Tales of the Frozen City

by JOSEPH A. MCCULLOUGH

  He had not recognised his own clothes to begin with, his vision blurred by cataracts and the colour of the robes altered under the golden whirling light emitted by the opened Eye. But his initial shock at the realisation that he was fighting himself, was swiftly superseded by the subsequent realisation that he had already seen how this scene played out, only minutes before – or was it hours? He wasn’t sure anymore – but from the other wizard’s point of view.

  He had to stop this, and he had to stop it now, for he knew how it would end. He was living on borrowed time, and time had run out.

  Lady Time could be a fickle mistress, as unpredictable and as unforgiving as her estranged consort Lord Death.

  But he could not relinquish control of the orb yet, not without cataclysmic repercussions. He had to close the Eye with care, if only his younger self would give him the time to do so.

  As Thauros fought to take control of the orb once and for all, his younger self fought to resist its power all over again.

  Whirling his staff about his head, the younger timerider bound a fraction of the vortex’s power to his will. With a sweeping motion of the carved stave, he sent a lash of potent energy back at Thauros.

  The spell struck, as hard as a giant’s fist. Thauros reeled backwards, breaking contact with the crystal. Frail legs gave way beneath him and he landed hard on the stone-flagged floor.

  Lying spread-eagled on the cold stones, his decrepit body numb with pain, he gasped for breath. Through barely open eyes, he saw the orb atop the plinth, licked by ethereal flame. He reached out to it with one desperate hand, but even as he did so he knew it was too late. The sands of time had run out for Thauros Malefizeit.

  The magical winds whipped at his body but rather than the warmth they had brought to his aching muscles before, now they brought the numbing cold of death. He felt those same muscles wither, his skin splitting and crinkling like a vellum scroll dropped on an open fire, the very flesh on his bones crumbling with every palsied twitch of his dying body, until finally blessed oblivion overcame him.

  And then he was no more, every atom of his being blown to the four corners of the Frozen City on the zephyrs of eternity...

  * * *

  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...

  Jonathan Green is a writer of speculative fiction, with more than fifty books to his name. Well known for his contributions to the Fighting Fantasy range of adventure gamebooks, he has also written fiction for such diverse properties as Doctor Who, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Moshi Monsters, World of Warriors, LEGO and Judge Dredd.

  He is the creator of the Pax Britannia series for Abaddon Books and has written eight novels set within this steampunk universe, featuring the debonair dandy adventurer Ulysses Quicksilver. He is also the author of the critically-acclaimed YOU ARE THE HERO – A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.

  2015 sees the release of SHARKPUNK, an anthology of shark-themed stories that he has compiled and edited. To find out more about his current projects visit www.jonathangreenauthor.com.

  SWORD CERULEAN

  Ben Counter

  ‘You do not will yourself to action,’ said Oderic the Just, placing his palm against the snarling ghoul’s forehead. ‘You have no control. I forgive you your evil.’

  Silver light pulsed from Oderic’s palm. The ghoul’s skull collapsed as if punctured and its dried, skinny body slithered to the pavement.

  ‘There will be more,’ said Sergeant Voss, one of the soldiers hired to accompany Oderic on this excursion into the Strangers’ Quarter of Frostgrave.

  ‘Of course there will,’ said Oderic. ‘Would we truly have a purpose here if there were not?’

  Feral ghouls roamed this part of the city, lurking between the tumbledown tenement blocks and ill-made shanties. Once they had been citizens of this city, before a terrible calamity befell it and their bodies had frozen in the chill that followed. They had thawed out imperfectly, their flesh turned mushy and sagging. It was only the remnants of the cataclysm’s magic that kept them intact at all. The warband had met several ghouls, and Oderic had always stepped forward to despatch them with righteous magic before Voss and his men had the chance to cut them down with swords and halberds. Apprentice Loya clutched her bundle of books to her robed chest, glancing between the ramshackle buildings as if certain that undead hands would drag her into the shadows at any second.

  Oderic did not look like a man who could despatch the hungry dead with such ease. He was old, with a voluminous white beard and long, lined face dominated by a hooked nose. He wore the white and silver robes of his religious order, a monastic group that studied arcane lore and philosophy in their cold mountain monastery, and had somehow managed to keep his vestments clean in the filth of Frostgrave. That in itself was proof of his magic. Every wizard called magic from a different place – Oderic claimed his was granted by the divine, channelled through him as an instrument of the gods.

  ‘We are surely close now,’ said Oderic. ‘Apprentice? Have we reached our destination?’

  Loya opened one of the books she carried with her. It was a grime-spattered account of the city’s history, an extremely rare tome that had cost Oderic a lot more than hiring the men-at-arms who protected him. She examined the page, then looked around the surrounding buildings. ‘There,’ she said, pointing at a symbol carved into the lintel of one of the few stone buildings in the Strangers’ Quarter. It matched the symbol on the page, a human heart surrounded by a wreath. ‘The arms of Saint Eukeldus. That is the building we seek.’

  Saint Eukeldus, patron of the afflicted and without hope. It was in his name that the plague hospital had been built – and it was only in the Stranger’s Quarter, among foreigners and beggars, that the ancient city council had permitted it to stand.

  ‘Then steel yourselves,’ said Oderic. ‘There is no prize worth the claiming, if it is not hard fought for. The trial lies within. Have faith, and it will shield you. Voss, gain us entry.’

  Voss, with the face of one who had long since learned to tune out Oderic’s preaching, led his men DuPresne, Karl and Bolos to the front doors of the building. The doors had been sealed with planks of wood driven into the stonework. With some effort the soldiers prised the planks away and Voss kicked the door open.

  All the men recoiled from the stink that rolled out. Apprentice Loya turned a shade of grey-green and covered her mouth. Only Oderic was unmoved.

  ‘Thus, with the crossing of the threshold,’ said the thaumaturge, ‘we bring light to the darkness.’

  * * *

  The plague hospital was a building of long, low wards, strewn wi
th the mouldering remains of the beds on which the afflicted had been left to die. Cells for the most infectious, or those driven violently mad, led off from the main wards. Voss led the way, carefully picking through the trash that choked the stairways and corridors as the warband descended down through the levels of the hospital. The hospital’s building was built on older foundations, an armoury or storehouse that reached down through the layers of Frostgrave’s history deep into the earth. The total darkness was pierced by the torch that Bolos carried.

  And the stench was everywhere. Death and decay, the nose-wrinkling sweetness of putrefaction, the meaty, throat-closing haze of flyblown flesh. When the great thaw had come to Frostgrave, opening up the city for rediscovery and exploitation, a great many long-frozen corpses were exposed to the elements. And a great many of them lay in the plague hospital of Saint Eukeldus.

  ‘Halt!’ hissed Voss as the warband crossed the centre of one ward where several bodies lay heaped up around the doorways. ‘Something is moving. Something has... ’

  He got no further before a hand shot out from a pile of corpses and grabbed his ankle. Voss let out an odd, strangled sound as he was yanked off his feet. The corpses came to writhing, hungry life and three of them slithered over Voss.

  Karl and Bolos grabbed Voss’ arms to drag him out. The torch fell to the floor and the ghouls cast writhing shadows across the walls and ceiling. DuPresne stayed with Oderic and Loya, sword drawn. More ghouls leapt from the shadows and DuPresne met one with a sword-thrust to the throat. Loya screamed.

  ‘Banish the darkness!’ yelled Oderic. In one hand a staff of golden light appeared, the sudden harshness of the light almost blinding. He wielded it like a spear, thrusting it through the chest of one ghoul. The undead creature burst in a shower of ash and a flare of sunlight.

  ‘Stay with me,’ said DuPresne to Loya. ‘I’ll protect you.’

  DuPresne led Loya and Oderic towards the far end of the ward, where an open doorway led to a stairway winding downwards. The torch was smothered and there was only the noise of ghoulish slavering, and the muffled cries of the other soldiers as they were trapped beneath a growing heap of undead.

  The three survivors stumbled blindly down the stairs. They bumped into an archway and stopped, DuPresne turning to listen for ghouls approaching from behind.

  Oderic flicked a wrist and a bright light flared from his outstretched finger, illuminating the chamber beyond.

  Even before the calamity, the plague hospital had been a place of the dead. Every day, bodies of the afflicted had been taken from their beds or cells. And they were taken here, to the place where magic once kept the unquiet flesh caged, where the rot and stench had been dampened down – to the corpse pit.

  The bodies there were missing limbs, or had rotted down to brown skeletons. But the magical aftermath of the calamity had reached this place, too, and the pit stirred at the approach of living flesh.

  ‘There!’ said DuPresne, pointing towards a door set into the wall of the basement. ‘Hurry!’ he pushed Loya towards the door, his sword held out towards the bodies clambering over one another to escape the pit.

  Oderic muttered words of power and flecks of orange-bright fire rained down over the corpse pit. Ghouls screamed where the embers touched their flesh and burned right through. But there were so many of them, and gnarled, dead hands reached over the lip of the pit.

  Loya pushed the door open. Oderic followed her. DuPresne paused, ready to impale anything that tried to get through the doorway after them.

  If he had just fled headlong, he might have made it. But the ghouls of the corpse pit rose like a breaking wave of rotting flesh, a mass of bodies rotted together, a dozen arms reaching, a dozen drooling mouths howling with hunger. Filmy yellow eyes were narrowed in rage as the wave crashed against DuPresne. He cried out, once, before the wave of decay smothered him and he was gone.

  Oderic slammed the door. A sturdy bar fell against it. Ancient fingernails scratched against the wood, but the door held fast.

  ‘They’re dead,’ said Loya. In the harsh light of Oderic’s magic, her young, pale face glistened with sweat. Strands of her black hair stuck to her face. She still held her books, as if they were a shield that might keep the living dead off her if they broke through.

  ‘Do not mourn them,’ said Oderic. ‘They have passed on to the better world beyond. Rejoice that they have shed this world of pain.’ He played his light across the basement they had found themselves in, revealing ancient stonework, the foundations of some structure that long predated the hospital.

  ‘There,’ he said, a rare smile breaking across his face. He pointed to a stone coffin in the middle of the room. ‘The sarcophagus. Your research spoke true, Apprentice! There lies the body of the Crusader Lord Benignus, and the Sword Cerulean! See, Apprentice, how faith has proven itself? Fate put the living dead on our tails, and drove us to the very treasure we seek!’

  Loya did not reply as Oderic knelt beside the stone coffin. He put a shoulder against the stone. Power flickered around him as he called on the strength of the divine and the sarcophagus lid shifted.

  ‘The Sword Cerulean,’ said Oderic. ‘Think on it! The weapon of the Crusader Lords, the blade that could vanquish the darkness itself! A thing of legend. And now I have found it.’

  The lid thudded onto the floor. Oderic looked into the coffin, and his smile faded.

  * * *

  It had been a long and tedious task, writing whole volumes of false lore. Oderic was highly educated and would have spotted any leads that were too obvious. The trick had been burying the legend of the Sword Cerulean, weaving it around true tales and histories, so Oderic believed he alone had uncovered something wonderful.

  Apprentice Loya brushed the hair from her face. ‘Have I done well?’ she asked. ‘Have I pleased you?’

  The Liche Enkurt looked down at her with sunken, filmy eyes. They were set deep into the dried-out skull of his face. From the sarcophagus he drew the golden mask, the beautiful face he presented to the world, and clamped it to the bare bone of his cranium.

  ‘You have, my child,’ he said, in a voice as dry as dust. ‘In dreams I led you here, and you did not falter. You will be the first of my disciples. In time, when we are mighty, you shall rule over a great swathe of the world. You shall be a queen, answering only to me.’

  The light conjured by Oderic had not died out completely. It was still enough to catch the tears filling Loya’s eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she gasped. ‘Thank you, my lord... ’

  Enkurt held up a hand to silence her as he stepped out of the sarcophagus. The liche’s ancient body creaked beneath his heavy purple robes and the dust of ages fell off him. It had been hundreds of years since he had sealed himself in, and when the thaw had finally come to Frostgrave, he had spent countless laborious nights sending dreams to likely acolytes. Then he had found Loya.

  ‘I must have more servants,’ he said. ‘The ghouls of this place will do for now but only the freshly-dead can serve my purposes.’

  ‘And what of him?’ asked Loya, pointing at the body of Oderic the Just. She pointed with the knife she had used to stab him in the back, using the moment of confusion as he looked on Enkurt’s sleeping form to drive the knife between his ribs.

  ‘The ghouls will bring him with us,’ said Enkurt. From the sarcophagus he withdrew his staff, topped with a skull of bronze with diamond eyes, and the ornate ritual dagger with which he had ended many lives to create corpses that would do his bidding. ‘He may prove useful. For now, my acolyte, let us leave this place. There is much for us to do.’

  Ben Counter is a lifelong gamer and miniature enthusiast living in the UK, near Portsmouth. He is best known for his series of novels for Games Workshop including the Grey Knights and Soul Drinkers series, and has also written supplements for roleplaying games including Dark Heresy, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and World of Darkness. He is a founder of Death Spiral Games, publisher of the RPG Sleeper: Orphans of the Cold War. Trademarks
of his fiction include flights of Moorcockian strangeness, gruesome horror, blood-spattered action scenes and stratospheric body counts. A connoisseur of creative ways to waste time, he is a passionate (and, he likes to point out, award-winning) miniature painter, as well as a regular at his local game shop where he can be found playing miniature wargames, refereeing tournaments of Magic: the Gathering or running RPGs.

  THE DEVIL’S OBSERVATORY

  M. HAROLD PAGE

  The wind howled outside the Devil’s Observatory. Around the ice-wreathed walls, the torches jammed into the cressets guttered and flickered. Ancient brass squealing, the loose telescope swung into a new position. A beam of starlight stabbed through the coiling torch smoke and splashed on the frosted flagstones just short of the plain hexagonal altar.

  Apprentice Linnet blew into her cupped hands, the knitted fingerless gloves damp on her lips. Her sisters would be sitting round the parlour hearth right now, toasting muffins and reading aloud from chapbooks.

  ‘Here we go again.’

  She checked the men on the dais guarding the entrance, then led her own four soldiers across the floor of the Devil’s Observatory, snaking between inlaid summoning triangles where stellar demons snarled and strained against invisible walls. All around, demons banged in and out of existence as their stars wheeled across the lenses of a dozen enchanted telescopes.

  As Linnet neared the central altar - if that’s what it was a thunderclap made her ears ring and a three-eyed star demon manifested. Condensing water misted its hide, and Linnet felt the interstellar cold even through her fleece-lined robes.

  ‘Same drill as last time,’ she ordered and sensed rather than saw her people fan out around her.

  The stellar demon’s eyes blinked, narrowed. It peered at the floor, triple trunks furling in what could be puzzlement.

  Linnet drew Suresmiter and waved the enchanted sword toward the demon. The blade glowed ember red as if the wind had kindled it, but she knew that the ancient weapon merely hungered for a fight.