Swords, Sorcery, & Self-Rescuing Damsels

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Before she could work herself up to full indignation, Frinzil heard a heavy door close at the end of the hallway, and the tiny locking sound which meant this entire wing of the manor would be empty until morning.

  That was her cue. She pressed her back against the stone wall, unlatched the iron grate beneath her, and dropped down as smoothly as her cramped legs would allow onto the wooden surface directly underneath, tugging a length of rope with her. Keeping a stone castle ventilated was serious business, and all the fanciest rooms were serviced by a network of shafts that were easily navigated by anyone who could squeeze inside them and didn’t weigh much more than eight or nine stone.

  Frinzil could swear with absolute sincerity that she had never set foot in Lord Orlehea’s library, but if her mother ever asked how much contact her elbows, shins, and knees had made with the tops of the bookcases, she’d be well and truly pounced. And if the distinction between walking on the floor and scampering across the tops of shelving seems an arbitrary line to hang one’s residency on, keep in mind that Frinzil was thirteen. Senseless, arbitrary rules were all she had.

  Also, she had finally remembered why the glyph on the elf’s robe had looked familiar. She had a hunch to verify, and no power in the Conquered Lands could keep her from doing just that.

  Frinzil knew the books in Lord Orlehea’s library far better than the Lord himself did—to say that she had devoured every book she had ever come across was to say that she was a spectacularly well-read girl. If the master of the house had designated any of his servants as Manor Librarian6 then she certainly would have seen a future for herself in his employ.

  ≈

  6 And he desperately needed to—by all accounts, he organized his books mostly by size and color.

  ≈

  Most of the cases in the room were easily traversed by climbing from one to the next, but the truly rare books—the ones even Lord Orlehea could tell were of value—were kept in a heavy, ornate display case that sat alone along the front wall. That was why Frinzil had brought the rope. On one end of it was a makeshift grappling hook of her own design, heavy enough to catch the rear lip of the case and support her own weight once the other end was securely tied and padded enough that it would do its job quietly. She had done this so frequently that she could usually get the hook to catch on her first or second try, and in no time, she had bridged the expanse between shelves, hanging from her line and scurrying across it with an efficiency that would impress any common burglar. She waited until she reached the far side before lighting her tiny lamp, so as not to spill a drop of oil along the way.

  Of all Lord Orlehea’s treasures, the one that fascinated her the most—the one she kept coming back to again and again after all her years of clandestine library raids—didn’t even warrant a position on the upper shelves. She climbed down the display case with the utmost care and fetched it from the bottom row. The tome was bound in dark leather and written in a language Frinzil had long struggled to understand. She had mastered Imperial Common and Imperial Proper by the time she was eight and had managed to get reasonably fluent in Elvish and Gnomish—languages she had never heard spoken—just by burying herself in Lord Orlehea’s forbidden stacks. The writing in this book, however, was something altogether more arcane, and Frinzil had yet to uncover its secrets.

  Once she had reclaimed her perch on top of the case, she flipped to the book’s back pages, where the painstakingly-scribed characters and delicate margin decorations ended, and a bolder, less ornate script began. Alone on a page that separated the two sections, scrawled with a heavy brush that had dripped at the edges centuries ago when it marked the parchment, was the very same symbol that adorned the visiting dignitary’s robe.

  Suddenly, the library door swung open, and the illumination from Frinzil’s hand lamp was engulfed by a blinding light.

  “It looks as though someone has beaten you to your prize, Horgruth.”

  It was the elf, his voice empty of all the charm or vigor it had carried earlier at the procession. If anything, he sounded bored. The light was coming from a wand he carried. This was sorcery, which was, as far as Frinzil knew, the exclusive domain of nefarious witches and dangerous thugs. In actuality, more than a dozen schools of magic were practiced throughout the Conquered Lands, some of them considered quite respectable. Lord Orlehea didn’t care for sorcery any more than he cared for children, though, so his library didn’t contain any books about it, and Frinzil’s education on the subject was poor.

  As her eyes adjusted to the glare, she saw that the elf’s human companion had entered the room as well. He wasn’t actually a magistrate, of course, although Frinzil wouldn’t have cared much about the difference between a lowly government official and a full-fledged Baron regardless. He reached up and snatched the book out of her hands.

  These two had clearly come to Orlehea Manor to rob it.

  Her primary concern, of course, was that she was caught. She was in the most forbidden room, perched atop the most forbidden shelf, and she knew full well that even speaking to a visiting dignitary was so forbidden that she could be ejected from the house for even joking about it.

  “You can take anything you want,” Frinzil said. “I won’t tell a soul, I swear.”

  Baron Horgruth ignored her and handed the book to his companion. “Well?”

  Mister Javrael flipped immediately to the back pages, his eyes finally betraying just a hint of emotion. “It’s real,” he said. “The imbecile has the actual spell, right here under his nose, and hasn’t the foggiest notion.”

  Horgruth was practically drooling. “And you can read it?”

  “Of course not. No one can read Archaic Arachnid except the spiders themselves. That’s why I had to bring one.”

  His robes shifted, and a massive, eight-legged form emerged from beneath them, crawling up his chest to perch on his shoulders, its eight glowing eyes peeking over the top of his head. If the elf had appeared slender before, he now looked positively emaciated—his total mass must have been at least one-third spider, and the robe now draped over him as if hung from a coat rack.

  The spectacle was more than a little disconcerting. “Listen, I—I could be fired just for being here,” Frinzil stammered. “Trust me when I tell you that, whatever you’re doing here, your secret is safe with—”

  Horgruth grabbed Frinzil by the arm and dragged her from the display case, knocking everything off the top two shelves in the process. He was much stronger than he looked. And at that moment, at the mercy of two thieves and a giant spider, all Frinzil could think of was the fact that her feet were touching the floor. After so many years keeping to the tops of the furniture, the plausible deniability she had worked so hard to maintain was blown.

  “What do you think?” Horgruth said to his companion. “Has this one saved us a trip back upstairs for the chambermaid? She looks innocent enough for our purposes.”

  The elf rolled his eyes. “What is it with surface people and virgins? As I said, Ghogg Thamogg requires a living soul and a sufficient quantity of blood. I assure you that he doesn’t care the slightest bit how many times his supper has copulated before he devours it.”

  That was the moment Frinzil realized that castle residency and library access were the absolute least of her worries. She took in as much breath as her lungs would hold and screamed. Horgruth winced but did not loosen his grip.

  “Go ahead, get it out of your system,” he said. “No one in this house is awake to hear it.”

  “Apparently half-rotten hog livers powdered with sugar and drenched in sleeping potion are the ceremonial dessert of my people,” Javrael clarified.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” the Baron said. “The Orleheas consumed that vile pudding out of obligation, and every single servant sampled it just for the thrill of eating above their station.” Frinzil made a desperate swipe at his face with her nails, but he twisted her arm back and clutched her to his torso, facing away from him. The elf had fallen to his knees and was now in
scribing a massive circle onto the tiled floor with a lump of charcoal, the massive spider balancing deftly on his back.

  “I daresay only a single child escaped our little ruse—sent to bed early with no dessert, I presume?” Struggling was getting her nowhere, so Frinzil went back to screaming—even if everyone in the manor was asleep, but she wasn’t about to take her captors’ word on the matter.

  The elf quickly finished his work. “Let’s get it done with,” he said. “You have the rest of my fee, of course?” He snatched the money sack the Baron tossed him and glanced inside. Then the spider shifted on his shoulders and clamped its mandibles over his face, its eyes glowing in the approximate spot where his own should be. The elf muttered something incomprehensible and sprinkled a bit of powder onto the diagram on the floor.

  Frinzil’s awareness expanded in a manner that was entirely new to her—she could see the elf and spider through her own eyes, and simultaneously see herself through the eyes of the arachnid (technically she could see through the elf’s eyes as well, but since his field of vision was currently limited to the dark interior of the spider’s maw, it wasn’t nearly as distracting). The elf’s spell had linked his own mind with hers and the spider’s. A fourth mind, vast and ravenous, nagged at the edge of her consciousness, but at that point Frinzil mistook it for a general sense of dread.

  The ritual required free communication between summoner, summoned and sacrifice, and Javrael found the mental link between them unpleasant, but necessary to circumvent various language barriers. This knowledge came to Frinzil along with a wave of emotions, motivations and jumbled thoughts—the elf, she learned, was aiding Baron Horgruth with his power grab because he was extremely fond of gold and didn’t give a bucket of warm piss about who held dominion over the Conquered Lands. The spider, however, had its own motivations. Its people had retreated deeper and deeper into the caverns over the centuries as fighting on the surface drove entire populations of elves, goblins, and troglodytes7 underground.

  ≈

  7 Also dwarves, who had moved into hollows in the mountains that spiders hadn’t been using anyway, but still made a lot of noise, which wasn’t great.

  ≈

  It had no use for gold whatsoever.

  Every one of the spider’s eyes locked onto the open book, and Frinzil gasped. The words on its pages made sense to her. The spider took control of the elf’s mouth and tried to use his soft, unfamiliar lips to form them. “Ggglt—Gg-chrl-ch-ch—”

  If it had spent as many hours studying the workings of humanoid faces as Frinzil had spent trying to unlock the secrets of Archaic Arachnid, it might have beaten her to the punch, too.

  “Grekchikt arkechiktl krkt,” Frinzil said. “Chrkriktl rk gikchrect xcht-kt chrt.” Roughly translated, it was “Undying Ghogg Thamogg, I summon you from the depths beyond depths, tether you to this plane, and bind you to my command.”

  A circle of flames opened on the spot where the chalk outline had been scrawled, and a huge, malevolent, misshapen thing clawed its way through it. It searched about for its sacrifice, found two beings whose minds were connected to its own but had not spoken the spell of binding, snatched up the elf and spider and devoured them whole. Baron Horgruth screamed.

  No one in the house was awake to hear him.

  The demon’s consciousness was all-encompassing, and Frinzil was far more aware of its hunger, its contempt, and its rage than anything that was happening in the room.

  “WHAT IS YOUR WILL?” It demanded. “ALL THE FURY OF GHOGG THAMOGG IS YOURS TO COMMAND.” Frinzil had never dreamed she could wield so much power. All the wrongs she had seen in the world could be righted. She now had the means to make sure that everyone, from the noblest and kindest to the most cruel, got exactly what they deserved.

  “YOU HAVE BUT TO WISH IT,” the creature intuited, “AND YOU WILL FIND YOUR EVERY DESIRE AT THE END OF A RIVER OF BLOOD, RESTING ATOP A MOUNTAIN OF DEAD8. I HAVE NO POWER TO BREAK THE SHACKLES THAT BIND ME HERE, BUT I WILL UNLEASH MY RAGE UPON THIS CURSED LAND, AND YOU SHALL RULE OVER ANYTHING THAT REMAINS.”

  ≈

  8 Ghogg Thamogg was pretty eloquent for a ravenous demon lord, but he was not subtle.

  ≈

  Frinzil exhaled. “I command that you go home,” she said, “and under no circumstances return to this domain, ever again.”

  ~*~

  Baron Horgruth was long gone by the time the manor staff awakened the next day, but it didn’t take much in the way of sleuthing to realize that he and his companion had been up to no good. He was picked up by the imperial guard at a nearby harbor, still shaking and almost eager to confess his entire plot. As for Frinzil’s role in it, she was named in the official account as “one of the servant girls.” No one even bothered to question her in an official capacity. Her parents, of course, were aghast when they learned how close the evening had come to tragedy, but she insisted that she had escaped the ordeal unharmed.

  And it was true. In fact, her brush with unspeakable temptation and unimaginable evil only drew the line between right and wrong more clearly in her mind. The sort of power Ghogg Thamogg offered came at a price she knew she would never be willing to pay. But the other magic she saw that night—the ability to communicate with someone without speaking or light up a room without oil or flame—seemed to require no blood rivers or corpse mountains at all. The more she thought about them, the more curious she became.

  Frinzil knew exactly what she would do with the rest of her life. She intended to study magic, and no power in the Conquered Lands could keep her from doing just that.

  ~***~

  Matt Youngmark is the author of the Arabella Grimsbro series, Chooseomatic Books, and the comic strip Conspiracy Friends. His next novel is Spellmonkeys, in which a 22-year-old Frinzil (the girl from his story in this very collection) goes on an epic quest to earn tuition money and remain in magic school as long as she possibly can. To find out more—and to get two free ebooks!—sign up for his author mailing list at www.youngmark.com.

  WARMASTER

  LOU J. BERGER & IAN BERGER

  Jillian lay awake until her father’s snores reverberated through the bungalow’s thin walls, then crept out of bed.

  She grabbed a leather knapsack and threw in some dried lamb jerky, a coarse blanket, a goatskin full of water, and some basic camping supplies. Stepping quietly so the floorboards didn’t creak, she snuck up to the attic and found the old wooden box with “WarMaster” carved into the top.

  Lifting the lid, she pulled a sword from its leather scabbard. The blade gleamed, long and silver, covered in ornate, black runes that she couldn’t understand. A ruby the size of a hummingbird’s egg lay filigreed in the solid gold pommel.

  She buckled the sword around her waist, threw the knapsack over her shoulder and left the house, closing the front door softly behind her.

  The sun stained the dark sky with roseate fingers as she walked down the road, through the slumbering village, and into the Dark Woods.

  She hiked for most of the day, thinking about her grandpa.

  They had spent every summer together, camping under the stars in the Dark Woods. He had taught her how to wield a sword, how to bind wounds, and how to build a fire to keep ogres away.

  He told her fantastic stories about assisting fairies and unicorns in their generations-long war with the ogres, healing them with poultices.

  When she was eight, he’d let her use WarMaster, practicing on progressively thicker vines, building up her arm strength. By the time she was ten, she was muscled and lean, slicing WarMaster cleanly through thick tree branches as if they were smoke. She had felt like an adult with him, while her parents acted as if she were an incapable child.

  So she’d decided to run away from home to find her own adventures in the Dark Woods, and maybe recapture how she’d felt when her grandpa was alive.

  When the sun touched the horizon, she stopped beside a small pond. Moving efficiently, she built a fire inside a ring of stones gathered
from the pond’s edge, boiled some water to replenish her goatskin, and threw a long vine over a high branch on a nearby tree. She fashioned a shelter of cut branches into which she tossed the blanket, ate a meal of jerky washed down with the fresh water, then hauled her knapsack, tied to the vine, up high to prevent bears from getting to it. After completing her preparations, she climbed into the shelter, snuggled under the blanket, and fell asleep, the unsheathed sword on the ground beside her.

  Some hours later, white light filled the shelter, waking her. Was it morning already?

  The brilliant light that had awakened her wasn’t shining through the branches. It came from WarMaster. That had never happened before.

  Was it glowing from heat? She licked the end of a finger and touched the glowing blade. There was no hiss.

  Something big splashed in the pond.

  She thrust the sword back into its scabbard, dousing the light it threw off. Then, she pushed a branch aside and peered out.

  The crescent moon’s weak light reflected off the wet hide of a massive red unicorn, standing in water up to his fetlocks.

  Her mouth fell open.

  Unicorns were real?

  Her grandpa had claimed that unicorns were harmless mythical creatures, not dangerous at all to people. She decided to put that to the test.

  She pulled her sword and crawled out of the shelter, holding it high, using it like a lantern. The unicorn, his ivory horn gleaming, stared at her as she approached but made no attempt to flee.

  Jillian reached out a hesitant hand and touched his flank. Powerful muscles rippled under his red hide, but he didn’t pull away. He danced in place for a moment, rolling his eyes so that the whites showed.

  “Careful,” she murmured, stroking its mane. “Don’t stab me.”

  Lifting the sword higher for more light, she examined the enormous, red beast.

  On its front left leg was a bloody gash. She knelt in the shallow water and brought the sword closer, to better examine the wound. It appeared to be a bite mark from a large creature. Maybe a bear?