by Adam Vine
The highest alcoves held weapons made of a metal I’d never seen before. It looked a little like Damascus steel, all clouded and layered with swirling whorls of color, but instead of varying shades of gray, these weapons were arterial blue, midnight purple, and bright, volcanic red.
“Wyvernwood,” Barn Owl said when she saw me eyeing them. She took down a short thrusting sword similar to a Roman gladius and made a few practice cuts in the air. “It was engineered by our ancestors to be able to cut through the Lice’s shells. So legend has it, anyway. My old martial arts master would say legends are always about what we want to be true, and never about what actually is.
“One thing’s for sure, though. Wyvernwood is the most durable substance we know about. It can hold an edge for years, and it’s the only thing we know of that can cut through solarite - that’s the synthetic analog of the chemical compound of the Lice’s shell, which the Amber City uses to armor its soldiers. Fools should've known that there’s no such thing as invulnerable.”
She spun her grip and offered me the handle. “Not that I’m about to let you touch my Wyvernwood on your first mission, but Len knew a thing or two about how to throw his cuts, and after talkin’ to the queen, I’ve got a theory. Wanna give it a whirl?”
I reached to take the strange, crimson short sword, but paused when I saw Zaea standing alone by the armory door. The other Vermin were already shrugging out of their furs and rushing to grab up their weapons and armor, but not her. Zaea stared anxiously at the endless rows of weapons, wrapped tight in a bundle of her own arms. For the first time since coming to the Burrow I saw her shiver.
“Give me ten seconds, okay?” I told Barn Owl.
“Suit yourself. You’ve got five,” Barn Owl said.
I rushed to Zaea’s side. She shied away from me like I was going to sting her. Yet the look in her eyes was anything but angry. She looked sad. “Zaea… your, uh… your highness? Majesty? I still don’t exactly know what to call you. What’s wrong?”
“Call me my name. And, I’m fine. We’ll talk about it later… if there is a later,” Zaea said.
“Are you scared? Because if that’s it, don’t worry. I am, too. I’ve never been this terrified in my life. Well… once. But it wasn’t the same kind of fear,” I said.
Zaea pursed her lips. “I’ve got a bit of pre-fight jitters, but I’ve had worse. Competing in the women’s royal grappling tournament for so many years made these things a little easier on my nerves. I won’t deny I’m afraid, but Ganheim put us through extensive nerve-conditioning, which helps more than you’d think. So it’s not simply that I’m afraid. I just can’t stop thinking about my dad.”
Her dad? I wondered. Now?
“Do you want to talk about it?” I said. Across the room, Barn Owl cleared her throat, a clear signal for me to move it along. “Look,” I lowered my voice. “I can’t count on anyone else here to have my back. For all I know, Cheese Eater would rather put a knife between my shoulders at the first opportunity he gets rather than let me complete this mission. They haven’t even told us where we’re going yet. We don’t know these people, Zaea. We don’t know that they won’t just leave us to rot out there once the shit hits the fan. We need to look out for each other, all right? And to do that, I need you here with me. 100%.”
Zaea nodded.
“Do they know about your… um… your lineage?” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might not have told them out of a desire to avoid unwanted attention or special treatment, until just then. But it seemed important. The look she gave me told me everything I needed to know. “Oh, crap,” I said. “Why?”
Zaea’s whisper was a lash of ice. “I don’t know how it is wherever you’re from, Daniel, but on most worlds, princesses don’t fight. You might not trust these people, but that doesn’t change the fact we need them. I plan to earn my daily bread. Not to mention, someone’s been following me. I think there’s a spy. I think it’s someone in this room.”
“What?” I said.
“Be quiet!” Zaea hissed. “Spider wasn’t the only one after us. Someone else has been following me ever since we got here, and he’s been following you, too. I saw him when you snuck into the morgue last night to look at Spider’s corpse.”
“Hey, wait a second…” I started, but Zaea cut me off.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll face them when the time comes. He’ll try to attack one of us, probably me, because he thinks I’m an easier target. So I agree with your plan. We stick together, no matter what.”
“How do you know I’m not the spy?” I said. At last, Zaea smiled. “All right. That was a joke. But since we can’t do anything about this now, let’s solve the problem at hand. If you’re sad, or homesick, or miss… someone… maybe I can help. We used to have a saying when I was training kendo: if you bring baggage onto the mat, you’ll carry it with you the whole fight. It means…”
“I know what it means. We had similar idioms in the arts I trained,” Zaea said. “You want to know what’s bothering me? I was thinking about my dad because I’m worried about him. The situation with Spider got me thinking. My family has enemies, Daniel. My dad is a good man. He fights for our people. He’s a peacetime leader. There has never been a war in our country on his watch. History will remember him as a benevolent king, a talented, charismatic diplomat… a great man.
“Yet people hate him. I’m worried that someone might… that something could… happen to him while I’m here, unable to help him. He’s just so old. He never looked old before I went away to school. When I go back now, however...” Her voice trailed off.
I thought of my parents, too, and the way they looked older, grayer, more exhausted every time I saw them on Skype. I thought of Kashka and my inability to save her from whatever demons made her act the way she did. I thought about my own, bleak future, forever shadowed by the good man I could have become, but never would.
I nodded and said, “You’re worried you won’t live up to his legacy. That you’ll die before you get the chance.”
Zaea drew a deep breath, blowing it out as a whistle. “I’ve lived such a privileged life. And I’ve squandered it. I’m twenty-two years old, and I’ve done nothing to give back. I want to do something good, which will make my father proud, before he’s…” she didn’t say it, but I knew she meant gone. “He’s my whole world, Daniel. The idea of never seeing him again makes me feel small.” Zaea shivered and dried a tear with the back of her glove.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s funny, isn’t it? That when facing death, all we can think of is the ones we love most.” Carly’s smile rose from the depths of my memory, a bright light shining through a thousand tons of ice. “Anyway, we’d better get suited up. These guys look like they’re almost done, and we definitely don’t want to be last. We all good now, Princess?”
Zaea stared at my hand until I let it drop. “Please don’t use the P-word. I don’t want them to hear. I’ll be watching you out there, Daniel from California. Don’t let anything bad happen to me, and I’ll do the same for you.”
“Deal,” I said, thinking, but it probably will, anyway. “Maybe we should have a code word. I donno. A secret handshake or something.”
“I don’t think we’ll have time for that in the middle of combat…”
“Just humor me,” I said. I held out my hand and waited for her to take it. “First we do this,” I said, giving it a solid shake. “Then we do this.” I dragged my hand away and made a fist. “Give me a bump.” Hesitantly, Zaea made a fist and tapped it against mine. I gesticulated an explosion with my fingers and made the necessary sound effect. Zaea rolled her eyes. “Wait. Get back over here. We’re not finished. Give me a boot,” I said.
“What?”
“Turn around and kick my heel with yours.”
“This is stupid.”
“That’s how we do it where I’m from… get stupid, get stupid! You never heard that song?”
“No,” Zaea said.
�
�Oh. It was pretty big when I was in high school. Well come on, don’t leave me hanging,” I said.
Zaea turned and touched her heel to mine.
“All right. Now we gotta do it all at once.”
Barn Owl coughed at us again. “Wait. I have to teach her this,” I said. “This is an important… spiritual… dance. My people cannot go into combat without it.”
We ran through our secret handshake again, me counting the steps out loud and Zaea flowing through them like we’d been greeting each other this way since grade school. Nobody actually uses secret handshakes. It was a Hail Mary pass to try to get her to smile, to forge a bond with her that I knew both of us would need if we were going to survive out on the ice. And it worked.
Zaea threw me a smirk and a sigh. “Let’s go get outfitted, shall we?”
The others were almost finished suiting up by the time we rejoined them. Barn Owl tossed us each a chainmail shirt. I put it on under my furs, and winked at her to signal that everything was good.
Side note: riveted chain mail is way lighter than you think. It is only slightly heavier than a windbreaker jacket. My first thought was, They always show dudes drowning in their armor when they try to swim in the movies, but I could totally swim in this. Then I remembered how cold it was on the Surface and thought, but I seriously hope I won’t need to.
That was when Gator burst in, panting as if he’d just sprinted the whole length of the Last Station in one go. “Sorry I’m late. There was a crisis on the onion matrix.”
“So nice of you to join us,” Barn Owl said. “We’re so happy you could grace us with your presence, cousin. Would you be so kind as to select your arms and armor, maybe do some light stretching to warm yourself, so we can please get the fuck on with the mission?”
The other Vermin hid their laughter behind clenched fists.
“Shit. I already apologized,” Gator said. “What more do you want?” He plucked a half-eaten onion out of his coat and bit down hard, then motioned to the top shelf with the rind. “Can I take the Archangel this time?” Gator said through a mouthful of red-white mush.
Barn Owl’s face became a circus of mock pity. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry, Gator, but you can’t.”
Gator popped the onion rind into his mouth and shrugged. “Why not?”
Barn Owl reached deep into the top alcove of the wall, fishing for something behind the carefully placed rows of Wyvernwood weapons resting on their oiled cloth beds. From that stygian darkness, she produced a slender, curved sword with a Wyvernwood blade slightly longer than a human arm, a red tongue shimmering like rippling blood in the dim light of the glowmoss. A Wyvernwood katana.
Barn Owl placed the crimson sword in my hand. “Metatron,” she said its name, the negligible weight of it slipping from her grasp into mine. Metatron was God’s chief Archangel, the Avenger of Heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost… or was he in the Bible, first? I couldn’t remember. It had been a long time since I’d studied Christian cosmology. Why would they name a weapon that here?
Coincidence?
Can't be.
I hadn’t been to church or even prayed with any sincerity since the accident, but a few years without faith can’t erase a lifetime of it. The sword called silently to me to remember that forgotten hope, that saccharine dream that I used to believe in, that the future could be better than the here and now, that we can be redeemed no matter how far we fall. The guilt of my unbelief was penetrating, but I clung to it, even as I relished the familiar lightness of the blade.
“You know how to swing that thing, kid?” Barn Owl whispered to me. “’Cuz if you don’t, I just made one big-ass mistake.”
Gator clapped sardonically. “Very funny. Great joke. Your skills as a comedienne are improving, ‘cos. It was truly wonderful. Now hand over that weapon, son. Visitor or not, a sword that sharp will cut your tiny pecker off the second you disrespect it, and you don’t have the prerequisite experience. Best leave it in the care of someone who does. C’mon. Give it over, before you hurt yourself.”
I held the pommel with both hands in a high samurai grip, choking up all the way to the simple square cross-guard, raised the sword over my head and cut the air three times, once down, then horizontal, and then a huge, sweeping diagonal, finishing with the point down and then tucking the sword against my hip as if I were sheathing it. I tapped the cross-guard with the meat of my fist, the old samurai way of shaking blood off the blade, for flourish.
Barn Owl cackled. “Oh, he knows, all right. This boy knows. Find yourself another snow-picker-sticker, Gazzo. I think this Archangel has just been permanently checked out by another member of our fine organization. And here I was, thinkin’ you were green as old mushrooms,” she said to me, raising one eyebrow.
Gator growled and shot me a look full of death and hellfire before trundling off into the shadows.
Zaea meandered slowly past the untold piles of archaic weapons, wondering aloud to no one in particular, “Since we don’t exactly know what kind of target we’ll be attacking, can any of you suggest which kind of weapon I should take?”
“All of ‘em,” the tall, hawk-nosed man named Vole said, tucking a scalping knife into his belt. It was already heavily laden with throwing axes and the black coil of a whip tipped with a cruel iron barb. The spear on his back was almost as tall as he was, and bore a Wyvernwood blade as long as my forearm.
Squirrel chortled. “She’d be lucky to find one after you’ve been at it, you greedy shit farmer.”
Vole raised a finger at the shorter man. “You wait one second, Squirrel. Just because I tend the mushrooms, doesn’t mean you can make disparaging remarks about my profession, or the inherent scent that comes with it. You try working long hours down there, shoveling literal mountains of our own precious brown gold, and tell me you wouldn’t catch a slight aroma. Someone has to do it. You’re all eating my mushrooms, anyway. Have you thought about what might happen if I stayed home, and hung out in the bath pulling my little snake all day, like you do? Maybe you all should think about that. Maybe it’s high time me and the other shit farmers, as you so indelicately put it, went on strike.”
The Vermin all chuckled. Squirrel crouched and playfully cut at Vole’s belly with the tip of his crimson-bladed short sword, blocking Vole’s counterattacks with the buckler in his other hand.
Vole tapped the blade way with his knife and heaved a great, downtrodden sigh. “I wish you’d take me seriously, Squirrel.”
“Start being serious, then,” Squirrel said, blocking a slash to the head.
“You can’t beat a well-made great sword,” Gator’s voice echoed from the darkness a few paces beyond the lamplight. “A full, two-handed, five foot-long and heavy as a boulder head-remover? You tell me who could say no to that. I couldn’t. Hand-and-a-half? Peh! Who needs a hand-and-a-half sword, when you can wield a real one? Not me. Only weaklings need two hands to swing a sword meant for one. I never liked that piddly little piece o’ scrap metal, anyway. If you think about it, any blade less than two meters is basically a knife.”
Barn Owl rolled her eyes. “To answer your question, Zaea, choose whatever weapon you’re most comfortable with. But if you want my opinion, a spear is always your best choice for a raid. You know I got mine. Whatever you choose, fast, light, and silent is the way to go for this mission. What Gator over here doesn’t understand is that we’re trying to get in and out of this place with our lives and the lives of the prisoners intact, without raising any alarms. Charging and barging is the tactic of fools. And I know a lot of dead fools.”
The burly, middle-aged woman called Mongoose mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
“Speak up, Auntie. We can’t hear you,” Bunny Rabbit said. She was bent over a longbow, which she was deftly stringing with a piece of hemp.
“I said we can always use more archers,” Mongoose said.
“Why? You’ve already got the best one in the Burrow,” Bunny Rabbit said, adding, “Me, if that wasn’t clear to you new pe
ople.”
Cheese Eater looked up from where he was sharpening his Wyvernwood sword on a whetstone and said, “Good thing those little arms of yours can’t draw with enough force to puncture a suit of armor, Bunny, or we might have to worry.”
“Good thing most Snowmen don’t wear any,” Bunny Rabbit said. “Only the alphas and some of their highest-ranking Eyeless. They wear shell pieces they pick off the dead Lice they find up on the Surface. Yuck.”
Mongoose mumbled something.
Bunny finished stringing her bow, and tapped Mongoose’s shoulder with one of her arrows. “Speak up, Auntie.”
Mongoose cleared her throat. “Archers are force multipliers - the more, the better. Does Princess Stick-Up-Her-Ass know how to shoot?”
“Sorry, but I don’t,” Zaea said, playing it off like Mongoose was only having a go at her, and no great secret had been spilled. “I was always better at throwing knives. Archery was never my strong suite.”
“Pity,” Mongoose said.
“Don’t be so hard on her, Aunt. Most likely, these are the last four torches either of them will spend alive. Why not let ‘em enjoy it?” Cheese Eater said.
“Fast, light, and silent. Got it. May I have a moment to look around?” Zaea said.
“Sure, just be quick, and don’t wander. These catacombs go on forever… real easy to get lost. We’re leavin’ as soon as everyone’s geared up. This section is the only part we use, anyway. The weapons end over there,” Barn Owl said, pointing to where Gator was emerging from the shadows with a huge, Wyvernwood great sword slung over his shoulder.
Barn Owl cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, her voice rebounding off into the darkness of the tunnels. “All right Vermin, listen up. We’re out of here in two minutes. This is the part where you pay attention. That means eye contact, Bunny Rabbit. Time to quiver those arrows.