Brimstone and Lily (Legacy Stone Adventures)

by Terry Kroenung

  Since it appeared that I might be stuck there until somebody came down to the basement to hunt for me, I decided to take a look around. It paced out at maybe twenty feet square. Although the walls were solid and smooth, cut from living rock, the floor wasn’t. Its designer had inlaid big tiles, but like no tiles I’d ever seen. Not square, but odd-shaped. In fact, they looked just like…my Legacy Stone.

  “Huh,” I breathed out loud. I squatted down and held the candle close to the floor. Hard to tell in the sputtery yellow light, but I took the tiles to be made of the same red stuff as my Stone, too. Huge arrow-shaped blocks of solid red jasper two-yards-across. They even had the same hole in the center. What on earth is this?

  I crawled all around the room, looking at every tile. Identical, with something like marble filling in the joints between them. And every tile faced the same direction, with the point of the arrow facing one particular wall, angled so they aimed at a single spot. I scooted up to it and gave it a look. Faint carvings crawled across it, in an alphabet I’d never seen before. The letters looked a little like the Viking runes I’d spied in a history book once, but no, not exactly the same. More swirly than Norse runes.

  I noticed something else as I stood there. My Legacy Stone burned a hole in my chest.

  Grabbing the cord from around my neck with a yelp, I yanked the whole necklace off and held it out. The Stone glowed. A dull reddish light came from deep inside it, like a beaker of blood on a sunny windowsill. Worse, the letters on the wall began to do the same thing, shining out from the surface as if they’d been heated in a forge.

  Okay, Verity, you hit your head when you fell and this is some crazy dream. You have those all the time. Don’t worry.

  Things got even spookier when the letters on the wall began to move.

  I shrieked. Yep, like a girl. I admit it right here in front of the world. The only other time I’d ever made that sound had been when Eddie’d dropped a wriggling slug down my back. My heart bass-drummed and my head answered with a banshee solo. Not good. I preferred a dream that I could wake up from. Not this overheated nightmare.

  Just as I started to holler for help, not caring whether it interrupted the dress rehearsal or not, the letters stopped moving. They rearranged themselves into a shape that I knew well. One that I could understand.

  A sword.

  The same fiery molten-iron color as the letters that formed it, the sword had a yard-long single-edged recurved blade that swelled a little bit toward the end, looking like a willow leaf with a wicked point. Its crossbar swirled in an S-curve and twisted like a vine. At the end of the handle the large pommel, sort of resembling an acorn, seemed as big as my fist. The whole thing still clung to thewall, the way you see old relief carvings in museums. But somehow I just knew that if I grabbed it, I could snatch it right off.

  Real smart, Verity. Put your hand on a red-hot piece of steel. Dream or not, that’ll hurt.Only a lunatic would try that.

  So I did.

  It didn’t feel raging-lava hot, but warm, like bath water. The grip seemed to be birch bark but felt like supple leather. No, not leather…skin. Human skin.

  I yanked my hand back as if it had been burned after all. Glancing down, I saw that my palm looked fine. My imagination must’ve been affected by the fall, the tiles, the letters. And now I could smell a tangy odor, easy to recognize because everyone in Washington spent the summer with it.

  Sweat. A person’s sweat. Maybe from somebody who worked hard in a small space…like in a stone cavern under the ground.

  To top it all off, I felt a buzzing vibration. At first I thought it lay under my feet, or in the wall. Soon I understood that it just was. It came from everywhere around me at once, like the very air I breathed throbbed from a close lightning strike. I started to have trouble thinking straight. This must be what the grown-ups feel when they drink whiskey. Fearing that I might faint, I grabbed at the sword again. This time I ignored every sensation and clenched my fist around the sword hilt. With a wrench I hauled the glowing weapon free of the wall and crashed backward onto the tiles.

  Lying flat on my back, I could see that the candle had gone out. I could see that, in what should have been total darkness. Oh, this is a much better dream than the ones I usually have. Not only that, I could hear the Macbeth actors reciting their lines upstairs, as if I stood right beside them. Before now the stone chamber had blocked all sounds. I could also make out a slithering sound, like a snake on the move.

  My new sword, now a three-dimensional steel and gold object, had stopped glowing. It had no more weight to it than a silk handkerchief. Its grip felt exactly like I held the hand of a living person. I could even feel its pulse. Most upsetting of all, the blade had curled around my neck so that the point stared at me like a spitting cobra about to strike.

  “Hi, Verity!” said the sword in a pleasant cheerful voice.

  4/ Jasper

  “If I turn into a giraffe and start bumpin’ my head on doorways, you’re in big trouble, mister.”

  A giant mouse squeaked and the sword clattered across the tiles. Mouse? Where’s the mouse? Is it Ernie? No, Ernie could never be that loud. Must be me. I skittered backward into a dark corner. Dark? Yep, couldn’t see a thing. But a second ago I had eyes like a cat. And now…

  Shivering, my mouth as dry as sand, I huddled into a little ball, feeling even younger and more scared than ever. This ain’t real. I hit my head fallin’ into this hole. Just a horrible dream as my brain swells. I’ve had worse. Pretty soon I’ll wake up and---or maybe not. Maybe they’ll find me dead down here after the rehearsal. ‘Poor Verity. What a tragedy. But there’s a war on. Thousands die on battlefields every day. Life goes on.’

  I felt my heart calming and my breath slowing. Not a sound audible except that. No actors’ voices filled my ears now. The wonder-senses that I’d enjoyed when holding the sword had left me. ‘When holding the sword…’ Sword? Where did it go? Don’t see a talking sword every day. Get movin’, Verity. If this is a dream, time to enjoy it. Life goes on.

  The Legacy Stone still glowed faint in my fist, as did the letters on the wall. By the Stone’s dim light I crawled toward the middle of the room, groping along the tiles. It took quite a while, but eventually my fingers bumped into the big pommel and felt for the hilt. With a nervous swallow I grabbed the sword and lifted it, still on my knees. Well, to tell the truth, it grabbed me. Honest. I felt a hand grip mine. Good thing, too, because I squeaked again and tried to throw it away. This time the sword would have none of that. Warm dry fingers clung to mine, squeezing tight. Now I could see in the dark again. Looking at the handle of the sword, I saw only my own fist. No other hand to be seen. But I could still feel it.

  “Pleased to meetcha!” the ghostly sword voice said. The weapon rose and fell as my hand got shook hard, as if by one of the enthusiastic salesmen who would come to the theatre to hawk their wares. “I’ve been waitin’ for you forever. Really forever, I think. No watch or calendar, but I’m pretty sure ‘forever’ fits the bill.” The voice filled my head but not my ears, somehow.

  “Uhh…,” I said, if that counts as saying anything.

  The sword giggled. It sounded like a kid, a boy about my age. That made it even weirder, but also calming at the same time. “That’s great. Verity Sauveur, ordained savior of the world, can’t put a simple sentence together. Got my work cut out for me, I do.” The voice adopted a snooty accent. “Here, try ‘Hello, I am enchanted to make your acquaintance.’ It’s easy. Just put your lips together and---”

  “Uhh…,” I repeated, ever so clever.

  The sword heaved a disgusted sigh. “I thought you got top grades in school! Your teacher thinks you’re so smart you’re unnatural. What would Mr. Ford say if he were here to see you stammerin’ like a drunk?”

  That started to wake me up. “How do you know---?”

  “Hey!” The blade tip sort of melted until it looked like a steely thumb. Pointing back at itself it howled, “Magick sword! Yep,
I can read your mind. You can accept that I’m talkin’ to you but the mind-readin’ is where you draw the line?” With that it snapped back to its former shape.

  “I…I…”

  “OK, let’s try charades. Sometimes we have to take baby steps before we can run.” Now the blade became an index finger. “First word. How many syllables?” The finger flowed into the shape of an ear. “Sounds like?”

  At that point it struck me that: 1) I was being made fun of by a talking sword that sounded like the class clown at my school; 2) I stood in some old religious shrine underneath a Baptist church that had been turned into a successful theatre; 3) just above me they performed a Shakespeare play about witchcraft and murder. Call me a sissy, but I just broke down and started sniffling. “Where’s my ma?” I blubbered. “I wanna go home! Help! Get me outta here!”

  My new sword’s blade wrapped around my mouth and shut me up. It didn’t feel cold, like steel, but warm and moist like someone’s palm. “Hush!” it whispered. “They’ll hear you.”

  The thought galloped through my panicked mind that that had been what I’d wanted. How else could I be rescued from this dungeon if no one heard my cries? Boy-sword seemed to hear that without my being able to speak it. “I can get you out of here without their help. In fact, it’s better that way. There are …people…up there who don’t really want to help you.” He said ‘people’ in a way that made me feel cold as a January swim.

  Peeling the obstruction away from my face I asked, “What is all this? It can’t be real. These things don’t happen.”

  “These things happen all the time. People just explain ‘em away as coincidences, dreams, or fantasies. Or else they look the other way and convince themselves that they saw nothin’ out of the ordinary. People are stupid. I know. I used to be one of ‘em.”

  Sneaky sword. Get me curious and nothing else matters. Wiping my nose on my shirt sleeve, I said, “Used to be?”

  “A long time ago, maybe forever, like I said before.”

  “Do you have a name? Can’t just call you ‘Sword’.”

  “How about Blade of Destiny?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Too showy? Cleaver of Retribution, then?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Edge of Vengeance?”

  “Get serious.”

  “Dread Hand of Reprisal? Bitter Steel of Punishment? Savage Sword of Sorrow?”

  Now I laughed despite myself. “Maybe somethin’ without a preposition?”

  “Oh, sure. Stifle my creative urges. Crush my artistic aspirations. Trammel my hopes of literary fame into the heartless dust of cruelty.”

  I gave the sword a frown. “Have you been readin’ dime novels down here?”

  “No!” The blade drooped, as if hanging its head in shame. “Wrote a couple, though.”

  I snorted. “Did not!”

  “Okay, you caught me. But I could if I wanted to.”

  “Jasper!” I blurted, inspired.

  “Say again?”

  “I’ll call you Jasper. It suits you, somehow.”

  My Legacy Stone flared up into its full glory at that. “The Stone approves,” said Jasper the Magick Talking Sword. As he spoke the letters on the wall where I’d found him brightened until they filled the whole chamber with their orangey light. “As does my Master.”

  “Who’s that?”

  The wall runes shifted again, like bugs scampering across the stony surface. As they flowed amongst one another, rearranging into a new pattern, more letters sprang to fiery life on all of the other walls. It felt like I’d been dropped into the middle of a blast furnace, except that I felt no heat, just…love, somehow. That warm vibration I’d felt when the letters and sword had first appeared filled the chamber again and hugged me like a grandfather. I thought I could smell bread baking and hear puppies yelping. If I’m still dreamin’, then don’t wake me up.

  “You ain’t dreamin’, Verity Sauveur,” said Jasper. “You know you ain’t. Because the dreams you’ve been havin’ are awful.”

  True. While the letters continued their journey around me, I saw flashes in my dizzy head of the dream I’d been having off-and-on for two months. I would fall forever down a long hole, like a well, and land in a dark place. Unnaturally beautiful children, all with pale faces and blonde hair, clutched at me with skeletal fingers, led by a sweet-seeming old lady who tried to eat me with her shark’s mouth. A golden-skinned man and an enormous floppy-jowled black dog came to my rescue, fighting them off as I made my escape to the sea. At that point I always woke up.

  Just that brief reliving of the nightmare made me shiver. Jasper wrapped his warm blade around my shoulders until I stopped shaking. By then the letters had stopped moving and taken their final positions. They filled every inch of wall space, starting with the place where I’d removed Jasper and wrapping around clockwise. I stood in the center of the room, slow-spinning to my right, and read.

  A contract. In Britannic too.

  Most of it read like Romanish lawyer-babble about the Rights and Responsibilities of the Stone-Warden (me, I figured), who shalt blah-blah-blah until such time as she wilt yap-yap-yap or unless both parties agree to jabber-jabber-jabber… It seemed to be an agreement that I would undertake a quest to use the sword of the Grand Mage (whoever the heck he was) in order to lead the Equity (ditto) against the Esteemed Gentlemen of the Honourable Merchantry (double-ditto) and return the world to its state of Accord and Harmony. All it required was a drop of my blood as a signature and the Great Battle Against the Shadows could commence.

  Uh-huh. Who did they think they were kidding?

  Me. I’m the only kid in the room.

  “Are you crazy?!” I shouted, which just made Jasper cover my mouth again. Unable to speak, I had to think the rest at him. “First off, I don’t what any of this is about. Who are all these people? I live in the capital city of the States United and have never heard a word about any of this stuff. Second, this sure sounds like you want me to fight a war and kill people for real. I don’t think so. Third, I’m only twelve years old! Can’t you get some general to do this? Washington’s crawlin’ with ‘em. Can’t swing a cat without hittin’ a dozen. And Fourth, I’m gettin’ outta here and goin’ back to Ma and Eddie.”

  I dropped the sword at my feet and ran toward the hole where I’d fallen into the chamber. No unseen hand clung to mine to prevent it. Jasper’s voice didn’t invade my head to try to talk me out of leaving. Strange mystical forces didn’t take over my soul and imprison me. My downfall was much simpler than that. I fell on my face.

  To this day Jasper won’t admit it, but I know he tripped me. I swear I felt an armored foot stub my toe. Crashing hard onto the tiles, I broke my fall with outstretched hands. The russet stones scuffed up my hands and I winced. Not because of the pain, but because of what I felt in the palm of my right hand.

  Blood. The wound was not so deep as a well…but ‘tis enough. ‘Twill serve.

  A hot wind swirled around me, peeling the letters from the wall and making the cavern look like it was filled with angry fireflies. Far-off voices chanted in a harsh language I’d never heard. I smelled a strange perfume. Brimstone. Brimstone and lily filled my nose. Swallowing, I tasted something hot and coppery. The sparking letters fluttered around my head like innumerable little bats, then flew straight into Jasper’s wall, which sucked them up into blackness. While that happened I spasmed with what felt like an electric jolt, then fell panting onto the floor.

  Total silence. Total darkness. Total despair.

  Had I just made a deal with the Devil? Or with something else?

  Oh, I felt more alone at that moment than I ever had before or have since. With the sword out of my hand I couldn’t see or hear anything. It was just me lying in the gloom with the feeling that the happy life I’d had up to that point was about to end. I still hoped that the whole experience was my hallucinating while unconscious from the fall. But that wish began to feel like a scared kid’s vain del
usion. Curled up in a ball like a wood louse (feeling like one, too), I cried till my throat hurt and I choked on the tears.

  They say that having a good cry makes you feel better. Maybe, but that night all it did was make me mad. If this wasn’t a dream then it was a nasty joke to play on a little girl and this little girl wasn’t laughing. Aching from the fall into the chamber, the scuffing tumble onto the tiles, the magical jolt, and the bawling, I felt around for that miserable sword. When I finally found it I grabbed the hilt in both quivering hands and cursed at the blade for what seemed like three solid minutes, using every awful term I’d ever heard a soldier or sailor use. When I had run out of breath and swear words I stopped, panting.

  Nothing. No Jasper. No chatty wiseacre talking sword. Is this really a dream after all?

  Growling, I stomped over to the hole in the basement floor where I’d fallen through. I squinted up at it. The opening seemed too high for me to jump up to and the walls were too smooth to climb. My ‘sword senses’ let me see that the chamber sat as empty as a banker’s heart. There was nothing at all that I could stand on to get up there. I blew frustrated air through my lips and considered what to do. Far above, the distant sound of the rehearsal reached me loud and clear. One of the murderers of Banquo explained that he lay in a ditch with ‘twenty trenched gashes in his head.’

  “Ain’t that a lovely thing to hear while you’re stuck in a dark hole?” I muttered.

  Should I yell for help again? Jasper had said that it was a bad idea, that there were harmful folks up there. But what did he know? Those were my friends, or at least friends of friends. Nobody dangerous. Stupid sword. Prob’ly just a figment of my imagination anyway. And even if he wasn’t, did I plan to let a talking sword that sounded like a bratty twelve year-old tell me what to do? If I’m the contracted savior of humanity then I need to start makin’ my own decisions. Jaw set, I opened my mouth to scream so all of Washington City could hear me, if that’s what it took.