Frost Fever

by Jonathan Moeller

  He blinked at me, and then to my utter astonishment he threw back his head and roared with laughter. A flicker of movement behind one of the glowing crystalline cylinders caught my eye, and I saw Sipad-Zid standing there in his ornate robes, gaping at his master. Evidently the Knight of Grayhold did not often laugh.

  “I confess,” said the Knight, “that it has never worked, not even once in all these years.” The Seneschal walked to the Knight’s side, holding a slim wooden case in his hands. “So, Irina Novoranya. Your choice. Die painlessly here. Or owe me a favor…and I shall help you steal the Ringbyrne Amulet from Jarl Rimethur.”

  “What about Alexandra?” I said, glancing at where she stood frozen within the crystalline column. I couldn’t quite make out her expression through the blue crystal, but it was obvious she had been frozen in a moment of sheer terror. I hoped that the Knight had told the truth about the spell putting her unconscious.

  “She will remain here,” said the Knight, “until you return with the Ringbyrne Amulet.”

  “Ah ha,” I said. “Then this really was a setup to screw…I mean, to betray me. I bring the Ringbyrne Amulet here, and then you kill us both.”

  “No,” said the Knight. “I give you my word as the Knight of Grayhold that should you bring the Ringbyrne Amulet to me, I shall release both you and Mrs. Ross from Grayhold unharmed, and send you back to Madison. I swear it upon my office as the Knight of Grayhold.”

  The floor shivered beneath me, and a cold wind blew through the Hall of Attainder. It was as if the vast castle itself had taken notice of the Knight’s oath.

  “All right,” I said. “We have a deal.”

  “Swear it,” said the Knight. “If Morvilind has left you the capacity to hold anything sacred, then swear it upon whatever you hold sacred.”

  “Fine,” I said, irritated. I thought for a moment. “I swear it upon the name of my brother.”

  Again the floor trembled beneath my shoes, and the cold wind blew past me, tugging at my blazer and hair. For a moment I had the sense of something vast and mighty looking at me, and then the sensation faded. Yet I had the lingering impression that breaking my oath would be a bad idea.

  “So be it,” said the Knight. “Seneschal.”

  Sipad-Zid stepped forward, bowed, and offered the flat box to the Knight. The taller man reached down and opened the box. Within rested a black cushion, and upon the cushion lay a twisted bracelet of silver. It looked as if three silver bands had been melted around each other, and a dozen gems that glowed with a pale blue light rested within the tangled bracelet.

  “What is that thing?” I said.

  The Knight lifted the box and held it out to me. “See it for yourself.”

  I hesitated, and then cast the spell to sense the presence of magical forces. At once a dozen screaming sensations roared through the spell, hammering against my mind. I felt the raw magical power surging through the grim stones of Grayhold, magic mighty and ancient and unyielding. I felt the intricate power of the spells of the crystalline prisons, holding their occupants unconscious and immobile. I felt the power of multiple warding spells around the Knight, and potent magic radiating from the sword at his belt and the gauntlet upon his left hand. Even Sipad-Zid had several warding spells around him, and his robe and jewelry had all been enchanted.

  Just as well I had not tried to attack either of them. Both had enough power to crush me with ease.

  The Knight gave me a knowing smile. I ignored it, gritted my teeth, and tried to focus my will upon the bracelet.

  It carried spells as well. Warding spells, I thought. Like…

  “Elemental spells,” I said. “It’s…warded against elemental spells.”

  “Frost and ice,” said the Knight. “While you wear it, you shall be impervious to spells of frost and cold and ice. Rather useful when facing a frost giant Jarl and his entourage, I reckon.”

  “I reckon,” I said. “Seems like quite a nice gift to give a thief.”

  “You cannot repay my favor,” said the Knight, “if the Jarl freezes all the blood in your veins. Take it.”

  I hesitated and then took the bracelet. It fitted comfortably over the wrist of my left hand, so comfortably I could pull the sleeve of my blazer down over it without trouble. At once I felt warmer. Not sharply warmer, but comfortably warm, as if I had stepped from the cold gloom of Grayhold into a pleasantly heated room.

  “Nice trick,” I said, trying not to show how much I coveted it. A thing like this, an object of magical power, might prove very useful.

  “Well,” said the Knight. “Sometimes a pretty girl just needs the right jewelry to match her clothes.”

  Good Lord. Was he flirting with me? Of course, I had started it with all my wisecracks about screwing someone over. In retrospect, flirting with a lord of the Shadowlands had probably been one of the stupider things I had done. Morvilind had once mentioned in passing that he would never need to kill me because my smart mouth would get me killed first.

  It seemed that I was determined to prove him right. Or my mouth was, at least.

  I worked some moisture into my mouth and met his gaze. “It doesn’t match my shoes.”

  “Where you’re going, it will,” said the Knight. He gestured with his armored hand, and the symbols upon his gauntlet flashed with white light. A curtain of gray mist shimmered to my left, and then shone with pale light. Through it I caught a wavering glimpse of a street and buildings rising on either side.

  “Madison?” I said.

  “Not far from the Capitol,” said the Knight. “Once you have retrieved the Ringbyrne Amulet, use the bracelet as a focus for a rift way. The spell will return you to Grayhold.”

  “Right,” I said. Now all I had to do was figure out how to steal away the Ringbyrne Amulet from a frost giant Jarl…a frost giant Jarl who had nearly been assassinated, and would be on his guard.

  Yeah. Easiest thing in the world, right?

  I took one last look at the Knight. He stared right back at me, and I had the overwhelming feeling that he had not told me everything. Something else was going on here, I was sure of it.

  He wouldn’t tell me, and the only way out of this mess was to steal the amulet.

  So I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and strode through the rift way.

  Chapter 7: The Glory of the Revolution

  A moment of searing disorientation, the sensation of falling, and I suddenly found myself in the middle of a street a block from the Wisconsin State Capitol, the summer air hot and muggy against my face.

  The rift way snapped shut behind me, and I felt the cold weight of the bracelet upon my left wrist.

  I had returned to the middle of a mess.

  Black plumes of smoke rose from the square, wreathing the white dome of the Capitol. The air stank of smoke and blood and the tang of powerful explosives. I heard the distant wail of emergency sirens, and the much nearer chatter of automatic gunfire. A barricade still sealed off the square, and a dozen dead men in blue Homeland Security uniforms lay before it. I couldn’t tell if they were Rebels or legitimate officers. Twenty or thirty more people in civilian clothes lay scattered on the street, some of them wounded and moaning with pain, some of them dead.

  The Knight had dropped me right into the middle of a fight. Unless I missed my guess, Rogomil’s Rebels had seized the Capitol and the barricades, which made me wonder just how many men he had smuggled into Madison. Then I realized that I had to get out of sight, right now, before anyone else saw me. I sprinted off the street, jumped the curb, and darted into an alley between a bank branch and a sandwich shop. Both buildings were dark, their doors closed and their shutters drawn. With luck, no one had seen me. A digital clock hung over the bank’s entrance, and with a shock I realized that less than an hour had passed since I had fled into the Shadowlands with Alexandra.

  It felt a lot longer than that.

  I leaned against the concrete wall of the alley, closed my eyes, and tried to think.

 
I was in a lot of trouble, and couldn’t see a way out.

  For one thing, I was in the middle of a war zone. The Rebels might have seized the Capitol, but that wouldn’t last long. If Carothrace and Tamirlas had escaped the ambush, they would call their men-at-arms and commandeer the local branches of Homeland Security. Guns and bombs and helicopters did not work in the Shadowlands, but they worked just fine on Earth, and the Elven nobles would sweep the Rebels from Madison. For that matter, the High Queen might send men from her Wizards’ Legion to aid the nobles, and they would call a firestorm of elemental magic upon the Rebels’ heads.

  Knowing Rogomil, he would escape long before that.

  Why seize the square, then? Why hold the Capitol? Rogomil was a lot of things, most of them bad, but he wasn’t an idiot and he wasn’t suicidal. If he was sticking around, he would have a good reason, or at least a reason that made sense.

  I tried to think it through. The Rebels wanted to overthrow the High Queen and restore self-rule to humanity. So how would assassinating a frost giant Jarl help that? The frost giants had been enemies of the High Queen for centuries. Except now the rebel Archons on the Elven homeworld had turned on the frost giants, and so the frost giants had come to ally with the High Queen against her rebellious former subjects. I had heard that the Archons attempted to work with Rebel cells here on Earth. If Rogomil assassinated Rimethur while he was under the High Queen’s protection, that would be a grievous insult to the frost giant Great King, and he might break off his alliance with the High Queen, or even throw his support with the Archons.

  So that meant Rogomil’s entire reason for coming to Madison was to assassinate Rimethur and embarrass the High Queen.

  Which in turn meant that the only possible reason that Rogomil had blockaded the Capitol…was that Rimethur was still inside the Capitol.

  That made sense. The Jarl and his guards would be the veterans of many battles both in the Shadowlands and upon other worlds, and they had been standing near the doors to the Capitol. When they came under fire, the Capitol was the logical place for the frost giants to shelter, and they would need only hold out until the Elven nobles arrived to smash the Rebels.

  And with that thought, relief flooded through me.

  I knew exactly what I had to do.

  Namely, nothing.

  I just had to wait. Sooner or later the Elven nobles and Homeland Security would drive out the Rebels and rescue Rimethur from the Capitol. All I had to do was make myself unobtrusive and follow Rimethur when he emerged from the siege. Madison would be on high alert as the Inquisition hunted down Rogomil and anyone who had helped him, and in that chaos, I could get close to the Jarl, steal the amulet, and escape back to Morvilind.

  I wouldn’t even have to go back to Grayhold. The Knight might be powerful, but he wasn’t powerful enough to reach outside of his demesne. If I chose, I could never return to Grayhold. The Knight had given me that enspelled bracelet, but I didn’t owe him anything.

  And I just had to leave Alexandra to rot.

  No one would ever know what had happened to her. Rogomil’s damned bombs had probably killed a lot of people, and Alexandra would be one more victim. The whole thing would be hushed up, and the Inquisition would make sure that anyone discussing it over the Internet would receive a stern warning and then a swift disappearance if they persisted. If I abandoned Alexandra and never returned to Grayhold, I had a far better chance of getting out of this mess clean.

  For a moment, I considered doing just that.

  Look, I’m not a good person. Maybe I never have been. Or Morvilind never gave me a chance to become one. I’ve done a lot of bad things. I’ve stolen and I’ve killed. I lie constantly and effortlessly, and I have never told the truth to Russell and James and Lucy, and they were probably the only three people I cared about in the world.

  Maybe that’s why I got annoyed when the Marneys invited me to church with them. The preacher always talked about the forgiveness of sins, and I had a lot of sins behind me. I didn’t want to be reminded of them.

  What was one more? What did I owe Alexandra? Granted, I had gotten her imprisoned in Grayhold, but if I hadn’t taken her to the Shadowlands she would have been killed in one of the explosions. She worked for Duke Carothrace, and might well turn me over to the Inquisition. She had no problem using the Duke’s slaves in her work. And she was kind to everyone she met, even the slaves, and teared up when she talked about her husband, and…

  I closed my eyes and sighed, remembering the contempt that had flashed over the Knight’s face when he talked about how I had almost killed Alexandra.

  “Damn it,” I muttered, “damn it, damn it, damn it.” I stared at the concrete wall for a moment, and then kicked it in sheer frustration. “Damn it.”

  I couldn’t do it. I knew, deep in my bones, that if I got the amulet I would return to Grayhold for Alexandra. I am not a good person, not even a little…but I suck at being ruthless when necessary.

  Maybe it was why I was always in so much trouble.

  Another distant burst of gunfire snapped me out of my reverie. It would be a grimly amusing death if I was gunned down while agonizing over a moral dilemma. First, I had to get that amulet away from Rimethur. Then I could worry about Alexandra.

  I started down the alley. I needed to find a place with a good view of the Capitol. A rooftop? No, that would be too exposed to bullets, and if Homeland Security sent in helicopters, someone might spot me. An upper-story window overlooking the square ought to serve. I could watch for Rimethur’s return, and if anyone stumbled upon me, I could Cloak until they passed by. I would just have to wait until Rimethur emerged from the Capitol.

  Or until the Duke’s men-at-arms carried out the Jarl’s corpse.

  Either way, I was taking the Ringbyrne Amulet.

  I decided to break into the bank and climb to its top floor. From the offices on the top level I would have a good view of the Capitol’s front steps, and likely anyone still in the bank had fled once the shooting and the explosions had started. Maybe I could even find some food to steal. I hadn’t eaten anything today, and after my magical and physical exertions in the Shadowlands, some food would be welcome.

  A turned a corner and froze.

  Four men in Homeland Security uniforms stood before the bank’s back door, pistols in hand. Before I could react, they all turned, leveling their weapons. I froze, raising my hands and cursing my inattention. I didn’t dare use a spell. I might be able to Cloak or Mask myself, but there were four pistols, and it would only take one bullet in the right place to finish me. If they were Homeland Security, I could probably bluff my way past them.

  If they were disguised Rebels…

  “Freeze!” snapped one of the officers.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I said, letting the words come out fast and hysterical. “Please, please, don’t shoot, there was an explosion, and all these men started shooting, and…”

  “Wait,” said one of the officers in a cold, flat voice. “It’s her.”

  Wait. They knew me?

  Then I recognized the officer. He was the middle-aged man who had been manning the checkpoint, the one I thought I had recognized. After seeing Rogomil, I could finally recalled the screener's name. His name was…Anton, I thought, and I had seen him a few times when Rogomil had been meeting with Nicholas Connor.

  “You’re right, Anton,” said another Rebel. “It is her. Matches the description. Brown hair, gray eyes, about five foot three…”

  “Katrina Stoker,” said Anton. I tried not to flinch. That had been the name I had used when I had been with Nicholas. Thank God I had possessed the wit not to use my real name, despite my infatuation with him. “It’s been a long time since Los Angeles.”

  “Only two years,” I said. “Not that long.” I had one advantage. Anton didn’t know that I could use magic. I had never told Nicholas about my magical abilities, had never used magic in front of him or his friends. As far as Nicholas and his Rebel cell
had been concerned, I was just a very skilled jewel thief.

  “You killed good men in Los Angeles,” said Anton. Even through his sunglasses, I felt his glare.

  I shrugged. “They killed themselves. Hey, you know what? If you go around trying to murder innocent people, sooner or later you’re going to get in trouble.”

  “They were not innocents,” said Anton. “There are those for the Revolution, and those against the Revolution. By not being for the Revolution, they were against us, and…”

  “That’s great logic,” I said. “Chases its own tail like a drunk dog.”

  “You should watch your tongue,” said Anton.

  “Why?” I said. “Sergei told you to bring me alive and unharmed if you found me, didn’t he? Else you would have just shot me dead here and now.”

  “You had better pray that Commander Rogomil does not give you to us when he is finished with you,” said Anton. He jerked his head, and two of the Rebels started forward, pistols still leveled at me. “Else I shall take great pleasure in making you scream.”

  “I bet you would,” I said, keeping the fear out of my voice and face. “Commander Rogomil now, is it? I thought he have promoted himself to High General or Grand Admiral or Supreme Poobah or something.”

  One of the Rebels snickered. Anton shot a glare at him, and the Rebel shut up.

  The four men led me to the back of the sandwich shop next to the bank. The back door had been kicked open, and we walked through a small kitchen and into the shop proper. Various meats and vegetables lay underneath a sneeze guard on the counter, and a dozen Rebels stood at the windows, peering through the shutters. A half-dozen more Rebels in Homeland Security uniforms waited by the door, all of them holding submachine guns of varying types.

  Sergei Rogomil waited in their midst, scowling. He was a big man, over six feet, and had to weigh at least two hundred and fifty pounds. Very little of the weight was fat, and his arms bulged against the sleeves of his colonel’s uniform.

  He turned as we approached, and his cold, dead black eyes considered me without blinking.