The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  “He didn't have a weapon,” Juoth said. “He was just standing there and looking at me and I came out with the spear and knife and stood looking back at him and thought of what he'd done to the lions and I realized they wanted me to kill him. And he knew it. We both looked at each other and we both knew it and then he looked to that raised gate behind me.”

  “What did you do?” Brack said. Not feeling like his voice was his own.

  “We ran,” Juoth said. A snort of laughter. “If it were a real tale we would have fought the guards and overcome them and thrown the cages open and freed the slaves and they'd sing of us now as we sat on thrones. But it's never like that. No, he just ran toward me and past me and I let him go and turned and followed. They tried to get the gate down but they couldn't do it fast enough and we ran out into the streets. I dropped the spear at some point and they chased us but we ran until we found some trash to hide in and we hid and that night we snuck out with a group of lepers and we left the islands forever.”

  Brack shook his head and could see Tarek doing it, doing all of it, and then he said: “Why are you telling me this?”

  “So you'll know,” Juoth said. “So you'll know why I'm here.”

  They rode the river down to a plateau and stood at the edge of the trees. There was no snow but just thin grass lightly frosted. Gray stones standing up out of the soil at places, low and flat. A type of tall weed moving in the wind like wheat but the color all wrong. The river swelling out and slowing. Five hundred yards away the descent continuing into that mist-covered valley, the water resuming its speed and the river there heavy and loud and powerful.

  They let the horse free to roam that grass and built in the center of the field a small fire. Lay out their bedrolls one on each side. Scavenging the wood they needed and keeping it small so the rising sparks would not be seen. The frost making the grass brittle and everything on the edge of frozen, but both of them sweating in their furs and leather and armor. The sun had fallen and a heavy gray dusk lay on the place and after they had eaten they both stretched out and looked up at that starstrewn sky for the black shape of the dragon moving in the night, but it did not come.

  After a time of silence, Juoth turned and looked at him in the glimmering light and his brow was creased and his eyes distant as if again turning about all the words spoken and looking in them for new meanings or perhaps old ones there confined. “Tell me something,” he said. “You told me of your great grandfather's kill. The one you tried to emulate. But what did that story have to do with this dragon?”

  “He killed it,” Brack said.

  Juoth just looked at him for a long moment. The way he had, with his eyes dark and full of thought. Again turning over everything that was said. Then: “He killed that other dragon?”

  Brack was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said at last. “He killed this one.”

  Chapter Nine

  I

  She went in and stood while the guard chained her to the wall and went out and already she knew something was wrong and stood longer waiting to see just how bad it was. The door closing heavily behind her and the thick smell of this place. Bones and mildew and age. And then she saw him sitting in the halfdark against the far wall and he was grinning and holding his arms back against the wall behind him, over his head.

  “Worlds turn and mountains fall,” he said. Eyes wide and staring and bloodshot. Hands not moving as if themselves made of stone. “But still he comes.”

  She did not answer and just looked back at him. This old man with his rotten teeth and long hair. His skin nearly gray from this place. And she thought then that maybe they knew he'd cut his chains but they did not care and perhaps this the reason. A dead and lost man still chained in other ways, if not with iron.

  For an invalid was not one to attempt a bid for his own freedom.

  “Still he comes,” he said. Then licked his lips. His tongue darting out quickly, almost as if it were afraid of this dank air. Wetting those already glistening lips and then disappearing between the crooked rows of teeth. “Still.”

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Mountains fall and worlds turn. Which way is the wind coming from, and which way is it going?”

  “Listen to me.”

  “And still he comes. Mountains turn and worlds fall.”

  She opened her mouth and went to speak again, but did not. For it was something deeper, something engrained. He was looking at her almost eagerly, as if waiting there for some response. For him, this was a conversation with two participants, not the incoherent rambling of one and the confusion of the other. Both on equal footing.

  Once she had known a woman who was perhaps her aunt. Some relative distant and yet usually at court. She could not remember now. Long ago, this had been, long before everything had come apart at the seams and the world had fallen into its current form. Her world, at least, trapped here in this dungeon and only shuffled out to pretend to rule a people she had once dreamed of ruling.

  The woman had suffered an affliction. They knew not what at the time and still did not. She had been standing in court and watching on a long afternoon while others talked and then suddenly she had been stepping and turning and falling. Not making a sound, her wrinkled mouth clenched tight and her gray hair descending ever so rapidly. The man next to her turning as well and catching her as she fell and calling out even as he did so for others. But the woman never making a sound.

  She never spoke again. Arisine had seen her at times. The skin on one side of her mouth turned down, her legs not broken but stricken with near paralysis. Unable to walk on her own or even to stand without help. The left side of the body much worse than the right.

  They'd brought her many potions. Chanted the dread spells as slaves gave their minds and filled the rooms with smoke or steam or sunlight or night air. Given her herbs and flowers to eat, or taken away others. None of it made a difference and she sat in her chambers with her blankets about her and did not speak. This silence like one who had taken a vow.

  But once, sent there for some reason she could no longer remember, the girl Arisine had been climbed the stairs in the flickering light of lanterns and pushed open the tall oak door with its metalwork and window, stepping through and into the woman's rooms. Two rooms, with a wide doorway and a stone wall between. A bed on one side and a sitting area with arched windows on the other. Those windows looking out over the long fields and the orchards and the world.

  It was before those windows that the old woman sat. The blanket upon her lap and one hand raised to her chin, supporting it. Gazing out at nothing and everything at once. She turned as Arisine came in and half-smiled and the girl walked across to her and sat on the sill. The drop below soaring and causing her stomach to jump, but she liked the feeling and leaned over just a bit more to look down the sheer stonework.

  And it was then that the woman talked to her. But she also did not. For every time that she spoke, the sound she made was not words, but fragments. Perhaps pieces of the same few words cut up and moved and put back together into a string of nothing with no meaning or sense to it. A babbling of confusion.

  But it was not as if talking to someone who did not know what she was saying. The same eager look had been in that woman's eyes. The same patterns of speech. Arisine would tell her something, of the day's chores or the war to the south. And the woman would speak, as if answering, and say nothing at all.

  Between her mind and her tongue, those words lost. But Arisine could see they were there, at least to start. Forming in her mind as true words and sentences and working their way down and in the process coming apart and then being spoken as nothing. They were whole when this broken woman thought them, but gone by the time they passed her lips.

  “The world turns and mountains fall, and still he comes,” the man said again.

  “Who comes?” she said

  “The mountains.”

  “The mountains come?”

  “The worlds turn.” Nodding n
ow as if in affirmation. “The mountains.”

  She did not speak again for a time and thought of the old woman whose name now escaped her and who was gone these long years, but she saw her here, in this old man and the only words he now knew. And when the hours had fled by he lay down and slept and she watched him sleep and the light from above moved through the dust as it floated in the air and then he woke and all was returned and he could speak as he once had.

  When she asked him of the mountains and the world and he who was coming, he had no recollection of any of it.

  II

  He climbed the next morning the ladder of brick and stone and stood looking out the top for a time and she asked him what he saw and he told her it was a street. Brick and mud and across it the rising wall of some building unknown. Then he leaned forward and put his head and shoulders slowly through the hole, those shoulders grinding in the dirt and mud but this time at last the dirt and mud not of this place. Instead the mud of that road with above it open air and that air covering all the world and when he came back down he was grinning madly and his eyes very wide.

  “You'll fit,” he said.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Nothing.” Nodding emphatically and then sitting down beside her and looking at her. “It's a little street. I don't know where it goes.”

  She thought she did but she could not be sure. “What was on the wall?”

  “On the wall?”

  “Signs, letters, ivy. Anything so I can find it again.”

  “Ah.” He closed his eyes for a long moment, then nodded once more. “Part way up there is a window. It has shutters that are brown and look like a bat's wings. Something is written above it but I haven't been able to read in years.” Grinning as if that news was some enchanting thing saved until now when life was light and easy. “But it was written in white.”

  Bat wings and white letters. She looked up at the ladder to salvation and licked her lips and found them as always slightly coated in the dust of the room and thought she tasted in it perhaps the dust of the world and what it meant. Dust blown on that long-carrying wind from the Island Kingdoms or down from the mountains or from the long gray desert to the east where the red stones rose from that colorless expanse like spires and creatures skittering in the night moved between the stones and called to a forlorn and pale moon.

  “I'll find it,” she said.

  “Then what'll we do? About your chains.”

  “We'll take them off is what we'll do.” It was her turn now to grin.

  “When are you going?”

  “After the next time he calls me,” she said. “Once I know where to go.”

  It was not as long waiting as it could have been.

  III

  She stood for the last time on the wall and looked out at the land. He was with her now but a mood had come on him like some storm and he was not speaking to her. Dressed all in black with his shirt white and an iron sword on his hip and looking like some relic here so far from battle but she did not tell him that and only looked.

  They'd met with two lords who were fighting over land. One portly and rich and the other tall and poor and both claiming some vineyard and he had not listened as they spoke but had sat brooding and when they were done she had said that the deed must be produced and neither could and she'd sent someone to check but knew already that neither had a claim to it at all.

  He had not spoken upon their arrival or departure and she had stood there and let them loose to tell of a queen who still ruled and the appearance intact.

  Below them the buildings spread out from the castle to the south and east and in front the orchards. But it was to the city that she turned her eyes. Short buildings even near the wall for no building was allowed to stand over two stories there lest it be taken and used as a siege tower and they then grew taller as they moved away before descending once more. Toward the riverfront and the docks and the rattle of chains and the creak of rope.

  She thought she knew where the dungeons sat buried in filth and perhaps knew the orientation of the wall and she looked and did not see the bat's wings nor the writing and was standing thinking through the map in her head when he finally spoke.

  “We're nothing,” he said.

  She did not want to look at him but she knew she must, especially now, and so she did. Him staring out across the field and not seeing her and the clouds moving in his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You can say that, but I don't.” She regretted it as she said it, but he only scowled and didn't move to strike her.

  “You know what we were. Now look at us. We're nothing.”

  “We're at peace,” she said. “We're prosperous. What else do you want?”

  “You call this prosperous?”

  “It's enough.”

  He leaned forward off the wall then and put his hand on the hilt of the sword and for one moment she thought he meant to draw it but he did not. He stood with his hand on it. “In the Island Kingdoms there is more gold than can fit on a fleet of galleys. In Dalimar they're mining diamonds from the mountains and piling them so high in carts the horses can't pull them. On the south sea the Tungisian fleet has ranged to the end of the world and come back with stories of another land where the men are ten feet tall and the land is beyond measure. And what do we have? Fields, timber, orchards. Nothing.”

  “You call this nothing?”

  Then he smiled and it was slow and perhaps worse than his eyes. “No,” he said. “You're right, it's not nothing.” Looking out over those long fields and the villages and cities in the plains and the rising mountains with towns of their own. “I have men.”

  “You don't want war.”

  He stepped toward her with hard eyes and was so close she could smell him and she did not flinch but it took all that was in her.

  “Don't I?”

  “You don't remember war. I do. You don't want it.”

  But then he was done with her and she saw what was moving in his mind and behind those eyes and it made him care not even for her insolence and she thought she could have told him he was a fool and a coward and even then he wouldn't have struck her. For he was elsewhere and had what he wanted from her and now there was more he wanted.

  “Not all at once,” he said. “Not all at once.”

  He went to the battlements and looked out and they were silent again and she thought of asking him and then thought the hell with it and walked around the wall. Tracing these steps in which guards clad in iron strode and where other men had sometimes stood screaming while archers rained upon those below a swift and terrible death. She did not look back at him and he did not say anything and one of the guards came out from a little wooden door on the inside wall and followed her and he also did not speak, a silent wraith whose only sound was that of his boots on the stone.

  She walked and kept her eyes forward and even so all she could think of were his words and the war.

  Waking once beside the river in the small cloth tent and looking out and thinking the sunrise on the water was red, so red, and then going down to the bank and all the little stones awash in blood and it rolling in the current.

  Running another time with the smoke in her lungs and a sword in her hand, the heft and weight of it, the blade broken half a meter up and still a splintered sword better than none and behind her a sound like all the world ending. In truth the pounding of the horses as they came down on the town. She had not looked and had never seen the horses but had heard them and smelled their sweat like salt on the air.

  Walking her own horse with the rope in her hand and the burns from that rope all up her palm and her feet aching and the horse just a day from its own death. Coming to a long stone bridge carved over a river by the Old Ones, an ancient thing that supported itself somehow and needed no pillars and which looked as if it could crumble and fall into the river at any moment but which had stood there in steadfast strength longer than any of the cities s
he'd ever seen. And all along the underside of that bridge gibbeted men and women in their hanging cages, some sitting in silence and others lying with their hands stretching between the bars and one with his head through and the skull gone and fallen a thousand feet into the crashing river below, for they were all dead and just husks of people now in their rotting clothes and parchment skin.

  She had to stop then on the wall and she did and breathed in deeply and when she let it out again the world was at peace. A fragile thing, that. The blossoms in the apple trees and the ivy growing up and spinning itself around the tower and the stone shingles. The women talking beside the stream and a child naked and running in water clear and flowing. A man sitting on a fence and looking out on a field burning only with the setting sun and between his teeth chewing a long piece of dried grass and at his feet his son looking up at him and then turning to find a piece of grass of his own.

  All this and no one thinking of war and feeling that this world they lived in was so firm and secure, like a thing carved from stone. Hewn into ironoak.

  But in truth all of it as fragile as the ice early in the year when it was black and glass as far as could be seen and the water still moved below it and it called out, groaning long and loud as it shifted.

  Smiling, she looked to the side and the buildings of the town and heard her dead father speaking to her. When did you start thinking like this, he asked. Grinning and turning in his old hands an old pipe and packing it with a thumb. Shaking his head and looking away and then looking back to grin at her again.

  And then she remembered his death and the sound of it and her smile faded. The world falling again into this new darkness.

  She blinked twice before it caught her and forced herself on and around the next corner of the wall and she found it there, that window with batwing shutters and above it white words in old paint turned to dust and it was not where she'd thought it would be at all and looking at it she felt then weak and old. This a kingdom that had once been hers to rule standing on these same walls with her dress blowing behind her in a restless autumn wind and thousands at arms in formation below her and now she did not know it as she should.