No Flame But Mine by Tanith Lee Page B

could be, she judged, far deeper than the width of the house itself.
    Had some witchling from another zone done this to spite her? It seemed feasible, but on the other hand were any of them canny enough?
    Jemhara approached the stack of gems. They glinted prettily. She touched one with her finger’s end. The cold scathed her and examining her hand, she saw a blister form at once on her fingertip. An effect of cold so intense was also unusual, for the people of this five-century Ice Age had adapted to it long ago. Only extended exposure could burn, never such a brief touch.
    Jemhara stepped back and threw a psychic blow at the pile of gemmy ice. It would have been crucial enough to fell a man. The ice never moved.
    Someone uttered a low sound behind her then.
    Jemhara did not turn.
    Every hair on her head and body had risen. She spoke softly, civilly. ‘How may I serve you, most mighty one?’
    But no answer came.
    Instead a sensual caress slipped over her neck and shoulders – light as nothing, perhaps no more than the lilt of a night breeze. Before she could prevent herself she had veered to face it. She caught the slightest glimpse.
    She had seen him before, she thought, or had she? For the god who had once visited her in her misspent youth, the Rukarian god who had fathered Lionwolf – Zeth Zezeth, the Sun Wolf – he had not looked as this one did. And yet, yet for an inexplicable moment he was Zeth. And then—
    Then he took on another masculine image. That was of a man in a mail of rime, his black hair spun and chipped with frost. And this Rukarian god’s name was Yyrot, Winter’s Lover.
    Her own hair smoothed down on her head. Whichever – whatever – it had been was gone.
    What had the double image said to her? Was ‘said’ too precise? It was more a noise, like that some large sombre animal might make, vocal, untranslatable. Jemhara calmed her breathing.
    The night had stayed otherwise very still. Or was it only that this part of Kandexa seemed closed in by heavy curtains?
    She looked again at the barricade.
    She remembered how she and Thryfe, lost in their love-making in the house at Stones, had also been shut within walls of timeless ice. But that had not been like this …
    Except probably that now, as then, there was involved a kind of occult magery, a thoughtless obdurate thing that did, could, would, obey few other magical laws.
    Jemhara’s earliest ability had been to thaw ice. She was a small child when first she did it. With her, it was less talent than intrinsic knack as, say, she had learned to walk.
    After a little while the edge of the barricade began to steam, or smoke. Rivulets like molten crystal snakes ran down into the street. Here and there flashing jewels tumbled from the pile.
    But then that too ceased. Though she had damaged the appearance of the gemstone wall the rest of it would not give.
    Jemhara saw she could not break through. And as she was she could not climb over, however swiftly or sorcerously aided.
    She had sensed an adversary all instinct. Thoughtless itself, could it read her thoughts? She brushed them away.
    Quietly she turned and went back along the alley and on, into another.
    How well did the faceless intelligence know her? If it came from a god, no matter which one, it might know all. But if it could not think —
    Jemhara wiped clean the whole surface of her mind.
    She crouched down in the pre-dawn dark – and was gone.
    A few minutes later another night-walker, a slender jet-black hare, loped into the eastern alley, reached the faceted cut-glass blockade, and sniffed it disdainfully.
    Then it bolted straight up the ice, its powerful hind limbs propelling it forward at breathless speed. Gaining the head of the heap it launched itself directly at the just visible window. A shutter slapped inward with a bang. Down into Jemhara’s attic room hurtled the hare, to land as if well practised on the bed of pelts.
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