by Ember Lane
The fighting was fine. It was exhilarating. But both Frank and Merl knew that learning to read was the biggest challenge Merl would face in the coming days, and that was fine, just fine.
The blizzard picked up. At times, Merl could barely see his axe head in front of his nose. Then another gust would open up a frosty world to him. Though sometimes it was little more than Frank’s back. Then, the Wizard of Quintz brought them all to a crouch by the side of the road. He nodded forward as if to say, take a look at that. Merl snatched peeks through the swirling snow. Erreden spread in front of them, a muddle of frosted roofs that vanished into the blizzard. Two zombays emerged from the narrow streets, breaking shelter and lumbering slowly toward them. Merl wondered if their sluggish gait was because the cold had muted them. Frank pointed over toward the chill coast. A rocky leg reached from the castle’s hill down to the sea.
“That way,” he called over the howling wind. “We climb up, then follow it down. We daren’t go into the city!”
Frank scrambled away, climbing the bluff. They all followed. Merl’s fingers froze around his axe’s shaft. His boots slid on the icy rock. He gritted his teeth, pushing on, pushing up. The cold clawed into his every crease. His feet became blocks of ice. Frank vanished up into the storm, and Merl hurried, desperate not to lose him. Gloomy Joe sheltered under Mushroom. Mushroom griped and moaned and told all that the weather had worsened since the old lords had left. The bluff led down—its slope treacherous—snow sheltering in craggy furrows. A curtain of white blustered past Merl, then curled around and swept back on itself. Frank dropped right off the rock and into the eddying maelstrom.
Merl came to the bluff’s end. He jumped, trusting to luck, trusting to Frank, and landed with a crunch, shale now underfoot. It slipped and slid beneath him as if the pebbles despised his touch. Waves crashed close by, a storm squall, gray, white and effervescing. The sea was close. It was angry and close, crashing onto the shale, vying with the screaming wind for vocal superiority. The downcast party trudged along the stony beach, not a soul to be seen until they came to a set of salt-rotted timber steps. Frank climbed them, waiting at the top like some ice-crusted savior. He helped all of them up, Quaiyl too, though whether the construct needed it or not was another matter.
They gathered on a wood-planked wharf. The snow seemed lighter this close to the sea—at least it stung Merl less with its icy swipes, but the wind cut through him like a thousand-folded blade sharpened on the Ice King’s whetstone. Fog now muffled his vision, the restless thick of a roiling cloud. A wall of it spread inland, cloaking the shipwrights, the fishers, and the mongers that would have likely lined this bleakest of ports. Great splats of ice clung to the wharf’s planks like frozen barnacles. Frank took a few treacherous steps forward. Misty tendrils welcomed him. Merl crept after.
The fog parted and revealed the hint of an outstretched hand. Its yellow nails painted a foul color on the pure white of Merl’s vision. It looked out of place and corrupt. A leaning head, angled wrong, like its neck was already broken, poked through the hypnotic swirl. Merl made to shout a warning, but his words froze in his throat. Frank tensed, clearly needing no warning. The Wizard of Quintz already knew. He had Scaramanza raised and ready. Billy already knew. His troll hammer was primed. Desmelda was ready. A crimson glow hatched in her hands.
The zombays came.
But the bastards weren’t going to keep Merl from Wave Walker. They weren’t going to separate him from the adventurer’s cabin, nor his cozy, swinging bed.
He raised the firestone axe.
The zombays came, silent assassins, their jaws barely moving, their snarls were fixed in place. Drool hung, perfect icicles of translucent gob, and their eyebrows were crystalized, hair frozen. Their skin was blue, black veins crazing it. They lumbered slowly, and then they saw Frank, and Billy and Merl, and then they saw Desmelda.
Drool icicles fell, shattering on the wharf. Frozen eyebrows snapped. Numb jaws howled with insane glee. Frank struck the first, then took a step back. His boot slipped on the ice, sending him sprawling and forcing him to claw for safety. Billy lurched forward. He grabbed Frank’s scruff and slid him away. The zombays attacked both with insatiable hunger but fell short as the pair scrambled back. Then Billy’s boots fled from under him, and he went down too.
Desmelda shot a blast of her crimson magic, but it petered out before it passed over Frank and Billy. It was like the cold had leeched its power away. Quaiyl burst forward, but even the construct was caught out by the ice. The zombays spilled on, like the fog was birthing foul spawn. Their front line tripped over the fallen ones. The next line trampled on in a rolling tide of death. Frank was up on his feet, Billy too. Scaramanza was busy now. Billy swung his troll hammer, but he had no purchase and went down—legs vanishing from under him again. Mushroom tried to jump forward, but he’d put little, if any, thought into it and skidded from the wharf.
Merl cleared his mind. He tried to pick out a path. He tried to become calm despite the terror that riddled him. The zombays neared in waves of purulence, crashing on the planked wood wharf. Merl found no path, because there was none was there, so he leapt forward anyway, swinging his firestone axe and chopping out. As he landed, though, one boot went seaward, the other inland. Still, he plunged his axe in, slicing a zombay head right down the middle.
Quaiyl yanked him back before tossing him aside like feeble jetsam. Frank used up his blast of emerald magic. Its fire was snuffed out the instant it hit the writhing zombay wall. The cold sapped its power away. More zombays clambered over their fallen. Merl screamed in hope as he realized they were freezing. The wall grew, like some ghoulish barrier, and now all of them watched in morbid fascination.
Frank signaled them down, off the wharf and onto the surer footing of the stony beech. Mushroom blinked in and out of sight, stomping zombays, drinking their spilt guts. The battle commenced. Waves broke close—closer as they fought their way forward.
Scaramanza sliced down. Frank’s eyes were squeezed tightly in exertion, frozen crow’s feet radiated out. Billy’s mallet rose high, framed in a swirl of storm, and then it dropped, shattering a frozen zombay head. Merl brought his axe around, his hands numb now, but stuck in the grip Frank had shown him. He buried it in a foul zombay’s neck. Black blood pumped—pumped and froze—froze and shattered. Quaiyl picked the foul zombays up, tossing them into the turgid sea. Its foam was freezing, now belching blocks of ice onto the shale. The zombays pressed on, though more fell from the wharf. Desmelda yelled. Her shrill scream pierced the torrential gale. Sea spray peppered Merl’s face while freezing waves swamped his boots.
“We’re surrounded!” Desmelda’s cry eventually reached Merl’s ears.
Billy was beaten back. Frank retreated into the heaving wash. The zombays pressed, they froze, they shattered, but still they came. Mushroom stomped into the sea water. Gloomy Joe squealed and whimpered. Desmelda shot spears of crimson into the sky, but her efforts were feeble in comparison to the power of the storm.
“Do something!” she screamed, but her words weren’t for Frank, the Wizard of Quintz, they were for Merl, Sheepherder of Morgan Mount.
But Merl picked up Gloomy Joe instead. He backed away from the zombay horror, his courage spent. His axe hung limp by his side, its gory deeds done. Merl backed into the icy swell, as did Frank, as did Billy.
It was hopeless.
They were undone.
Billy turned. His face was full of horror, of defeat, of hope, and of exaltation.
Oh! Hope and exhilaration!
Merl couldn’t fathom how Billy felt joy. Not now. Not when their fight was lost. Billy started screaming like a madman. Then Merl’s frozen tunic cracked. It tightened around his neck, and he was pulled from the sea and tossed away. He smashed into wood. It was curved like a keel. Gloomy Joe started barking. The dune dog shook his head, his ears whipping Merl’s frigid cheeks. A great shadow stood before Merl. It threw Desmelda into the boat, then Billy, , and Frank. Quaiyl pull
ed himself over the gunwales, sliding down the inside of the giant’s rowboat and coming to rest by Merl.
Merl wanted to cry with relief, but his tears froze.
Somehow, they were back with the giants.
28
“Not a bad bit of joinery,” Mushroom said, inspecting the giant ship. “Seen worse. Don’t get craftsmen like you used to.”
Merl grinned. He shot Billy a look. His friend grinned back, but Frank scowled.
“What letter is it?” The Wizard of Quintz asked again, glaring at Mushroom.
“That’s an E, Frank, an E, and if you turn it the other way around, it’s a three,” Merl said.
“Looks a bit like that other one,” Billy moaned. “P weren’t it, Merl? Tha one with tha beady eye. Why’d they make ‘em all so similar, Frank? If I’d invented words, then I’d’a made them all different, like. It should be more like animals, I reckon. I mean, you’d never mix up a snake an’ a cow, would you, like?”
Frank looked fit to burst, but he gulped a breath and calmed. He’d learned a lot about being calm from Merl, and that was something Merl was really proud of. Frank called it meditation, and they did it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Merl preferred the night one because he could pick a star and imagine it was shining over Morgan Mount. That way he shared it with Portius, with his girl. Billy called her Merl’s girl. He said it over and over as if he was teasing, but it didn’t work, Merl loved it. Merl’s girl sounded just fine.
“No, no you wouldn’t mix them up, Billy.”
Truth was, Billy was much better with words than any of them thought was possible. He was probably better than Merl, and Merl was already reading whole strings of the damnable things. Frank started each morning with what he called a recap. He went through all the letters, and then they started the real work. It was Merl’s turn today, and they were attempting to piece together all the words on the brown panel in Merl’s mind—the one which used to portray his naked body and the firestone axe. Except it wasn’t naked anymore. Sailstitcher had made him new clothes and they now clad the portrait in his mind as well as his body. His old clothes had been ruined by the journey through Alaria and finished off by the freezing sea. Merl had never known clothes to crack before. He had a new tunic, and pants, and a belt, but alas no new boots. They were getting cobbled still. For some reason his new clothes all showed up on the muddy-puddle colored panel. Merl thought it might be because they all had oomph in them.
Oomph was Billy’s way of interpreting the Power of Objects. The Power of Objects was Frank’s explanation. He’d invented it and not the old lords. Merl preferred oomph. Just like his axe had two hundred and forty-two to three hundred and twelve slashing damage, so his new tunic also had words associated with it. According to Sailstitcher, the tunic gave him four armor, three slashing resistance, and two piercing resistance. By all accounts it was rubbish, but then it was made out of old sail cloth, so what could you reasonably expect? His pants were made of sailcloth too and had much the same oomph.
Merl had lost one boot when Stormsurfer had plucked him from the beach. He was still waiting for Sailstitcher to finish his new pair, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t exactly need boots on Wave Walker. It wasn’t like they needed him to navigate this time. The giants knew exactly where they were going.
So Merl wasn’t naked anymore, and that pleased him. Especially as that panel was the main focus of the day. Merl had drawn a chalk picture of the panel on the adventurers’ bar’s floor. It had the stick figure, which represented him, in the center. The stick figure had five squares down one side of it, and five on the other. Underneath, a long red tube had some figures drawn on it, and then what looked like a blacksmith’s anvil with a couple more figures beside. There were twelve more empty squares to the right-hand side of his boxed-in figure, and a whole column of rectangles on the left.
Frank wasn’t concerned with the words in the rectangles, not today, anyway. Today they were going to work out what words were in two of the boxes that surrounded Merl’s figure. Both words were in the middle boxes, halfway up and halfway down the columns that edged Merl’s figure.
“Let’s try the box on the left,” Frank said. “Give me the letters.”
“M then A, then I, and then N,” Merl said proudly.
Like Billy, he was chuffed with how much they’d learned in the three days they’d been back aboard Wave Walker. He’d never expected learning words to be as easy, but now, provided he had a clear mind, things tended to slot right into place a whole lot easier.
“And what does that say?” Frank asked.
“Easy,” Billy blurted out, “Main—like main… ” Billy’s words fizzled out.
“Main weapon?” Merl ventured.
“That has your axe in it?” Frank cocked his head.
“Yup, there and in me little man’s hand.”
Frank scratched his chin. He’d shaved all his stubble off that morning, and it was clearly itching him. “So, that’s your main weapon,” he said. “What’s the other say?”
“It’s a long ‘un, Frank. A right long ‘un.” Merl preferred the shorter words. He’d have probably guessed main all on his own, but still wasn’t confident enough to stick his neck out—not quite yet, anyhow.
“Just split it into threes, like we did yesterday.”
Frank had an answer for everything. Well, most things. He was still kicking himself about the frozen zombays. He blamed himself for leading them into a situation with no escape.
“S, E and C,” Merl said, and Frank chalked the three letters on the floor.
“O, N, and D,” Merl continued.
“Second,” Frank said. “That spells second.”
“There’s more—told you it was a long ‘un. A and R and Y. There, that’s done.”
“Second-hairy,” Billy said, and burst out laughing.
It was a measure of how well Billy was doing that he could laugh and joke about it. Yesterday they’d breezed through his first panel. His was all about a farm and how many acres it had at level-one—the answer was ten. What crops he was allowed to plant—barley, potatoes and cabbage. It told how many constructs he’d need to work it, and their yield of the green bricks. Apparently, barley took four days to crop, and a level-one farm would give Billy eight green bricks. Potatoes would take six days to crop, and they would yield fourteen bricks, and cabbage took ten, but gave thirty.
Merl had never heard of anything so stupid. Everyone knew potatoes took the whole of summer to grow, and cabbages took two seasons at least. Barley was the fastest, but not four days, more like half of the growing month—fifty odd nights—something like that. But then again, it didn’t make sense that a cottage could just build and unbuild itself, or a wall could just become. This was the business of the old lords though, and they were masters of magic, according to Frank.
“Secondary,” Frank corrected. “Is the square empty?”
“Yes, Frank. Only three other squares are full. My tunic’s in one, pants in the other, and me rope belt’s in tha last.”
“That’s coz you got no boots or hat,” Billy said, and Billy was right again.
Frank made Merl and Billy write main and secondary a load of times, and then they had a rest. Billy jumped onto the bar and swung his legs over, dropping behind it. “Ales all ‘round,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.
“You know”—Frank pulled up a chair—“never known two folk take to learning like you and Billy. In Quintz there’s folk that have been learning for years, yet they seem to hate it. It confused the heck out of me coz I couldn’t work out why they bothered if they hated it so much.”
“Maybe it’s like muckspreading,” Billy said. “When you first do it, it’s great, but after a while it’s just another chore.”
“Learning’s like findin’ out little secrets, Frank,” Merl added, climbing onto his stool and taking a sip of the frothy, giant-brewed ale. “Like, you know, the huntin’ is as much fun as the findin’. We’re hunti
n’ the words, findin’ out what they mean, and it’s like we’ve worked out another clue.”
“Well, we know what that brown panel is now, Merl—or at least I’ve got a good idea. I reckon that the empty boxes are all clothes and weapons that you haven’t got yet. I reckon you’re missing one of these.” Frank held up his finger—the one with the magic ring on it. “I reckon that if you get one of these, then you could store a suit of armor in it, and you could magic your clothes on and off as you need. Just like I do with our weapons.”
A sudden thought struck Merl. He eyed Frank suspiciously. “Have you got a panel like mine?”
Frank blushed. His cheeks went crazy red. He smiled and tried to hide it by sipping at his ale.
“Have you, Frank?” Merl craned his neck to stare at Frank’s now pained expression.
“Yes,” Frank admitted. He set his mug down and raised his hands. “I have, but I wanted you to understand it yourself. I wanted you to commit it to memory. The squares—the pictures—are called slots. So one is your main weapon slot. When your sailcloth tunic is shown there, it’s called equipped. If you have two tunic, you equip one—the one you want to wear, and the other is stored in a thing called your inventory.”
“Where my inventory? Is it like a cupboard? Merl asked, scratching his head.
“Sort of.” Frank held up his hand and pointed to his ring finger with the other. “This is where I put all my stuff. This ring is my inventory. I’m telling you this so that when you get a ring, you’ll understand.”
“Can we get rings in Quintz?” Billy asked.
Frank raised his eyebrows, nut then sighed. “You should be able to, but the wizards can be quite… snobby there, and the students are worse. They think they’re special, just because of who they are, but trust me, they’re nothing like you and Billy. You two have got more courage in your little fingernail than the lot of then have in their whole bodies.”
