Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology Page 12

You are not like me, Evening Wolf sang. He went on to observe, in precise ululating syllables, that he himself was a master wolf, proud and unconquerable, whereas Snow Wolf was a pale castrated dog that the pig-tenders used as a woman every ninth night.

  “The human creatures,” Snow Wolf continued, “they have legends of ice giants… in the shape of wolves. My ancestors are such. They run now in the sky, hunting the sun and the moon. You cannot expect… you cannot expect…”

  He was struck dumb by the enormity of the explanation he was trying to make.

  Evening Wolf interrupted, in fine voice, suggesting that it was not necessary for Snow Wolf to keep squeaking; it would be easy enough to locate him by the scent of his relaxed bowels.

  Snow Wolf made no retort to this, though Evening Wolf paused for him to make one. There was no point in talking anymore. The human in Snow Wolf felt weak, very weak. But all the time he was stronger and stronger.

  *~*~*~*

  Evening Wolf, weary of abusing his passive enemy, began to expound on his own virtues. He allowed that Snow Wolf might have stood high among such white dog-sheep as were native to Iceland. But he himself was a different breed. Descended in long line from the gigantic dire-wolves who reigned pre-eminent in Europe before it was known to humankind, Evening Wolf had many illustrious ancestors and he named a few of these to Snow Wolf and to the snowthick night sky.

  He told of his own heroic birth, during the collapse of Roman power in Central Europe. Those were good times, rich in blood, in action and in food. But the chaos simmered down to a long wasting anarchy–without war and its harvest of carrion, without peace and its rich preyable increase. Famine came, and after it plague. Humans and other cattle grew thin and scarce; live ones were not worth killing and the carrion was not safe to eat. Those were the bad times and many of Evening Wolf’s people died in them.

  Then Evening Wolf had the courage to rise up and go alone, far from the familiar paths and the known hunting grounds, sacred from thousands of centuries of slaughtered prey. He fed among the steppes of Russia, and won names of terror from the free farmers around Novgorod. Then he went north and west, drawn by his destiny, and hunted among the dense woods of the Scandinavian Peninsula. After many lifetimes of cattle he heard of a new land in the northern sea. People were fleeing there to escape the conqueror, King Harald, the first king to unite all Norway.

  Evening Wolf followed them. King Harald was waging war ceaselessly, and that was good. But he promised peace, and that was bad. Evening Wolf followed the Norse to Iceland and established himself as a great landholder and chieftain. It was a land of opportunity and Evening Wolf made the most of his opportunities.

  Now he had great herds of cattle: sheep, pigs, humans, cows. He killed among them when he chose. He rewarded them when he chose. They knew their lives and their deaths rode in the corners of his jaws. That was why Snow Wolf had been a fool to challenge his supremacy. They feared him and loved him. They would never leave his rule.

  I am a god among them, Snow Wolf! Evening Wolf howled, throwing his head back exultantly to hurl his voice straight up into the wind-driven snow. I am a god to my people!

  Likely, likely, very likely, Snow Wolf sang in the pit. Gods are good eating, he added reflectively.

  *~*~*~*

  The man in Snow Wolf had died a seasonable death, as the snow settled down like a shroud around the boasting Evening Wolf. Snow Wolf’s pity for his enemy was equally dead; he would be merciless, soulless, bloodless for a long bright season until summer returned, if summer ever returned. His jaws clamped and clamped again in ecstasy at the thought of tasting the sun’s golden blood.

  *~*~*~*

  Evening Wolf shifted his stance uneasily as he looked down into the pit. There was light there now, two circles of ice-blue light that were Snow Wolf’s eyes. The rest of the white wolf’s appearance was oddly unclear, shifting in outline constantly like a cloud or a snow-drift. The voice, too, was oddly disconcerting. It was a wolf’s voice, clear and true… too clear, too bell-like. It hardly differed in sound from the voice of the winter storm, singing on the rocks around him. It had breath but no blood in it; it did not have the hot meaty tone of a voice from a living throat.

  Snow Wolf sang.

  A god, a god, a god, he sang, with mockingly curt barks. Very likely. Gods come from the south and east, like the sun. Many have come, from the south and east, to Iceland. We were here before. We were here when the sun itself first crossed the sea. The Firbolgi came, the Vanir came, the Aesir came, the Coranians came: we were here. We killed and ate them all.

  Evening Wolf began to back away from the pit, but it was too late for him. Snow Wolf–a wolf-shaped patch of blizzard with blue burning eyes–leapt out of the pit and seized Evening Wolf by the throat with teeth the color of lightning. Snow Wolf’s jaws clamped shut and Evening Wolf died. Snow Wolf’s jaws opened and Evening Wolf fell to the ground and shattered like glass. The dead wolf’s body had been frozen solid by Snow Wolf’s wintry touch.

  Snow Wolf stepped into the air and ascended swiftly to the sky, his howling indistinguishable from the winter winds.

  The others had already begun to gather in the appointed place beyond the clouds: his brothers and sisters, his ancestors, those cold inimical spirits of nature, eternally hostile to gods and other mortals. The snow wolves formed two great packs to continue their perennial quest: to hunt down and kill the sun and the moon, so extinguishing all light and hope for mortal life.

  Snow Wolf ran west and south, beyond the horizon, baying after the sun that had already fled the winter sky.

  *~*~*~*

  It was a long winter and a hard one for Hvitaness. Snow and storms and bitter cold did much damage; many animals died and the planting was late. It was late, too, before Snow Wolf returned, his hair still streaked with winter’s white. He seemed weary and dispirited when he surveyed the damage done to the stead, but said nothing about it. Perhaps this was because, on his travels, he had won a great wealth of raw red gold (which he poetically referred to as “a few mouthfuls of the sun”), and this was of more value than the dead animals or the poor crop that summer promised.

  His wife had fallen in love with a great chieftain who lived nearby. She often went to visit him, and one day she did not return again to Hvitaness. That day, in early evening, Snow Wolf sat alone in his darkening hall. He wondered if a god would ever come across the sea that he and his kindred would be unable to kill and eat. But if one ever did, it is not part of this story.

  JANE LINDSKOLD is a New York Times best-selling,

  internationally published author of over sixty short stories and twenty-some novels. Her most famous works include the acclaimed "Firekeeper" fantasy series, which began with Through Wolf’s Eyes and concluded with Wolf’s Blood, and the "Breaking the Wall" series.

  Jane was living with the late, great Roger Zelazny, when he died in 1995 after a battle with colorectal cancer. Our cause is very close to Jane’s heart.

  Knight’s Errand

  Jane Lindskold

  The worst thing about taking out sorcerers is the clean-up afterwards. Seriously, during a fight you have some idea what to expect—it might be fireballs or lightning strikes or bolts of ice; they might summon demons or elementals or maybe a host of undead—but the basics are the same. They’re going to try to make sure the one who dies isn’t them.

  My job is to make certain their heartfelt desire doesn’t come true, that, instead, they are the ones who end up as bleeding corpses or heaps of earth (some of the ones who’ve played around with longevity magics skip the dead body and go directly to dust) or get transformed into ravening insane monsters (which I then have to kill all over again).

  It’s the aftermath that always makes me regret taking up this job. There’s a good feeling to finishing off someone whose goal is global domination or some other ambitious bit of cultural reform which—no matter how grandiloquent the speech—always boils down to “my world, my rules.” Even when I was a boy, I didn
’t like bullies. That didn’t change when I got older and their rationalizations got fancier.

  But, as I said a moment ago, it’s the clean-up that makes the job unpredictable. Site inspection and survey became a part of the job back when I was just getting started as a knight errant. There had been too many instances when something nasty crawled out of the ruins of a collapsed stronghold or seemingly deserted castle. If it wasn’t something animate, then the trouble came from enchanted items left about the place. No matter how fraught with evil the history of the location, it didn’t take many years for the brave and the bold—or the stupid and the greedy—to start poking around. They’d emerge wearing a ring that turned them into a berserk ogre when the moon was a waning crescent or brandishing a sword that demanded the blood of a virgin every fortnight. Or they’d turn loose the dragon that had been sealed in the caverns deep below the sorcerer’s retreat or unbottle the djinn or…

  You get the idea, right? It isn’t pretty.

  So there I was, high up in a tower, sorting through the alchemical lab and magical research facility owned until very recently by Myron the Magnificent.

  (Why do sorcerers always live in towers anyhow? Is it from a deeply buried sense of inferiority? I can understand the desire for isolation. If you were doing the sort of things they like to do, you’d want to be isolated, too. And anyhow, it’s easier to believe you’re lord of all you survey if there aren’t that many people around, outside of those who work for you. But towers? Even for the ladies?)

  I hadn’t brought my assistants along with me for this part of the job. Myron the Magnificent had actually been a rather mild type as sorcerers go, more into research and fabrication than the usual grandiose power dreams. If it hadn’t been for his liking of such unsavory ingredients for his potions—and how many of those ingredients came from living creatures, including humans—he might have been left undisturbed to work away in the highest reaches of his porphyry tower amid his chosen desolate mountain fastness.

  (If you’re wondering, it was the incident with the four newborn infants and the basket of kittens that got me called in. Nasty stuff.)

  Even though I’d left my assistants getting some well-earned rest and repair, I wasn’t exactly alone. I had ridden out on my dark chestnut warhorse, Biter, as nasty-tempered a mount as ever decided to take out his resentment over being gelded on anyone he could get his hooves and teeth into. I also had brought along Spike and Tyke, a pair of war dogs who, in addition to being two of the fiercest hounds to wear spiked leather collars, had also been trained to sniff out magic. The final member of my entourage was Turbulent, a gyrfalcon who was both battle-trained and a remarkably intelligent message carrier.

  Spike and Tyke had already done their part, discovering at least one hidden door I would have missed and a staff concealed as one of the supports of a canopy bed. They found a lot of other stuff, too. I’m just giving them credit for what I would have missed.

  They didn’t miss the little box that would turn out to be the source of all my troubles. I didn’t miss it either. I just had no idea that what it held would be such a pain to deal with.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get back to that room at the top of the tower. I was there, not wearing my armor, because it’s really easy to break things when you’re encased in bulky steel clothes, and there was a lot of glassware, mirrors, ceramics, and other breakables in that round-walled room. I might not be wearing armor, but I was hung with enough amulets and talismans that I was nearly as well-protected—at least against the sort of threats I expected.

  I was holding a box in my left hand. It wasn’t much bigger than what you’d use to hold a deck of playing cards. The box itself was wood—teak, I think—but it was so heavily inlaid with slivers of mother-of-pearl and ebony set in complex geometric designs that you could be forgiven for missing the underlying reddish-brown. I’d just finished saying a series of disabling charms over the box and had undone the lock with a bone key that on a ring I had removed from Myron’s body before it was consigned to the fire. Next I tilted back the lid and looked inside. I wasn’t really surprised to find that this box contained another box. Sorcerers like things like that. Not only do the layers frustrate thieves, they keep the contents from rattling about and getting scratched.

  Again I went through the routine necessary to open this box (which was of ebony, inlaid with teak and mother-of-pearl)without getting myself burned or electrified or whatever nasty curse had been left for those making unauthorized entry. This time, I selected a different key from Myron’s ring, a tiny one, delicate as a soap bubble, carved from alabaster. Despite its apparent fragility, the key turned in the lock without snapping. I lifted the lid, worried I’d find yet another box—Myron seemed to be a box-within-a-box-within-an-eggshell-within-a-kernel-of-grain sort of fellow. To my relief, I found instead a piece of plush green velvet wrapped around something irregular enough in shape that I was pretty certain I wouldn’t find another box.

  I bet myself that it would be a ring—a ring set with a dark emerald that had been carved into the semblance of something reptilian and nasty. What I saw when I unfolded the last bit of velvet was a white stone so brilliant that it was almost translucent. It wasn’t set in a ring either. Instead it was shaped into a small, not very well-crafted carving of a duck. At least that was my first impression. There were wings sweeping back and meeting at a point, just like those of a duck or swan when it takes to the water. The head was all wrong for a duck. Instead of a beak or bill or whatever it is that ducks have, there was a bulky head with what appeared to be small horns. The area around the tail was wrong, too. There was something frothy there that I took to be a representation of the water this mutant duck was swimming on.

  Striding over to the window, I held the carving up to the light. Just like that, my perspective changed and I saw the carving for what it really was. It wasn’t a duck at all; it was a winged horse. The carver had rendered it with its legs folded under it as if it had lain down to sleep. The neck had a proud arch and the head—now that I wasn’t trying to make it into a duck’s—was fine-boned and delicate, with flaring nostrils. What I’d taken for horns were actually small ears, pricked and alert. The frothy stuff was the winged horse’s tail.

  Awed by the craftsmanship in this tiny carving, I inspected it more closely. The stone seemed to be some sort of marble, lightly veined with ivory and palest grey. The unknown sculptor used these veins to suggest shadows and bring out highlights. The end result was that the stone looked more purely white that it would have if it were all one color. Even though the winged horse was not painted in any way, it looked so realistic that I wouldn’t have been surprised if it unfolded its wings and rose to its hooves at that very moment.

  For a fleeting second, I considered withholding this piece from the roster listing all the goodies, dangerous or not, that I had found. Usually, my contract stipulated that my fee included my pick of what I’d found, but there are restrictions. If something was ruled too dangerous, too unpredictable, or too valuable, then I must graciously make another selection or take compensation in currency. I didn’t need to have been at this job for as long as I had to know that this little carving was going to be ruled too valuable. Just the skill with which it was made would raise the price, but I could also feel the magic shivering off it in waves.

  I was about to rewrap the carving in its green velvet shroud when I noticed that the sky, which had been perfectly clear when I took the carving to the window so I could get a look at it in sunlight, was darkening. Roiling clouds in shades of storm grey and blackest night were swirling, creating a whirlpool current that was moving to center—no great shock– on Myron’s purple porphyry tower.

  At the same moment, I felt motion in my hand. The tiny winged horse was stirring. I know I said that the carving was so realistic that I wouldn’t have been surprised if it unfolded its wings and got to its hooves. That’s just a figure of speech. The fact is, sophisticated as I was in a wide variety
of magics, I was surprised, so surprised that my hand opened of its own accord. I would have dropped the carving, except that it spread its wings and glided to the floor. As it did so, it began to grow. When I recovered from my shock, I wasn’t looking down at a tiny white carving of a winged horse, I was looking up into the face of the full-sized animal.

  The winged horse was muscular and powerful in a manner the carving had only managed to suggest. Its muzzle shaded to bluish-grey, as did the tips of its ears. Otherwise, it was a study in white on white with one striking exception. The eyes that now met mine were dark brown and so typically horsy that they seemed all the more exotic.

  “Are you the knight for whom I have waited?” asked the winged horse in a voice that resonated like trumpet calls on the field of battle. “Then don your armor of silk and spider webs. Equip yourself with the Lance of True Valor and the Sword of Righteous Might. Then leap astride and we will sally forth to win the day from darkness.”

  “Whoa!” I said, somewhat unwisely, for those pricked ears flattened as if I’d spoken an obscenity. “I mean, prithee, slow a moment. I am indeed a knight, sword-kissed near twenty years ago, and hardened in many battles. Yet I know not of what you speak.”

  The winged horse snorted. “This is no time for talk! The dark clouds swirl. The celestial portal will gape wide and my enemy will be upon us!”

  I’m still not sure how he managed what he did next. I mean, the room had windows, but they were by no means large enough for even a pony to pass through, much less this magnificent destrier, even without the added breadth of his white-feathered wings. But somehow he worked it so that in one breath he was in the tower room, a threat to shelves of delicate crucibles and retorts. Then, in the next breath, he was outside, flapping his wings only enough to hold his position, while angling his head so that he could better inspect the ominous windstorm above us.