The burial chamber was so crowded that Larc could barely breathe. Children and cababar covered the floor, makeshift sickbeds lined the walls, and elderly humans wandered through the mess, confused about where they were. Six days had passed since Krevas had ordered the non-fighting citizens to retreat, and the pit alcoves to the back were beginning to fill, causing the whole cave to reek of refuse. Above, the ghostly purple glow of burial ice cast a funereal light on frightened and uncertain faces. Larc wished she could say or do something to soothe the people. A song would have provided a nice distraction, in ordinary times, but in the face of grief and suffering, singing seemed in poor taste.
Normally, the burial chambers were silent, sacred, solitary caverns. This cluster of more than fifty large chambers, the nearest to the lake, had been linked by wide tunnels, shaped by Icers more powerful than Larc, and the chambers themselves widened to accommodate nearly twenty thousand people, about a fifth of the population of Iskalon. No amount of widening could accommodate such vast numbers, and Larc resorted to drawing cold from the air and hovering above the humans in order to move through the caves. It seemed a waste of vaerce, and it was hardly polite, but war did not make politeness or distant moments of old age a priority. Her ice-armor was heavy, and she carried a leather satchel with rags and some of the medicinal fungi that aided her tasks, so she did not rise very high. She floated to the nearest wall and waited patiently while children playing a constricted game of bladderball moved even closer together to give her room. After six days without bathing or changing, their skin and leather clothing were covered in grime.
An elderly man coughed ceaselessly on his molebear hide. Larc knelt and placed her hands on his chest. T'Jas flooded into her, strengthening, reassuring. She hummed softly, a lullaby her mother often sang, soothing him as she reached deep into his chest with T'Jas. She found the source of pain and healed it, then moved quickly to the next patient, leaving the man in a quiet, deep sleep. He coughed once from that sleep, then stopped as his chest realized the pain was gone.
She went from person to person, stopping occasionally to draw more T'Jas from the icy walls, humming under her breath all the while. Each life she extended would take a little time off her life, but she hardly cared. The average Icer lived twice as long as a human, and she was willing to trade a few years so that hundreds might live today. With only ten Icers to care for several hundred infirm, many of the elderly and chronically ill had worsened. And the constant shuffle of wounded, humans and Icers both, up the tunnel from the battle caves, had only taxed the Icers further. Larc had been forced to make the decision not to heal more than one Warrior who was past her help. She knew the other Icers were just as demoralized by those painful decision as she. The cramped conditions, and limited rations, did not lift anyone’s spirits.
In spite of her utter exhaustion at having T'Jas running through her almost constantly, Larc was glad that there was something she could do. Healing was her strongest ability with T'Jas. At least she had not been assigned to collapsing tunnels or shaping out new alcoves; she was hopeless at working with rock.
She was leaning over a pregnant woman, exploring her belly, when Pasten approached. The woman's child would have been a girl, but it was dead inside of her. She was shaking and moaning, and blood was seeping from between her legs and pooling on the floor around her. This was the third miscarriage Larc had seen in as many days, but it made her want to weep as much as the first had. At least she could save the woman’s life; without healing, she might have bled to death. Larc placed both hands over the woman's navel.
“I’ve received a command from the city, Larc.” Pasten looked haggard. She had not slept any less than the rest of the Icers, but it showed more strongly in her pale blue eyes.
“Have you, Princess?” Numbness washed over Larc’s grief. Focus, she told herself. Her T'Jas weakened a little, and she drew more cold from the walls. Within the woman's belly, the dead child began to dissolve. The flow of blood began to staunch as Larc helped her body reabsorb the tissue. The patient stopped shaking and the horror of what was happening seemed to come alive in her eyes. “No,” she whispered. She tried to sit up as her stomach sank, and Larc gently urged her to lie back while she continued the healing.
“All Icers we can spare are to report to the city. The wounded must be healed there and sent back to the lines.”
Larc closed her eyes and concentrated on the healing. When it was done, she began to stand, but the woman grasped her arm. Her grip was strong, her color healthy, but her eyes were empty. “You could have at least let me bury him.”
Larc almost corrected her, stopped herself just in time. She pulled the woman’s hand, her grip weakening quickly, from her arm, squeezed it gently, and released it. “I’m sorry. This was better for your health. The babe is part of you again, at least.”
She took a large piece of chamois from her bag and began sopping up the blood. “Any we can spare? We can spare exactly none, Princess.”
“Larc.” Pasten paused as if considering her words carefully. “I know the situation here as well as you. But if we do not keep the lines strong, there will be no one to protect the burial chambers, and all this will be for nothing.”
Larc beckoned a hale woman who stood nearby and handed her a fresh rag with instructions to finish cleaning up and watch for complications. The patient lay quietly now, her face covered with salty tear streaks, her body shaking with grief. Larc thought of the innocent life that had lain there, killed by the caustic conditions of war. She thought of fire advancing up the tunnels into the burial chambers.
“Is there a plan for escape, Pasten?”
“We are working on a tunnel from here to the Outer Tunnels. I don’t know if we will be safe there, but at least we won’t be trapped.”
Larc nodded. Best if it did not come to that. The Outer Tunnels were wild, and even if the Flames didn’t follow them, there were other dangers, rockfalls and deadly animals, that the people of Iskalon were in no condition to face.
“I have told the other Icers. You are the last. You must go now. Take a raihan from one of the messengers at the cavern entrance; you will need to conserve your strength and vaerce. Report to Maudit’s officers. They have set up triage in the Council Hall.”
Larc curtsied and rose above the unusually solemn bladderball game. She tried to ignore the sounds of pain and suffering as she left them and Pasten behind and floated toward the entrance. Once she had passed through the narrow tunnel, she settled onto the ground and released T'Jas.
The main tunnel to Iskalon, intersecting several other tunnels from nearby burial chambers, was open, guarded by two Icers. Nearby, several Scribes with their pale, slender raihan awaited orders to take messages. Larc saluted the Icers, fist to heart. She turned to the nearest Scribe and asked him, apologetically, for his beast. The man was petite for a human, as most Scribes were, and he handed the raihan over courteously but with obvious reluctance. Messenger Scribes forged strong bonds with the animals they rode. Larc promised him she would send the raihan back with the next messenger.
Raihan were small and looked so delicate that Larc felt even her meager weight might crush them, but this one stood meekly while she mounted and gripped its upright blue horns. When they left the purple light of the burial ice behind and entered the long, dark tunnel to the city, Larc did not waste vaerce on an icelight; the raihan itself glowed with phosphorescence in the darkness. It glided like an Icer over the ground, swift and silent; Larc did not feel a single jolt from the rough stones of the tunnel.
Soon, the downward curving Bridge of Ancestors stood before her, towering magnificently over the lake. A heavy fog, mixed with dark smoke, hung over lake and city. The Guild houses and the top of the Council Hall stood in the fog like a thousand tiny islands. The Palace looked dark and empty. The air was chokingly stale.
Larc used T'Jas to create a bubble of oxygen over her mouth and the raihan’s. They must have closed off the tunnels, sealed them against attack. Then she saw something that made her heart skip a beat. Straight across the lake, where the Fire Bridge had once floated, joining the island of Iskalon to the tunnels that lead downward, was only water. The same gaping absence loomed where the Bridge of Prosperity had floated, and the King's Bridge was gone as well. Iskalon was sealed up and cut off, ready for siege.
Larc could not help thinking about the fungal tunnels and the livestock caverns beyond the sunken bridges. How much had been harvested, how many cababar brought into the city, before it was shut off? Would she have to worry about her patients starving now, in addition to waiting too long for healing? How long before the food ran out altogether?
When she was halfway across the Bridge of Ancestors, there came a grinding sound, and the walls of Iskalon shook. It came again, and again. The Flames meant to breach the sealed-off tunnels. Surely, if they did, the lake would stop them. But Flames could float through the air just like Icers, and if they swarmed over the lake, they might gain enough ground on the island to do real damage. The sensitive raihan picked up Larc’s sudden urgency and broke into a run. If there were not wounded piling up now, there soon would be.