Thrall

by E. William Brown

  Our first contact with the enemy came as we were picking our way through the rocky maze they called the Boulder Field. It looked like some giant had dumped a bag full of house-sized rocks onto an open field, and then kicked them around some to create lots of broken rubble. I could see how it would be a challenge for sentries on a distant hilltop to spot a group sneaking between the boulders, especially since the company had broken up into smaller groups by that point.

  I couldn’t even see what happened, thanks to a boulder that was in the way. One moment we were jogging along, and the next the clang of metal on metal filled the air from somewhere up ahead. I tensed, and drew my revolver. But by the time we reached the scene the fight was over.

  Two Moon Ghosts were dead and another wounded, just like that. There were a couple of bodies with another unit’s insignia laid out next to them, and blood splashed liberally over the cold stone.

  “Scouting party,” one of the men said, like that explained everything. The way Captain Arnor nodded in response, maybe it did.

  “Push on until we find an ambush,” the captain decided. “Then we’ll see how sharp the Night Claws are this time around.”

  Again, that was all it took to get the whole company moving again. I caught glimpses of the squads rearranging themselves as we set off, adjusting their formation with nothing but a few gestures. Okay, it made sense that a ranger unit would have some kind of sign language, just like modern special ops forces. But I remembered how much shouting, swearing and general struggle it took for Captain Rain to get my own troops to perform even the simplest maneuvers. The contrast was pretty amazing.

  “They won’t try a serious ambush down in the Boulder Field,” Captain Arnor explained in a low voice as we wound our way through the rocks. “The sight lines are crap, and it’s too easy to get encircled. But keep a sharp eye out when we start up the slope on the other side. There’s a couple of good choke points where a response team could try and hold us off, so keep your head down until I see what we’re dealing with.”

  A few drops of rain fell around us as he spoke, and quickly turned into a steady drizzle.

  “Will do. Time to close up, Alanna.”

  I’d had her stick with an open-faced helm while I was talking to people, but given the skill level I was seeing I suspected that was asking for an arrow to the face. My force field ought to stop attacks like that, but I was done relying on just one layer of defense for anything.

  Finally, Alanna replied.

  In a matter of seconds the helm’s nose guard and cheek protectors grew out to merge into a solid plate that covered the lower half of my face, and then extended down over my chin. Little holes appeared around the mouth area, enough to let sound through but far too small to admit an arrow or dart. Thick plates of something transparent grew out to cover the eye holes, protected by reinforcement spells.

  “Nice trick,” Captain Arnor commented, before turning his gaze back to the terrain.

  We made it through the boulder field without any further encounters, and started up a ravine that would let us bypass the next hill instead of climbing it if we could get through. The men were obviously expecting to find a blocking force somewhere along the narrow passage, but instead we reached the far end without incident.

  Arnor frowned as we came out onto a barren hillside. He paused for a moment to peer through the worsening rain at the rocky hills all around us, as if searching for some sign of the enemy. Not that he was likely to find any, with the way visibility was dropping.

  “What’s he playing at?” He murmured. “They can’t have been that far out of position.”

  “Want me to go up and take a look around?” I asked. “The way the weather is going, that won’t be an option for much longer.”

  “No, we’ll press on. If Commander Rurik has guessed that you’re with us he’s probably moving to force a quick engagement with our main body, and if that’s the case we need to get in position to hit their flank. But keep a sharp eye out. We should have run into a screening force before now.”

  Ten minutes later we were climbing another rocky slope when a volley of magic arrows suddenly rained down from the ridge line above. Most of them hit, which confirmed my worries about the accuracy of enemy snipers, and one glanced off of my force field.

  The Moon Ghosts all found cover before I could blink. Several more arrows bounced off my force field in the moment it took me to realize what was happening, and find a boulder of my own to huddle behind. I turned to the captain, who’d ended up behind the same cover, and found him frowning again.

  “Problem?”

  “It’s an odd site for their ambush,” he replied. “Not a bad position, but we’ve already passed better ones. They should have been set up further out, unless they were busy with something else while we were marching here.”

  “Want me to clear the ridge, or should I just keep my head down while you work?”

  “They’ve already seen you, so there’s no point in trying to hide any longer. Show us your mettle, wizard.”

  “Heh. Watch this.”

  I launched myself into the air, rising over the top of the boulder and opening up on the ridge line above with explosive rounds. Several arrows were in the air before the first explosion went off, but they were too slow to hit me when I was flying. By the time they reached my position I’d risen another hundred feet, and the thunder of my attack sent the enemy diving for cover.

  I had bullet factories for three different grades of explosive round in my revolver now, and I’d chosen the middle size. Each shot struck with the impact of a good-size bomb, conjuring several pounds of white-hot nickel-iron under the same pressure as the Earth’s core. The resulting explosions shattered boulders and dug out craters in the ground, showering the ridge with debris and molten metal. I arced high over the ridge, walking my fire back and forth across the enemy position. Rain flashed into steam, momentarily hiding the enemy, but I didn’t need to see them to cover their whole position with overlapping blasts.

  Then I descended to land on the ridge, and survey the results of my bombardment. I drew Grinder, just in case, but didn’t turn it on yet. It seemed hard to believe anyone could have lived through that.

  The steam cleared away, revealing a devastated landscape but no trace of the enemy. No bodies, or pieces of bodies, or even bits of armor. That was odd. I hadn’t used anywhere near enough firepower to obliterate bodies like that, so where did the archers go?

  The rain abruptly turned to hail. Then a freezing mist rose up to cover the ridge, and the temperature plummeted so fast I actually felt it for a moment before my warmth enchantments adjusted to the change.

  “What the hell?”

  Something big and massively powerful slammed into me from behind, and sent me flying. But with the protection of my new cloak the blow didn’t even hurt, and I kept my wits. Instead of crashing into the ground I could no longer see, I fed power to my flight spell and rose into the air.

  This is faerie magic, Daniel! Alanna exclaimed, just as I broke free of the fog bank. It covered the whole ridge line we’d been trying to cross, rolled down the slope to engulf the rocks the Moon Ghosts were hiding behind and continued on to pool in the valley below.

  “That’s a big spell,” I observed.

  Not for the winter court, Alanna replied. Be careful, Daniel. They’re fond of deceptive glamours.

  “Yeah, well, let’s just not play that game.”

  I gathered my power, and began assembling a massive dispel field. I usually avoided spellcasting on this scale during a fight, because it took too long. But ground troops wouldn’t be able to reach me up here, and I didn’t feel like going down into the mist where they could trick me into shooting my own allies.

  My spell was only half finished when I saw a sudden gathering of power, and a lightning bolt slammed down from the clouds above to strike me. My ears range from the thunderclap, and I lost lift for a second from sheer surprise. But I didn’t seem to be hurt.

&n
bsp; “You alright, Alanna?”

  I’m fine. It didn’t even breach my metal shell, she assured me. Did you see where the spell came from?

  Yeah, but if they’re that eager to stop me I’m not going to let them interrupt my spell.

  A second lightning bolt struck me. Once again, the blast was deafening, but it couldn’t actually hurt me. My force fields didn’t seem to be interacting with the lighting, but the thousands of tiny metal shields that floated above my new cloak and surcoat formed a conductive later that it couldn’t penetrate. All they were doing was heating up the metal, and considering that it was enchanted tungsten I wasn’t too worried about that.

  I finished assembling my spell, and blanketed the slope with a dispelling. The icy mist dissolved into nothingness, and I caught a momentary glimpse of strange shapes struggling against each other on the ground. Then most of them dissolved as well, revealing the men of the Moon Ghosts who’d been cloaked in illusions. They paused in their fighting, looking around uncertainly.

  I waited another moment, hoping the rest of the weirdness would turn out to be an illusion too. But no, apparently there really were a group of elves riding giant polar bears down there. There were only a handful of them, but the way they were wading through Captain Arnor’s men said something about how tough they were.

  Then the fog rose up out of the ground again, hiding the melee from my sight. But this time it was just fog, without any illusions layered into it.

  Oh, and this time I’d spotted the source of the spell. I switched my revolver to the big explosive rounds, and opened fire on a clump of boulders a few hundred yards away. Obviously I wasn’t going to be hitting anyone with a pistol at that distance. But the heavy bullets my weapon fired easily had enough inertia to carry that far, and with explosives you only have to get close. The first round struck the hillside, and sent up an enormous gout of flame and molten metal. After that I just held the trigger down, and walked my fire over the enemy wizard’s position.

  The results were pretty impressive. My high-power rounds conjured several hundred pounds of molten metal, and my revolver could conjure a new round and fire it in a little less than a second. Huge gouts of flame erupted from the hillside, showering the whole area with broken rock and brilliantly glowing sprays of white-hot metal. Every plant in the area caught fire, and hissing puddles of molten metal accumulated in low spots only to be set flying again by the next explosion.

  For maybe twenty seconds I turned the target zone into a flaming hell of sudden death. Then something massive and impossibly fast shot out of the mist, and slammed into me. My amulet’s force field strained for a moment before collapsing, and then my face was full of giant teeth as a heavy weight drove me to the ground.

  I turned Grinder on, and stabbed the thing with my blade of screaming plasma. It howled, more in anger than pain, and tried to claw my armor open. But its claws just skidded across my shields, unable to penetrate despite the vortex of hungry magic that surrounded them. I fired a plasma jet into its face, and the hairy creature broke off its attack to shield its eyes with one beefy arm. By then the whirling disks of force that made up Grinder’s blade were up to speed, and I lopped its other arm off.

  It howled again, and dissolved into the mist.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  A wendigo, Alanna said. A hungry spirit of wind and ice. They aren’t easily slain, but it won’t be eager for a rematch after that. Look out!

  Two guys riding giant bears loomed out of the mist, swinging naginatas at me while their mounts tried to claw and bite. The blades shone with an icy blue radiance, and left trails of ice particles in the air as they moved. But they bounced harmlessly off my shields, and the claws and fangs of the bears didn’t fare any better.

  I swung Grinder in wide arcs for a moment, trying to fend them off while I switched ammo types. Then I shot one of the bears with a bouncer round. The whirling blades of force that surrounded the bullet diced it to chunks in a shower of gore.

  The elf who’d been riding it was untouched, seemingly immune to magic. He threw some kind of curse at me, an angry tangle of snarling black magic that clung and gnawed at my wards. I ignored it, and shot him twice in the chest.

  Once again, the force blades didn’t seem to touch him. But the big iron bullets smashed right through his mail shirt, and reduced his chest to a bloody ruin.

  His companion cloaked himself in an invisibility illusion, but it didn’t do him any good when I could still see his magic. I shot him next, and then turned my attention to the mist. Was that an air spirit maintaining the weather magic? Maybe I could free it, and get rid of our visibility problems.

  Why the hell was a group of winter fae attacking an Asgardian military exercise? I had a bad feeling about this.

  Chapter 14

  Caspar didn’t get his victory.

  Oh, the Moon Ghosts held up just fine with my support. Together we cut that winter fey ambush to ribbons, and went looking for more. But there were other faerie war bands in the mountains, and between their magic and the monsters they commanded they were damned near unstoppable. By the time we’d gotten back in contact both groups of Asgardian soldiers had taken heavy casualties, and the generals had called off the exercise.

  Instead they opened a new gate in the middle of the combat zone, and ordered the two battle groups to combine forces and conduct a fighting retreat. I probably could have begged off at that point, but I didn’t want to look like a coward in front of my hosts. So instead I stuck around and helped them patrol the area, beating off two attempts to drop bombardment spells on the extraction zone and a clever attempt to scramble the gate’s teleport magic, until the survivors of the last band of troops came straggling in.

  The winter fey were deadly foes, and I think more than half the men who’d marched out for the exercise died before we could withdraw. But they’d be back at sunset, and the faeries we’d killed would stay dead. Caspar was pissed as hell at losing the chance to improve his win ratio, but Commander Rurik seemed to think the affair was a draw at worst.

  As for the Moon Ghosts, they were in a partying mood.

  “Roofmistress!” Captain Arnor called as we marched into the hall. “Meat and mead for the men! Tonight we celebrate our first victory of Ragnarok, and we owe it all to our wizard. Come, Daniel. The seat of honor at this feast is yours.”

  I took the chair to the right of his with a weary grin. Illusionist mages were a pain in the ass to deal with, and their fighters were good at getting into close combat where I couldn’t just blow them up. But the Moon Ghosts did pretty well against their monsters and bear cavalry as long as I kept dispelling the glamours. Somewhere up in the mountains, some faerie commander was probably bitching up a storm about the frustrating mage who kept screwing up their ambushes.

  “Thank you, Arnor,” I said. “It isn’t exactly what the Allfather brought me here for, but it was a good workout.”

  Fiona appeared at my side with a flagon of mead, and a relieved smile.

  “Congratulations on your victory, master,” she said. “I’m glad you made it back.”

  “We were worried when we heard about the faerie attack,” Caitlyn said, perching herself on the armrest of my chair as she examined me for injuries. “You should be careful. You won’t just come back at sunset if something happens to you.”

  Arnor laughed. “Isn’t that just like a woman? Don’t fret, girls, our wizard is more than a match for a few faerie striplings. But he’s not the only hero of the hour. Boris! Don’t think I didn’t see that shot you made in the second ambush. Two hundred yards if it was an inch, and it took that mage right in the throat! That’s a new record for you, isn’t it?”

  The women started laying food on the table while the men settled into their seats, boasting about their feats during the day’s battle. Doting girlfriends sat in their men’s laps or leaned over their shoulders, listening to each story with wide eyes. Weapons and armor were handed over to serving girls, who carried each ma
n’s gear off to his room and returned with more servings of mead.

  My twins blended into the crowd of pretty women, watching my back and carefully vetting the food and drink I was served. It kept them too busy to flirt and tease the way most of the other women did, but that was just as well. It wasn’t like I could do anything with them anyway. As long as they were bound to the hall they were still technically Odin’s servants, not mine, and that meant my coven binding considered them off limits.

  Alanna was another story, though.

  Are you sure you don’t want to come out and join the party? I asked her at one point.

  It’s tempting, she admitted. But this would be the perfect time for an assassin to strike. I’ll not leave your back unprotected just to enjoy a little mead.

  My new cloak covers my back pretty well, I pointed out.

  It doesn’t protect your throat, or your eyes, she retorted. Just because I’m not covering your face right now doesn’t mean I’m not ready to shift at the first sign of danger. I shall not risk losing you, so please don’t tempt me.

  Alright, suit yourself. I appreciate you being so protective, Alanna. I just feel bad that you can’t enjoy yourself because of it.

  Then get us home as soon as you can manage it. I’ll trust Sefwin’s wit to keep assassins out of the palace, but I won’t rest easy until we’re safely behind your walls again.

  That was a sentiment I could agree with. But I wasn’t any closer to a solution for our Aesir problem.

  I’d learned quite a bit about the Atlantean style of enchantment from studying that rod, and the spells it could cast were a lot less mysterious to me now. The soul magic I’d learned from it was the main reason I’d felt comfortable asking the hall for Fiona and Caitlyn, since I was confident I could smuggle them out of Valhalla now. I’d have to bind them into a soul trap before I cut their link to the Moon Ghost Hall, but the rod had shown me how to do that kind of thing. I still wasn’t quite sure how to bind them into a living body properly, but Cerise had spells for that.