Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black) (16 page)

that was mostly full of wagons and improvised shelters. There were campfires

everywhere, surrounded by clumps of half-frozen refugees. I picked out a few

soldiers here and there as we walked, but no one who looked like an officer.

The main gates of the keep were closed, but a smaller door set into one of

them stood open and unguarded. Inside was a small entryway, leading into a

fairly large hall. Long wooden tables and chairs were stacked against the

walls, but the middle of the room was currently clear and mostly empty. A few

men in better armor than the regular soldiers stood clustered around a throne at

the far end of the room, apparently in the middle of a discussion. A gaggle of

servants surrounded them, rushing here and there on various errands or just

standing ready near their masters.

There was a stir as we entered, and our escort took us right up to the

throne as the men eyed us curiously.

“Milord Baron? This here’s Daniel the Black, a wandering adept. He’s

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responsible for the commotion down at the docks. Rode in on some kinda giant

stone horse with a bunch of refugees, and some more of those cowards from

the 5th Margold.”

Baron Stein was a heavyset man of middle age, with the look of a former

athlete starting to go soft around the middle. He scowled at me like he’d caught

me pissing in his cereal. Then his gaze wandered to the girls, and fixed

covetously on Avilla.

“Damned wizards, always causing trouble,” he growled. “As if we don’t

have enough mouths to feed already. I suppose you think I’m going to hire

you?”

I hid my annoyance, and just raised an eyebrow. “I can do any number of

useful-”

“Spare me the sales pitch. We’ll find a cot for you, but there’s no room

for the baggage. Get rid of the peasants, and keep that witchy-looking bitch on

a tight leash or I’ll hang you both. Erica, take the blonde upstairs and get her

cleaned up. I’ll see if she’s a decent fuck tonight.”

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Chapter 7

“Like hell you will,” I growled. “Avilla is mine, and I’ll kill any man

who touches her. If this is how you do things in this shithole we’re leaving.”

I threw up a force wall around my whole party, not trusting these damned

savages not to rush us. But the Baron just laughed.

“Finally, a man with some balls! What can you do that isn’t a parlor trick,

then?”

I considered him for a long moment before answering.

“I can make heat without fuel, heal mortal wounds, raise fortifications and

kill giants in single combat,” I said evenly. “What does your settlement have to

offer me?”

“Food, gold and someone to stand guard while you sleep,” he answered

immediately. “How long to raise the town wall enough to stand off giants?”

“Frost giants? That would take a forty foot curtain wall, minimum, with a

thick earth fill or enough buttressing so they can’t just knock it over. About a

week for that, and then we’d need to come up with something to kill them

with.”

He nodded sternly. “That’ll do. I’ll pay twenty crowns for the wall, and

find a room for you in the keep until it’s done. Deal?”

“Make it twenty-five. You won’t find another wizard who can do that.”

“Done. Someone find this man a room. Get started today on it – I don’t

like the reports I’m getting from my scouts.”

I held my silence as we were led upstairs, and servants hurriedly

removed someone’s belongings from a modest third-floor room with an arrow

slit for a window. As they left I turned to the girls, noting their shocked and

strained expressions.

Then I shut the heavy wooden door, and barred it.

“Avilla-” I began, only to be interrupted when she threw herself into my

arms.

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“Thank you, Daniel!”

Well, no need to apologize for talking about her like that, apparently. I’d

been a little shocked at the surge of possessiveness the Baron’s pronouncement

had evoked, but if she didn’t object I wasn’t going to worry about it right now.

“No problem, Avilla. I’m not going to let some random asshole kidnap

and rape you no matter how important he thinks he is.”

She hid her face against my chest and nodded. “Thank you. What are we

going to do?”

“We’re not staying here, that’s for damned sure. I don’t care if he was

serious or just testing me, anyone who thinks like that can’t be trusted to lead a

settlement in a crisis. But we can’t leave right away. We need money and

supplies before we can move on, and I need to do a lot more enchantment

work.”

“I’ll go ahead and give him his wall,” I decided. “That gives us a week to

get ready, and then we can move on after I get paid. Or after I take it out of his

hide if he tries to cheat me.”

Cerise nodded. “That works. But I don’t trust this place.”

“Neither do I,” I agreed. “Alright, from now on no one goes anywhere

alone. Look out for each other, and get my attention if there’s a problem.

Cerise, honest evaluation. How well can you fight soldiers?”

The young witch considered that. “I’m not completely sure. I can move

faster than normal people, and my curses go right through armor. But those guys

are a lot stronger than I am, and I don’t have anything like your wards. Best

guess? As long as I take them off guard I can probably handle two or three

soldiers at once, but that’s about my limit.”

“Alright, we can work with that. Beri, you said you have an uncle in the

town guard? I need you to get in touch with him, find out his impression of the

Baron and get an idea what’s been going on lately in town, and let him know

I’m looking to hire a half-dozen good fighters. Find out where Captain Rain is

set up too. It doesn’t sound like he’s going to get a good reception, so we may

be able to work with him. Cerise, can you go with her?”

She looked at Avilla, who nodded. “I’ll be fine, love. I’m upset, but not

hurt.”

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“Alright, then. Um, Daniel, soldiers usually aren’t shy about throwing

their weight around and knights are worse. If something happens, how much do

I need to let them get away with?”

I sighed. This was probably inevitable.

“Handle it like you did with the deserters. Try to keep your head down

and avoid trouble, and if that doesn’t work tell them you belong to a scary

wizard who’ll torture them to death in front of their families and sell their

souls to dark powers if they touch you. If that still isn’t enough, do whatever it

takes to get yourself and Beri back to me in one piece. I’ll back you up.”

“Got it. Thanks, Daniel.”

They left.

I went to the window, and spent a few minutes gazing out over the town as

I tried to organize my thoughts. I’d been hoping to take refuge here, but that

didn’t seem like a good idea now. The more I learned about this society, the

less impressed I was. Maybe if we found a bigger settlement, with several

different factions of nobles? Then they’d have to have some basic rules of

civilized behavior, at least when it came to dealing with each other. If we

could dress like nobles, and throw around some casual displays of magic…

yeah, that might work.

A disgusted sound from Avilla drew my attention.

“Ew. There are lice in this bed, and bedbugs too. Don’t these people

know how to wash their blankets?”

“Um, that’s a lot of work, Miss Avilla,” Tina said tentatively. “Especially

in winter, when you have to build a fire and heat the water first. Besides,

they’ll just hide in the mattress and come back out when we’re done.”

Right. The joys of medieval life. Though it was interesting that Avilla felt

the same way I did about it. I suppose being a hearth witch living in a magic

house made it easy to have higher standards.

“Hmph. I can drive them out, but they’ll just go into the walls if I can’t get

the rooms around us as well. I suppose we have to use chamber pots too, and I

can’t imagine how horrible the food will be. Daniel, are you sure we can’t just

camp out somewhere?”

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I started to tell her no and paused, with a glimmer of an idea building. I’d

already seen that working with stone could be amazingly fast, and it was still

early afternoon. I just might be able to swing this.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I told her. “Both of you bring your things, and

follow me.”

I threw the door open and headed back downstairs, headed for the great

hall. I found Sergeant Thomas and Captain Rain there, the latter still in a

stretcher, being chewed out by an irate baron.

“-have known better than to waste good coin on mercenaries.” Baron

Stein was saying. “A useless bunch of shopkeepers and tradesmen. If we

weren’t besieged I’d send you all packing… what?”

He rounded angrily on me.

“I’m going to get started on the wall,” I said blandly. “I’ll need a squad of

men to watch my back while I’m distracted with magic, since I’ll have to stand

outside the wall for most of this.”

He put his hands on his hips. “What, you think I have nothing better for my

men to do than babysit you?”

I shrugged. “How about the useless shopkeepers and tradesmen? All they

need to do is keep watch and sound an alarm if something tries to sneak up on

me.”

“Fine,” he growled. “Keep them out of my sight, and maybe I’ll forget to

wonder why I’m paying them.”

“Very well, Baron. By your leave, then.”

I nodded, and turned to go. The little group of soldiers followed, and I

paused in the courtyard outside the keep.

“I don’t suppose you’re interested in a more reasonable employer?” I

asked.

“I don’t think that would go over well,” Captain Rain replied glumly.

“Besides, I didn’t see any bags full of gold in your luggage.”

“A few days of selling magic items will change that,” I pointed out. “Just

think about it. If you want to make it home I’m probably your best bet. In the

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meantime I’ve got a construction project to start on.”

I had him send a man back to my room to wait on Beri and Cerise, to let

them know where to find me. Then I took four more as guards, and headed back

to the docks.

I’d noticed before that the town wall didn’t actually go all the way down

to the waterline. Instead the low mound most of the town was built on ended

about twenty yards from the river, and the wall followed the top of the mound.

I figured that was probably because the architects had wanted the wall to

completely enclose the town, but had to leave the actual shoreline clear for

docks and what looked like a small boatyard. The gap was small enough that

archers on the wall could cover the whole area during the day, but it would be

easy enough for monsters to slip in at night and attack the dockside district.

It also left me a conveniently situated stretch of unclaimed land.

I paced off the distance from the corner of the wall to the river, thinking it

through. Upgrading the existing defenses would actually be more trouble than

working from scratch, so I started my work fifteen paces out from the line of

the town wall.

First I dug a hole down to bedrock, which turned out to be about twenty

feet down here. Then I started conjuring stone at the bottom of the hole. I had to

be careful not to do too much at once, but I found that a steady flow of a couple

dozen cubic feet per second was just within the power budget of my new

amulet. Hard-packed earth was several times easier, which was a simple way

to fill the space that wasn’t going to be load-bearing. Soon I was back above

ground level, and working my way out toward the river.

Things got tricky there, since I wanted my work to project well out into

the water but I needed to be fairly close to the section I was working on. I

solved that by dropping rocks and dirt through the ice and fusing it together to

make a cofferdam, then scooping the water out with telekinesis. That took most

of an hour, but gave me a relatively dry hole where I could excavate and then

build back up with stone.

I built up a solid circular foundation forty feet across, about half of it

projecting into the river. Ten feet above the waterline I turned that into a tower

instead of just a solid mass of rock and earth, which got a little tricky. Stone

was my only construction material, and it doesn’t have the tensile strength to

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support long horizontal surfaces. I ended up putting a big stone column with a

spiral staircase around it at the middle of the tower, and each floor was

basically one big doughnut-shaped room with an arched ceiling. After some

thought I added four internal walls, each a good four feet thick, to break up the