Cronica Acadia Read online

  “He paid me great insult. But if he would care to ap—”

  “No,” said Doppelganger before William could finish.

  The dye was cast. If Doppelganger were to be a warrior in this world, he would need to duel. And this was as good a time to start as any. The dire wolves had not killed him, and an overweight, pockmarked guard would not either.

  “Very well,” said the shire-reeve. “Step back three paces each of you.”

  The shire-reeve held a piece of red fabric in his outstretched hand. “When this cloth hits the ground, the duel will commence.”

  “Stop!” Only one man in all of Hempshire could make such a command at this juncture. The crowd turned and made way as Alfred approached Doppelganger. “Get rid of that trash,” he said.

  Doppelganger nodded quickly to Nerdraaage, who ran over and collected the lesser shield, axe, and helmet.

  “You will use mine,” Alfred announced. Doppelganger thought that he saw William’s eyes momentarily roll back into his head as if he would faint right there.

  Alfred handed Doppelganger a battleaxe that was so well balanced that it seemed to turn feather-light as he held it up in striking position. He handed Doppelganger his Merciless commemorative shield. It was round and had vicious-looking spikes on the front. Ringing the shield were words in Acadish, Dwarvish, and Elvish. In the center it said Alfred the Merciless.

  Doppelganger slipped his left arm through the heavy leather straps of the shield. Alfred attempted to put his helmet on Doppelganger, but clearly it wouldn’t fit. “Your head’s too damn big.” Alfred took the old helmet from Nerdraaage and stuck it back on Doppelganger’s head.

  Doppelganger looked down at the magnificent shield and wondered how long it would take him to kill one hundred each of orc, goblin, and troll. But he was getting ahead of himself. Did he not now have a human opponent six paces in front of him who would like nothing more than to end Doppelganger’s warrior ambition right then and there?

  “Ready,” said the shire-reeve. It was more command than question, so neither party answered. They raised their shields and weapons. The red cloth was dropped and a second later hit the ground.

  For another second after the duel began, they just stood in place. Suddenly William made his move and charged with a series of three overhand blows that clanged harmlessly on Doppelganger’s shield. The ineffectiveness of the attack emboldened Doppelganger, and the physical jarring of combat dispensed with whatever nerves had plagued him.

  Doppelganger retaliated with his own overhead blows that crashed monstrously against William’s shield. He raised his shield so high against the withering blows that Doppelganger saw William’s unprotected belly. But an axe strike there would likely eviscerate William, so he kicked him instead. William doubled over, and his labored breathing stopped altogether for a few seconds.

  It was a very lopsided duel, Doppelganger bashing forward and William retreating hopelessly. The crowd jostled around behind them as the spectators attempted to keep the duel in view. William’s retreat was halted when he found himself back to the shire-reeve’s office and unable to move further. Doppelganger rained blows down upon the splintering shield until the shield itself cracked in half and William slid down to the ground. Doppelganger smashed the sword with his axe and it too was dropped, leaving William with his bare arms outstretched defensively. Doppelganger raised his axe for the killing blow and paused ever so slightly. His look of ferocity must have said he was willing and able to deliver that killing blow. “I concede!” shouted William.

  A cheer rose up from the crowd. Doppelganger took his weapon in his shield hand and lowered his right hand to assist William off the ground. That struck him as the noble thing to do, and though he wasn’t feeling particularly kind at the moment, he knew that others were watching. William did not say anything or even look him in the eye.

  The shire-reeve congratulated Doppelganger. “Well done,” he said. And then the crowd, led first by the guards, pressed in around him. Tolliver could not reach Doppelganger but shouted a promise of the best dinner Doppelganger had ever had. He wasn’t such a bad sort, thought Doppelganger.

  When the crowd thinned, Doppelganger walked to his friends, who had kept their distance. They all smiled in joy and relief. “You won your first duel!” said Dangalf.

  “And you won it so easily!” added Ashlyn.

  “You didn’t think I could do it!” he chided them. “You had faith in me,” he said to Nerdraaage.

  “Yeah,” said Nerdraaage. “But I’m drunk.”

  Doppelganger remembered his borrowed gear and searched out Alfred. He saw him chatting with the Captain of the guard. Beaming with pride, Doppelganger approached Alfred, who turned to face him. He stood before Alfred no longer as a lowly guard but as a comrade in arms. A victorious combatant. An equal. “You forgot everything I taught you, you hymen!” screamed Alfred as he roughly pulled his gear from Doppelganger.

  XVI

  Tolliver kept his promise and served roast pork to the Keepers. He also opened a bottle of Aged Vinlandian for the table.

  With his duel victory, Doppelganger was suddenly enjoying the warrior prerogative, or at least the prerogative of victorious warriors. There were congratulations from the town’s most prominent citizens, the adoring compliments of children, the flirtations of lovely maidens, and now even the skinflint Tolliver was gifting the most expensive items on his menu.

  The pork was an especially nice change for Nerdraaage, who had taken to ordering the roast beast, the cheapest item on the menu, for every meal so that he had more drinking money. “Roast beast?” Doppelganger had asked him the first time. “You never did the Chef’s Surprise quest, did you?”

  “No,” Nerdraaage had replied.

  “So you don’t know what roast beast is?” Dangalf had asked.

  “No, and I don’t want to know,” Nerdraaage had said quickly. “It’s cheap and it tastes good. That’s all I want to know.” But tonight at least he knew he ate pork.

  “Good company, good food, good wine,” said Dangalf. “What more could you ask for?”

  “That,” said Nerdraaage, looking to a table of men who puffed on long pipes. Dangalf nodded sympathetically, but their funds were not yet liquid enough for smoke.

  Dangalf shared with the others his newfound knowledge of this world from the Cronica Acadia in a greatly abbreviated form: “First there was God. The uncreated God they call him. The transcendent God, and he plays very little part in the legends other than getting the ball rolling. He had some children. Gods also. The immanence they call them. And he took them and hid them in the world. Not to punish them or because he feared them but because he wanted to test them. This is the Before Time. Now on top of the world God put all sorts of monsters or daevas, so he puts the daevas there and gives them free reign over the surface. Well eventually the gods have had enough of living in the dark, and they create the Inversion, where they turn the world inside out and they take their rightful place on the outside and all the daevas are trapped under the surface. This is called the classical age, and everything was great, but like the uncreated God before them, these gods bring their own children into this world, and those were the three righteous races of elf, dwarf, and man. And that went on for a really long time, eons or so, but then the unrighteous races show up. And the legends conflict on whether that was because the gods put them there to test the righteous races or because they were put there by the daevas still underground. And there was an unrighteous image of each of the righteous ones, and that was the troll, goblin, and orc. And for a while after that, righteous and unrighteous lived together until a troll king killed an elf princess and ruined everything. And that was the first murder. And Woden was so angry that he sundered the world so that each of the races should remain forever separate and distinct.”

  “Who’s Woden?” asked Nerdraaage.

  “He’s from game lore,” said Ashlyn. “Woden was the leader of the pantheon of the gods.”

  �
��Never heard of him.”

  “Sure you did,” said Dangalf. “Our home world had a day named after him. Woden’s Day.”

  “Never heard of that either.”

  “Wednesday!” said Ashlyn. “I always wondered why that day had such a funky spelling.”

  Dangalf continued. “And the Sundering was followed by the three hundred days of darkness, and pieces of the cracked world floated away such as Oceania, only recently rediscovered. And though the three hundred days of darkness was rough, after it came the Golden Age, when sapiens—both righteous and unrighteous races are called sapiens—they became independent of the gods, and the great schools were formed. And in time a portal was opened to another world and travelers went back and forth between them.”

  “The portal to our world?” asked Ashlyn.

  “It would seem,” said Dangalf. “And there was a great conflict between the two worlds about the future of the White and Blue Schools, and a civil war almost erupted between the righteous races. The solution was the Schism, which saw the closure of the portals between the worlds and ushered in the present age.”

  “What age are we in now?” asked Doppelganger.

  “The ages are usually named in retrospect,” said Dangalf somberly. “But the End Times has been suggested.”

  He told them that the last Great War between the Alliance and the Legion was finally ended due to what the dwarves call the Three Pillars of Victory, but only after significant advantage had been gained by the unrighteous as illustrated by Weyd’s map. The question remained, when was the next Great War?

  On to more mundane but nonetheless important topics, he described to them that this world had twenty-four-hour days (for the most part) and twelve-month years (for the most part). “For the most part?” asked Ashlyn.

  “These are imperfect measurements like our home world,” explained Dangalf. “And they sometimes play catch-up as we did with leap year.”

  Time was measured by sundials and candles and hourglasses, though these hourglasses were often designed to measure times much greater than or less than an actual hour.

  Coinage was the copper farthing, the silver crown, and the gold sovereign. Bars of gold and even rarer metals were used as higher denominations of currency but were so far beyond their means at this time as not to warrant further discussion.

  Dangalf told them that because of the stubbornness of their home country in not switching to the metric system, they were all familiar with the measurements used in Acadia, such as miles for distance, pounds for weight, and pints for volume. Only occasionally did he think they might encounter a term such as league that they might not immediately recognize, but he reminded them that he was there to keep them informed about such things, and for the record, a league is three miles. And as a side note, he told them dwarves, the first great builders of this world, created measurement. But Nerdraaage was not as nearly impressed by this achievement as Dangalf wanted him to be.

  Finally he explained the base-twelve numbering system that was sometimes used in spells or ceremony. “What does that mean?” said a slightly inebriated Nerdraaage.

  “Duodecimal,” he said. “They have two more numerals than us. A number that looks like X represents the decimal ten, and a backward three represents the decimal eleven.” He wrote on a parchment as he described the following: “In duodecimal one-zero is what we know as twelve and one-zero-zero is what we know as one-hundred and forty-four.”

  “That’s confusing as hell,” said Ashlyn.

  “Confusing is October being the tenth month,” insisted Dangalf. “Duodecimal is preferable to decimal in many ways. And a dozen coins is still a dozen coins regardless of how it is represented. New numerals. Same old numbers. Math is universal.”

  “I thought we were in a new universe,” said Nerdraaage. And that is where Dangalf decided he had educated the other Keepers about their new world enough for one day and returned to his drinking.

  XVII

  The scrivener entered the inn and approached their table. Doppelganger beamed at the expectation of more congratulations, but that was not the scrivener’s motive.

  “Ah, Doppelganger and Dangalf,” said the scrivener. He might have been as young as twelve, but he sounded like a thirty-year-old accountant. “We have a problem.”

  “Vinland, we have a problem,” said Nerdraaage.

  “Would you have a seat, Master Scrivener?” said Dangalf.

  “Thank you,” said the scrivener. “And you may call me Bartleby. We have sent record to Vinland of your deeds, and now we hear back from the sages that they have no record of any of you.”

  “Is that a problem?” asked Doppelganger.

  “It is if you want acknowledgement for any of your deeds. Were your births not registered?”

  The four looked at each other blankly. “No they’re not,” said Dangalf.

  “Well, it’s never too late,” said Bartleby, and he placed some scrolls and other tools on the table. “You first, Doppelganger. Your place of birth?”

  “That’s difficult to say.”

  “We were born between towns,” added Dangalf.

  “Then what town were you born nearest to?”

  “This one.”

  Bartleby wrote on a scroll with great flourishes, and then he held the tip of the quill pen in the candlelight. He took Doppelganger’s thumb and jabbed the end of the pen into it.

  Doppelganger stood up angrily, pulling Bartleby up with him. Even William hadn’t spilled his blood.

  “Oh dear,” said Bartleby.

  Dangalf and Nerdraaage each took one of Doppelganger’s big arms, and he released Bartleby. He sat back down, still flush. Bartleby carefully placed the scroll before Doppelganger.

  “I suppose I should have warned you about that. If I could just get you to place some of your blood next to my signature.” Doppelganger did so.

  “What is the point of the blood?” asked Dangalf.

  “The sages want it. They have magic that will show your character and also if you have records already with them. There are plenty of rapscallions who would like to start over with a new identity, but nothing gets past the sages.”

  When it was Dangalf’s turn, he started to expound on the potential invasion of privacy poised by the sages maintaining a giant database of everyone’s blood.

  “Prime directive,” Ashlyn said, and Dangalf’s own words shamed him into surrendering his blood to Bartleby.

  The process was repeated for Ashlyn. “You realize we all have the same birthday now,” she said.

  “Happy birthday,” said Dangalf. “Maybe Tolliver will bring us another bottle of wine.”

  “As for you, Master Dwarf,” said Bartleby. “This will serve only as a record of your service to the humans. You will have to register with your own people. The dwarves are very particular about their clan affiliations and are not ready to turn over those responsibilities to the sages. But rest assured, when your lorekeepers create a record of your birth, they will have our record of your good deeds. Good day to you all.” They thanked Bartleby as he departed.

  “I have guard duty,” said Doppelganger, rising to leave.

  “Hey,” said Dangalf. “I took tonight off from studying for you.”

  “You can still study.”

  “No I can’t! I’m drunk!”

  “You can come visit me at the front gate if you get bored.”

  “The front gate?” asked Ashlyn. “A promotion?”

  “You could say that. If any of you have to take a shite tonight, you might want to say hi to William. That’s his new post.”

  “Great,” she said. “Now I can’t use the bathroom anymore.”

  Doppelganger did not want to leave his friends, but he was excited about being on the front gate. He expected the shift to pass quickly as he would have another guard to talk to and maybe even some townspeople or visitors passing through the gate. And there was always the possibility of a raid or a bandit trying to run the gate.

 
After a full day of physical punishment, Doppelganger had to pull guard duty for four to six hours. Ashlyn and Nerdraaage were employed as well, Ashlyn at the Silent Woman and Nerdraaage working at both the stables and the smithy as needed.

  Only Dangalf avoided any actual employment. His reading requirements were significant even when away from his instructor, and additionally there were few occupations suited for an apprentice mage. (Ashlyn had suggested he could hire himself out for children’s birthday parties.)

  Of greater irritation to Doppelganger and Nerdraaage was that it appeared that Dangalf got a full night’s sleep and then could often be found sleeping during the day. Dangalf explained to them that during the day, when he was lying down with eyes closed and sometimes snoring, he was not actually sleeping but was in fact slumbering. The distinction was lost on them.

  XVIII

  Slumber as practiced in the White School was the process that allowed the body to rest and regenerate electroplasm while the mind remained fully awake. Dangalf had taken Weyd’s advice and constructed in his mind a magnificent library that he had seen in a movie with green leather furniture and bookshelves so high he needed to use a ladder to get to the top shelves. Already he had about two dozen books on the shelves and none more prominent or convenient than the Cronica Acadia. As he took down any of these books during his slumber, he could open them and see them as clearly as if he was looking at the original. Now they were in his psychic library permanently, to be perused as he needed or wanted, complete in every facet as he had captured them during his waking hours down to dog-ears, wine stains, and scribbled notes in the margin. And slumber reading was faster and more intuitive than conscious reading.

  Dangalf added to his imaginary but fully realized library a window overlooking a green forest with lighting that would change according to the real time in Acadia. He then put in a great red door leading to the outside. He thought for a moment and decided to put a lock on the door, and there it was.