The Great Glass Mountain - Session Fifteen

 

Schreyer

 

Queen Valenta the Chain Knight rode north out of the capitol. She rode hard and when she crossed the river to reach the woods where the Company found the Crown, she made a rough crossing that left her horse shivering so she had to dismount and wipe him down. As she toweled the beast it occurred to her that this might be the last time she did this. Anything she did now, she might never do again.

 

The Chain Knight cantered her exhausted beast through the woods and a traveler came out of the frozen forest to beg her for help. He was injured and his horse was injured and he said a beast had attacked his companions. A serpent that demanded gold and belched flame when the poor travelers couldn't pay up. He was embarrassed to have fled and that's why Valenta, just for a moment, believed him.

 

The rider thought he recognized the brave Knight. Valenta told him it was unlikely. He saw her oubliette mail and asked if she was the Chain Knight. He must have been thinking of someone else.

 

Valenta saw him slip the hidden blade from his sleeve. She didn't exactly see it but she had just recently been attacked in exactly this manner and saw it coming. The Fox Knight slashed at her with his feather blade and she whipped her chain around his body and yanked, intending to unhorse him and ride away before he could remount. When she turned she saw that the chain had wrapped around his neck and dragged him an ell or two before releasing him. He didn't give up. She rode away before he got the chance.

 

 

In the clearing she heard three familiar voices and a new one. The captured Mule Knight was babbling on about the Mock Knight. How he had wanted to be buried in the ground like a man, and the Mule Knight had told him they'd treat his body like the body of any real Knight: bury it if possible, leave it for the crows and vultures if otherwise. Valenta rode into the clearing and asked what happened. The Knights had been assaulted by the warriors of the northern realm, but had beaten them back. Alexander the War Knight saw the scar on the Chain Knight's ungloved hand. The swelling. He realized what happened to her. 

 

The Queen told the Company the King was dead. The Mock Knight laughed. The King dead, the Queen fatally poisoned, his job was done. He could have stayed home with his friends and they could have all lived. Alexander kicked him. He kept kicking him until Auckland stopped him. They needed the last Northern Knight alive to help them avert the upcoming war. Which is what they were going to do first thing in the morning. Head to Bravecrossing and call the whole thing off. 

They dreamed of a beach on a rocky shore. The beach and the surf beyond were littered with mechanical components. A giant bronze ring stuck out of the waves. On the beach, too far away to identify, a group of naked warriors ran footraces and wrestled by a bonfire. The largest warrior picked up the others and tossed them into the water. A corpse lay on the sand, wrapped in the white and gold vestments of the Great Glass Mountain.

 

 

At dawn they rode west. Alexander gave the Queen his heavy fur cloak and rode beside her to catch her if she fell. He had been squire to her husband and though she barely remembered him he considered her family. The hills were blanketed. A lone figure struggled through the snow. Auckland and Shoat rode forward while Alexander held back with Valenta and the prisoner (mounted aboard the wizened horse they found in the swamp). The man was clad in the mail and helm of the Legion, but he had no sword or shield. He saw the Knights approach and tried to flee, as though he could move any faster than he already was. They stopped short of the reach of their halberds. The Legionnaire could only grunt and wheeze in response to their inquests. He pointed behind them. Five more mailed figures struggled through the sleet, these ones carrying shields and barbed swords.

 

The Company didn't want to get involved. They had a mission and couldn't risk the Queen catching a glancing blow. The lone deserter raised a hand to her as if begging her aid as she rode past. His five comrades seized him in their arms and dragged him away. 

 

The land north of Bravecrossing was denuded of trees for a full league. The stumps were freshly cut and there were drag marks where men and animals had hauled the logs back to the river valley with the Holding. A lone copse stood at the top of a knob of rough terrain that made felling them prohibitively difficult. A peasant militia cried out for aid from the stand of trees that sheltered them from the wind. They had been attacked by northern warriors and fought to delay them while the rest of the loggers escaped. Many were wounded by the wicked barbed swords of the invaders. The Knights said the attackers were not northmen, but members of the Legion. They offered to escort the woodsmen back to Bravecrossing, mounting an injured man on the Mule Knight's tall steed and assembling a travois to pull the wounded who could not ride.

 

Shishkin

 

They reached the valley by nightfall. There was a haze of smoke from all the fires burning to keep the tents and temporary structures warm. There were more people than the Knights had ever seen in one place. Even without Alexander's people, who had defied the order to migrate and stayed at Castleview. A party of black armored sentries halted the group, accompanied by warriors from Cugganscove in fish scale armor. They let the Company pass when they recognized them as the most famous Knights in the realm. Boar and Gert were up the river making preparations to assault the enemy stronghold. Boar's wife Muriel ruled in Bravecrossing.

 

The Knights proceeded through the camp to the castle that spanned the river. It was their first experience with light pollution, enough campfires burning to drown out the stars. They passed a cider tent where Sparenot and her family (and farmhand) ladled out cups of perry to the assembled peasantry. The vassals of the realm recognized the Knights. They recognized their Queen Valenta. Someone tossed a dried flower, leftover from the green season. Then another. A woman tried to garland the Queen with a crown of grass. Alexander, aware that there were assassins operating disguised in the realm, shoved her away.

 

Muriel greeted her son Shoat and his new friends in the castle, accompanied by a praetorian guard of the palace washerwomen and bakers clad in the same black armor as her husband's huscarls. The spikes were snipped or ground down and sanded. Not as a visual metaphor for the wearers' femininity, but because wearing spiked armor indoors was a great way to get stuck to every physical object you walked past. The Lady of the House was, at first, delighted by her son's new armor and weapon and Knighthood. Of course she then had to critique the poor condition of his panoply, stained by mud and blood and soaked with melted snow. He removed his helm and she tried not to freak out over the scar one of the northern Knights painted on his eyebrow. It made him look like his dad, albeit more handsome. She realized the Queen and the other Knights were there, composed herself and told the servants to set out a meal for the group.

The lady of the house entertained the company while Valenta got the facts of the situation from Muriel's handmaid Glorietta. Paste and the Companions had come from the Glass Mountain with the last wave of migrants. He announced the death of the King, and the Glass Knight's dying wish that his daughter Gert take over the war against the North and lead the people to their new home. Valenta scowled. That wasn't how it happened at all. 

Shoat drank Sparenot's brandy and talked with his mother. He tried to put on a brave face but when she heaped praise on him and told him the tales of his great deeds that he had accomplished, he had to confess. He hadn't saved the King from the Flying Swords. He was disabled by a hammer blow and the Horn Knight saved him by negotiating a surrender, which the King then violated by killing the mercenaries under a flag of truce. He wanted to be told it wasn't his fault, or punished for his misdeeds. His mother denied him that catharsis. She poured him more brandy and he realized that it was too late. His deeds would live on in stories and song no matter what he told people about how it really went down.

 

Or it was her way of telling him that she was no longer his arbiter of right and wrong, dispenser of reward and punishment. He was a Knight now and he had to decide for himself.

 

 

Valenta was exhausted and didn't feel like dissembling. She told Glorietta the truth. She killed the King to end his madness. Gert wasn't supposed to lead the realm in the invasion, she was supposed to call off the invasion and rebuild it. Auckland casually repeated the details of the Chain Knight's regicide to the whole table. Glorietta quietly noted that Paste had brought Ada with the last boatload of evacuees and refused to let her out of his sight, convinced she was a suicide risk. Valenta allowed that this was so.

 

Muriel couldn't get between Valenta and her daughter when it came to what the Glass Knight's last wishes were. She'd offer hospitality and what help she could. If and when Gert came back down the river she'd tell her whatever Valenta wanted, with all her courtiers as witnesses. Alexander would stay with her and speak to his old friend Boar. Meanwhile the Company would journey out into the frozen wasteland to find the Wheel and end the Winter that never ended.

 

Shoat suffered a sleep paralysis nightmare. He thought it was the drink or the fatty food after eating nothing but trail rations and water. Then he recognized the woman sitting on his chest. She was naked and her wild cloud of hair stopped the moonlight through the window from falling on her face. The Drunken Seer dismounted him, allowing his trapped erection to spring free under the blankets. She stood at the window and looked out at something, hair concealing her face still. He approached and she pointed at something out the window. He squinted but couldn't see. She touched his forehead and he saw like the hallucination of a migraine passing through the visual center of the brain. The opposite end of the realm. At the base of a sea cliff, on the frozen shore. The Wheel. He understood where he needed to go. She put a hand on his abdomen and he went spinning back into the old frog-sculpture bed that his parents kept in his old room. With a motion like falling down over and over again he blacked out.

 

Valenta woke up in the dungeon. Her first thought was treachery. Then she saw the door was open. Muriel's black armored sentries stood guard. She was wrapped in furs. She wasn't imprisoned. They let her sleep underground, in the dungeon, to restore her spirit. Muriel remembered. So she rolled on her side and went back to sleep.

 

Herdman

 

The dungeon after that was a dark space. Not a comforting dungeon but one that filled her with fear. It was familiar. The endless dark space with the hooded figures with cold swords and lanterns that gave off no light. She tried to fight, to escape. This time there was no passage to the surface. No light.

 

A flash of color shot through the crowd. A sound like voices through a layer of earth. Another flash, not a spark from a sword but a vision of color seen briefly through the blackness before the press of robed figures obscured the scene. Closer and louder until they broke through. Four men, armed and armored and laughing and taunting one another as they hacked a path through the shades to Valenta. One with black pearls for eyes. One with eyes of glass. A third who wept waterfall salt tears. A fourth she had forgotten until this moment who wept beer as he cackled with glee at the slaughter of the ghosts. She remembered him now. She remembered it all again. A teenaged figure helped her aboard her horse and she escaped the horde.

Upstairs, Auckland woke to shouting from the dungeon. He recognized the voice of the Iron Knight. The warrior had been imprisoned by the Glass Knight after he stated his intention to "deal justice" to Ada. The Companions brought him to Bravecrossing and, without orders from the King to execute or free him, locked him in the dungeon. The Horn Knight worried that he escaped and was raising hell. But that wasn't a problem. The Iron Knight Phinney was yelling for help because the Queen, in the next cell over, wasn't breathing.

By the time the Horn Knight got down there two chambermaids and the palace physick were already tending to Valenta. They turned the Queen on her side and the wizened leech cut her arm to draw blood. They tried to improve her circulation, to induce her lungs to draw air.

It didn't work.

 

Luyckx

The Horn Knight herded the servants aside and bade them retrieve the Queen's panoply. He pulled off the blankets and dragged the bed to the center of the room to serve as a bier. Together they dressed her in her armor and weapons and laid her out with all the treasures they had found together. By the time Shoat woke and fought his way through his massive hangover down the stairs to the dungeon, Aunt Valenta was already arranged. He added a couple trophies to the pile.

The Physician asked if they planned on burning her here or taking her back to the plain. He could remove the organs and dress the rest so it wouldn't putrefy. The Horn Knight said that was fine, but let her rest a day or two. Let Ada and Gert see her with her organs still on the inside. Open the window to keep her cold. She wouldn't rot much.

They couldn't stay to welcome Gert. They didn't want to deal with the difficult familial conversation or try to convince her the invasion was a bad idea. If they wanted to save the realm from the Winter that never ended they needed to actually save it. But first, a visit to the Screaming Seer. They had heard what they thought was him during the night, echoing from the hills northeast of Bravecrossing. If the Drunken Seer had visited during the night he might be there too. They released the Iron Knight from captivity and gave him his sword and mask and horse and invited him to travel with them. From his cell at the end of the dungeon, the Mule Knight shouted that if they were releasing people who had unsuccessfully tried to kill the royal family they ought to release him too. This they did not do.

 

The Drunken Seer had relocated from his cliffside village to a sad little hill a league away from Bravecrossing. His acolytes wore their coats in layers and kindled a sad fire by the sad porch they built on the side of the hill in imitation of the scaffolding where they once made their homes. The Screaming Seer lay atop it and screamed. This time it really sounded like he was in pain. Shoat approached him where he lay on his platform but one of the cultists stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. There was a scrap of birch bark paper there.

 

It read "I'M SORRY" and on it was an image of a shattered crown.

 

Shoat asked if that was all the Seer had to say. The cultist told him to turn the page over.

 

"YOU SAW WHILE WE WERE BLIND".

 

There was nothing more to say. 

Thayer 

 

By midday the Company had returned to Bravecrossing. By then their boat was ready. The helmsman was none other than Ganthryn the sailor, the old guy they had rescued from the crabs. He had already said goodbye to his sons when they went to fight in the north. He didn't want to go to a realm where there was no ocean. He wanted to repay the Knights for the aid they rendered him at sea and if that meant dying at sea when the realm froze over that was a prize he was prepared to pay. He'd die the way he lived. They were also joined by Ashbless the lumberjack. Head of the militia the Knights rescued from the copse of trees, he would likewise serve them on their journey and die if such was his fate. The last to see them off was Kana, daughter of the orchard keeper Sparenot. She gave the Knights one of her kittens as a ship's cat. 

 

It was dark before they reached the oxbow lake that led down to the river and the capitol and the inlet. Ganthryn piloted the ship while the Knights slept. They dreamed of a garden in a tower with an open roof. The rows of manicured trees were the size and shape of crouching men. They knelt and reached up with arms of green branches like children expecting to be picked up by a parent. The character in the dream whose perspective the Knights occupied bent before the largest of the plants. They trimmed an errant twig and began to cut silk for the skin. They cut the pattern and laid it over the face and head and stitched it shut. They felt a deep sadness because they knew the thing would come into the world trusting its parent and expecting love and companionship. It would, instead, go out into the world and meet the exact same fate as the last one.

 

They sailed past the Glass Mountain. The flags and banners were all gone. Only the stone images of all the Knights' heraldry remained. Tankard. War. Pearl. Chain. Half finished Salt, Horn and Seal. Then out into the inlet they went. The sea was oddly calm but the weather was awful. At dusk they found explanation for both: the sea had frozen over into a jagged plain of pack ice. They made camp on shore and slept without dreaming.

 

 

They spent the next day crossing the ice on horseback. Ganthyrn stayed with the cat and the boat while the Knights set out on their steeds and Ashbless aboard the Tall Steed taken off the Mule Knight. They encountered nobody and nothing but the wind and clouds and snow, which all gathered in a column over the sea cliffs a day's travel to the southeast. They made camp on the shore so the pack ice wouldn't shift beneath their feet and swallow them. They found a spot sheltered from the wind and there built their fire.
 

Shoat was on watch when the hail of arrows hit the camp, and thus the only one clad in his full panoply. They were largely spent, fired from so far away, but the hail of barbed heads struck the unarmored Knights and started them awake. They grabbed their gear and scrambled away from the light, squeezing into their mail and helms and plates on the frozen beach. The attackers fired at the horses where they stood by the fire, sending the beasts fleeing onto the ice and out of sight. The Knights, armored and armed and no longer silhouetted by the bonfire, worked their way inland to get eyes on their attackers and formulate a response.

 

They spotted the warband before the warband spotted them. A group of twenty or thirty Legionaries huddled in a depression amid the foothills of the mountains above. Lumps in the snow who occasionally rose to loose a shaft at the now abandoned campfire. There were too many for the three Knights and one lumberjack to take in a straight fight. Auckland had a plan. He told the rest of the Company to get clear and crept around behind the Legion. He mounted the tallest rock he could find and blew his horn. The grim warriors turned and notched barbed arrows to pick him off his perch. The sound of the horn triggered an avalanche that sent snow cascading down on either side of him to bury the warband. The Knights returned to their camp where Ashbless stomped out into the dark to retrieve the horses. It was the least he could do for the Knights. The Company outfitted him with a spare breastplate over his gambeson, and a war flail taken from the Mock Knight.

 

With the prize so close at hand, the Company set out at dawn and made for the tower of clouds at a gallop. They struggled through the fog and mist and blinding snow but by evening emerged into the eye of the storm. At the base of the great steaming sea cliffs they found the Wheel. Mounted on a stone platform that stuck out of the ice, frozen in place, guarded by a warrior in golden armor and a horned helm. He ordered the intruders to halt. The Wheel was not to be tampered with by marauding swordsmen. The Knights told him they were here to repair it. The Wheel was not broken, he insisted. It turned as it pleased and if it declared that it was Winter, Winter it would be.

 

 

The Company rode him down. Though the man was no Knight he gave a good account of himself in the first exchange of blows, surviving impacts from halberds and the Iron Knigth's wicked executioner's sword. The Knights pressed the attack and the Horn Knight felled him with a blow of the blinding flail taken from the Flying Swords. The incapacitated guardian clutched at his face through his helm and, as the Company approached the Wheel, begged them not to damage it. The Iron Knight told him to relax, they weren't here to break it. The Seers had commanded them to repair it. The guardian hadn't realized the Knights worked for the seers. He tried to commit suicide to erase the shame of raising a hand to their servants. The Knights plucked the knife from his hand, sat him up and put Ashbless in charge of saving his eyes while they fussed over the wheel. It was no good, said the blinded fighter. If the Wheel was truly stuck it could only be lubricated with pollen, snow and grain.

 

The Knights had snow in abundance. They had bread, which was made from grain. They had a dried flower, caught when the people of the realm showered them outside Bravecrossing. They squeezed a few precious grains of the yellow stuff onto the wheel with the rest of the mixture.

 

Slowly it cycled from Winter to Spring. The whirling clouds piled like a tower over them slowed, then evaporated. It was over.

The Knights made sure the guardian wasn't going to die. They sat him on the rock and gave him back his ax and commended his good work guarding the wheel. Now they had to go. The ice was starting to break up. With Ashbless in tow they mounted up and rode as hard as they could for shore. The sea cliffs towered above them to the north, offering no way out. Even at top speed they were over a day's ride from safety. The landscape shifted as the pack ice cracked and began to drift apart. To melt. There was no way out. Nothing to do but try to stay level as the sheet beneath their feet tilted and rolled over.

They heard pipes. A song they recognized. The berg in front of them tilted on its side and a space opened in the shape of a door. Inside, Kemp the Child, looking wizened and Goblinoid, beckoned the Company inside. They rode hard to reach the opening. The ice rolled slowly so by the time Ashbless' horse jumped the gap the portal was partially submerged and a bunch of seawater got through. Kemp the Goblin slammed the door shut. On the other side of the portal was a realm like the one they saw in the dream when the old Goblin died. A forest full of green roses. 

 

 

 

Kemp's transformation into a Goblin was complete. He didn't belong to the world up above anymore, he told them. They told him his family was still alive and thriving. They had received a gift from his sister. He told the Company that his new kingdom and his place in the line of succession and his supernatural powers were all good and fine, but he would trade it all for one more day playing amid the rows of trees and the ripe fruit on the ground. The Knights told him he could go back any time. His family would be happy to see him. It wouldn't be the same, said he. He didn't belong there. So what, said the Company. In this world he was bound by the laws of the Free Folk but in the waking world he was still Sparenot's son and she would welcome him home even just for a little while. 

 

He said he'd think about it. They pressed the issue and he cast his hand forth and flung them through the other door in the oak at the opposite side of the wood, twin to the one they arrived through. He was still a twelve year old kid but the part of him which had been uplifted to a fairy lord didn't want the Knights to see him cry.

 

Ganthryn thought he was dreaming. He had gone to sleep in the boat with the little cat curled on his chest, the only warm place amid the glittering wasteland. He woke up in the spring and found the kitten chasing the butterflies that alighted on the wooden benches of the vessel. A geyser of water sprang forth from the dunes over the beach. Three Knights, a lumberjack and all their horses came spilling out in a torrent of wet sand. They slid down the beach to the water's edge and regained their footing, bedraggled and wet but already drying in the heat and sunlight.

 

Shoat climbed aboard the vessel and, exhausted, fell prone. He immediately sprang up again, coated in the filthy water that filled the bilges of the vessel.