"No," said Milla. "I am not -"
Once again thunder smothered her words, but the lightning struck the earth on the far side of the lake. Whatever Odris was playing at, she was being careful. Milla frowned as she also recognized that she now knew much more about lightning than she ever had before. Like the fact that if a bolt hit water near her, its force could travel through the water and hurt her. No one had told Milla about this. She just knew it.
It had to be a result of her shadow being absorbed by the Storm Shepherd.
"I have it!" said the Face. "This is riddle the second."
"A traveler begins a journey. For the first week, he is carried south. For the second week, he carries others. In the third week, he flies up into the sky. In the fourth week, he falls back down. Who is the traveler?"
"That's it?" asked Odris incredulously. "That's the best you can do?"
"Quiet," ordered Milla again. She was annoyed that the Storm Shepherd seemed to know the answer already. Surely she could do better than a cloud-woman.
"This is a very hard riddle for a Chosen," chuckled the Face. "You'll never get this. We shall talk and talk and talk -"
"The traveler is an iceberg to begin with," interrupted Milla. "Then it is free-flowing water. Then it is water-cloud, as from a kettle or where the hot metal boils under the Ice. Then it is rain, or snow."
"That's not it!" groaned Odris.
"Yes it is," said the Face angrily. "You are no Chosen! No Chosen knows anything of icebergs.
What are you?"
"I am an Icecarl," said Milla. "I am Milla of the
Far Raiders. Daughter of Ylse, daughter of Emor, daughter of Rohen, daughter of Clyo, in the line of Danir since the Ruin of the Ship."
"Danir?" said the Face, its mouth and forehead twisted in rage. "Danir? You are of Danir's get!"
The whole Face reared up out of the water. Long teeth grew where none had been before, and a great tongue came lashing out to grip Milla.
But before it could grab hold, the Face suddenly froze. Ice crystals formed in a great ring around it and started to spread inward in thousands of tiny branching lines.
The Face screamed and groaned, and settled back into the lake bed. The ice retreated, and was soon gone.
Milla stood, still trapped, her heart hammering. She had been helpless, certain that she would be eaten - or perhaps drowned - by the Face. Then the ice had come. But from where?
"The riddle game binds you as much as Milla and must be played out to the end," said Odris to the Face. "But tell me. Who was Danir that you hate her so?"
"I will ask my third riddle," said the Face sullenly, ignoring Odris's question.
"Danir is the ancestor of my line," Milla answered.
"I, too, am curious why she should have an enemy from another world, from a time so long ago."
"This is riddle the third," muttered the Face, ignoring them.
"There was a being proud and free, who through no fault of its own was caught up in a war between the rulers of two worlds. The war had gone on for many, many years, and there was much hate between the two sides. Finally the war ended in a great working of magic. An arcane barrier was raised on one world, to keep light - and the enemy - without. On the other world, a spell caused most of the inhabitants to forget their powers and much of their past. Bereft of both memory and magic, these once proud beings were easily bound, each to its own allotted cell. Only a descendant of the original binder could free them, either by moving their binding from the place to their person, or simply loosing their chains.
I am such a prisoner, and I was bound here by Danir, who you claim as your far ancestress. Will you free me?"
"That's not a riddle," said Odris indignantly. "That's a question. Or a statement. Or something."
Milla frowned. It wasn't a riddle, but the Face seemed to sincerely believe that Milla could free it.
"I don't understand," she said. "Danir is the far ancestor of my clan, but she was an Icecarl. Icecarls have never come to this world, to Aenir. We live on the Ice, in the Dark World."
"I don't care what your people call you now," said the Face. "And I can't remember what you called yourselves then. All I know is that soon after the creation of the Veil and the Forgetting, I was bound here by a sorceress called Danir."
Milla shook her head. This was a matter for Crones to ponder over, not for a warrior. She longed for the clean Ice and an enemy that she could fight and kill. Not these games of words and magic.
"Even if the Danir who bound you was the same as my far ancestor, I do not have the knowledge to free you," Milla said. "I do not count this answer as the third in the game. You must ask a proper riddle."
"No, no," sobbed the Face, tears of darker water streaming down its cheeks. "You must free me. So many Chosen have come over the centuries, but none could free me, for none were of Danir's line. I would serve as your Spiritshadow"
"She's already got me!" interrupted Odris. "What would she need a great lump of wet for?"
"Please," begged the Face. "I have sat here too long. Set me free!"
"I do not know how," whispered Milla. She felt the Face's desire for freedom. The worst punishment an Icecarl could imagine would be to be penned up and unable to move. If the Icecarls could not follow the Selski migration, they would die.
"I do," said Odris. "Do you want me to tell you how?"
CHAPTER TEN
After a few hours of steady walking, Tal had left the grasslands behind. Possibly they had been moving the other way as well, all the time. In Aenir it was hard to be sure.
The grass ended in a completely straight border that stretched as far as Tal could see to the north and south. On the western side it was grass, on the eastern, a strange desert of red sand and spiky blue crystals that grew up in columns, looking from a distance almost like trees.
The major difference was that the crystals were very sharp, and they seemed to be carnivorous. At least, there were scraps of flesh and skin hanging off many of the "plants," and all of them were surrounded by rings of broken bones.
Tal gave each crystal plant a wide berth. As far as he could tell, they couldn't move, but he didn't trust them. They might be like the trees of the forest where he'd arrived and would move when it suited them.
As he walked farther into the desert, it got much hotter. The crystals shone more brightly, with a hypnotic glare. This was how they caught their prey, and Tal had to stop himself several times from walking into one of the plants. He wished for his old shadowguard. It would have shaded his head from the sun, and shielded his eyes. But the shadowguard was gone, back to living its life as a growing Dattu.
Then Tal remembered that he did have a companion that could shade him. He stopped and looked up. Adras had been trailing behind, quite high up. Now he was nowhere to be seen. But he wasn't too far away. Tal could feel his presence, a connection between them. He recognized it as being like the link he'd had with his shadowguard.
"Adras!" Tal shouted. His voice was hoarse. He'd drunk from a small stream that morning, but had been wanting another drink for some hours. This desert was much hotter than it had any right to be.
Adras did not answer his call.
Tal called again, and listened. There was a faint boom up ahead, a rather pathetic thunderclap.
Tal sighed and began to slog
toward the sound, carefully winding his way between the crystal plants.
A few hundred stretches farther on, he came to an oasis in the blue crystal desert a patch of more usual earth, with a small bubbling spring surrounded by a stand of tall, thin trees with greenypurple fronds.
Adras was hovering above the spring, sucking up moisture. A thick column of vapor spun out of the spring and into his open mouth.
Tal hurried down to get a drink. There might be something to eat, too, for the trees had fruit between the fronds.
There was also fruit on the ground. Tal had a drink, then picked up a piece of fruit and examined it. It had a hard skin, but was soft and pulpy inside. He had seen such fruit before, though only in baskets brought to the Chosen Enclave. His mother had called it cakefruit, cut it into slices, and cooked it in the oven.
Tal couldn't do that here, but he did roast the fruit with a beam of hot white light from his Sunstone, until the pulp browned. Eating it brought back memories of better times, when his family was all together and the worst thing Tal had to worry about was going back to a new term at the Lectorium.
Tal spat out the last mouthful of cakefruit. He didn't want to remember any more. It was too dispiriting to think about his family and their troubles. He had to focus on the immediate objective.
"I have to find the Codex," he said aloud.
Above him, Adras nodded his head, but did not stop soaking up water vapor. The desert had been hard on the Storm Shepherd. He had shrunk to three quarters his normal size in the dry air. Now he was intent on taking in as much water as possible, to last him till the cooler night.
"It's better that Milla left," Tal added. He was looking at Adras, but he was really talking to himself. "It makes everything more… I don't know… straightforward. I mean, she didn't want to find the Codex, really. She just wanted to know about Aenir to tell that weird old woman."
Adras stopped taking in water vapor long enough to burp. Then he started sucking again, his powerful breath twisting the water into vapor and up into his mouth.
"Beautiful," said Tal. "You're a big help." Despite the heat, now at its most intense, Tal didn't want to wait. Every minute spent in the oasis was time lost. Anything could be happening while he sat around eating cakefruit. To Gref, or to his mother.