Snowcastles & Icetowers

by Duncan McGeary

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, I suppose not.” Moag seemed troubled. “You did say that this kind of metal and stone were common in your land.”

  The wizard turned his attention to the little sword again and nodded. “I may be able to reproduce the steel of the blade itself, but alas, the valuable stones and Glyden are beyond my power, as I have told you. Still, it is better than nothing. “You should be armed. Lay it down, with the sheath on it, and turn your eyes.”

  Greylock placed it upon a rock which was about waist high, and turned to cover his eyes. Even so, the flash that ensued raised stars before his eyes. He turned to see a new Thunderer, still glowing from the intense heat of its creation. Greylock gasped and gingerly felt the warm Glyden of the hilt. He removed the crude sheath with a caressing movement, and the new blade sparkled even in the dim light of the Twilight Dells.

  “It is Thunderer! “ he said, wonderingly.

  The old man sat sprawled upon the path, his legs stuck out in front of him like two knobby branches of a tree—stunned and more than a little confused.

  “Something went wrong with the spell!” he said. “It was as if someone took control of the spell and bent it to his own will. I have never felt such power!”

  Moag got up slowly, unsteadily, and his eyes focused on the new sword. He seemed completely taken aback by the sight.

  “This is not possible! I chanted a simple spell of forging, nothing more.” He examined the sword as if he could find an explanation in its surface or a flaw in its work. “This is a better weapon than it should be—better than the laws of magic should have allowed. It cannot be true Glyden. It must be simulated, somehow. Still, I believe we shall be the object of every thief in the hundred fiefdoms of Trold!”

  “It is real, Moag. I can feel it.”

  The wizard shook his head, confused and unable to accept what he was seeing. He was startled by the sword’s beauty and aura of power. For the first time, he began to look upon Prince Greylock as someone other than a partner in greed—or an unwanted master. This uncommon deed had not been done for a common man!

  Mara was also looking at Greylock with a different look in her bright green eyes. As he strapped on the new blade, fancying the way it slapped against his leg, he smiled gleefully at her. She smiled back shyly.

  The smile changed her sullen countenance into the fair and pleasant face her green eyes and blond hair had always promised. Perhaps she finally believed that he was a prince, he thought, and it somehow pleased him to impress her. She was just a girl compared to the Lady Silverfrost—yet she seemed to have unaccountably gained weight and was more and more appealing.

  As they continued, the old man walking ahead of them bent over in thought, Greylock tried to engage her in conversation.

  “Why did you help me, Mara?”

  “I did not do it for you! I did it for Grandfather, and for myself. I am tired of traveling from place to place, always in search of Glyden and never finding any. It is only when we serve someone that we settle down for a while. But lately Grandfather would rather starve than give in. After this, I’m afraid he will never use his magic for others. He has this dream of finding Glyden, you see.” She sighed deeply. “I suppose he thinks we shall hire each other, and therefore be able to care for each other’s every need for the rest of our lives.”

  “But I do not have a home to give you, Mara. I am as poor as you are.”

  “You will have a home, Prince Greylock. Someday you will have a kingdom!” Greylock wondered how she could be so certain. “It is time we found a place to stay,” she continued, “and it is better that we serve a Tyrant than a poor farmer who happens to own a small trinket of Glyden. It is better to serve in luxury, after all, than serve in poverty. If we must serve, of course.”

  “If I ever reclaim my throne, you will be given all you ask!” Greylock vowed fervently.

  She looked at him searchingly, her green eyes showing doubt and concern. “You must promise me that you will let my Grandfather go when that happens, Greylock. Let Moag finally have some Glyden of his own, with no price on it.”

  “Of course!”

  They both fell silent at this, troubled by the trick they had played on Moag.

  Several times during the rest of that long day, Greylock thought he caught a glimpse of movement behind him, but since it was still far away he assumed that the Wyrrs were stalking them from a safe distance.

  The Twilight Dells seemed never changing; never fully light, never fully dark. When night fell, and they sat around a fire, it did not seem as if a full day had passed in all the time they had been traveling. Yet it seemed as if they had always been traveling. Though Moag grumbled at the loss of his cart, he seemed to be able to do most things by magic. Greylock watched the wizard light a fire in the rain with damp wood.

  “Can you teach me some of this fire-magic?” he asked curiously.

  “Don’t bother to learn it, Greylock,” Mara said in disgust. “Magic is nothing you cannot already do by hand, if you are willing to work a little.”

  “My granddaughter could learn,” Moag said, ignoring her comment. “It is in her blood but she doesn’t want to. I suspect that she already knows a great deal, however. I am almost certain she is a Wind-Witch, though she denies it. She refuses to use her wind-magic, for she confuses all magic with the admittedly flawed characters of her father and grandfather. It is such a waste of talent!”

  “But what about me?” Greylock persisted. “Could I learn?”

  “You would already know if you could,” Moag answered simply. “For instance, I am a Fire- Wizard. I have always had power over the flames. My granddaughter, I suspect, is a Wind-Witch, as I have said. There are also Earth-Wizards, and Water-Witches, and so on. We all have some small measure of power over the other elements, but the power is usually concentrated in one of the four elements; earth, fire, wind, and water.”

  Greylock asked no more questions of the old man, but he wondered as he prepared for bed if Moag could be wrong. On the High Plateau magic was not known, yet there were often phenomena that were unaccounted for. In his family, for instance, there was an instinctive feel of the land. On the High Plateau, a youth would not necessarily know if he possessed power over any of the elements. He might realize that such an element responded well to his touch, but if he had not been trained, if he did not know it was possible, that power might remain undeveloped. It was not like the wizard’s own family, which by his own account, had had generations of magicians.

  He wondered briefly if he should tell the wizard of his revulsion to the land, now stronger than ever as he prepared to lie upon it for a night’s sleep. But he knew the old man would just dismiss the vague feeling as imagination.

  There was one thing the old man’s magic could not provide them. They ended their second day with no more food in their bellies than had been found on the trail. In the Twilight Dells this was not much.

  As the fire reached its zenith from the thawed wood, all three of them seemed to have the same thought at the same moment. Greylock saw the old man and Mara looking at him, and when he raised his eyebrow, she answered him.

  “Yes, Greylock. Your hair has become more gray!”

  That night Greylock had the first of his distressing dreams of Wyrrs calling to him, beseeching him for help. When he awoke in fright, he could not remember the reason for their pleas—yet the prayers directed to him had seemed proper. He shook off the nightmare as nonsense.

  Yet the land of the Wyrrs undeniably disturbed him and he could not say why.

  The next morning, as they prepared to leave on what the old man had promised could be the last leg of their journey through the Twilight Dells, Greylock sighted a huge column of curling black smoke hovering above the normally white mists of the dells. He was strangely certain that the dark haze was hovering over exactly the same valley from which they had escaped the day before.

  Mara looked up quickly from her task of gathering the bedrolls when he poi
nted out the unusual sight, flicking hair from her eyes. Then she turned to Moag accusingly. “Grandfather! There was no need to punish the Wyrrs. They have suffered enough!”

  “It is not my doing!” Moag seemed as puzzled by the smoke as they were. “I did not create a fire; I used a simple smoke spell. It should have been blown away by the winds long ago.”

  The three of them watched the smoke rise over the Twilight Dells a while longer in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Greylock was remembering the children, with the huge eyes and bloated stomachs, and wondered if they had escaped the fire. Even the Wyrrs did not deserve to die such a horrible death.

  “Perhaps, in the confusion, the fire got away from them,” Mara said quietly, but Greylock did not believe it. Something must have happened to the Wyrrs after they had left, he thought. Though he did not say so, for fear of frightening the others, he kept a close watch on the trail behind them as they started on the day’s journey.

  Just as he feared, the sun had not long risen above the horizon before he caught a glimpse of movement behind him. He watched a little more carefully—but not, he hoped, too noticeably—and this time he was rewarded with the fleeting sight of half a dozen dark figures among the trees. They were still some distance away, but Greylock had no doubt that their own small party had been sighted as well. He did not believe the followers could be Wyrrs, for those strange people could not be seen if they did not wish to be, and they would even now be swarming down upon them.

  Greylock had a sudden sick certainty that he knew who was causing the swath of destruction through the Twilight Dells. He was surprised and alarmed that any of his own people would have dared to come this far, but perhaps they had also discovered that the “demons” were not as deadly as they had been taught. The Wyrrs would not be able to stand against the soldiers of the High Plateau during the daylight, he knew, though from what the old man had said, the Wyrrs were formidable on their own land by night.

  And yet, Greylock still did not say anything to the others. Instead, he took the lead from the old man, and used his new sense of the land to lead them more quickly through the winding valleys. Moag relinquished the lead without comment, not objecting even when Greylock purposely led them very close to the fortresses of the Wyrrs. But he quickly saw that he could not shake his pursuers this way, or leave them behind. As the trackers gained steadily on the trio, Greylock took the only course he hoped could frustrate the pursuers, a course that appeared equally hazardous to the three partners. If he could just provoke the Wyrrs to come out, he thought, perhaps the followers would be waylaid.

  By now even Mara was looking over her shoulder, aware that they were being followed. It was she who let out the shout of surprise that alerted the others to the presence of three men in their path.

  Two of the men were dressed like Greylock, though they had evidently not discarded as many layers of clothes—no doubt because they meant to return as soon as possible to their homeland. The soldiers stood on their toes, with their swords ready, should Greylock decide to rush them with the big sword that hung from his belt.

  The third man stood idly, casually, between them with a grin of triumph. The man was tall and dark, and wore a single, heavy red robe. Perched on his shoulder was a black crow, the silhouette of which was stitched onto the uniforms of the soldiers.

  “Well, Greylock!” the man said. “You did mean what you said, and I see that you were right. There are no such beings as demons—though some of the denizens of this loathesome land come very close!”

  “Go back, Redfrock!” Greylock answered in despair. “I was banished by my uncle from the High Plateau, and I have left as I was commanded. You have no authority here!”

  “Of course I have authority! I have six soldiers—while you have an old man and a girl. I am surprised that you were able to survive your trek through this horrible land. True, these beings that have pestered us are weak and unskilled opponents; but by their very numbers and persistence, they have taken the lives of fully half my men.”

  “So you have been burning their houses,” Greylock said bitterly. He saw no way of escaping the Steward and his soldiers.

  “Are you ready to go back, Prince Greylock? You have proven that there are no demons, but what of the gods? Do you not wish to investigate them as well?”

  “I do not know if there are gods or not,” Greylock said defiantly. “But I do know that no one can survive the snows of Godshome. You are going to have to remove me from the Three Tiers of Existence altogether, Redfrock!” With this he drew the replica of Thunderer, and the morning light caught the burnished metal in a blinding ray.

  The two soldiers gasped and backed away from the sword, but Redfrock quickly recovered. “It is a fake, you fools! Did you not see Thunderer in the hands of the Tyrant?”

  The soldiers hesitantly advanced on Greylock, and then moved more boldly as the other four soldiers the Steward had spoken of came from the trees behind them to join in the battle.

  Greylock hoped that the wizard had been thinking of some way to use his magic while this talk had been going on; and hoped that Moag remembered that the men of the High Plateau were unaware of magic and would use his power to its most startling effect.

  Then two things happened simultaneously to save the three partners. Out of the trees, on all sides of the clearing, came the Wyrrs that Greylock had sensed earlier. And from his two partners came the magic he had hoped could extricate them from the Wyrrs.

  As the advancing soldiers stopped and looked at the pitiful army rushing toward them uncertainly, the ground before them exploded in flames. The fire was whipped to a deadly height by a sudden mysterious morning gale, and the partners began to retreat. The wind would not have kept away the soldiers of the High Plateau for long, but the Wyrrs were unable to stand before it and rolled away like the dried stalks of a bush.

  The Wyrrs turned their fury on the men of the High Plateau, who sliced through them with their swords as if they were merely practicing the art of war, instead of waging it. But the Wyrrs kept coming, climbing over the bodies of their brothers, and the last sight Greylock had before they left the valley was of the Steward Redfrock, standing in the middle of the little circle of his men, shouting orders while they were being overwhelmed by the vast numbers of Wyrrs. The black crow hovered over the fight, cawing.

  Greylock doubted that the entire company of soldiers would be destroyed, yet he was not worried any longer of pursuit, for he did not believe the Steward would try to follow him. If half of Redfrock’s company had already been killed in the Twilight Dells, Redfrock would be thinking that he would need an equal number to make it back to the mountains; even then, it would be close. Besides, the Steward would now have the mysterious fire and sudden wind to think about.

  But Greylock was not at all content with just escaping alive from the encounter. Steward Redfrock now knew that his opponent was alive—and would undoubtedly be waiting for Greylock if he returned to the High Plateau. A surprise attack would be much harder now, if not impossible.

  Mara and her grandfather were breathing hard at the pace he was setting, but he did not slow down until he was well away from the Wyrrs, and the sun was almost gone. They had not yet asked him about the strangers who had attacked them; apparently there was no need to explain who they were.

  “Thank you for using your wind-magic, Mara,” he said, when he at last slowed the pace. “I know how you hate to use it.”

  “I did not use my wind-magic!” she said, and Greylock was unable to tell if she spoke the truth. “I do not know where that wind came from.” Moag could not hold back a smile. “It was just a coincidence, Mara?”

  “Yes!” Her tone would brook no more questions, and she said nothing more as they set camp for the night.

  Again Greylock had a dream of the Wyrrs, and when he awoke in the morning, more of his hair had turned gray.

  Chapter Three

  Greylock was able to detect that they were leaving the Twilight Dells by the
same mysterious sense which had” made him notice the sickness of the land. Bad patches of ground still existed, and the terrain looked no different, but already he could feel some changes in the earth. Parts of this land felt fertile and rich.

  “Where are we now?” he was finally moved to ask.

  Moag seemed a little surprised by the question, and frowned as if he were about to ask how his partner could have known. To Greylock’s relief, he did not pose the question. He knew he could ask the old man what it meant to have this feeling of the land, but for some reason he wished to keep it to himself; to reveal it when it was least expected. Besides, he guessed that the wizard suspected some kind of power in his new master, but had not quite admitted to himself that it could be beyond his own .knowledge.

  “We are leaving the Twilight Dells,” Moag said finally—as Greylock had thought he would. “Soon we will be on the borders of Far Valley, and at its center is the BorderKeep. The ruler is an officious man whose army is unfortunately mighty. He once tried to enlist me in his service. He even forced me to wield my fire-magic for him. Me! I would never serve such a fool willingly, you can be sure of that.”

  “Old man,” Greylock said. “I believe you dislike more people than I like.”

  “Nevertheless, we will avoid the BorderKeep, I think,” the wizard said forbiddingly. “The Lord High Mayor may be dangerous, if only because he commands a people far more worthy than he. I do not understand why they have not thrown him out long ago. But people like being dictated to, I always say. We must journey beyond Far Valley, to the first of the fiefdoms of Trold, to get the kind of help we need.”

  Small and unimportant Far Valley may have been to the worldly-wise wizard, but to Greylock it was a fascinating glimpse of how the people of the Underworld lived; unaware of their luxury, ignorant of poverty.

  On the High Plateau, only the Tyrant and his family lived so well. The very lack of food and warmth helped the citizens accept the cruel religion of the Gatekeepers, which said that any person who could no longer produce for the benefit of all—especially for the benefit of the royal family—should seek the “comfort of the gods.” All but the most hopeful of the elderly and the sick knew that this meant death, but the sleep on the snows was a better end than some other fates the Tyrant and Steward could subject them to. It was not to the Tyrant’s advantage to increase the food supply, or improve the life of his people. As long as the harsh religion of the Gatekeepers kept the people of the High Plateau in his thrall, the Tyrant would never question the priests—even if it meant the exile of his nephew. Greylock was determined to change this state of affairs.