by Stone Thomas
“What does my penchant for pastimes have to do with recruitment?” Akrin asked.
“Precisely,” Cindra said.
“If you have something to say—” Akrin said.
“It just strikes me as odd that a man with as much dash and reflex as you prefers to sit when he could shine,” she replied. “Sports seem like a natural application of your athleticism and quick judgment, but what do I know. I’m just a gal, bored to tears by dice and paper. But go along, you haven’t brought a team with you. It’s hard to muster a team if you’re not a proven winner.”
Akrin seethed and spat. I thought Cindra might have pushed too hard, but she stood there, half a smile taunting Akrin’s half a frown. I had no idea where she was going with this, but I loved it.
“What do you want if you win?” I asked.
“People, of course,” he replied. “If I win, I get to recruit twenty people to Roseknob. The choice is theirs, but I have free reign to make my pitch for the world’s best city.”
“Okay,” I said. Nola and Cindra gasped. They might have thought I should talk him down from that number, but I was feeling pretty good about our odds of winning a game we hadn’t even identified yet. “If we win,” I said, “you let us build you a shrine.”
“Roseknob’s population is bursting,” he said. “Even if there were anyone alive who remembered how to build a shrine, I’m not sending Nola any portion of my nourishing souls. I worked hard for my dinner.”
“You misunderstand,” I said. “We’ll build a shrine to you.”
Nola smacked her forehead with her palm.
“You have yourselves a deal,” Akrin said. He beamed with self-congratulation.
“We’ll choose the game though,” I said. “A team sport. It’s not ready yet, so do come back when it is.”
“I’m intrigued,” Akrin said. “How experienced are you at this game?”
“I assure you,” I said. “I’ve never played it, and I won’t until you return.”
“I look forward to stealing your most skilled residents,” Akrin said. “Until then!” And with that, he soared into the air.
“Arden,” Nola said, “you should rest until my uncle’s boon wears off. You’re making some decisions that are a little more knuckleheady than usual.”
“Your father loves to roll dice,” I said. “Cindra was right to steer us toward a physical challenge. I have a plan for this too!”
I just needed to find Vix. I strolled past a row of small buildings built like shops and taverns. They all sat empty and without roofs, but they were otherwise finished — floorboards, walls, windows, and a frame that the roof would cover soon.
A pair of brunettes in long flowing robes walked toward me. “Girls,” I said, approaching the flame dame and her ice queen sister. “A mailrunner showed up with this for your father. I thought you should see it instead.”
Lily and Ambry read over the letter. Lily looked up and smiled. “So she’s alive. She’s alive out there, Ambry!”
Ambry’s eyes were wide and starting to tear. All she said was, “Mom.”
I was glad the girls took this as good news. “We’ll find her,” I said. “We’ll bring her here.”
“We have to get rid of my father first,” Lily said. “If he banished her once, he’ll just do it again after…”
“After what?” I asked.
“He’s been politicking all day,” she replied. “He thinks he could run Halcyon better and some people are starting to agree.”
“He’s a summer squall that will blow over soon,” I said. “Trust me.”
“Trust?” a voice said from across the hill. “You? Why would anyone?”
“Gruppin Ingriss,” I said. He seemed startled to hear his first name come out of my mouth. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Your days of ruling Halcyon are over,” he said. “I’ve called for an election.”
+28
“I hope you’re ready for a little electile dysfunction,” I said, “because mine is one ballot box you won’t be stuffing.”
“I won’t have to,” Valleyvale’s former mayor said. “The results of your little consensus poll are in. The people are overworked, penniless, and afraid that you’ll conscript them into a never-ending war. They wonder how you’re any different than Duul himself.”
“Yurip shared the survey results with you,” I said.
“Is that your chief administrator’s name?” he asked. “Then yes. He’s the one that will set up voting stations as well. A smaller village can get by with just a head priest’s say-so, but you’ll be a city with so many people here. Cities need mayors, plain and simple.”
“I look forward to a free and fair election.” I held out my hand, but good ol’ Gruppin just looked at it, turned up his nose, and walked away.
“You must take after your mom,” I said to Lily and Ambry once their father was out of earshot. “Any idea where she could be?”
“None,” Ambry said.
“The mailrunner must know,” I said. “She’s the one that handed me the letter. We’ll track her down. In fact, I may have a plan for that too.”
In an uncharacteristic show of affection and gratitude, Lily threw her arms around me. “I knew following you to Halcyon wouldn’t be a waste,” she said. “Everyone told us, ‘girls, that boy is dumb as a box of bricks and not handsome enough to make up the difference,’ but you’ve really gone above and beyond for us, and for the people of our little city. Thank you.”
My hands found her waist instinctively. I was surprised how thin she was under that formless, flowing blue robe. Her eyes glistened as she looked up at my face. I looked at Ambry, who smiled and patted me on the back. It was moments like this when I knew we were on the right path, making calculated decisions that were right for our city, no matter what the people outside Halcyon thought.
They can call me dumb, but they can’t say I’m not smart.
“Have you seen Vix?” I asked. “I saw her maybe ten minutes ago.”
The girls shook their heads so I wandered on, following the sound of banging and grunting. If that was Vix and Mamba, I wanted to find them before it was too late to join in.
It wasn’t our resident builder though, or the sweet sweet sound of outdoor copulation. It was a horde of goblins with their shaman, Mayblin, in the lead.
“Mayblin!” I yelled, jogging toward the jabbering squad of green-skinned creatures. Their large pointy ears flopped with each step as they marched toward a tall, wide stone building.
“They did it!” Mayblin shouted. She wore rags that covered her private goblin parts and carried a metal staff that glowed red at its tip. “They freed the lord of the rocks!”
“That’s great news,” I said. Then I rounded the corner of the building those goblins approached. It was a three-story stone structure — one of the largest in Halcyon. Wooden support beams lay across the open top, waiting for a roof.
Inside was a massive skeleton, fully excavated from the cave below the hill that served as the goblins’ longtime home, our quarry, and our mine for iron, precious metals, and energems.
“This,” I asked, “is the lord of the rocks?” The creature’s skull was as long as I was tall, with a powerful jaw posed wide open. Thin metal rods spiked from the floor and forked open at their top ends to support the monster’s ribcage, its arms, its neck — all of the inanimate bones that comprised its long-dead body.
“Yes,” Mayblin said, “because old stories die hard.” Her voice was quick and shrill, but her words were clear. “They all believe it’s a dragon that will rise from death and lead us to glory one day. It’s a nice story, but what do goblins need with glory?”
“Everyone deserves a little glory, Mayblin.” I patted the goblin on the head and admired the “dragon” skeleton a moment more. “Does this mean everyone is willing to start mining gold for our new mint?”
“About that,” Mayblin said, nibbling at her thumbnail. “I may have lied. Goblins do that when they�
�re nervous. No, we do it all the time. Sometimes. Anyway, the excavation wasn’t holding everyone back.”
“Then what was?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Goblins like getting our hands dirty and digging shiny things out of the rock, so we never stopped mining. See?” She handed me a small gold nugget. It was the size of my thumbnail, a cold lumpy chunk of pure wealth. I tucked it into my pocket as Mayblin continued. “We have a ton of gold and other stuff down there, we just didn’t want to turn it over to you until you did your part.”
“Well, the Halcyon museum of natural history is off to a good start,” I said. “Please find Yurip and let him know we can start minting coins now.”
“And what should we do with the energems?” Mayblin asked.
“Bring them to the temple,” I said. Her smile faltered. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s a lot of them,” she said. “A lot to carry, and this is admiration hour.” She pointed at the dragon with her thumb.
“Take your time admiring the lord of the rocks,” I said. “You deserve this. Bring the energems up at your own pace.”
Mayblin nodded enthusiastically and pushed her way back through the crowd. There must have been hundreds of goblins, some on their hands and knees, all staring at the skeleton with wide eyes.
I continued my mission to find Vix. When I finally found her, she was standing outside the smith’s shop. A sign hung above the door that said, “Forgery.”
“You may want to drop a letter or two from the end of that sign,” I said. “People will get the wrong idea.”
“The idea,” the smith said, “seems to be ordering supplies from me without ever trading anything back in return.” He narrowed his eyes at Vix. She responded by growling and thrashing her tail against the ground.
“I built you this forge,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean you get free work out of me forever,” he said. “Look at everything I’ve made for you!”
I surveyed the ground around the smith’s shop. “Did Vix ask you to make a hundred iron swords?”
“No,” he said, “Nola did. I’ve made sturdy rapiers, slender estocs, serrated short swords. I still haven’t found one she really likes. She’s very picky.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nola is the type to mince swords. But what is Vix asking for?”
“He made me the spring plate,” Vix said, “and the crank handles, and nails for the siege tower. He’s made tools for the construction crew. He’s made me two cannons — even though I only asked for one!”
“You said you wanted cannon towers,” he said. “You implied more than one.”
Time to break this up. “Truth be told, we’ll pay you gold for all the metal that you mold. Until that day, I pray you’ll stay at making these great tools of trade.”
They both gave me a strange look. Their look said, “You sound like a total dweeb.” What I heard was, “Tight rhymes, dude!” It was nice, hearing whatever I wanted to.
“I can’t keep making whatever Vix dreams up,” the smith said. “I’m content to wait for payment, and I’m happy to help her test out new ideas, but metal doesn’t grow on trees.”
“What if it did?” I asked.
“It doesn’t,” the smith insisted.
“I know,” I replied, “but what if it did?” I still had that plethorchid seed pod in my pocket, so I dug it out, cracked open the casing, and pulled out a hard, round seed. It was the size of a walnut, but perfectly smooth. I glanced at the seed, then at the pile of discarded swords.
Suddenly, my body started shaking and my vision swirled. Halcyon faded into darkness around me, and only the smith and Vix remained. Next to the smith was a tall bushy tree with thick dark limbs that looked… metallic.
My vision swirled again and the sky lightened until it was back to normal. I swooned on unsteady feet while Vix and the smith took hold of my arms to keep me from falling over.
“That was so cool!” I said. “I just premonished!”
“Do you need a towel?” Vix asked.
“No,” I said, “It was a dry premonition. Watch me unfold the future.”
I took one of the smith’s discarded swords, dug a small hole in the ground, then popped the seed into it. Before kicking dirt over it, I stabbed the sword into the hole and right into the seed itself.
The sword sank into the dirt — or, more accurately, it was pulled belowground by the budding plethorchid plant. Soil bulged over the seed-and-sword until a small mound of dirt was all we could see.
Vix and the smith bent over to watch that tilled soil produce a small green shoot that split small branches off, sprouted leaves, and kept growing. After five minutes, it was a foot tall and its branches had darkened to the near-black color of cast iron. Flower buds formed at the tips of its branches, and when they opened the petals were polished and silver.
The flowers grew until their weight forced the branches to bow and tilt toward the ground. Then, from the center of each flower, a small sharp blade emerged. Those flowers bloomed into swords identical to the one we fed the plant initially.
The smith started freaking out. “There are a dozen fully-formed swords!” he yelled. “And the plant is still growing!”
“Sell them if you want,” I said, “or melt them down and make something else. This ought to tide you over until the miners can get you more metal. Oh, and our head farmer said to tend this with devotion. I trust you’ll figure out what that means.”
Vix and I walked away while the smith circled his new sword bush in a very still-freaking-out way.
“I’m glad he’s happy,” I said. “There’s something I wanted to show you.”
“There’s something I wanted to show you too,” she said. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine?”
This could go a number of ways. I lowered my hands slowly toward my waist and kept an eye on her fingers. They went low too, reaching behind her back. Then she reached inside her skirt… pocket. She had something in her pocket. Okay then, back to my original plan.
I pulled the blueprints from my own pocket and handed them to her. She simply gave me a folded up sheet of parchment.
“Where did you get these?” she asked. Her fuzzy fox ears twitched forward. “What kind of building is this?”
“It’s for a shrine,” I said. “I’d like to unlock your skill Sites Templar and ask you to build shrines to gods from other cities. If Nola shares the vibrations she gathers from all of us, we’ll build new alliances against Duul.”
Vix kept scanning the blueprints. “These plans are a little crude.”
“Kāya and Brion left them lying around in Valleyvale. They were building a shrine of their own. I think if you swapped out the curved walls—”
“I’ll build with seven sides to maximize the wavefront reverb,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a builder alive who makes shrines, but it looks like a basic echo chamber. I can work off these plans.
“I’ll need energems though, raw ones. There’s a recipe here for mortar that requires ground up energems, and then Nola will have to meditate inside the shrines until they fill with enough energy to power up.”
“Mayblin is bringing a ton of them to the temple,” I said. “Let’s build one to Gowes first, but I’d like seven total. I’m hopeful we can recruit more help.”
Vix nodded and stared at me for a bit. “I’m waiting.”
“Oh, right. Skillmeistering, commence! Wait... why do you have so many XP?”
“First, that’s rude. I work hard,” she said. “Second, I’m cheating.” She leaned close and spoke in a low voice. “Mamba suggested I nap in the Recovery Beds in the infirmary, and Lana let me. The sick people in there need lots of rest to heal up, but I’m in great shape so they work a little different on me. The beds have sped up my ‘biological processes’ as promised, including my sleep cycle. A little nap is all it takes, and then I’m back at 100% and ready to work. It’s how I’ve gotten the walls done, the security gates repaired, a str
ing of new commercial buildings, houses, the prison, and more.
“Plus, I have two workers I’m using Command Chain on. I finally had to break up the workers into teams so that the Meadowdale natives work together on one side of the hill and the Valleyvalians are together on the other side. I deputized their captains with that new skill, so that’s a free XP boost right there when I’m within range.”
“Wait, you built a prison?” I asked.
“Yes,” Vix said, “because you told me to. Mayor Ingriss was agitating people and you said, ‘Have your workers start building a prison. Seriously.’”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said, completely forgetting I had said that. “I’m impressed you got to it so quickly. Here, I’ll just make some adjustments… And… There. You can Command Chain three people now and at greater distance, you can activate special properties for divine and military buildings, and you’ve mastered Fundamentals. Now, what’s this paper you handed me?”
The sheet of paper in my hand had a few unfamiliar words on it. “Dixette,” “Troxie,” and “Pixa” were written in pink, while “Haxor,” “Extar,” and “Ardex” were in blue.
“Are these potential stage names for adult actors?” I asked. “Are you looking for a class change all of a sudden? I must admit, I’m curious what that skill menu would look like.”
Vix snatched the paper and tightened her lips. “I’m trying to come up with baby names, you ass. I’m just not quite sold on any of these, especially the girls’ names. They don’t have the same noble honesty of ‘Camixa,’ but I can’t exactly reuse my sister’s name.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Dixette is off the table. Kids are cruel with nicknames. There’s something about Haxor that doesn’t sit right. The others are kinda nice. Especially Ardex.”
“Foxkin have certain naming conventions,” she said. “It’s the best we can do if you wanted a junior.”
“I don’t need a junior,” I said. “Honestly, whatever names you pick will be perfect.”
She looked away and spoke under her breath. “Right, because you won’t have to say them.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.