Page 89 of Spinning Silver
We rode down the white road with snow and ash blowing together in our faces.
The hot flecks stung on my arms, but we were going quickly; the road was blurring silver beneath us with every leap of the stag, going as fast as the Staryk wanted to go, as fast as it could, and with one more leap we were under pine trees burning, a terrible red roaring flame all above our heads, and with another leap after that the road burst out from beneath them and was running next to the river.
But a river in spring, roaring, full of cracked chunks of ice bobbing and smashing against one another as they swept past us downstream.
Scattered silver coins were gleaming among them, and the Staryk gave a cry of horror as he saw ahead the waterfall alive again: a roaring torrent, bursting from the side of the mountain and crashing down in clouds of steam.
At the base of it, Chernobog danced and twirled with his arms in the air shrieking in delight.
He wasn’t burning all over anymore. He’d swelled out of human size and become monstrously large, a towering figure of charcoal covered thickly with ash, laced with deep cracks where glowing red veins of heat showed through, open flames only flaring here and there from his body.
He put his face into the falling water and drank in enormous thirsty gulps and grew a little more, as if he were somehow making more of himself to burn.
Coins of Staryk silver were shining like a carapace over his face and shoulders, scattered on him by the falls.
He wasn’t standing there alone: a knot of Staryk knights were trying to fight him, flinging silver spears at him from the shore of the spreading waterfall pool, but they couldn’t get close.
There was a forest of spears floating on the water, scattered and scorched, and he wasn’t bothering to turn away from his gluttonous drinking.
The Staryk king leapt off the stag and cried to me, “The mountain must be held against him, do whatever you can!” and then he drew a silver sword and ran to the pool and put his foot out onto the surface.
Where he stepped, ice grew solid underneath him, and he ran straight at the demon on a shining white road.
In his ecstatic hunger, Chernobog didn’t see him coming; the Staryk swung the sword into his monstrous leg, carving deep, and Chernobog roared in fury as ice spread in a crackling wave over the surface.
I ran up the road to the tall silver doors in the mountainside and pounded on them.
They had been shut and barred. “Let me in!” I shouted, and abruptly there was a grinding on the other side, and Shofer was there, heaving up a great crossbeam of silver that had blocked the door, and pushing it open just enough for me to squeeze inside.
A gust of cold air blew out, escaping, cold enough to make me realize how warm it already was outside, and even only standing in the cracked opening, Shofer’s face instantly began to shine with ice-melt.
He dragged the door shut again behind me, and lowered the bar back into place, and sagged away, pale.
“Shofer!” I said, trying to hold him up.
He wasn’t there alone; behind him, guarding the door, was a whole company of Staryk knights or lords, all of them holding tall shields of clear blue ice bounded in silver, overlapping one another like a wall.
They’d retreated well back from the opened door, but once it was shut, they rushed forward again, and there were hands reaching to help us back behind the ice wall of shields.
Behind that shelter, Shofer wiped the wet from his face and struggled back onto his feet.
I caught his arm urgently. “Shofer, the mountain—where the mountain is broken, where the waterfall comes out. Do you know where it is? Can you take me there?”
He stared at me wet and cloudy, but he nodded.
Together we ran up the road into the heart of the mountain, slipping a little with almost every step; the surface had gone slick, and there were tiny trickles of water running along the surface in places.
When we came out finally into the great vaulted space, it already felt somehow smaller overhead, as if the ceiling had drawn in closer on us, and the grove was full of Staryk women huddling close together beneath the white trees, making a smaller citadel of themselves.
I saw between their bodies the deep blue cores of children being sheltered from the growing warmth.
They looked up as I ran past with Shofer, with desperation on their faces; the ground was softening underfoot, and the limbs of the white trees were drooping.
The narrow stream was gurgling up out of its wellspring and running away through the grove, into the mountain walls.
He led me into a tunnel running parallel beside it, the deep crystalline walls breathing faint fog around us, full of the low groaning creaks of a frozen lake beginning to break up in spring.
And then the path ended suddenly in another tunnel, its sides very smooth, and the river became wide running down it.
He halted at the edge, staring down at the running water in misery and fear, and I said, “I can follow it from here! Go!”
I kicked off my shoes and plunged into the water and ran along the dark tunnel with the current, splashing along until it came out again inside the vast empty storeroom.
I ran through it and into the other side and kept going in a scramble over the narrow, choked space left by the water and the crammed heap of silver coins, mounds of it dragged along by the water.
The waterfall was roaring up ahead. Chernobog was a blurred capering shape on the other side of the mountain as I drew near, a shadow glowing red with coal.
I managed to climb a final massive slope of coins that had built up in the tunnel to the crack in the mountain: a wide and terrible maw of broken glass that looked like it was lined with teeth that had been softened around the edges: seven years since Mirnatius was crowned, and the mountain had first broken.
I imagined an earthquake or reverberation shuddering through the Staryk kingdom, and the crack spreading to let summer’s heat come in.
I could even see where they’d tried to patch it or block it, and the water had broken through again and again, widening the crack, each year draining away a little more strength that Chernobog could lap up from his seat upon the throne.
So their king had fought off summer every year instead, as long as he could; he’d stolen more and more sunlight from us, trapped in gold, so he could summon blizzards and winter storms in fall and spring, and keep the river frozen, if he couldn’t close the mountain.
And at last he’d come for me, a mortal girl who’d bragged that she could turn the silver that filled his treasure-rooms into an invincible hoard.
Silver coins were going out with the water like leaping fish, tumbling away between the shards, a treasure that was nothing next to the water itself: that clear cold water that was life, all their lives, draining out of the mountain to slake a thirst that had no end.
Chernobog would drink up the whole mountain and all the Staryk in it, and then he’d go back to Lithvas and suck everyone there dry as well.
Even if the Staryk king hadn’t told me, I would have known.
I recognized that hunger: a devouring thing that would gulp down lives with pleasure and would only pretend to care about law or justice, unless you had some greater power behind you that it couldn’t find a way to cheat or break, and that would never, never be satisfied.
The Staryk king was below and all his knights with him, on a ring of ice that the king was keeping frozen around Chernobog.
They were fighting together, determined, and where their silver swords struck him, frost crawled away over his body.
But they couldn’t put his fire out. He shrieked with rage, and the frost evaporated away into steam again as gouts of open flame erupted from the wounds.
Yet they couldn’t get to the core of him.
He’d grown too big, and he was still growing; he was still draining them even as they were trying to fight him.
He cupped his hands beneath the falling water and brought gulps of it to his mouth, throwing his head back and laughing with horrible gurgles, and with every swallow he was growing a little more.
I gripped the edges of the crack carefully and leaned out and shouted, “Chernobog! Chernobog!” He looked up at me with eyes that glowed like molten metal in a forge, and I called down, “Chernobog, I give you my word! By high magic I’m going to close this mountain crack now, and shut you out for good! ”
His eyes widened. “Never, never!” he shrieked up at me. “It is mine, mine, a well for me!” and he flung himself at the mountainside and began to claw his way up towards me.
I darted away from the opening and back into the tunnel, scrambling over the hills and valleys of silver, and I waited until he came peering into the dark at me.
He laughed at me through the crack and struck the edges with his fist, shattering more of the mountain’s crystal wall to open it wide. “I will come in, I will drink my fill!”