Free Swans Over the Moon by Forrest Aguirre Page A

minutes, should they be so foolhardy as to
charge the combined Scaramouche-Euler army. The horrisonant clatter
of rioters wafted up from the city streets below. Small fires
erupted from windows and doorways in every quarter. Even the
smaller buildings of the palatial compound had begun to take flame.
The faint stench of smoke could be smelled even at this dizzying
height.
    “So,” Dexter spoke in his falsetto baby
voice. “You've done it,” Sinistrum scratched out the conclusion to
the enigmatic sentence.
    The Judicar turned to his counselors. He
cocked his eyes sideways in puzzlement. If the trio could only see
beyond the jet black of each others' protective goggles, they would
have noted the confusion in his gaze. “Done what?” he demanded.
    Selene looked out over the encroaching
armies. Her smile grew with each new campfire, each puff of smoke
and flame below, each progressing mile of darkness cast down by the
waxing eclipse.
    Heterodymus' voices blended as one, both
twins speaking in exact mimesis of the other in word, tone,
fluctuation, as if their brains had finally fused into one
though-entity, young and old meeting at maturity optimist and
pessimist compromising at pragmatism, left and right turning to
center.
    “Light is dawning on me even as the darkness
falls. Her sister's unfit ends used to her own. Their cessation of
life and power further her own ambitions to rule and live as Queen
of Procellarium, her father cast down from the throne not only by
enemies from without, but by his own hand. An intrigue between
Scaramouche and Euler, and the quiet urging of rebellion against
the old order of the Judicar to bring in the new order of The Queen
of the Moon. This world, M'lord, can never be the same. I fear that
this is the end of your rule.”
    The Judicar turned to his smiling daughter.
“Is this accusation true? This secret combination of darkness and
treachery?”
    She giggled teasingly. “Almost. I will tell
the rest in a moment, but, yes, Heterodymus is right about many
things. Not the least of which is the removal of the old regime to
create room in which to usher in the new. Therefore, I see no need
for the old counselors. I have my own twins.”
    The Tarans, who had kept still to this point,
swooped down, a bundle of scarves swinging between them. They
caught Heterodymus in a tangle of white lace, a silk and satin web,
which they dragged, laughing, into the air and cast into the city
streets below. Heterodymus' billowing flailings and shrieks were
lost as he plummeted to the screaming farrago below, a city
enveloped in blankets of black smoke and flame that singed the net
before the counselors even hit the ground.
    The Judicar fell to his knees and looked up
again at the Tarans, who innocently played with the train of
Selene's dress, as if their infant minds were incapable of
comprehending the act of murder they had just committed.
    “And I suppose they shall kill me next,” he
said in resignation.
    A pained expression crossed her face. She
clicked her tongue while shaking her head, as if simultaneously
chiding and feeling pity for an ignorant child.
    “No, no, Daddy. How could I let that happen?
It would be . . . improper for me not to complete the chain of
events I set into motion those many, many years ago, when I was but
a child.”
    The Judicar blinked behind his goggles, as if
trying to force a vision from the past into being before his eyes.
His confusion only grew.
    “I . . . I try to remember you as a child,
but I have no recollection of you being other than what you appear
to be right now. You have always appeared thus, for as long as my
memory serves me. How many years.”
    “Oh, surely I can't be expected to remember
the exact number of years,” she said. “But I do remember when
this,” she indicated the surrounding maelstrom with a sweep of the
hand, “was all initiated. Back when I realized that you were too
weak to rule effectively, despite your best efforts. Back when I
tried