Tales of the Frozen City

by JOSEPH A. MCCULLOUGH

  Jonathan Green

  The icy wind that cut across the ruined battlements of the keep bit as hard and as deep as a snow troll. It keened through cracked archways and howled around broken staircases. The only other sounds were the muffled footfalls of the warband, and the tapping of the wizard’s staff as he tested the frost-rimed flagstones before him, wary of traps even after so many frozen centuries.

  Thauros Malefizeit paused, taking in his surroundings. The space before him had once been roofed. The pillars that had supported its vaulted arches were now broken stumps of masonry. Little of the chamber’s walls remained either, other than for those of the tower pinnacle that rose beyond the heavy, half-open double doors on the far side of the roofless hall. The scattered bones and remnants of ancient armour that lay about the place in untidy piles were not entirely unexpected either.

  The climb to this high jutting promontory of the ruined city had been long and hard, fraught with snow troll ambushes and the hazardous nature of the ruins themselves. Thauros had lost one of the warband to icy stones and unsteady footing that had seen the wretch plummet to his death on the ice-black crags below.

  Behind the wizard the remaining men-at-arms that formed his bodyguard made their way to the top of the broad flight of snow-dusted stone steps.

  ‘Spread out, and keep a watchful eye,’ the ruffian who led the warrior band commanded. The sergeant’s scarred face and the steely look in his eyes gave him the kind of countenance that would make any rebellious spirit think twice before challenging his orders. Thauros couldn’t remember the man’s name; after all, the sergeant, just like the rest of the warband, was expendable, as far as he was concerned.

  The soldiers looked about them warily, alert to any signs of danger, unnerved by the ever-present moaning of the wind, certain that so great a prize as the one the wizard doubtless sought could surely not be so easily won.

  Thauros leant his weight on his staff. He might look young, but he was older than his smooth, unblemished skin and sparkling eyes might suggest. The wind sent flurries of fat flakes dancing across the flagstones, but in the breezes that tugged at his robes and threatened to pull the cowl free of his head, he felt something other than the fell winter’s lingering chill. He felt promise and expectation. He sensed a future pregnant with untold power.

  He looked at the hourglass atop his staff. As he watched, the steady trickle of sand grains falling into the lower bulb slowed until it finally stopped altogether. And then the sands began to shift and dance, a vortex forming within the glass in sympathy with the eddying motion of the wind about the tower top, and the grains began to tumble back into the upper bulb of the hourglass. In its turn, the icy wind became a blizzard that sent flurries of snow rushing across the cracked flags and scattering the piles of age-blackened bones.

  It was then that the mage became aware of the golden glow suffusing the chamber beyond the double doors. And then the attack came.

  The warriors emerged from between the open doors, their weapons clattering against the portal as they passed through, their bony footfalls echoing from the ice-skinned flags.

  ‘Defend yourselves!’ Thauros shouted, his authoritative roar cutting through the mournful wail of the wind and returning to him again from the broken walls of the keep. But his call to arms was unnecessary; the soldiers had seen the tower’s defenders too and had already drawn their weapons in anticipation of the battle to come.

  Standing firm, his feet apart and legs braced, in readiness for what he was about to do, Thauros inhaled deeply, muscles tensing as he dipped a toe in the river of time itself, and drew just a fraction of its potential power to him.

  As he directed the flow of chronomantic energy into his core, the men-at-arms advanced, relieved at last that they had something to fight, even if their foes were the walking dead.

  The skeletons stalked towards the warband, deathly doppelgangers of the advancing soldiers, their bony carcasses still clad in the clothes and armour they had worn in life, although their clothes were now rags and their armour rusted and pitted with age. Their weapons had suffered the ravages of time as well, once carefully-honed blades nocked and blunted, the metal dulled by rust.

  But regardless of the condition of their blades and breastplates, everything about the skeletons – from their garb to the way they held their weapons – spoke of their warrior heritage. In years long past, when these bones had been clad in flesh, they too had been masters of the sword and axe.

  As Thauros shaped the surging power of the river of time into a potent spell, the sell-swords moved against the long-dead guardians of this place.

  Swords clashed. Blows were traded. But while the skeletal warriors had clearly known a life of battle, in their undead condition their ability to perform the actions they once had in life had slowed. As such, the wizard’s warband had the advantage, just so long as they could put from their minds the fact that they were effectively fighting their own futures, the reminder of their own mortality never stronger than when facing these fleshless human forms.

  But Thauros need not have doubted the men’s courage. They set about their enemy with such fury it was as if they were fighting Lord Death himself, with their own souls, and their continued existence, as the prize, should they prevail.

  To the wizard’s left a burly barbarian clad in a snow leopard’s pelt locked axes with a skeleton with a rotting hide hung about its bony shoulders. Freeing his curved blade again, he smashed the skull clean from the skeleton’s shoulders with a scything chop.

  To his right another undead guardian fell as an archer loosed an arrow at a skeletal bowman. The arrow severing its spine, the bones of the skeleton warrior clattered to the ground as the spell binding them together was broken, along with its shattered vertebrae.

  Thauros put the actions of the warriors from his mind as he focused on harnessing the temporal power now surging around the tower top like a hurricane, with him at its eye. This was more than the fleeting vagaries of glimpsed possibilities or past lingering memories. It was greater even than the magical potential generated by the sands of time in the glass atop his staff. There had to be a source of great chronomantic power nearby.

  His eyes closed as he concentrated on channelling the raw time essence ebbing and flowing like the tides around him, Thauros nonetheless allowed himself a brief smile. He had decoded the clues contained within the pages of the grimoire correctly. The artefact – the Eye of Amarra – was somewhere nearby.

  And then the spell was ready.

  Thauros could feel the power energising his every fibre, and trying to contain it felt like trying to hold the breath in his lungs at the bottom of a lake. And then he could contain that pent-up breath no longer.

  The spell burst from him in an ever-expanding sphere, the shockwave of its passing visible as a ripple, as the force of the blast distorted the very air at its passing. Their backs to the blast, the men-at-arms weathered the storm, but the charm binding the skeletons’ beleaguered bones together failed. The skeletal warriors broke apart, becoming nothing more than piles of bones scattered about the shattered keep.

  ‘With me!’ Thauros commanded, flexing his shoulders, easing the tension in his muscles.

  ‘This way!’ the sergeant-at-arms directed, his men throwing the scattered bones wary glances as they made their way towards the half-open doors, as if half-expecting the skeletons to resurrect themselves and attack again.

  The wind howling about inside the tower room was even stronger than the blizzard assaulting the icy battlements, such was the magical potency of the artefact contained within. But Thauros didn’t feel cold; this magical cyclone warmed him from the inside out as a million possibilities vied to become reality, as the future tried to take shape and overtake the present, the past nothing more than a distant memory.

  As Thauros crossed the threshold, the golden glow became a blaze of brilliant light that consumed the tower chamber, causing the men behind him to gasp and stumble to a halt, their resolute det
ermination quelled in the face of such unmatched magical power.

  Shielding his eyes against the glare of the coruscating light, Thauros first saw the source of the radiance – a perfect sphere of crystal as large as a man’s head, resting atop a carved column of stone – and then the silhouette of the hunched figure standing behind it. Someone else, clearly another mage, had beaten him to the prize. The mage’s hands clasped the crystal, as if trying to contain the etheric energies rippling from the magical wonder.

  ‘Do not delay about your business,’ Thauros chided the warband, the prodigious power thrilling every fibre of his being. ‘I hired you for a reason.’

  Angling his staff, he indicated the figure standing behind the plinth, attempting to wrangle the unfettered energies of the sphere. ‘Attack!’

  ‘Men of Arngard, do you want to live forever?’ the sergeant shouted, leading his men into the chamber at a run, his sword held high.

  And then the soldiers’ pelting run slowed, as if the men were attempting to run through honey. But it wasn’t their charge that had slowed, it was time itself, or at least Thauros’s perception of it.

  He witnessed every movement performed by the mage in crystal clarity. He saw the bolts of coruscating energy leap from the wizard’s outstretched fingertips. He saw the withering effects of the blasts on the doomed men of the warband. He saw their flesh shrivel, their eyes dissolve into puddles of slime inside their sockets.

  He watched, in appalled horror and with no small thrill of excitement, as the men’s armour tarnished and their weapons corroded in their hands, the ravaging effects of untold centuries working upon the metal in seconds.

  He watched until there was nothing left of the soldiers but bones and armour, their physical remains dropping to the floor, their flesh falling in grey drifts of dust about them, only to be picked up and flung about the chamber by the perpetual whirlwind.

  And then the wizened mage, his long white beard almost reaching to the flagstones at his feet, turned the energies of the sphere against Thauros.

  In an instant time sped up again, the rate of its passing continuing to accelerate. Thauros could feel the strength draining from his arms and legs, his staff suddenly heavy in his hands. But he resisted.

  Where the wretches he had sent to their deaths had been mere mortals, Thauros Malefizeit was a timerider, a chronomancer, whose magic had tamed time itself and who had wrought spells that could unleash its undreamt of power at his command.

  His vision blurred as cataracts clouded his eyes, like feathers of frost spreading across a window pane. But he would not be beaten.

  Even as he felt his hair lengthening beneath the cowl of his cloak – the growing mass of it pushing the hood free of his head as years passed in mere moments – and the itch of the whiskers of a beard descending in long white strands from his cheeks and chin, he tightened his grip on his staff. Summoning what reserves of strength he had left, and focusing his mind once more, he drew a wisp of magical energy to him. Winding it about his staff, he brought it under his control before he unleashed it again, channelled through the sandglass.

  The wizened mage was thrown back from the plinth and tumbled to the ground.

  His spell cast, Thauros took a moment to catch his breath, letting the staff take his weight again. For a moment his gaze fell on his hands, although they didn’t look like his hands; they were arthritic claws barely covered with translucent, parchment-thin skin.

  Suspecting that his attack had only wounded the mage, and knowing that if he did not finish the job he had started then doubtless his rival would seize the opportunity and finish him, Thauros hobbled across the chamber, past the plinth. Wincing against the golden glare still pulsing from the sphere, as he manoeuvred himself between the bones of the dead warband he caught sight of the mage again.

  Thauros need not have worried about the wizard attacking him again; he had clearly paid the ultimate price for unleashing the power of the Eye of Amarra. The mage lay on the ground, his physical form crumbling to dust as Thauros watched, his robes seeming to burn under the attentions of the ferocious chronomantic energy, until dust and ash was all that was left of him. This residue was caught by the dancing zephyrs and blown from the chamber through glassless windows and the open doors, to be caught by the blizzard still howling outside, and carried to the four corners of Frostgrave.

  As the old man died, so, at last, did the power he had unleashed from the ancient artefact. The molten light faded until the sphere appeared to be nothing more than a lump of lifeless crystal, darkly reflecting Thauros’s surroundings from its obsidian-black surface.

  The roar of the magical wind faded and, left in silence, Thauros realised he was panting heavily. The battle with the mage had taken it out of him, both body and soul. He looked down at his withered frame and ran a liver-spotted hand through the long white beard that had sprouted from his chin. The chronomantic duel had aged him considerably. He looked his age now, something that could not have been said of him for a long time. He couldn’t allow that state of affairs to continue.

  The Eye of Amarra was a source of great power; he had gleaned that much from the many ancient tomes and mouldering scrolls he had picked through, but more importantly he had witnessed it for himself. If he could unlock that power, as the other mage had done, he could then use those same chronomantic energies to reverse the aging progress and restore both his youthful countenance and vigour.

  Laying down his staff, Thauros placed his hands either side of the round crystal. Taking a deep breath, he began to intone the incantation he had discovered inscribed within a frozen manuscript in one of Frostgrave’s long-forgotten libraries – the spell that would awaken the power of the Eye of Amarra.

  At once, the same golden glow as before suffused the glassy black orb. The crystal felt warm to the touch, his muscles reenergised. The power swelled and he felt the etheric winds buffeting his cheeks, tugging at his robes and the long white hair of his beard. It took all Thauros’s focus to contain the magical energies of the Eye. He was only dimly aware of the flickering of the sky beyond the open windows, the flow of time surging through him now. It felt like a wild beast that he had to tame, twisting and bucking within his grasp, as if trying to break free. But Thauros would not relinquish his hold on it now. He had come too far to give up at the last hurdle.

  As the magic continued to course through him, his senses became heightened to preternatural levels. He became aware of the world beyond the enclosed chamber, the blizzard raging across the battlements of frozen stone, and he sensed the presence of others upon the tower top. Men, treasure hunters, doubtless come to steal his hard-won prize from him.

  He had fought too hard and given up too much to allow the Eye of Amarra to be snatched from his clutches just as he was on the verge of unlocking the secrets of the orb.

  He had never had such potent power at his fingertips. Reaching out with his mind, he called to the bones of the warband, reminding the dead sell-swords of their oaths, reminding them that they had sworn to defend him.

  And at his invocation, one by one, the skeletal remains of the sergeant-at-arms and his men clambered to their feet, buoyed up by the winds of the magical vortex. Weapons clutched in bony fingers, the tarnished remnants of armour and ragged clothes clinging to their skeletal frames, the undead mercenaries marched from the chamber, through the half-open double doors. Moments later the muffled sounds of battle being joined reached Thauros’s ears.

  With a part of his mind concentrating on animating the skeletal remains of his erstwhile companions, Thauros had to battle even harder to maintain his control of the magical energies surging about the chamber. But moment by moment, he could feel the pressure on him easing, although this knowledge did not bode well for him. It meant that one by one his skeleton warriors were being cut down by the new arrivals. All too soon the division of his abilities was gone and he knew that his warband had failed to defend him once again.

  Thauros was aware of someone entering th
e chamber, cautiously making their way between the double doors. Peering through the whirling golden light of the etheric vortex with rheumy eyes, he saw a figure dressed in long robes and clutching a staff in his hands. It was another wizard, and he was accompanied by his own band of brigands and sell-swords.

  The chronomancer cursed inwardly, not having the breath left to give voice to his frustrations. He was so close to mastering the feral magic of the Eye. If he were to stop now, the backlash of uncontrolled energy would end him as surely as it had the mage before him. He couldn’t let anything distract him now.

  Diverting part of his focus again, he formed another spell in his mind and lashed out with the full force of the orb’s power.

  Bolts of coruscating energy leapt from his outstretched fingertips, striking the charging warriors. Where they struck, flesh withered, tabards and tunics became rags and the gleaming metal of their armour and weapons tarnished. All the other wizard could do was look on in horror as his defenders became nothing but bones, their spines, skulls and ribcages tumbling to the stone flags in disordered heaps. And then only the wizard remained.

  Without a second thought, Thauros turned the pent-up energies of the Eye against the interloper. But where the soldiers had succumbed immediately, the rival spellcaster resisted. His pulse quickened as he realised that his rival was another chronomancer. Although the wizard’s flesh did not instantly turn to dust, Thauros’s rival began to age rapidly nonetheless. His clean-shaven jaw sprouted a beard while his dramatically lengthening hair pushed the hood of his cloak from his head.

  And it was in that moment that Thauros caught sight of the other’s face and an icy chill gripped his heart.

  He tried to call out to his rival, to call a truce, but his throat had constricted in shock.

  Dispelling the aging hex, he focused fully on trying to reverse the aging process, rather than attacking the other wizard.

  For his rival was Thauros Malefizeit, the same Thauros Malefizeit who had entered the tower chamber less than a turn of the sand-timer ago.