Atop one of Dracoheim’s summits was a fortress, a place of high walls, deep courtyards, lofty towers. In the depths of the snow, much of the place was buried, locked in hibernation. Nevertheless, some of the wall peaks were visible, and a few towers jutted above the surrounding drifts. In one of these towers a pale light glowed through an ice-sheeted window. It was a high garret, a solitary room well-removed from the rest of Castle Dracoheim. This solitude served both the castle’s mistress and the denizen of that room himself.
There was indeed but a single occupant of that lofty nest, and he was no ogre. He was a person of manlike stature, though smaller and slighter than a strapping male. Now he seemed almost childlike, for he huddled upon a bed, buried under several furs of white bearskin. With a soft moan he clutched his arms around his thin chest, and he shivered.
His tremors were not the result of cold, for it was fairly warm in this garret. A mountain of coal was piled in the corner, and an iron brazier still radiated some of the heat from the blaze the man had kindled forty hours before. Then he had been alert and active, but later he had left the stove to burn down low while he went to his bed and buried himself under his quilts.
He had slept the deep and dreamless slumber that inevitably followed the drinking of his elixir, when the magic suffused his flesh and hummed warmly through his body. It brought serene pleasure, indeed the only contentment that he knew. Yet, as it always did, that pleasure waned acutely with the fading of the magic, and so he awakened as he did now, with the hunger burning within him. It was a craving that drove all other matters from his mind.
The hunger was nothing strange; he felt it and fought it through every waking minute of his life. But now that hunger was tinged with despair, for the means of slaking his need was growing short and would soon be exhausted.
The manlike being peered from beneath a corner of his blankets at the workbench along the far wall of his room. The cluttered table extended nearly halfway around the periphery of the circular chamber. There were many objects on that bench, lining the shelves on the wall above as well: bottles and vials of multitudinous dusts, ashes, powders, and liquids; boxes of arcane ingredients; tomes of ancient wisdom-some bound and locked on the shelves, others propped on the table, open to marked pages-as well as various odds and ends, halfway sorted into piles. There was a mound of feathers, a stack of ivory walrus tusks, skulls of men, ogres, and walrus, and a scattering of marble-sized objects that were the dried eyeballs of various creatures.
The watery eyes of the figure under the blankets sought one and only one object: They came to bear with fevered intensity upon the stoppered bottle that stood on the far left end of the curved table. The glass of the container was semitransparent, smeared with scratches and blotches and ancient, grimy residue, but there was enough clarity for him to see the line marking the amount of liquid-the oh-so-precious life-giving elixir! — remaining.
That amount was heartbreakingly small, barely two fingerbreadths above the bottom. He wanted to leap up, race to the table, and lift the neck to his eager lips, sucking down every drop of that precious draught in one exhilarating frenzy. His belly growled at the thought, and saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth. For a moment he tugged at the heavy blankets and half rose before slumping back down and letting out his breath with an audible groan.
If he did that, if he sucked the bottle dry, then his elixir was gone… gone until the snow melted and the courtyard became passable again… until he could make his way to the Dowager Queen and promise that grotesque ogress anything, whatever she demanded in exchange for more of the potion, the liquid that was life itself to him.
He would do that willingly, he knew. Indeed he would go to her, as soon as he possibly could, and he would beg and grovel, plead with her. His craving would be written on his face, and her sneer, her scorn, would ridicule him. She would play with him, taunt him, tantalize and tease him, and he would sob and plead some more.
In the end, of course, she would grant him his wish. He was, after all, the royal Alchemist, and he would be no good to her, nor to the king himself in distant Winterheim, if he was reduced to a sodden mass of need, a pathetic creature of desperate craving. He could not work in that state, could barely even survive. Naturally, the Dowager Queen would make him suffer, would demand a multitude of unguents and admixtures in exchange. He would do the work she asked, and she would reward him with his potion.
He lived for that great day, that moment when she would produce a cask of the stuff, when he would have all the elixir he needed for weeks, even months, at a time. But for now he knew that time lay in the insufferably distant future. Bitter experience had taught him that even if he descended from his tower, clawed his way through the snow with frostbitten fingers and frozen feet, and forced his way into the main keep, he would find the Dowager Queen sleeping, a brace of guards at her door-brutish, hulking ogres in their own right-blocking his access until the sun had emerged into view and the great ogress decided to arise from a long winter’s torpor.
So he was left, for now, with this pathetic draught, the few swallows in the jar, and he would have to make that reserve last for the rest of the winter. Despite his current need, he understood that a greedy gulping, consuming all of the potion right now, would lead only to greater desperation and pure, unadulterated misery in the days and weeks to come.
He must be conservative and careful. Very slowly, he pushed the heavy weight of bearskins off of his shoulders and his chest. The air in the room had grown somewhat clammy. Still moving slowly, he twisted, put his feet on the floor-which was lined with bearskins-and tried to force himself to a standing position.
He rose unsteadily, and the shaking of his knees was so intense that he immediately sat down again. That was fine… every minute of delay now was another minute he was able to survive, without replenishing his supply. So he tarried with some semblance of patience, allowing blood to circulate into his legs. There was a flagon of water near the stove, and a box with some dried fish-cake, but he ignored those. Later, after he had sipped his potion, there would be time for mundane drink, for such scant food as he cared to force down his throat. But first…
The bottle stood there on the bench, taunting him. His gaze remained riveted to the glass vessel as he felt the longing churn in his guts, well up his gorge and swirl, maddeningly, through his brain. At last he could wait no longer. He forced himself to his feet and in a matter of five steps brought himself to the workbench, bracing his hands upon the solid stone surface, leaning forward to catch his breath as might a man who had just completed a ten-mile run.
His hands trembled so much that he feared he would drop the bottle if he tried to pick it up right now. That thought was too terrible, so he stood very still and drew deep, slow breaths, forcing his attention away from the potion, trying to divert his mind from the hunger for even a few seconds, enough time to settle his churning nerves.
Nearby was a ceramic dish, a large bowl containing his attempts at an experiment made the previous autumn-an experiment that had yielded disappointing results. The residue in the bowl had collected little dust over the winter, for he kept his room very clean. Specks of gold gleamed in the powder, and, spotting them, he was able to force a wry chuckle. In his homeland, the amount of gold he had used for this single experiment would have bought a family food for many years, allowed a man to build a decent house, or to be outfitted with weapons and armor enough to embark on a lifelong career of adventure.
Here, on Dracoheim, there was gold aplenty, drawn from the island’s own rich mines. This fistful came from a crate of gold dust the Dowager Queen had provided him for use as the basis of his experiment. He recalled the queen’s purpose and command. The ogress desired that he create a unique explosive material, something that her son, the king of Suderhold, could use to aid his constant wars against the humans.
He had combined the gold particles with simple salt and black cinder drawn from the slopes of one of Dracoheim’s several, mostly dormant, volcanoes. The gold, salt, and black cinder were augmented by rare ash provided to him by the Dowager Queen, something the powerful priestess claimed to have extracted from secret rituals, ordered by her violent god, Gonnas the Strong.
The Alchemist had respect for Gonnas the Strong. It was during one such ritual that the queen had also created the potion that above all else, gave him reason for living. He had set himself to his latest experiments in the fall, before the Sturmfrost, and had started out with a sense of optimism. If the ash had some concealed potency that, mingled with the other materials, could bring destructive force to life, he would discover that power, and he had every reason to expect that the queen would reward him.
He had tried for weeks, using the ingredients in a variety of concentrations and proportions, always working carefully lest he create an explosive that would destroy him in the process of discovery. His concoctions had fizzled
