He contacted Diana and discussed the mission that would take his friends and him farther north. Diana missed him greatly, but she was in full support of a mission to rescue the children with healing magic. They both thought of it as one of their highest priorities, and it must be done before the church could further indoctrinate the abducted children.
“Michael, I know you will face many dangers. It’s your destiny, but know that I love you and want you back in Southport as soon as possible.”
Chapter 20
A heavy snow was falling when Michael met with Sir Gregory the morning of his departure.
“Michael, I know you want to be home in Southport before your child is born, but I could really use your help in restoring Briarton. If you would consider staying, I would appoint you temporarily as the vice governor. There is more than I can possibly do to set this province right again. It’s the breadbasket of Glastamear, but I fear we’ve lost so many farmers, the harvests will be poor for years and that will hurt the whole kingdom. Min Hollow depends on us for all of its food because there is no useful land for farming that high in the Mountains of Min.”
“Thank you for the expression of confidence Sir Gregory, but I have many other duties. I’m still acting for Governor Talton in managing his food relief, and like you, I have business interests that must be looked after.”
“Our partnership on the Street of Dreams project should be well received when we restart construction in the spring, but I’m afraid there will be no demand for more housing because of the many deaths. The back part of the Briarton Hospital property will probably not be in demand for many years.”
That was fine with Michael since he was secretly saving the property to rebuild the hospital someday. They talked of their business partnership for an hour before Michael departed.
Michael and his five friends piled into the remaining sleigh. Gregory Oxbow drove the snow-elk. He had a real affinity for them, and the elk were excited to be off with only the weight of the six men and their supplies rather than the weight of thirty-five dead and frozen bodies or the loads of firewood they normally hauled in winter. Since only his friends were along, Michael enchanted the sleigh with the fire mage spell of warm blanket as soon as they were out of range of the enchantment that prevented fire magic in Briarton. The newly fallen snow made the ride smooth and the spell made it comfortable. They talked of their trip as they sped along, and Michael told Jim and the Oxbow brothers about the isolated castle that he’d seen in his nighttime flight over a remote valley located near where the White Mountains and Mountains of Min joined.
When they stopped for the night, Michael decided to try a new spell that he’d learned from the fairies of Fay Woods but never used. He cleared a twenty paces circle of man-deep snow from a field of winter wheat using the dwarfish spell excavate. He warmed the area with winter blanket until the ground was no longer frozen and the stubble of the last wheat crop was visible in the melted water. He sat on a wolf skin blanket in the middle of the warm circle and began one of the most difficult casts known to the Fairy Folk, speed crops. He repeated the ancient Elfish words of the spell as if a chant. Almost imperceptibly the first green shoots began to appear while his friends watched in wonder. An hour later at twilight, the Fairy Lights of the far north appeared as red and green streaks crossed the starlight, but still he chanted the Elfish words. Finally, the grain was ripe. Michael led the shaggy white snow-elk to that spot to graze on ripened wheat while the men slept in the warmth of the enchanted sleigh.
The next day they continued their travel north. Michael was sitting next to his friend Jim when Jim said, “Michael, you are truly the one of Grifton’s promise. I thought I would never see the fairy circles of myth. I assumed they were merely tales from the Legend Times, yet a single human produced one in a few hours last night. I think there is nothing you can’t do.”
“Alas, I am no hero of myth, but the same friend you’ve known for years, Jim. I do the best I can, but I can be killed like any man. It might be another two thousand years before another man with elfish manna is born in Glastamear, and Gripton’s Promise could be delayed until then. The odds of my completing all of my tasks are impossibly long, but I remain who I am. Just a friend with a few extra magic spells.”
Jim nodded, but his expression was doubtful. “What of this latest quest to free the abducted children? You haven’t spent much time describing our tasks, but we are all very much in favor of getting those children to safety. We found out what a monster like Toby can do.”
Toby was the church’s first attempt to make a healer priest. The young boy had been taken at a very early age, four years before the pogrom against the Healers’ Guild began. The church had turned him into a monster that had participated in and even enjoyed the tortures endured by the Oxbow brothers when they were captives in Broken Arrow. Instead of using healing magic to eliminate pain, he had the skill of using it to enhance pain and to keep the victims from passing out. The friends were all determined to stop the creation of any more Toby-like monsters.
“At this point, I don’t have a plan. We’ll look for a weakness when we find the castle in the snow of that high mountain valley. There must be some way of getting people and supplies into the castle even though I could see no entrance from the air.”
The friends enjoyed their three-day ride to Crow Crossroad. They took turns driving the sleigh while the others stayed in back and told jokes and stories. Each night Michael contacted Diana through mage thought-talk. She was busy with the leasing of apartments in their Southport building and managing their other business interests. It turned out Diana had an excellent head for business, and she was assisted by good advice from Timothy and his wife Carolyn. Since she was also a healer, she could easily dispel the morning sickness and other discomforts from her pregnancy with twin girls.
They reached the town of Crow Crossroad on the fourth day. It was a tiny village with about a dozen houses, but a rather large inn. The Crow’s Nest Inn catered to the warm weather travelers who were going to Glastamear’s largest city of Min Hollow, which was both the seat of government containing the palace of the king as well as the center of the Church of Perry Ascendant. Every winter, deep snows in the Mountains of Min made reaching the capital city impossible, and the inn would have very few guests until the snow melted in late spring.
The innkeeper seemed thrilled to see six travelers, and Michael negotiated a good rate for three rooms with meals. He planned to spend two nights at the inn. Each night he would sneak out and convert to an eagle to search the mountains for a route to the castle where the young healers were held. He also wanted to rest the snow-elk before attempting the arduous trip into the higher mountains. At dinner Michael and his friends were joking and telling stories when the innkeeper approached to refill their mugs with hot cider.
Michael asked, “Is there any news at all from the capital? The epidemic has been brutal this winter in the rest of the country, but I heard that they sealed the gates to Min Hollow early this year to stop the spread of the white pneumonia into the city.”
“Do you know the route into the city?”
Michael explained that none of them had ever been to the city.
“The Castle Gateway is a huge stone structure built directly over the roadway on this side of the Valley of Avalanches and Great Tunnel of Sacred Passage. The fortress is manned all winter, and from its towers, the guards can see far into the mountains, although not directly into the city. Occasionally, the guards come to Crow Crossing for supplies since they have no route left into the city after the avalanches of winter begin. They keep two sleighs pulled by snow-elk for these supply trips.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of the two great castles that guard the roadway and of the tunnel that connects them through the Mountain of Perry’s Hope. Do these guards know what has happened?”
“From their highest tower, they can see a discoloration in the snows in a valley below the city’s walls. By looking through their long-glass,
they think it is thousands of bodies that have been tossed over the walls to roll down into the valley. The guards are convinced the epidemic is in full force in the great city.” He made the sign of Perry, turned, and walked back towards the kitchen to get a bowl of grilled winter vegetables for their table.
That night, Michael flew in his eagle form directly to the valley of the fortress he thought of as Ice Castle where the healer children were imprisoned. He perched on a ledge over the valley and tried to understand exactly what he was seeing. He used perfect recall to sort through hundreds of books he had read during his four years as an apprentice.
When he came to the thousand-year-old text Adventures in the Land of Ice, he realized what this valley really was. Before reading this book, Michael had never heard the words ice river or even thought of ice as moving downhill. The author used that term to describe giant slowly moving sheets of ice that progressed down from the White Mountains into the Ice Sea. The valley with the castle was located above the points at which two giant ice rivers converged, leaving a sharp point of rock on which this castle had been built. Michael knew that any attempt to travel across these ice rivers was usually fatal as a result of giant fishers and fractures in the deep ice, which were invisible because they were often covered with freshly fallen snow.
Michael spent hours perched above the Valley of Ice thinking about other things that he’d read in William’s library, probably the largest library outside of the city of Min Hollow. There were stories from a thousand years ago of coconut groves in Hearthshire Province and accounts of winter travel to Min Hollow. There were Legend Times stories of larger towns in the White Plains than exist now, as if the climate was warm enough to support more agriculture in the north two thousand years earlier.
Michael had always assumed that some winters were colder than others, but that the variation was random. He now realized there was a trend. It was colder now than in the Legend Times and colder than the times of the fables of monkeys in Southport and coconuts in Hearthshire. There was change, but it was so slow that humans with their short lives didn’t notice. Michael had no clue as to why. He decided to discuss this theory with Obert, chief shaman of the naiad. Obert would have lived through this change and would know of it first hand.
It was late in the afternoon when Michael returned to the Crow’s Nest Inn. He was anxious to discuss his theory with Jim and the Oxbow brothers.
Chapter 21
Michael had explained his assumptions about the climate getting colder at dinner, and Gregory asked, “If this far fetched story is true, how does it help us get into the Ice Castle?”
“In the accounts of his travels, the author described a cave dug by water melting during the summer. Some of the winter’s snowfall always melts and runs down through the fissures where it creates a passage through the ice and rocks to flow out and form rivers. The author claims to have traveled for thousands of paces through one of these caves created by an underground river simply by walking in the gravel alongside the water. In the winter he assumed the river would be frozen and he could have walked directly on the ice.”
Jim said, “And you plan to find the correct river so we can all just walk to the castle underground?”
Michael smiled and replied, “I’ve learned a thing or two from the dwarves. I can see into the ground in a sort of shadow picture of what lies below. If it’s there, I can find it.”
Peter who was always the practical one said, “We just walk in, fight off forty knight protectors, and dance away with eighteen children from one of the most remote and unforgiving places on the planet Home. Michael, you said there are forty knight protectors; there’re only five of us and only Jim is really a master with a sword. You, my friend, need a better plan.”
Michael knew Peter was correct. “I’m sorry I don’t have all the answers yet. I’m going back to Ice Castle tonight to see if I can find the tunnel and follow it to where it reaches the surface. If I find the entrance, I’ll explore inside the tunnel but probably not try and enter the castle itself. I’ve gotten good at sneaking around, and I will go into the castle if the risks are low enough.”
Jacob asked, “I haven’t seen a single bird since we arrived. Michael you’ve read more books than the rest of us combined. Why is this town Crow Crossing and this inn The Crow’s Nest? Does that prove it was once warmer here and there were more birds?”
Michael smiled. “It’s not very good proof because the crows in the name are not actual birds. Pilgrimage trips to the Most Holy Shrine where Perry was born began at least eighteen centuries ago. Because the pilgrims always wore black, the common people began to call them crows in those ancient times. It’s not common to use that term nowadays, but it’s mentioned in many of the history books. For example, The Twelve Crows of Swine Home is about a pilgrimage about six hundred years ago from a small town in the southern Barrier Mountains to the holy shrine. It was a violent time of civil war, and all but the author perished on the journey by violence or from the cold. We’re staying in an inn that was designed to hold pilgrims traveling to the shrine; the inn was never a nest for the other type of crow. In fact only ravens live this far north. I’ve seen them soaring over the Mountains of Min several times.”
After his nightly contact with Diana, Michael stripped and climbed out the window of the room he shared with Jim. After transforming to a Giant Ki Eagle, he flew directly to the fortress that he thought of as the Ice Castle.
He kept his invisibility spell in place because even eagles would be unlikely to fly around that remote valley of ice where there was no food. He flew lower and lower circles around the castle until he was gliding only a few paces above the ice. As he passed each level of the castle he counted the manna signs. There were still forty fire mages, one of which was extremely powerful like the high priests that he had met. He saw signs of eighteen healer children somewhere near the exact middle of the huge fortress about half way up the tallest tower.
Abruptly, he noticed something strange and landed near a two-paces long object covered in snow. He converted back to his normal form but remained invisible while keeping his warm blanket spell in place. When he brushed away four hands deep snow, he found the body of a young man of perhaps seventeen years. With his healer senses he could tell that many bones had been broken as if the man had fallen from a great height, but where he lay was not directly below the castle’s walls. Michael also noticed that the nude body had been bound with cords around his hands and feet. He saw other shapes he assumed were also bodies in the snow. He gasped. He knew exactly where he was. This was the valley of the hallowed Winnowing Castle of the Knight Protectors. Their most sacred and secret base.
He knew that the ancient myths and stories were true. He was standing below the location where every knight protector in the past fifteen centuries had come to be initiated into their secret brotherhood. No one who failed his knight’s test at Winnowing Castle ever returned. He had read an account of the winnowing in a book written by a knight protector, now dead for eight hundred years, and these bodies were proof of its truth. Failure was rewarded by expulsion in a most dramatic fashion, via catapult. The ancient tome had been in a locked safe in William’s library because the church had proscribed it under penalty of death, but it had described in detail the death of the author’s closest friend in this manner when he failed one of the winnowing tests.
Michael walked along the line of bodies; soon he needed his dwarfish senses to detect them because they were imbedded in the ice. He followed them down the ice river for two thousand paces before he quit. Each body was buried deeper in the ice as he walked away from the castle. Every century at least two hundred young men who failed their tests had been bound and shot by a catapult onto this ice river. Fifteen centuries of bodies were moving slowing toward some distant lake or sea.
It was difficult to imagine their anger if the knight protectors learned that some group had invaded their most holy fortress and stolen the healer children from under their noses. Mi
chael smiled. He looked forward to their frantic reaction and astonishment. Although they were officially under the supervision of the Holy Son of Perry Ascendant, the knight protectors had their own hierarchy. There were many levels, but all of them reported to the Holy Commander of Perry’s Warriors; he was their general-in-charge. Michael hoped the powerful fire mage manna sign indicated that the Commander was present in the Winnowing Castle. It would be even more fun to steal the children from directly under his upturned nose.
He resumed his eagle form and continued his search for a way into the castle. It was after dawn when he discovered the white painted wooden doors in the side of a rock wall about three thousand paces from the castle. Snow had drifted against the opening making the entrance almost invisible. Michael converted to his human form and cleared the snow away from the double doors. He pulled open one side of the creaking door and glanced into the darkness. After casting night surgery, Michael saw a tunnel extending in a nearly straight line into the cliff. The natural tunnel had been extensively modified. Along one side a deep channel for water about one pace wide was directed into a large grate in the bottom of the channel. The water was frozen solid and none was actually flowing into the drain, but it was clear that the objective of the stonework was to keep the roadway next to the channel free of water during the summer melt. Next to the water channel was a road wide enough for a large wagon. The top of the passage was high enough for the wagon’s driver not to need to worry about the roof clearance of the tunnel.
Michael realized that it must have taken decades of work to refine this underground passage for the easy transport of supplies. It showed the slow impact of time. The stone roadway had indentations from the passage of thousands of wagons. The place was ancient but maintained for regular use. Michael saw horse droppings dried and frozen near the entrance. He walked forward pulling the door shut behind him.
The Mages' Winter of Death: The Healers of Glastamear: Volume Two Page 15