The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  But none of that mattered as the world spun madly and so Brack nodded once and followed them into the village and the man with the half-shaved head looked at him in a way both unsettling and showing that they shared in this small corner of the world a secret only the two of them knew, but neither would speak for some secrets were best left in their graves with the bodies that covered them.

  Chapter Two

  I

  In this pitted world of perpetual darkness she stood in her chains and looked above to where the light filtered in through the window and fell across to the distant wall and the shadows of the bars embedded in that light. It was a far off thing as if drowning and looking at the light that was the surface. She looked at it each day and it was always just as far.

  All about her the stone of this old room and an ever-hanging dampness. The air itself heavy and the rock walls slick and growing from the gaps between the stones a thick and rotting moss. Vines with veins of red streaked through them as if blood beat in some massive and unseen heart. The droppings of bats and men upon the floor, and the smell of it.

  The things she had grown accustomed to in her five years thus enslaved.

  She could hear the sounds in the road above of horses on the stones and men talking and they were all filtered with the distance and faint. She had at first called to them and screamed and they had not responded. Perhaps unable to hear or perhaps simply more willing to ignore. To be on with that business which they had. Now she did not scream but just looked and listened and both sight and sound were the same.

  And she waited. For what, she knew not. But she waited.

  The chains bound her to the wall with iron rings, but there was enough play in those cold bonds to move slightly about the room. It was a deep and cavernous thing, the far end faded so entirely into black that she could not see what was there. At times she would hear sounds from that side as of someone breathing and then the sounds of eating and once, just once, a weeping sort of call. But her movements were just for a few yards from the wall and a few down the length of it, and she assumed that whoever was so ensnared across from her also had such limited confines.

  She had once called out to them, as she had to the others. Never had there been a response. Not so much as an acknowledgement of the call.

  Against her own wall there lay a thin cot of little more width than a blanket, a chamber pot of tin and a small wooden stool with uneven legs. Beneath that stool a single book that she could read for just an hour a day when there was enough light. She had read it so far six times and was reading it again.

  Now in the dark she could sometimes read it, the pages recalled in her mind. But she waited for the light all the same.

  She heard the key in the lock as she always did and turned to face the door. There was just one, at the western wall, set equally between her and whoever occupied this world with her. They always came from there and walked down a long stone path over a deeper pit, the bottom of which she had never seen, and stepped out onto the stone floor near her. As happened now, her attendant striding in a flowing white gown with gold trim and a slender gold band about one wrist.

  The girl stopped in front of her. Looking down at the stone. “They're asking for you.”

  “Let them ask.”

  “Please give me your hands.”

  She held out her hands obediently and the girl fit a key into one shackle and then the next, pulling them each apart and letting them swing back to strike loudly against the wall.

  “Come with me.”

  The first time this happened, she had tried to run. Not in the room, but as soon as she had gotten through the door. It was years ago and she could still remember the cry as she'd pushed the ageless girl aside and turned and run for the end of the hall and the beating of her heart and pounding of her breath on the stairs. The twisting and turning in endless and mazelike passages above, hearing feet all about her closing in, and unable to find the way out. Wanting in her panic to scream and claw at her own eyes and face but just running and running and then at last stepping out into the room where he waited for her. Seated as he was on that golden throne and grinning with the dagger in his hand.

  She had not run since and she did not run now. Instead she walked with this girl and they crossed the stone walkway and she glanced down into the bottomless dark and stayed in the center of the stones. Waited at the door while the girl unlocked and opened it. Stepped through and into that hall and followed as she was supposed to follow and waited.

  Always waited.

  II

  They bathed her and she lay naked in the warm water and closed her eyes and not for the first time wondered if she held her head below the surface if she could drown herself. Their hands now so gentle upon her with the soap and rags trying in desperation to pull her from the water, raking at her flesh and skin, but unable to draw her out. How long would it take until the world came rushing into blackness and was no more?

  She did not know and she did not try. But she thought it always.

  Standing afterward the girl dried her with a towel and they crossed the room to where a dress hung over a wooden chair. Green, this one, like emeralds pressed into fabric. The same gold that the girl wore as trim. A long and flowing thing of silk and beauty. She stepped forward and allowed the girl to pull it over her head and down and then to begin tying the laces in the back.

  “What is it this time?” she asked.

  “I don't know,” the girl said.

  “You don't know.”

  “No.”

  “Or you won't tell me.”

  The girl was silent. She continued tying the laces with careful hands. When she finished she went to bring the shoes from next to the door. These a gold that matched the trim. She set them down and stepped back. Folding her hands in front of her.

  The woman sighed and stepped forward and into the shoes. She had not worn shoes in weeks and they felt tight and confining but she stood in them all the same. Looking at the stone wall where a tapestry hung down and on it a symbol of a scorpion in red and all about a weaving of colors. The light in the room nearly blinding to her as it came in the windows and the smell somewhere of incense.

  “Do they fit?” the girl asked.

  “I'll worry about whether or not they fit.”

  The girl didn't answer but instead went to the door and opened it. A heavy door of mahogany. Swinging on hinges oiled to silence. Outside a wide hall with more tapestries like the one in the room and down the hall the sound of music and people talking. Two men stood there and both had spears and one was looking down the hall toward the sound, but he turned back when the door opened.

  “She's ready,” the girl said.

  The men nodded and the one who had been looking down the hall grinned. The other motioned her forward with a hand young and strong. Leather bracers on his arms and a vest of the same. The scorpion there inscribed with crimson thread upon the center of his chest.

  She went to them and the door closed and one went ahead of her while the other stepped behind. The one behind touched the small of her back and pushed just slightly and she walked. Along both sides the same stone and sconces on the walls with burning torches and the stones scorched black above them. A thin smoke against the ceiling and running along like an airborne river darkly moving toward the vents. The sound of her shoes and the guards' boots loud on the stones.

  They walked and she thought of the person still imprisoned across from her and the sickly sound they made when eating, as if tearing the meat from bones and sucking up that skin through cracked lips. A sound that carried even in a room so large. The snap once as a bone broke and no one ever coming to take that faceless prisoner from the tomb they shared. And then for a moment she felt weak and she leaned to the side against the wall and the guard in back pushed her again and she straightened and walked on.

  As they came into the room at the end of the hall the noise swelled. She blinked in the light of windows in the ceiling and torches on nearly every bar
e place on the wall and looked about. A group of men standing in bright robes before a raised dais and laughing as a jester in the middle of the room rolled. The jester's face a horror of scars and grinning merrily all the same as if his mind were broken and lightly coming up out of the roll to do three dance steps and bow and all the men laughing. Across from them a group of women sitting on pillows and a servant in leather and canvas handing down a bottle of wine to one of the women.

  They all looked when they saw her, save for the broken jester who rolled again and laughed, a high and shrill sound. The din of the room falling away and just that terrible laughter remaining and rising to the vaulted stone ceiling and wood beams and coming back from them to double upon itself.

  The young man at the heart of the group stepped forward. His hair long and perfectly kept and so bright in this light that it was almost blinding to her and she looked at her own hair for a moment and touched it and then put her hand down. He was holding a wineglass the color of smoke and half filled and he raised it to her. “You've come.” His voice light and careless like upon him there was no weight from things in this world or in any other.

  She nodded and stood on the edge of the room and felt the guards step back from her. He crossed alone and the others' eyes on him. He did not look back at them but dismissed them as only he, of all their group, could do. The women watching and the jester dancing some jig with a leg stiff and half lame. That river of smoke moving in the center of the ceiling and just beyond her vision, but still felt there like some omniscient beast itself with its lifeblood everywhere in this place.

  He stopped in front of her and did not touch her and took a drink of his wine. “Took long enough for you to get here.”

  “I just do what they tell me.”

  “Is that how it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I'm glad you're here now. Do you like the dress?”

  “Do I like it?”

  “Do you like it.”

  She nodded just so. Touched the fabric with a fingertip. It was a game as everything was a game and she knew that as well as anyone in this room and perhaps better and so she said: “Yes, I like it.”

  “That's the one you told me you liked, you know.”

  “I remember it.”

  “Well then, come. Let's eat. Or did you eat before you came?”

  She just looked at him and her face did not change and in that shared gaze was all of it, the core of it, though he smiled still. It that stretching moment he dared her and she fought it and did not rise up to it and finally said: “I could eat.”

  “That you could.”

  So they went across the room and the voices about them were picking up again now but were hushed and he led her to a small table that had been set at the foot of the dais. A thing of metal and wood with three legs and on it a small bowl of fruit and a loaf of some type of bread. Not warm but not that far from it. He took one of the chairs out and held it for her and she sat and he sat opposite her and picked up one of the pieces of fruit and took a bite.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  “They're no one. Or just as close as you can get.”

  “But they think they're someone. All of them.”

  “The next time someone comes in here and doesn't think he's someone will be the first.” He grinned. “I let them think it. What's the harm?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Nothing ever. They're scum like all the rest and if they ever start thinking they're not scum I can kill them and they know it and I know it. And as long as we all know it, we get along. Don't you think?”

  “I suppose you do.”

  He leaned back and she watched him and his thin frame. He did not wear a sword but he sat like someone who had his already drawn and with a lazy confidence. She wondered how hard he worked to put it on, for it wasn't in his face. He watched everything, always, and yet still put out one leg like there was nothing to bother him and it was not for her, for she knew him, but it was for them. Each bite was for them and they watched and would not come over until they were told and not a moment sooner and if they died in the court before that moment came then so be it.

  “Aren't you going to eat?”

  “I'm not hungry.”

  “I thought you said you were hungry.”

  “Maybe I lied.”

  “I don't have any place for liars in here.”

  “Then why do you have a whole room of them just over there?”

  He stopped chewing and looked at her a moment. Weighing something in his mind and feeling the heft of it and then setting it back down. Turning it perhaps to see all of the sides. The scorpion on his own robes moving with both heartbeat and breath. And then he tipped his head back and laughed and it was a golden laughter and behind him the tormented jester cackled and roared and threw himself on the ground with a shriek, rolling over and over and then scrambling to his feet to laugh once more.

  When it died down, he took up the bread and tore it in half with his hands and set one half in front of her. Inside there was still steam and it rose gently. He nodded at it.

  “Eat it.”

  “I said I'm not hungry.”

  “I know what you said.”

  She took the bread up and took a bite and longed to eat every bite there was and his also. Her stomach clenching at this lost and forgotten gift. In her world this something no longer in existence, as stripped from the earth as any one thing could be, and yet here in plenty and just sitting on a plate within a room full of people, none of whom would take it. The jester too feeble and the rest unneeding. But she fought that too and took a small bite and put it down again.

  “They're here to meet you,” he said.

  “I gathered that.”

  “You see the fat one? He's from Plarenth and he wants to trade me some of his skins for some damn thing. He's not got enough for what he wants but he's got some. And the tall one is from Grayston and he's here about a debt my father owed and wants to know can we find the record. And the other three, they're from Mraok and they want to talk about archers and dragons.”

  She had been reaching for the bread again and she stopped halfway and looked at him. “What have they said?”

  “Damn fools think they saw a dragon.” He shrugged. “They've got a lot of gold for archers.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Told them they needed the archers.” The grin again. “Did I mention the gold?”

  “But you don't believe them.”

  “About the dragon? Of course I don't. But that's not what matters. What matters is that they believe it and they'll pay for some men to go sit on the walls or some such thing. Staring at the sky for a few months until no one sees anything. Then they'll send them back but I'll still have the gold and we'll all be good friends.”

  “I told you they're liars.”

  “Not this time they're not. They do think they saw it.”

  She took the bread up again and turned it and looked at it and took a bite. “Let me talk to them.”

  “You don't trust me?”

  “I just want to hear it.”

  “Don't we all want to hear it.” He turned and beckoned to them. The fat one was watching endlessly and stumbled as he started coming over, the others trailing behind him.

  And she looked then at the windows of this room and her mind in another time and place and she could hear everything as if it were happening again. The ring of metal on metal and someone shouting and another man crying as he tried to hold his entrails in with his hand and crawled across a scorched forest floor covered in ash and bone. The very air seeming to move as if alive itself. Snowblind in the memory as she'd been in life and the whole world just pain and that blurred wash of darkness and light but screaming still and her hands clawing endlessly for her sword. The sound of bowstrings and then a great rushing sound like a whirlwind coming down on them and everyone calling out and then the memory faded back and became nothing.

  She felt her skin p
ucker and clasped her hands and at last was truly finished with the bread. On the far side of the room the jester was clapping his hands to a beat no one could hear and it was no beat at all. Just the random and sporadic sound of his palms slapping one against the other and he too stupid and ruined to know it and grinning the whole while as if this song where the song of some angelic beings with wings like the sun and voices too beautiful to ever be heard twice.

  The men came over and stood opposite the table and none of them spoke and the fat one was breathing very hard and the others swallowing and all of their eyes very wide, their faces bright with the wine. Clutching in their hands accounts of what they should say on rolled papers.

  He stood to join them and waved easily one arm in her direction, sweeping it toward her in a way so formal and lost to her that at first she did not know what he was doing. He bowed his head slightly to her and addressed the men as one, liars or tellers of the truth that they may be:

  “My mother,” he said. “The queen.”

  Chapter Three

  I

  In silence he sat with before him the glassware mug of ale and all about the sounds of men talking and in the corner a blind man playing some instrument for which he did not know the name. The sounds of it jaunty and bright and in contrast to this place with its dark clientele. The town for mining and mining alone and these men heavily muscled from years of such and with a blackness in their hair and beards and upon their skin. Two women in the corner and one sitting in some thin lace upon a man's lap and laughing and the other scouring the room.

  Across from him, the man with the half-shaved head sat with his chair leaned back against the wall and the front legs up. His ale untouched before him and a warm brown in the lantern light. All the windows like black oil with the night. A great wagon wheel as a chandelier in this vaulted room with above it a balcony and doors opening off that into parts unknown. Rooms perhaps for those such as him.