The Bridge of Frost

Three nights of hard frost have locked a massive span of blue ice between the Twin Spires. Frozen deep inside the translucent ice hangs a sixty-year-old clan warbird, masts and all, like an insect in amber. Once the noon sun hits the spires, the ice bridge will begin to thaw and crack.

The warbird's cargo hold is dry and dead silent. Lashed to her keel beam is a massive glacier-lance weapon forged of ancient, unmelting ice. Beside it rests a carved black-wood otter totem inscribed with the name of Stillwater Aerie. Overhead, the ice bridge groans and begins to drip—you only have time to haul out one prize before the ship drops!

Halfway up the ice shaft, the ancient glacier-lance begins radiating unnatural cold, growing thick new frost across the tunnel walls and threatening to seal you in! Below your feet, the warbird lurches downward in the cracking ice, and the six crewmen hauling the weapon can no longer feel their fingers.

A crack splits the ice bridge from spire to spire like a cannon shot, and the warbird drops another foot! Scrambling toward the exit hatch with the totem, you pass the frozen captain still seated at her chart table under a glaze of ice. A purser's strongbox is frozen to the deck beside her boots, and a knotted otter-clan name cord is tied around her wrist.

The weapon wright—a frost-scarred lutrine engineer—circles the ancient ice weapon twice in awe. "I haven't seen true glacier-ice in thirty years. I can mount it on your gun deck so it fires twin freezing spears each volley, or I can buy the weapon off you right now for silver."

Stillwater Aerie is built around a steaming geothermal spring high in the snows. When you place the black-wood otter totem in the hands of the clan elder, Old Pell, he sinks to his knees. "That was my mother's warbird—we burned an empty funeral pyre for her sixty years ago." Rising to his feet, he says, "Stillwater pays its debts. Name what your ship needs."

A sharp-dressed vulpine broker examines the carved black otter totem twice and quotes a price from her catalog. "Clan totems almost never reach the private market—they either go home to their kin or burn on a pyre. My wealthy client will pay handsomely in silver for a sixty-year-old relic, or trade you an artificer's weather-bell from his collection."

Sixty years late, the clan burns the black otter totem atop a wooden raft in the center of the hot spring while the entire aerie keeps vigil until dawn. At first light, Old Pell brings out an instrument wrapped in oiled leather. "My mother read the weather for three clans. The morning she flew into that freeze, she left her sky-orrery on its hook—saying a frost that hard needed no forecast."