walked that his feet were going numb. Despair threatened to engulf me. Then the wolf in me dismissed it. We were still alive and moving. There was hope.

We trudged on. Endlessly. Time became motion, steps taken in the dark. Sometimes I closed my eyes to rest them from the unnatural light, but even then, I seemed to see it. At such a moment, the Fool asked shakily, "What"s that?"

I opened my eyes. "What"s what?" I asked him. Blue afterglows danced before my vision. I blinked. They didn"t go away.

"That. Isn"t that light? Shut the box. See if it"s still there or if it"s some sort of reflection."

It was hard to get the box to shut. My fingers were cold, and my one unbooted foot was a cold aching lump at the end of my leg. But when the box was closed, a blue shard of light still beckoned to us. It was irregularly shaped and oddly edgeless. I squinted at it, trying to make it a.s.sume some familiar aspect.

"It"s very strange, isn"t it? Let"s go toward it."

"And leave the wall?" I asked, oddly reluctant. "There"s no way to tell how far away that is."

"Light has to come from somewhere," the Fool pointed out.

I took a breath. "Very well."

We set out toward it. It did not seem to grow larger. The floor became uneven and our pace more shuffling as we groped ahead with numbed feet. Then, in the s.p.a.ce of a few steps, our perspective on it changed. A wall to our left had been blocking our view, allowing us to see only a reflection in an icy wall. As we moved past that projection, the blue gleam opened out and became a beckoning corridor of blue and white ice. Hopes renewed, we increased our pace. We hurried around a bend in our black chamber, and suddenly a luminous vista spread before us. The closer we approached, the more my eyes could resolve what we saw. As we angled back toward the illumination, it increased, and after a narrowing in the pa.s.sage, we emerged into a world of light-suffused ice.

The beam seemed sourceless, as if it had wandered through windows and mirrors and prisms of ice before it found us. We entered into a strange maze of cracks and chasms in a world of palely gleaming walls. Sometimes our way was narrow and sometimes broad. The floor under our feet was never level. Sometimes it seemed we walked in a sharp crack in the ice that had happened yesterday and sometimes it looked as if melting water had slowly sculpted the wandering path we followed. When we came to ways where the pa.s.sage branched, we always tried to choose the larger way. Often enough, it narrowed shortly after we had made our choice. I did not say to the Fool what I feared; we followed random crackings in the ice of the glacier. There was no reason to expect that any of them led to anything.

The first signs I saw that others had pa.s.sed this way were subtle. I thought I tricked myself into hope; there seemed to be a scattering of sand where the floor of the pa.s.sageway was slick. Then, that perhaps the walls had been squared off. My nose caught the scent first: fresh human excrement. In the same instant I was sure of it, the Fool said, "It looks as if steps have been cut into the floor ahead of us."

I nodded. We were definitely ascending, and broad shallow steps had been cut in the icy floor. A dozen steps later, we pa.s.sed a chamber cut into the ice to our right. A natural fissure had been enlarged into a waste pit, a place to throw rubbish and dump chamber pots. And a grave for the ignominious dead. I saw a naked foot, obscenely pale and bony, projecting from the midden. Another body sprawled facedown upon it, ribs showing through tattered rags. Only the cold made the stench bearable. I halted and asked the Fool in a whisper, "Do you think we should go on?"

"It is the only path," he said tremulously. "We have to follow it."

He stared and stared at the discarded body. He was shaking again. "Are you still cold?" I asked. The pa.s.sages we were in seemed slightly warmer to me than when we had been in darkness. Light seemed to come from within them.

He gave me a ghastly smile. "I"m scared." He closed his eyes for an instant, squeezing unshed tears onto his golden lashes. Then, "On we go," he said more firmly. He stepped past me to take the lead and I followed him, full of dread.

Whoever was responsible for dumping the slops and chamber pots was a careless fellow. Splotches and splashes marred the icy walls and mottled the ice underfoot. The farther we went, the more obviously man-made or at least hand-modified the pa.s.sages became. The source of the blue light was revealed when we pa.s.sed an exposed pale globe that was anch.o.r.ed to the wall overhead. It was larger than a pumpkin, and gave off light but not heat. I halted, staring up at it. Then, as I reached toward it with curious fingers, the Fool caught at my cuff and dragged my hand back down. He shook his head in silent warning.

"What is it?" I asked in a whisper.

He shrugged one shoulder. "I don"t know. But I know it"s hers. Don"t touch it, Fitz. Come on. We have to hurry."

And we did, for a time. Until we came to the first dungeon.

chapter 20.

CORRIDORS.

It is said that at one time there was a seer or oracle who resided on Aslevjal Island. This tale seems to be very old. Some tell it that there was only one, and she lived for many generations, but remained young, raven haired and black eyed. Others say that there was a mothershouse of oracles, with a Great Mother who pa.s.sed on her seer"s duties to her elder daughter in turn, so that a succession of oracles served there. All speak of them as having lived beyond their Great Mother"s day. There remains no living witness to the truth of this tale. It was said that the seer lived within the glacier and emerged only to accept offerings that visitors brought to Icefyre. If a seeker of truth brought animals to sacrifice, the seer would do the bloodletting and then fling the entrails into the air and let them fall smoking to the ice. The future of the visitor was spelled out in the curling of the guts. After the reading, in the name of the dragon, she would claim the sacrificed animal.- c.o.c.kLE c.o.c.kLE"S COLLECTED OUTISLANDER TALES The door was nearly invisible. The Fool had pa.s.sed it before I perceived what it was and halted him with a touch to his shoulder. Either the door was made of ice, or was so thickly coated with ice that its original material was unseen. The hinges were vague bulges in the wall, and I saw no sort of handle or lock. It baffled me. There was a narrow slit in the door at about waist height. I stooped to peer into it, and was shocked to see a ragged and battered man crouched in the far corner of a cell. He stared in my direction, mute and expressionless. I staggered back from the sight with an inarticulate cry.

"What?" the Fool whispered and stooped to look in himself. He remained crouched by the door, his face a mask of horror. Then, "We have to let them out. Somehow."

I shook my head wildly, and then found my tongue. "No, Fool. Trust me, please. They"re Forged. However heartless it seems to leave them in there, it would be a danger and a cruelty to let them loose. They"d turn on us, for our cloak or for sport. We don"t dare let them out."

He stared up at me incredulously. Then he said quietly, "You didn"t see them all, did you? Riddle is in there. And Hest."

I didn"t want to look. I had to. Heart thundering, breath coming fast, I crept to the door and peered in.

The inside of the cell was dimly lit with the same blue glow as the corridors. I let my eyes adjust to the light until I could see the entire cell. The room was a cavity chopped into the glacier. The floor was crusted with waste. There were five Forged Ones inside, and nothing else. Four of them had taken positions in defensible corners, backs to the walls. Hest, weakened with injuries, sprawled on the floor in the center of the cell. Plainly none of the Forged Ones dared venture forth to attack him, for that would leave their own backs exposed. The three strangers in the cell were Outislanders, starved and scarred and dressed in rags. Their captors had stripped Hest and Riddle of their heavy fur coats, but even so, they were better off than the others. They still had their boots. I quested toward them desperately with the Wit, willing with all my might that I feel something from them. But there was nothing. They crouched, staring with brutish animosity at one another, less than animals. Their connection to the world and society had been stripped from them.

I sagged away from the door, sitting down flat on the icy floor. Misery and sickness flooded through me. Evil memories I had thought long banished clawed at me with scabby fingers. I do not think the Fool could have understood the depth of my horror. He could not feel their absence of connection as I could.

"Is there nothing we can do for them?" he asked softly.

A smile like blight came to my face. I clenched my teeth, refusing to feel the emotions that threatened me. I would not think about this too deeply. I had already thought this through, long ago, and I knew all the final answers. No sense in agonizing my way through lessons I had already learned. I spoke flatly. "I could kill them. Maybe. There are four of them on their feet, and though three of them look starved and weak, I"ve known Forged Ones to pack up and fight together. For a time, until there were spoils to claim. I don"t know if I could kill them all before they pulled me down. Riddle"s a good fighter. And he"s still healthy."

"But . . . Riddle and Hest?" He pleaded with me.

He should have known better. "Fool. That isn"t Riddle or Hest. Their bodies are there, and all the things they knew are there. But that"s all. They no longer care about anything or anyone. The only things they"ll consider are their own physical appet.i.tes. Would Riddle let Hest lie there on the floor, injured and unguarded? No. That isn"t Riddle. Not anymore."

"But . . . we have to do something!" His whisper was agonized.

I sighed. "If we open that door, I have to kill them. They"ll make me, unless I"m willing to let them kill me."

"Then we have no choice?"

I smiled bitterly. "There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones. I kill them, or they kill us. Or we walk away."

For a long time, the Fool stood silent. Then he turned away from the cell door and walked slowly away. I followed him.

The ice corridors began to show more signs of use. The floor looked trodden and grubby, the icy walls scarred. We pa.s.sed more dungeons, identical to the first. I peered into each one we pa.s.sed, sick with horror, but we did not speak of the people we glimpsed inside them. The ones with the woman and the girl in them were the most heartrending for me. The floor of those cells had a layer of straw on it and there were pallets in each corner. Evidently the lives of these captives were to be prolonged. It seemed a crueler fate than Riddle, Hest, and their companions endured. Death would not be swift for the men, but cold ate a man just as steadily as starvation did. They would not suffer long. From the length of the woman"s unkempt hair and filthy nails, she had been in there for a long time. Huddled in a filthy bear rug, she crouched in the corner, staring at the wall. In the next cell, a girl of about seven picked at scabs on her ankles. Her eyes flicked once to meet mine as I stared through the crack in the door. The only emotion they showed me was wariness.

Eventually, the corridor of dungeons came to an end. The hall grew wider, and the pale light globes were s.p.a.ced more frequently. The pa.s.sageway had been carved rather than chopped out of the ice, and there were grace notes of frozen beauty in the arched walls. The floor was clean and sprinkled with sand for traction. It seemed older to me, as if it had been built to accommodate a greater flow of people, but we had still not glimpsed a soul.

Then we came to a junction that offered us three choices. The main corridor continued before us. To our left, a wide pa.s.sage descended in shallow steps that wound down and out of sight. To our right, a stairway was cut in the ice, and led steeply upward. Both looked older and far more worn than the path we had been following. The Fool and I halted and exchanged glances.

From the opening on our left, my ears caught a faint shushing sound. It came at distant but regular intervals. I cupped my ear to it. After a short time, the Fool whispered, "It sounds as if something huge is breathing down there."

I widened my nostrils and drew in a deep breath. What I smelled inspired me with hope even as it made the sound instantly recognizable. "No. It"s waves, it"s the sea. This way leads to a beach. Come on."

His face lit like a man suddenly reprieved. "Yes!" he prayed, and hastened down the broad, wide steps. I followed him and, catching his shoulder, moved him to the inside curve of the steps. "Stay by the wall," I instructed him in a low voice. "If we hear someone coming up, it will give us that one moment to surprise them." Our only weapon, his belt knife, was already in my hand.

We were already weary, with no idea of how long we"d been exploring the ice maze. The steps were shallow and maddeningly irregular. They were gouged too as if heavy objects were often dragged up or down them. As we went deeper, the sea smell became stronger, and the air grew damper. The steps became more slippery, and soon we were negotiating our way down ice steps sheened with water. Someone had thrown sand on them, but it had melted unevenly into the surface, leaving k.n.o.bs of glistening and slippery ice when least expected. We were forced to go more slowly. Soon the walls were gleaming with slow water, and drops fell from overhead. The smell of the water grew stronger, but the light did not vary from the witchglow of blue that suffused us.

Then we reached the pitted bottom step and saw the futility of our hope. Beyond the ice was a slope of worn black stone that gave onto a beach of black sand. Several metal pegs were driven into it, as if small boats were sometimes moored there. Waves shushed in and out over it, lapping relentlessly higher. And overhead in the cavern, barely visible in the blue glow of the last of the pale globes, was a high ceiling of glistening ice.

"If we had a boat, and if the tide was going out, I"d chance it," I said.

"If," said the Fool, and snickered. I looked at him in shock. He looked terrible, and it was not just the blue light. He took his pack from my arm and sank down on the wet steps with it. For a moment, he hugged it to him as if he were a child hugging a beloved doll. Then he opened it and rummaged to the bottom for the flask of brandy. He opened it and offered it to me first.

I took it, weighed it in my hand, and then drank no more than a quarter of it. It was the same apricot brandy that he had brought to the little house that Hap and I had shared. I swallowed the warmth of a summer day, and then breathed out through my open mouth, tasting apricots and friendship as I held the flask out to him. He took it from me, exchanging a square of black bread for it. It was half the size of my palm. I sat down beside him, and ate it slowly. There were raisins and nuts in it. It was dense and sweet and small, making me more aware of the hunger I"d been ignoring. We ate slowly in silence. After I"d licked the last crumb off my palm, I looked at him. "Up?" I said.

"It won"t lead out," he told me softly. "Think about where we are, and the legends we"ve heard from the Outislanders. This is where they came in under the ice to see the dragon. That little winding staircase must go up to Icefyre. Why else would it be there?"

"Maybe it goes up and out," I said stubbornly. "We won"t know until we try it. Maybe that other, wider way goes to the dragon. That would make more sense."

He shook his head. "No. The dragon must be above us, if you could sometimes see him from the surface. The staircase goes to the dragon. Not out." He was adamant. He leaned his head against the icy wall. "There is no way out for me. And I"ve always known it."

I heaved myself to my feet. The seat of my trousers was wet. Oh, good. "Get up," I told him.

"There"s no point to it."

"Get up!" I insisted, and when he didn"t move, I seized him by the back of his collar and hauled him to his feet. He did not resist, but only gave me a doleful glance. "We"ve come this far together, through the years and over many a path and byway. And if we are going to end here, under the ice of Aslevjal, then I"m going to see this d.a.m.nable dragon that made us come all this way. And so are you."

Is there anything more wearying than shallow steps? Perhaps slippery shallow steps. Nevertheless, we ascended them, and as before, we stayed close to the inner wall and kept our ears perked for sounds of anyone coming our way. We heard the waves growing ever fainter behind us and the random plops of falling drips. Eventually, we reached the place where we intersected with the carved corridor. We halted there, listening, but heard nothing.

I was tired. I was sure we"d gone far past a time when we deserved a night"s sleep. My head felt stuffed full of felt and buzzing flies. The Fool looked worse. We crossed the corridor and entered the stairwell. He followed me slowly up the narrow steps. The staircase wound as it climbed. As soon as its curve took us out of sight of the main corridor, I stopped him. "You. Drink the rest of the brandy now. It will warm you and give you a bit of heart, perhaps. In any case, it will do you more good inside your belly than inside the flask."

"Can I sit down?" he asked.

"No. I might not be able to get you up and moving again," I replied heartlessly, but he had already sunk down onto the step. Again he took the brandy flask, opened it, and offered it to me. It wasn"t worth an argument. I wet my mouth with it, and then told him, "You finish it."

And he did, in a single deep swallow. He seemed to take a long time to cap the empty flask and put it away. "This is hard," he said, but he did not seem to address his words to me. "I"m too close to the end. I"ve had glimpses of this, but never clear ones. And now all I know is that I must go on, and that every step I take leads me closer to my death." He met my eyes and said without shame, "I"m terrified."

I smiled. "Welcome to human existence. Come. Let"s go see this dragon you came so far to save."