The Monsters of Stephen Enchanter

by Natelson, D. J.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Tinkerfingers and Youngster fell into bickering, and neither mentioned bedazzlement again. Stephen himself had no desire to bring up the conversation. He concentrated on building snowmen.

  Stephen was soon deeply immersed in his work, and lost all track of time, and of his surroundings. It wasn’t until someone laughed particularly loudly that he remembered the company around him, and that he wasn’t laboring alone. It took him a moment to focus upon the scene, and when he did, it couldn’t have surprised him more. He had been working silently, away from the others; they had, at some point, become a jovial group, designing snowmen together, giving them details and artistic flurries and useless little additions. The companions remained productive—there must have been nearly a hundred snowmen already done—but they were lighter and happier than Stephen had seen them.

  It occurred to him that this was what the company was like when under the eyes of neither the Jolly Executioner nor his pet enchanter.

  Stephen turned hurriedly back to his work, lest the others notice him and become solemn and argumentative once more.

  The company worked until it had grown too dark and too cold to do anything but huddle by the fire and sip hot drinks. In the intervening hours, nearly two hundred snowmen had been packed and stood waiting, spread out over a radius of a sixth of a mile. Stephen had not enchanted a single one of them. Eleven hours remained and, although it was barely seven in the evening, Stephen lay down and went to sleep.

  When Stephen awoke, the waning moon was high in the sky. Stephen nodded to Craggy, who was on watch, and began the arduous task of temporarily enchanting two hundred snowmen. “I hope the monster isn’t far from here,” Stephen told one of them as he worked on it. “I don’t know how far you can hop without falling apart, and I don’t have the energy to reinforce you.” And, to another, “Not, mind, that I usually want monsters nearby.” And to a third, “In fact, it would be fine with me if monsters didn’t exist at all. Or fairies, for that matter. Or Jolly Executioners. Or mad villagers trying to kill me.” The snowmen, enchanted but not yet brought to animation with a final word, made no response.

  The enchantments Stephen performed were all of the most rudimentary sort. He spent no more than two minutes on any of the ones he himself hadn’t built, and barely five on those he had—his own elite guard, who would perform the most important task of guarding his person. Even working steadily and linking the enchantments together into one massive enchantment—and a separate linked enchantment for his personal guard—he hadn’t finished by the time the Jolly Executioner announced that it was six o’clock and time to go, and wasn’t the Enchanter done yet? The snowmen didn’t look lively to him.

  Stephen composed his face into an expression of benevolent mystery. No one could see it under his scarf, but it made him feel better. “Certainly I have finished,” he said, and placed the final magic in place to make it true. “I have one hundred fifty snowmen at my command—all that remains is a single word, which I shall not speak until it we are actually leaving.

  “We are leaving,” said the Jolly Executioner.

  Stephen nodded and spoke a single word that rattled branches but made no audible sound. One hundred forty snowmen—he had been exaggerating slightly—turned to him.

  The companions, who had been expecting this, barely jumped; but the horses, at suddenly finding themselves surrounded by living snowmen, panicked. Only Noble Steed, who had become used to the peculiar feel of her master’s magic, remained unflappable. Several of the company hurried to calm their horses.

  “Listen up, snowmen,” said Stephen. “Today we’re off to attack a vicious fire-breathing village-devouring beast out of folklore. You are going to sacrifice your lives to protect me—and, of course, the rest of this company—from death. You will go in waves, accosting the beast, drawing its fire. You will present yourselves as targets and, when you get the chance, throw yourselves down the beast’s gullet. Understood?”

  The snowmen rotated their round heads, exchanging wide-eyed glances. One, a particularly dumpy specimen hopped a step forward to address its master. “Nooooo,” it moaned. “Please, noooooo.”

  “I did not ask your opinion,” snapped Stephen. “Stand to attention.”

  “What a coward,” scoffed one of the snowmen. “Whining to the Master.”

  But the vast majority of the snowmen agreed with the first. They bowed and quavered with fear, and that fear infected all of their comrades who shared their magic. “Noooo, Master!” they begged. “Please, we are your faithful servants. Don’t send us to our deaths!” And, mostly, “Nooooooo!”

  Only the snowmen Stephen himself had built, beady-eyed and mouthless, did not complain. They stood alert and, when several of the snowmen tried to escape, herded them back.

  “You will not run away,” Stephen told the deserters sternly. “You will accompany me and do as I say.”

  The snowmen struggled against his words, but in the end they had no choice but to obey. They did, however, continue moaning.

  “What,” snarled the Jolly Executioner, “is going on? Why are they making that infernal racket?”

  “They’re afraid,” Stephen said grimly, “and some people took it upon themselves to give their snowmen mouths.”

  “Noooo . . .” moaned the snowmen. “Help us . . .”

  “Will they follow your orders?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then order them to be silent!”

  “Nooooo . . .” the snowmen moaned.

  Stephen clapped his hands twice. “Snowmen, be silent!”

  There was a brief moment of quiet before the snowmen began moaning again, pleading with Stephen for mercy, crushing in toward him. Stephen’s own snowmen were obliged to hold them back, lest they injure the master.

  “It didn’t work,” the Jolly Executioner observed.

  “Then you should have given me more warning. I only had time to put the crudest of enchantments on them—enchantments designed to control action, not words. I did not foresee the addition of mouths—and no, I can’t destroy the mouths without destroying the enchantment, and then I’d have to start from scratch. But loud snowmen will work as well as quiet—maybe better.” He turned to the snowmen. “Form orderly ranks nearby and do not move again without my command.”

  “Noooo . . .” groaned the snowmen, as they moved to obey.

  “I feel ill,” said Weakstomach. “This isn’t right. Why are they afraid?”

  Presumably, thought Stephen, because the people who made them were afraid, and I unwittingly channeled that foreign fear into their enchantment. And it’s not my fault; I didn’t have enough time; but I’m the one who’ll be blamed.

  “It’s bad luck to fight surrounded by cowards,” said Twitch.

  “Superstitious nonsense,” said Miss Ironfist. “We’re wasting time—the beast could already have awakened.

  “Worse,” said Stephen, “the enchantment is decaying. It’ll last a couple of hours, but not much more. We should hurry.”

  The Jolly Executioner had, presumably during his long disappearance the day before, located the Beast of Quag in a bowl-like depression less than a mile from camp. Walking alone in his traveling stride, Stephen could have made the trek in twenty minutes despite the deep snow.

  It took the company nearly two hours.

  The fault lay, predictably enough, with the lugubrious snowmen. They took enormous pleasuring in hopping into every shrub, tree, or companion who was—and sometimes was not—remotely in the way. Every time one tripped or lost a clump of snow or scrapped its side against a twig, it complained loudly to Stephen.

  “Master! I’m suffering! My innards are leaking!”

  “The sun burns me, Master! I’m in agony!”

  “No you’re not,” said Stephen, whose patience had long since evaporated. “You can’t feel pain.”

  “Don’t you love us, Master?”

  “How could you treat your faithful servants like
this?”

  And of course there was the ever-popular standby of “Nooooo . . .”

  “Enchanter!” the Jolly Executioner would yell. “Hurry up! And control your snowmen!”

  “They’re hopping, aren’t they?” Stephen would reply, breathless and harassed. “If I’d had more time, maybe I could have made something better—but I didn’t, did I?”

  Stephen had other problems. With each hop, the snowmen packed more snow onto their bottoms. Within a tenth of a mile, each was hopping on an extra six inches of snow; after two, they were tottering on clumped towers; after three, they were too heavy to move.

  “We’re stuck,” they moaned. “Release us, Master; we can be no help to you. Leave us in the glorious cold and let us die natural deaths in the spring.”

  “Not, I think,” said Youngster, “your best work. Look—there’s one I made—the one with the horns. Ugly, isn’t it?” Tinkerfingers had stayed behind to watch the horses—someone had to, and Tinkerfingers, Youngster gleefully informed Stephen, was the least useful in this sort of situation. “I tried to make it hideous.”

  “I especially dislike the mouth,” said Stephen. “Snowmen! You’re being ridiculous. Separate yourselves from the snow. You’re magic. It’s not that hard.”

  “We’re tired . . .”

  “You’re lazy cowards!”

  “We can’t help it . . .”

  “No, but you can obey me. Knock the snow off on low roots or stumps, and keep moving.”

  Three snowmen managed to dash themselves to bits on stumps, but the rest came grumblingly on.

  “Do you see my personal guard complaining?” Stephen asked them. “Do you? No!”

  “It’s not fair; they’re special. You love them better. Why couldn’t you have given us that much magic? We’re weak. Leave us.”

  “Don’t worry,” Youngster told them brightly. “We’ll be fighting the Beast of Quag soon enough, and then you’ll be able to end your miserable existences.”

  “Noooooo . . . .”

  “Enchanter! Get a move on—and shut up those snowmen. The beast will hear it.”

  “If there’s anything in the world that hasn’t already heard them,” Stephen muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “I said I can’t. If I’d had more time—”

  “Oh, stop whining,” said Miss Ironfist. “You’re as bad as the snowmen.”

  Youngster snickered.

  “I am not,” said Stephen, but he didn’t complain again.

  “I’m taking the rest of the company ahead,” the Jolly Executioner announced. “Twitch, Youngster, stay with him.”

  “Try to arrive before the monster’s dead,” Miss Ironfist added.

  “We will,” said Youngster. “We’re almost halfway there, after all. Hurry up, snowmen.”

  The snowmen did not hurry, but they did arrive eventually—most of them. Twenty or so had managed to become completely stuck, or had fallen apart, or had simply frozen in place, their meager magic exhausted. The rest arrived before the Beast of Quag was dead—indeed, before it had awoken.

  Stephen, Twitch, Youngster, and a hundred twenty whining snowmen stepped out onto the lip of an enormous bowl-shaped area, studded with trees not quite waist-height. The company had hacked a path through these trees to the center of the bowl, where a clearing stretched fifty feet across. In the very center of the clearing was a mound of snow and ice. Several members of the company were hacking at the ice with their swords. The enchanted weapons cut easily through the mound, but left enormous chunks of ice that none of them could lift away.

  Some people, Stephen thought, were simply incapable of thinking ahead.

  The snowmen spotted the mound, realized what it meant, and began moaning with renewed vigor.

  Warthog jogged toward them, waving. “The Jolly Executioner sent me,” he said. “Enchanter, we need the ice removed from around the beast so we can kill it. Send us some of your snowmen.”

  “My snowmen are made of snow,” said Stephen. “Snow is softer than ice.”

  “But they could lift away the dropped snow.”

  “Sure they could,” said Stephen. “If they had arms.” That wasn’t precisely true: several of the snowmen did have stick arms, but he hadn’t bothered to reinforce or animate them. That wasn’t part of the snowmen’s purpose.

  “Can’t you do something? At this rate, it’s going to wake up.”

  “Maybe it died in its snow cocoon; we could hope.”

  “We can hear it snoring. Can’t you melt the ice?”

  “If I were a battle-wizard. Which I’m not. Melt it yourself—light a fire on top of it. The beast’ll love that.”

  Stephen was being unhelpful, and he knew he was being unhelpful. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, he had enchanted far too many snowmen, he had listened to said snowmen moaning at him for the past two hours, and he wasn’t keen to attack random monsters in the first place. Helpfulness wasn’t the uppermost thing on his mind.

  Swishy jogged up to them. “The Jolly Executioner wants to know what’s taking so long,” he said. “He’s in a mood.”

  “He always is,” said Stephen.

  “No, he’s really in a mood. He wants you to get down there immediately and melt the ice.”

  “Tell him I can’t.”

  “He’s not going to like that.”

  “Then tell him he can—”

  Crack.

  Stephen jumped and one hundred twenty snowmen whimpered.

  “Withdraw!” the Jolly Executioner bellowed. “Enchanter!”

  Enormous quantities of snow and ice fell away as the thing inside shifted and stretched. It wasn’t awake yet, not quite; but it had felt the cold and something deep inside its brain had warmed.

  “Enchanter!”

  Stephen waved at the Jolly Executioner. “Snowmen—” he began, and cleared his throat. “Snowmen, attend.” He straightened, drawing the part of enchanter close around him. “Now is the time! You know your duty and your orders. On my mark, half of you—that half; don’t argue—will rush forward and protect the company from any initial flames. The rest of you—except my personal guard—will be in the second wave.”

  “Fools,” Twitch murmured under his breath, watching the retreating company. “If they had stayed close, the beast might have been slain before it had fully awoken.

  “Why don’t you go, then?” Swishy asked.

  “I was ordered to stay with the Enchanter,” Twitch replied, not in the least taken aback. “That is my duty. What is yours?”

  “Messenger,” said Swishy, and he and Warthog edged along the rim of the bowl toward the Jolly Executioner.

  It was just as well Twitch didn’t go running down to slay the waking beast. It might have been groggy and slow, but every move catapulted ice in random directions with enormous speed, and Twitch would probably have been killed before he reached the beast.

  “Snowmen,” Stephen said, “stay back until you can safely approach. Don’t die unnecessarily—defense of the company is necessary, defense of me doubly-so, randomly running into chunks of flying ice not at all.”

  For once, the snowmen did not protest an order.

  The last of the snow and ice finally fell away, and the Beast of Quag emerged. It was low to the ground, wide and flat, with a waving spine. It resembled nothing so much as a tailless stepped-on lizard. Needle-like hair covered its body, white as snow. The snowman nearest Stephen pretended to faint, and became stuck to the ground. Its comrades moaned.

  “Enchanter!”

  Stephen jumped. He spotted the Jolly Executioner waving at him.

  “Right, snowmen,” Stephen said. “Go protect people.”

  “Noooooo . . .” the snowmen moaned as they hopped forward, two or three to a companion, shielding them from the monster.

  The beast slunk forward, mouth in a perfect O, tongue flickering to taste the air, quivering with tension. When the first of the snowmen came too close it spun and a great gout of flame burst
from its mouth, vaporizing the snowman and the striplings on either side of it.

  The other snowmen stopped in their tracks and turned to flee, but Stephen’s command held true, and they could not help but stay in front of the companions, guarding them against the beast’s fire. “Nooooo . . .” they moaned—but moaned quietly, so as not to draw the beast’s attention.

  Not quietly enough. Faster than Stephen would have believed possible, the beast whirled and sent flame at every single one of the moaning snowmen. Not one had gotten within twenty feet of it, and not one of had survived.