“Are you ready?”
“I have some questions.”
“Good.” Wyvernus smiled across the low table at her, his teeth very white in the moonslight. “Ask me anything you like. This is a test, nothing more, and a very simple one at that.”
“That is all?” Sulema frowned at the silk-covered mounds between them.
“That is all.”
“This is magic?”
“Very small magic, yes. I already know you are echovete—you used to scream your head off when you were a baby and I was working—but I need to determine how strong you are, and how your power balances out between sa and ka.”
“Will it be anything like dreamshifting?” She had experienced a taste of her mother’s magic, and wanted none of it. The fox-head staff she had banished from sight, if not from her mind.
“No.” The chamber rang with his denial.
She wanted to squirm like she had as a child and Istaza Ani was teaching maths—but he had said she should ask him any question that came to mind.
“I thought you wore the big mask to work magic?”
He smiled at that. “This is just a small magic, as I said. Very small. I do not need the Mask of the Sun Dragon—or the Baidun Daiel—for something like this.”
She took a deep breath. “All right, I am ready. What do I do?”
“I will sing a note, and when I tap the table, you tell me which bowl feels most alive to you.”
Sulema blinked, and Wyvernus laughed at her surprise. Then he closed his eyes and began to sing.
The Zeeranim are very fond of music. The desert sings as the dunes swell and recede to the pull of the moons, the warriors sing as they ride out to the hunt, young Mothers sing to the children they hope to bear. They sing of life, and death, and all the little moments in between… but Sulema had never heard anyone sing like her father. His voice rose into the air, lifting her spirits up to the moons, a single note clear and sharp and bright as the sword at her waist.
This one, she thought, and reached out without hesitation to touch one of the covered bowls. She could not have said how she knew, any more than she could have explained the difference between red and blue, or hot and cold. She just knew.
Wyvernus let the note fall away, and smiled.
“Very good,” he said, “and very fast.” He reached to draw away the silk, and laughed when Sulema recoiled. The silk had concealed a very old bowl, reddish-brown with age, made from a human skull inlaid with silver and precious stones. “Come now, you will hurt poor Yoric’s feelings.”
“Yoric? The poet? You knew him?”
“Alas, not well. Ah, you should see your face!” He laughed, and his laughter was as beautiful as his song. “Ah! I am teasing you, child. These bowls are ancient beyond knowing. Their owners are long gone to dust. A king simply does not have time to go about lopping off people’s heads, just to make bowls.”
She found herself laughing along with him, and as they were revealed one by one the row of jeweled skulls grinned too, enjoying their game. Rob’s head was full of rocks, Natan full of air—not empty, her father had chided—Jonnus held cinders, Tracia a live mouse that scampered away as she was revealed, and Olivia was full of… dead spiders. Sulema shuddered when her father stuck his finger in the bowl and stirred them around, and found herself thankful for the morning’s fast.
“Oh, these are not just any spiders. Look.” He picked one up between thumb and forefinger and held it entirely too close to her face. “See how it glitters in the moonslight?”
“Almost like metal.”
“Almost like metal, very good. The Araids use blood magic to fuse flesh to metal, and so turn an ordinary spider into a weapon.” He dropped it back into the bowl with a clink, and wiped his hand on the front of his robes with a grimace. “Fell things.”
“Ew. I had never imagined there could be anything worse than spiders.” At her father’s laugh, Sulema pointed to the last bowl, larger and more misshapen than the last. “And that one?”
“Ah yes, I saved the best for last. Last test, and tell me true if you sense anything. Most people cannot, so do not feel bad if you feel nothing.”
“I am Ja’Akari,” she assured him, stung. “My words speak only truth.”
“You are Atualonian,” he replied, “so that will likely change. Now, listen.”
He closed his eyes, and drew a deep breath, filling his chest, his belly, tilting his head back and letting his shoulders fall loose. Sulema expected his powerful voice to bellow forth like her mother’s shofar, but the sound that rolled over his tongue and into the deep night was the slightest call, the softest cry, the last sad notes of a shepherd girl, playing her lonely flute.
No man could ever make a sound like that, she thought, stunned. A dragon, maybe, but not a man.
The bowl on the table sang back.
“I hear it,” she whispered, and might have wept for loss when Wyvernus let his song die away. For it had been a song, a whole song in a single note. “I heard it.”
“You heard it.” His voice was as rough as a warrior’s after battle. “Of course you heard it.” He drew back the white silk to reveal a skull white and smooth as polished alabaster, crowned with a pair of small and delicate antlers. “Amrit il Mer,” he named her, for surely no man’s skull could be so beautiful. He reached into the bowl with both hands and drew forth a delicate orb, a globe fashioned of rose-colored rock and set with jewels. “This, my dear, life. No echovete can hear it unless they are powerful— very powerful—in sa. Yet you were able to hear the masculine ka as well. Truly, you are exceptional.”
The globe held Sulema’s attention. She was seized with the desire to snatch it up, to claim it as her own. “What is it?”
“It is life. The resonance of life, to be more precise. See, it was fashioned from red salt and white, and turned to stone by some art we no longer possess. This is our world as Akari Sun Dragon might see it. Look here.” He turned the globe over in his hands and traced a line where the pink salt was nearly white, and tapped a tiny chip of onyx. “This is us, this is Atualon. This is Nar Bedayyan, and this little vein of lapis is the Dibris, and right here? That is your City of Mothers.”
“Ai yeh,” she breathed, and reached for the globe.
“Aat-aat, not yet, you are not ready for this yet, my girl. This stone has power all her own, power even I do not fully understand. But this, right here, this is what I wanted to show you.” He pointed to, but did not touch, a scorched and broken area not as wide as the palm of his hand. “Do you know what this is?”
“Quarabala?” she guessed.
“Clever girl. What caused this damage, do you think?”
Sulema frowned and looked from the globe to his face, though it was not easy to look away from the stone. “Surely whoever made this fashioned it so?”
“Not at all. This stone mirrors our world exactly. If the Dibris were to bleed dry, the little vein of lapis would disappear. If Atukos were to crumble into the sea, this bit of onyx would disappear as well.”
“Ai yeh,” she said again.
“Exactly. So I ask you again, what caused this damage? To the stone… to our world?”
“The Sundering?”
“Well, yes. And no. This damage, the cracks here, and the burns, and the brittle nature of the surface, all happened at the same time. The Sundering was not caused by a human war, Sulema—the war was a part of the Sundering. Humans are not big enough, not powerful enough, to effect such change.” He placed the stone carefully back into the bowl. “Only a dragon could do such a thing. That seared and broken place is where Akari Sun Dragon breathed fire upon our world in an attempt to wake his mate, to make her hatch. He very nearly succeeded. Kal ne Mur nearly died trying to sing the dragon Sajani back to sleep. As it was, the draik’s efforts tore the world in half, creating two worlds that are part of and yet separated from one another. These two worlds have been drifting farther and farther apart since that day.”
Sulema blinked. “Two worlds? The Twilight Lands are real?”
“As real as ours, and in as much danger. They have no sun, save that light that filters through the veil to them, and we have no magic save a pale shadow of past glories. If the dragon wakes, the veil will be shredded, and…” He held his two fists together, then drew them apart with a jerk and held them open, palms-up. “Neither will survive. Nor would we survive the physical act of the dragon hatching, any more than an egg survives the chick.
“Do not doubt, Sulema, the dragon is waking. All the signs are right here for us to see.” He tapped the globe with one finger.
“If the dragon wakes, we die. Can we kill the dragon?”
“Spoken like a barbarian warrior.” He laughed. “Just how big do you think a dragon is, Sulema?”
“Well, bigger than a lionsnake, I imagine—”
“Yes, bigger than a lionsnake. Bigger than Atukos. Bigger than the world, Sulema. Our minds are too small to hold such wonder. We have no more hope of killing a dragon than an ant has of killing us for stepping on its anthill. Even if we could kill her, what then? If the chick dies within the egg…”
“It rots.”
“It rots,” he agreed. “Our only hope is to keep the dragon alive and asleep for as long as we can. She has been asleep for as long as our world has existed, and she can sleep until the end of time, as far as we know. The only way to keep the dragon from waking is to sing to her through atulfah. The only one who can do this…”
“Is you,” she whispered.
“Is you,” he corrected gently. “My time is nearing its end, sooner than I might wish. Truly, daughter, you are our only hope.”
“Za fik,” she swore. “There is no choice for me, is there?”
“There is always a choice,” he told her. “I cannot compel you to learn atulfah, or to use it to sing the Dragon to sleep. You could choose to deny your birthright and return to the desert, free as a sparrow in the wind.
“I cannot, however, allow you to leave untrained or able to wield atulfah, a sword for whomever chooses to claim it. Your mother kept you shielded from atulfah for all the years you were gone. You could be shielded again—sealed for all time. But you would be cut off from the song as if you had been born surdus, unable to sense sa or ka. Cut off even from the smallest magics— you would be unable to seek water in the desert, unable to bond to one of your great cats.”
“The Dragon would wake.”
“And destroy the world, yes. Most definitely.”
“This is no choice, this is horse shit.” Sulema scowled, not caring whether or not one was allowed to say “horse shit” to a king.
“I never promised you a good choice,” he replied. “Sometimes your only choice is, as you say, horse shit. Sometimes it is a choice between death and death. Sometimes it is a choice between two different deaths. But there is always a choice.”
“So. Remain in the trap and die, or chew off my leg and bleed to death.” Sulema thought that the skulls were mocking her, safely dead and exempt from the struggles of the living.
“I said much the same thing, when I was your age.” Wyvernus clasped her hands between his, and his eyes were full of moonslight and sorrow. “None who bear such burdens as ours do so lightly, or without pain. Are you the woman I think you are—the warrior your mother claims? Will you bear this burden, knowing that you alone must pay the price?”
She stared at the Dragon King, his face deeply lined with strain and worry, aged before his time like dates left too long in the sun. His hands, cradling hers, trembled like an old woman’s. His eyes, it seemed to her, had seen far too much. Those eyes said that when death came, it would not be too soon. Because she had her mother’s stubborn chin, and her father’s stubborn red hair, because she belonged to both of them but belonged, at last, to herself, she drew her hands away and stood.
“It may not be much of a choice,” she told him, “but you say it is my choice. I will not make it until I have had time to think.”
He stood as well, and bowed to her as if she were king and he a stubborn child.
“As you wish.”