Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black)

by Brown, E. William

  But if I went down that road we’d all be dead in a matter of weeks. So instead I pried myself away, and went to work.

  There were men patrolling the top of the wall now, and troops moving into several of the new towers. They were glad enough to get out of the overcrowded barracks in town, although the exposed position of the new construction left them a little nervous. Since the new wall didn’t connect to the old one it would be easy for monsters to sneak into the empty ground between the two fortifications at night, and stage ambushes or try to break into the towers.

  But there was no way to reach the top of the wall without going up through a tower, and their exterior doors were heavy masses of stone mounted on pivots set into the wall. Nothing small enough to fit through the doorway was going to break in overnight, so as long as they didn’t get careless they shouldn’t have much to worry about.

  Besides, it was a temporary problem.

  By lunchtime I’d extended the wall well around the curve of the town, although of course the tops of the new defenses towered over all of the original construction. Still, it was good enough that after Beri delivered lunch I felt I could afford to take a few breaks. So once she was safely gone again I retreated to the top floor of a newly-built tower and pulled out the book Holger had sent me.

  No, I wasn’t planning to put some kind of slavery spell on the witches. But with both of them warning me about Cerise’s problems I’d be a fool not to look into my options. Maybe there would be something here I could use?

  It was slow going at first. Like most hand-written books it was short, barely a hundred pages of neat calligraphy. But the language was dense and obscure, full of unfamiliar references and poetic turns of phrase. I would have been completely lost if not for the grounding provided by my mana sorcery, and even then making sense of it wasn’t easy.

  I spent most of the afternoon alternating between projects, snatching twenty or thirty minutes at a time to read in between throwing up new walls and towers. It wasn’t the most efficient way to do things, but it gave me time to mull over each chapter’s contents.

  There was a lot of talk about souls and spirits, which I tentatively decided were probably real in this magical world. There was also a fair amount of stuff I would have dismissed as standard medieval bullshit back home, but here I had to stop and think about it. Did biology run on some kind of elemental magic here? Was it actually meaningful to talk about non-sentient forces like magic being innately good or evil? Was it plausible to think of corruption as a literal force that drags anyone who deviates from divinely mandated moral principles down into utter depravity?

  Fortunately I had the right forms of magic to check some of these ideas.

  A careful self-examination confirmed my previous impression that magical forces were an addition to normal biology, not a replacement for it. Living things had a natural magical field that acted as a sort of life force, affecting and sometimes enhancing physical processes. But I still had organs, cells and biochemistry, and so did the various people I’d healed.

  Similarly, my understanding of magic made it pretty obvious that it was a force of nature rather than a living thing. But this world was swarming with tiny, invisible elemental spirits that were basically made of magic, and they seemed to have at least animal levels of intelligence. So it was entirely possible that when Cerise stole power from a magical creature she was ingesting fragments of its personality too. That wasn’t exactly the same thing as the ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic the book talked about, but it was close enough to explain why people would believe in such things.

  As the afternoon wore on I gradually began to see how these bindings could work. At first I’d thought it was a matter of imposing commands on the victim, but the human mind is far too complex and malleable for that to be practical. Even if you invented a spell to let you perceive the subject’s mind, how would you ever pin down what the individual parts did in enough detail to accomplish anything? You’d need some kind of mind control sorcery to make that work, and I got the distinct impression that there wasn’t any such thing.

  So instead, binding rituals always involved making the subject consent to some sort of verbal or written agreement. A basic binding simply compelled the victim to avoid any action she believed would constitute a violation of the agreement. More complex versions could force actions or even changes in mental state, which I found rather chilling. The victim’s own magic was the power source for such a binding, so the more powerful she was the more complete it could be.

  With that foundation laid, the second half of the book was a dissertation on how to word a binding to enslave a witch in the most abject servitude imaginable, and how to torture her into agreeing to the binding.

  After a few pages of that I was sorely tempted to march into town and level the temple. Maybe try out some of their own torture techniques on the priests, and see what they thought of them. A gang rape would be hard to organize, but the hot pokers and thumbscrews would be easy to duplicate.

  I kept reading, though.

  It had struck me that the Church’s witch-binding techniques sounded like they had a lot in common with the coven-bonds the witches themselves used, and there were a lot of potentially important observations in between the stomach-turning passages about the best ways to torture a young woman without marring her appearance too badly.

  The major loophole in these binding techniques, which the author returned to time and time again, was that a binding’s meaning is interpreted by the mind of the subject. A witch bound to tell the truth can still be mistaken. A delusional witch will still be crazy after she’s bound. More subtly, a quick-witted victim can choose how to interpret any ambiguity in her bindings.

  That was an enormous problem with verbal bindings, because the fallible nature of human memory meant details would inevitably be lost or distorted over time. Make a homicidal witch swear to ‘never do harm of any sort to anyone’ today, and she’ll eventually convince herself that only applies to physical harm. Make the vow more complex, and that just gives her more details to mix up and build loopholes out of.

  Written contracts could be far more complex, but had the drawback that the binding was anchored in the physical document. A binding you can break just by burning a piece of paper isn’t very reliable, unless you can be very certain the paper is well protected.

  The solution the church of Odin had come up with involved a standard set of bindings known as the Riven Covenants, which were chiseled into stone tablets and stored in some secret location. A clever bit of sympathetic magic allowed anyone with a sliver of stone from one of the tablets to bind victims to abide by their contents, despite having never seen them.

  The last few pages of In Tauro de Maleficis claimed to be a copy of the text of the Riven Covenants. The contents looked like they’d do an exceptionally thorough job of making the victim into a devoted slave of her binder, but of course there was no way to check their accuracy. For all I knew the actual text on those tablets was completely different, and I wasn’t about to bind someone just to see how they acted afterwards.

  I was considering whether to add finding those tablets and destroying them to my to-do list when a distant rumble and crash distracted me. A cacophony of faint shouts and scream rose up as I hurried to the top of the tower where I’d been taking my last break of the day.

  I reached the parapet to find a pall of smoke hanging over the town. From my vantage point I could see a wide gap in the old town wall, and dozens of figures rushing across the snow-covered fields beyond. The setting sun cast long, weirdly-distorted shadows across the mob, and for a moment I couldn’t tell what they were. Large figures and small ones, some on two legs and others on four.

  Then the breeze blew some of the dust away, and I picked out a goblin mounted on wolf-back. Beside him a troll lumbered through the snow, waving a huge club studded with spikes over its head.

  There were hundreds of them, and the lead elements were already halfway to the breach.
/>   “Damn it,” I growled. “Don’t these guys ever give up?”

  There was no time to descend to ground level and make my way through the crowded streets of the town. By the time I reached the fight that way there’d be a few hundred goblins and half a dozen trolls inside the town, and I had no idea if there were enough troops in the garrison to drive a force like that back out.

  I vaulted over the parapet, pushed off from the side of the tower, and threw myself into the air with a burst of force magic.

  I still hadn’t figured out how to fly properly, but I had more than enough power to throw myself around. I pushed again, sailing high into the air over the town. Activating my force field muted the wind in my face, but the sudden change in aerodynamics sent me into a spin.

  I straightened out, found myself far too close to an approaching rooftop and pushed off again. Up, arching high over a clump of three-story buildings. A sideways push to correct the beggining of a tumble. A flex of my flesh magic to suppress a sudden flash of nausea.

  Up again, and now I could see the breach clearly. A thirty-foot section of the old town wall had simply collapsed, crushing the buildings built against it and throwing the townspeople into confusion. A band of goblins wearing white cloaks were standing in the rubble, shooting arrows into the crowd of fleeing civilians. Sappers? Some kind of goblin commandos?

  Another push, angling for the center of the breach. If I could throw up an obstacle before the main force arrived maybe we could keep them out of the town. I could hear horns blowing and bells ringing all over the settlement now.

  One of the white-coated goblins spotted me as I fell towards them. He shouted, pointing and dancing around, and the others turned their heads skyward. A rain of arrows rose to meet me, but my new shield was far stronger than the one I’d used before. Goblin arrows weren’t going to do anything to it.

  None of them missed.

  The first few arrows rattled off my shield just as I’d expected, raising little showers of blue sparks as they were thrown away. But these projectiles were magical, imbued with all sorts of minor spell effects. Bursts of flame and electricity flashed uselessly against the barrier, but speed and penetration effects took a heavier toll on my amulet’s energy reserve. One carried a dispelling effect that attacked the magic of my barrier directly, while another struck with such force that it started me spinning again.

  Then four shamans raised their little bone staves, and hurled dark blobs that trailed streamers of sickly green smoke at me.

  I managed to dodge one, but the second went right through my barrier and grazed my leg. Agony flared through me as the immaterial spell ate into my flesh like acid, and for a crucial second I was too distracted to dodge. Another curse smashed into my side.

  I screamed.

  I hit the ground moving far too fast.

  My shield stopped first, but I’d intentionally designed it not to transmit impacts to me. So an instant later I slammed into the inside of the barrier, still tumbling from those last seconds of uncontrolled fall. I hit a solid mass of stone, flipped over it and plowed face-first into a cavity in the rubble. For a moment I hovered on the edge of unconsciousness.

  But my amulet was still around my neck, mindlessly trying to heal all my damage at once. With that help I somehow managed to cling to consciousness. With a groan, I tried to move.

  My right arm was a mass of pain, and my hand didn’t want to work. My face was covered in blood, and my front teeth were missing. Worse, I couldn’t feel my legs at all.

  I managed to shift a little, so I could turn my head and see out of the hole I was in. The flash of pain from my arm nearly made me pass out again. Definitely broken.

  An arrow smacked into my depleted shield with a flash of green smoke. Goblin voices gabbled at each other in their own language, and then a shaman cautiously peered over the edge of the hole.

  His eyes met mine, and a toothy grin split his wrinkled face.

  “We got you now, flying man,” he said. “No more running and killing of goblins for you. Spirits of earth, crush!”

  The stones beneath me shifted, and began to move.

  Chapter 11

  The shifting stones pressed against my shield, raising showers of blue sparks. It was holding for the moment, but I knew now they had non-physical spells. I groped for my flesh sorcery, trying to focus enough to shut out the pain so I could try to escape.

  A silver knife opened the shaman’s throat, sending a spray of bright red blood arcing over me. A lithe form vaulted the rock he’d been standing on, and slid down my shield to land next to me.

  “Daniel!” Cerise gasped. “Shit, you’re fucked up. What can I do?”

  “Keep… off me…” I gasped. It was hard to breath, and my voice wasn’t working right.

  More goblins were coming into view now. One loosed an arrow at her, but she sidestepped it neatly. “You got it. Fading light, flee from my presence! Devouring night, make my shadow your home!”

  The dim light of twilight suddenly faded to pitch darkness. I heard the frantic jabbering of goblins, and more arrows whistled through the air. Then a goblin shrieked in pain.

  “I can keep them busy for a few minutes,” Cerise’s voice whispered in my ear. “But the shamans will tear down my shadows pretty quick and then I’m fucked. So work fast.”

  “’kay.”

  I gathered my focus again, and managed to get a pain block in place. With that done I was able to levitate myself without passing out from the pain, and get all my body parts arranged more or less the way they were supposed to be. Damn, that was a bad landing.

  Priorities.

  I had broken ribs, and one of them punctured a lung. That was why I couldn’t breathe right. Okay, push the ribs back into place, clear my lung and stop the bleeding. No time for anything more. Why couldn’t I feel my legs?

  My spine was severed down near my waist. Damn. I needed mobility, and I levitating myself took too much concentration. I couldn’t fight and move at the same time that way. Alright, I’d have to try to fix it.

  Cerise yelped in pain, and the impenetrable blackness around me faded to something more like a moonless night. Now I could make out vague outlines moving around me, and an occasional flash of magic.

  Was that a faint tingling in my toes, or just my imagination? Damn it, this was taking too long!

  Sounds of combat were springing up all around me now. Screams and shouts and the ringing of steel against steel. A wolf howled nearby, and the bellowing roar of a troll echoed it. An impact glanced off my shield, which still wasn’t back to full strength. Why not?

  Oh. Maybe putting defense and healing on the same item wasn’t such a smart idea. The amulet was mindlessly dumping almost all of its energy into the healing spell, trying to fix everything that was wrong with me and leaving only a tiny trickle to recharge the shield. I’d have to change that later, assuming I was still alive.

  Finally, sensation returned to my legs. My broken bones weren’t really healed, but they were set firmly enough that I could move without causing more damage. That would have to do for now. I set myself down, and stood on wobbly legs.

  “Done!” I announced. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Three arrows hit my shield immediately. They didn’t penetrate, but the barrier wavered ominously. Damn it, where was Cerise? I couldn’t throw any ranged attacks or I might hit her.

  “Turn left and walk a little,” Cerise said from behind me. “I’ve got your back.”

  “Got it.” I turned, and hobbled forward through the darkness.

  A large shape loomed in front of me. I extended an eight-foot force blade from my left hand and swept it across the shadowy bulk. It collapsed with an agonized animal sound, and I stepped around it.

  Another dark shape, but this one was just a wall. Heavy stone, thicker than I was tall. Right, the town wall. This must be one end of the breach.

  “Can’t hold the darkness much longer,” Cerise warned.

  I nodded, and pu
t my back to the wall. With my amulet’s energy flow mostly tied up I couldn’t afford to waste magic on anything big, but shifting some of the broken stone beneath our feat to give us cover wasn’t too hard.

  “Alright, let it go,” I said.

  The darkness faded to twilight. Cerise stood beside me, breathing heavily from the fight, with a nasty gash on one arm and bloodstains all over her knee-length dress.

  In front of us the breach was full of monsters. Hundreds of goblins, about half of them on wolfback, were pouring into the town. Here and there a troll strode through the rushing crowd of smaller monsters, roaring and looking for enemies. A handful of archers on the wall above rained arrows down into the mass, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

  I threw a volley of force blades into the press, and a whole group of goblins fell in a spray of blood and severed body parts. But they could see us now, and the nearest goblins immediately rushed us.

  I manifested an eight-foot blade of force from my left hand and swept it across their ranks. Goblins and wolves fell, cut in half by the invisible blade. But there were too many of them, moving too fast.

  A javelin bounced off my shield. I swept my blade back and forth, cutting down more attackers. A goblin leaped off his dying mount with swords like meat cleavers in both hands, but Cerise knocked him out of the air with a curse. Arrows fell around us, and a ball of sparks arced over our attackers to detonate on my shield.

  It collapsed.

  A troll lumbered into range, raising a broken-off tree trunk high over its head. I stabbed it in the groin with my force blade, and it dropped the improvised club to clutch at itself. More goblins poured around it into melee range, stabbing at me with spears. Cerise gutted one that got too close, and I cut down more with another sweep of my hand.