by Matthew Lang
“So what do we—or rather you—know and remember, then?”
“North-north west?” Xavier said helplessly. “Or north-north dark in the current parlance. I remember there was talk of the statues of our ancestors, a tree of stone, and roads leading south from Blackwater, but I have little hope that those roads still exist.”
“Blackwater?” Duin asked, speaking for the first time since he and Adam left the cave.
“That is what his keep was called, yes. It was built near a large area of peat bogs, and I understand that the people were not overly creative when it came to naming their lands.”
“I know where there are peat bogs to the north dark,” Duin said.
“Do you now?” Xavier said sarcastically. “And why should we trust you to lead us safely?”
“Because you don’t have a choice?” Adam suggested coolly. “It’s in the right direction, and your other options don’t seem too great at this point. Oh, and because you’re going to apologize for tying him up and treating him like dirt?”
“I’m what?”
Esmeralda cleared her throat meaningfully. “I see your point, Sir Adam, but that would be my responsibility. Goodman Duin, we apologize for the way in which you have been treated by our people and, should you aid us in our quest, pledge to henceforth do everything in our power to see to your safe return to civilized society. Do you accept our apologies and pledge your commitment to our cause?”
Duin rose from his rock and bowed low. “I do, Your Highness.”
“Thank you,” Esmeralda said formally. “When should we start, and how long is it going to take?”
“It would take me many sleeps on foot, Highness,” Duin said. “However, I believe it should be no more than five or six at the pace of your riding lizards.”
“We can leave once we’ve restocked our provisions,” Darius said. “And the sooner, the better.”
After a little discussion, Adam and Duin went to harvest more of the young fern shoots and refill their waterskins for the journey ahead, and Darius packed all the dry supplies they would take from the waystation.
“Shouldn’t we leave some for the next scout to come this way?” Adam asked.
“No,” Darius said simply. “We need the provisions, and either we will return in time to direct a resupply mission, or they will be out in force looking for us when we do not return.”
And with that cheery response, Adam wished he hadn’t brought up the topic at all.
Chapter 6
DESPITE XAVIER’S continued misgivings, their little band of adventurers, as Adam liked to call them, adjusted readily to Duin’s direction and were soon moving along at a brisk pace. Over the next few sleeps, he learned a lot more about his companions and the society they came from.
Darius was captain of Esmeralda’s personal guard and a surprisingly uncomplicated man, proud to serve the royal family of Aergon. He was not large by modern standards, standing around five foot seven inches in height, but he was solid muscle all the way through, with a body that most men would have killed for. He was a serious man who spoke little and smiled even less than Duin, but serving royalty had given him manners and courtly graces Adam did not expect in a soldier—especially given his own time in the reserves. Darius was also a consummate rider and huntsman, proficient in many weapons, from the curved saber he indicated was a standard weapon for lizard riders, to the spear and blowpipe, which were cruder hunting tools he had fashioned from surface-growing bamboo. He topped the spear with a flint point and made darts for his blowpipe from sharpened slivers of bamboo, fitting them with the fluffy seed stalk from wild grasses that plugged the narrow blowpipe sufficiently to allow for a smooth flight and a clean shot. Darius had tipped his darts with the poison from the spiders he had killed for their dinner the first sleep and created a quiver from a section of bamboo, covered at the top with netting made from palm husk, which stopped the darts falling out when his mount ran down a tree or across the underside of a rocky ledge.
Magister Xavier turned out to be witty and urbane in mannerism, possessing a powerful and surprisingly rich store of surface lore. Xavier had been one of two apprentices to learn under Magister Nickedemus, who had apparently been a man of great power and learning. Of all the three Aergonites, he was also the one with the richest knowledge of their people’s history, and Adam learned more about Aergon from his conversations with the necromancer—including the all-important why.
“Defense” had been Xavier’s simple answer. “Obviously I studied the healing arts, but there is precious little that can be done with sorcery to aid healing.”
“I don’t know,” Adam disagreed. “That unguent of yours seems pretty magical.”
“Hardly,” Xavier said with a chuckle. “Just the right balance of herbs and other ingredients. It is one of our master’s oldest formulae.”
“Our?”
“Her Royal Highness and I,” Xavier said, his voice taking on a slight mocking tone.
“Esmeralda studied magic?”
“Yes,” Xavier said shortly. “And she fancies herself something of an expert, despite her lack of practice.”
“Mmm,” Adam said noncommittally. “How exactly is necromancy defense? I mean, do you really raise zombies?”
“Yes, I do,” Xavier said. “It is a lot of work to prepare the body for zombification, especially if you want a zombie that has some skill in battle—and one that isn’t going to be lost to rot in a month or so.”
At this point the conversation deviated to timekeeping, and Adam learned that Aergon did indeed have a calendar, although it was based around sleeps rather than days, with weeks of seven sleeps and ten months of thirty sleeps. That settled, they turned back to the topic of the undead, and Adam asked the question he wasn’t certain he wanted an answer to. How did Xavier stop the corpses from rotting?
“Salt,” Xavier said. “There is a great underground sea which we tunneled into, and we have been extracting salt for years. Once we found that preserving bodies in salt made it more difficult for rot to set in, defending our people became much easier.”
“And they’re really that effective against the kanak?”
“Ha! Hardly,” Xavier said with a dark laugh. “But that is not why we have them. They are fantastic sentinels, especially against the cave spiders, who find them unpalatable, but mostly they defend us against the dragon.”
“The dragon this sword is meant to kill?”
Xavier nodded. “Her name is Khalivibra, and she has caused us more damage than all the kanak combined.”
“How’s that?”
“She drove us from our homes on the surface,” Xavier said. “It happened a long time ago, back in the time when the sun did not hang motionless in the sky as it does now….”
INSTEAD, ADAM was brought to understand, this world once had a day-and-night cycle, with the sun rising in the morning, setting in the evening, and the stars and moon coming out to shine down on the land during the night. The ancestral Aergonites lived on the surface, much in the way Adam had always envisaged an idyllic feudal existence. They were ruled from the city of Aer Goragon, capital of the Kingdom of Aracao and known far and wide as the Golden City on the plains, for it was built of a yellow stone that gleamed in the morning sun. There were also seasons—times of growth and greenery and times of falling leaves and snow.
In the days of King Henricus the Third, tragedy befell the land, and as Magister Ignatius Solmento foretold, the light of the moon was darkened by the flight of great bat-like wings. The dragons came in the hundreds, and the great serpents fell on a people unprepared for their onslaught. Their fire burned crops, livestock, homes, and people. Their wings brought terrible storms to lash the land and flood the fields. Where the dragons landed, the ground shook and ruptured beneath their feet, collapsing buildings, castles, and mountains alike. No one knew how many people died in those early years, though in time the Aergonites learned to fight back, harnessing great magic to strike down the wyrms and stabil
ize the land. Some even struck bargains with the dragons for protection of their lands, although the protection was not a guarantee of safety for those living near the borders where another dragon lurked.
However, the people of Aracao soon found themselves facing a far greater challenge—the dragons had cast the moon from the sky. At first the people missed only its glow, striving instead to adapt to a lifestyle of subterranean cultivation in their attempt to hide their food stores from the dragons. Most of them, of course, had taken to living beneath the ground in cellars and tunnels to hide from the dragons for so long some had not seen the sky in cycles.
And then the cycles stopped.
Slowly the days and nights became longer, the seasons stretched and lengthened, but no one knew why. At first most common folk simply welcomed the times of sun and shivered through the times of ice, but soon they were alternately cursing at or pleading with the gods, and some even threw themselves into depraved dragon cults in desperation. But neither the gods of old nor gods of new were listening, because some years after the dragons first came, the world stopped turning—or so says the Book of Solmento.
As one side of the world burned, the other side froze, and the dragons fell to fighting for what food they needed to support their vast bodies. They were forced into the band of twitterlit land between light and dark, just like the rest of all living creatures. Soon there were only two that claimed Aracao as their territory, and they preyed on the people there. Some say they farmed the people as the Aergonites today farm spiders now for silk and meat. Any pretense of cooperation had vanished with the dragon wars, and the king could do little but acquiesce to the dragon’s increasingly bold demands for power, food, or both. When their demands were not met, the dragons simply took what they desired, so after a few years, all of Aracao lived their lives in fear of the dragons’ raids. Until Prince Fernando.
Fernando was the youngest of the royal family and about as far down the line of direct succession as one could get. His estate, if you could call it that, was known as Blackwater Keep, for it sat at the edge of a large peat bog. The peat tilled into his fields made his lands fertile, and his status as the least of the royal family had given him enough latitude to pursue his passion for the magical arts. And when the great golden wyrms raided his lands for the seventh time, he turned his attention to the creation of a weapon that would end their incursions—a weapon that would come to be known as Wyrmbane.
“Forged from the light of a fallen star and strengthened with folded moonsilver, Fernando set the blade with stones sacred to the moon goddess, Selune, in the hopes she might lend her aid against those who had cast her from our skies—and perhaps she did,” Xavier said. “In a mighty confrontation, Fernando, in his fifty-first year, slew the great dragon Khaled, mate of the dragon Khalivibra, who hunts us even now in retribution for the deed. For the killing blow struck by Prince Fernando should have been the start of our grand revolution; instead it was a dirge. Straight and true was the thrust of his blade into the dragon’s breast, the serrated edge of Wyrmbane digging deep—so deep that it stuck, wrenched out of his grasp as the great beast’s body fell back into Blackwater Keep. Its death spasms brought the structure down around it as it died, killing the prince and fully half of the keep’s inhabitants.
“It is said that in death the drake Khaled uttered a curse so powerful it caused the fire in his belly to burn his blood and blacken the land. Blackwater burned, and the peat in its marshes caught fire, and the people of Blackwater had no choice but to flee—south from their home, harried by Khalivibra herself, and leaving burning Khaled in the ruins with Wyrmbane lodged in his chest, and surely leaving behind any hope of our salvation with it.”
“That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?” Adam said. “Isn’t recovering hope of salvation the entire point of this outing?”
Xavier laughed. “That is most certainly true. I do apologize, Sir Adam. I do like a good oration, and that ending is the traditional one as it would be told in the Caverns of Aergon. Mayhap we shall change the ending of the tale, no?”
Adam had laughed along with the magister and continued riding.
HE CONVERSED little with Esmeralda, although that was partially because he felt unable to approach or talk to her, never quite certain if it would be rude to talk to a princess uninvited. On those rare occasions he did speak to her, however, she was refreshingly down to earth.
“I never expected a princess to be so skilled,” Adam said at one point during their ride.
“When you say ‘skilled,’ I assume you are referring to practical survival skills, rather than singing or embroidery?” Esmeralda asked.
“Well… yes.”
Esmeralda shrugged. “I am the only child of a dying king who rules a shrinking kingdom,” she said. “I understand that once a princess’ tasks were limited to chatter about gowns and hairstyles or some similar nonsense, but there is no neighboring prince waiting to wed me and lead my people. As far as we know, there are no other kingdoms left free from the dragon’s tyranny.”
“So… you’re doing this in part to find a suitable husband?”
Esmeralda looked at him for a long, unsettling moment before bursting into peals of laughter. “You know,” she said, “that is a very good way to put it.”
“And why can’t you just rule Aergon yourself?” Adam asked.
“I am just a woman, Sir Adam.”
“So?” Adam said. “Wait, was that a ‘I’m just a woman so I can’t rule a kingdom,’ or ‘I’m just a woman and men won’t let me rule a kingdom’?”
“Is there a difference?” Esmeralda asked. “I am precluded from ruling by my sex, and I do not have the skills or training required to rule.”
“And some man whose claim to greatness is wielding a magic sword to kill a dragon is?”
“He would command respect.”
“And you can’t?”
“Not as immediately, no.”
“Well… that’s stupid.”
Esmeralda laughed again. “You are a delightful man, Adam. Is it truly like that where you are from? A woman can do anything a man can?”
“Pretty much,” Adam said. “There’s still some things women generally choose not to do, but it’s more their choice than them being barred from it.”
“It sounds like a very nice place,” Esmeralda said, her tone thoughtful.
“Well, I like it,” Adam said. “Of course, it could be said that I’m biased.”
RIDING THROUGH the lowland rainforest was a very different experience for Adam. Unlike the cool heights of the mountains, the air below the tree canopy was thick, still, and humid. After only an hour’s riding—according to his still-functioning watch—he was soaked with sweat, and the Aergonites weren’t faring much better. The red light that slanted here and there through the canopy was barely enough to see by and gave Adam the impression of walking in the darkened pits of hell. They had taken to using torches in order to light their way, collecting swollen taproots full of sap that burned brightly enough to give them some visibility in the darkness—the wan light of the Aergonite bowls having proved too dim to cut through the murk.
It was interesting to see that Duin, true to his word, reacted to the fire much the same way as he did to the sunlight, which really made perfect sense when Adam thought about it. His furry friend kept away from the fire if given the chance, bothered by the way the flickering light caused fur to sprout and vanish. More often than not, Duin scouted ahead, wearing the leather pants and loose shirt he had acquired at the waystation, but even so, his muzzle would occasionally lengthen or hair would begin to sprout along his arms. The first few times this happened had been unnerving for Adam, but after a while, it became normal.
It was amazing what became normal. The constant buzzing of insects and biting flies became normal, as did smearing their exposed skin with thick mud in an attempt to prevent the bloodsuckers finding a meal, at least until Duin found a certain plant, its mass of orange-brown roots hanging from an
overhead tree branch looking for all the world like the remains of a massive food fight. Breaking open the roots revealed a pungent-smelling clear fluid, which turned out to be a much better insect repellent than heavily caked mud, although Duin cautioned them against getting it into their eyes or mouths.
The forest was also teeming with life, from small lizards and rodents who scuttled away as they approached, to dragonflies as long as Adam’s arm that zoomed through the air, hunting the flying flitterfish that lived even here. There were also large herbivorous tortoises, although the one they encountered was merely the size of a horse, and Duin warned they got at least three times as large.
“Their eggs are good eating if you can find a nest—and dig through it,” he said.
There was, however, a distinct lack of larger mammals, from what Adam could see. No birds either. There were plenty of reptiles and insects, as well as spiders and scorpions big enough to make sleeping within four feet of the ground a very dangerous proposition, but aside from a few rodent-like creatures and what appeared to be a herd of wild goats that they spotted in the distance, the only mammals Adam really saw were the humans themselves, who were often outclassed by the other creatures of the jungle. On more than one occasion, they had to climb up the trunk of the nearest tree to wait out the passing of an army ant swarm, where each individual ant was a good six inches in length.
Indeed, the biggest obstacle to their progress was the sheer amount of waiting they had to do—be it waiting for the ant swarm to pass or, more commonly, waiting for the rain to ease. Adam had vague recollections of learning about the water cycle in geography in high school, but he had been completely unprepared for the deluge that occurred every twelve hours or so. Sometimes it seemed they had gone barely any distance at all before Duin squinted through the canopy, sniffed the air, and declared that they needed to set up camp—and by camp he meant construct a platform in a tree with a roof. The first time he mentioned it, Magister Xavier had scoffed.
