The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  It was two hours later when Juoth spoke into the silence and the light wind. The ridge had been rising below them and turning to merge with the mountains and the drop on either side was near a thousand feet, down through boulders and grass. The slope so steep he could not stand on it and little could grow. The horses rode one behind the other but Juoth did not have to speak loudly to be heard in this deserted world.

  “Your great grandfather didn't kill it,” he said.

  “You've been thinking about it.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “And that's what you think.”

  “That's what I think.”

  Brack nodded and looked into the mountains, still above them. The dark path of the road visible going up into the stones and trees. “I know he killed it.”

  “I'm sure he thought he did, but it's the only thing that fits. He wounded the dragon and it lived. It wouldn't be the first time. Dragons are great deceivers. It could have been an intentional move for survival.”

  “I'm telling you he killed it.”

  “I heard you.”

  Brack reined the horse up and trotted it sideways in the road, turning so they faced each other. Crossing his arms and sitting back in the saddle. Juoth stopped as well and regarded him.

  “My great grandfather killed it, first with the bow and then with the sword. Through the ribs and into the heart. When it was dead, he took an ax and he cut off the beast's head. Then they buried the body in the mountains and they buried the head in a lake. Leagues apart. And then the city feasted, for the threat of a generation was gone and they no longer had to look to the sky every time they heard something on the wing or saw a shadow moving through the grass.”

  Juoth was silent. As if knowing he was not done.

  “When I saw it, at the keep. I saw its neck. Have you ever seen a man hanged who lived? The burn of the rope on his skin, a scar bitten into him for all time. The dragon has a scar like that around its neck, a ring where the scales no longer grow. Right at the place where my great grandfather took its head off with the ax. It still carries those marks and it always will.”

  Juoth would not look at him. Looking instead down over the countryside and then up at the mountains and anywhere but at his eyes.

  “Well?”

  “You mean magic.” A weight to the words.

  “I do.”

  Juoth pulled back on the reins with the hand without the glove and brought the horse's head up and went past Brack on the side of the road. Not turning his head and his back straight. Brack watched him go and turned the horse with him but did not follow. Leaning forward and resting his arms. Then he said:

  “You think I'm wrong?”

  Juoth stopped and did not turn. Facing forward and only forward and his words swept back on the wind. “There is no such thing as magic.”

  Brack smiled. “There is and I've seen it.”

  “You think someone used magic to bring a dragon that was killed two hundred years ago back to life. That's what you think.”

  “Believe what you want. I have no other explanation for it.”

  Juoth wheeled then, his eyes flashing. “There are a thousand. The dragon didn't die. The story you heard is wrong. Your great grandfather didn't kill it at all. It is a different dragon. Pick the one you like. They're all more likely than magic.”

  Brack did not answer then but just looked at him and they two sat in the road. Far off on the wing, a bird called, a low and sorrowful sound that carried to them over endless distance and the bird itself not even visible in the sky. But returning now to these lands in which it lived, the dragon far off and searching elsewhere for its prey. At long last Juoth turned the horse again and kept on down the road and Brack watched and then followed him and beside them the small mountains rose with their stone caverns and the secrets they kept.

  Chapter Eleven

  I

  They took the road on into the evening and about them the cedars rose up to saw the sky and the stones grew to great heights so that the road went through them and it was like riding in canyons of shadow and darkness and the ground littered there with smaller stones as if at some time long ago a stonemason twice the size of any man alive in the world which they inhabited had come and crouched and there inscribed some words or shapes now lost to the wind and rain and age. These small stones the mere chippings of his work. That unfathomable giant a ghost now moving in this place.

  Perhaps the shapes and names carved there of gods and dragons.

  It was in one of these passes that a shadow fell over them. The two stones between which they rode had in millennia past been one, and it had split in a jagged line down the middle at some time unknown. Both sides towering twenty feet above them and four times that long. The road well worn and many travelers having taken this path. Moss and lichen covering these new faces and on the top cedars growing from the very stone itself and their thin roots moving under the moss like veins.

  The horse shied and stumbled as the shadow fell and in that heartbeat Brack knew how they'd ridden themselves into this prison on their own and there was nowhere to run. Dragonfire could fill the slender canyon like a molten tide, the flames rolling over themselves and billowing up to scorch the sky. Men and horses both turned to ash. The smoke of their bodies spinning skyward to mix with the clouds and perhaps later to return them to the fields and dirt and thus to complete the cycle that all men must make.

  Juoth was off his horse faster than could be followed, sliding with barely a movement and bringing the bow up as he fell. The arrow nocked before he touched the ground and drawn as he crouched. Brack did not dismount but swung also the crossbow from the saddle with its bolt already in place and twisted upward to track the beast on the wing.

  They waited and the minutes ground by and nothing came. Neither shadow nor the beast itself. He held the bow aloft on shaking arms and the horse pranced slightly and when he finally put it down he half expected the shadow to return and mock his lack of vigilance, but it did not.

  Juoth turned and looked at him as he pulled himself back atop the horse. His breathing heavy. “Maybe it was just a bird.”

  “If it was I haven't seen one like it before.”

  “There are a lot of things you haven't seen.”

  “There are a lot I have.”

  Sitting then in silence and breathing the world's bones and the predestination etched in them. The time now for flight but standing in that place and waiting. For a man who believes his death is upon him must know and all else falls aside and he will find out or he will die and in doing learn that the fates have cast their lots and he has come up wanting. But he must know and he will always do what he can to know and so they waited to see what would come to them and nothing did.

  For now and in this ringing silence, both of them alive. The shadow of the beast fallen and fled. They were a long time looking at the sky and then finally they put their heels into the horses and went on through that canyon and out the other side and still there was nothing in the sky to see and they rode on. But the feeling remained in his spine for a long time and he rode with the crossbow in his hands and when it got heavy he shifted it and would not put it down.

  After a time the ground began to rise more below them and the road twisted in and ran along the side of a sheer stone cliff. The cracks running upward through the red and gray rock and the marks of the water coming down and at some points ledges where birds sat and looked down and called to them. Along the roadside a flashing of metal and Brack looked to it as they passed and saw an ancient breastplate in the tall grass and above it a man's skull. The lines and cracks in it like the ledges above and all the rest of him gone and Brack could imagine this man trying for reasons that would forever be his own to climb that cliff in his armor and the stone loose and dusted beneath his fingers. Eventually those fingers slipping off and the man's scream as he fell and the shower of stone around him as his body first slid and then dropped free of the wall and he fell in nothingness to his en
d. His broken body food for the wolves that stalked out of the timber at night with their eyes yellow and luminous.

  When they came to the pass where they would move up and through the mountains and into the plain, it was tall around them and a stream ran through the center, moving swiftly with them over the smooth stones. Banks of grass and scrub trees. A dirt path where those who did not want to go in the water went up the side, but they ignored it and walked the horses into the stream and it flowed about their legs with the hair brown and dark and the water breaking cool and swirling around them.

  Juoth stood his horse and turned in the saddle. Looking up at the high walls rising on either side. “You want to get out of it?”

  “I don't see how.”

  “It's like the stone, but I can't see the end.” Nodding in the direction they traveled. The canyon again pinning them on both sides, a beautiful channel for destruction and death.

  “You think it's the fastest?”

  He nodded.

  “All right.”

  They went on, looking again to the sky. But Juoth more than Brack, for Juoth knew dragons and how they hunted and what they would do to prey trapped in a flowing river by stone walls, and Brack knew this dragon and what it wanted and it was leading them and drawing on strings and they were following as they were told. But it would not kill them here for if it was just the kill that it wanted, it could have had it long ago.

  They'd ridden this stream on the dripping horses for just over two hours when they found the dead girl.

  II

  The man was kneeling in the stones at the edge of the stream with the girl's head in his lap and her hair light and soaked and flowing in the river, twisting in the current. He had his head down and he looked up as they came around the bend. His beard thin and dark on his face, his eyes wide, his hands on the girl's arms as they lay limply at her sides. The color gone from all of it. Washed from the world. Her feet in the water and already a dull gray though Brack knew she had not been dead long.

  They drew the horses up and stood them and looked at the man and his jaw worked and he did not say anything. Did not raise his hand to them in greeting or to fend them off. Brack looked at him for a moment and then got down from the horse and went to them.

  There was less blood than there should have been and all he could think was that the river had taken it and with her heart still and dead in her chest that was the end of it. The break jagged along her temple. The rock lying there in the short weeds. He could see the laceration and within it the ripped skin now turning white and even under that the white of her skull where it had broken. There were no other wounds on her body and it had taken her all at once.

  “You do this?” Brack said. His voice quiet, the sword heavy on his back. His feet wide and his arms folded, still a distance of two strides between them.

  The man shook his head and looked back at her and said something and Brack could not tell what it was. His voice was gone. A dull rasp in his throat and nothing more.

  “Look,” Juoth said from atop the horse. Pointing with the gloved hand.

  The other man lay in the weeds up along the bank. His throat cut and the whole front of him soaked in blood and the flesh a deep and sickly red. His hands lay on his chest and were coated in blood as if he'd died trying to hold its flow within his body. He did not have on a shirt nor pants but just his underclothes and they were stained and ruined. There were two more cuts on his face but they had not mattered as his life slipped between his fingers and he fell. This also done quickly for there was not a mark on the man sitting with the woman's head in his lap.

  Brack knew how it had happened and he did not ask and walked forward and knelt by the man. “Did you know him?” he said.

  “No.” His voice still rough but able to be heard at this distance. “Met him down in Canntal. He was selling a horse for food and asked if he could go with us through the pass. Said it was safer that way in case there were thieves. We've been traveling with him now a week, eight days. I don't know.”

  “A week.”

  The man nodded. He had not let go of the girl and he would not.

  Brack looked down at her and could not tell her age. Perhaps once she had been beautiful with her slight build and long hair but now the whiteness stole her body and made her an ancient thing, a crone with two hundred years and a withered form. He looked away again.

  “Your wife?”

  The man shook his head. “My sister.”

  He had not expected that and all at once he thought of Kayhi as she came up to him on the wall, calm and strong and terrified. Telling him of the men and the progress. Kissing her forehead and sending her down to the cities and thinking even then that he shouldn't have done it but not knowing what else to do or the hell it all would become and now it was done.

  “You can ride with us,” he said.

  The man shook his head. “I can't leave her.”

  Brack spoke softly. “We can bury her. If you still want to go through the pass, ride with us.”

  “I won't.”

  “It'll be weeks walking.”

  “I won't bury her.”

  “And what will you do instead?”

  The man looked off down the river the way they were going. Where the land rose up and curved again into the cedars. Moving toward the higher pass where they would go through. “I have to bring her.”

  Brack looked up at Juoth and the other man said nothing. His face unreadable.

  “We can't bring her,” he said.

  The man sat and looked at him. Brack did not see the knife and did not know his thoughts but knew he was thinking of meeting the other man who had been selling his horse. In whatever place that man now inhabited. That other side of life. He let him take the time he needed to run it through and then he stood.

  “All right,” Brack said. “All right.”

  The man looked back at him and his eyes were lost but in them was something moving and it was desperate and frantic and Brack did not like it but he could think of nothing but Kayhi and in things like that there was only the illusion of choice and nothing real.

  III

  They rode with the man behind him and the girl rolled in a blanket and lashed on the horse behind Juoth. It was the only way and they knew it and hated it and rode all the same. The young man looking over at her all the time and saying something to himself again and again and Brack trying not to listen for there were some things he did not want to know.

  The river curved up and then they lost it through the rocks and the road split away and climbed toward a worn peak. Loose stone and shale beneath the horses' hooves and once they got down and walked them, all slipping in the stones, until moss and roots took hold and they could ride again. When they came out on the top of that peak it was not the summit but they could see it from there and they stood the horses for a time in the sun and looked out about them. The mountain now a long thin plain running away in rises and valleys and the river far down below and sparkling in the sun and the forest slipped away and down below a great distance.

  A thin finger of black smoke rose back the way they'd come. Slightly twisted as it moved toward the clouds. Three vultures circled it on the air and hung there, those false birds of prey that were cowards and worse. Brack looked at them and thought of the farmer and his family and could not know and cursed anyway and looked away.

  “It could be anything,” Juoth said.

  “This your first day riding with me?”

  “Could be a barn burning down. A field being cleared. Any damn thing.”

  “Could be.” He spit the words and scowled and thought even then he could smell the smoke and everything in it.

  “Don't make things that aren't there. What we have is enough.”

  “There's a difference between making and knowing.”

  “I know there is.”

  “Well.”

  “Well what?”

  “Well this is the difference. This right here.”

  �
��I don't think it is.”

  They rode down a little way into the valley and made their camp in a copse where two trees had fallen one atop the other, each as high as Brack's waist even lying down, forming a windblock and the wall of the camp. Others had been there in times past and there were the remains of three fires, each older than the last, and who knew how many built atop each other on each spot. The camp was meager and they had little and soon Juoth had one of the fires going again and he was cooking and the young man was taking his dead sister off the horse.

  Brack rose and held her thin body and the man nodded at him and worked the knot loose.

  “She was older than you,” Brack said.

  “I'm no boy.”

  “I didn't say you were.”

  “I'll be twenty in the spring. She'll be twenty-six.”

  Brack noted how he said it and did not say anything. The boy got the knot loose and pulled the rope through itself and cursed and licked his finger where it was shot through with rope splinters and wiped his hand on his pants and pulled the rope again. It came all the way off and he took her by the feet and Brack by the shoulders and they set her on the ground. Near the logs where nothing would come to her in the night without first passing them.

  “What's your name?” Brack said.

  “Varin,” the boy said. Offering nothing for his sister.

  They tied and watered the horses with the bags they'd filled in the river and set them to grazing on the far side of the camp and Brack looked once to see if the smoke was still rising and it was too dark to tell and this camp too low. All about the trees stretching and the sun on the far side of the mountain and everything here in shadow. In this hollow where they hid like animals from all the world offered.

  Juoth had shot a rabbit with his bow and he had it on a spit over the fire and they sat and watched it while it cooked. The fat snapping as it hissed in the flames. Brack closed his eyes and opened them again. When it was done Juoth took it down and cut it into pieces and threw two to each of them and they ate and it was too hot and very good.