The Ring of Winter (35 page)

“I have him for you, master,” Skuld announced proudly. Artus’s body was still, his legs hanging as limply as a rag doll’s. At the sight of Kaverin, though, the explorer began to struggle against the silver guardian’s grip.

Kaverin leaped to his feet. “Kill him, you idiot! He has some kind of magical artifact that lets him control ice, some wand or—” His dead eyes went wide with amazement. “Cyric’s blood,” he whispered. “He found the ring!”

Skuld tightened his fist, but it was as if Artus had suddenly been shielded by some powerful armor. The silver guardian clapped another hand over the one holding his prisoner, but that didn’t help either. Perhaps I should just bite the nuisance’s head off, he decided. That’s always effective.

But when Skuld tried to pull his hands apart, he found them locked together. A cold more profound than any he’d felt in his fourteen hundred years began to seep into his fingers, climb up his arms. He felt his limbs stiffen, his hands grow absolutely numb. In desperation, Skuld pulled at the frozen arms with his other set of hands. The fists holding Artus cracked, then came apart with a loud snap.

The explorer rolled off the giant’s frozen hands and tumbled through the air. As he fell, he touched the Silvermace family crest on his tunic. The diving falcon sewn in white on the green cloth flapped its wings and loosed its hold on the spiked mace. The raptor was a thing of thread no longer, but a creature of ice. It pushed away from Artus, instantly growing as large as the explorer. With its cold talons, the ice falcon snagged Artus’s tunic and lowered him gently the rest of the way to the cobblestones, Then it circled up into the sky.

“This time, Kaverin, I’d say I have you,” Artus said slyly. He held up his hand, letting the torchlight glitter off the Ring of Winter.

A line of ten-foot-tall spikes shot up between the command center and the rest of the Batiri horde. Seeing themselves cut off from the rest of the troops, the guards lifted M’bobo off her feet and set her down next to Rayburton. They surrounded their queen, holding their spears out menacingly to form a spiny circle that resembled some sort of deranged land urchin. Rayburton tried to struggle to his feet, but M’bobo kicked his legs out from under him. “You not going anywhere,” the queen said, brandishing her scimitar.

The bara slumped to the ground with a muffled groan. He turned once more to Artus, but the explorer couldn’t decide if the sadness in Rayburton’s eyes was the result of his mistreatment or the fact someone had recovered the Ring of Winter.

Kaverin Ebonhand didn’t run, neither did he let his surprise show. Calmly he placed his stone hands on his hips and said, “You ‘have me’ no more than I had you in the goblin camp.”

A pair of silver hands grabbed Artus by the shoulders and spun him around. Another pair slammed into his sides, cracking ribs and sending daggers of pain through his lungs. Artus tried to call upon the powers of the ring, but the barrage of fists was so fast he couldn’t concentrate. Blow after blow rained down upon him, battering his head, his arms, his chest. Desperate, the explorer reached out to shield himself, but Skuld grabbed his hands.

“You can’t use the ring if I tear your arms off,” the spirit guardian said gleefully. He stood little more than ten feet tall now, his magical energy having been drained in repairing the wounds wrought by both the dinosaur and Artus.

As he spoke, Skuld yanked the explorer’s arms up and pulled him from the ground. All the while, he drove his other two fists into the man’s ribs, hammering away like a dwarf in a diamond mine.

Though the pummeling was painful, it was not as furious as Skuld’s first assault. Artus focused his thoughts through the haze of pain. He could feel the ring’s power coursing through him, knitting broken bones and healing the muscles torn by Skuld’s attack. And as the spirit guardian cocked his free arms back for a killing blow, Artus struck.

A set of muscular arms made of crystal-clear ice sprouted from the explorer’s side, blocking Skuld’s attack. The silver-skinned giant found all four hands caught in globes of ice that tightened like vises each time he moved. He howled in frustration, but that quickly turned to a panicked cry for help. The ice was spreading up his arms, paralyzing him as it went.

“Master!” Skuld shouted. “I will be slain!”

Kaverin had already foreseen that possibility. With a spear he had snatched from one of the goblin guards, he charged silently forward. Artus could not turn, could not see the attack coming. Certain of victory, Kaverin raised the spear to strike.

The spearhead never reached its mark.

With a shrieking war cry, the ice falcon dropped from the sky. It tore the weapon from Kaverin’s grasp, knocking the redheaded man onto his back. The falcon snapped the wooden shaft in two, then sailed back into the night to circle protectively, high over its creator.

From the cobbles, Kaverin looked up with dead, lifeless eyes at Skuld. The spirit guardian gnashed futilely at Artus with his filed silver teeth. His arms, torso, even his legs were coated with ice. Skuld’s head remained free, but it only moved sluggishly from side to side. His breath turned to steam in the chill air. Then that, too, stopped, and the silver earrings on the guardian’s ears ceased to jangle.

Artus stepped back to study his handiwork. Skuld stood rigid, his arms held menacingly before him—just like the statue he and Pontifax had found that day in the Stonelands, only much larger. Perhaps that’s why the Skuld statue was in those ruins; someone had trapped the treacherous spirit guardian and left him to stand forever in the rubble—until some unfortunate stumbled across him, of course. Artus couldn’t let that happen again, not after all the suffering Skuld had caused.

The explorer reached up for the spiked mace sewn onto his tunic, the last remnant of the Silvermace crest. The mace disappeared from the cloth and appeared in his hand, as formidable a weapon as any forged with flame. Artus had to strike Skuld only once. The paralyzed giant shattered like glass.

Artus turned, only to find the goblins hustling their queen back to the safety of the jungle. She was cursing them for their cowardice, but not struggling very hard to get away. They’d left Rayburton behind, wisely assuming the powerful human would leave them alone if they did.

That gave Kaverin a hostage, as well, and the leader of the Cult of Frost now stood next to Rayburton, the broken spear held up to the bara’s throat. Blood ran in a thin line down Rayburton’s neck. “The point is too deep for you to make it so cold it shatters, or to throw a collar of ice armor around his throat to stop it from harming him,” Kaverin said.

Artus dropped the mace and took a step forward. Kaverin dug the spear tip deeper into the bara’s throat. The thin line of blood became a small but steady stream. “I won’t be foolish enough to ask for the ring,” Kaverin said, “just my life.” For the first time, Artus heard fear in his old adversary’s voice—fear and barely hidden madness. “The prize is yours, so you’ve nothing to fear from me any more.”

“You’re right,” Artus said flatly.

Without the slightest movement, Artus conjured a fierce winter wind. The icy blast struck Kaverin in the chest like a hammer’s blow. It lifted him away from Rayburton, bearing him backward until he hit the partial remains of a wall. There, a dozen hands of ice grabbed him. His arms straight out from his side, his legs held apart, Kaverin hung from the brick wall.

Artus cut the ropes binding Rayburton’s hands and gave the bara his dagger. The gem that gave off a continual radiance flared like a miniature sun when Artus held the weapon, but died back to its normal glow once Rayburton took it in his twisted fingers. “Artus,” the bara said, using his gag to staunch the flow of blood on his neck. “Please. Take the ring off before you lose control.”

“I know perfectly well what I’m doing,” Artus replied. He turned his back on Rayburton and walked slowly to face Kaverin.

The leader of the Cult of Frost looked wistfully at the Ring of Winter. “So close,” he murmured. “So very close.” Then the expression vanished from Kaverin’s features. “I could have destroyed the entire world, you know.”

A rapier appeared in Artus’s hand, a long barb of ice tapering to a needle point. Silently he continued to move toward Kaverin.

“Let me free,” Kaverin said, struggling against the hands holding him to the wall. “At least let me die with some dignity, not like a madman, chained so he won’t bite the headsman.”

Artus paused. “So you can die with honor? Be a ‘good soldier’ like Pontifax?” he asked. With a lightning-quick strike, Artus drove the rapier through Kaverin’s heart. “You wouldn’t know how.”

The scream had yet to die on Kaverin’s lips when the two wolf-headed minions of Cyric appeared to either side of the dying man. They grabbed his jet-black stone hands with their spider’s legs and yanked him free of the icy restraints. “The Lord of the Dead sends his thanks, Artus Cimber,” they said discordantly, their voices rising over Kaverin’s scream. Then the denizens were gone, a stench of brimstone marking their passing.

Artus turned back to Rayburton. “Go to the temple ” he said wearily. At a gesture from the explorer, the ice falcon swooped out of the sky and grabbed the bara. “The goblins will scatter without their leaders. Tell the king and Kwalu, if you can find them.”

“But what about you?” Rayburton cried as he was lifted from the ground.

“I have a promise to keep.”

*

Lugg hid in the embrace of a tangled, rather odoriferous thorn bush, just beyond Mezro’s magical wall. Two gangs of Batiri battled in the small clearing before him, vying for a sack of flour and three mangled chickens. Of the twenty or so goblins that had started the skirmish, only five remained. They were battered and bloody, so exhausted from the fight that they could barely heft their spears.

The flour and the chickens were the dregs of the supplies the goblins had massed for the assault on Mezro and everything they’d pillaged from the city before the fight turned against them. Lugg wasn’t sure what had happened to bring on the Batiri defeat. From the shouts of the retreating warriors, he’d heard that Skuld had been destroyed and some human demigod had broken the charge on the temple with a wall of ice. That was good news, at least. Maybe Artus had found that ring he was looking for.

The thought of the explorer brought a pang of regret and an equal feeling of anger to Lugg. He was still rather annoyed at having to rescue Byrt on his own.

After leaving Artus, Lugg had made his way across the battle-torn city, mostly by hiding in the rubble of shattered buildings until the goblin patrols passed. At first he hadn’t much of a plan for finding Byrt, then inspiration tapped him on his furry shoulder. He realized the goblins wouldn’t use Byrt in battle and that the little gray wombat was of no value as a hostage. That left him the unpleasant fate of becoming part of the Batiri foodstock.

It was a relatively simple matter to find the location of the goblins’ baggage train. By keeping to the shadows, he could watch for the troops transporting supplies to the front lines, then reverse their trail. The sleuthing took Lugg through the Scholars’ Quarter, to the place where the Batiri had first entered Mezro. The goblins’ supply stockpile was located just outside the city’s magical wall.

At the moment, Lugg had the sinking feeling he wouldn’t find Byrt here, even if he’d been part of the supply train earlier. Toppled wagons and empty crates littered the area, along with the corpses of fifty or more Batiri. For the past hour, the clearing had been the site of a dozen bloody skirmishes, just like the one going on at that moment before Lugg’s beady eyes. The winners had taken whatever they could carry. The losers had been left to rot.

The wombat winced as a goblin fell into the dirt, a spear sticking out of his forehead like a unicorn’s horn. The battle was over. With a savage whoop of victory, the surviving Batiri carted the chickens and the flour into the jungle.

The shrieking of birds and chattering of monkeys vied with the diminishing sounds of battle from the city’s center. It was difficult to hear over the din, so Lugg was particularly cautious about moving into the open. It wouldn’t do Byrt a bit of good if he got captured now, when he was the only one who cared enough to look for him.

At last the wombat trundled out of the thorn bush, sniffing to clear his nose of the lingering, sickly sweet smell. “They must have carried ‘im off, too,” Lugg said mournfully. “What a bloody rotten way to go—walking groceries for cannibal goblins.” He stuck his head into an empty barrel, looking helplessly for some clue that might lead him to his friend. “Still, that’s not as bad as what that pirate captain wanted to do with us after ‘e’d decided the zoo wouldn’t want us. Four-legged footstools indeed!”

Lugg fairly shook with anger, at the indignity he’d been subjected to aboard the ship that had stolen him and Byrt from the little island near Orlil they’d once called home. To his surprise, he found he missed the squalid place more and more. It was certainly paradise compared to Chult, if for no other reason than its complete lack of goblins.

“This is what we get for trusting ‘umans, I suppose.” Lugg paused to pull a sharp bit of stone from his paw. “Still, I thought Artus was more of a chum. We saved ‘is life, after all. But what does ‘e give us in return? The rotten twister lets me and Byrt fend for ourselves with the goblins.”

“That’s hardly charitable on your part, old sport.”

The familiar, cheerful voice came from a nearby bush. It took a minute of frantic uprooting for Lugg to get to the source, but when he finally did, he found Byrt sitting contentedly in a bamboo-barred cage. Fresh fruits and vegetables packed the prison. From Byrt’s chubby cheeks, it seemed he had been well fed during his captivity.

“The Batiri were very hospitable,” the gray wombat said, nibbling on a large yam. “One of them hid me here, hoping to come back later I suppose. I strongly suspected his motives, of course, but I figured you would free me from any bubbling pots before things got too hot.”

Byrt looked at his friend with vacant blue eyes. “Artus has his hands full, I’d wager, so don’t be so hard on him. That Kaverin fellow who was after him—” he mocked a shiver “—quite a rotten piece of work. His descendants will be embarrassed for generations. I can just see his great-grandson now, pelted by overripe summer squash in the schoolyard for having such a blighted family tree… . Very sad, indeed.”