Three hours later, they approached the enormous gray granite fortress built more than a thousand years earlier to guard the only approach to the capital city from the rest of Glastamear. The huge castle could hold thousands of warriors in times of civil war, but in a peacetime winter it was garrisoned with only fifty troops. The road passed directly though the fortress. An enormous portcullis guarded each entrance, and they could only be opened by a complicated set of hoisting wheels and winches. That is unless you were the only man in Glastamear who could cast the earth spell dwarfish strength.
Michael could tell from his detect life spell that no one was on guard. The troops were sleeping high in the fortress in rooms with coal fireplaces and confortable beds. The fortress didn’t need guards standing out in the freezing wind because no one could possibly get inside without the garrison lifting the portcullis. The fortress extended completely across the narrow canyon, leaving no way around it. The only choice was directly through Castel Gateway. In a thousand years, this fortress had never fallen or even been penetrated by a single soldier of a rebellious Glastamear or foreign army.
Michael cast the earth magic spell that reduced the weight of the enormous iron portcullis to that of an ordinary window. He lifted it high enough for Jim to walk under without even bending over. Michael stepped inside and slowly and quietly lowered it back into position. With his detect life spell in place, Michael could tell where the stables and barns were located. When they entered the stables, they saw ten cows, lots of chickens, six horses, and eight snow-elk. Michael used his mage thought-talk to reassure the animals and keep them quiet. Michael hooked one four-elk team to a large sleigh while Jim took care of the other one. There were still no signs that the humans sleeping high in the castle had noticed the intrusion. Michael stood next to the elks’ stall and used fire magic to inscribe a message in the oak.
“We’re sorry that we needed your snow-elks and sleighs. Here is a bag of coins that should more than offset the costs.” He signed it Robbie the Unicorn and Stanley the Troll, and attached a leather bag with enough gold to spread among fifty men and still be significant.
Michael moved a millstone from the courtyard so that he would have something to stand on next to the portcullis. Again he lifted it, this time high enough for Jim to drive one sleigh and then the other under it while he held it open. Michael returned the millstone, lifted the portcullis again, stepped under it, and slowly lowered it. Michael and Jim laughed as they considered the theft. They thought they had committed a crime that could be the stuff of fable.
They rode their sleighs through the ferocious blizzard throughout that night. It was only with detect life spells that they could stay close together. By the time the feeble dawn arrived, a one pace deep layer of new snow had covered their tracks. There would be no record of their visit to Castle Gateway in the snow of the castle’s courtyard and no trail to follow.
The blizzard continued, and Jim suggested that the conditions were so bad with the wind and heavy snowfall that they should find shelter and wait out the storm. They drove their sleighs a nearby stone outcropping where Michael used the dwarfish spell excavate to create an artificial cave and used a fire spell to enchant it for warmth. They sheltered there for six hours as the storm raged.
Chapter 24
By afternoon the blizzard was over. Michael and Jim harnessed their snow-elk and resumed their journey to the agreed upon meeting place, but the delay made them arrive well after dark. Both men had cast night surgery as darkness approached. Michael knew exactly where he’d left the supplies, but when he reached that location, two paces of newly fallen snow covered the provisions and there was no sign of the Oxbow brothers.
As they stood near the buried supplies, Jim said, “The brothers had a long head start. They’re in trouble somewhere between here and Crow Crossroads. They should have arrived here before the blizzard was even in full force.”
Michael knew that the brothers were totally reliable. Jim was correct; something was seriously wrong. He helped clear the snow from the supplies so that Jim could begin the conversion of one of the large sleighs for sleeping. Before he transformed into a Giant Ki Eagle, he put his armor, his elfish long sword, and his elfish daggers in a leather pack which Jim attached to the back of his eagle form. He flew along the route they should have taken all the way back to Crow Crossroads. By using his detect life spell, he should have been able to find them, but they were not along that route, at least not alive.
He continued his search making wider and wider circles. It was two hours later that he found the life signs of four men in the back of the sleigh. In front, there were two men with extremely strong fire magic, the type he’d seen before from high-ranking knight protectors. The sleigh was headed towards Winnowing Castle’s secret entrance along the route he had noted previously, a snow-buried ancient stone roadway. They were passing through rugged terrain in a deep ravine.
Michael flew until he was ahead of them, converted to his natural form, and dressed in his armor, which like all of their group’s armor was enchanted with a spell to prevent damage from fireballs. In spite of the armor, he cast quench fire magic so that fire magic could not be used to hurt the Oxbow brothers in case they were not still in their own enchanted armor.
Michael stood in the middle of the snow-covered roadway with his sword in the high guard position. He used mage thought-talk to reach the snow-elk. They knew Michael well from their long journey from Briarton, and he realized they were smart enough to question why these other men were driving them hard without even stopping to let them graze. As the sleigh came around a bend in the ravine, Michael ordered the elk to stop. They did.
Both knight protectors jumped from the skidding sleigh and pulled their weapons. “Brigand, you picked the wrong group to attack. Now you’ll die slowly to train our new priests.” Both men laughed at the joke of a foolish thief attacking them.
Neither man was in armor. They wore the same blue quilted robes he’d seen in Winnowing Castle. From their comments, Michael understood that these knights wanted humans to use in training the healing priests. That was why they had bound the Oxbow brothers and were delivering them to the castle.
“Craven knightly buffoons, you’ll never live to reach the decadent warmth of Winnowing Castle with your captives. You will surely perish here in the snow and cold.”
Both knights charged in fury when he spoke the name of their most sacred and secret stronghold. It was exactly what Michael was hoping would happen. His first strike decapitated a knight while his follow through blocked the second knight’s weapon with such force that it shattered the knight protector’s sword against the impossibly sharp elf blade. The man threw his broken blade at Michael and tried to cast a fireball. When his magic failed, he drew his dual daggers and charged. The daggers were useless against the strength of his dwarfish enchanted armor. An instant later the knight was staring at his right arm where it lay in the snow. Two seconds after that, he collapsed face down. Michael knew he was lucky; they had wanted to capture him alive and greatly underestimated him. They were also wearing no armor because of the great cold. If they had their steel plate armor, both of his killing blows would have been useless had they come from an ordinary sword.
Michael mentally calmed the snow-elk who were about to bolt. He used the same spell to reduce his own excitement. He found the whole back of the sleigh was covered in snow. He dug through it to free each of the Oxbow brothers. They had been bound hand and foot and thrown on top of the supplies purchased in Crow Crossroads. They’d been trapped there throughout the whole journey through the ten-hour blizzard. The brothers were mostly unharmed because each wore the rings that Michael had enchanted with warm blanket. Their wrists and ankles needed healing, but they had no frostbite injuries.
Jacob explained, “They were waiting for us in the barn where the sleigh was parked. They bound us and put us in the back of the sleigh and headed out into the snowfall.”
Peter said, “I asked why t
hey didn’t just take the sleigh; they didn’t need us. One knight laughed and said we were needed for practice for some obnoxious children. If we were lucky we might survive for several months.”
Roger explained, “We were to be experimental subjects for the children held in the castle. They thought the youngsters needed real people to practice on maybe something even worse like examining our insides. They wanted both experimental subjects and our sleigh with its supplies.”
“Did your theft go as planned?” Gregory asked in a teasing tone.
“Yes, Jim is with the supplies and the other two sleighs. Let’s clean up this mess and find a place for you to wait for us to catch up.”
Michael used excavate to open a pit next to the roadway. They searched the bodies but found nothing useful except for the unbroken sword of the first knight and the daggers from both. After they pushed the bodies and the bloody snow into the hole, Michael replaced the soil. They moved fresh snow to cover the burial place and found a place outside the ravine for the Oxbow brothers to wait for Jim and Michael where they wouldn’t be seen if any other knight protectors came along the road.
Michael flew back to where Jim was waiting. They finished converting one of the sleighs to accommodate sleeping. It was before dawn the next day when they headed towards where the Oxbow brothers waited. By nightfall, they were all together in a camp near the road and about two hours away from the Winnowing Castle. They rested for three hours before heading to the castle on that moonless and bitterly cold night.
The snow was again piled high against the door to the tunnel, almost obscuring the white painted doors. They dug out the doors. Michael asked Roger to stay with the sleighs while the rest of them followed the tunnel into the storage area. Michael gave each man a ring enchanted with transparency to use until he brought the children down from their dormitory. Everyone but Michael found a confortable out-of-the-way place to sit and wait for the children.
Michael quietly and invisibly climbed the stairway to the kitchen. There was no one evident to his detect life spell on the lower levels of the castle. He found the direct stairway and quickly climbed to the dormitory level, He cast a naiad spell to unlock its three strong iron locks. Before opening the door, he transformed into his own childhood image of a unicorn, a powerful pale blue beast with short hair, a bright pink mane, a horse-like head with big brown eyes and a single spiral golden horn. He made himself into a rather small unicorn since he would need to lead the children down two spiral staircases before they reached the tunnel where his friends waited.
There were no fire mage signs in the dormitory, and he entered to the squeals and delight of the young healers. They all seemed to be talking at once as they petted him, and he used mage thought-talk to urge them to quiet down. Grendel moved next to one of his horse-like ears and said quietly, “Robbie, can we take the puppies along.”
He thought the word yes back to her, and most of the children followed her into the classroom and began to take the pet of their choice. Michael realized how stupid he’d been when two boys began arguing over who should have a specific dog. There were fewer dogs than children. He thought at them a strong command. “Bring all the dogs. We’ll share; that’s what Robbie’s friends do. We must leave immediately for your new school.”
The children followed him into the stairway that led directly to the kitchen. A few grabbed toys but in most cases they only carried the puppies. They were dressed in their nightclothes. Not a single one brought extra clothes to protect against the brutal cold outside the castle. Michael thought that would leave the knight protectors even more baffled at their escape. Diana had purchased a selection of warm children’s clothing in various sizes for the rescued children.
When they reached the kitchen, several of the children noticed dried-apple and honey tree-spice pies and grabbed them. Others took some meat pies and bags of candied nuts and raisins. The favorite thing to steal was from a jar of hard candy balls made from golden honey and tree spice. Michael had to constantly remind them to be quiet, but those mental commands didn’t help much. He found that their excitement at the adventure was too great to contain, and he cast the spell calm soul, strong enough to influence all of them.
He was in a hurry to get them all down to the storage area. They had plenty of food in the sleighs and didn’t need to raid the knights’ kitchen. The whole process of getting the puppies and ransacking the kitchen for sweets took longer than Michael had planned. It was likely that someone assigned to breakfast duty, would soon be coming down to the kitchen to begin preparations, and it would be impossible not to notice that things were missing and in disarray.
He cajoled, persuaded, and encouraged the children until they were all headed down the steep spiral staircase that led to the storage area. Once he they reached the door, Michael used mage thought-talk to get Jim to open the door. As the heavy wooden door opened, Michael thought-talked to the kids that his friends would help them get to their new school. As they came through the doorway, Peter, Gregory, Jacob, and Jim removed their transparency rings and helped each of the eighteen into the back of the wagon. Jim hooked up Robbie the Unicorn to the harness to the children’s delight. Just then Michael noticed a fire mage headed down towards the kitchen.
Once all the children were in the wagon, the four adults held onto the outside of the wagon’s frame, and Michael charged down the tunnel as fast as he could pull the wagon without endangering the children. As he went through the tunnel, he detected many other fire mages stirring around the castle. Their escape had certainly been discovered, and four men were now coming down the stairway to the storage area. Others followed. He continued his rapid run through the tunnel, but he ran slower than a full gallop because he couldn’t risk overturning the wagon.
As He skidded to a stop at the door to the outside, he saw the signs that many fire mages were charging down the tunnel two thousand paces behind them. Jim and Gregory jumped off and opened the doors to the outside, and Michael pulled the wagon through. The doors were closed, and all the men began to shovel snow in front of the doors to temporarily block the exit. While this was happening, Michael transformed back to himself and dressed in his armor. He used excavate to lift an enormous drift of snow and pack it against the door.
While the kids were transferred to the sleeping sleigh, the knight protectors began pounding on the doors with their swords. Others were burning the wood to make it easier to shatter. With fire spells, the wooden doors and snow barrier wouldn’t be an obstruction for long. Michael detected over thirty knights in the tunnel. Once all the children, their puppies, and their toys were loaded, all three sleighs left in a hurry. Since the snow was much too deep for easy travel, the knights would only be able to follow on snowshoes, and that would be much too slow to do them any good. They were safely away. Michael reached out to Diana to let her know of their success.
Unfortunately, since Michael had no children, he had greatly underestimated the number of stops required when you traveled with eighteen children and ten puppies on a trip through a snowy and empty countryside where the soft powdered snow was deeper than any of the children’s heights. Within the first six hours, Michael realized that their ten-day trip might actually take twice that long and he tried to think of another plan.
Chapter 25
It was impossible to travel through the Great Northern Forest except by following the few roads cut through the dense stands of trees. Since the roads all led from one community to another, it would have been impossible to keep their travel a secret. Michael estimated that it would take over twenty days to reach Black Sand Beach at their current rate, and they had too little food. Buying food in one of the villages would be difficult because during this brutal winter food was very scarce in northern Glastamear. Also, since it was impossible to get all the children to sleep while the sleighs were still moving, they camped each night for eight hours. That pause every night would become more dangerous as they neared the heavily populated areas of Briarton Province
where brigands and outlaws were common.
Michael recalled the detailed map on the floor of the dwarves’ travel room in Fay Woods, and he redirected their travel to the nearest one, which had been a dwarfish mining community two thousand years earlier. It was in a remote part of the southern foothills of Mountains of Min. The abandoned mine was not an easy place to reach even by sleigh, but it seemed better than any alternative. He contacted Lady Barbara at Dragon Crag and asked her to send the Silver Trident back to Black Sand Beach with enough supplies for moving the eighteen children to the town of Rock Point on Mitchell Island where the guild was planning to make a training school for the children with healing talent.
The travel was arduous. They had to take many turns and change directions repeatedly, and at times, Michael had to use his dwarfish spells to remove impassable obstacles. Each night, Michael would become an eagle and choose their best route. The heavy snow cover allowed them to pass over many obstructions, and Michael doubted their route would be possible for wagons after the snowmelt. They reached the mine on the eighth day. Michael had always wanted to have as many children as possible. This was his first experience with a group of eighteen youngsters. Even though he loved children, he decided that four or five would be as many as Diana and he could possibly handle.
Unlike most dwarfish ruins, this one had many stone buildings above ground, although they were currently buried three paces deep in snow in this bitter winter. They made camp inside one of the largest buildings after they cleared enough snow to make an entrance possible through the huge bronze doors. The doorway was high enough to bring all three sleighs into the central meeting room of this abandoned dwarfish community. Michael cast spells to warm the huge space and to provide light.
The Mages' Winter of Death: The Healers of Glastamear: Volume Two Page 17
