The Ice Mage Incident – Episode 7
The thin veneer of ice coating my clothes made me feel like I was wearing a suit of armour. Except that real armour doesn’t take over your bodily movements and force your legs to plod behind an unsavoury ice mage into his lair.
For that was who the skinny, long-haired villainous-looking man had to be.
The ice mage, Salkeban.
No matter how much I moaned and resisted, the mantle of frozen water covering my coat and trousers drove me on, creaking and grinding as it flexed at my waist, hips, knees, and ankles.
You may be wondering why I didn’t cast a spell of my own to stop what was happening. The thing is, I was too discombobulated to picture my spellbook in my mind. On top of that, my lips and tongue were so numbed by cold I couldn’t have uttered a single word of magic even if a spell had popped into my head.
At least my eyes still worked, and – just in case – I made an effort to memorise the route we were taking.
It was a long one. Or perhaps it only seemed so.
The cave sloped gently downwards, meandering deep into the ice in a series of smooth curves. The floor was overlayed with sand-like grains of ice which crunched underfoot and offered my soles a firm grip. To either side of us – close enough to touch if I’d been able to raise my arms – were the cave’s glassy walls which arched overhead to form a rounded roof a few feet above our heads.
Every once in a while we’d come to a junction where two or three passages led away. They all looked the same to me, but Salkeban never faltered, turning into one of the openings to a new cave at each junction and striding along as if he walked the same route every day.
Trailing noisily and unwillingly after him, I tried desperately to work some life back into my lips and tongue, flexing and bending them like a goggle-eyed necromancer invoking demons.
It made no difference. Every part of my mouth remained stubbornly unresponsive.
Salkeban had been getting further ahead as we walked, and after a while he looked back at me over his shoulder.
“Come on. Keep up,” he said with a condescending smile as if I was dawdling on purpose.
Chuckling to himself like he’d made the funniest joke in the world, he strode on.
I didn’t like the blacksmith much, but that fatuous comment decided me: I liked the ice mage even less.
Despite how deep below the surface we must have been, the passages were illuminated by a pale light. Was it caused by daylight filtering from above through the ice? Or did it issue from the ice itself? Whichever it was, it wasn’t natural and I grudgingly upped my estimation of Salkeban’s prowess with magic.
The gruelling journey came to an end when we entered a cavern about the size and shape of a church hall, with arching, glossy walls similar to those of the cave we’d just stepped out of, but many times higher. The cavern’s floor was featureless apart from a small pool of bubbling liquid near one end. Close to the wall at the other end, a rope dangled from the lofty peak of the vaulted roof, its loose end lying in a coil on the floor.
Once I’d lurched through the entrance, my suit of ice waddled me over to the rope, then brought me grinding to a halt.
I wanted to ask, in the strongest possible terms, what was going on, but all that came out of my mouth was a slurred groan.
As if he sensed my question, Salkeban came and stood in front of me. “Like I said, we’re going to have a little chat.”
I dragged my gaze away from the rope and glared at him. My lips parted like icebergs slowly drifting away from one another.
“Ooooooothhhhhhhh,” I said.
“Oh, silly me. I forgot.”
He snapped his fingers and his eyes glowed. Heat rose in my neck, banishing the cold and numbness from my lips.
“How dare you?” I said, thrusting my head forward and fixing him with my fiercest stare. “I demand you let me go at once!”
“Come now. You’re not in any position to be making demands. Besides which, it’s rather rude of you to ask to leave before we’ve had a chance to get to know each other.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“I think you do.” He reached out an arm and swung the rope closer to himself. “I brought you to this particular room because you give me the impression you need a little encouragement to loosen your tongue.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, if you’d been more cooperative when we met, we could have had a chat over coffee. Instead, you’re going to tell me what I want to know over a game.”
“A game? I’m not going to play any games with you!”
“Oh dear. Wrong again.”
With that, his eyes glinted as he made a complicated sign with his fingers. Within seconds, my suit of ice had me lying on my back on the floor.
While I protested loudly, he tied the rope around my ankles. At another gesture from his fingers, the rope tightened and hauled me off of the floor. My hat fell off as I rose higher, the rope biting into my ankles as I hung upside-down like a side of beef in a butchery. He gestured again, and my coating of ice shattered and fell away.
With nothing holding them up any longer, my arms dropped straight down. I was suspended too high above the floor for them to reach it. The numbness faded from my arms and I realised I was holding something in my right hand. I glanced at it and saw Trewla’s hat still clutched in my fingers.
“The rules of the game are simple,” said Salkeban, walking over to the pool at the other end of the cavern. “I’m going to ask you questions, and you will answer them. If you refuse or lie to me, I’ll throw one of these at you.”
He waggled his hand over the pool, and a fist-sized ball of ice rose from its surface. It floated in the air at shoulder height, hissing and crackling as though on fire.
“This is no ordinary ice,” he said in a conversational tone. “It’s much, much colder. So cold, in fact, that the sound you hear is caused by the air coming into contact with it being instantly frozen.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Imagine what it will do to you if it touches you.”
“You rotter! You’ll get nothing from me!”
It was all bravado on my part, of course. Inside, I was quaking like a jelly on a honky-tonk piano.
Ignoring me, he said, “To make the game more challenging, you’ll be a moving target.”
His eyes flared blue. The rope jerked, and I began to sway from side to side. Only a little at first like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, but picking up speed and going further and higher with each swing until I feared my brains would be dashed out on the cavern’s walls.
Over my shrieks and curses, I heard Salkeban shout, “Silence!”
My mouth snapped shut.
Unable to take my eyes off the horrible ball of ice floating next to him, I could do no more than whimper when his voice rang out once more.
“Let the game begin!”
*** Continued in Episode 8 ***