II. Nock

            When the armies of petty warlords and brigand chiefs became incessant in their activities the master of Nock, a fell mage known as Glym through the centuries, built a wall out of the attackers.  The hairless magician in his garment of woven cold awaited the incoming horde of the vile and the desperate one morning.  There was a snap of frost and thereafter future raiders looked elsewhere for plunder.

            A powerful cold still clung to the twenty foot high battlement which ringed the Steam City of Nock at quite a distance.  Even the Fencer, with his resistance to such an extreme, could hardly get within a few meters of the wall.  In the failing light of dusk he tried to get a better look at the fused and frozen bodies within the ice.  Just hints of forms locked together in an unsettling aesthetic.

            “They say that this is the burial ritual of the town,” commented the Trumpeter sagely after finding his companion in grisly meditation.  “Perhaps if we should perish in this place we’ll join the wall.”

            The Fencer once more looked back at the sleeping dead.

            “Maybe they could tell us their stories, or something concerning the Riddle.”

            The Trumpeter winced.

            “Wish you’d keep that to ourselves friend,” sighed the musician looking back across the icy way to the city’s inner wall.  “But, then again, what fun would that be?  We should return, payment is being argued over and the Driver even claims he’ll teach us what a hot meal means again.”

            The Fencer shrugged and, with only a single glance back towards the quiet dead, the two men headed in the direction of Nock proper.  Great clouds from the mingling of natural volcanism and melting snow bloomed with color from the lights of the boulevards and pleasure palaces.  Piercing through the shroud of steam a diorite cliff jutted hundreds of meters into the air, upon which loomed the alabaster fortress of Vael, looking down on the city, windows like glowing eyes staring into encroaching night.

            As the Fencer approached the congregation of laborers inside the inner gate the group fell apart, cadres drifting off to spend their bounty.  Only the Driver stood there, counting something in the dim radiance of a street lamp.

            “Ah, this is for you,” said the excitable man as he handed the Fencer a pouch full of broken bits of silver, an odd mangled coin in the mix.  “A bonus for you, and you should receive further since you cut the haggling session the rest were belaboring me about.  Must fear you or something.”

            The long-armed man then handed out a small handful to the Trumpeter.

            “What, no sinecure for the rear-guard?” protested the mountain man summing up his pay.

            “Well, your friend’s bonus had to come from somewhere,” replied the Driver sagely.  “But don’t let me leave you unsatisfied.  How does company, a warm bed and a meal sound to you two?  As a collective.”

            The two let their employer lead the way as they had neither the grace nor knowledge to function in such as civilized a place as Nock.  It was a fair marvel of paved streets, lighted houses, and cunning waterways designed to channel the melt which would otherwise turn the basin into a volcanic lake.  Warm steam was in the air as well as the nervous tension of population.  A heart beat in the dark.

            “What is that sound,” asked the Fencer as the heavy chiming grew closer.

            The Driver laughed.

            “That is the Clock.”

            “Clock?” asked the Trumpeter.

            “Keeps time.”

            “What does it do with time?”

            The Driver just smiled.

            “I’ll show you after dinner.”

            The sound of the chiming heart followed the trio through the city.  Buildings towered tall and narrow.  At one point the Fencer was accosted by a surly lamplighter on his rounds and there nearly was a fight.  Some presence had him on edge and he couldn’t quite accept his southern isolation as the cause.  Dhala hung heavy and cold at his side, especially in the warm air of Nock.

            It had something of his village’s great lodge, the inn where they at last could rest their feet.  There was a sense of community about the place.  Yet even as they took their seat in the cooler corner, imperceptibly so from their rugged experience, the unspoken tone of isolation was evident in the singular peoples eating and drinking quietly by themselves. 

            Cities.  Perhaps it was isolation which put the Fencer on edge.  He wasn’t sure though.

            “Call me Firo,” grinned the man the two had only known as the Driver before, his bristling beard exaggerating the wideness of his smile.  “Are you really only going to go by the Trumpeter and the Fencer?”

            “For now,” said the Fencer quietly.  There was no reply from the Trumpeter who was glancing about the room with his thoughtful blue eyes.  He was noticing that same isolation as the Fencer.

            “It’s too bad,” frowned the musician propping his trumpet up next to him like a sleeping companion.

            “Indeed,” replied Firo.

            “Wouldn’t it be good to invite them all over to our table?  Or take over that center one?  We could feast together.  Talk.  Share stories.  I know!  I could play them a bit of something I’ve been working on.”

            Both Firo and the Fencer hastened to replace the Trumpeter’s love of his own noise with a taste of the ale which by providence had arrived. 

            “I suppose you are quite right, not really the tone of this place.”                       Quietly the Fencer and the Trumpeter shared a moment where they remembered lives and places more close-knit and interdependent.  It was a mixed thing to be on one’s own.  The distant clock gave seven great knocks before receding back, almost out of hearing.  It took several more minutes, well after the food had arrived, for the Trumpeter to really cause some trouble.

            “So,” he began while shoving a slice of meat pie in his mouth, “what did we risk life and limbs to bring to this town?”

            Firo was leaning back at this point, watching the two eat.  He still seemed to be the boss.

            “The heart of a giant,” he stated calmly and quietly, not moving or changing demeanor.  The Trumpeter stopped chewing.  Firo eyed them both for signs of hysterics. 

            A giant.  An old thing from before the Uplifting, before all the magic had flown away.  They were legends even before those recent events; creatures of size who sat upon the stories told about them, exerting a gravity through time. 

            The Trumpeter swallowed his pie.  The Fencer downed the last of his ale.

            “I’m going out for some air,” he stated too calmly.

            “Your room will be waiting, though I hear the hosteller likes to lock up the place after, oh, when that clock thing sounds twelve times,” recommended Firo, not trying to stop the swordsman.

            “Why?” asked the Trumpeter and it took the Driver a few blinks to realize was referring to the expedition for the heart.  The Fencer left and a few sets of eyes followed him out the door.

            “Oh, it’s what I do.  I’m in the oddity business.  I find things.”

            The Trumpeter had gone back to eating with a sad look on his face.

            “Aren’t you worried about your friend?” asked Firo looking towards the door.

            “Quite.”

            The air of the inn seemed to pause thoughtfully while the bearded man homed in on the subject.

            “I mean, aren’t you worried about him out there, alone, in the city?”

            “Oh, no,” which only made things worse for Firo’s mind as it began looking to contextualize the Trumpeter’s first response.

            “Also, he makes me sad,” sighed the Trumpeter.  “He didn’t leave any of his food behind.”

            Out and about the Fencer was surrounded by the warm steam city.  He needed time to reason with himself.  The thing he and the other laborers had dragged all the way from Ahgren was anathema, part of that ensorcelled world which broke the planet and then left them all to freeze amongst the ruins.  No, not quite the right way to put that, he thought as he meandered through street after street.  All part of Winter’s Riddle, the cause of all this endless ice and the heart pangs which afflicted the Fencer as he worked to construct some sort of answer.  The sounds of running water followed him wherever he went.

            Across town a lamplighter was murdered.  A senseless act, but it made the perpetrator feel better after sneaking into the city through the secret ways.  Revenge was on his mind and there was a prize to win also.  Water babbled.

            The Fencer saw her as she left the quiet chatter of another inn.  A phantom gust of wind swooped down, parting the steam.  A freak occurrence.  A play of chance.  Back home, before the Fencer was the Fencer and while there was still a village of the narwhal hunters to call home, very few things were attributed to simple chance.  Gods and spirits were the arbiters of every action, and even after the Uplifting the utterances and attitudes remained.  So now, seeing the wind fall on the woman, tossing back her full hood, revealing her hair to be the color of emerald, he inwardly blamed fate or some other proxy.

            The woman was quick to bundle back up, pulling a thick muffler over her face and checking in all directions for witnesses.  The Fencer remained hidden in a shadowy ally, not breathing, watching. 

            Part of his reason told him to run, since he had seen what one with the talent was capable of once before, but another, deeper reason made him quietly pull free Dhala from his side and follow the emerald lady as she moved quickly and quietly through the streets of Nock.  The way grew familiar.

            She stopped when she reached the staging grounds where the Heart lay on the sledge.  Smoke from the riff-raff Firo had hired to watch the thing mingled with the curtains of steam.  The Fencer tried to keep a close eye on every detail and movement the lady made.  The bored men smiled when they saw her pleasant figure approach.

            The emerald lady pulled something small from a pocket, holding it out favorably to the assorted rabble.  She then tipped her hand in silence, the noise of the water running was too loud, but not loud enough to drown out the heart of the clock knocking away. 

            Their smiles grew and they collapsed into bliss.  With a practiced bounce she was on the sledge in a clock-beat while the fencer circled around, climbed up a low shop, gaining height, fearful of the lady in the cloak. 

            She felt along the chains which bound the tarp around the cargo and when she found no loose flaps flourished a curved silver knife.

            He could just stay still and quiet, wait for her to walk away, but he always discounted his first ideas.  Well, most of the time he did.  Maybe it was the old mores that made him do what he did next, which demanded the death of those with signs of the talent so that the crimson demon wouldn’t whisk them away to hell.  Maybe it was something else, a bad habit he had picked up in the cities, or earlier.

            The Fencer remembered the Stranger with blue hair.

            Across town a murderer arrived with news and somewhere else a baby was born.  The clock, knocking ever onwards didn’t stop for any of these things.  Back at the inn Firo exchanged knowledge and madness with the Trumpeter.  Secrets were abroad, and maybe that is why the Fencer chose that moment to leap upon the emerald lady, chancing that he could split her accursed skull open before she had a chance to reduce him, and presumably the whole city, to glimmering ashes.  Maybe that wasn’t the reason at all; maybe he didn’t have one.

            She turned, an arm lifted and the Fencer fell into a great wide viridian sea as the lady’s hood slid back and out and over the world.

Chambers of the Heart I. Driven Snows

            Ice and snow across a long plain.  The noontime sun sent long shadows cascading from its perch in the north where distant mountains dug dark tooth-marks into the sky.  Wind and the hollow echo of empty tundra were the only sounds which came to the men. 

            The going was easier now that they had left the southern foothills, but the caravan’s burden had a troublesome gravity.  There were over two dozen men dragging the cargo along, with one man behind to scream if trouble snuck upon them, and the Driver, as he liked to be called, walking ahead with the purpose of looking important and heaping unhelpful abuse on those in the middle, all flea-touched, dull-eyed laborers.  They pulled the great chains to drag the massive sledge across the infinite ice.  With each pull they sucked in the frigid air.   Progress was only a few meters at a time.  Not much else could be hoped for on the thankless plains of Winter.

            They came from Ahgren, the city at the southernmost point of what passed for civilization and were the worst offspring of their barbaric age.  They had set out with almost forty strong backs to drag their cargo to the steam city of Nock but after visitations of frost, sickness and brawls their numbers were sufficiently dwindled.  Greater shares for the survivors.  Spirits were high.

            “It will be a great thing when I have the silver from this hellish enterprise in my hand,” sneered Yogo as he rested.  Despite the Driver’s histrionics the men had declared it noon and broke off into small groups to gnaw upon their half-frozen rations and huddle where the biting wind couldn’t find them.  “I will go bathing in a sea of silken women!”

            Yogo had the dark complexion of one used to hard labor under the merciless southern sun and took great pride in claiming this made him resistant to the cold.  He wore only a single layer of woolen rags and went bare footed.  Sitting across from a handful of fellow toilers, rubbing heat back into his calluses, he continued describing in great detail the number, shapes, colors and temperaments of the women which his silver would buy on the streets of Nock.

            Two men he didn’t trust sat across from him, while others, some more loyal, some not, fanned around in a circle.  Of the two strangers one wore even less than he, some liar in seal skin and his mad manservant in the long coat and scarf.  They called themselves the Trumpeter and the Fencer and Yogo’s eyes would frequently drop to look at the items of their station they carried.  One a silvery instrument which would certainly fetch several weeks of a whore’s attentions and the other some nasty looking piece of black ice he wore as a sword.

            Most of the varied rabble sat in dazed exhaustion just trying to gather enough strength to finish the day’s work.  The Trumpeter busied himself with a rumpled bit of vellum and worked his mouth around odd-sounding words like a lunatic sunning himself with his own magnificence.  The Fencer just stared ahead at Yogo, an expression of intense control in his grey eyes.

            “Something the matter?” Yogo spat out, glaring back.

            “No,” replied the Fencer smoothly, “no, keep rhapsodizing about what you’re going to do with all those women who aren’t your wife.”

            Yogo laughed heartily, catching some of the midday sun in the sound and glancing to another huddle of freezing men.

            “I want to hear more about how you’ll feed the uglier prostitutes to the more attractive ones as a form of payment and how grateful the recipients of your largesse will be.  The acts with which you’ll be rewarded and particularly the diseases you’ll be giving them for free.”

            The be-scarffed musician laughed something Yogo didn’t quite catch.

            “What was that?” he demanded of the fool.

            “I said,” began the Trumpeter with whimsy in his voice, “oh no.”

            “You’re not from Ahgren,” said Yogo, shifting his attentions back to the one with the weapon.  “Because if you were from Ahgren you’d know that I’m Yogo.  My blood is so cold that even Winter fears to touch my veins and I wield a certain kind of practical magic.”

            Here he flourished the collection of blades he kept along his sides; crude metal implements which spoke of frequent use.  He grinned with satisfaction.

            “So tell me Fencer, where do you come from?”

            “The Village of the Narwhal Hunters,” he replied.  “It lay far to the south of that stinking pile of bricks known as Ahgren.  There I held the position of Keeper of Reason; an office of great import and little respect.  Now the Village is gone so I believe all disused titles have fallen to me, including Chieftain and Master Whalesman.”

            Yogo developed a long grin as the Fencer continued his telling.

            “No places south of Ahgren,” he countered dryly.  “Nothing but ice demons, frozen cadavers hungry for the warm breath of children and the star things which creep in during the endless dark of the winter months.  Nothing else.”

            The Fencer grew increasingly bored as Yogo spoke, as if he had heard it all before.  A few of the other men in their circle eyed the brigand curiously. 

            “With so many titles I wonder why your magnificence is out here lugging that sledge with the rest of us.”  Yogo pulled a particularly long and filthy blade from his brace and began cleaning his teeth of the hard tack he had inhaled for lunch.

            The Fencer seemed on the edge of a violent reply when his companion, the Trumpeter, broke into the conversation.

            “Troubles with certain self-aggrandizing armed men,” said the tall musician with as much diplomacy as he could manage, “back in that Ahgren place.”

            “I had taken up with a fine lady of easy devotion and an unusually low bride-price,” frowned the Fencer sadly.  “Matters were complicated.  These northern dialects made communication uncertain for those first few weeks we stayed in the city.  Sadly, the man I presumed to be her father was something more like an employer.  There were issues of bride-price recurrence.  Also the Trumpeter didn’t help matters.”

            “So we sought warmer climes,” interjected the Trumpeter once more.  “Nock is a bit of Summer from what I hear.”

            The other laborers cursed and made warding signs at the mention of the taboo word, though Yogo seemed too much of a heretic himself to care.

            “Oh really,” he said absently as he looked around the various camps and played with his knife.

            The driver called the break over with shouts of reduced pay, pointing at the sun, dancing with excitement while the rest of the crew moved their chilled limbs to pull the chains once more.

            The Trumpeter contemplated the cargo; a huge boulder-shaped thing, tethered by chains and covered in a tightly bound tarp.  The Fencer took this opportunity to shove his companion to the side.

            Just as the loon went sprawling into the silver carpet of snow Yogo turned and with him a good half of the crew suddenly threw down their chains.  Grinning traitors fell upon their surprised brothers with their hands and knives.  Shouts and the dull glint of a wary sun on dirty metal.  Something flashed towards the Fencer.

            Yogo’s blade sank into the swordsman’s shoulder.  Wincing with another layer of pain upon the ache of the labor and the harsh cold, the Fencer loosed his blade from its wrappings.  The black crystal of the weapon seemed to drink in the light of the sun.  The attacker drew a few more choice knives and did his best to keep the Fencer’s attention.  The knife-fighter laughed.  The Fencer charged.

            Snow packed to ice by the passage of the massive sledge proved to be difficult ground for the man with the sword.  He skid and slipped but never lost his footing.  Yogo danced about shoeless, darting in to nick the Fencer’s throat and pull out the narrow blade from his victim’s shoulder.

            “Quit playing and just kill him,” shouted a voice.  Half fallen, the Fencer looked over his shoulder.  Another traitor was moving to dispatch the Trumpeter from behind, the musician now upright and dusting himself off. 

            The Fencer shouted to his friend but the lunatic simply continued his inane preening.  A cold jab of pain in his back brought the swordsman around.

            “That blade of yours is gonna fetch a lot of affection from the ladies of Nock, your friend’s thing too,” hissed Yogo in the Fencer’s ear before he pushed his victim face-first into the snow, blade freeing from the back of the man with a show of red.

            A cry rang out. 

            Sputtering from the ground, desperate to see the tableaux of the Trumpeter’s demise, the Fencer cleared his eyes, coughing.  The would-be assassin stood shocked and then crumpled; the surreal image of an arm the color of dead stone sticking from a massive wound in his chest.  Yogo gaped amazed.

            It fell like black rain.  The lead traitor’s instincts pitched him backwards with the canny grace of a lifetime spent fighting men as cruel and quick as himself.  Against an ordinary weapon the knife he raised along his arm would’ve been sufficient defense, but here the nightmare thing in the Fencer’s hands sheared the dagger in half and went on through the upper part of the forearm.   

            “Do you want me to kill him first, or all of you?”  The Fencer’s voice was raspy and harsh, a voice unused to being raised.  It wasn’t this call that stopped the coup, but instead the unsettling realization that a monster such as Yogo was now weeping blood and tears on the ground in front the foreign swordsman that stopped the fighting.

            “Him first!” declared a wind-worn traitor who was waiting with a stone in his hand to finish off a laborer.  The Fencer smiled, short grayish hair tossing in the wind.

            He pulled Yogo to the edge of the icy path which amounted to a road and then pushed the maimed man with his foot, sending him tumbling gently down the slight decline.

            “If he is as tough as he claims to be he should last until we make it to Nock, though the thought that all you northern devils are liars and there is no such city now crosses my mind,” reasoned the Fencer.  “Still, he should have enough vivacity to last until we reach our destination.  Whether we are safely in the city by the time or still traveling will depend on your backs.  If we don’t make the City of Steam by nightfall you’ll all become better acquainted with my weapon, which many of you have jealously gazed upon.”

            Silence, and then the survivors of both factions began hastily pushing the few dead and dying out of sledge’s way.  The Driver leaped down from the top of the bundled cargo on his stubby legs and was all smiles.

            “A thousand thanks!” he said through his bearded grin.  “You are more than welcome to take the most coveted rear-guard position as we push to Nock.  With some luck and your...encouraging presence we should make it to the City of Steam shortly, just as the Great Eye sets.”

            “What was all that about?” asked the Fencer binding his wound.

            The Driver glanced to the mysterious cargo before replying, “I’ll tell you when and if we reach the city.  I sense a conspiracy but I’d bet the one-armed man over there was the only one who knew enough to be dangerous.”

            “I happily accept the rear guard position on behalf of my friend here,” said the Trumpeter interrupting graciously.  The madman stalked back to his attacker and retrieved his spare hand.  The Fencer sighed but the Driver was already back to berating the laborers, all of whom were suddenly traitors. 

            “I didn’t think anyone would keep something like that,” said the Fencer to the Trumpeter as the second man pulled the petrified limb from the aspiring assassin. 

            “I needed something to protect me from you at the very least,” said the Trumpeter matter-of-factly while trying to clean the already freezing blood off the jagged, sharp edge where the limb had been snapped off its original host.

            Already mad, the Fencer felt an argument boil up inside him but the Trumpeter’s cool blue eyes caught the swordsman’s.  The mountain man then looked upon Dhala, the raw bit of frozen nightmare that the Fencer kept at his side.  It too seemed to watch them from the numerous whorls and jewels of crimson which peeked out of the strange crystalline matter of the blade.  He still had it in his hand, ready, waiting with a cold reason, to cut life into death.  Again there was that smothering sensation, as in a dream that was not his.  He put the thing away.

            “I always knew you were a reasonable fellow,” smiled the Trumpeter.

            The men took up their chains again and the great sledge pulled forward on the strength of desperation.  The loyal and the traitorous heaved their way towards the distant cloud which was the City of Steam.  With their goal in sight the Trumpeter flourished his instrument and without the Fencer to stop him emitted a blast of ear-piercing triumph across the lifeless plains.

            A man laid dying, hungry snows already building upon his gnarled frame like sand into dunes.  Then along came the peal of the trumpet and his eyes shot open into the glare of a billion mirrors shrieking light, into the driving cold brilliance of the sun on Winter.