George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

Watt trundled down the hill on a combination of tanklike treads and spidery articulated multi-jointed legs. “College girl. Give me the snow globe, and I’ll kill you fast.”

“How about you let me go, or I smash the globe?”

“It’s magical , fool. You can’t just crack the glass.”

Marla lifted her metal-wrapped hand. “Not even with brass knuckles enchanted for extra smashy-ness? I can punch through a bank vault with these.”

“Try it.”

Uh oh. Marla smashed her fist into the top of the snow globe, and, predictably, nothing happened except the tink of metal tapping glass. “Huh.” So that was no good. But now that she looked closer, this was clearly not a mass-produced snow globe, with the glass top glued on — it was more homemade looking, and the base appeared to just be a jar lid painted black, which meant maybe…

Marla twisted the glass top one way, and the base the other way, and at first it didn’t want to give, but she was a champion opener of pickle jars, so she strained, and then —

“No!” Watt screamed, and the woods filled with swirling whiteness, deadening sound and reducing visibility to no more than a foot or two at most.

“You rescued me,” came a voice from within the whiteness.

A woman dressed in ragged black furs stood before Marla, who still held both pieces of the now-empty snowglobe in her hands. She was tall, black-haired, black-eyed, still strikingly beautiful despite being at least twice Marla’s age, and when she spoke, arctic puffs of air emerged from her mouth. She shivered. “I’ve been walking in that snowstorm for… how long? Time is strange in there. What year is it?”

Marla told her. The woman’s lips quirked in a half-smile. “That means I missed the 1936 World Series then. I don’t suppose you know who won?”

“Uh. I don’t really follow sports.”

“No matter. I can look it up.” She waved a hand in front of her face, and the snow that filled the air sizzled and turned to steam, replacing the opaque whiteness with merely misty vapor… allowing them to see Savery Watt, who was trying without much success to trundle his way back up the hill.

“Son,” the woman said, and Watt stopped, then slowly rolled backwards and rotated on his treads to face her.

“Mother,” he fluted.

“Oh hell,” Marla said. “Did I step into a family thing?”

The woman approached her son and touched his robot face. “Oh, Savery, you naughty boy. What have you done with your body?”

“I… it was destroyed in a fire, Mother. An explosion in a, uh, factory I owned.”

“That breaks my heart, baby. I carried that body in my own body, I gave birth to it, and you let it be destroyed? In a fire , no less? I take that as a personal insult.”

“It was an accident.”

“How about trapping me in a jar for all those decades? Was that an accident?”

“I didn’t do that! It was Leland! I just held onto—”

“Do you remember the Robert Frost poem I read to you when you were a boy?” she said. “The one that starts ‘Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice’? Do you recall how it ends?”

“No, Mother.”

“It ends, ‘I think I know enough of hate / To know that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”

“ Please , Mother,” Watt said.

She shook her head, sadly. “You had your fire already, my darling. And now… ” Ice flowed from her fingers, covering him in a frosty shell, and his amber lights dimmed. She glanced at the two terrified meth monkeys, waved her hand casually, and they froze in place, transformed into ice sculptures of themselves.

She turned to look at Marla, smiling. “Now, dear, what’s your name?”

“Uh. Marla Mason. And you are…?”

“I call myself Regina Queen.”

Marla blinked. “Doesn’t that mean, like, ‘Queen Queen’?”

She smiled indulgently. “Some people need to be told things twice before they understand them, dear. I’ve been married to two men — bore them both sons — but I didn’t want to keep either of their last names, so I made up my own, suitable to my station. Some called me the Snow Queen, though I’m not from a fairy tale.” She stretched her arms overhead, turning her face up to the sun. “Oh, it’s so nice to be out and about. I love the winter, but that was too much of a good thing. Now. Why did you set me free?”

Marla considered lying, but who knew which lie would keep her from being turned into an icicle? “I was sent to, ah, blow that guy up. Your son. No offense.”

“Of course, of course.”

“And to steal the snow globe, though I didn’t know there was anybody in it.”

“Mmm.” Regina sat cross-legged on the dirt, produced a hairbrush from somewhere not entirely obvious, and began brushing out her long black hair. “Who hired you?”

“A sorcerer in Felport, named Viscarro.”

“I see. I mentioned I was married twice. My second husband was the Reverend Reginald Watt, poor Savery’s father. My first husband, father of my firstborn, was Captain Antonio Viscarro. So I assume your employer is my son Leland? And that my boys had some sort of falling out?”

Viscarro’s name was Leland ? He didn’t look like a Leland, but then, he didn’t look like anything except maybe Methuselah. “He didn’t tell me his family history. Ma’am. Just sent me with a dud bomb and orders to steal a snow globe.”

She finished brushing her hair and stood up. “All right. I have no intention of being imprisoned again, which means, as much as it pains me, I’ll have to go kill my son Leland.”

“Is that totally necessary?”

“I’m afraid so. You’ll take me to him, of course.”

“That’s maybe not such a good idea.”

“If you aren’t with me, Miss Mason, then you are, by definition, against me.” She walked over to one of the meth monkeys and kicked his arm, the limb snapping off and shattering into chunks of ice. “Which is it?”

“Right.” Marla had no great love for Viscarro, but he was a ranking sorcerer on Felport’s council, and if some outsider came into the city and murdered him there would be consequences. Chaos, retaliation, all-out magical warfare, and other disruptive, city-wrecking unpleasantness, and if Marla was on either side of the conflict, it would be bad for her. Plus, Marla wouldn’t be able to get paid if Regina killed Viscarro. “So, you want revenge against your son, or…?”

“Of course not. I love my boys. They had their reasons for imprisoning me. But once Leland realizes I’m no longer in the snow globe, he’ll come after me, to kill me, or trap me again, and… I can’t abide that. I don’t know for sure if I’ll win a fight against my son, but with the element of surprise on my side, and your help getting in to see him, it’s possible. I’d prefer to go somewhere up north and avoid the whole ordeal, but what choice do I have?”

Marla thought furiously. “What if Viscarro didn’t know you’d escaped?”

“The snow globe is empty, dear. That will be readily apparent when you deliver it. And while we could, I suppose, kidnap some hill person and trap them in the globe, they would soon perish in the snow there, and the ruse would be revealed. Only someone with certain… immortal qualities… can survive inside that sphere.”

“Yeah, okay, but what if we put him in the globe?” She pointed to the frozen junk sculpture that was Savery Watt. “Getting your other son out of the way too?”

Regina shook her head. “That’s not my son. That’s just a pile of junk. His soul isn’t in that body, he was just using it. His soul resides in some object — probably an egg, or stone, or jewel, but a lich’s phylactery can be almost anything. I grant you, your plan works in theory, but without the phylactery, we can’t trap him. No, I’m afraid war is the only solution.”