Thrall

by E. William Brown

  Velvet frowned. “Does the new general have some grudge against rangers, my captain? This is the third time in a week.”

  “No, he just doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. I don’t care how much Brand favors him, he needs a hundred years in the Halls before he’ll be fit to lead einherjar. He should be learning to use a polearm right now, not leading a battlegroup.”

  He set his helmet down on the table, and took his seat. “So who’s that lurking around behind you, anyway? Another new recruit?”

  “No, sir. This is Daniel Black, a wizard from Midgard, and his familiar Alanna. Gustav said that he’s in Asgard at the Allfather’s command, and asks the Moon Ghosts to give him hospitality during his stay. Daniel, this is Captain Arnor, commander of the Moon Ghost band and lord of this hall.”

  Captain Arnor looked me up and down with a scowl. “A wizard, in Valhalla? Now that’s just insulting. Do you even know how to fight? Or is it all magic mumbo jumbo with you?”

  I shrugged. “I’m sure you elite badasses are more skilled than I am with any normal weapon. But I’ve fought dragons and sea serpents hand to hand, and lived to tell the tale. These days I seem to specialize in killing giant monsters.”

  “Huh. I suppose that’s tolerable, then. Is that what you’re here for? Setting up some wizardly trap for the Great Beasts?”

  “Something like that. I can’t talk about the details, but I can tell you someone’s going to be getting a nasty surprise if I can pull this off.”

  “What if you can’t?” One of the men I hadn’t been introduced to put in.

  “Then I’ll be monster chow, and the gods will have one more Great Beast to deal with,” I replied.

  The man laughed. “Monster chow, eh? Least he’s got the right spirit, boss.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Grab a seat, stranger. Lift a few tankards with us, and share some tales of your battles in Midgard. We’ve heard little enough of how the war goes there. I don’t suppose you know Prince Caspar?”

  “Is that who you were talking about before?” I said. “Yeah, we’ve been butting heads since I came to Kozalin to set up my citadel. Annoying as hell, not completely incompetent but not half as smart as he thinks he is. When he died in that raid on Gaea’s halls I thought I was finally rid of him. I should have known he’d end up in Valhalla.”

  “Did he really save the city from an army of ape men?” Someone asked.

  “Hell, no!” I scoffed. “Is that what he’s been telling people? Brand was in command of that battle, but I was in the thick of the action. Here’s how it really went…”

  Chapter 10

  I spent half the night in the mead hall, sharing tales with the men and listening to theirs in turn. In some ways that was a waste of time, but given how much people seemed to dislike wizards here I wanted to make a good impression. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be stuck in Valhalla, and there were bound to be endless ways they could make life difficult for me if they wanted to.

  So I traded war stories for hours, putting away enough mead to make an elephant tipsy in the process. The men were suspicious of me at first, but most of them thawed a bit as the evening wore on. They were more interested in drowning their memories of the day’s defeat than picking fights with a strange wizard, anyway.

  Watching the operation of the hall was educational. Each of the men seemed to have a favorite girl or two who attended him personally, flirting shamelessly as they catered to his every whim. But there was also a swirling mass of serving girls who came and went, bringing in platters loaded with food and mead from the kitchen and carrying off empty containers. In that crowd I rarely saw the same face twice, and I suspected they were all just temporary constructs of some sort. An ever-changing menu of willing flesh, being paraded past the men for the benefit of anyone who was looking for a change.

  The twin redheads seemed to have attached themselves to me, because whenever I wanted something one of them was there to provide. They were just as flirty as the rest of the serving girls, flashing me inviting looks and brushing their breasts against me at every opportunity. It didn’t affect me as much as it might have, since my coven binding made them off limits.

  But I was amused to see them give Alanna the same treatment. She frowned and tried to ignore them at first, but over the course of the evening her resistance gradually crumbled. By sunset they’d gotten pretty blatant, dropping little hugs and kisses and rubbing their breasts against her at every opportunity, and she was blushing and returning the attention.

  I guess even wise, ancient dryads don’t have much resistance to flirtation.

  That was when the great table suddenly became much more crowded. One by one the warriors who had died during the day’s battle trooped into the hall, their injuries fading away as they handed off their weapons to the attendants and found their seats. They were in a bad mood, and there was a lot of grumbling about Prince Caspar’s supposed incompetence. Their ire was a good thing for me, though, since I’d already established myself as the man’s rival.

  “Did he fuck up your city defenses as bad as our field exercises?” Someone asked at one point.

  “Constantly!” I agreed. “I came to Kozalin to build a citadel, and set up some magical farms so we don’t all starve to death if Fimbulwinter really lasts for ten years. But I couldn’t go a week without some new crisis coming up that he wanted my help for. You’d think with thirty thousand troops and the strongest group of wizards in Europe he’d be able to handle a few monsters, but I swear the Unraveler almost took the city with just three ships from Hel’s fleet behind her.”

  “The Unraveler? You mean Loki’s daughter?” Another man said. “She’s supposed to be a tricky bitch.”

  “I’ll say. She infiltrated the Red Conclave pretending to be a mortal sorceress, and no one suspected a thing.”

  I still couldn’t believe she’d pulled that off, especially with such an obvious non-disguise. The whole Conclave had been on the lookout for Loki’s daughter, yet somehow no one thought to wonder about the green-eyed redhead with fire sorcery who was just the right age? There had to be some kind of magic at work there.

  The mead flowed freely, and it wasn’t long before the drinking songs started. By then a lot of the serving girls were spending more time in someone’s lap getting felt up than they did working, although they seemed to enjoy the attention. A few of the girls played instruments, and the more athletic ones took turns dancing on the tables during some of the songs. Their clothes seemed to spontaneously become scantier as the evening wore on, although they never quite got to the point of flashing the audience.

  By then Alanna had migrated to my lap, and was getting pretty amorous herself. So I took my leave, and carried her up to our rooms.

  “Did you ever hear from Nomiki?” I asked her as I shut the door.

  “Yes, Daniel,” she breathed into my ear, and then nibbled it a bit. “I told her the whole tale. Everyone is worried, of course, but there’s naught to be done about it. Cerise wanted to follow you, but the others convinced her it would be madness for her to try to come here.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “I don’t want them doing anything crazy. It would only make things worse.”

  She nuzzled my neck. “Mm hmm. I promised Cerise that I’d take good care of you while we’re gone.

  I chuckled. “I bet you did. Anything else?”

  “Elin is going to research alternate means of communication,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll be able to speak directly, in a week or two.”

  “Good for her,” I said. “Hopefully we won’t be her that long, but it pays to be prepared.”

  “We shall overcome, my wizard. Now come to bed, and let me banish your worries.”

  She did, too.

  Thankfully my healing amulet treats alcohol like a poison, and it can fix hangovers as easily as anything else. So I didn’t have to pay much of a price for the night’s partying, and once I pointed out that aspect of her new powers Alanna recovered quickly enough.r />
  After that introduction the Moon Ghosts didn’t bother me much, and for a couple of days I hoped that I’d achieved my goal of getting time to work without interruptions. Which was a good thing, because the enchantments on that rod were by far the most complicated magic I’d ever dealt with.

  A normal wizard could have spent years trying to unravel their purpose, and probably would have failed in the end. Even with the fine perception my sorcery granted, I had to take the device apart to make out the enchantments on all the different pieces. But the enchantments on a given component often didn’t make sense in isolation, relying on the influence of other nearby pieces to achieve their real effect. I could only imagine how confusing that would be for a wizard who had only seen the monolithic enchantment style practiced by European mages.

  My mana sorcery was happy to parse out what each enchantment did, and when I held up two parts next to each other I could predict their interactions as well. But there were so many of them that it still took days to work through them all.

  The combat spells that the rod could project through that diamond were an interesting puzzle, more like Cerise’s style of battle magic than mine. Instead of using magic to project real forms of energy, the rod spun out magical fields that created all sorts of fanciful effects. There was an attack spell that caused nonliving matter to melt away, without damaging living creatures. Another one made a blinding flash that stunned anyone who saw it, leaving them too dazed to do anything for several minutes. Then there was the one that made ropes of crimson energy that to bind a target, wrapping them in layers of enchantment to prevent them from escaping or casting spells.

  I found it interesting that the crimson bonds explicitly prevented teleportation, shapeshifting, dematerialization and about a dozen other things in addition to interfering with active spellcasting. Were there targets that could do that sort of thing using innate abilities of some sort? Or was there a way to resist the anti-casting part?

  All of the attack spells were pretty sophisticated, and some of them would penetrate my own defenses disturbingly well. The crimson bonds, in particular, were something I didn’t have a good answer to. I took careful note of the gaps, and spent a couple of hours one afternoon upgrading my personal wards to eliminate the worst of the vulnerabilities.

  The diamond’s main function, though, was to act as a focus and targeting mechanism for a family of strange intangible spell effects that the rod’s internal components could generate. That group of enchantments was a lot harder to figure out, because they were supposed to manipulate some sort of invisible force or substance that I couldn’t identify. It definitely wasn’t any of the physical forces I knew, and it wasn’t raw mana either. There were some peripheral bits that worked with the same life energy as my healing magic, although I still suspected that was some kind of analogy or mental shortcut rather than a real force.

  The rest, though, was meant to manipulate messy lumps of something that was entirely unfamiliar to me. There was one spell for reaching out and extracting one from a target, with a complex mechanism that looked like it was supposed to dig it out of some kind of protective container without damaging it. There was a storage spell that could hold a few dozen lumps, and a bunch of housekeeping enchantments for managing some sort of spillage or energy bleed off from them. A massively overpowered attack spell could be used as a sort of battering ram, to break down barriers that would normally block this sort of energy manipulation. There were also spells for ejecting stored lumps, or implanting them back into a container. That last one was surprisingly fiddly, with hundreds of complex sub-spells that built smaller structures. Some of that looked familiar to my flesh sorcery, which was really odd…

  I’m embarrassed to admit that I spent several hours trying to make sense of that mess, before I finally realized I was looking at soul manipulation magic. Once I made that leap, though, it all made sense.

  The rod’s primary purpose was ripping souls out of sacrificial victims so they could be fed to the spire. That’s why the attack spells embedded in it were all disabling effects instead of lethal ones. The soul extraction was a little too slow to be practical against an opponent who was trying to resist, but if you stun them and bind them first that’s another story.

  Once I figured that out it was obvious enough why it didn’t work. There was a connector between the soul magic core and the spell focus diamond that was badly damaged, leaving the two components isolated from each other. More importantly, the soul conduit that was supposed to connect the rod to the Sunspire had been broken at some point.

  That wouldn’t matter much if you were just using it against normal people. But if you wanted to steal a god’s soul, the enchantments on the rod wouldn’t be enough. That soul trap was nowhere near big enough, and I was pretty sure the mana converter didn’t put out enough power either. At least, the rod’s designer didn’t seem to think so. The enchantments included a mechanism for drawing massive amounts of mana from the Sunspire to supercharge all of its attack spells, and the soul trap had an overflow mechanism that was supposed to feed souls down the link.

  So if I wanted to fix this thing, I was going to have to venture into the spire and find the mechanism it was supposed to be linked to.

  “But do you want to fix it?” Alanna asked.

  “What I want is to be back home digging in,” I grumbled. “I had too much work to do even before this mess, and I want nothing to do with that damned spire. Going inside that thing is going to be dangerous, even for me. But I don’t see a lot of options.”

  I’d warded my workshop to prevent eavesdropping, but I couldn’t be sure that would actually work against whatever methods Odin might have available. So even if I’d had a brilliant idea for getting out of this I wouldn’t have mentioned it out loud.

  Unfortunately this wasn’t the kind of problem I could blow up, and I was drawing a blank on more subtle solutions. I might be able to figure out some way to sneak out of Asgard if I put my mind to it, but what good would that do? Odin knew where I lived, and it wasn’t like I could move the island. I suppose I could flee to China or something, but how could I possibly relocate hundreds of people without being caught?

  So far, the best bet I could see was to play for time. Look busy, promise results without delivering anything, and hope Loki makes his move soon. Once the gods started fighting each other in earnest Odin would be too busy to go chasing after me, and hopefully he’d die in the war. I didn’t like depending on luck like that, but maybe an opportunity would come along if I was patient.

  I was just starting to consider how to survive a trip into the spire when I was interrupted by a knock at my workroom door. A moment later, one of the twins stuck her head in.

  “Lord wizard? There’s a man here to see you. He says he’s from Kozalin?”

  Alanna and I exchanged a look of complete confusion.

  “How the hell did they send someone here?” I said.

  Alanna shrugged. “I suppose we should find out. But let’s be safe about it.”

  She stepped into my arms, and flowed into a wooden shell that tightened and sprouted steel skin. A moment later I was wearing her armor form.

  The serving girl stared. “That’s really strange to watch, my lord.”

  “Disturbing?”

  “It looks like fun, actually,” she replied with a smile. “She can still feel you, right? It just confounds the eye, the way she melts from one form to the other. I wonder if the Hall could teach me to do that?”

  “Not if you want to stay human,” I said. “Alright, I’m ready. Go ahead and send him in.”

  She bowed, and shut the door. After a brief delay it opened again, and a scruffy-looking guy in a quilted gambeson came in. He held a crumpled hat in his hands, and his eyes darted about nervously.

  Strange. He looked vaguely familiar, but his clothes definitely came from Valhalla.

  “Good day, lord wizard,” he said with a bow. “I, ah, thank you for seeing a little nobody like me, milo
rd.”

  The voice, I recognized. He looked ten years younger, and he’d grown a beard since I last saw him, but I’d know that subdued whine anywhere.

  “Nat?” I exclaimed. “Nat Legap? I thought you were dead?”

  “Well, yes, milord. Can’t rightly say I expected to end up in Valhalla, of all places. But I’d hardly be here if I still drew breath, now would I?”

  Alanna snickered in my ear.

  “Oh. Right. I guess this is the Viking afterlife, isn’t it? But, ah, no offense, but I wouldn’t have expected to see you here either. How did that happen?”

  A sheepish look stole over his face. “Heh. Might be my Valkyrie ain’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, milord. She watched the whole fight with that damned overgrown worm, and she was right desperate to grab someone. But you lived, and that wolf feller died with a prayer to the Witch Goddess on his lips, so she couldn’t rightly take him. I suppose she saw me shaking my fist at the bastard, and decided to settle for that.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  “I might of shouted something about stepping on him. Hell, what was he going to do to me? I was already dead by then, drowned in that fucking steel coffin. Great idea there, driving down a frozen river in a big metal box. I’m surprised it didn’t fall through before that bastard smashed up the ice.”

  “It wasn’t my brightest idea,” I admitted. “Although I doubt using a boat would have worked out any better. Narfing would have just smashed it with his tail when he saw that it was floating.”

  “True enough,” he agreed, shaking his head. “I still can’t believe you fought that thing underwater, and came out alive. But I’ve heard all manner of crazy tales about what the city’s been through since then. I don’t suppose you know what became of Aina?”