Preview: Lure of the Landkraken

Ed Greenwood created the Forgotten Realms. Before there was Dungeons & Dragons, he was already working out the world so many of us would roll so many dice in. Even if you don’t partake in roleplaying games, if you saw Honor Among Thieves, you saw Ed’s creation brought life to the silver screen. His influence on fantasy is colossal. Ed has also created the settings of Stormtalons and Mornmist, sold over 40 million copies of his books worldwide in over 40 languages, and won multiple ENNIES. He’s also still spinning new Realms lore, and I've found him always happy to answer questions about it too. I’m grateful to know Ed, and grateful this master world builder has dipped his pen in my own world of Qualth and my land of Norrøngard. For today’s preview of Tales from Stolki’s Hall, we look at the opening of his story, “Lure of the Landkraken,” (though Ed and I have debated whether landkrakens truly exist.)

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The fog was heavy, a ghostly cloak that glowed in the night.

A cloak they were getting all too used to. In the days when spring warmed into summer, sea-fogs beset the lower streets of Sindholm after dark, on nights when the winds howled not.

This was just one more such night, the fog a wet and clinging cloak with tentacles that came creeping in under the warmest wool and furs. Shivering weather, when folk who had no need to stir from hearth bided indoors, leaving the dark streets and alleys to scuttling rats and those driven by their needs.

Which at this moment very much included the huldra shield maiden Halla Skogsdóttir and her steadfast companion Luta Ragnarsdóttir, for their needs included eating.

Often and well, if possible.

Yet good food—and drink, the drink was not to be forgotten!—and for that matter warm, snug accommodations required hacksilver, and it had a habit of running low. It was running low right now. So Halla and Luta were getting bone-cold and wet, out here in the night. Luta had found work, which was why they hadn’t yet resorted to prying the more decorative gable horns off roof-ends and selling them elsewhere on behalf of a fictitious sick aunt demolishing her smokehouse. Yet.

Luta was the arch-tongued beauty, so Luta found most of the work. And it was retriever work suited to Luta’s most often used skill: she was an expert climber very much at home on walls and rooftops not her own.

Which was why Halla was sitting on the slick-damp wooden planks of the street in this thickening fog pretending to fix her boot heel. A pretext to loiter.

Somewhere in the eddying coils of fog above her, her beloved—her exasperating beloved—was on the roof of the house she was keeping her back firmly to. The abode of one Brandr Fire-Eyes, reputed to be a wizard and definitely the man who’d swindled Luta’s current client, Jora Ulfsdóttir, out of an amber pendant, a keepsake of her dead grandmother she very much wanted back.

Halla snorted. Humans. We could both die for an amber pendant.

Oh, well, it was a living.

* * *

Oh, well, it was a living. Of sorts.

Luta closed her eyes. They were doing her no good in this fog anyway, and the blindness might help her listen more intently at the smoke hole she was pressed against.

That voice had to be Brandr. Aye.

“Arnorr’s magic was powerful. His corpse door is not unguarded.”

Luta was up on this cold, slippery roof trying to learn the routine of the house, how many dwelt within, and when a retriever desiring to search for an amber pendant and bear it away back to a grateful Jora Ulfsdóttir could best enter the place without being seen.

“A wizard’s rune,” said a deeper, rougher voice, like a boot stirring gravel. It was not a question.

“A rune,” Brandr agreed. “Likely the most powerful in the whole Barrow. It sucks the life out of whoever disturbs its chalk in the slightest. Or so the old men say.”

Luta had never heard of Arnorr before, but it was clear enough: he was a long-dead—must be, or it wouldn’t be “old men”—wizard. And now in the Bjarg Barrow, the labyrinth of tunnels under most of Sindholm where the dead were housed, and folk just a little more desperate for hacksilver than Luta and Halla sometimes went hunting tomb treasures.

“And your way past it? A spell?” A new voice, a weasel voice, higher and younger.

“A hand not ours to wipe right across the mark, and break its power—and pay the price.”

“Whose?”

“Who’s been most persistent in demanding his hacksilver back from me?”

“The older Snari. Snari Grimsson.”

“Indeed. A hint that he’ll get his loan back should bring him within reach like an eager valravn. Then we beat him senseless—I thought you’d like the sound of that—drag him down the Barrow and use his hand to wipe the chalk. That crutch you kept from the beggar we fed to the eels should serve to move his arm and keep the curse on him and not us.”

“And then what? We get inside, and then?”

“Then you leave matters to me.”

“What I mean is: why did they call him Arnorr Eyehands? Is ‘eyehands’ some sort of spell? That might be on his body, waiting for us?”

“You listen to too many skalds when you go drinking,” Brandr replied severely, and then added something else that Luta couldn’t hear, for all the men she was listening to were on the move now, striding away, wooden furniture groaning across a floor as it was shoved aside. She listened a little longer, but only to silence. They were gone.

And might well be going out, where it wouldn’t do for them to stumble over a woman on their very doorstep with a bootheel that wasn’t broken after all—let alone a second woman up on their roof, uninvited. Wherefore Luta moved. Spiderlike, patient. Stealth over swiftness, on the damp slickness.

Well, now. Why disturb a long-dead wizard, but for treasure? Powerful magic, according to this Brandr-thief who was also a wizard. Treasure. Moreover, men down the Barrow were men not at home when Luta came calling, at this smoke hole or another one…

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