Castle for Rent

“I’m going to give it the old college try. If I flunk out … can you take on a new employee?”

Five Ice Island

Snowclaw had been kneeling all day on an ice floe, waiting for a huge sea animal called the jhalrakk to come within range of his harpoon. But the jhalrakk had other ideas. It was content to stay where it was, just out of reach, half submerged in the shallow icy waters of the inlet. It had been feeding all day, ingesting vast quantities of water and filtering out what was edible. Only when it had its fill would it move out to sea again, and maybe — just maybe — its course would take it near Snowy’s position.

Snowclaw knew it was a big jhalrakk (the word was sort of a growl, done with a snap of the jaws). He’d wanted to bag a big one all his life. This might be his chance.

It was cold. It was always cold here; the perennial question was how cold. Today, it was very cold. Bone-freezing cold. You had to watch when you took a leak outside, so as not to wind up stuck to one end of a pisscicle. It was cold.

Snowclaw hadn’t moved for a very long time. Slowly he brought his four-digited hand to his belly, where the fur was a little thinner and finer than that which covered the rest of him, but just as milk-white. Bone-white claws extruded from the ends of his fingers. He scratched carefully, exhaling.

His feet, which were huge and padded with thick spongelike tissue at sole and heel, were cold. His left knee was cold. His butt was cold.

Damn, he thought. I’m cold.

He didn’t know whether he’d be better off bagging the jhalrakk or not. If he did, he’d be all night gutting it, cutting it, and dragging the carcass back to his shack. And tomorrow would go to rendering blubber, seasoning hide, and doing a hundred different other things with all the products and by-products that jhalrakks produced. He didn’t look forward to any of that; it was all hard work. He just might freeze if he had to stay outdoors any longer. On the other hand, if he didn’t bag something soon, he would starve. But at least he wouldn’t have to break his back doing all that damn work.

It had been a very lean hunting season. He needed a little luck, or he didn’t know what he was going to do.

The jhalrakk suddenly began moving. Snowclaw tensed, his left hand coming up to grip the front of the harpoon’s shaft, his right moving back along its length.

The jhalrakk was heading straight for the floe. Snowclaw rose to a crouch and brought the point of the harpoon in line with the sharp, spiny back of the jhalrakk as it cut through the water, steaming toward him like a great ship, the kind Snowclaw would spy far out to sea sometimes. The spine rose, revealing the broad rubbery expanse of the beast’s flanks. Then the head came out of the water. Its six eyes seemed to focus right on Snowclaw. The beast’s great maw opened, revealing row on row of needlelike teeth.

Snowclaw swallowed hard and ran his tongue across his frost-white fangs. He stood up.

Come on right at me, big fellow.

Snowclaw made his shot. The harpoon skidded off the blubbery flank of the jhalrakk and plopped into the water. Snowclaw grabbed the line but his numbed hands couldn’t stop it until it had paid all the way out, pulling taut against the iron anchor spike which had been pounded into the ice. Snowy growled and pulled on the line, but the jhalrakk had run over it, and now the big animal was diving. The beast slid out of sight, disappearing into the frigid, blue-black depths of the inlet.

Big it was, the largest that Snowy had ever seen. The jhalrakk was now underneath the floe. Snowy prayed that it would stay submerged and pass on out to sea. But the way it had looked at him …

The floe lifted out of the water, tilting sharply to the right. Snowclaw threw himself flat and hung on to the iron spike.

The floe soon became almost vertical and seemed about to tip over. Snowy knew he was in for a dunking, anyway, so he let go and slid into the water, hoping that he could swim away before the huge slab of ice flipped over on him.

It didn’t. Snowclaw surfaced and watched the massive ice island slide off to one side and slip back into the water edgewise. The jhalrakk appeared satisfied that it had done enough damage. With a mocking wave of its flukes, it moved off serenely toward the open sea.

Snowy couldn’t recall ever hearing of a jhalrakk big enough to lift an ice floe; a good-size one could overturn a large boat, for sure. But a huge, weighty mass of ice? It was ridiculous.

He swam back to the floe and climbed painfully back up on the ice. The wind hit him, making his waterlogged hide feel like a suit of fire. He pulled in the line, only to discover that he’d lost his best harpoon. With a savage growl, he yanked out the spike and threw it and the line as far as he could out to sea.

Some time later, grumbling, cursing, and generally bad-mouthing the world and everything that crawled or swam or walked in it, Snowclaw waded through deep drifts on his way to the only really warm spot he knew. He hadn’t thought he would ever go back, but he was at the end of his tether. Maybe the time he’d spent away had made him go soft. He was losing his touch. You couldn’t have asked for a more perfect setup shot on that jhalrakk. And he’d missed. Blown it completely.

He was just about frozen through, and could barely move, his fur a stiff mat of ice. The wind was howling out of the north throwing light snow, and night was falling. He could barely see through the icy rime forming over the fur around his eyes.

He found the crevasse and the steps he’d cut out of the ice going down into it. Minding where he put his feet, he descended the treacherous staircase.

The mouth of the cave was only a few steps from the bottom of the stairway. He went in, and the temperature immediately rose a few degrees. A few more steps inside the cave brought a warm draft from within. It felt like heaven.

There was a Gothic arch at the end of the tunnel, passing him through to a stone-walled corridor.

He was back in Castle Perilous.

The first time he’d stumbled in here, he and his hairless buddy Gene had met up and trooped around together. They’d wandered through the damn place for weeks, hopelessly lost. But after a while they’d become seasoned Guests of the castle, acquiring a sixth sense that allowed them to navigate the vast edifice with a reasonable chance of at least finding a way to the lavatory.

He made a series of lefts and rights, moving through bare hallways lit by jewel-tipped light fixtures in their wrought-iron mounts.

At length he smelled food: human food, which ordinarily he found rather tasteless. But if he talked nice to the cooks, they would whip up something more to his liking. If Linda was around, she’d do it for him no questions asked.

He found the Queen’s dining room and walked in. There were a number of hairless types — humans — at the table, his old friends among them.

“Snowclaw!”

Linda jumped up, ran over, and hugged him. He hugged back, careful not to crush the little human female, of whom he was greatly fond.

“Snowy, you’re soaking wet!”

“Yeah, I been swimming.”

Gene Ferraro thumped him on the back. “I knew you’d come back.”

“You knew something I didn’t,” Snowclaw said. “Not that I didn’t miss you, Gene, old buddy. How’s it going?”

“Oh, been pretty quiet around here.”

“Find a way back to your world yet?”

“Nope,” Gene said. “Still working on it.”

“That’s too bad. We’ll have to mount a search party. After all, you helped me find my aspect.”

“It was nothing. Yours is one of the stable ones.”