The Ethics of Elemental Servitude

by J. Scott King

Hodge

It was quiet beneath the great stone bridge. A light snow had been falling since early morning and the quay and river ice were blanketed in fresh powder. At the far end of the dock, stowermen huddled around a barrel fire, smoking pipes and warming their hands. An ice rigger, laden with crated supplies, sat moored nearby, battened down against the cold and wind, deserted.

Hodge knelt unsteadily at the edge of the landing and looked north toward the ruins of Stoneholme. The sky was black with the clouds of a rare late summer storm that would bring heavy snow and cold, biting wind to the bridge town of Andenn’s Crossing. It did not bode well for the long winter to come, but more, it would make the next few hours much more difficult than the old soldier would have liked.

He dropped his pack to the ice, drew out a pair of snowshoes and a set of oiled leather gaiters. He donned them quickly and then stood, hefting the pack onto his shoulders. He pulled the collar of his heavy longcoat across his bearded face and secured it.

Hodge took up his walking staff and gazed north across the ice of the Andenn River.

Penderhaldt had a couple hours on him.

Hodge shuddered at the memory of the utter devastation he’d discovered less than an hour before in the old artificer’s workshop. He had no understanding of what had happened, no sense of how his charge, his friend, had survived such an ordeal.

How could he have missed it? How had he not seen it coming?

His hands began to shake, and his heart pounded in his ears. His vision tunneled, darkened, as it had so long ago in the closing days of the war as he marched north in the dark and the cold and the uncertainty.

Hodge leaned into his staff to steady himself, closed his eyes. He drank in the cold dockside air, drawing deep, steady breaths until he found his soldier’s resolve.

He gazed once again across the river ice.

“Where’ve you gone, Penn?” he breathed.

A gust of wind howled across the river ice as if in answer. Hodge lowered his head and leaned into the gale.

“Alright, old man,” he said softly, and then he set out across the ice, searching for evidence of Penderhaldt’s passage.

Penderhaldt

Two days before, Penderhaldt sat uneasily at his cluttered worktable, the components of the compass he’d been working on since the summer thaw strewn before him. He still had a good deal of work ahead of him and he was running out of time. Winter’s Song would tie up at Midspan in the next day or two, and the ice-rigger’s captain, a Darrowdale trader named Warric Grey, was not known for his patience.

The compass had proven a fascinating, if difficult, challenge. Most of the captain’s specifications were routine. He wanted a box compass that could be held in one hand. It needed to be durable and resistant to the merciless winters of Andenn’s Passage.

Nothing too difficult there. As a master artificer, Penderhaldt had been making compasses and other devices for decades. And, as an Adept of the White March, he had spent many years using his arcane talents to fortify the ships of the Darrowdale Merchant Houses against the cold of the north. Trade did not slow during the winter months. Imbrium and silver from the deep mines of the Whitestone Mountains, and pelts from the Andenn Steppes flowed into Andenn’s Crossing and on to Darrowdale year-round, by airship during the summer months and ice-rigger much of the rest of the year.

No, the challenge lay in a singular requirement. The captain of the Winter’s Song wanted a compass that could predict the weather, a device that, in addition to pointing the way from one port to the next, would allow his crew to avoid severe storms and take advantage of favorable winds while running the ice of the Andenn.

And that would require divination magic, an area of study that lay considerably outside Penderhaldt’s experience.

With some consternation, Penderhaldt had spent several tedious weeks searching for a diviner to help him with the work. There were folk in Andenn’s Crossing who claimed the gift, but he’d quickly marked them as charlatans, one and all, bent on parting passersby from their coin with stories of lost treasure and lost love. There were two diviners of note in Darrowdale. He’d written to both. One had responded with a polite decline and the other hadn’t managed a reply at all.

And so, Penderhaldt had explored other options. After several weeks of research, he’d settled at last on an approach that leveraged his own art to mimic divination. His solution to the divination problem was elegant and undeniably original, and he was eager to bring his vision to life.

Penderhaldt craned his head to one side and absently rubbed the base of his neck. He sighed and then got to work.

He conjured a sphere of coldfire to illuminate the worktable, his eyes narrowing as they adjusted to its icy blue light. He cleared the space directly in front of him, pushing aside an untouched tray of bread and cheese, a nearly full bottle of brandy he didn’t much care for, and the flotsam of bits and bobs one would expect to find in any respectable tinkerer’s workshop.

At last, he retrieved a worn leather folio from a pile of books and journals. Setting it before him, he opened it and began to thumb through loose pages of parchment and vellum filled with detailed sketches of the captain’s compass and its individual parts, each drawing accompanied by extensive notes rendered in Penderhaldt’s fine, meticulous script.

He smiled as if greeting a familiar friend as he came upon the attunement sigils that he’d designed to protect the captain’s compass from the harsh conditions of the north. They shared a common design that had served the artificer for many years, but each sigil contained subtle variations to account for the material, form, and function of the component it would serve. Routine things, really. He’d spent the previous evening scriving them into their attendant compass components. Penderhaldt had little doubt that the attunement magic held within the sigils would serve the captain’s compass well beyond its practical life.

Penderhaldt set the sigils aside and continued to thumb through the stack. More notes, more sketches, an early design of the compass housing… He sighed heavily, began to flip through the pages with more urgency.

“Where did I…?” he said. He slammed the folio shut and tossed it back on the pile, leaned back in his chair. He scanned the worktable.

“Ah,” he said, tapping the table with his fingers. He stood and reached for a worn leather scroll case, untied the closure, and removed a vellum scroll. He set it on his worktable and unrolled it slowly, his calloused hands tracing along its smooth surface.

An immensely complicated sigil filled the page. Penderhaldt smiled, warm satisfaction billowing in him. He had never conceived of such a thing, not in his many decades as an arcanist. The sigil, a nuanced latticework of delicate symmetry, would serve as an arcane framework for his solution to the divination problem. He would use it to bind an elemental to the captain’s compass and empower the unique, divination-like transmutation mechanics of his design.

Penderhaldt reached for a small box, pulled it close, and opened it. A flat ring gleamed like polished silver on a bed of soft leather. He picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand, admiring its workmanship in the coldfire light. Tomas Manton, an Andenn’s Crossing jewelsmith with whom he had collaborated for many years, had outdone himself. Following Penderhaldt’s direction, Manton had used imbrium, a rare, exceptional metal that was, in the right hands, remarkably pliable to arcane manipulation. Ice-rigger ships and clouds and snow drifts, finely engraved in Manton’s understated pictographic style, seemed to drift along the ring’s silvery opalescent surface.

Penderhaldt had come to think of it as the divining ring of the captain’s compass. It was the centerpiece of the device, the foundation on which he would scrive his extraordinary sigil.

At the heart of his solution to the divination problem was the assertion that the elemental bound to the compass would be drawn to wind, even at great distances. The stronger the wind, the more agitated it would become. This agitation would, in turn, create tension in the binding, creating a pulling effect on the divining ring itself. The sigil would read this tension and transmute the imbrium at the point of contact between the binding and the ring. If the winds drawing the attention of the elemental were within the tolerance limits of an ice rigger, implying good sailing conditions, the imbrium would transmute to glacial-blue ice at the point of the binding. If the winds exceeded what the vessel could reasonably withstand, the imbrium would transmute to black ice.

Penderhaldt leaned back in his chair. He was ready for the difficult work ahead, but a shadow of uncertainty had been growing in him for some time.

He blamed Tavreau, and why not? Penderhaldt had never met the man, but he’d collected the Círbann scholar’s work over the years. The man’s most recent treatise on artificing, Meditations on the Ethics of Elemental Servitude in the Creation of Clockwork Entities, had a arrived several weeks ago, not long after he’d started work on the divination problem.

He was on a tight schedule and had done his level best to ignore the thing, but it had called to him ceaselessly from the stack of unopened parcels and post that he’d left accruing on his worktable like snow for the better part of a month. He’d finally relinquished late one evening, setting aside what modest work that remained on the sigil.

He read Tavreau’s treatise, and then he read it again. It was compelling, and deeply troubling.

Tavreau made an ardent, reasoned argument against the practice of binding magic. The scholar maintained that arcanists have little understanding of the elemental realms and know even less of the entities that inhabit them. He further claimed that elementals inhabiting our own world are bound to their native realm in ways we cannot possibly understand. Tavreau argued that subverting the will of such a creature might, at best, destabilize the natural order of things. At worst, it was, in his view, the moral equivalent of slavery.

Penderhaldt found that he reluctantly agreed with the scholar. He’d bound elementals into service before, but never permanently. And that was the problem here–the permanence of his solution. The compass required it, to be sure, but Tavreau, damn him, was right.

Could he alter the design of the sigil to grant the elemental the illusion of freedom? The possibility had confounded Penderhaldt for a full week until the bier-wood box that would house the compass works arrived by post. It was lovely work, a smooth white box with whorls of ashen gray throughout and blackened-steel hinges and clasp. As he inspected it, he wondered if it was possible to allow the elemental to stray from the compass while the device was closed. It was, he surmised, beyond certainty that the compass would remain in just such a state when not in use.

Penderhaldt had thrown himself into the problem and, in short order, completed the necessary modifications to the binding aspect of the divination sigil. When the compass box was closed, the binding magic would allow the elemental to wander relatively unhindered, giving the creature some semblance of autonomy. But, when the compass case was opened, the binding would assert itself fully and draw the elemental into service.

Penderhaldt’s fingers traced along the delicate lines of the sigil. It was a judicious compromise, he reasoned, and yet… He would have to consider his choice of elemental carefully. It would need to be a lesser entity, something of limited intelligence. The living embodiment of a light winter breeze. Finding such a creature in the vicinity of Andenn’s Crossing might take weeks, which Penderhaldt did not have.

The old man sighed and stood. He poured a cup of snow- nettle tea, cold now after sitting untouched for much of the morning. He walked to a window overlooking the Midspan docks and leaned heavily against its frame, cradling the cup in both hands out of habit.

Snow fell softly through the morning light. The heavy flakes would soon cover the quay and river ice. A lone ice- rigger was tied up at the southern-most dock, a small vessel owned by one of the local mining guilds. Laborers were busy loading crates of food and supplies, oblivious to the snow like most folk who lived in the north.

His gaze softened as he made his decision. He would have better luck finding the creature he sought in the elemental plane of ice itself, the realm his arcane Order called the White March.

With hours of meticulous scriving ahead of him, Penderhaldt drained the last of his tea and set the cup on the stone sill of the window. He smiled and nodded, and then strode to his worktable. He cleared a space for the work at hand, settled into his chair.

Penderhaldt secured the divining ring of the captain’s compass in an engraver’s vice. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. As he slowly exhaled, he opened himself to the White March, the source of his power.

Primal cold surged within him, obliterating movement and memory for what seemed an eternity. As his own attunements to cold compensated, Penderhaldt opened his eyes and let out a long, easy sigh. The White March hummed within him, a boundless harmonic that imparted clarity and deep calm.

In the quiet, Penderhaldt lost himself in the pattern of the divination sigil, allowing his senses to drift along the subtle nuance of its form. When it was set in his mind, he took up a simple imbrium stylus from his worktable and began to scrive the sigil’s intricate latticework of lines into the divining ring, channeling the source of his power with an incantation that began as a wistful, guttural murmur and rose slowly, implacably, to a deep, reverberating chant that blurred the room with song.

Hours passed. The sun set and rose again over Andenn’s Crossing before Penderhaldt lowered his scriving stylus. He freed the divining ring from the engraver’s vice and inspected it. It pulsed with arcane power. Satisfied with the work, he allowed his connection with the White March to fade.

A wave of exhaustion broke over him. He would need rest before assembling the compass and summoning an elemental to bind to the device.

Penderhaldt yawned as he haltingly made his way to an old couch he kept in his workshop. He collapsed into it, sending a storm of dust into the early morning light. He settled in deep, hugging his arms close across his chest.

As the old artificer closed his eyes, a final shuddering yawn pealed through him, and he surrendered to sleep.

Hodge

Hodge stood in the fading light at Stone’s End. The ruin of the bridge’s precipitous cornice loomed above him like a wind-swept mountain peak. He’d found no trace of his friend during the hour it had taken him to search the ice from Midspan to the terminus of the bridge. It was open ice from here to the northern shore of the Andenn.

Penderhaldt could be anywhere.

The old soldier sighed. He drove the spiked end of his staff into the ice and turned his back to the wind. Unbuttoning his coat, he reached into an inner breast pocket and withdrew a well-loved wooden pipe filled with kyreweed, the tobacco he favored in inclement weather. Once lit, it would smolder until it was gone, despite the wind and the cold. Hodge tamped the tobacco down with his thumb and then reached back into his coat pocket for a pinewood match. In one practiced motion, he fired it, cupped his hands around the flame, and lit his pipe.

He scanned the ice for movement, a light, anything that might indicate Penderhaldt’s position. But there was nothing. Just the falling dark and the growing storm sweeping across the river ice out of the north.

#

It had only been a few hours since he’d last spoken with the old man. Hodge had been clearing snow from the cobbled walk outside the sprawling rowhouse he shared with him, the day’s shopping stacked neatly to one side of the door, when Penderhaldt had stepped into the brisk afternoon air.

“Ah,” he said eyeing the freshly shoveled path. “Thank you, Hodge.”

Hodge paused and tilted his head to gaze at the gray-white sky. “More on the way by the looks of it. I’ll be shoveling again by day’s end.”

Penderhaldt wore his heaviest longcoat–a patchwork of caribou skin and white bear fur–and companion boots. The embroidered gray skullcap that he favored most days covered his head and his long gray-white hair spilled from it over one shoulder like a sleeping fox. An oiled leather satchel hung at his side.

“Heading out on the ice?” said Hodge.

“For a short time,” he said.

Hodge nodded toward the old man’s satchel. “Finished?”

“Close… I think,” he said, pulling the bag close with his hand. “Needs some last-minute tinkering, but close.”

“Do you want some company?”

“No… no, I’ll be fine,” said Penderhaldt, looking away abruptly. “Just a short walk beyond the bridge, Hodge. I’ll be back well before nightfall,” he said.

Hodge considered the old man for a moment, his eyes narrowing. He said, “Safe travels, then. The stew should be ready in a few hours.”

Penderhaldt turned his head and smiled at Hodge.

“Cassie’s?” he asked.

“Aye. What else, old man?” Hodge replied.

The artificer clasped Hodge on the shoulder. “I may need it,” he said.

Penderhaldt stepped past Hodge and began to walk into the bustling marketplace. He stopped abruptly, turning back.

“Oh,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’ve made a mess of it in the workshop.”

“More than the usual muddle?”

Penderhaldt stole a glance upward to the top floor of the rowhouse. “Yes… that’s one way to put it,” he said, absently.

“I’ll tend to it,” said Hodge.

“My thanks.” And with a hand raised in farewell, the old man walked into the crowd of the Midspan Market.

Hodge watched Penderhaldt walk away until the old man was out of sight.

There had been a look to him when they spoke. Something in the old man’s eyes, his manner. Distraction? Anticipation? Hodge had seen the look before. Penderhaldt was running late on a difficult commission, an extraordinary compass, by the old man’s accounting, and he was exhausted after days of scriving enchantments into the device’s components.

“So, it’s down to the last moment again, is it?” Hodge muttered, a wry smile on his face.

After nearly two decades in Penderhaldt’s service, Hodge had become familiar with the old man’s work habits. The artificer had never failed to meet an obligation, not in Hodge’s memory. It was also true that he had never turned down a commission, not if it held his interest. And the compass captivated the old man like nothing Hodge had ever seen. Penderhaldt fell on it with the wonder of a child and the dogged determination of master craftsman who had not allowed himself an idle moment in many years.

Determined to set things right in Penderhaldt’s workshop before the artificer returned, Hodge had finished shoveling snow from the walk and then brought in the shopping–venison and vegetables for the stew, a round of rustic seed bread, and a few bottles of ale to wash it all down.

The house had been cold, unusually so. Hodge shivered as he made his way down a set of curving wooden stairs, worn to the sheen of melting ice through long years of use, to a modest kitchen. Diffuse light, softened by the late afternoon snowfall, painted the small chamber in hues of gray through a narrow leaded-glass window that ran nearly the length of the room. Hodge set the ingredients for Cassie’s stew on a butcher’s table and stowed the bread and ale in the larder. He removed his hat and coat, tossing them on a nearby chair, rubbed his hands together, and then lit the hearth.

For the better part of an hour Hodge prepared the stew, one of Cassie’s specialties and a favorite of the old man. In the many years since his wife’s passing, Hodge had never quite gotten it right, but the aroma of the stew always brought her into their home, summoning her warmth and kindness to them.

Hodge smiled in anticipation as he set the pot to simmer. It would need a few hours at least. Time enough to attend to Penderhaldt’s workshop.

He left the close confines of the kitchen and climbed the broad stone stairs to the artificer’s rooms, which spanned the upper level of their home and the top floors of two adjacent row houses. They held a modest bedchamber with a balcony overlooking Midspan Quay and an expansive, spectacularly cluttered workshop that warmly invited you in and then held you there, lost in wonder.

The air had grown colder as Hodge ascended and when he reached the landing, he nearly lost his footing. Ice covered the stone floor. The workshop’s heavy wooden door stood ajar, a drift of snow spilling from the room through the doorway and onto the landing.

“What…?” he gasped.

Hodge used a hand to steady himself against the nearest wall, carefully made his way forward, and shouldered the door open, carving through knee-deep snow until it would move no further. He shuffled into the room.

Hodge drew a sharp intake of breath that caught in his chest. Penderhaldt’s workshop was a ruin of debris entombed in ice and deep drifts of snow.

Dread shuddered through him.

“What have you done, old man?”

#

Hodge wore the cold fear of that moment like a shroud clinging to a drowned man. A shiver passed through him and suddenly his entire body shuddered in the biting cold of the memory. It drove him to one knee and sapped his resolve.

He had seen it in the old man’s distracted unease, had known something was wrong. And yet, he’d done nothing in that moment.

The shame of it welled in his eyes. He quickly closed them against it, the displaced tears drifting down his face in lonely rivulets to freeze in his beard.

“Pull yourself together,” he said.

Hodge drew in a long puff of smoke from his pipe. The warmth of it steadied him. He drew in another and slowly exhaled. Warmth returned and along with it, his determination.

Hodge shrugged off his pack. He opened it, dug through its contents for a moment, and then drew out a small coldfire lantern, a sphere of blackened steel housing an orb of glacial ice that shimmered with lambent, blue-white light. Penderhaldt had surprised him with it some years ago, a gift, he’d said, to honor his many years of service.

But Hodge had known otherwise. The artificer had made many coldfire lanterns over the years, but never one quite like this. No, this was a gift of friendship, the artificer’s wordless poem honoring the long path they had walked together.

There was nothing he cherished more in the world.

Hodge stood and attached the lantern to an iron ring mounted at the end of his staff. He bent to pick up his pack, hefted it onto his shoulders, and then took up his walking staff, drawing it close to open the lantern’s shutter just enough to allow a beam of light to penetrate the growing gloom.

He lingered a moment, savoring the kyreweed, and then began to walk north, each breath of smoke from his pipe billowing behind him for but an instant before the raging wind tore it to nothing.

Penderhaldt

Penderhaldt startled awake. The cold, shapeless memory of a dream clung to him like a shroud.     Unsettled, he sat up, massaging an ache in his neck. He lingered at the edge of the dusty couch for a moment, orienting himself, willing the uneasiness of the now forgotten dream away.

He had slept much longer than he’d intended. Penderhaldt’s workshop was awash in the light of coldfire lanterns. A fire cracked in the stone hearth and a light breakfast had been set out in an adjacent sitting area. The soft gray light of dawn was just beginning to touch the room.

Penderhaldt smiled as he pushed himself up from the couch.

Hodge, he thought, delighting in the inviting warmth of his workshop. The man knows me better than I know myself.

He made his way to a chair near the fire and sat, sinking deeply into the soft leather. Penderhaldt nibbled the cheese and dried venison Hodge had laid out for him as he contemplated Captain Grey’s compass. Once assembled, it would be the finest device he had ever made. A work of grand art, with components crafted by master artisans and enchantments that would protect it from the relentless cold of the north for generations.

Penderhaldt smiled contentedly.

“Best get to it,” he said.

Penderhaldt stood stiffly and walked to his worktable. He conjured a sphere of coldfire above its surface and then got to work. He laid out the compass parts on a soft leather hide, gathered the necessary tools, and then began to assemble the captain’s compass. He smiled at the simplicity of the task, three months in the making. When he was finished, he tested the mechanical elements of the compass to ensure that everything was in working order. Satisfied, he closed the compass and placed it directly in front of him, securing the locking clasp so that the case would remain closed until he was ready.

It was time.

Penderhaldt placed a hand on the captain’s compass, drew a deep breath, and opened himself to the power of the White March.

He set the pattern of the divination sigil in his mind. Its nuanced elegance gratified him, assured him. He allowed himself a rare, prideful smile and then began the incantation that would allow an aspect of himself to manifest for a short time in the White March. It was a difficult spell that carried some risk, but Penderhaldt considered it far less dangerous than physically traveling to the elemental plane of ice via a rift, something he had done only once in his many years as an Adept.

As he completed the spell, a facet of himself shifted into the White March. He remained physically within the warm confines of his workshop, one hand on the compass, but also stood on a vast plane of ice, an avatar in the realm that was the source of his power.

#

In the White March, luminous, glass-like ice stretched beyond the limit of his sight in every direction. Snow fell delicately from a crystalline sky, drifting down and down and through the ice, each flake a sigil, a latticework of power and intent.

“Marvelous!” he said in breathless astonishment. He had never seen such a thing in the White March, had no sense of its purpose.

He peered closely at a snowflake as it drifted across his line of sight. Its nuance captivated him, drew him in, began to untether him. He shuddered as if startling out of a light sleep. He turned away and shut his eyes, suppressing a wave of cold despair.

The extraordinary sensation unsettled him. He considered abandoning his undertaking, leaving the White March to explore other options, but he did not have the time. He had to press on, to focus entirely on the task before him, and he would have to be quick about it.

Penderhaldt opened his eyes and looked outward, softening his gaze to guard against the enticement of the sigils falling gently all around him. He watched for disturbances in the flurry, anything that might indicate the presence of an elemental, and to his great surprise, he quickly found what he was looking for–an elemental drifted near, intangible but for the eddy of its passage.

Penderhaldt sang to it in the soft cant of his art, beckoning it close. The elemental shifted its course. As it drew near, the artificer smiled. A lesser wind elemental.

It was precisely what he sought.

#

In his workshop, Penderhaldt activated the sigil with a short incantation. Opening the compass case would begin the binding process, tethering the elemental to the device. If the binding sigil did what it was designed to do, closing the case would summon the elemental from the White March to the realm of men.

He slid the locking clasp aside and made ready to open the case, but a feeling of unease stayed his hand. Penderhaldt sighed.

“Tavreau,” he said.

But no… no, he had taken the scholar’s perspective to heart, had modified his approach. His solution was elegant. His design was not… unkind.

It was not unkind.

Penderhaldt nodded once, took a deep breath, and then opened the case.

#

In the White March, the ice at Penderhaldt’s feet exploded in a cascade of glistening shards, throwing him into the air. A storm of wind and snow and penetrating cold spiraled up from a gaping crevasse, spinning him in a tight arc before streaking away.

Penderhaldt cried out in surprise as he surged upward. Disoriented, he lingered in an eddy created by the violent passage of… something. He gazed into the distance trying to spot it, to make some sense of it, as he drifted back down toward the ice like softly falling snow.

#

In Penderhaldt’s workshop, a biting frost formed, descending from the ceiling in a fog of crystalline ice. It began to snow, and a cold wind stirred in the chamber, growing rapidly in intensity until a blizzard raged in his workshop. In the onslaught, Penderhaldt lost his footing, hit the stone floor hard. He watched in breathless silence as the storm consumed the chamber. Books blew from their shelves and a flurry of debris swirled throughout the room–loose parchment and scrolls, and the tattered remnants of sketches and notes that had adorned the walls of his workshop mere moments before. Drifts of snow began to form along the floorboards and at the base of the room’s central hearth.

Penderhaldt rolled onto his side, managed to pull himself to his knees. “Hodge!” he shouted. “Hodge, man!” But his words were lost in the howling wind of the storm.

He exhaled heavily, drew a breath, and braced himself. He gripped the edge of his worktable with both hands and pulled himself to his feet. He leaned into the table, ice stinging his face, his eyes. He reached for the compass.

Penderhaldt gasped. The whole of the divining ring had turned to luminous black ice.

#

In the cold of the White March, Penderhaldt tracked the path of the disturbance as he regained his footing on the ice. This was not the lesser creature he had seen meandering lazily above the glacial plane. It was something else, a living storm of roiling wind and ice. Penderhaldt shuddered as the entity sped away into the vast firmament of the White March.

And then, abruptly, it slowed and turned. The creature hovered motionless for a breath and then another, and then began moving again, directly at him, gaining speed as it closed the distance.

Cold, abject fear turned Penderhaldt’s blood to ice. He slammed his eyes shut and spun frantically into a crouch, cowering in a huddled mass against the impact he hoped would never come.

#

In his workshop, Penderhaldt slammed the compass case shut.

The storm in the chamber abated immediately.

#

In the stark beauty of the White March, Penderhaldt opened his eyes. He stood slowly, scanning the lucent sky. The immense creature was gone. So, too, was the light snowfall of enigmatic sigils. The air was still and utterly silent. Penderhaldt lingered a moment more and then ended the spell that had allowed him to be in two places at once. His avatar vanished from the White March.

#

Penderhaldt leaned against the table breathing heavily as he surveyed the damage to his workshop. The chamber looked like an abandoned ruin after a long winter storm. He took a moment to catch his breath and then brushed snow from the captain’s compass with one unsteady hand. He could sense the creature testing the limits of the binding enchantment. It was decidedly not the simple wind elemental he had intended to capture–the thing had come from beneath the ice!

He trembled as confusion and fear threatened to overwhelm him.

“Come on, man, think!” he said. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. He focused his attention on the problem at hand, breathing through his growing unease.

His sigil had worked. There was no doubt of that. It had worked. Its magic had bound the elemental, had summoned it to his world. Had it been a sentient entity of even moderate intelligence, the binding magic would have failed, and he would be dead. He was certain of it.

Penderhaldt’s concern receded a measure. He had to trust his design. The elemental bound to the device was far more powerful than he had intended, but the binding magic of the sigil would continue to assert itself until the creature submitted to its fate.

It could not do otherwise.

Penderhaldt considered sparing a few hours to rest, but he was eager to examine the compass in operation. It was possible, he admitted with some reluctance, that the elemental was too powerful for the device itself–its housing, its works. He wasn’t sure if the thing would be of any use at all.

There was simply no way he could deliver the compass to Captain Grey without assessing its integrity first. Gazing about his workshop at the devastation left by the storm, Penderhaldt thought it might be best to find a quiet spot outside for that.

Hodge

Wandering the ice in the dark searching for Penderhaldt, blinding snow and wind battering him with every step, had become pointless. Hodge had lost sight of the bridge town twenty minutes ago. He had little doubt that he’d be able to find his way back, but he wasn’t sure Penderhaldt could, despite his considerable art.

Though he does have a compass, he thought with a brief, ambiguous smile.

Hodge considered returning to Andenn’s Crossing. Should he trust the old man to make his own way back in his own good time? Hodge knew he could be home in an hour, maybe less with the wind at his back. A bowl of Cassie’s delicious stew in his lap, a tankard of ale, or better still, a mug of hot mulled wine, legs outstretched in front of a crackling fire.

He surveyed his surroundings.

“Damn,” he said.

Hodge drove the spike of his staff into the ice and fully opened the coldfire lantern’s shutter. Its arcane light illuminated an area ten paces in every direction. He removed his pack and dropped it to the ice, sat down upon it. He pulled his coat tight and lowered his head against the storm.

“You come to me, old man.”

Penderhaldt

Snow fell on Midspan, muffling the late morning sounds of the bridge town. Penderhaldt’s apprehension eased as he walked. Andenn’s Crossing had been his home for nearly thirty years and the marvel of the place never failed to fill him with warmth.

The town sat on an ancient stone bridge that had, at one time, spanned the Andenn River from Stoneholme in the north to the Andenn Steppes in the south. Penderhaldt made his way along the shopfronts and street vendors of Midspan, navigating a winding lane bounded on either side by basalt and bier-wood buildings that rose five stories from the bridge deck. He nodded to familiar passersby as he strode beyond the market, past the merchant houses and the old garrison, and on to Stone’s End, where the bridge fell away to ruins.

From there, he descended a narrow set of wooden steps that switchbacked through the tumbledown shacks and walkways that sprawled among the piers and abutments below the town proper, and down further still to the docks and warehouses built on the ice of the Andenn River itself.

Once on the ice, Penderhaldt walked toward the ruins of Stoneholme, the great Carran city that had fallen to Dachaal raiders nearly three centuries before. Lowering his head against a steady northerly wind howling across the ice, Penderhaldt trudged on through drifts of fresh snow and patches of bare ice, settling at last on spot a league north of the bridge town.

He knelt on the river ice, removed the compass from his satchel, and set the device before him. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, resting a moment in the resonance of his connection with the White March.

He sensed the bound elemental roaming to the northwest where the distant sky was dark with leaden clouds.

“There you are. Now, let’s have a look,” he said. He removed his gloves, rubbed his hands together, and then opened the compass.

The sigil’s binding magic drew the arcane tether taut, pulling the elemental close. The snowfall grew heavier in the immediate vicinity and the wind picked up, gusting playfully along the river ice, but the shift in weather was tolerable, nothing like what had transpired in Penderhaldt’s workshop or on the glacial plane of the White March. He was pleased to find that the elemental had diminished to an incorporeal state, a strong indication that the binding enchantment had fully asserted itself.

Penderhaldt leaned in close to examine the captain’s compass. A small section of the imbrium divining ring had turned to blue-black ice, indicating a storm in the general direction of the bank of clouds to the northwest. The elemental strained against the binding magic in the direction of the distant storm, just as the artificer had hoped. Penderhaldt picked up the device and rotated it in his hand. The divining ring responded as intended–the transmutation effect flowed along the ring’s surface, maintaining its alignment with the distant storm.

Penderhaldt sighed deeply as the tension of the day began to fall away. He raised his head to the sky and closed his eyes, delighting in the wind and snow that danced lightly along the contours of his face.

He smiled and turned his attention to the captain’s compass once more. Everything was in working order. It truly was his finest work.

Satisfied, he snapped the case shut and set the compass back down on the ice. At once, the snowfall diminished, and the wind calmed. Penderhaldt sensed the elemental moving off, back toward the cloud-dark sky.

He nodded, a satisfied smile on his face.

Eager to help Hodge restore things to order in his workshop, Penderhaldt drew his satchel near to pack up for the walk home.

As he reached for the captain’s compass, the familiar harmonic of his connection to the White March cantillated into a deep, discordant vibration.

Penderhaldt stiffened and gasped for breath.

The air around him grew suddenly still, and the falling snow slowed its descent. It fell through the ice of the Andenn River.

Fear surged in the artificer.

“No!” he breathed.

Biting, unnatural cold impaled him, obliterating his attunements. His breath froze in his chest. Ice bloomed on his clothing, his hair, his face and hands. Tendrils of river ice spiraled up from where he knelt, enveloping him in fine, crystalline stalagmites to his neck.

In a blind panic, Penderhaldt tried to isolate himself from the White March, to sever his arcane link to the source of his power. But he could not. He was held fast, body and mind.

And then the elemental manifested before him, an immense living storm, the incarnation of primal winter. An ancient thing of profound, unfathomable intelligence.

The White March itself.

The entity drifted to within a breath of Penderhaldt, regarded him, coldly considered him. And then it turned away, its indifference entombing the artificer in despair, a forgotten thing held fast in the deep ice of the first winter.

Helpless, Penderhaldt watched as a gust of wind, a slight thing, formed on the ice and drifted toward the compass. It coiled around it, flung open the case, and then dispersed. The divining ring instantly transmuted to ice, glistening like a moonless winter sky alive with stars.

A flake of snow spalled from the ring and drifted softly upward to hover before him. He stared at it in wonder.

It was a sigil, his divination sigil.

The symmetry of its magic dissolved before him and something new began to form in its place. Penderhaldt lost himself in the utter beauty of it, drifting in the impossible nuance of its creation. It was alien, beyond his ken, and it lulled him like soft, loving words whispered to a child. He found solace in its unfamiliarity.

Penderhaldt startled as if waking from a dream.

An intricate snowflake floated in the air before him, an astonishing sigil, alive with its own inner light. It began to drift slowly toward his left eye. Penderhaldt’s dream-like calm shattered, and panic overwhelmed him again. He tried to move his head, to close his eyes, but he was ice now, and very nearly nothing more than that.

The sigil gently came to rest.

A resounding harmonic pealed outward from Penderhaldt’s left eye, saturating the artificer in arcane energy that fractured him into two aspects.

On the ice of the Andenn River, the relentless, debilitating cold fell away from Penderhaldt like a calving glacier. He collapsed to the ice, laying there for a time, disoriented and adrift in exhaustion. Something lingered at the edge of Penderhaldt’s perception, a shade of himself, an avatar not unlike what he had conjured earlier that morning.

Penderhaldt rolled unsteadily to one side. The captain’s compass sat on the ice just out of reach, a light dusting of snow covering its case and glass, the now useless divining ring. He turned away from the thing, flopping heavily onto his back.

Something whispered softly in his mind.

Penderhaldt shuddered and turned back to look at the compass. Somehow, he knew it would be a small matter to restore it to working order, to infuse it with true divination magic, that Captain Grey would use the device for many years, would marvel at its ability to predict the weather. He would cherish it. The man would leave it to his eldest son, and he to his eldest daughter, and so on down the years.

The thought surprised him.  Penderhaldt had no sense of how it had come to him, but there was a plausibility to it. It seemed more memory than fancy.

As he lay there, the notion faded.

He managed to sit up, breathing heavily with the effort.

He gathered up the compass and stuffed it into his satchel, and then pulled himself unsteadily to his feet.

He could not do otherwise.

Penderhaldt stood for a moment in the growing dusk and then, with some apprehension, raised a hand to probe his eye, though he knew with terrible certainty what he would find. Solid, primal ice. A boundless, interminable connection to a source of magic he had thought he understood.

He nodded slowly.

Service in exchange for revelation.

It was not unkind.

Again, something whispered at the edge of his thoughts. Penderhaldt abruptly turned, fixing his gaze to the north. A colossal storm was developing many leagues beyond sight, well beyond the ruins of Stoneholme, and though Penderhaldt could not say precisely how he knew it, he was certain that Andenn’s Crossing would soon be buried in the first deep snows of late summer.

He sighed wearily and turned to begin the long, slow trek back to the bridge town he called home. He muttered softly as he went, his purpose not entirely his own.

Hodge

Huddled against the howling wind, a fresh bowl of kyreweed glowing in his pipe, Hodge considered his options. It had been an hour since he’d settled in to wait for Penderhaldt and the cold was finally starting to get to him. As recently as a few weeks ago, the old man had once again offered to fortify his winter gear against the cold, but Hodge had politely declined, as he always did. He enjoyed the feel of biting wind on his face, the growing numbness of fingers and toes as he went about his business in the bridge town and on the surrounding river ice. It made him feel alive, made him look forward to the warmth of hearth and home.

And that sounded rather good about now.

Hodge shuddered. He knew he could last the night, could pull himself up at first light and shake off the stiffness, continue his search for the old man. The thought of it, though, was daunting. He had not been this cold in a long while and his heart was heavy with worry.

There would be no sleeping in the gale, so he sat and he smoked and he tried not to think about the old man.

And then, the wind abruptly died.

“I remember making this,” said a familiar voice.

Hodge sat upright. Penderhaldt stood in the light of the coldfire lantern, gazing intently at the device.

“You shed a tear when I gave it to you.”

Hodge stared at the old man for a long moment, a slight smile forming on his granite countenance. “I didn’t,” he said.

He stood slowly, brushing ice and snow from his longcoat. “You had me worried, old man,” he said.

Penderhaldt said nothing. He seemed lost in thought as he continued to focus his attention on the lantern.

A soldier’s unease crept into Hodge. He pulled his pack from the ice and slung it over a shoulder. His eyes never left the artificer.

“Grey’s compass,” he said. “Did you finish it?”

“No,” said Penderhaldt flatly. The artificer reached out with a tentative hand to touch the coldfire lantern, drew it back abruptly.

Penderhaldt turned to Hodge, sighed. “No, not quite. The compass requires some… attention. Nothing particularly difficult. I’ll have it sorted out in the morning, well before Captain Grey knocks on our door.”

“Will you, now?”

Penderhaldt pulled the staff neatly from the ice and walked over to Hodge. The artificer casually handed the staff to him, the lantern swinging gently on its chain creating an umbral dance of shadow and arcane, glacial light.

Hodge reached for the coldfire lantern, steadied it, and had a long look at Penderhaldt. The old man was steady on his feet, but his face was gaunt, the color of ash-laden snow.

Hodge drew in a sudden, sharp breath. He raised a hand to touch the left side of his friend’s face.

“Penn,” he breathed, “what’s happened here? Your eye… it’s… it’s iced over!”

“It’s all right, Hodge,” said the artificer, his voice calm, reassuring. “A mishap, nothing more.”

“Can you see out of it, man?” said Hodge.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Everything. I can see… everything.”

“I don’t understand. The damned thing looks frozen through!”

“I imagine it is,” said Penderhaldt.

“You imagine?” Hodge said.

Penderhaldt brushed Hodge’s hand away in agitation. He sighed deeply and turned away, took a few slow steps to the edge of the lantern light.

“Penn. What’s happened?” said Hodge.

The old man stood in silence for a long moment, staring out into the darkness.

“A miscalculation,” he said at last. He muttered something under his breath, too soft to make out, and then turned to face Hodge.

“More than that,” said Penderhaldt. “Of a certainty, Hodge, more than that. I lost myself in a problem I was not… equipped to solve.”

Hodge leaned on his staff in silence, waiting for his friend to continue. Penderhaldt abruptly shifted his attention to the river ice at his feet, his head casting about as if searching for something.

Hodge took a step toward his friend. “What do you mean, old man?”

Penderhaldt returned his attention to his companion. “The White March is a living thing, Hodge,” he said, “and it has marked me its own.”

“But you’ve served the White March for decades, Penn. Your Order…”

“My Order?” he said, his voice roiling with contempt. He laughed bitterly. A shuddered peeled through him, and his head and shoulders slumped.

Softly, his voice the slightest breath, Penderhaldt said, “Yes. That is so. My Order serves the White March.” He raised his head unsteadily then to gaze at his friend, one eye glistening with tears, the other with portent, “But I… I am indentured to it.”

The words hung in the air like an epitaph.

The old man sighed deeply. “I don’t quite know what to do, Hodge. Lost,” he said. “I am lost.”

Hodge considered his friend. There was little he could say. He doubted he would ever understand what had happened to the old man, but he didn’t need to. Penderhaldt would find his way. He always had.

For now, though, the old man needed a meal and a pint and a night’s sleep. That would make a start at it.

Hodge smiled warmly at his friend.

“And yet,” he said, “here you are.”

Penderhaldt

In the White March, Penderhaldt knelt on a glistening plane of ice.

…here you are. An echo fading in Winter’s embrace.

A light fall of sigils drifted down and down. They fell through the ice.

They fell through him, and their passage left an accumulation of secrets.

J. Scott King makes his home just north of Seattle.  He’s been writing fiction casually for many years and recently decided it was time to become more serious about it.  The ‘Ethics of Elemental Servitude’ is his first published work.  He is currently working on two short stories and a novella.  When not writing, Scott studies Aikido and explores the mountains and coastlines of the Pacific Northwest with his wife and his dog.  In his spare time, he works in technology leadership at Starbucks.