Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black)

by Brown, E. William

“Hmm. Let me try.”

  She closed her eyes, and after a moment the aura of power that still lingered about her faded. Her horns vanished, and her claws shrank and flattened until they could almost be mistaken for fingernails. Her tail remained, although it seemed a little shorter than before.

  “That’ll do,” I nodded approvingly. “We’re done hiding what we are from our own people, but we’ll have an easier time meeting strangers if you can look relatively normal. I take it you’re stuck with the tail?”

  “I can’t hide it with magic,” she said mischievously. “But if it’s important I’ve got other options.”

  She curled the slender appendage up to slip the end inside herself with a naughty grin. Then she flushed, and her eyes fluttered. Somehow she managed to slide a foot or more of tail into her hidden depths, leaving the remainder tucked neatly out of the way.

  “Whew,” she said. “There. Give me a skirt and no one will suspect a thing. Plus if I get bored I can just give myself a little thri-ooooohfuck! Wow. You’re right, honeydew. This thing is wicked hot.”

  I facepalmed.

  Avilla giggled. “Told you. Careful or you might end up addicted to yourself.”

  “Cute,” I sighed. “But you can play with yourself later. Right now we need to focus. We all need fresh clothes again, and if there’s anything else you girls want to steal from this place now’s the time. We won’t be coming back.”

  Cerise extracted her tail with a long, sensuous wriggle, and grinned at me. “Sure thing, Daniel. Totally serious now.”

  Avilla smiled at her demented partner indulgently. “I could fix our clothes, Daniel. But my power is running low, and doing that instantly in this place would pretty well drain me.”

  “That’s easily fixed,” I pointed out. I put my hand on her shoulder, and poured a modest stream of magic into her body. As usual she sucked it up like a sponge.

  “Warn me if you start feeling high,” I told her. “We all need to keep our wits sharp right now. But I should be able to give you enough for that kind of spellcasting without a problem.”

  The girls shared one of those looks that was probably a whole conversation. Avilla sighed, and left her lover’s arms to snuggle up against me.

  “Thank you, Daniel. You have no idea how good this feels. But I have to ask, where are you getting all this power? Cerise stole enough life force from you to kill a hundred men, and the maids told me you’d barely finished healing yourself when you left to rescue me. Is it wise to push yourself any further?”

  “I suppose it is about time I let you two in on that,” I mused. “I think I mentioned once that one of the elemental sorceries I gained when Hecate brought to this world is magic itself?”

  They both nodded. “Yeah, but I still don’t see how all of magic can be an element,” Cerise said.

  “It’s not ‘every kind of magic’, it’s ‘the stuff that spells are made of’. Which is an odd way to think about things, I know. But understanding what spells are made of, how that stuff behaves and where it ultimately comes from, lets me do some crazy things. Like this.”

  I fished my amulet out from under the remnants of my shirt, and held it up.

  “This thing is enchanted to put a barrier against physical attacks around me when I want it to, and it automatically heals me whenever I get injured. That last part has saved my life a few times now, because it works even if I’m not in any condition to think about it. But the most important thing it does is act as a power source.”

  Avilla nodded. “I thought you must have something like that. But what does it draw on?”

  “Itself.”

  I grinned at their puzzled looks, and went on. “One of the most important discoveries that we’ve made back on my home world is that mater and energy are different forms of the same thing, and if you understand them well enough you can change things from one form to another. Some transformations are a lot harder than others, but stuff like turning motion into lightning or lightning into heat and light is easy.”

  “But turning matter into energy is where things get interesting, because transforming a grain of sand directly into heat would reduce this whole town to a puddle of molten rock. Anything solid has fantastic amounts of power bound up in its structure. So when I used my metamagic sorcery to create an enchantment that gradually transforms solid matter into raw magic…”

  “An unlimited source of power?” Avilla breathed.

  “Effectively,” I agreed. “It’ll eventually eat itself, but that will take a few centuries. There’s also a limit on how fast it can generate magic, but with this amulet that’s high enough that it usually isn’t an issue. Other than that, yeah.”

  “I want one,” Cerise pleaded. “Please, Daniel? I’ll be really grateful.”

  I chuckled, and mussed her hair. “It’s on my list. I have to work out how to make it so you can control the power feed, or it’ll force-feed you power until you explode or something. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this fiasco, it’s that I need to stop trying to do everything myself. The first chance I get I’m going to gear you two up.”

  That got excited smiles from both of them.

  “Just remember to keep this a secret,” I warned them. “We don’t need every wizard within a thousand miles converging on us to find out how it works.”

  “Of course,” Avilla said seriously.

  “This is the kind of thing you take to your grave,” Cerise agreed. “Not a word to anyone, unless we talk it through and agree.”

  “Good. Now why don’t you find some clothes to steal while Avilla works her magic? I expect the guards have all fled by now, but from what I remember of that fight I don’t think you’d have any trouble with a straggler.”

  “You got that right,” she grinned.

  “Come to think of it, weren’t you supposed to be bound not to attack them? How did you get around that one?”

  “That half-assed thing? A binding I didn’t agree to can’t hold me for long, Daniel. I was already wiggling out of it, but when the circle went down my girl here popped it off me easy as pie.”

  Avilla leaned against her affectionately. “It wasn’t that easy. But we’ve put a lot of work into being able to free each other from hostile magic, and I still had a lot of the power you gave me. I even managed to charm a guard, and I didn’t think I was anywhere near being able to pull that off.”

  “Makes sense. Well, good work, both of you. We make a good team.”

  “We do, don’t we?” Cerise agreed. “Alright, quick looting run. Be back soon.”

  Sure enough, we found that Avilla could handle a constant power feed just fine as long as I didn’t get carried away with it. We found a basin and washed away the blood, and then she produced a needle and thread and sewed my clothes back together so finely they looked like new when she was done.

  It was odd watching her work. At first glance it looked like she wasn’t even using magic, but somehow everything went far faster than normal. Rips that should have taken an hour of painstaking work to repair were closed in moments, and everything fit back together perfectly despite the fact that I knew there should have been missing pieces.

  But I didn’t have time to just sit and watch. I didn’t know when the next time we’d have a moment of peace might be, so I took the time to lay a warmth enchantment on Avilla’s dress. Cerise returned around then, and I repeated the process on one of the cloaks she’d found while Avilla altered a shirt and a pair of pants to fit her.

  I noted that she somehow managed to make the stolen clothes fit Cerise like a second skin, but I wasn’t complaining.

  Aside from books there wasn’t much of interest in the temple. A few coins on the bodies and in the priests’ rooms, and a small chest in what I presumed was Holger’s office that held a few bags full of copper and silver coins. It was small potatoes compared to what we’d taken from the Baron’s keep, but we took it all regardless. No telling when we might find ourselves needing it.

  Then we
set out into the snow.

  The storm had blown over while we were otherwise occupied. A steady sprinkle of snow was still falling, but the wind had died down considerably and I could actually see the whole plaza in front of the church. Unfortunately, that was partly because of the burning buildings.

  Distant shouts and screams rose up all around us. Less than a block away one of the streets was blocked by a knot of townsmen fighting a group of goblins on wolf-back next to a pair of burning buildings. Further away I heard the roar of a troll, and the sound of something being smashed.

  “Damn. Cerise, are you up for a real fight?”

  “My legs are a little wobbly,” she admitted. “But I can manage, as long as it doesn’t last too long.”

  “Alright. I’ll take point. You watch my back, and keep Avilla safe. But if we run into ungols I’ll probably need your help. The damned things are so fast I have trouble landing a hit on them, but I think you can match them now.”

  “Ungols? Fuck. I’ll do what I can.”

  The new goblin attack seemed to be centered on the breech in the wall, but the river side of the town was far from untouched. We passed one house after another with doors and windows smashed open, and bloodstains scattered at random. The ungols had been busy.

  How many people had died while I was under Cerise’s spell?

  I shook my head. I couldn’t save them all regardless. There were too many monsters, too much ground to cover, too many targets who couldn’t fight back effectively if I was busy somewhere else. Maybe if I’d gotten here a few days earlier, or if things had gone differently during the first goblin attack.

  Or maybe not. I still didn’t know how the goblins had punched that hole in the town wall. For all I knew the same method would have worked on the new wall I’d been building. There were far too few people in Lanrest who could fight at all, and none who could stand up to the real threats.

  The sound of battle somewhere ahead of us drew my attention. We were almost there, but someone was having a hell of a fight.

  I turned a corner, and my fears were confirmed.

  The granary was a cluster of two-story buildings surrounded by a low wall, and someone had blocked the entrance with a pair of overturned wagons. But there was a desperate battle taking place in the courtyard beyond. A few dozen soldiers and armed townsmen, against at least two ungols.

  I checked, and glanced at my companions. How to do this?

  “Get me to the crowd,” Avilla suggested. “I can use them for cover, and then you two can concentrate on the monsters.”

  “Good idea,” I agreed. “Full speed, then. Ready, Cerise?”

  I scooped Avilla up in my arms. Cerise closed her eyes for a moment, and then her horns were back. Her green eyes glowed faintly in the darkness.

  “Ready,” she agreed. “One more push.”

  I charged.

  With bursts of force magic turning each step into a giant leap I tore down the street with the speed of a galloping horse. Cerise easily kept pace beside me, her long legs matching me stride for stride. We crossed the length of the dark street in moments, and leaped over the barricade into the chaos of the torch-lit courtyard.

  Two steps into the melee a blur of motion tried to pounce on Cerise. She ducked, grabbed with her tail as her knives came out, and tumbled across the cobblestones locked blade to claw with her attacker. They both moved blindingly fast, and for a moment I couldn’t tell who was winning.

  I set Avilla down amid a clump of startled townsmen, and activated Grinder. The shriek of tortured plasma cut through the noise of battle like an air raid siren, and the ungols reacted instantly.

  The one fighting Cerise broke off and backed away, dripping blood from half a dozen shallow wounds. A second one put its head down and barreled through the crowd, sending grown men flying as it knocked them aside. A third jumped down from the roof of a building, landing in the rapidly clearing space around the first. All three watched me warily.

  Cerise rejoined me. She had a huge bruise on her cheek and a bloody nose, but otherwise seemed unhurt.

  “Fuck, those things are tough,” she complained. “My athame’s can barely scratch them.”

  “Lord wizard!” Captain Rain exclaimed, hurrying through the crowd to join me. “Thank the gods you came! How do we fight these things?”

  “You don’t,” I told him. “Keep the men back. We’ll handle them.”

  The middle ungol opened its mouth, letting its black tongue loll out.

  “Wizard too slow,” it hissed mockingly. “Can’t catch. Watch food die.”

  There were at least a dozen bodies on the ground. My people, killed by these… things.

  “Oh, you think so?” I growled. “We’ll see. Cerise?”

  “Yeah, boss?”

  I reached into the enchantment in my hand, and suppressed the automatic shutoff. Then I handed her Grinder.

  “Try this instead.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Fuck yeah! Let’s see you assholes shrug off this baby.”

  She tossed one of her knives in the air, caught it with her prehensile tail, and took the offered weapon. Then she turned to rush the ungols.

  I followed her, and projected a roof of force above our heads.

  Sure enough, the creatures tried to use their incredible agility to evade her. They smacked into the force wall a heartbeat after it formed, sending them tumbling back to the ground. They recovered in seconds, but by then she was on top of them.

  Grinder flashed and snarled, and a long tail went flying. The white mist of their breath weapons enveloped her, and for an instant her own shadowy aura stood out in stark relief as it shed their magic. A spray of crimson blood showered across the snow, but a larger shower of black ichor followed it.

  I turned the wall into a dome, trapping us all together inside.

  A flurry of impacts buffeted both the dome and my shield, but all failed to penetrate. Huge jaws clamped shut around me, lifting me off my feet like a dog preparing to shake a squirrel.

  I rammed a force blade down the thing’s throat.

  It dropped me and backed away, bleeding black ichor from the wound. I tried making the ground under its feet grab it, but it ripped its way free with overwhelming strength.

  But that distracted it long enough for Cerise to come bouncing over it and drag Grinder right through its body. It staggered, cut nearly in half, and I turned my attention back to maintaining the dome.

  From there it was over in seconds. When the last ungol fell Cerise loped its head off, took a few seconds to make sure of her kills, and then limped back over to. Her left arm was a mangled ruin, half her tail was just gone, and she was bleeding from more cuts than I wanted to think about. But she was grinning like a lunatic.

  God, she was beautiful.

  “Three less demons in the world,” she reported happily. “Am I the baddest bitch ever, or what?”

  “You’re amazing, Cerise. Now let me heal that before you bleed out.”

  Epilogue

  We left Lanrest the same way we arrived.

  It took barely half an hour to put walls and a roof on the hover-barge, and expand it a little to accommodate our larger party. After the ungol attack there weren’t nearly as many of us, anyway. The demons had killed a lot of men, and they’d taken a particular delight in carving a path through them to kill any children they could find.

  The river was frozen solid now, and our vessel glided silently over the ice as we left the town behind. That was a good thing, because it meant the giant shapes approaching the burning town hadn’t noticed us. I wouldn’t have seen them either, if not for the light of burning buildings leaking out through the breach in the wall.

  There had been something else among the giants. A vast shape that made them look like children, creeping across the fields on four legs with its wings folded against is scaled back.

  Somehow I wasn’t surprised to find that there were dragons in this world.

  The weather closed in again as we crui
sed downriver, the light snow building rapidly into a howling blizzard again. Inconvenient as it was I was glad for the cover. But the timing seemed odd. Had someone ringed the town in storms to prevent anyone from escaping?

  There was no way to be sure. But as I squinted into the icy blast, it certainly seemed that there were faint glimmers of magic permeating the falling snowflakes.

  “What now, sir?” Captain Rain asked from beside me.

  I glanced back at the huddled mass of refugees crowded into the barge behind me, and considered.

  “Let’s get another mile or two down the river, and I’ll stop for a bit. I need to set things up so someone else can drive this thing, and come up with a way to keep everyone warm. The walls and roof help, but with this wind it’s not enough.

  “And after that?” Oskar asked. He and a plump woman I assumed was his wife were huddled under a blanket near the front of the barge.

  “That depends. Markus, can you think of anywhere in this kingdom that could weather an attack by giants?”

  He frowned. “Not Margold. Not if they’re serious about it. No one builds walls that strong.”

  “What about Kozalin?” Oskar asked. “They’ve got the Red Conclave there, and the Griffon Knights, and three High Temples. It’s not walls we need to look for, it’s men with the strength to hold them.”

  “You may be right,” Marcus mused. “It’s a major city, and I’d lay odds either the King or his heir will be there. The elves have an embassy there too, if I remember right. But it’s a long trip.”

  “We can cover a lot of ground if we need to,” I said. “The Baron had gotten news from there. The Conclave is trying to do something about the weather, and there are enough elite forces there that they’ve got the luxury of trying to help other settlements. Do you know how to get there?”

  Markus nodded, and patted the leather satchel at his hip. “I have maps.”

  “Good. Kozalin it is, then.”

  I turned my attention back to the snow in front of me. Visibility was poor, but the sun was finally rising. As long as I was careful, I could steer a course through the storm.