Brian Murphy - The Search For Magic

While working waterfront grog shops for his master, Raegel met a kindred spirit-a tough, sullen young fellow named Mixun, “short for Mixundan-talus,” as he often said. Mixun was down on his luck. He wouldn’t speak of his origins, but he’d come to Sanction as the bodyguard of a steel merchant named Wendelsee. Wendelsee had died-poisoned by a jealous rival-and Mixun was left without gainful employ. It was hard for a bodyguard to find a new job when it was commonly known his last master had perished violently.

The two men hit it off, although a more disparate pair would be hard to imagine. The tall, seemingly guileless Raegel and the dark, dangerous-looking Mixun began running small capers of their own, like rigged dice games, or liberating high-value goods from warehouses. They did well at petty larceny for a while, until the lord governor of Sanction, Hogan Bight, announced his intention to clean up the waterfront and drive out the criminal gangs hiding there. Less than a week after Bight’s decree, Raegel and Mixun found themselves invited to leave town, which they did, taking ship to the west before the leaves changed that fall.

Ironically, the duo did very well in honest, upright Solamnia. Posing as refugees from Nerakan oppression, they worked a number of successful capers in Port o’ Call, including the pearl scam. They salted oysters with seed pearls and convinced their marks they could grow pearls of any size by using a magical powder (which was just black sand from Sanction). They worked this scam successfully three times. On the fourth try, they ran afoul of Captain Persayer, who was not fooled. Instead of a handsome payoff, the farm boy from Throt and the sullen bodyguard found themselves taken by the vindictive captain and left to die on the frozen shore.

By the time they reached the top of the glacier, the snow was pelting down in great feathery globs. It was very wet, sticky snow, and they quickly found themselves soaked through to the skin.

Raegel gazed across the featureless plateau of ice. His scarecrow hair was laden with handfuls of fluffy white snow. “I don’t see any place to go.”

Mixun replied, “Inland is just ice. We must stay close to the ocean, where the glaciers break off. Maybe we’ll find a cave or something.”

They trudged on, the taller Raegel breaking a trail. Every footfall broke through the crust of ice over the last layer of snow, and lifting his heavy feet reminded Mixun of trying to free himself from a bear trap. They blundered on like this for almost a mile, getting colder and wetter with every faltering step, then Raegel broke through an extra deep drift and sank into the snow up to his chest. He struggled for a moment, lost his balance, and fell face down in the snow. Mixun halted. His friend tried to stand, but another shell of ice cracked beneath him, and he disappeared below the surface.

“Raegel! Ho, Raegel!”

Mixun moved forward carefully, but not carefully enough. The ice gave way under him too, and he slid feet first into the depths.

He slid quite a ways-more than twice his own height-before coming to rest against a pile of loose snow. Mixun sat up and saw Raegel lying on his stomach a few feet away.

“Ho!” he said. “Are you alive?”

“So far,” was the whispered reply. “Don’t talk so loud, if you want to keep living.”

Mixun looked around and saw the reason for Raegel’s concern. They had fallen into a large hollow in the ice, ten feet or more below the surface, and if the rest of the roof gave way, they’d be buried alive under tons of ice and snow.

With great deliberation, Raegel sat up. His face and hands were chalk-white with cold, leaving only the tips of his ears and his nose with any color in them. Mixun was shocked, but knew he was at least as far gone.

“Well, we’re out of the storm,” Mixun said in a very low voice.

His lanky friend remarked, “Snow news is good news.”

Mixun was too cold to groan. He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his square chin on them.

“Never thought I’d go like this,” he muttered. “I always thought I’d die with a sword in my hand, fighting to the end.”

Raegel imitated Mixun’s fetal posture and said, “I always wanted to die in the arms of a beautiful lady. A rich, beautiful lady.”

They said little more. Breath froze on their lips, sealing their mouth with ice. After shivering apart for a while, Raegel crawled to his friend’s side and huddled close to him.

Last post, Mixun thought. He would never see home again, never complete the task he’d dedicated his life to. Everything had ended in this white desert, forever frozen and dead.

He closed his eyes. With his last bit of strength, he found Raegel’s hand and clasped it. His friend returned the gesture with a slight squeeze, just to let Mixun know he was there.

Shut off from the sensations of his body by the encroaching cold, Mixun fell into a twilight of dreams, images, and lost desires. He saw again the wide sandy wastes of home, the burning sun overhead, and the wind stirring the dust into whirlpools around him.

Strangely, he felt no heat from the sun, which should have been beating down on his exposed face like a torch. He felt nothing at all.

The landscape shimmered, though not with heat. It trembled with a rapid, rhythmic pulse that he first thought was his own heart beating, but it was too fast, too even. The pulsation grew stronger. The darkness around Mixun lightened a bit as he struggled to rise to consciousness.

“Stop kicking me.” Raegel sounded slurred, like a drunken man.

“I’m not kicking you, you idiot.” Mixun did kick Raegel then, and was delighted to feel his leg respond to his mental command.

A roaring filled the ice chamber, and snow cascaded down. The cold skin of Mixun’s face was still warm enough to melt it, and he opened his eyes, breaking the lacy crust of ice on his lashes. He sat up. Raegel was lying on his side, curled up in a ball. The noise wasn’t in Mixun’s head, it was real.

“Raegel! Raegel, wake up!”

“Scratch my back, will you?” the drowsy man replied.

“Get up, jackass! The hole’s coming down around us!” Mixun said hoarsely. He drew back his foot and planted a sharp kick on his friend’s backside. Raegel flinched hard and rolled over, rubbing the spot.

Dragging his benumbed friend by the collar, Mixun scrambled up the ramp of snow created when “he and Raegel had tumbled down into the ice cave. The tremors were very rapid now, almost continuous, and the roaring, grinding sound was deafening.

Mixun glimpsed the chill gray sky and burst through the last few inches of loose snow. Once in the open, he thrust both hands into the hole and hauled Raegel out.

Towering above them was the source of the noise and shaking-an enormous wheel, fully thirty paces high, made of heavy timbers and strapped with black iron bands. The wheel stood upright and was turning at a goodly rate, digging plow-like teeth into the ice. Snow and ice sprayed out behind the wheel in two high arcs, creating artificial drifts on either side of the deep trench the device was carving. The axle on which the wheel turned was as broad as a man was tall, and protruded some distance from the center of the wheel. Rising from the ends of the axle were two tall wooden masts, topped with windmill vanes, spinning briskly.

“What is it? What in the name of the four winds is it?” Mixun shouted, backing away on his feet and hands, sliding on the seat of his pants across the ice. “Some kind of machine,” Raegel said. “I can see that! But what kind of machine?” As if in answer, the churning wheel sounded a shrill blast on a brass horn. The windmill vanes canted, presenting their edges to the breeze, slowed, and stopped. At once the vast device slowed. The plow blades no longer tore smoothly through the ice crust, but bit and bounced on the stone-hard surface. Lethally large chunks of ice flew, and for some moments the two men were kept busy dodging them.