The Mages' Winter of Death: The Healers of Glastamear: Volume Two (13 page)

Chapter 19

That night, Michael took his eagle form and searched using his dwarfish earth senses for a suitable cave. First, he flew over Temple Square to see the number of bodies that needed to be buried. He couldn’t count the number; it was many thousands. He landed on the Perry’s Hand symbol above the main entrance of the temple and enchanted it with
quench fire magic
. There would be no more fire magic in the city of Briarton.

After the enchantment, Michael flew widening circles around the city. When he sensed a dry cave less than a thousand paces from the city’s walls and about ten paces below ground, he used the dwarfish spell
excavate
to prepare it. He made a steeply sloping shaft from ground level down to the largest room in the cave system. The massive underground space would be able to hold all the bodies from the square with a lot of room to spare. When he went down into the massive underground room, he sealed all the other passages using the dwarfish spell
excavate
so that the bodies could not contaminate the city’s ground water and the bodies would never be disturbed by anyone searching through the cave network once he sealed it. He wanted no chance of the white pneumonia returning in the distant future from an accidental exposure.

Once the burial cave was ready, he flew back to the Unicorn Steed and slept for the rest of the night. In the morning, he walked to Sir Gregory’s house with Jim and the Oxbow brothers. All six of them were in full armor with their swords and crossbows at the ready because lawlessness had taken hold in the streets of the desperate city. They used their snowshoes because the streets were still two paces deep in snow in most of the city.

At Sir Gregory’s huge home and business compound, the guards expected them. Jim and the Oxbow brothers were taken to the kitchen for breakfast, and Michael was asked to join Sir Gregory, his wife Lady Breen, and their three oldest children in their dining room. Lady Breen was a striking flaxen-haired beauty; the three children shared her good looks. They were ages ten, eight, and six.

With the children at the table, Michael decided not to discuss the burial plans or impact of the epidemic on the city. Instead he told of the warmth of the southernmost province even in winter. He delighted the children with his account of the first masked ball of the season, the beauties of the Great Temple of Southport, and the tall tower on the temple grounds called The Light of Perry, which served as a lighthouse visible from far at sea. He also told the tale of seeing the enormous mastodons on this trip from Snowport and being followed by great wolves. He described the fun of a sleigh ride with a four snow-elk team across newly fallen snow, charging through the night at the speed of a galloping horse. After breakfast, Sir Gregory invited Michael to his office to discuss the food supplies and how they should be distributed.

Sir Gregory began by saying, “Michael my friend, thank you for the joy you gave my children. It’s been a bleak winter for them, and I rejoiced seeing the smiles you brought to their faces. Do you have children; you’re very good with them.”

“My wife, Diana, is pregnant with our first. I hope to be back in Southport for the birth. You have become the leader of the province since the governor died, but I’m not certain that congratulations are in order. It must be a terrible burden.”

“It’s not a role I ever wanted. My wife is well connected with the royal family, and she got me the appointment as the King’s Agent. I had begun to feel the job of acting governor was hopeless until you arrived at our gates yesterday. Thanks be to Holy Perry for your gift of food.”

“High Priest Simon and Governor Talton asked that the food be freely distributed based on the number of people in each household.”

“It will be done exactly as they wish. I have no desire to try and profit from this horrible winter. I will begin the distribution this afternoon.”

“With each gift of food, I’d like one of the apothecaries that came with me to distribute the white pneumonia cure. We need to break this epidemic. We must also bury our dead. I would like to begin today to clear the Temple Square. Are you in contact with High Priest Wheaton?”

“No, I last spoke with the high priest when he received the order to recall all knights and priests and lock the temple compound. He didn’t like the idea, but it was a direct command from the Holy Son. I have tried sending messengers to the temple walls, but since the priests locked the gates, no one can get near the compound’s walls without a fireball tossed their way to discourage discourse. The citizens now hate the clergy for their abandonment and for hording food while the town faced starvation. Last month before this enormous snowfall blocked the streets, a general riot broke out and the governor was murdered and his home ransacked. Since then, at least half the population has fled the city, and no street is safe for me without a guard detachment. However, the last two storms have left so much snow in the streets, that things are quieter because many residents’ doors are blocked by snow.”

“So the knight protectors here can still cast fireballs?” Michael asked.

“Yes, certainly. Why do you ask?”

“In other towns where the clergy has abandoned the citizens, Holy Perry has withdrawn his blessing. That happened in Hearthshire Town, Broken Arrow, Snowport, and other places. The temple in Hearthshire Town had to be rededicated by High Priest Carson to remove the taint and allow the sacrament of Perry’s Fire.”

“I’ll try another messenger today. If the high priest will come to the wall, I’ll let him know that you’ve returned with a huge food shipment.”

“I’m sure you know that the bodies in the Temple Square must be buried. I have three sleighs here in town that can move even in this deep snow. I’d like you to provide a detachment of city guards to load and unload them. I know of a nearby cave we can use for a common burial. Are there any priests not inside of the temple compound? I’d like the rituals for the dead as part of this mass burial.”

“I have three priests here in my house. They are Perry’s shrine attendants from small towns who arrived too late to enter the temple compound. I’ve kept them here because there is so much anger that they feared to be seen in their brown robes in the streets of Briarton. What a sorry state the church is in if these ordinary small-town priests have lost the goodwill of nearly everyone.”

“Assisting with the burials should improve their image. I plan to begin this morning if you agree.”

Sir Gregory called for an aide and sent him to bring the priests. A few minutes later, they entered. None were fire mages, and all wore the brown robes of the lowest level priests.

Michael asked, “Good men, are you willing to assist in burying the dead. There are thousands of bodies in Temple Square that will need the reincarnation blessing.”

They all agreed. Sir Gregory offered to loan them heavy coats to protect them from the bitter cold of the burial site, and all three of them walked with Michael and his friends to get the three sleighs, which they drove to Temple Square. A detachment of city guards was waiting, and they loaded bodies onto the sleighs. Michael and his friends took the first load to the burial cave. The priest blessed the location making it an official cemetery. They blessed each of the bodies, and a detachment of city guards dropped the body down the shaft that Michael had formed. For a week Michael and his group continued this burial routine from the winter darkness of early morning until after the night’s return. They also buried all the bodies they found in the streets or that people brought out to the sleighs as they drove through town.

During that exhausting week, Lady Marsha set up the first apothecary shop in the partially finished Street of Dreams shopping area that Michael and Sir Gregory owned. They sold the cure for one crown to those who could afford it and gave it away to those who could not. Soon lines formed outside the store before dawn, and the four apothecaries were busy all day every day.

By the tenth day, the epidemic was finally broken within the city, and the few new cases that showed up were rapidly cured. After the bodies from the square and streets were buried, Lady Marsha converted two of the sleighs to traveling apothecary shops to take the cure to the rest of the province. During this period, the city guards went from house to house to inform people of the free food at the common warehouse and the cure available at the Street of Dreams shopping area. Where people had been snowed in because the huge drifts blocked their doorway, the guards shoveled the snow away and freed them. The city guards also cleared the main streets for wagon or horse travel. These actions made both Sir Gregory and Michael into local heroes. Everywhere Michael or his friends walked, their armor was recognized, and they were greeted cheerfully.

By the end of the week, the city was in much better shape, but the temple compound was still closed, and the lights of Perry’s fire were not seen in the colorful windows of the Great Temple of Briarton. The priests and knights had lost their fire magic. Some of them came to the walls to beg for coal or firewood to warm their rooms.

The population knew that the three rural priests had done the ritual of the dead over the bodies before they were buried in a mass grave, and those three priests were now welcome guests in the city. However, the priests and knight protectors from the temple remained afraid to venture onto the streets because of the anger of the local citizens. Sir Gregory arranged for a shipment of coal and dried foods to be delivered to the temple gates so that the priests could pull the wagon into the compound when the square was empty at night. Someone involved in the preparation or in the movement of the supplies wanted revenge upon the residents of the temple compound. Unbeknownst to Sir Gregory, the body of a white pneumonia victim was buried under the coal.

Since the situation seemed stable in Briarton, Michael was determined to head north to Crow Crossroads, and from there, find the remote valley where the children with healing magic were being held. He hoped that he and his friends could find some way to free them before spring released the iron grip of the winter of death. High in the mountains and that far north, the freezing temperatures would be death to anyone without heat from fire magic or a stable source of coal or firewood. He might not be able to use
submerge fire magic
without being murderer to all within the castle. He and his friends had to find another way, but the less time the church had to indoctrinate the young healers the better.

He contacted Diana and discussed the mission that would take his friends and him farther north. Diana missed him greatly, but she was in full support of a mission to rescue the children with healing magic. They both thought of it as one of their highest priorities, and it must be done before the church could further indoctrinate the abducted children.

“Michael, I know you will face many dangers. It’s your destiny, but know that I love you and want you back in Southport as soon as possible.”

Chapter 20

A heavy snow was falling when Michael met with Sir Gregory the morning of his departure.

“Michael, I know you want to be home in Southport before your child is born, but I could really use your help in restoring Briarton. If you would consider staying, I would appoint you temporarily as the vice governor. There is more than I can possibly do to set this province right again. It’s the breadbasket of Glastamear, but I fear we’ve lost so many farmers, the harvests will be poor for years and that will hurt the whole kingdom. Min Hollow depends on us for all of its food because there is no useful land for farming that high in the Mountains of Min.”

“Thank you for the expression of confidence Sir Gregory, but I have many other duties. I’m still acting for Governor Talton in managing his food relief, and like you, I have business interests that must be looked after.”

“Our partnership on the Street of Dreams project should be well received when we restart construction in the spring, but I’m afraid there will be no demand for more housing because of the many deaths. The back part of the Briarton Hospital property will probably not be in demand for many years.”

That was fine with Michael since he was secretly saving the property to rebuild the hospital someday. They talked of their business partnership for an hour before Michael departed.

Michael and his five friends piled into the remaining sleigh. Gregory Oxbow drove the snow-elk. He had a real affinity for them, and the elk were excited to be off with only the weight of the six men and their supplies rather than the weight of thirty-five dead and frozen bodies or the loads of firewood they normally hauled in winter. Since only his friends were along, Michael enchanted the sleigh with the fire mage spell of
warm blanket
as soon as they were out of range of the enchantment that prevented fire magic in Briarton. The newly fallen snow made the ride smooth and the spell made it comfortable. They talked of their trip as they sped along, and Michael told Jim and the Oxbow brothers about the isolated castle that he’d seen in his nighttime flight over a remote valley located near where the White Mountains and Mountains of Min joined.

When they stopped for the night, Michael decided to try a new spell that he’d learned from the fairies of Fay Woods but never used. He cleared a twenty paces circle of man-deep snow from a field of winter wheat using the dwarfish spell
excavate.
He warmed the area with
winter blanket
until the ground was no longer frozen and the stubble of the last wheat crop was visible in the melted water. He sat on a wolf skin blanket in the middle of the warm circle and began one of the most difficult casts known to the Fairy Folk,
speed crops
. He repeated the ancient Elfish words of the spell as if a chant. Almost imperceptibly the first green shoots began to appear while his friends watched in wonder. An hour later at twilight, the Fairy Lights of the far north appeared as red and green streaks crossed the starlight, but still he chanted the Elfish words. Finally, the grain was ripe. Michael led the shaggy white snow-elk to that spot to graze on ripened wheat while the men slept in the warmth of the enchanted sleigh.

The next day they continued their travel north. Michael was sitting next to his friend Jim when Jim said, “Michael, you are truly the one of Grifton’s promise. I thought I would never see the fairy circles of myth. I assumed they were merely tales from the Legend Times, yet a single human produced one in a few hours last night. I think there is nothing you can’t do.”

“Alas, I am no hero of myth, but the same friend you’ve known for years, Jim. I do the best I can, but I can be killed like any man. It might be another two thousand years before another man with elfish manna is born in Glastamear, and Gripton’s Promise could be delayed until then. The odds of my completing all of my tasks are impossibly long, but I remain who I am. Just a friend with a few extra magic spells.”

Jim nodded, but his expression was doubtful. “What of this latest quest to free the abducted children? You haven’t spent much time describing our tasks, but we are all very much in favor of getting those children to safety. We found out what a monster like Toby can do.”

Toby was the church’s first attempt to make a healer priest. The young boy had been taken at a very early age, four years before the pogrom against the Healers’ Guild began. The church had turned him into a monster that had participated in and even enjoyed the tortures endured by the Oxbow brothers when they were captives in Broken Arrow. Instead of using healing magic to eliminate pain, he had the skill of using it to enhance pain and to keep the victims from passing out. The friends were all determined to stop the creation of any more Toby-like monsters.

“At this point, I don’t have a plan. We’ll look for a weakness when we find the castle in the snow of that high mountain valley. There must be some way of getting people and supplies into the castle even though I could see no entrance from the air.”

The friends enjoyed their three-day ride to Crow Crossroad. They took turns driving the sleigh while the others stayed in back and told jokes and stories. Each night Michael contacted Diana through mage thought-talk. She was busy with the leasing of apartments in their Southport building and managing their other business interests. It turned out Diana had an excellent head for business, and she was assisted by good advice from Timothy and his wife Carolyn. Since she was also a healer, she could easily dispel the morning sickness and other discomforts from her pregnancy with twin girls.

They reached the town of Crow Crossroad on the fourth day. It was a tiny village with about a dozen houses, but a rather large inn. The Crow’s Nest Inn catered to the warm weather travelers who were going to Glastamear’s largest city of Min Hollow, which was both the seat of government containing the palace of the king as well as the center of the Church of Perry Ascendant. Every winter, deep snows in the Mountains of Min made reaching the capital city impossible, and the inn would have very few guests until the snow melted in late spring.

The innkeeper seemed thrilled to see six travelers, and Michael negotiated a good rate for three rooms with meals. He planned to spend two nights at the inn. Each night he would sneak out and convert to an eagle to search the mountains for a route to the castle where the young healers were held. He also wanted to rest the snow-elk before attempting the arduous trip into the higher mountains. At dinner Michael and his friends were joking and telling stories when the innkeeper approached to refill their mugs with hot cider.

Michael asked, “Is there any news at all from the capital? The epidemic has been brutal this winter in the rest of the country, but I heard that they sealed the gates to Min Hollow early this year to stop the spread of the white pneumonia into the city.”

“Do you know the route into the city?”

Michael explained that none of them had ever been to the city.

“The Castle Gateway is a huge stone structure built directly over the roadway on this side of the Valley of Avalanches and Great Tunnel of Sacred Passage. The fortress is manned all winter, and from its towers, the guards can see far into the mountains, although not directly into the city. Occasionally, the guards come to Crow Crossing for supplies since they have no route left into the city after the avalanches of winter begin. They keep two sleighs pulled by snow-elk for these supply trips.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of the two great castles that guard the roadway and of the tunnel that connects them through the Mountain of Perry’s Hope. Do these guards know what has happened?”

“From their highest tower, they can see a discoloration in the snows in a valley below the city’s walls. By looking through their long-glass, they think it is thousands of bodies that have been tossed over the walls to roll down into the valley. The guards are convinced the epidemic is in full force in the great city.” He made the sign of Perry, turned, and walked back towards the kitchen to get a bowl of grilled winter vegetables for their table.

That night, Michael flew in his eagle form directly to the valley of the fortress he thought of as Ice Castle where the healer children were imprisoned. He perched on a ledge over the valley and tried to understand exactly what he was seeing. He used
perfect recall
to sort through hundreds of books he had read during his four years as an apprentice.

When he came to the thousand-year-old text
Adventures in the Land of Ice,
he realized what this valley really was. Before reading this book, Michael had never heard the words ice river or even thought of ice as moving downhill.  The author used that term to describe giant slowly moving sheets of ice that progressed down from the White Mountains into the Ice Sea. The valley with the castle was located above the points at which two giant ice rivers converged, leaving a sharp point of rock on which this castle had been built. Michael knew that any attempt to travel across these ice rivers was usually fatal as a result of giant fishers and fractures in the deep ice, which were invisible because they were often covered with freshly fallen snow.

Michael spent hours perched above the Valley of Ice thinking about other things that he’d read in William’s library, probably the largest library outside of the city of Min Hollow. There were stories from a thousand years ago of coconut groves in Hearthshire Province and accounts of winter travel to Min Hollow. There were Legend Times stories of larger towns in the White Plains than exist now, as if the climate was warm enough to support more agriculture in the north two thousand years earlier.

Michael had always assumed that some winters were colder than others, but that the variation was random. He now realized there was a trend. It was colder now than in the Legend Times and colder than the times of the fables of monkeys in Southport and coconuts in Hearthshire. There was change, but it was so slow that humans with their short lives didn’t notice. Michael had no clue as to why. He decided to discuss this theory with Obert, chief shaman of the naiad. Obert would have lived through this change and would know of it first hand.

It was late in the afternoon when Michael returned to the Crow’s Nest Inn. He was anxious to discuss his theory with Jim and the Oxbow brothers.

Chapter 21

Michael had explained his assumptions about the climate getting colder at dinner, and Gregory asked, “If this far fetched story is true, how does it help us get into the Ice Castle?”

“In the accounts of his travels, the author described a cave dug by water melting during the summer. Some of the winter’s snowfall always melts and runs down through the fissures where it creates a passage through the ice and rocks to flow out and form rivers. The author claims to have traveled for thousands of paces through one of these caves created by an underground river simply by walking in the gravel alongside the water. In the winter he assumed the river would be frozen and he could have walked directly on the ice.”

Jim said, “And you plan to find the correct river so we can all just walk to the castle underground?”

Michael smiled and replied, “I’ve learned a thing or two from the dwarves. I can see into the ground in a sort of shadow picture of what lies below. If it’s there, I can find it.”

Peter who was always the practical one said, “We just walk in, fight off forty knight protectors, and dance away with eighteen children from one of the most remote and unforgiving places on the planet Home. Michael, you said there are forty knight protectors; there’re only five of us and only Jim is really a master with a sword. You, my friend, need a better plan.”

Michael knew Peter was correct. “I’m sorry I don’t have all the answers yet. I’m going back to Ice Castle tonight to see if I can find the tunnel and follow it to where it reaches the surface. If I find the entrance, I’ll explore inside the tunnel but probably not try and enter the castle itself. I’ve gotten good at sneaking around, and I will go into the castle if the risks are low enough.”

Jacob asked, “I haven’t seen a single bird since we arrived. Michael you’ve read more books than the rest of us combined. Why is this town Crow Crossing and this inn The Crow’s Nest? Does that prove it was once warmer here and there were more birds?”

Michael smiled. “It’s not very good proof because the crows in the name are not actual birds. Pilgrimage trips to the Most Holy Shrine where Perry was born began at least eighteen centuries ago. Because the pilgrims always wore black, the common people began to call them crows in those ancient times. It’s not common to use that term nowadays, but it’s mentioned in many of the history books. For example,
The Twelve Crows of Swine Home
is about a pilgrimage about six hundred years ago from a small town in the southern Barrier Mountains to the holy shrine. It was a violent time of civil war, and all but the author perished on the journey by violence or from the cold. We’re staying in an inn that was designed to hold pilgrims traveling to the shrine; the inn was never a nest for the other type of crow. In fact only ravens live this far north. I’ve seen them soaring over the Mountains of Min several times.”

After his nightly contact with Diana, Michael stripped and climbed out the window of the room he shared with Jim. After transforming to a Giant Ki Eagle, he flew directly to the fortress that he thought of as the Ice Castle.

He kept his invisibility spell in place because even eagles would be unlikely to fly around that remote valley of ice where there was no food. He flew lower and lower circles around the castle until he was gliding only a few paces above the ice. As he passed each level of the castle he counted the manna signs. There were still forty fire mages, one of which was extremely powerful like the high priests that he had met. He saw signs of eighteen healer children somewhere near the exact middle of the huge fortress about half way up the tallest tower.