Plague of Ice

10

"A mephit," said Regdar. "What on earth is a mephit?"

"A creature born of the elemental ice," explained Sonja. "Like an elemental, only more concrete in form." She turned to the little creature. "You're from the Plane of Ice, are you not?"

The mephit nodded. "The othersssss come with your friend." The mephit's wings suddenly unfurled behind its shoulders but never flapped as it levitated a few feet off the ground. It rose to eye level with Sonja and studied her face intently. "Yooou are warm and yet you are cold. You are not like the others."

Sonja didn't appear uncomfortable talking to this bizarre creature hovering inches from her face.

"I am a druid of ice," she told it. "I used to encounter your kind on the Endless Glacier where I grew up."

The mephit cocked its head in unfamiliarity. "Endless… Glacier? I know it not."

"I'm not surprised," Sonja said. "You're no longer on the Plane of Ice."

The creature grumbled to itself. "Thiiiis we know. The great winds blew us through the hole in the planes. We are stuck now. You must help us."

Regdar and Lidda didn't know what to say as they observed this exchange.

"Sonja," Regdar said, eyeing the mephit suspiciously, "are these creatures evil?"

"Neither evil nor good, in my experience," Sonja said, some annoyance apparent in her voice at being asked such a question in the creature's presence. "They did not aid the frost giants, nor my parents. They lived alone in secret and made alliances with no creature." She turned her attention back to the mephit. "Now you want us to help you?"

"Times are strange," the mephit said. It hovered back to the ground and let out a piercing squeal. Somewhere down in the dark, another squeal echoed.

"Your friend is below with the otherrssss," the little creature said. "We must go down." It unfolded a single wing to indicate the stairway leading down. "There all we will explain."

"What do we do, Sonja?" asked Lidda.

"That's easy," said the druid, removing the magical, smokeless, heatless torch from the wall. "We go down."

She took a step or two down then hesitated as she peered into the blackness. Her knees felt suddenly weak, and she almost dropped the torch. Regdar grasped her arm in support, but she shook him off. She knew she needed to be strong and to lead, no matter how unsettled she was in these close quarters.

The others followed Sonja down the stairway, which wound straight down some twenty feet before stopping at an archway. The opening led to a vast, open area beneath the frozen city. Slender pillars supported the ceiling, and massive, circular walls marked the locations of the towers above, like great roots extending into the earth.

"Yondalla above," said Lidda as she looked around the room. "Whoever built this place didn't do anything small, did they?"

The incredible depiction of a tarrasque was nothing compared to the mural that lined the outside of the cylinder from which they emerged. Beasts of legend frolicked in gardens and infernal flames. Griffins floated through the heavens and serpents stalked the oceanic depths. Titans battled fiends, heroes confronted dragons, and set between them were arcane glyphs and writings in ancient languages. No vault any of them had seen contained such art, nor any king's palace. The walls of their cylinder were only the beginning. Along the floor and the other cylinders they could see similar images, all coated with a layer of clear ice that clung thickly to the walls and distorted the images through its ripples.

The ice had taken its toll down here, too. The floors were slick and frozen, and portions had warped and heaved up under the cold. Huge icicles hung precariously from the roof like the stalactites of a cave, threatening to fall at any moment. The magical, white torchlight struck the ice and sent strange reflections all along the walls and floor, and a tiny army of reflections followed along as they walked.

The occasional decayed desk or bare table stood next to the cylinders, some of them collapsed and broken. The mall looked unused for centuries. The impression was of a vast storehouse, fairground, museum, dance hall, or dining hall, an all-purpose subterranean meeting ground for the wizards who lived in the long-neglected towers above. To Sonja, Regdar, and Lidda, this place seemed like a blow to the heart, not only for its size and intricacy but also its emptiness. It felt every inch as desolate as the snowy, white world through which they'd just come.

This wasn't an expanse of nature, free of man. It was a relic of man's faded glory. It was a tomb.

Their mephit escort had little patience for the newcomers' awed stares. It let out another high-pitched squeal, and another replied from across the cavernous hall from the dark. The sound grew in echoes until it had the force of a jungle cat's roar.

"Your friend should be in that direction," the mephit explained. As they crossed the marble floor, keeping their footing carefully on the slick ice, their every footfall echoed throughout the hall.

Hennet was easy to find. He was backed against one of the cylinders, using his short spear to hold at bay a whole colony of ice mephits. There were about a dozen of the creatures. All of them looked almost exactly like the first, with only small deviations of size and face to tell them apart. The art on the cylinder depicted a stark starfield. Hennet and the mephits seemed to be floating together in a void. With the torch brought close, Hennet could finally get a good look at the things surrounding him.

"Hennet!" Sonja shouted. "Is that any way to greet our hosts?" Her voice reverberated throughout the mall.

The sorcerer turned to face Sonja. At that moment four or five of the mephits leaped into the air, swiftly grasping the shaft of his spear and ripping it from his hands. These mephits flew off with it while the others surrounded Hennet, hovering mere inches from his face, as if daring him to make any move. The mephit who greeted Sonja, Regdar, and Lidda flew over to join them and was soon indistinguishable from the rest.

"Please!" yelled Sonja. "We have an opportunity here. Let's not spoil it!"

"He killed three of ours already," whined one of the mephits. "We saaaaved him, and he repays with death!"

Lidda and Regdar looked up to see a small trapdoor built into the ceiling. A feeling like a small tremor spread across the room, and the trapdoor shuddered above them. Somewhere off in the darkness, an icicle was shaken lose by the vibrations and crashed to the floor.

"They attacked me!" protested Hennet.

"Only because he attacked usss first!" another mephit shouted.

"Please, please everyone," Sonja said, lowering the pitch of her voice in hopes that cooler heads might still prevail. "We're together in this thing. We must cooperate if we're to accomplish anything. I ask you to release Hennet, and Hennet, you must be calm. Just come over here."

"He is dangerous!" shouted another mephit. "A killer! You ask us to free him?"

"I ask you to give him a chance to repent for his mistakes," Sonja said. "He never would have killed you if he knew the truth."

"What truth?" Hennet shouted at Sonja. "What are these things?"

"With any luck," the druid told him, "they're our new friends."

With that, the mephits relented at last, pulling away from Hennet, dropping his short spear at his feet. He cautiously bent over to recover his weapon and walked over to join the others, dragging the spear's point on the floor. They kept a collective scowl trained at him, as if to say that they would have their revenge yet.

Again, the trapdoor above them rocked under a draconic assault.

"You killed some of them?" Sonja whispered into Hennet's ear. "You don't know what you almost did."

She turned her attention to the mephits, crowded around a small corner of the floor, all of their unearthly blue eyes staring at their human guests.

"I am Sonja of the North," she said. "These are Regdar and Lidda. Hennet you've met. We came to this city to investigate the origins of the cold that is currently expanding and devastating the countryside. We encountered the dragon up there several times in the past few days."

Lidda and Regdar exchanged a worried glance behind Sonja's back. Why was Sonja telling these monsters everything? She said they weren't evil, but that didn't make them friends.

"He is called Glaaaze," explained one of the mephits. They seemed to have no obvious leader. A different mephit spoke almost every time.

"Glaze," Sonja asked. "Is he the one who did this? Unleashed all this ice?"

The mephits nodded fervently. One of them proclaimed, "With the Ilskynarawin!"

Sonja shook her head at the difficult word. "The… Ilskynarawin?"

"It's an artifaaact," said a mephit. "It tears a hole in the worlds. Brings ice onto Prime. This issss what has happened here. It blew us through, and now we can't go home."

"It does more than that," supplied another. "It summons. It summons creatures of ice here. It turns place into cold place."

All this would explain how Savanak got here, Sonja reasoned. He was probably native to the plane of ice, but a powerful summoning spell uprooted him from his home and placed him here. That would explain the snowbloom, the polar bear, and other oddities of the cold zone. But the mephits' description also set off a long-lost twinge of memory in the back of Sonja's mind, something her parents told her when she was a child.

"The Frozen Pendant," she said. "I think I've heard of it, under the name 'the Frozen Pendant'."

"What do you know?" asked a mephit.

"Only a story I heard as a child," Sonja said. "I always thought that my mother invented it, but maybe not. It took place in an ancient kingdom in the middle of a hot desert. I don't remember many of the details, but there was an evil, foolish chancellor or vizier who presented a piece of jewelry to the sultan. The chancellor opened a box, and when the sultan touched the pendant, it erupted with ice, killing him, the chancellor, and everyone else. The ice went on to devastate the entire kingdom."

"There's a halfling story not unlike that," added Lidda.

"It may or may not have beeeen the Ilskynarawin," a mephit offered, "but 'Frozen Pendant' is a good name."

The others nodded in agreement, their little heads bobbing up and down aggressively

"Where is this Frozen Pendant now?" Regdar asked.

Every one of the mephits faced the ground. "Down, down, down. Hot down. We cannot go. You may go, not weee."

"Slow down," Sonja said. "Tell us about Glaze. Tell us how all of this happened."

The mephits whispered to each other for a moment in an unintelligible language all their own. Regdar took the opportunity to whisper in Sonja's ear.

"Are you sure this is smart?" he asked the druid. "How can we know they aren't deceiving us?"

"I don't," Sonja confessed, "but they saved our life. We should at least listen."

"The dragon Glaaaze," said one of the mephits suddenly, "lived far to the north, where his kind were being slaughtered by giants of frost."

"That could be the Endless Glacier," said Sonja, "where I was born. How do you know?"

"He told us when we arrived. He wanted us to stay in this new snow world. But we want to go back home."

"Why can't you just walk through the rift again?" asked Regdar.

The mephits talked to each other in their own language, almost as if they were deciding on the proper response. "Wiiinds!" one shouted. "We get blown back through."

"You refused to cooperate with Glaze?" asked Lidda.

"And he killllled some of us."

"We took refuge in the towers…"

"… where Glaaaaze cannot reach us."

It was unsettling the way the mephits began and ended one another's statements, sometimes switching speakers two or three times per sentence.

"He is young but smart, for one of they, one whiiiite," other mephits said. "He did not want to fight giants. So he left."

"He wanted to find new place, place free of giants."

"He traveled from snow-capped mountain…"

"… to snow-capped mountain. For a while…"

"… he finds peace, but older, more…"

".. aggrrrressive whites live…"

"… there already and force him…"

"… out."

"But he heard about Ilyskynar… Frozen Pendant. He heard it here, in lost city in forest near mountains…"

"… he went seeking. Many yeeears he search forests. Find nothing."

"Then he finds this city, in this forrrrrest. He searched city…"

".. breaked through to this underground. Open…"

"… doors to towers, searched towers. Maked lair…"

"… in one tower, broken…"

"… open at top."

The mephit extended a wing to one of the cylinders in the distance, indicating the bottom of one of the great towers. A tremendous pile of broken wood was heaped against the door and welded together with ice, meant to keep the dragon out. Sonja assumed this was the work of the mephits' icy breath-not as strong as that of a white dragon or a winter wolf but still potent.

"And then," a new mephit took the dialogue, "heeee found a stairway…"

"… down, down, down."

"He follow. Into hot place. Hot…"

"… place under towers."

"Magically heated," reasoned Hennet. "Too hot for you to go there yourselves?"

The ice mephits shuddered at the thought. "Boil, sizzle, boil!"

"You mean," said Sonja, "that Glaze found the Frozen Pendant somewhere beneath this underground mall. When he activated it, the rift opened, and you were blown through along with the elemental ice."

The mephits nodded together.

"Earlier," said Lidda, "we encountered a creature that looked like a giant scorpion, only it was made of ice. How did it get here?"

"Wander through rift," several mephits explained. "Probably not only. Door between worlds open. Strange thiiings happen."

"If we manage to restore summer," said Sonja, "such aberrations will die in the sun. Can we undo what Glaze has done if we get the Frozen Pendant?"

"Bring to us," said one of the mephits, and the others joined it in a chorus. "Bring to us! Bring to us! Bring to us!"

"We know what to with iiiit do," one of them assured the party.

"Can't you just tell us what to do with it?" asked Regdar.

The mephits shook their heads in unison, obviously anxious to dispel this idea.

"Too tricky," said one.

"Too dangerous," chimed another.

"Only make things worse," offered a third. "We must do."

"It's still down there?" Sonja asked. "Glaze didn't take it with him?"

"No," said one mephit. "We search."

"Not up here."

"Down there."

"We sure."

This made a certain amount of sense to Sonja. If the artifact was kept in a magically heated area deep below the city, it was possible that Glaze, a creature of the tundra but still more capable of weathering temperature changes than these mephits, would leave the Frozen Pendant below. The most likely creatures to seek it would be those like these mephits, composed of ice itself and therefore unable to venture into a hot area. Whether the young, inexperienced white dragon was intelligent enough to make such a plan was another question entirely.

"So you want us to go down and find the Frozen Pendant for you?" Hennet asked. "What do we get if we do this?"

One of the mephits shrugged oddly. "No more ice!" it shrieked with something vaguely like a laugh. The others joined it, until their shrieks were so loud they were nearly deafening.

"Stop!" shouted Sonja. "That's too much." The mephits stopped, but the distant reverberations continued for many moments.

"This is too much for me as well!" said Regdar. "Let's do as they say."