Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black)

by Brown, E. William

“We’ll make it worth your while,” Cerise added slyly, sliding over to press her breasts into my side. Her hand began to wander down my belly, but Avilla took it and put it on my shoulder.

  “Down, kitten. You’ll get your attention soon.” She smiled indulgently.

  I chuckled. “She does do a good sex kitten act, doesn’t she?”

  “Oh, it’s no act,” Avilla corrected. “Silly kitten thought a succubus would be an easy target for her first power theft ritual, and she’s been insatiable ever since. Keeping her occupied is a terrible distraction, especially since I’m so easy to seduce. I can’t count the number of times I’ve lost a whole day because she didn’t want to get out of bed. Maybe that’s something else you could help us with?”

  “Yeah. You two are unbelievably tempting, you know that?”

  They both giggled happily.

  I shook my head. “This is a lot to take in. Cerise, is that what you were up to earlier? Checking to see if I could counter your mind control powers?”

  “Partly,” she admitted. “But I really do like to play like that. What do you have against enchantment, anyway? It’s not like I was going to do anything you wouldn’t like.”

  I frowned. “You’re asking for an awful lot of trust from someone you’ve only known a few days. For that matter, the same goes for this coven bond thing. I’m surprised you want to jump into something like that so fast.”

  “In a less desperate situation we might be more cautious,” Avilla admitted. “But the way things are going, I don’t think we have the luxury of being indecisive. Besides, it’s been a very eventful three days. We’ve already seen most of the important things. You’re a bold leader of men with more than enough power to protect us, yet you’re not ashamed to ask a woman for advice. You’re considerate to a fault, but you don’t allow others to take advantage of you.”

  “You fuck like a god,” Cerise put in cheerily.

  Avilla smiled slyly. “Oh, yes. We aren’t going to find a better man. But Daniel, we can offer as much as we ask. A coven-bond can include almost any vow, and once taken it becomes unbreakable. Do you wish us to never desire another man? To always hunger for your touch? To submit to your guidance in all things? Ask anything you like of us, Daniel. You may be surprised at how far we’re willing to go, and how little we ask in return.”

  Her beautiful face was inches from mine, her firm breasts brushing against my chest, and the memory of what the three of us had done just last night threatened to overwhelm me. It was so tempting to simply say yes, to whatever this vision of loveliness might ask of me.

  But I’d been married long enough to know better than to make major decisions in this kind of situation. Amanda had done the same thing, offering a blow job out of the blue and pausing in the middle of it to propose vacation plans or a new car or whatever else she might want at the moment.

  So instead I hugged Avilla against my chest, and sighed.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told her. “I’ll want to know a lot more about what’s involved in a coven-bond and how they work.”

  “Of course,” she agreed.

  “If there are unbreakable vows involved I want us to think very carefully about what to include,” I went on. “Something that sounds fine at first glance could easily end up making us all miserable twenty years from now.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of notes we can look over,” Cerise agreed. “I’ve been trying to work out ideas for years.”

  “Thank you, Daniel,” Avilla breathed. “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to make this work.”

  Then she kissed me, and the time for conversation was over.

  Chapter 8

  In the cold light of day, I was sure there had to be a catch.

  Seriously, two beautiful young women volunteering to share a guy? Let alone the thing with the maids, and all the ‘please tell us what to do’ vibes I was getting from them.

  It was too good to be true. They wanted something from me, and they were trying to dazzle and distract me to keep me from noticing the catch until it was too late. It was the only explanation that made sense.

  Unfortunately, my own ignorance made it impossible to guess what the truth was. Maybe this ‘coven bond’ ritual was actually going to turn out to be a mind control spell, or some kind of sacrifice. Maybe they had a way to steal my magic if I consented. There were a thousand possibilities.

  Or maybe they were just desperately scared, and were trying to make sure I didn’t abandon them. That was the kicker. Just because they were trying to manipulate me didn’t meant it was for nefarious purposes. Hell, they might even like me as much as I did them, in which case it would be damned stupid to throw this away just because I couldn’t let go of my suspicions.

  So I resolved to keep my eyes open, learn fast, and play along until I figured things out. At this point that was really all I could do.

  At least I finally had some time to prepare. I’d sandbagged more than a little on my construction time estimate, but I still needed to spend most of each day working on the wall. I wanted to make sure the Baron would have no excuse to interrupt my work or short me on my payment, and besides I was a little nervous that the giants would make a move before I was finished. The town had been attacked several times by goblins, trolls and other lesser threats, so it was only a matter of time.

  The first day I spent part of the morning making the rounds of the injured who’d been under my care, speeding along their healing and making sure they’d all make a full recovery. They were happy enough about that, and more than a few of them made inquiries about whether I was hiring. Not having time to organize that myself, I sent most of them to see Avilla.

  She’d been shocked when I told her I was putting her in charge of organizing the group I wanted, but she was happy enough when I explained my reasoning.

  “We can’t afford to take a bunch of extra people, and I figure this is like setting up a minor noble’s household. I’ve got no idea what we actually need in the way of domestic staff, but I’m sure you can handle that side of it. We’re also going to need laborers to move supplies around, teamsters to drive whatever I come up with for transport, probably a blacksmith and some other craftsmen to support the troops and keep all our gear in order. Keep the group as small as you can, but I expect we’ll end up with a dozen soldiers and at least that many support staff.”

  “More, if we want to be self-sufficient,” she replied, already considering the problem. “What about families? The best craftsmen will mostly be married, won’t they?”

  “Probably. We’ll take them, of course. But try to keep the total number of people down, especially children. Travel is going to be dangerous no matter how well we prepare, and I’d rather not have a bunch of little kids in the line of fire.”

  I spent an hour enchanting warmth cloaks for Cerise to sell, and confirmed in the process that I was getting faster at it. It was a pretty simple enchantment, and practice made a big difference. The last cloak took me barely ten minutes to make, and I was actually optimistic about improving on that time. With any luck I’d be able to equip my whole group with them before it was time to leave.

  Unfortunately working on the wall didn’t get any easier. My limit there was more a matter of power than skill, at least when it came to conjuring up thousands of cubic feet of earth and stone. The second tower went up a bit faster than the first, but the fact that I wasn’t bothering to do anything fancy with the interior was a lot of that. I put on exterior doors of stone, but the inside was just five identical floors of one big room each.

  Things got more complicated when I got to the road I’d noticed running parallel to the river. Obviously that called for a gatehouse, but how was I going to make a gate out of stone? Mechanical engineering wasn’t my specialty, and it would be awful easy to end up making the gates so heavy they’d be impossible to move.

  Putting in the foundation for a pair of towers with a gatehouse between them was easy enough, but I was still mulling over the gate problem
when I heard Beri’s voice call down from the top of the wall.

  “Master Black? Are you down there?”

  “I’m here!” I called. “Wait where you are, I’ll be right up.”

  I carefully levitated myself up the face of the wall, and found Beri waiting at the top. She was wearing one of the new warmth cloaks, which seemed sensible enough, and awkwardly holding something to her chest.

  She gave a startled squeak, and backed away for a moment before she recognized me.

  “Oh! Sorry, sir, I didn’t realize that was you for a moment. Miss Avilla sent me with lunch. Unless you were coming back to the tower?”

  “No, I need to make as much progress as I can today. What have you got there?”

  She smiled. “It’s pretty clever. She made minced meat rolls, but they would have gone cold long before I could get them to you in this weather. So Miss Avilla collected stones from the river and heated them on the stove. Then we filled the bottom of a pot with them, put the rolls on top, and wrapped it in towels so I could carry it without getting burned.”

  She set the pot down as she explained, and spread a blanket in the lee of the parapet so we could sit out of the wind. Then she produced a small decanter of water, and a cup.

  I shook my head. “That girl is a miracle worker with this domestic stuff, isn’t she? Well, you may as well have a seat. How are you doing?”

  She seemed a bit surprised at the question, but recovered quickly. “Well enough, sir. I’ve been helping Miss Cerise run errands all morning. We’ve traded off two of the cloaks already, and we’ve been procuring all sorts of supplies for Miss Avilla. Mind you, no one wants to part with food.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to do something creative to stock up for the trip. Bribe an official with magic items, or maybe go find a lost granary to recover. I notice the Baron has salvage teams going out to the surrounding farms already.”

  “Yes, sir. Um, do we really have to leave?” She looked out over the frozen landscape around the town. “That seems awful dangerous.”

  “We’re going to be in danger no matter what we do,” I pointed out. “Don’t worry, we’ll be a lot better prepared this time. We won’t be on foot, and I’ve got some ideas for magic weapons to discourage any monsters that try to bother us.”

  “If you say so, sir. I’ll miss the tower, though. I wish we could just close the doors and stay behind those walls until this is all over. The thought of going out there again...”

  She huddled in on herself, clearly terrified at the idea. Poor girl. I suppose I couldn’t blame her for that. I put a comforting arm around her, and she curled up against me.

  “Tina and I are lucky you came along when you did,” she said softly.

  There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I occupied myself with eating. The food was excellent as usual, but hungry as I was it didn’t last long.

  “Master Black?” Beri asked. “Does it take a special talent to learn magic? Or can anyone do it?”

  “Are you interested?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. The stories all say bad things happen to people who tamper with dark forces. But I can’t help thinking that if Miss Cerise ran into some terrible monster in a dark alley, the monster would run away screaming. I’d give a lot to be like that.”

  “Hmm. Well, there’s more than one kind of magic,” I said, repeating what Cerise had told me just a few days before. “Some you have to be born with, but others anyone can learn if they’re willing to put in the work. Unfortunately it takes years to get to where you can do anything impressive. Cerise and Avilla have both been practicing since they were children, and they’re just starting to blossom.”

  “I see.” She shifted, her hand slipping under my cloak to rest on my chest. “I suppose I’ll just have to stay close, then. Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

  Was she trying to flirt with me? Well, this was hardly the place for that.

  I let her go, and set the lid back on the pot. “No, I’m good. I’d better get back to work now.”

  Conjuring metal took easily a hundred times more energy than stone, but in the end it was the only feasible solution. I hung each leaf of the gate on an iron post set deep into the stone, with a counterweight that would be hidden inside the wall. That let me build each door out of a framework of iron bars several inches thick, covered with a two-inch facing of iron plate studded liberally with spikes. The inner surface got a much thinner layer of iron plate, and I was able to fuse all of it together into a single seamless mass with a bit of effort. The whole thing took a couple of hours to build, including the iron beams that could be dropped across the inside of the gate to hold it shut. But the end result was light enough for a couple of men to open and close, albeit with difficulty.

  A few men from the current gate garrison wandered out for a look while I was working on it, and their sergeant offered some shrewd advice on details like where to put vision slits and the door into the gatehouse. I ended up installing a portcullis, along with quite a few arrow slits and murder holes covering the approach to the gate.

  They also pointed out some of the practical problems inherent in living in such a structure, which convinced me to go ahead and install fireplaces on each floor and a few privies in discreet locations. It was far from ideal, but that way they’d be able to get by if I never got a chance to put in magical heating or plumbing.

  Later that afternoon, once I’d finally finished the gatehouse and started on the next stretch of wall, I got my next visitor. This time it was a burly fellow with graying hair and a scraggly beard, carrying a weathered-looking spear and bundled up in a coat and cloak that seemed quite well-used. He was accompanied by a couple of younger men, also armed with spears, but from the way they focused on surveying the snow-covered fields around us I surmised they were here as his bodyguards.

  I was raising a new stretch of wall when I noticed them, and dropped back to ground level to see what they wanted. As the older man approached I noted that he wore a large silver amulet outside his cloak, bearing an odd knotwork symbol that looked sort of like three overlapping crescent moons.

  “Any idea who that is?” I asked the leader of my current bodyguard squad. What was his name, again? I’ve never been good with names, and there was so much coming and going it was getting hard to keep track.

  “That’s Holger Drakebane,” the soldier explained in a low tone. “He’s the High Priest of the temple here in Lanrest.”

  Sadly there was no time for further questions.

  “Ho there, wizard! I’d like a word with you.”

  Well, that was different. What was the proper form of address for a high priest, anyway? Heck if I know, and guessing wrong would look pretty strange. I’d have to wing it.

  “Ho yourself, priest! I suppose I can spare a few minutes from the wall. What brings you all the way out here?”

  He pulled up in surprise, and for a moment I thought he was going to take offense. But then he laughed.

  “‘Priest’, indeed! That’ll show me. Holger is the name. I understand you go by Daniel the Black?”

  “Close enough,” I replied. “Black is actually just my family name, but people keep trying to make it into a title. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s more a matter of what will you do, and whether you ought to. I’ve been hearing some disturbing rumors about your apprentices, and the scale of this wall project is a bit disquieting as well. But perhaps we should discuss this privately? I know how you wizards are about protecting your secrets.”

  “Good idea. How about the top of the wall, then?”

  “That would work”, he nodded.

  I’d been keeping the face of the wall where I was doing construction pretty vertical, since it was a lot easier to start a new section and just stand on it as I grew it to full height than it would be to walk back and forth along an incline. That meant there was no easy way for anyone else to reach the top unless they wanted to go
all the way down to the gatehouse and climb the stairs there. So I led Holger over to the workface and conjured stone under both our feet, sending us smoothly up the side like a slow-moving elevator. In a matter of minutes we were halfway up.

  “An interesting technique,” Holger observed mildly. “I don’t sense any elementals at work, but no human could power spells on this scale for any length of time. That would require a pact with demons, or worse. But drawing so heavily on such bargains always gives them away.”

  I shook my head. “Bargaining with anything that doesn’t like humans is a fool’s game. Everyone makes mistakes, and the first one will kill you. No, I found an entirely novel source of power for my magic. Without giving too much away, you might say that I’m tapping into the substance of the world itself to power my spells.”

  He frowned. “That seems phenomenally dangerous.”

  “There’s a reason I haven’t revealed the technique to anyone. The world is far too big to be harmed by a single wizard doing this, but if it became commonplace there could be problems. Normally I’d have spent a lot longer studying things before putting it to any large-scale use, but events have forced my hand.”

  “None of us expected Ragnarok to come so soon,” he agreed. “Loki has barely been free for a year, and the sages all expected he would spend generations preparing his forces. But that’s neither here nor there. Will this technique of yours affect the fertility of the earth? Could it disturb the dead, or make crops unwholesome?”

  “No, it doesn’t operate on that level. It affects the actual substance of the stone under our feet, not the spiritual aspects of the land. I can’t even begin to deplete the amount of energy available - what I’m doing here is like dipping a cup in the ocean. The main hazard would be if something goes wrong with my energy tap. In that case it could release a huge amount of uncontrolled magic, probably manifesting as intense heat and invisible destructive forces. Obviously I’m confident I’ve solved those issues or I wouldn’t be risking myself, but it’s one of the reasons I try not to have too many people nearby when I’m working large-scale magic.”