The Butcher of Gadobhra

They watched as the Frost Devil screamed after Ben and his mount. Ben slowed, timing his descent, trying to judge how fast Mudhead could pull up. Finally, he gave up, dropped the reins, and held on to the saddle with his good hand. "You know better than me. I'll leave the flying to you. Pull up at the last minute as close to the ground as you can and head over to Ozzy. Pass him by from a hundred feet away."

Mudhead snorted and rolled his eyes, indicating that had been his plan all along. The horse had no intention of being caught by the insane windbag following him. He pulled up in time to avoid the ground, but it was a near thing. They skimmed over the ground, only twenty feet above it, and didn't slow until well out of the path of the cyclone barreling at the ground. Cyclones are not nearly so good at turning as Legendary steeds, and the intense pain the Ice Devil was experiencing as the flaming coating on its core continued to burn didn't help. It wasn't a deep thinker most of the time, and didn't normally have to deal with silly things like 'The Ground.' Where it lived were cold open skies with floating islands of ice. If an island got in the way of an Ice Devil, the island went away. Not so the solid earth of the Conjunction.

Hitting the ground at high speed caused grievous injury to the Ice Devil. Earth was a foreign substance to it, nearly as bad as fire. Its winds were snuffed and dissipated by the collision and it took all of its remaining power to pull itself back together. It saw the little man and his horse fleeing, and pursued, but was slow and clumsy. It tried to gather wind and ice to heal itself, hampered by the wound in its core and the stubbornly smoldering substance that had entered the crack started by the sword. Part of it noticed the Butcher, the heat couldn't be hidden, but that was for later. It needed Ben dead! Then it would kill all the little warmlanders that had slaughtered its minions, forcing it to take care of things personally.

Ozzy had been imbuing more and more smoke into Chainey. Caldrius had called the animated chain his familiar, which was almost correct. Chainey was a combination of three things: The magical artifact from the smoke known as the Trammelian Chain, a bound Charnel Daemon with a love of burning things, and the Butcher's Smoke. This was reinforced by their agreement, and long hours spent working together in the smokehouse and their various adventures. The chain was closer than a familiar in many ways, and part of the Butcher, able to share in some of his power.

Chainey was also in two places at once. Part of him watched over the smokehouse in Sedgewick where he was constantly processing meat and packing it into Smoke-infused barrels. Over the long months of work, Chainey and Old Joe had grown closer, the Smoke Golem using the chain to keep track of the Butcher. When Chainey wrapped around Joe's leg to get his attention, Joe immediately saw what worried the chain.

"He's playing with another cyclone? Damned fool boy. Off gallivanting with armies when he should be working on his recipes. But I've been wondering why this cold snap annoyed me so much. Not good for me to get involved, gave up too much power to go flying around, and it would just get me noticed. But that doesn't mean I can't loan you some." Smoke flowed from Joe into Chainey, and across the long miles to where the Butcher was swinging the chain and preparing to go hunting.

Ozzy saw his chain thicken, each link becoming over six inches wide. He smiled and aimed for the smoldering, sparking core of the Frost Devil as it went by, and threw his chain at it, thankful for his Butcher skill of Chain Grab and the Chainweaving he'd learned in the Smoke. The end of the chain had split into ten different strands like the tentacles of a Kraken, and when Chainey hit the core, he wrapped it securely.

Chainey grew taut, and Ozzy used all of his strength to hold on. The chain was wrapped around his left arm several times. If there was a weak point, it was the Butcher's arms or his anchor to the ground, not the chain. The Frost Devil was furious and continued to pull in Ben's direction, too infuriated to notice what held it back. But it was strong. When Ozzy had pulled a cyclone from the sky before, he'd used physics and its own momentum against it and only had to hold it for a second. Now he was pitting his strength against one as it pulled directly away from him.

Jon and Cham felt their roots weakening. They held on, but the cyclone was actually pulling Ozzy off the ground now, despite their efforts, and the weight of his bag. The Silverthorn vines were snapping. Suzette was casting Evergreen's Shining Lance at the core, doing over 1600 points per spell, and yet the cyclone didn't turn. At the last moment as Ozzy, Jon, and Cham were about to sail off after the cyclone as it pursued Ben, two huge hands grabbed the Butcher's thighs and held on tightly.

Jon and Cham realized that what they had thought was a snowbank was in fact a wounded Jotun, who laughed with glee at getting so close to them. "Brogthall warned you he was sneaky! See, I am a good mercenary, serving my Winter masters and earning my pay by sneaking up and attacking you. I will hold you here until they come to deal with you!" Ozzy's feet settled on the ground, held in place by fifty tons of ice giant.

Ozzy grinned at him and concentrated on keeping the cyclone from tearing off his arms. Help came as the people in the camp charged at the Ice Devil, Themis judging this was the best chance they had at killing it. Caldrius was in the lead, everyone giving him space as he'd warned them to keep their distance. They were happy they had done so when he shouted out, "Crimson Bands of the Molten Core come now to my aid!"

Molten chains erupted from the ground, wrapping around the core, something that he never could have done if the Ice Devil had moved fast and stayed high. It was followed by the Earth Mage casting Binding Chains of Earth. The spell normally summoned chains of stone, but these were glowing with Heat, the rock coming from further down as Rastfian reached deeper. Both of them felt their spells begin to break, and threw all of the concentration and mana into maintaining them, choosing to concentrate on control and let others worry about doing damage.

With the Frost Devil held in place, every fire mage advanced as far as they could and threw fireballs until their mana was exhausted. Workers grabbed the fainting Mages and dragged them back to the Bunker. Baron Order Fallowstone hadn't cast a spell yet, letting the younger mages expend their mana and leave the field. He used the time to channel a larger and larger spell until he had spent all of his mana, channeling all of his pent-up rage and frustration into one huge strike.

"Pyroclastic Twin-Fireballs of the Apocalypse!"

The spell roared away from him and exploded in a fifty-foot radius ball of fire, then exploded again a moment later. As he swayed back and forth, exhausted, he saw Caldrius give him a thumbs up, and then he collapsed and was dragged away by a helpful Worker.

Jorges had held off firing the catapults. The winds were too strong and the chance of hitting the core and breaking the ceramic containers was too small. So he improvised another plan. He turned to Miriam, Clyde, and Althea who were manning the catapults, "Who wants to do something stupid and heroic?" All hands were immediately raised. "Excellent. We have four shots left and four of us. Grab one and follow me."

Harmonia saw what they were going to do and grinned. If she wasn't allergic to immolation, she might have joined them. Instead, as the crew of bombers advanced, she reached out to the local winds and used her air aspected spell of

Calm Winds

to weaken the cyclone. Her spell broke immediately, and the Frost Devil cursed at her, saying something in a language she hadn't heard in years. She grinned as she stood next to Ben, casting the spell over and over, weakening the winds in front of the charging workers.

All four of the Contract Workers had high strength from their skills and were part of the original Sedgewick crew. They weren't in Ozzy's league, but with a strength of over 30, they could hold their own. They bent low, pushing through the cyclone until they were in the eye of the storm, directly next to the bound core. They slammed their jars down on the core, engulfing it in burning fuel. The flames from the burning spells and fuel were intense. Clyde and Althea were leather workers, with no defense against the fire, and died quickly, Miriam and Jorges weren't able to drag them away fast enough. Both of them had started as blacksmiths and had resistance to fire. They stumbled away, burned but cooled by the winds, and flung out of the cyclone, hurt, but surviving.

Ozzy was channeling his heat through Chainey directly into the core. He was holding the chain in his left hand and had summoned his barbecue tong in the other. From his charnel pit in Sedgewick, Heat flowed to him and into Chainey. Joe poured more coal into the fire and added his own power to the mix. The massive health of the Ice Devil was dropping fast, its wind disrupted and vast Heat applied directly to its core, but it wasn't dead yet. Themis started advancing into the winds, and Claudia joined her. Ben and Harmonia followed, shielding the quartet from the winds. Themis unleashed her spear, sending a spray of javelins into the core. Claudia was reaching for the abilities she held as Duchess of the North. Like Billy and Layla, she had power in her own lands. She used it now to keep herself and the other three people near her from burning or freezing to death.

Suzette sank to the ground, no longer floating and exhausted, "I'm done. I put every spell I had into that thing."

Ozzy yelled at her. "Then get out of the way, no sense dying."

She laughed, and her shadow began to fade away, "Silly Butcher, I was never here." She watched the rest of the battle from the relative safety of the ruined college, guarded by her fairies and two shadowy hounds.

The cyclone sensed its peril and began to draw in its winds and power, to protect its core. The four advancing people took damage from the flying shards of ice that cut like knives. Ben unleashed the spell he'd been saving and

Phoenix Fire

roared down from the skies striking the cyclone and healing his friends. Only a second passed before he cast it again, burning through his mana and stamina, spending thousands of each. The ice melted and the winds warmed and dispersed. Themis stuck her spear into the crack started by

Glitterspark

, widening the breach, and pushing it deeper and deeper. Ben grabbed the hilt of his weapon, wincing as the intense cold froze his hand. It healed a moment later as he channeled

Phoenix Fire

into the sword itself and deep into the core, putting a halo of healing energy around the four of them and melting part of the core.

Pulling on all of her authority, Claudia used both hands to thrust her sword into the core. It was an heirloom of Carl's house and he'd given it to her as a wedding present, and ideally suited for channeling her Ducal power and destroying an invading foe. Themis felt the power she unleashed. She'd been near Gus when he had done a similar thing when slaying the Sewer Beast of Barroth when it attacked the capital from below. The core exploded, knocking them all backward. Without the nimbus of Phoenix Fire, most would have died as the last of the Frost Devil's being was released. Most of the core shattered, but not all. Only Harmonia noticed the two chunks of blueish crystal as they disappeared into Ben's ring. She said nothing. Anyone crazy enough to charge a Frost Devil with a sword deserved a little extra loot.

The silence seemed strange, as the winds calmed and the skies cleared. Overhead, the sun shone down as Winter retreated from this part of the North.