The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them she felt almost herself again and she turned to walk back to him. Inside her, something growing and changing. A child with a great and terrible hunger. A child with teeth and eyes of fire.

  Chapter Ten

  I

  It was in the early morning under a rising sky of clear blue so dark on the edges it neared some color unnamed that could swallow all within it that they came to the fence and the remains of the cattle. They'd found a second horse at a small cabin on the edge of the forest with only a dead man to inhabit it and they stood them both now near the treeline for a quarter of an hour and did not speak and Brack smelled the blood on the wind and looked out over the field. The hour of waking birds but not a sound from them nor the fluttering of wings. Not even the circling as there should have been of vultures and carrion birds in that open sky. At last he looked at Juoth and nodded and they rode down with the brittle grass breaking under the horses' hooves and went to a place where the fence had fallen and rode into the field.

  Most of the cattle were in pieces. One halved entire, the head and chest remaining and all else gone. Torn skin, scattered entrails. Others just raked to death. One lying on its side with its glassy eyes wide and no wound upon it at all. But dead just like the others.

  It was worst in the center of the field. There the bodies had been dragged and it had stopped and eaten. Sitting beside this pile of slain cattle and bending to reach with that serpent's neck and holding them down with a claw and pulling with smoking teeth until part came away and then straightening to chew, eat, consume. Then bending again to its task.

  Brack got down from the horse and Juoth stayed mounted and looked always at the sky and the horizon lines. They had been riding now for weeks and they operated like this without speaking to one another but each knowing what the other would do and how it should be done.

  He did not have to go up to them to know what had happened, but he did it all the same, for he was a hunter and he knew thoroughness was the heart of his craft. Many thought the bones of hunting were aggression or luck or some otherworldly ability to kill that other men lacked, but he knew it was just seeing the details and being careful and taking your time. Going over everything in this meticulous way. For all of the signs to point you to a kill were always there and the only difference on any hunt was that some men found them and others did not.

  It had killed a hundred head but only eaten perhaps a dozen. A few blackened and charred but most eaten raw. The bones snapped in half; when wolves ate, they left on the bones the marks of their teeth and those could be seen still years or decades later and the kill thereby identified. When a dragon ate there were never such marks for it destroyed the bones or ate them as well. But the snapped pieces, shattered like the branches of a dead tree, were all he needed.

  “How old?” Juoth asked from the horse.

  “Three days, maybe. More likely two.”

  “We're getting closer.”

  “I know.” He raised his head to scan the sky and there was nothing and in that also he knew they were close.

  This was the fourth such slaughter they had found. One of sheep and now three of cattle. In the first the farm had also been burned and there were a man's bones in the field and the remains of three people in the house. The man had been holding a short hooked sword like the officers in the last war had carried for ceremonies and the blade had melted and twisted and then set again, as if cast into some hellish blacksmith's fire with no care to the result.

  That first killing ground they had found two weeks back and it was all old and the animals still living had returned. By the second, they'd halved the distance, then made up another day by the third, losing time as they came out of the alpine fields and into the valley country when a storm swept up against the wall of mountains and pinned them for half a week.

  But always they marched closer and soon they would be upon it.

  The path had been predictable as he'd feared and this wasn't really hunting, not the way he'd hunted elsewhere. The beast was heading for the cities of the plain and Kayhi and it was moving slowly so that it could feed. If it wanted it could have crossed that great distance in days, flying so high that its huge bulk was nothing but a speck in the sky and its heat couldn't be felt, but it did not. For it knew that what it sought would not escape it and it preferred to move at leisure and with much rest and sustenance. An arrogance in that.

  Brack stood back and looked out to see if the carnage spread and it did not. Either this had been the herd entire or the rest had run. Then in the far distance he saw a horse and rider coming down the dirt road and the dust rising up around him and he went back and got on his horse and wheeled it around to wait.

  At last the man neared and drew the horse up a hundred yards from them and looked at them and then slowly came forward. He was unarmed as far as Brack could tell and wearing the rough clothes of a farmer and old boots made from leather and tough and probably worth as much as his horse. But in this work a necessity.

  “These your cattle?” Brack asked.

  The man nodded. His face was long and the jaw angular and his hair thin on the top of his head, though he did not look old. His skin marked with patches from the sun. Dust coating his whole being as if he were born from it.

  “They were,” he said.

  “Did you see it?”

  He nodded.

  “You were wise not to fight it.”

  The farmer looked at him a moment and turned and spat in the road. Looked back up. “I'm as dead now as if I had fought it and been killed with the cattle. This way's just going to take longer. You may see that as a mercy, but I'm not as sure.”

  Brack reached to his belt and took off the leather pouch he wore and poured into his hand a fistful of gold and held it out. The man did not move but just looked at him and then turned again and spat. “Who are you?”

  “That important?”

  “You carrying that much gold and throwing it around, I'd say it is.”

  Brack nodded. Did not lower the gold. “Therros Brackson,” he said. “Do you know the name?”

  The farmer looked at him a long moment. Then snorted and shook his head, the flicker of what might have for him been a grin at the edges of his lips, the smallest movement. He turned his head as if he were for a third time going to spit and then thought better of it and looked back at them. “Come on,” he said.

  II

  The house was a modest one made of mud and stone and wood and it sat on the edge of a small stream with willows hanging out over it and the sun golden in their arching branches. They came to it down the dusty road and from there it did not look as if a dragon had passed and all the carnage from the field seemed a thing distant and perhaps even untrue. The sound of the water moving lightly over the stones, the breeze in the tree branches. There was a woman sitting on the porch and she stood as they came up. Dark hair and clasped hands and two children coming out to see when the farmer called out.

  They got down from the horses and tied them to a tree in the front and the farmer went and got a bucket of water from the well and Brack took it before he could lift it and carried it himself over to the horses. Setting it where they could all reach and wiping briefly his wet hands on his horse's coat. His hands coming away dark with the dust. He did not know when he'd bathed last and had not thought about it on the road, but did now.

  The man's wife was named Marna and she smiled as they shook hands and her eyes widened when the farmer said his name and Brack smiled and looked away and saw the two boys staring at the sword. He bent down and shook their hands each in turn and their eyes did not leave the sword the entire time.

  Inside it was plank wood floors and walls and ceilings and light from the windows slanting in the dust of the air and a stone hearth in the center of the main room. Two lanterns sitting on the mantle and neither burning. Candles sitting about and rough wooden furniture and the chairs covered in hides. The whole place meager but clean an
d kept and dry. They nodded their thanks and took off their weapons and hung them by the door and sat and looked about the house.

  The woman went into the kitchen and when she came out she had a stoneware pitcher full to the brim of clear water and she poured it into clay cups and nodded to them and they thanked her and she went back out again. The farmer calling to her about the meat they'd dried and coming also to sit before his own cup at the table.

  “Don't eat all you have on our account,” Brack said. “We've got some food in the saddlebags.”

  “It's nothing,” the farmer said. “We were going to eat it anyway. Now we'll just eat it with you.” He shrugged. “A man has to eat and there's never enough so why fight it?”

  Brack took the bag back out and poured again the coins into his hand. A few more this time than before. Reached across and set them in front of the man, the metal rattling as they spread. The farmer opened his mouth and Brack raised a hand.

  “For the meat,” he said.

  The farmer looked at him and then nodded and reached and slid with one hand all of the coins over the edge of the table and into his other hand. “For the meat,” he said.

  The boys were out in the yard playing and they could hear the crack of the sticks coming together and them yelling from time to time. Slowly the smell of the meat came into the whole house, strong in the midday air. Already dried and salted but cooked all the same to make it feel new and fresh and the smell of it was very good. The farmer leaned forward with his elbows on the table and looked from Brack to Juoth and back again.

  “You're making for Cabele?”

  “Or Darish-Noth.”

  “Cabele is closer.”

  “Then we'll go there first. Which is the best road?”

  “The old road,” the farmer said without hesitation. As a man in country he knows very well and who trusts that knowledge. “The new is fine if you're with a caravan or a company and you want to stop and trade, but it goes out of its way to hit the towns. Harihold. Stallfast. Barrion. The old road goes up through Krassmark Forest and under the Fall of Revian. Then you come down through the hill country into the plains and you can see Cabele for two days before you get to her. Unless you're riding hard.”

  “We'll be riding hard.”

  “If your horses will survive it.”

  “We'll buy new ones if they don't.”

  The man leaned back in his chair. Picked up his cup and drank and set it down again. “You really mean to catch the dragon? You saw my cattle.”

  “And yours aren't the first.”

  “I thought as much.” He looked away and then licked his lips and seemed to be turning something in his mind. Rolling it and getting a feel for it and what it was. Then he said: “Is it true what they say about you? I saw the helmet.”

  Brack nodded. “It is.”

  “You killed the red dragon.” He said it as if speaking of something barely believed. The trust one places in a dream. A tale that must not be true but has been passed down for generations. A feat not accomplished twice and so the first time is suspect.

  “It was young and stupid,” Brack said. “But yes. I killed it.”

  “And now you're sitting at my table.”

  “And we thank you.”

  The farmer waved it away. “I heard the stories, but you know how those things are. You took it with a lance first?”

  “I didn't take it alone,” Brack said. “I had three companies of queen's men from the Springlands and archers also and many of them are dead now because of it. But yes, I rode it down with a lance and buried it and came back with the sword to finish it.”

  “Is that the way to do it?”

  “There is no way to kill a dragon,” Brack said. He nodded toward the wall where his sword hung with his cloak. The crossbow outside and strapped still to the horse. “I don't have the lance now but I'll do it with what I have. Each time is different. Men who try the same thing every time are men who are killed.” Thinking then of the bow and the quartered horse and the gold and the damned dragon falling on the town while he watched.

  “So you don't have a plan.”

  “We'll make one when we see it. For now we're just trying to get to the cities.”

  “And you're sure it's going there?”

  Brack nodded but did not say anything. Hoping the man would take it as fact if he said it and not ask why. For the explanation was not one that could be easily swallowed, no matter how he knew it to be true nor how the dragon had so far done exactly as he'd known it would.

  “Where do we find the road?” Juoth asked.

  Marna came out then with the meat and called to the boys in the yard and she set it down as they came running in the door and it slamming open and closed and her yelling at them to wash up and stop running. It was not as much as Brack had hoped and he was glad for the gold and nodded his thanks as she cut a piece and set it on his plate. Then Juoth, then the farmer, then the boys and at last herself.

  The farmer cut his first to show them they could and put the cut piece in his mouth and looked at Juoth. “Just follow this one until the swamp where the creek holds up. Then it goes up and to the east, though the treeline. There's a ridge there and on top is the road. Take it from there and you'll be in the plains in two days and at Cabele in four. Darish-Noth is another day's ride if you want it.”

  They ate and the meat was very good and full of salt. The woman got up after a moment as if remembering something and the farmer waved her down and back to her food and he stood instead and went out the door and came back with another pitcher. This one of ale frothing still from the cask. He took their empty cups and poured and Brack drank deeply and felt it almost immediately in his blood and drank again.

  When the food was done the farmer looked at his sons and they both stood and took away the dishes and then went out through some other door for Brack did not see them again but shortly heard them in the yard. Marna went to sit in the main room and the farmer sat back in his chair with the noon light on the top of his head and picked his teeth.

  “You should stay here the night,” he said. “Sleep and rest the horses. They're about beat, those ones. Then take the road in the morning.” He nodded at Juoth, eyes flickering to the burned and halfhealed skin along his hairline. “Marna can give you something for that.”

  “Thank you,” Juoth said. “But we can't.”

  “Afraid it'll get to Cabele before you?”

  “It will anyway,” Brack said. “But it's what we can do.”

  For in that, he knew, it was toying with him always. It could be upon Cabele in hours and by the time they arrived it could have reduced it to ash and bone, stone and cinder. So always it was far enough ahead, even as they closed the distance. But it wanted him to see Cabele and to see the fire and to hear the screams of the dying and to know Kayhi was among them.

  And for that want he would kill it. For in this creature birthed of fire that could destroy the world, it was the one weakness.

  But that was how you hunted, for everything had a weakness. And killing was only the art of finding it and knowing how to use it and then using it when the time came.

  III

  They rode out an hour later and each with a skin of ale and more of the dried meat for the trip and the farmer went with them as far as the road. Pointing to them the way and then shaking their hands, clasping each about the forearm and saying not a word of the gold but thanking them for it all the same. Brack looked back after they had gone a ways and he was still sitting his horse in the road and watching them.

  It took the better part of an hour to reach the swamp. A deep and dark thing with mud all up to the road and a dense look to it that felt unnatural in this land of open fields breaking to plains. The sound of birds and other things within. The creek running to it just as the farmer had said. They turned there to the east and soon crossed another short field and went through the treeline and into a thin forest of cedars and birches with their bark peeling like pink paper and the g
round below them a bed of brown needles and they rode through this for a short time. The ground beginning to swell beneath them and then rising in a ridge. The horses breathing hard with the effort, the soil full of sand. They at last came out on top of the ridge and there was the road before them, an old thing of beaten dirt and grass and sand and with boulders standing at places on either side of it, the rolled destruction of some prior land, the road snaking through them and moving down this spine of hills and out of sight.

  They stopped shortly and let the horses breathe and looked out over the country. On their left a string of short mountains, an open valley between them. Barren to the dead and dried grass, not even scrub cedars in that withered expanse. The trees returning on the side of the mountains in groves, but these nothing like the mountains they'd just ridden down out of or the true mountains of the north beyond. That an endless world of stone and snow, these short mountains that could be ridden over in a few hours and put behind, hardly true to their name. Forested hills and shallow valleys.

  Beyond them, on the far plains, the stone walls of Cabele.

  They followed the road and the day grew hot and Brack took off his furs and packed them and then rode in his leather armor, the mail and plate strapped also to the horse's sides. If the dragon came he would be horribly exposed but it would not come. The worst things to fear now were the wolves and bears and either he could handle as he was.

  They saw one of those bears off to the east and at the bottom of the ridge, standing with his great padded feet in the cool river and his head turned and looking up at them as they passed. The horses shied but did not run.