The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  The dead were little better. A scorched skeleton lying in the path with nothing human left, just bones and some of those melted on the ends and smooth as glass. Two more behind it. A skull leaning against a pile of stones near what had been the inn. Riding past he could smell it even in the cold air. A tangled dress and two legs and on the other side nothing but blood and the top of the girl gone.

  The blind man lying in the middle of what had been the bar, the instrument clutched in his hands. Perhaps having played to the end. His body burst and split.

  He got down off the horse and he walked through this carnage and he did not want to look and he did anyway. In it the only blessing that it had been a small town and so the number of the dead wasn't what it could have been and that a small blessing indeed. He went on down the street and past piles that had been homes, barns, sheds, and then he came to a place he knew and he stopped and closed his eyes and then turned slowly to look at it as the horse stood behind him.

  It was only bones and it could have been anyone's bones and they were charred black from the flame with the white showing through. Those old teeth. The eyeless sockets. Arthritic fingers now twisted one last time. All about the body the house gone and all in it a choking pile of ash swirling in the mountain wind.

  The tea kettle alone and lying on its side and cracked like the helmet on those gold coins and just as empty.

  He knelt on the warm stones and felt the dark thing inside of him bloom and surge and for just a moment, he let it.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  She paused at the ends of her chains, clutching the gaps between the bricks, her bare toes dug in below her. Breathing in that dust and mortar and blood with every gasp. The window still high above as she scaled the wall and the ground of this prison more than her own height below her feet.

  Here, as far as she could continue her climb. For the chains held her fast and all of this climbing for that infernal sun meant nothing as she had known it would when she started. The nights and days and weeks wasted. Briefly she lowered her head against the wall and cursed herself and then began to climb back to the floor below.

  That floor of cold and damp. How much more of that she could take before something in her mind snapped with a soft click and she was no longer herself, she did not know. Not as much as she hoped, surely. She stepped down onto it and shivered and listened to the chains clink down around her feet and leaned back against the stone wall. Fingers and toes throbbing.

  The carved stone ladder could reach to heaven itself and she could not climb it as long as she was chained in hell.

  She sat and looked at the chains around her hands. They had been also about her feet when she arrived here and since the guards had stopped. Perhaps too lazy to hook them up over and over, perhaps content after all this time that she would not and could not escape. Either way, only her hands remained bound and she closed her fingers like folding a glove and pulled the manacle up toward her wrist and felt it cut into the skin.

  Her hand small and withered with the lack of food, the time. But not small enough. She closed her eyes and pulled and felt her skin slide over the slick bones and still it was not enough. Released the chains and sat back, a thin line of blood running down from the base of her hand, hot and dripping.

  They weren't chains she could take off without the key. In that it was simple.

  A shuffling sound from the far darkness. In those early days she had risen and stood her ground, ready to fight for her life or call out or do anything at all. Now she barely turned her head toward the sound of her unseen companion. Lost there in these dank shadows.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  It did not respond and never had. The sound of bare feet on the stones. The silence again.

  “Talk to me.”

  Then, from deep off in the darkness, a soft voice. More a whisper than anything truly spoken, but enough in this silent hole in the silent ground. A hissing voice coming through broken teeth. “Talk to me.”

  She sat looking and did not move. All this time pleading and yet getting what she asked for was somehow more terrifying than the persistent quiet and shuffling feet. The slurping sound as it fed. She could feel her heart in her chest and she wiped the palms of her hands on her rough clothes. Feeling a slight shake there.

  “Who are you?”

  Again, that voice coming back, soft and broken: “Who are you?”

  For a moment she had the horrifying thought that there was nothing in here with her at all and there never had been and it was her own mind, just her mind bending and breaking and splintering. Splitting up as he wanted it to. Breaking free of that grounded reality and leaving her here in the dark, talking to herself and answering herself and shadows moving behind her eyes alone. Sanity a slithering thing slipping away through her fingers.

  And then he came out of the shadows. Standing far across the room with his back hunched and a hand to his face. The edges of him still fading into the blackness so she could not fully tell his size. His hair knotted and thick on his head and in his face, the hair of one down here for many years without it ever being cut. The canvas clothes the same as hers, though older and spotted and worn and covered in grime.

  He stood for a long moment facing her in this silence and darkness. He was not chained but the manacles hung from his wrists and feet. Links trailing away and the ends twisted. This the sound as he moved. He looked once at the door and then back at her.

  Finally, she found her voice: “Who are you?”

  He did not answer, but just cocked his head to the side and looked. Then tipped it back to crack his neck, then looked again. His hand still covering his face.

  “Come forward.”

  “Come forward,” he said. Appearing to think it over, to consider. At last stepping forward just one step, then two. Pausing there and looking long at her. Stepping again.

  She let him come and she did not speak. Afraid that if she said anything he would turn and flee back into the dark and it would be months or years before she saw him again or this would be the end of it entirely. The way she watched a deer in the field as it ate an apple and looked around from the base of the tree and saw her standing there in the tall grass, thinking if it should run or eat, tail twitching, and then carefully ate again.

  So he came until he stood not ten feet from her and would come no more.

  She could see now that his face was scarred. Two long puckered scars, so white against his dirty skin, running from scalp to chin. A third on his forehead near the hairline. Two others disappearing beneath his hand, their true impact unknown. Perhaps more in that ragged beard, though it was wild and full enough to cover them. Age spots along his arms and his fingernails grown yellow and long. He blinked at her and stood with his back still hunched but also looking as if he may flee.

  “Lady Arisine,” he said.

  II

  She sat looking at him a long moment before speaking, feeling that voice move through her, that name she hadn't used since she truly sat the throne above. Here there were no names for this was a place in the world in which they weren't needed. Names were a thing born of necessity and they died when that was stripped from them and she had expected him to say anything but that.

  “You know me?”

  He nodded his head and it was the smallest movement, just a twitch. The hair flicking and the eyes blinking twice. “The queen.”

  “Who are you?”

  He lowered his hand, slow and careful. She had expected the scars below to cross his face and twist or torment his features, his lips spilt and rolled back from his teeth, his nose gone. But it was not so. The scars faded to nothing and his face below was wrinkled with age but whole. The lips and nose thin and slender, the skin pale.

  “What do you need from me?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You've been trying to talk to me. What do you need?”

  She just looked at him. It had to be something said in jest, she thought, but there was no
humor in his eyes. A soft kindness perhaps, and something else as savage and untamed as a wildfire, but no humor. It was a question to which he actually wanted an answer.

  And that frightened her in a way she could not explain.

  “How did you break your chains?”

  “Ah, you want freedom.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not all want it. Only some.”

  She shook her head. “You do.” Waving a hand toward those hanging chains at ankle and wrist.

  “Do I?”

  “Do you not?”

  He sat then, slowly, on the stone floor. The dim light falling from above. He glanced once at the door as he did it and listened and she listened also, but all was quiet. He sat with his legs crossed and looked back at her and ran one of the broken chains through his fingers. “I don't know,” he said at last.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Crimes against the crown.” He grinned. “As are you. But that's your son up there.”

  She nodded and did not speak. Suddenly her throat tight and her eyes on fire, but she fought it down. He watched her do it and she felt from the way he looked at her that he could see her doing it. Inside. The way it ripped through her body and the tearing of tissue. Clenching every muscle in some desperation to bring the world back under her own control. That little she still possessed.

  “I can help you with those chains,” he said. “If that's what you want.”

  “How?”

  The old man reached into his dirty robes and from them drew a thin metal file. The edges worn down and beaten. Slightly rusted about the wooden handle. He held it up to the light and the light would not catch that worn metal. But he nodded and tossed it lightly and it landed at her feet. Bouncing on the stones.

  “It took me three days,” he said. “And your hands will feel like fire. But you can cut through the chains.”

  “Do they know?”

  “The jailers?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “They don't bring me out. When they bring my food, I sit against the wall with the chains and I don't speak and they don't ask.” He nodded toward her. “You can't, though. They take you out. They'll know if you cut them.”

  Elation had been growing in her, and she felt it evaporate like water and blow away with the wind. But still she said: “I'll be faster.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I'll have to.”

  He looked up then at the ladder above her, where the stones had been removed. That climbing series of rough steps in the darkness, barely visible in the gloom unless you knew to look for them. The high window and bars above. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said.

  And she looked also and did not want to but knew he was right. For she had to cut them off, then climb and remove more stones, then find a way to remove the bars at the top. It was a thing that could not be done. With time, it could, but not in a night. Not between meals, between being called up and paraded in front of her subjects as if she were still the ruler and not the boy at her side.

  “I can help you,” he said then.

  “How?”

  “I'll do it is how. But you must wait. I'll climb it, I'll dig them out. I'll get rid of the bars. Then we'll try to cut you free and you can run. But you can't do it yourself.”

  “You'd do that for me?”

  “No,” he said.

  She wanted to ask him what he meant but she was at once sick of his dancing around the points and yearning for his help and so she said nothing. Just looked at him. He was not looking at her now but was instead wrapping and unwrapping the links of the chain around his wrist. Rolling it first one way and then the other. Looking at it and nodding and rolling it again.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “Talk to me.” He looked at her and grinned and again she saw moving in his eyes those elements in such contrast, the kindness and the wildfire. Something loose and wrong and ravaging. But also rooted there something else, something she no longer saw in her son's eyes.

  “Please.”

  “I'll do it,” he said. “For myself.”

  III

  He worked the next three nights above her in the dark. When the guards left he came over in his chains and robes and took from her the spoon and put it between his teeth and smiled with his lips only and then climbed barefoot the tall steps, his chains rattling against the wall. She moved aside as he dug so the dust would not fall on her and when he got a stone free he called out softly and dropped it down out of the darkness and she caught it and carried it back to the bones and put it down with the others.

  Then returned and waited again until there was another. This over and over, his form rising in the darkness to twice and then three times the height of her chains. Until at last he reached the bars above and dropped the final stone, one she could barely catch to prevent the noise as it struck the floor, and then he stood with his feet in the mortar and his hands wrapped around the bars and for the first time since she'd been cast down here—that dark and horrific first night—something moved across the light.

  A shadow passing. His face pressed to the bars.

  He looked out for a time and said something but she did not know what. And then he began to work, pushing the spoon again into the mortar. By now that lone instrument bent and battered, mangled by this hard labor. But still the mortar and stone drifting down.

  It took two more nights before he had the first bar free. He did not drop it to her but put it in his robe and tied it and climbed down with the spoon in his mouth and handed it to her. It had been set into the mortar when it was poured and it was of black iron and the ends brighter where the stone had ground at them. Just as long as her arm from the elbow to the tips of her fingers.

  “It will be close,” he said. Holding the bar sideways against her body and nodding and sliding it up and down. “But you'll fit.”

  Then he climbed again and set to work on the second one.

  She'd asked him his name many times and he would not give it. Would not speak to her about anything regarding himself. He went through periods where all he would do was repeat what she said and others where he spoke on his own. There did not seem to be anything else different about him at those times, save for what he said, but still she was afraid. She did not know if he saw it, but she felt it clutching her heart and hoped he'd work faster.

  It was the night after with the dust falling down about her face and shoulders and the second bar halfway free that the door opened. He froze and she turned frantically toward it and the light that had seemed so dim and worthless before now seemed to be pouring in from the hall with no end, the shadows thrown back.

  The guard—of course not the girl, through the damning of fate—coming across the floor. Walking slowly with the keys in his hand and those keys swinging and him grinning to himself as he looked at her. Something predatory in his eyes that made her want to cross her arms over herself and she did but then put them down. For she could not let them win at anything which she controlled and she would not now and if he was looking at her that was all she had.

  She stood and tried not to look up. A small sprinkle of dust falling from above. How much, how much. She stepped to the end of the chains and held out her hands. “Hurry,” she said. “Don't keep him waiting.”

  The guard raised an eyebrow and then laughed. “You're telling me what to do?”

  “I know he sent you.”

  “I bet you do.”

  She nodded as if that settled it and held out her hands. Heard a soft grinding from above. A bare foot twisting in powdered mortar atop a smooth stone. Losing purchase now with the first bar gone and the second loose, only one left to hold.

  Don't fall, she thought. Damn you, don't fall.

  “Got someone here wants to see you,” the guard said.

  “Take me to him.”

  “Just like that?” He laughed again. “Don't even want to know who it is?”

  “What difference does it make?”

/>   “Maybe makes a lot.”

  The grinding again. Something falling and striking her head, perhaps a small stone. She tried not to move and didn't know if he saw it or not. Her last prayer one said as a child and long ago on her knees by a bed so large it felt as if it were a great blue sea and soft, with oil lamps around and long swaying curtains and pillows larger than her small body and all this so, so long ago and yet she found the prayer rising in her mind now. Running through those familiar words like a chant, a plea, a prayer of desperate supplication and desire.

  All the time, dust moving in the light. So much more dust than had ever been in this place of mildew and water.

  “He'll be angry if he has to wait.” Still holding out her hands.

  The guard shook his head. Leaned in and took one hand, fitting the key into the lock. Turning it, turning it. A soft click and the release as the iron dropped open. The second hand. Everything taking ages, entire lives passing in the swirling stars as he switched to the second lock. She heard the grinding sound again and it was louder and she just knew he was going to fall and he did not and she watched the guard the whole time and then they were at the end of eternity and he unlocked the second wrist and stepped back.

  The prayer still repeating, rolling through her mind like the tide, the cycles of the moon. Tumbling again and again.

  “Let's go,” he said, taking her arm and pulling her toward the door.

  Chapter Eight

  I

  They rode four days out from the village in this wasteland and rough terrain with the horse carrying them both and all about the mountains sloping down from the town which was in turn down from the keep and the land always growing lower as it ran to the seas. So far off it felt like a different world and perhaps one they would never see again. They rode through a frozen forest where the trees were all stark white and brittle and the branches shattered when they touched them, as the horse brushed by. Across a wide lake that was as solid as stone and as clear as glass and looking down where the snow had blown away they could see the rocks of the bottom and at one place a man in armor with a blue and frozen face and his arms outstretched and mouth and eyes open and the eyelids eaten by fish that lived and swam in the ice itself. Through a deep valley with boulders all scattered about as if giants had come and rolled them and white deer in that valley running between the boulders ahead of the horse and then climbing the shale cliffs along the edges and standing beneath their clouding breath to watch them pass.