As soon as the paralysis felled Caven, the wichtlin seemed to lose interest in its victim. It turned toward Tanis, who held his sword ready even though it was clear now that the weapon was as useless as a feather against this monster. The wichtlin fastened its unblinking gaze on the half-elf, moved nearer, and attacked. In moments, Tanis, too, stood immobile. Wode tried to flee, but the being vanished, only to appear directly before the squire, who, with his nag, ran into the creature and froze instantly.
That left Kitiara alone against the wichtlin. She pulled her dagger and prepared to vault from Obsidian, who now stood hock-deep in a tangle of ground-hugging plants.
Then the horse screamed, and Kitiara halted her dismount, twisting in midair, only one foot in a stirrup, as she looked down.
Skeletal hands, dozens of them, were reaching up through the plants, up through the ground. They held the struggling mare, who continued to whinny with fright until Kitiara thought she'd go mad. Her gaze darted around. The wichtlin bore down slowly upon her. The skeletal hands reached out to grab her if she fell from Obsidian's back. The mare gave a shudder, a paroxysm of death, and Kitiara kept her seat only by dropping the dagger and holding on to the dying mare with both hands.
Then a voice sliced through the night.
Kitiara fell into the waiting hands.
But they vanished as her body crashed into the damp soil next to her horse. The swordswoman lay still for a moment, casting about her for the wichtlin. It, too, was gone. 'Obsidian!' She sat up slowly, reached out a hand, and stroked the animal's lifeless shoulder. As she caressed her longtime animal companion, the horse turned to dust beneath her fingers. A moment later, even that last trace of Obsidian evaporated. Kit leaped to her feet, spied her dagger in the weeds, and retrieved it/Slowly she circled, ready for anything that challenged her. Where was the possessor of the voice? The words shouted were undeniably magical, but was the one who shouted them her savior or a new attacker?
She heard nothing. Caven and Maleficent, arrested in midstride, stood like a statue in a village square. Wode and his nag were likewise frozen in a tangled mimicry of Caven's stance. Tanis, on foot, had been caught in the middle of a lunge, his sword pointing straight toward… nothing. Dauntless stood stolidly near the half-elf. To all appearances, the horse was the only other living thing within view. There was no sign of whatever had uttered that cry of magic in the night.
Chapter 10
Janusz took a deep breath to halt his tremors as he leaned away from his scrying bowl. Kitiara's face faded from the surface of the water.
She'd be safe for a time; he'd seen to that. The groping hands had returned to their owners in the Abyss. The wichtlin was now crawling harmlessly along the bottom of Ice Mountain Bay. It would have to search some time to find living souls to claim in those frigid depths.
The explosion of magic that allowed the mage to both scry and speak left his ears ringing and his hands trembling. For a moment, he feared he might faint. But it had been necessary. The mage had come within a heartbeat of losing Kitiara Uth Matar.
And Kitiara Uth-Matar was the only person who could tell him where the nine ice jewels were.
He had only two of the ice jewels, one of which the ettin carried, and he thanked Morgion for the luck that had prompted him to hold back two of the eleven purple gemstones in the encampment at the Meir's castle.
Janusz eyed the iridescent jewel that lay atop an alabaster pedestal on the table. The purple crystal, the size of a small egg, glowed as if it contained all the knowledge of Krynn burning within it. The doltish gnome who'd sold him the jewels had launched into a tiresome litany of the stones' history. The mage had ignored much of the creature's prattling, but one thing lingered in Janusz's memory-that the gnome believed the jewels had hailed ultimately from the Ice-reach. Staring into the amethyst-colored orb now, the mage didn't doubt that its glittering coldness had been formed in the snowy reaches. That was why he'd persuaded the Valdane to flee to the southernmost point of Ansalon. They'd come to the Icereach in search of more jewels. And under the spell of the ice jewel, the Valdane's dream had expanded, grown from a yen to overrun a neighboring fiefdom to a hunger to command the entire world.
Janusz forced himself to look away from the stone, but the movement seared his eyes. The jewel held his gaze like a spell. The mage had commanded dozens of ettin slaves to search ceaselessly for the spot that just might offer up more ice jewels-because, he told the Valdane, the jewels could hold the secret to the Valdane's ultimate power over all of Ansalon. In truth, Janusz hoped that the charismatic stones would do far more for the mage himself than for the Valdane-that, in short, they would show Janusz how to dispel the bloodlink that bound him to the ruler's will. But that would occur, if ever, only far in the future, after exhausting years of study, he knew.
The mage quaked inwardly at the risk he was taking in letting Res-Lacua carry one of the precious artifacts, but it was necessary if Janusz were to use the stones to teleport the ettin and Kitiara to the Icereach. That was one mystery of the stones that the mage, through months of study, had been able to discover. Handled correctly and cautiously, the stones allowed him to teleport objects, both living and nonliving, from the site of one jewel to the whereabouts of another.
When Kitiara arrived at the top of Fever Mountain in Darken Wood, the mage would use the ettin's ice jewel to bring them both to the ice warren. Then, he vowed, he would interrogate her himself and discover the hiding place of the other nine precious stones.
Janusz forced himself upright, rolled back the sleeves of his robe, and glanced at the entrance to his chamber. The mage sat atop a stool. Obviously made from the same magical ice from which the mage had fashioned the ice warren, the stool was festooned with a brocaded version of the canvas that protected the walls and floor. Off to the right, a curl of steam rose from a ceramic beaker set over a flame. Dozens of stoppered containers littered the worktable.
A window broke the monotony of the room's walls. The opening showed a panorama of the Ice-reach. Snow swirled around an outcropping of ice. Janusz glanced at the window and swore. He muttered an incantation, traced a figure in the air, and the scene in the window shifted to one showing a castle, flying black and purple pennants at every spire. Golden sunlight poured over the scene, and the mage's face looked wistful for a moment.
The walls of Janusz's Icereach quarters, of course, were of solid ice. But the door was equally solid oak, banded with iron, teleported by the ice jewel to this accursed frozen wasteland months ago.
'Not that time matters in this place,' Janusz muttered. 'Forsaken by the gods. A fraction of a year, a fraction of a lifetime. What's the difference?'
There were no seasons now, no shy blooming as of a spring maiden after winter's crone had eased her dying clutch upon the land. He smiled at his fanciful-ness. Habits died hard. He'd been a romantic soul long ago.
Once time had mattered. Once he'd felt himself bloom with the seasons, had felt his heart expand and thaw with the warming of the soil and the unfolding of new leaves. His romanticism may have been laughable, given the grayness of his hair and the wrinkles that creased his cheeks from nose to mouth. But he'd known true love-he'd known Dreena-and the world had seemed young and new.
'Pah!' he muttered, and pushed the useless past from his mind. 'My heart is as frozen as the Icereach.'
The walls, floor, and ceiling, were solid slabs of ice, slicked to a mirrorlike smoothness. Much of the icy surface was covered with thin canvas to protect the warren's occupants from sticking to the ice in the same way that warm flesh adheres to frigid metal on an especially cold day.
'An especially cold day,' he repeated now. Janusz laughed soundlessly. 'There are no days here that don't fit that description.'
There was no fuel for a real fire, nor was there a fireplace. A fireplace of ice? No, and magical blazes drained too much of his strength. It took nearly all his power these days to keep track of Kitiara and Res-Lacua, a continent to the north. Even now, he'd had to expend still more energy to give Res-Lacua the power to speak in Common
