Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black)

by Brown, E. William

  Holy ground?

  That could make this more complicated, depending on what it did. Best to delay contact for as long as possible.

  “Can you find her?” I asked Avilla.

  “Yes, we have more than enough of a bond for that. But I’ll need a minute, and depending on what wards the priest has they might react.”

  “We can work with that.” I took Avilla’s shield down, and picked her up.

  “Hold on, and try to stay quiet,” I told her. “We’re going airborne.”

  She gulped, and closed her eyes. “O-okay.”

  I jumped.

  I was getting better with force-boosted leaps. My first jump took us to the roof of one of the three-story tenements facing the little plaza that held the temple. I didn’t linger on the windswept roof, not knowing if the wooden shingles would hold our weight for any length of time.

  My second jump took us across the plaza. The wind immediately grabbed us and pushed, throwing me off course. I pushed back, squinting through the blowing snow at the looming shape of our destination. Up, up, rising above the steeply-sloped roof. There was no steeple, but a taller structure that was probably a bell tower rose from the far end.

  A hard push in that direction, and Avilla squeaked fearfully in my arms. No doors or roof hatches that I could see, even as we closed the distance. But the roof looked like slate, so it ought to hold our weight.

  I landed us as gently as I could manage in the gusting wind, on a sloped expanse of roof tiles just upslope of the bell tower. My shield expanded at the last moment to cushion our landing, and nearly pitched us right off into space. I held us in place with one last, frantic force push, and my feet settled to touch the steep surface.

  I dropped to my knees, and set Avilla down.

  She opened her eyes, and plastered herself against the tiles.

  “Eep! Where are we, Daniel?”

  “The roof of the temple. Would they use the main chamber for this kind of ritual?”

  She visibly gathered her wits, and shook her head.

  “No, he’ll have a ritual chamber. Behind the alter, or maybe in a cellar. Probably a cellar, actually. I’ve never seen a temple to the Aesir before, but Cerise told me they like to do their dark deeds underground.”

  “Alright. One thing at a time, then.”

  I reached into the roof tiles with my magic, and confirmed that they still counted as Earth to my sorcery. Good. It took only a few seconds to shape a section of tiles together into a solid mass, with handholds rising from the outer surface for us both to hang onto.

  That would keep us from getting blown off or falling through while I did the rest.

  Raising a force dome over us to block out the snow and wind took a little more effort, since I wanted to be sure it would last a good while after I took my attention off of it. The roar of the wind faded as the barrier of magic absorbed most of its force, and the snow no longer reached our patch of roof.

  “I’m putting out your torch now,” I warned Avilla.

  “What are we doing up here?” She asked.

  “Attacking from an unexpected direction. Stay quiet, I’m going to cut a hole in the roof and take a look at what we’re up against.”

  I had to carefully brush away the snow that clung to the roof first, since a puff of falling flakes might well draw attention. But after that it was trivial to cut through the heavy tile and the wood beneath with a force blade, and lift out a small section of the roof.

  Below us a single long room ran most of the length of the building. A few torches in brackets on the walls provided dim illumination, just enough to pick out the major features of the room.

  There were no pews, just a wide open space with a wooden floor. A large statue stood at the end opposite the doors, depicting a bearded man with an eyepatch holding a spear in one hand, with ravens sitting on his shoulders. That would be Odin, I suppose.

  At the statue’s feet stood an alter that was considerably less ceremonial than the ones in Catholic churches. It was a slab of weathered stone a bit longer than a man’s height, with a mass of runes and vaguely Celtic-looking knotwork carved into its sides. But what grabbed my attention were the gleaming manacles sitting atop neatly coiled lengths of chain at each corner.

  Lovely. There really weren’t any good gods in this world, were there?

  In the dim torchlight I could see a dozen men sleeping in bedrolls in the middle of the room, and three more awake and playing some kind of card game. There was a door behind the alter, with another man leaning against the wall next to it. They were all pretty normal-looking men at arms, wearing chainmail shirts and armed with a variety of spears, swords and axes.

  Tricky.

  I put the section of roof back in place, and told Avilla what I’d seen.

  “Could we go around them?” She asked. “The door must lead to the inner sanctum and the priests’ quarters. If we move further down the roof we could come in through that and search for the way down to the cellar.”

  I rubbed my chin. “Maybe. But if we’re sneaking through a maze of little rooms it would be easy to blunder into someone, and have them shout before we can react. Let me take another look at this.”

  I lifted the roof patch again, and studied the layout. The roof was supported by an open framework of heavy timber, which included thick horizontal crossbeams running the width of the room. Easily big enough to walk on, although getting from one to another would take magic. The guy by the door looked like he’d managed to fall asleep standing up, and the room had several shadowy corners where it might be possible to float down to the floor without being spotted.

  Avilla’s head appeared next to me for a moment, but then she squeezed her eyes shut and pulled away. Damn, she really did have trouble with heights.

  I shifted to put my lips at her ear. “Just stay here for a few minutes. I’ve got this.”

  She nodded.

  I slipped through the hole, most of my weight suspended on a vector of force magic, and dropped onto one of the crossbeams. It was already creaking faintly as the wind outside buffeted the roof, and my own meager weight made no impression on it at all.

  I froze for a long minute, watching the men below. But no one reacted. From where they sat in the torchlight the roof would be lost in shadow, and there was more than enough background noise to cover any little sounds I might make.

  Carefully, I threw up an invisible bridge of force between the beam I crouched on and the next one over. I crossed it on hands and knees, moving slowly so as not to draw the eye. Still no one looked up.

  Several nerve-wracking minutes later I was directly above the card game. The players were intent on their cards, apparently still oblivious to my presence. Was this actually going to work?

  Thankful that my magic was largely devoid of special effects, I conjured up a small disk of stone and layered a set of spells on it. Effects I’d done before, but this wasn’t going to be a stable enchantment. Just a hasty set of single-use spells held together by conditional triggers. It only needed to work once.

  When I was finished I waited for a few minutes until they dealt a new hand, and dropped it into the middle of the group while they were all busily studying their cards.

  The magic grenade fell silently through the gloom, nearly striking the floor before the levitation spell caught it. A set of eight-foot force blades sprung out along the edges as it rebounded, and the disk began to spin furiously. In the blink of an eye it bounced back up to head height, then wobbled up and down for a few seconds before the magic failed and it settled to the floor.

  The effect on the sentries was roughly comparable to dropping them in a blender. Blood and gore went everywhere, and I had to close my eyes for a moment. Turns out even the really hardcore slasher movies aren’t as bad as the real thing.

  But they died so fast the only noise was the soft whir of the force blades, and a series of thumps as body parts fell to the floor. One of the sleeping men mumbled and rolled over, but aside fro
m that there was no reaction.

  Not trusting my good luck, I disposed of the other sentry quickly and returned to the roof. Avilla was watching with wide eyes.

  “You make the most terrifying weapons, Daniel. I’m glad you’re on our side.”

  I smiled grimly. “Thanks. Can you locate Cerise now?”

  “Now? But, what about the rest of those men?”

  “They’re not much threat to us asleep, and I’d rather not kill them if I don’t have to. The way the floor is built I think the cellar is just dug out directly under it, like your house. So if you can tell where Cerise is we can go right through it, grab her and run before they have a chance to react.”

  “Well, if you’re sure.”

  Unlike my sorcery, Avilla’s witchcraft involved a bit of a ritual element. She pricked herself with a little paring knife, squeezed a few drops of the golden fluid she used for blood into a small wooden bowl she produced from somewhere, and sprinkled in a few pinches of crushed herbs while chanting under her breath. Then she dipped a sewing needle in the mixture, and threaded it with a hair plucked from her own head.

  She held it up, and the needle swung as if magnetized to point at a spot not far from the alter.

  “There,” she pointed. “I think you’re right, we’re much closer than I expected.”

  “Keep that going, then, and hold on. I’ll get us down there, and see if I can get a look at what we’re getting into.”

  I took her in my arms again, noting in passing how natural that was starting to feel, and dropped through the hole. Avilla buried her face in my shoulder, her eyes screwed shut, but she managed not to make any noise. We landed lightly a few steps from where her needle was pointing.

  The instant my feet touched the floor the hollow boom of a gong echoed through the temple, and a wave of hostile magic tried to smother my defenses. Avilla’s locator spell flickered out like a candle in a storm, and my levitation collapsed almost as fast.

  “Ah, shit.”

  My shield barely wavered before a fresh rush of power from my amulet stabilized it. My power source was far too strong for the temple wards to cancel out, but there was no telling what effect they’d have on normal spells

  The soldiers were already sitting up and looking around, trying to find the source of the noise. Guess I should have killed them after all.

  I drew Grinder, and set Avilla down. She grimaced as her bare feet touched the floor, and a burst of smoke rose up around her. She stomped her foot and shouted angrily in what sounded like Greek, and a flash of golden light drove the temple’s magic away from her.

  “There,” she pointed. “Hurry! I don’t know how long I can hold the wards at bay.”

  Grinder chewed through the heavy boards of the floor with little regard for the magic that infused the wood. There were two layers of heavy planks nailed to a grid of beams, easily a foot thick all told. But it didn’t slow me down much. I carved a handhold first, then cut a generous chunk free of the floor and boosted my strength so I could heave it out of the way.

  Bright firelight shone up through the hole, but there was no time to let our eyes adjust. The soldiers were grabbing up weapons and turning towards us now, and I doubted my force blades would carry far with the magic of the wards opposing them. So I grabbed Avilla, and dropped through the hole.

  We landed on something big, with leathery hide and far too many muscles. It bucked violently, sending us flying sideways to smack against a wall of lighting. I heard Avilla scream, and found myself tumbling onto hard stone with all my muscles convulsing.

  I heard frantic shouts and chanting, but for a few seconds my wits were too scrambled to make sense of anything. Something solid struck my shield, and was thrown back with a frustrated snarl. Complex spells wove through the air around me, hostile forces fighting one another.

  I shook my head, and sat up slowly.

  “Well, that was an unexpected bit of excitement,” Holger’s voice said mildly. “It seems that the tales of your demise were a bit exaggerated, Daniel. We’ll have to take care of that soon.”

  The middle-aged priest was standing barely three paces from me, surrounded by a group of priests and flunkies. All of them were armed, mostly with long spears bearing elaborate runic decorations, and none of them looked happy to see me.

  The room behind them looked like a cross between a high school chemistry lab and a medieval monastery. There were tables bearing elaborate arrays of glassware, shelves crowded with jars and vials, and here and there large books chained to reading stands or stacked in stone niches in the walls. A handful of nervous-looking soldiers stood back against the walls, observing the proceedings from a safe distance.

  Unfortunately a swirling barrier of dense magic stood in the air between us, rising from a geometric design inscribed in the polished granite of the floor. A circle enclosed by a triangle enclosed by another circle, all heavily decorated with runes.

  Behind me Avilla was sprawled on the floor, with a demonic-looking creature looming over her. It was built something like a gorilla, but it was as big as a horse and sported four arms and a tail. Its black and red hide resembled a lizard’s, and it’s protruding snout hung open to reveal a mouth full of sharp teeth. But the massive, erect phallus rising from between its legs left little doubt about what it wanted to do with my companion.

  Blocking its path was a much smaller figure that seemed equally demonic at first glance. Her pale skin gleamed like ivory in the firelight, her nakedness revealing an eye-catching beauty that could almost have been human. But a sinewy tail lashed the air behind her, and her waist-length mane of ebony hair floated in the air around her on a swirling vortex of black magic.

  Then I looked closer, and realized it was Cerise.

  Her slim hands had curled into claws, her eyes glowed red with infernal magic, and she was dripping blood from half a dozen wounds. But she gripped her silver daggers tightly, and stood crouched protectively over Avilla’s prone form.

  “Stupid wizard,” she hissed at me. “Not to bring honeylove into trap!”

  “Yes, that could have gone better,” I admitted.

  Holger chuckled dryly. “Indeed. Well, we were able to switch to a dome configuration before the demon escaped, so no harm done. I’m afraid you’ll be observing this little experiment from an uncomfortably close distance, but perhaps that’s for the best.”

  “Oh really? What is this, anyway? I have to admit, it’s not what I was expecting.”

  “It’s a bit of an experiment,” he explained. “I couldn’t bind Cerise conventionally, since you had my only fragment of the Covenant Stone. But the temple here in Lanrest has six demons that we’ve kept bound since time immemorial, and your pet murder witch can’t help but feed on her kills. The more of their essence she absorbs the more firmly their bindings apply to her as well, and a woman is far more pliable than a demon. She’s already become fairly biddable.”

  Cerise tossed her head angrily, exposing the horns that now sprouted from her forehead. “Stupid priest. Too much demon. Go mad, eat your heart!”

  “With the whole weight of our temple’s wards preventing you from harming any member of the priesthood? I think not, young lady.”

  The demon took one long step back from Cerise, and glanced at me. Apparently it didn’t like what it saw, because it bared its teeth at me and growled.

  I ignored it in favor of looking around the interior of the prison. Grinder was lying on the floor not far from where I’d landed. The blade had deactivated when it left my hand, a safety feature I’d installed to keep it from being used against me.

  “I suppose that’s kind of clever,” I remarked as I eased my way around the edge of the warded zone. “But what makes you think I’m just going to sit around and let you do it, Holger? Any demon Cerise could fight, I can kill easily.”

  The priest favored me with a thin smile. “I think you’ll find that we’re prepared for your heathen tricks, Daniel. You can’t reach outside the circle for power, and
the floor is quite thoroughly sealed against earth magic. Perhaps you can beat one demon, but your personal magic will soon be exhausted. As you can see, your golem and your blade have already failed.”

  “Of course, that’s assuming that your own apprentice doesn’t kill you first. She’s already fed on three of our prisoners, and I’m afraid she’s becoming rather unbalanced.”

  I scooped up Grinder, and glanced at Avilla. She was still sprawled motionless on the floor, but from my new position I could see that she was still breathing. One blue eye was half open, watching me intently, and the oppressive pressure of the temple wards was nowhere near enough to crush the bonfire of magic that blazed in her heart.

  Cerise caught the look, and cautiously reached back to touch Avilla with her bare foot. Something passed between them, a flicker of personal magic I couldn’t quite read. But I thought I caught a hint of relief pass over Cerise’s features before she scowled at me.

  “You fucked up,” she hissed. “Fix it.”

  “I will. Last chance to back down, Holger. You’ve got a pack of ungols roaming the town, and a clan of frost giants planning to attack at dawn.”

  He frowned. “Do we? I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it, Daniel. Still, I suppose we’d best not draw this out. Rathrenwisthet of the Devouring Horde, I charge you to kill that wizard.”

  The hulking demon snarled, and rushed me.

  I flicked Grinder back on, and braced myself with force magic. The brute slammed into my shield, sending me sliding back a foot despite my spell, and clawed frantically with all four arms.

  I swung Grinder, and it tried to block instead of dodging. The violet blade chewed through hide and flesh and the bones beneath with a snarling shriek, spraying mangled bits of demon everywhere.

  The beast staggered back, clutching at the cauterized stump where it’s upper-right hand had been. Cerise took advantage of the distraction to leap lightly onto its back, planting both of her daggers into its heavily muscled neck. They didn’t penetrate very far, but there was a spray of black ichor from the cuts.