Tales of Ethshar

“We can’t go on like this,” his father was saying. “At a sheep a day, even allowing for a better lambing season next spring than the one we just had, we’ll have nothing left at all after three years, not even a breeding pair to start anew!”

“What would you have us do, then?” old Kirna snapped at him. “You heard what it said after it ate Adar. One sheep a day, or one person, and it doesn’t care which!”

“We need to kill it,” Wuller’s father said.

“Go right ahead, Wulran,” someone called from the darkness. “We won’t mind a bit if you kill it!”

“I can’t kill it, any more than you can,” Wuller’s father retorted, “but surely someone must be able to! Centuries ago, during the war, dragons were used in battle by both sides, and both sides killed great numbers of them. It can be done, and I’m sure the knowledge isn’t lost...”

“I’m not sure of that!” Kirna interrupted.

“All right, then,” Wulran shouted, “maybe it is lost! But look at us here! The whole lot of us packed together in the dark because we don’t dare light a proper council fire, for fear of that beast! Our livestock are taken one by one, day after day, and when the sheep run out it will start on us — it’s said as much! Already we’re left with no smith but a half-trained apprentice boy, because of that thing that lurks on the mountain. We’re dying slowly, the whole lot of us — would it be that much worse to risk dying quickly?”

An embarrassed silence was the only reply.

“All right, Wulran,” someone muttered at last, “what do you want us to do?”

Wuller looked at his father expectantly, and was disappointed to see the slumped shoulders and hear the admission, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe if we all attacked it...” Wuller suggested.

“Attacked it with what?” Pergren demanded. “Our bare hands?”

Wuller almost shouted back, “Yes,” but he caught himself at the last moment and stayed silent.

“Is there any magic we could use?” little Salla, who was barely old enough to attend the meeting, asked hesitantly. “In the stories, the heroes who go to fight dragons always have magic swords, or enchanted armor.”

“We have no magic swords,” Illure said.

“Wait a minute,” Alasha the Fair said. “We don’t have a sword, but we have magic, of a sort.” Wuller could not be certain in the darkness, but thought she was looking at her sister Kirna as she spoke.

“Oh, now, wait a minute...” Kirna began.

“What’s she talking about, Kirna?” Pergren demanded.

“Kirna?” Illure asked, puzzled.

Kirna glanced at the faces that were visible in the lantern’s glow, and at the dozens beyond, and gave in.

“All right,” she said, “but it won’t do any good. I’m not even sure it still works.”

“Not sure what still works?” someone asked.

“The oracle,” Kirna replied.

“What oracle?” someone demanded, exasperated.

“I’ll show you,” she answered, rising. “It’s at my house; I’ll go fetch it.”

“No,” Wulran said, with authority, “we’ll come with you. All of us. We’ll move the meeting there.”

Kirna started to protest, then glanced about and thought better of it.

“All right,” she said.

3

The thing gleamed in the lantern-light, and Wuller stared, fascinated. He had never seen anything magical before.

The oracle was a block of polished white stone — or polished something, anyway; it wasn’t any stone that Wuller was familiar with. A shallow dish of the smoothest, finest glass he had ever seen was set into the top of the stone, glass with only a faint tinge of green to it and without a single bubble or flaw.

Kirna handled it with extreme delicacy, holding it only by the sides of the block and placing it gently onto the waiting pile of furs.

“It’s been in my family since the Great War,” she said quietly. “One of my ancestors took it from the tent of a northern sorcerer when the Northern Empire fell and the victorious Ethsharites swept through these lands, driving the enemy before them.”

“What is it?” someone whispered.

“It’s an oracle,” Kirna said. “A sorcerer’s oracle.”

“Do we need a sorcerer to work it, then?”

“No,” Kirna said, staring at the glass dish and gently brushing her fingers down one side of the block. “My mother taught me how.”

She stopped and looked up.

“And it’s very old, and very delicate, and very precious, and we don’t know how many more questions it can answer, if it can still answer any at all, so don’t get your hopes up! We’ve been saving it for more than a hundred years!”

“Keeping it for yourselves, you mean!”

“And why not?” Alasha demanded, coming to her sister’s defense. “It was our family’s legacy, not the village’s! We’ve brought it out now, when it’s needed, haven’t we?”

Nobody argued with that.

“Go on, Kirna,” Wulran said quietly. “Ask it.”

“Ask it what, exactly?” she replied.

“Ask it who will save us from the dragon,” Pergren said. “None of us know how to kill it; ask it who can rid us of it.”

Kirna looked around and saw several people nod. “All right,” she said. She turned to the oracle, placed her hands firmly on either side of the block, and stared intently down into the glass dish.

Wuller was close enough to look over her left shoulder, while Illure looked over her right, and Alasha and Wulran faced them on the other side of the oracle. All five watched the gleaming disk, while the rest of the crowd stood back, clearly more than a little nervous before this strange device. Wuller’s mother Mereth, in particular, was pressed back against the wall of the room, busily fiddling with the fancywork on her blouse to work off her nervousness.

“Pau’ron,” Kirna said. “Yz’raksis nyuyz’r, lai brinan allasis! ”

The glass dish suddenly began to glow with a pale, eerie light. Wuller heard someone gasp.

“It’s ready,” Kirna said, looking up.

“Ask it,” Wulran told her.

Kirna looked about, shifted her knees to a more comfortable position, then stared into the dish again.

“We are beset by a dragon,” she said loudly. “Who can rid us of it?”

Wuller held his breath and stared as faint bluish shapes appeared in the dish, shifting shapes like clouds on a windy day, or the smoke from a blown-out candle. Some of them seemed to form runes, but these broke apart before he could read them.

“I can’t make it out,” Kirna shouted. “Show us more clearly!”

The shapes suddenly coalesced into a single image, a pale oval set with two eyes and a mouth. Details emerged, until a face looked up out of the dish at them, the face of a young woman, not much older than Wuller