by Matthew Lang
“All right, Sir Adam, you’ve made your point,” Elder Jirsca said softly.
“No, I don’t think I have,” Adam said. “Princess Esmeralda has worked for some time to ensure that haerunwoln children are safe. The next time you want to ask why no one stands up for you, maybe you should ask when the last time was that you stood up to aid anyone else.”
“Even so, there are matters we cannot help directly with,” Elder Jirsca said, her voice as rich and melodious as Adam remembered from yestersleep. “We are not numerous enough to fight as an army, nor would we be welcome if Aergon sent theirs.”
“Army?” Adam asked.
“Of course,” Elder Thera replied somewhat caustically. “You didn’t think Khalivibra has just been sitting on her hoard of gold for all this time, did you? She commands an army of thralls, armed with whatever weapons existed in the city when she first warped their minds. You will not break them, and even if they fight with fists, you’ll have to cut through them all to retake Aer Goragon.”
“Unless we kill the dragon first,” Esmeralda said softly.
“And how will you do that without an army?”
Esmeralda took a deep breath. “We found Wyrmbane. Adam?”
Reaching into a pouch hanging at his waist, Adam brought out the rounded stone and placed it carefully on the table before him, lest it roll off to the side.
“Where is the rest of it?” Elder Jirsca asked. “Surely that cannot be the sword?”
“The sword proved to be just a sword,” Esmeralda said, pushing an errant strand of hair back behind her left ear. “The power of the Dragonslayer was vested in that stone.”
“Then we need a blade,” Jirsca said slowly.
“Yes,” Esmeralda said, “and my people will forge it.”
“Then until they do, we shall keep the stone safe,” Thera said, reaching out toward it.
“Like hell you will,” Adam said, snatching it back. “No offense, Elder, but I don’t trust you with it at all. We give it to you and there’s no way you’ll give it back to us.”
The woman’s cheeks colored. “You doubt my word?”
Adam smiled tightly at her. “No, I don’t. That’s the problem. Did you hear the words that were coming out of your mouth not five minutes ago?”
“It’s all right, Adam,” Esmeralda said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the table. “If she wants to take it, let her take it. I am sure we can trust her integrity.”
Adam glanced at Duin, who shrugged, and then back to meet Esmeralda’s gaze. She was staring at him intensely, and for a moment, he thought he caught the flicker of a smile. Grudgingly he put the stone back onto the table and tried not to wince at the triumphant smile that broke out across Elder Thera’s face as she reached and snatched up the stone.
There was a loud sizzling sound, a cry that was almost a yelp, and the stone dropped back to the tabletop, rolling this way and that across the table. Thera was on the floor, clutching her hand amid the remains of her broken chair. Even from across the table, Adam could see her skin was blistered and burned where she had touched the stone.
“Sorcery!” Thera gasped. “She wants the stone for herself.”
Esmeralda sat back with a soft smile. “Of course I do,” she said easily. “I want its power just as much as you do. Even if I never used it to slay Khalivibra, if I could harness it… but I cannot. No one can. The stone chooses.”
With a sense of timing that Adam had hitherto only associated with screenplays, Wyrmbane rolled to the edge of the table and dropped itself into his lap. Despite the searing it had given Elder Thera, it proved to be quite cool.
“And it has chosen Sir Adam,” Esmeralda finished.
Adam looked up at the ring of faces once more staring in his direction.
“It’s done what?”
“THE PROPHECY is true, then,” Elder Faas said, his voice low and so soft Adam had to strain to hear it.
“I believe so,” Esmeralda said solemnly.
“What prophecy?” Adam asked.
By this point several servants were helping Elder Thera to her feet again, and one was bandaging her burned hand. “Congratulations, Sir Adam,” she said sweetly. “You get to slay Khalivibra.”
“What?”
“You did not tell him?” Elder Jirsca asked.
“There wasn’t time,” Esmeralda said. “By the time we were safe, we were on the way here already.”
Elder Jirsca folded her hands into her lap. “I think we shall have to work with Princess Esmeralda’s plans,” she said. “You seem to hold all the cards, Your Highness.”
“No, she doesn’t,” Adam said firmly. “I haven’t agreed to any of this.”
“But you found Wyrmbane,” Elder Jirsca protested.
“And who said I was going to use it?”
Duin coughed and reached inside his tunic to retrieve a battered book, which he placed on the table.
Adam gave him a sour look. “You too?”
“You asked the question,” Duin said apologetically. “I picked these up at Blackwater.”
“What are they?” Adam asked warily.
“The Book of Solmento,” Duin said. “The one we found in Fernando’s laboratory. Xavier had the missing pages. I thought you might want them.”
“You knew?”
“I guessed,” Duin said. “I do not know any more than you do.”
“Is that an original work?” Elder Faas asked.
“I believe it is, Waur Faas,” Duin said. “It does not appear to be altered as ours is.”
“I thought you didn’t read well,” Adam said.
“I don’t,” Duin said. “But I have a good memory. I know it is different to the stories Waur Thera taught us.”
“Then perhaps we may all learn something today,” Elder Faas said softly. “Princess, would you be kind enough to read the relevant sections?”
“Relevant?” Adam asked.
“There are over three hundred pages, Sir Adam,” Esmeralda said. “And we still do not know what half of the writings pertain to.”
Skeptical, Adam sat back wordlessly as Esmeralda opened the leather cover and sifted through the loose pages Xavier had torn from the start of the tome. Finding the correct place, she cleared her throat and began to read.
“I see the times where the world does not turn, and this shall be a sign to the heir of Aergon that the times of testing is nigh. Mark the calendar of old for the sacred times of our Lady Selune, and at the height of her power, return to the pillars of the moon and cast the symbols. Bring with you the catalyst of the sun and the gifts of the moon, and the chosen will be revealed unto the worthy. For only one who has seen the moon can continue this great journey, for it is in the light that we were born, and in the light that we shall return, should our world ever be rewon.
“As above, so below, and the Children of the Moon must…”
“Darn,” Esmeralda said. “It’s torn right there.”
“… not dwell beneath the ground,” Elder Faas supplied. “That is the passage that forced us out of Aergon.”
“Despair not,” Esmeralda continued. “For the light of Selune shall not be lost, and the great wyrm will be cast down. And when breath is lost and the night is at its darkest, only then shall the path back be clear.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Adam asked.
“Selune only knows,” Elder Faas said calmly. “You must understand, Sir Adam. Ignatius Solmento was a great man driven mad by what he saw. We do not know the meaning of every passage—nor can we know that every passage has meaning.”
“You’re saying this could all just be the ravings of a madman?”
Elder Faas smiled sadly. “Would that they were. Magister Solmento is the only raving madman to have predicted the Fall of Selune and the arrival of the golden wyrms. When those events came to pass, our people took more heed of his words—thankfully, Mennos, the high priest of Selune, had the foresight to record them just in case.”
; Elder Thera made an indelicate noise. “You mean he wanted to be certain he had the key to his riches and survival should Selune truly abandon us for our excesses.”
“What excesses?” Adam asked.
“We can discuss that another time, Sir Adam,” Elder Faas said. “If you would continue, Princess?”
“For the hero who finds the Eye of Fernando and sets it anew shall cast down the wings of gold that wound the city under the red sky that never changes.”
“The Eye of Fernando?”
In his lap, the pommel stone glowed a warm green.
“Not possible,” Adam said. “Even if you go by that gibberish, I can’t set the stone in a sword. I don’t know how. What am I meant to do, pick it up and push it into the pommel?” As he spoke, Adam picked up his broadsword and pressed the green stone against the plain steel end of his modern sword.
Strangely, it sank easily into the metal until it reached what Adam would have thought of as a perfect midpoint, and then with an audible click, it refused to budge farther. When Adam again took his left hand away, it was fused into the metalwork of his blade, looking for all the world as if it had been set there deliberately, an oval gemstone encased in steel.
“I guess so,” Esmeralda said mildly.
“That wasn’t funny.”
“It was from over here.”
“I still don’t see how I’m in any way qualified to kill a dragon. I’ll get killed. Worse, I’ll get you all killed too.”
“But you are the chosen,” Esmeralda said. “I knew it when you first arrived—one who has seen the face of Selune. The ritual worked and—”
A cold certainty stole over Adam’s body. “Ritual? What ritual?”
“The ritual to reveal the chosen,” Esmeralda said more slowly.
Adam folded his arms across his chest and stared at her impassively. “Do go on.”
“I have known for some time that something was not right, that Xavier might have betrayed us,” Esmeralda said, her eyes scanning his face. “Down below we mark time carefully, using candle clocks. The magisters—and I—have some that are precisely calibrated so we know when the solstices are, or should be now that the sun no longer chases after the moon. It has been important, because each solstice is a time of power. In summer, the sun is at her strongest, and her followers are mighty, but in winter, Selune is at her peak, and we can still call upon her for aid. And we need that more than ever if the balance is to be returned to the world.”
“But that’s impossible,” Adam said. “You get solstices because the angle of the world’s tilt affects how the sun shines onto it at any given moment in the planet’s orbit around the sun. If your world doesn’t turn, the angles with which the sunlight falls would always be the same, so solstices would not occur.”
Elder Jirsca shook her head. “How is it that you know so swiftly what it has taken our people a hundred cycles of living topside to work out?”
Adam shrugged. “I’m a scientist. It’s my business to know.”
“I see,” Elder Jirsca said carefully. “Well, one of the first of Selune’s Children to be exiled to the surface was apprenticed to Magister Paulus. We call her Bonita, lady of the skies, and it was she who first traveled to the dark way out in the west, to the frozen lands that still see the stars of old.”
“Well, yes,” Adam said. “They don’t go anywhere. You just can’t see them for the light of the sun.”
“So Bonita said,” Jirsca agreed. “And she took with her maps of the heavens she had copied from the library of Aergon before leaving, and returned to tell us something none of us had known—our world is still moving. According to her observations of the stars in the dark, we….” Jirsca paused and stood up, then walked over to the sideboard and picked up a rounded yellow fruit. “Where you come from, Sir Adam, the world must turn like so,” she said, turning the fruit in her hands. “And the day passes into night as the light from the sun falls over us, even as the shadow of night falls upon the other side?”
“Yes.”
“When Selune left our skies, this world stopped turning,” Jirsca continued, stopping the turn of the fruit. “Although, as you pointed out, the world would still orbit around the sun,” she added, walking slowly around the table. “But Bonita has shown that instead of staying perfectly still, our world is, in fact, doing this.”
As she took her next step, Jirsca moved the fruit so it rolled gently up and down. “It’s slow, but it’s noticeable, and when our scouts made contact with Her Highness here, we worked out that it takes one full cycle—which I think you call a ‘year’—for it to move down and up.”
“Which means we have solstices, based on the movement of the world relative to the sun, and they work well enough for our purposes,” Esmeralda said.
“Wait, when you made contact with Esmeralda?” Adam asked.
“Ah, yes,” Esmeralda said. “In Aergon we have used the solstice—the old winter solstice—every cycle in an attempt to find the chosen of Solmento’s prophecy. We go to the surface and invoke Selune’s ritual at the sacred stones, but it never worked, and I began to suspect that Xavier might have been doing it wrong. It was not much at first, especially given how advanced he is—was—in the magical arts compared to myself, but he would mispronounce words or leave them out. Sometimes I felt the runes he drew on the menhirs were not quite formed as they should be. Little things. So I started looking at options. It was easy to access his chambers—they are cleaned every sleep, after all. And it came to me that the best way to find out about the rituals of Selune would be to maintain contact with the Children who were being sent topside, and so I did.” Esmeralda’s eyes grew soft and distant at the memories. “My first attempt was laughable, of course. What would I know of the things people needed on the surface? I gave them clothes, some perishable foods, candles without thinking of the need for ways to light them, mostly practical, but silly.”
“And that is when our scouts met her,” Jirsca said. “Ever since the start, when the treetop city was first built by the Children, we have returned each year to collect those left behind. And once we saw what she was doing….”
“We spoke when we could,” Esmeralda said. “And the lorekeepers of the Children agreed with my thoughts and came up with a way to ensure that finally, we would succeed despite Xavier’s interference. The haerunwoln provided us with the missing piece of the ritual, the catalyst, and our ritual worked for the first time this cycle—it brought you to us. And you have found Wyrmbane, and the Eye of Fernando has accepted your blade.”
“And I want to help you because…?” Adam asked. “Don’t get me wrong here, Princess, but since my arrival here, I’ve been shot at, sliced, battered, nearly eaten, and if it wasn’t for your meddling, I’d still be at home living a life without dragons, without magic, and most importantly, without near-death experiences occurring nearly every day. You didn’t ask me if I wanted to come save your kingdom, and frankly, I’d much rather not be here right now. So why the hell should I put my neck on the line for you?”
Esmeralda’s eyes widened at Adam’s outburst. “W-well, I thought the honor and the glory of… of….”
“She can get you home,” Duin said softly, his voice expressionless. He was as still as Adam had ever seen him, gaze fixed firmly out the window. “Elder Thera believes the ritual can be reversed if it is performed at the temple of the sun in the city of Aer Goragon.”
“It can?”
“We first thought to banish Khalivibra, but to do so, we would have to defeat her anyway,” Elder Jirsca explained.
“I see,” Adam said, his eyes narrowing. “You’ve known about this since I’ve met you, and we’ve been alone together for how long, and you didn’t think any of this was worth mentioning?”
“I’m sorry,” Duin said. “I don’t know if I believe it any more than you, but I don’t know any other way to get you home. I didn’t want to tell you because I—”
“Didn’t want me to know until it was too late?”
Adam asked. “Until I’d found the stupid rock so you could say I was all ‘chosen’?”
“I didn’t know,” Duin said, turning back. “And if this was all a big mistake, would you really want to be told you were expected to battle Khalivibra? And what if it’s wrong now and you go against her and get killed? What was I supposed to say? Welcome to Boolikstaad; if you’re the hero, you get to kill a dragon. If you’re not, you’re stuck here forever, because until someone does kill the dragon, we can’t get you home?”
“You could have told me the truth.”
“And then you’d have been upset and angry and possibly dead if you started yelling about it while kanak were around.”
“You will not stay, Sir Adam?” Elder Faas asked.
“Stay?” Adam asked. “Why would I stay?”
“To rule.”
Adam laughed darkly. “Elder Faas, I am in no way qualified to rule anything.”
“But the Wyrmbane has chosen you as Fernando’s heir.”
“Good for it. Consider this my resignation notice—what do you call it, abdication?”
“And if we are unable to send you back?” Elder Faas asked.
“Then you can find a way, or you can slay your own bloody dragon.” Scowling, Adam drove his sword point first into the table and stormed out of the room.
Chapter 16
THE PROBLEM with being a new face in a small tight-knit community is that it’s almost impossible to stay hidden for any length of time. All but running down the steps that wound through the tree fortress, Adam found himself in the relative privacy of the hot springs he and Duin had soaked in just hours before, sitting moodily on one of the springy chairs there—a living sapling trained into a sturdy seat as it grew. At any other time, Adam would have marveled at the skill behind its creation; now he barely worried if the chair would break under his weight, given the creaking of the wood as he rocked back and forth on its springy branches. Around him the sounds of haerunwoln life filtered through the canopy, quiet as it tended to be. Through the screening bamboo, he could hear the sounds of bathing, laundry, and cooking as water was retrieved for boiling or stones were heated to bake or grill on. Above him, he heard the noise of a crowd trying to be silent filtering through the hanging curtains of sweet-smelling moss that enclosed the outdoor baths.