Dangerous Games

by Clayton Emery

  Castle Delia was almost a square league in area, and the mansions, outbuildings, and battlements on it ran for acre upon acre, stacked six and seven stories high in places. Two hundred and sixty rooms made up the main house, a maid had breathed. Or so it was rumored: no one knew for sure. Over two thousand servants kept it tidy under the all-seeing eye of Umeko, Acting Chamberlain (the former chamberlain, Sysquemalyn, had vanished) for those few occasions when Lady Polaris actually visited. For it stunned Sunbright to learn that this vast castle was only one of seven such keeps owned and maintained by Lady Polaris, in addition to her mansions in many of the larger floating cities, including one in the capital city of Ioulaum. To the tundra-dwelling barbarian, who owned a sword and a blanket, the idea of so much wealth—and the power it brought—was incomprehensible.

  And his difficulties with the city-mansion were immediate and irritating. For one thing, in the few days he’d been here, healing, resting, and arguing with Candlemas, he’d consistently gotten lost. Many rooms and hallways had no outside windows, being lit by magically illuminated globes. In such conditions Sunbright had no way to tell north from south, east from west. He felt like an addled child every time he fetched up in some dead-end hallway or dusty cellar, which was often enough. A maid had offered to assign him a boy as a guide, but the barbarian’s pride had bristled at the idea. Eventually, he decided to stick to outside hallways to keep his sense of direction, even though the yawning windows with their precipitous drops made his stomach ache and his bowels pinch.

  And now he’d told Candlemas he wanted to be on the ground a while, and had sounded whiny. If it weren’t for needing to find Greenwillow, he’d climb the Barren Mountains and take up sheepherding.

  “Here!” The wizard led him around a trio of ornate gold-leafed screens that depicted heroic battles and quests from the distant past. Behind the screen were odd statues and rolled rugs, glass chandeliers hanging from temporary wooden frames and a dozen or more mismatched chests, both plain and fancy. Planting his sandaled feet before one, Candlemas uttered a cantra to spring the lock and flung back the lid.

  Sunbright peered. Inside were gadgets and gewgaws, velvet pouches, long wooden boxes, bundles wrapped in cloth and tied with ribbon. Candlemas plucked one up at random. To Sunbright it looked like something cut from a reindeer’s guts, bulbous and tubular, but crafted of silver, now tarnished black in the crevices. “Do you know what this is?”

  The barbarian shook his head.

  “Neither do I,” snapped the mage in disgust. “But it’s magic. I have three apprentices who do nothing but detect for magic. Everything in these chests is enchanted, and I don’t know what any of them do!”

  Sunbright watched as Candlemas opened another chest, then another. Most were full. “Where did you get these things?”

  “They’re found in odd rooms in the castle, bought in markets, won by Lady Polaris in gambling dens, and from her neverending wagers. She wins a pot of gadgets and sends them to me, and I’m supposed to interpret them!”

  Sunbright was mildly interested. “And do you?”

  “Sometimes.” The mage slammed the lid. “I work on whatever problem or question she hurls at me today, then drop it for tomorrow’s emergency. Most I can fob off to underlings, but sometimes I must work nonstop to glean the workings of some piece of arcane junk. I once spent three weeks analyzing a jeweled poker-sort-of-thing. Polaris—excuse me—Lady Polaris insisted it would harden quicksilver to silver. Do you know what it did? It curled one’s hair! It came off some fop’s vanity table!”

  “Why would someone want to curl their hair?” asked Sunbright.

  Candlemas rolled his eyes. “Never mind. That’s not the point.” He swept his arms to encompass the jammed chests. “I had hoped you, with your promise of shamanism, could help me solve some problems. The wheat rust, for one. Blight, actually. One assistant thinks it’s attacking rye now. Shamen are supposed to understand growing things. I had hoped that, among other experiments, you could assist me in sorting these gadgets, perhaps find one that cures plant disease. There are enchanted tools here that resemble farm implements. Maybe one deters crop rot. A magic sifter, or wand of rowan wood, or a stone that, buried in the field, sucks up evil influences.…”

  Idly, Sunbright touched the top of an iron-strapped chest. The glyph protecting it shocked his hand. Sucking a scorched fingertip, Sunbright opined, “I couldn’t even break one of these locks, let alone puzzle out your—gaj-dits. Blight is part of the natural order of things, you know. Plants grow strong, are attacked by disease, but fight it off and grow stronger. Or they die and are replaced. All things scribe the circle eventually, come from earth and return to it. Us too.”

  Candlemas rubbed his head, work-roughened, chemical-stained hands rasping on his bare scalp. “I don’t need a lesson in barbarian philosophy. Yes, things pass away. And I’ll pass away, and so will thousands of peasants, if we don’t cure this blight! Don’t you understand? If we can employ magic properly, we can undo all these ills and make the world a better place! The point is not to give in to despair, but to best it! Magic can solve everything given enough time and effort! There’s no limit to its power!”

  “Everything has limits,” said Sunbright evenly. He fingered the nose of a statue, a bronze beauty holding a two-headed snake across her bare shoulders. “A touch to this statue wears it away, in a small way. This castle will be dust some day. Trying to stop the decline of things, or to hasten natural ways—hardening quicksilver to silver—never works for long, and usually backfires. If you would cure your blights, burn the crops. That’s a natural cure and ends the problem. Let people move elsewhere and eat differently until new, clean crops appear. The land and people will be stronger for it. But to hope that a random tool from a heap of junk will solve your problem is silly. To cure an ill, you need only visit the source. Sit upon the earth, in the field, fast, clear your mind, learn how the grain eats of the earth, and why the disease works its evil.”

  “There isn’t time.” Candlemas stared out a distant window.

  Sunbright continued, “And another thing. Where’s your end of the bargain? You agreed to help me track Greenwillow’s soul. How fare those efforts?”

  The elder mage only waved his arms. “Again, there might be something in these boxes. Mirrors are the best thing I know for seeing to other worlds and planes. Telescopes sometimes, or kaleidoscopes. Glass eggs, too. There are probably six of each in these trunks, and more downstairs. And enchanted doors: there are five in the cellar, stacked against the wall. Feel free to fit them to frames and chant over them. By the time you’re as old as me.…”

  The barbarian peered at the trunks, frowning. “I’d give the same answer. A mirror might show some other world, but only that part desired by whoever enchanted it. So too a glass egg or door. To find Greenwillow, we’d need some part of her: a lock of hair, or a ring she wore for a long time. Shamans can learn the animal by reading a bone, or commune with the dead while sleeping on a skull. But we have no piece of Greenwillow. Only dreams.”

  That thought conjured the night’s vision, a dark forest, Greenwillow’s ghost leading him on to—what?

  He interrupted himself. “I need to go to the forest.”

  “Fine, fine. Ask the birds if hollow wheat kernels are bitter, or if groundhogs can gnaw bare cobs.” Candlemas waved a weary hand. “I’ll fetch you at sundown.”

  He forked his fingers to invoke a shift spell, but Sunbright stopped him. “Let me retrieve my tackle.”

  “Why? I said I’d fetch you within hours.”

  The barbarian didn’t answer, only turned for his chambers. Candlemas swore softly and slammed the lid of a trunk.

  * * * * *

  How proceeds the fire?

  The fire amongst the humans? They seek heat, and we heap on coals.

  Far below the earth, in chambers that had never seen sun, whirled a score of creatures like tops with diamond tails. Cruel gashes with rock-hard edges were their mouths, for
they could eat anything found underground: roots, rocks, moles, hibernating bears, tombstones, and bones. But mostly they fed on magic, for enchantment ran through their very fiber. They were the Phaerimm, unknown to men, seldom seen, and even then invariably mistaken for dust devils. Usually they destroyed the observer, champed his bones and muscles to bits, leaving only scraps and stains in the wilderness.

  I like it not. Piling magic on magic puts them at risk of burning out, but it endangers us as much.

  We discussed that at length. There is no other way. We shall be safe. Their idiocy shall scour the earth, but not penetrate here.

  If we are careful.

  We are always careful. We must be, for we are so few.

  We are the oldest living things on the planet.

  All the more reason to safeguard.

  The humans will be undone, have no fear. They are soft and cannot last.

  Look how our drain spell sucks the nourishment from their food. Soon they will have naught to eat.

  They’ll eat each other.

  All the better. Their bones will enrich the soil. And we will again hold the worlds above and below.

  If we give them magic enough to choke.

  The humans are foolish to use magic so freely. Don’t they see it hastens their demise?

  They see nothing, know nothing. They will burn out and cease to be.

  This new magic we’ve pulled from the sky will add more dweomer than ever before. Mountains of magic!

  For an orgy—a holocaust of magical energy!

  But it will take time. Many revolutions of the sun.

  Not so many. Not so …

  * * * * *

  It felt good to have soft earth and needles under his boots, to smell pine sap and wet moss, to hear warblers trill and red squirrels chitter, to feel the wind on his scalp. Sunbright felt at home.

  But more exciting, he thought he recognized this stretch of forest.

  It was hard to say, for he’d dreamt it, at night, when distracted by the vision of Greenwillow. But the folds of land looked right, the configuration of those two joined pines was familiar, and the spidery bulk of that bull pine called to him. His lover, his sweet elf, had floated that way, he thought. Always having lived more by emotion than by logic, Sunbright followed.

  It felt good to touch nature again, and also to shoulder his traveling gear. He wore the heavy Harvester across his back in a new bull-hide scabbard and at his belt hung the warhammer of Dorlas, son of Drigor, a weapon he’d inherited and promised to someday return to the Sons of Baltar in the far Iron Mountains. A new goat-hide vest was laced across his chest and a bright green shirt hung to his knees. Around his waist was a thick, studded belt, and his tall moosehide boots with the rings and buckles were newly-blacked and the leather oiled. The workmanship of his clothing and tackle was exquisite, hand-stitched by Lady Polaris’s seamstresses and saddlemakers. Not that he cared: he would have gone abroad in rags to tramp the forest.

  And tramp he did, past trees like pillars, in a hushed, green-filtered, luminous light. He moved quickly, driving game before him, delighting in their quick fluttering. The flick of a deer’s white tail as it bounded away. The snuffling of a badger dragging its striped head back into its sett. The twitter of chickadees tracking him from twig to twig. The slither of a green snake as it oozed around a bole and clung to the bark with its belly scales, tongue flickering. Sunbright breathed deep and laughed aloud, glad to be back, as if he’d been gone years and not a few days. The only dark cloud was the need to return to the floating castle high above like a squat stone cloud. But he pushed that thought aside and gloried in his freedom, like a child let out of school.

  Walking for miles, he watched everywhere, naturally curious and trained to be cautious. At one point he halted, bemused. Drawing his sword, he hunkered alongside a pine, slowed his breathing, unfocused his eyes to better detect movement.

  Something had alerted him, but he didn’t know what. A sense of being watched or, oddly, spoken of. (Though he couldn’t know it, he sensed the Phaerimm plotting far below the earth.) In time, doubting his own senses, Sunbright sheathed his sword and moved on, walking warily until he was half a mile away. Finally he dismissed the unease with an old adage. “ ‘Imagination is a two-edged sword: a blessing and a curse.’ ”

  Pausing to rest, he lay flat and drank from a rippling stream, surprising a frog. He ate a meager lunch from a haversack, pressed on. Somehow he knew which paths to follow, for Greenwillow had shown him. In the same way, he knew she was still alive, waiting for him, helping him. Helping him find her.

  Then, abruptly, he found his (their) destination. And it made sense, for the shooting star and Greenwillow’s warning had broken his sleepwalking, kept him from pitching out a window.

  Here the shooting star had plunged into a hillside, blowing open a crater like a tumbled mine shaft.

  Easing his sword from its scabbard, though he sensed no danger, Sunbright paced forward. The forest here was scrubby, rife with pin oaks and mossy granite rocks taller than himself. Yet several rocks had been blown aside like dandelion fluff when the star crashed. The forest was hushed, for animals still avoided the area. Quietly, wary of hidden holes, Sunbright padded across old leaves, then onto fresh-turned dirt of yellow and brown. The hillside was not high, and the impact had split the top like a loaf of bread, leaving a large hole. Sunbright tiptoed to peek inside.

  The bottom was ten feet down at a slant. Nothing showed but dirt. Considering the size of the hole, and being unfamiliar with shooting stars, Sunbright had no idea how deep the star might be buried.

  He stood up straight and checked the forest all around, but saw nothing but a pair of cardinals chasing each other through a wild rose bush. The sun was one hand over the horizon, for he’d spent the afternoon walking. Now that he was here, he didn’t know what to do. Once he called quietly, “Greenwillow?”

  No answer.

  Humming a love song to himself, he swept clean a rock and sat down to wait for sunset, Harvester across his knees.

  * * * * *

  “There you are! What’s this hole?”

  Sunbright rose to meet the arcanist. Candlemas, always curious, sank sandal-deep in fresh dirt as he climbed the low hill and peered into blackness.

  “A shooting star landed last night. I saw it from a window.” The memory of almost tumbling out made Sunbright’s knees shake, but he clamped them straight. “I don’t know how deep it is.”

  “Keeper of the Sun!” Candlemas reared back as if from a bonfire. “Feel that enchantment!”

  Sunbright stood alongside, but felt nothing. “What? It’s magic?”

  “By Jannath’s Tears, I’ll say! My, it’s—imagine how strong the magic must be if we can feel it at a distance!” The stocky mage jumped in place like a child offered a treat. “We must dig it up! I must have that star!”

  Shrugging, Sunbright sheathed Harvester, cast about for some digging implement, for he wouldn’t ply his sword as a shovel. Breaking a dead branch clipped by the fallen star, the barbarian slid down into the hole and dug. Candlemas helped, shoveling dirt with his hands like a dog. As the sun disappeared, he picked up a stone, muttered a small cantra, and set it glowing like cold fire.

  “That’s a handy spell,” Sunbright told him.

  “It’s nothing.”

  The star was not deep, it turned out, not over two feet buried. Sunbright missed it at first and started to dig around, until Candlemas stopped him. “What are you doing? Dig it free!”

  “This?” The barbarian thumped the branch on the star. It looked like a plain, lumpy stone, burned black. “This can’t be it.”

  “Why not?” Candlemas hunkered on his hams above the hole. “What did you expect?”

  “Shouldn’t it glow, like your rock there?”

  A snort. “No. It was afire when it fell, like iron in a forge. It was snuffed by the dirt.”

  “Seems pretty ordinary for something so magical.”

  “And what
’s an emperor’s crown but a hoop of pointed gold? Yet it can move mountains.” The mage ran his hands over the burned, sandy surface lovingly. “My, my. I might get my own floating city after all. Imagine the value of this thing! I’ll be rich.”

  “It’d make a fine anchor.” Sunbright tried and failed to lever the thing up. “It’s powerful heavy. Or else stuck.”

  “It’s not stuck. Here, give me a hand.”

  But dig and grab hold as they might, the two men couldn’t budge the star, though it was no bigger than a pumpkin. If anything, the star settled deeper into the hole they scratched, as if alive and wishing to hide.

  Sweating, swearing, Sunbright opined, “You’ll have to dig away the hillside, and hitch an ox team to drag it out. It weighs more than lead!”

  “I think you’re right.” Candlemas’s face and hands were sooty, his arms sandy to the elbows. “It must be made of … I can’t think what. The densest metals are lead and gold, though the old books speak of adamantine being harder and denser. Still, this is the most solid stuff I’ve ever seen. I doubt your sword could scratch it.”

  “We’ll never know,” countered the barbarian.

  The forest was dark. In a distant bog crickets chirped and peepers cheeped. Candlemas reached out, grabbed the small stone he’d illuminated, snuffed its magic and turned the hole black. “We’ll return on the morrow. I’ll have Damita from the stables bring a hitching rig and a stone boat. Then—”

  “What’s that?” Sunbright snapped his head up, out of the hole. “There’s a rushing in the treetops.”

  “Night wind. It’s—no, wait.”

  Candlemas squinted in the dark. The little star was glowing. Ripples of green light chased each other across its surface.

  Sunbright glanced down, hissed, “You said it wouldn’t glow!”

  “It shouldn’t!” Candlemas backed up, slid on sand, landed back on the cooling star. Eldritch fire illuminated his hairy toes. “It’s magical, but—”

  Near Candlemas’s shoulder, Sunbright ducked as the rushing sounded again, louder, as if a giant bird beat the forest, hunting them, or a hurricane stirred the tree crowns. But the sound was loudest in the hole. The rushing came from the fallen star. “It’s hissing! It’s working! It’s—”