The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  “About the boy.”

  “Yes. Look what he's doing.”

  “I know what he's doing.”

  “Well.”

  “You do too.” Brack looked up. He could hear the rabbit cooking. “You know what's happening to him and you can act like you don't and that won't change it. That won't change any of it.”

  Juoth did not answer. After a while the rabbit was cooked and they took it off the spit and ate it with their hands. There were ten pieces and when they'd had enough Brack took the ones that were left over to the boy and held them out to him. He did not take them, but did look at Brack in the same way that he'd been looking at the trail. When he'd held them for long enough Brack took the boy's hand and put the two pieces into it and folded his fingers closed over them and then the boy held them. He went back and sat by the fire and when he looked back again a few minutes later the boy was eating the rabbit, pulling it apart with his teeth, ripping each piece off and holding it up to the moonlight and nodding and then eating it. One and then the next and then the next.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I

  She sat in that pestilent darkness and leaned her head back against stone both cold and wet and watched him come to her in the shadows. He moved like a thing very long imprisoned, picking his way with a strict care and silence. Looking always at the door and stopping to listen and on his face endlessly the hint of a smile, as if he possessed some knowledge the rest of the world did not but which it craved at every turn. He came through that gloom and sat next to her and for a long time said nothing and then said:

  “It's time.”

  She held a hand up, the chains rattling. Black and rusted and unbreakable. She had tried many times when she first arrived and then given up and now they were a part of her the way that the changing of the guard marked time. Her world and all that it contained.

  He nodded. “You're ready to cut them?”

  “I won't have a week.”

  “I know.”

  He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes and when he closed them he looked very old and she became all at once afraid that he would die. But then he opened them again and that light was still in them and he said: “I'm a young man, you know. A—”

  And then he stopped and his mouth hung open for a moment as if he had forgotten it and he blinked twice and then looked at her and turned his head to the side and closed his mouth. Looking very calm, as if expecting nothing, as if not knowing that he had just been speaking. He nodded once and looked away across the room.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Mountains fall,” he said.

  She'd forgotten how it made her feel and it was as if her vertebrae were all ice. A sudden and cold feeling as it moved in spine and nerve and bone. She swallowed hard and was very aware of her own chains and that she could not run and she watched him carefully.

  “Mountains fall and worlds turn,” he said. “I've told you with the young goat and you've not listened. But they fall as they fall as they fall.”

  Now he looked at her and he was gone. There was no other word for it. In his eyes was another man or the lack of a man altogether. A great and hollow emptiness where once he had been. That light of youth in old eyes replaced by nothing and more of the same. She did not know if he saw her or not or if it was even to her that he spoke.

  Then he reached over calmly and said: “Have you heard?”

  She moved to the side just slightly and he did not follow. His hand extended as if wanting something. Asking perhaps for coins in the drizzling rain, a vagrant under a bridge. A child perhaps in need of food. The fingers slightly bent and white at the ends and it was then that she saw he was barely breathing. His chest moving like that of a man already looking into death's realm and seeing him there in his robes and steadying himself for that meeting.

  “The mountains fall,” he said. “They always fall.”

  She did not speak and he looked over at her for a long time and then finally he lowered his head to his chest and he slept. His breath still shallow but in sleep at least in constant time and growing stronger. She wanted to wake him and did not and just watched him sleep. Hearing the guards changing in the hall and not knowing what she would do were they to come in and find him there.

  When he opened his eyes again, they had changed back. He blinked as he had before and looked at her.

  “It's time,” he said.

  “What's happened to you?” she said.

  He looked at her a long moment and she could see tears in his eyes. There contained and pooling, but also something else. A deep-rooted fear like someone standing on a snow bridge over a great crevasse and understanding only at some vast midpoint that it was snow and ice and not stone and suddenly feeling the distance below them in a different way as from the bottom that bridge crumbled and the burning sun rose over the mountains.

  “I don't know,” he said. “I don't remember.” He raised a hand, touched his face. His temple. “But I know that it's time. I know it.”

  “Time for what?”

  He motioned to the chains. “Don't wait. You have enough time but you must do it now and you must run. For what is coming is coming. I know it. You must run.”

  She leaned forward, curiosity pushing away the fear. This broken man, his mind splintered and cracked, within him in pieces. First one and then the other and maybe more. “What's coming?”

  “I don't know,” he said again. “But I know you have to do it now or it's going to be too late. You have to believe me.”

  She looked toward the door. The silent guards beyond. Impossible to know when they would come and when they would not. Days or hours or minutes.

  He reached up and took her chin in his fingers. The flesh thin and drawn and very cold. Turned her head toward him where he was crying and his face tracked with it. Rivers in the mud of years upon his skin. “Please,” he said. “Mountains fall and worlds turn.”

  II

  She set to the chains and the file was very small and it was very slow. In the first hour just working to make a small track in the link where the file would follow. The blade moving first to one side and then the other. In the end she had to make small, slow movements, always drawing the file toward herself and watching the line carefully. Over and over on that black metal.

  And then it began to bite. Slowly at first, but she could feel it catch. The resistance on both sides. The file would no longer jump the line and she could move first backward and then forward. Doubling her speed. The movement still so slow that she could not see the work, but each time the groove just a little deeper, a little closer.

  He watched her work and muttered to himself. First about the worlds and mountains. Then leaning against the wall in silence. Returning to ask her how it was coming and to tell her it was time. Then walking away into the shadows and muttering again things she could not make out and coming back and sitting beside her. At times alarmed and at others unconcerned.

  Her progress in that darkness like trying to dig a grave without any tools. Clawing dirt and stone with broken fingernails. Painful in its slowness.

  But progress all the same.

  “How do you know?” she asked him at one point. The groove now deep and clear.

  “I can see it.”

  “What can you see?”

  He did not answer. She glanced at him and could see that he was himself, but he did not want to answer. She stopped filing and he looked very quickly at her and then shook his head.

  “Tell me or I'll stop.”

  “There are many futures,” he said. “I can see them all. There is one where you don't cut them and what follows is a horror like we've never known. There is another where you cut them and you look back for me and you are found and then it returns to the first. And there is still another where you run and then I can't see you. But in this one you are gone and this is the one that must be.”

  She could not speak. She had known he would say something she would not believ
e but she had not thought it would be that. “You're a seer.”

  He shook again that old and frail head. “No, I am just a man. I don't know how I see it. But I saw it before they brought you here and I knew I had to wait and when you came you were the same as what I saw.” Waving a hand about them. “This time, when you can cut them without being found. The ladder I was to make, the bars I had to remove. You climbing them and going up through the window and running.”

  “You see all of that?”

  “As if it already was. I see it the way you remember yesterday. Like it happened, but I know it did not. A memory that has yet to be created.”

  “How?”

  “I don't know,” he said. “That's what I don't remember. All I remember is being here and waiting for you. Helping you.” He smiled and it was sad and thin. “And now you're here and I've done what I've always known I would do.”

  She could find no words for that and she set back to work and the link grew thinner. She would need to cut first one side and then the other. Unless she could bend the link open when the first side was cut, but she did not think she could. The file would have to be sharp enough. Then she could cut the other hand.

  She knew if she asked him he would tell her it was sharp enough. This man who had watched her cut that link already.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  He shrugged those thinbone shoulders and raised a hand. “My memories of before were lost. Maybe they're traded. I don't remember being anywhere else.”

  “Ever?”

  “No.”

  She stopped then but not to make him talk. Just to look at him. Her own imprisonment so short compared to this man who knew nothing else and had been here in that sense all his life. She did not know if he was telling the truth about what he saw for the future but she knew he had helped her and there was little else to bet on. And looking at him there in the jail she knew he was not lying about what he remembered, or at least did not know that he was.

  And that had to be enough.

  She worked then and forgot the time. Everything was just the movement of the file. Back and forth endlessly and each stroke seeming to accomplish nothing, but the cut in the link growing deeper all the time. She heard the guards often and they never came in and he did not even glance toward the door when they passed, so sure was he that they would not.

  III

  She began to climb and she felt as if she were being born anew, the violence and struggle to emerge into air and life. Each handhold loose with grime and dust. Slipping once the first time and falling back to the ground from only the third step and all the air out of her and lying there by her husband's bones and the old man standing over her and saying nothing but blinking rapidly and waiting for her to recover.

  And then she stood and climbed again. For it was the only way and the thing she must do.

  Now it was not only for herself. It was for the people who still thought she led them. Her people. She could die falling from the top of this ladder or squeezing through the small gap in the bars or running down the street to find archers on the walls. But she must do it and she would risk that for at least in death no one could blame her for her failure.

  And she could not blame herself.

  For how many would die if her son took them to war? The men and boys would die in the fields, lying in mud made from dirt and their own blood. War was glorious when the army stood flashing in the sun and marched out in a long and invincible column, but it became its true self when men were cut down by others they hadn't seen, the battle raging. Lying in the fields and gasping for breath that would not come, staggering with a cut throat and a shower of blood no one could quell, calling out for lovers or mothers as they tried to hold their slick entrails in with a hand and could not.

  The rest would die in the villages. Run under by advancing armies that took food, clothing, women. Leaving the towns stripped bare. Other villages burned as examples or because they harbored soldiers. Still others destroyed as battles swarmed over them, men and horses and a torrent of bloodshed to leave only broken buildings and shattered bodies behind.

  Her people would suffer, and they would die. In greater numbers than she could count. To be written out in the next history by the victors, a forgotten and faceless multitude of the dead.

  And so she climbed. For them, she climbed.

  He watched her from below and did not speak. She knew somewhere within her that he would be killed and she thought he knew it also and so she'd told him of the war. He had not asked nor responded, but she wanted him to know. It made it easier to think he was risking his life for the people and not for her alone. She clung to that, not knowing if it was true or not.

  Not knowing exactly who it was that needed to believe.

  She'd asked him to come and he'd said nothing. Asked again into the silence. But she knew he had not seen himself in that future and so he already knew he would not come and there was little more to it for a man who remembered what he had yet to do.

  Halfway up she could really start to see the light. Early morning in the city. The shadows moving in that light. People walking down the dirt road to the stores, a wagon going to the market. Men and women calling out. The city waking up, but not yet fully awake. The sun on the horizon in a bold orange as it rose.

  She climbed for that light. Every step closer, every handhold. Slipping a second time and feeling it in her stomach and holding on to press herself against the stone. Breathing very hard. In a moment the feeling passed and she placed her hand carefully and surely and moved up the wall. Alive again and unwilling to look below.

  And then she was at the bars. They were so far away and then came up all at once and she wrapped her fingers around those which were left, the three in the center torn away, and she held to them and felt more secure than at any time during the ascent. The metal solid and firm in the stone. She pulled her face close and leaned forward to that gap and could not tell if she would fit or not and looked out.

  The alley cast in shadow. Empty and desolate now the road. She looked long down to her left and a man was walking around the far corner with something in his arms. The other way was nothing at all, the road running along below the wall, curving away and disappearing. She looked at it and could hear nothing and looked back down finally at the old man below her. He just stood in silence and did not pull his eyes from her. She steeled herself and looked back to check the empty road again and then began to pull herself through the bars.

  She thought that someone would come and no one did. The bars tight on both sides of her. Once for a moment she was stuck in that metal claw and then she thought of her husband below and pushed and then she was free. Lying in the dirt of the road and gasping and the sweat running down the back of her neck and it felt like nothing else. Looking down the road and seeing no walls. The chains still hanging from her wrists shortened and shattered.

  And then all at once she was terrified. For this freedom she'd dreamed of she now held and at any moment someone would call out and it would fall apart around her and be swept away. Precious and fragile and maybe more precious for that fragility. She looked back at the hole between the bars and thought about what he had said and then turned and ran in that rising sun, her bare feet in the swirling dust, running as the morning light washed out the shadow of the wall.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I

  The boy woke the next morning and seemed himself and they packed what little they had on the horses and Juoth rode out first into the road with that road falling away below him into the sweeping plains and he trotted his horse sideways and stood it in the road and looked down on that world as it stretched. Brack still pulling the boy up behind him and looking at the dead girl lashed and rolled in her blanket on the other horse. Hauling his mount about by the reins and glancing once more at the camp where they'd left only ash and the grease from the rabbit dried in that ash and the dust from the road rising about them in the early morning sun as the horses pr
anced.

  He rode up to where Juoth waited and looked ahead. It was a long fall through timber and rock and open grass into a valley deep below. The range ran out to both sides of them and a point pushing forward to the west where he could see the thick cedar forest rising up the slope and giving way in that valley to grass alone. He thought he saw a long way down a stone bridge over a gorge but there the trees were thick. Rising on the far side the last hill and much shorter and just glimpsed beyond it—a view they would lose as they rode down—the open and yawning yellow plains.

  Above the sky nearly white as if all color had bled from it. An empty firmament without bird or cloud or dragon. He could see Juoth looking with his hand on the bow and as always he knew the dragon's heart and where it would be and so he only looked as he must and knew instantly that the emptiness confirmed that knowledge which he already had. It would not kill them here and yet death clung all about them and he could feel it in his clothes and hair and skin.

  The dead girl lashed to the horse.

  They rode down in that rising dust and the day began to warm as they went and it was as always farther in life than it had appeared. The slope not heavy but endless and the horses trotting and soon breathing hard and the sun coming up above the range to the right and baking the world. He had not worn his furs again and was glad for it and he began to sweat all the same and the boy also.

  They passed halfway down the remains of a mill. This abandoned for many years. A ramshackle house with the roof fallen in and a long storage barn now little more than posts and trusses standing and in the water the old wheel still turning in the current of a small stream. Pieces of the wheel missing and it no longer driving anything but turning all the same. Spinning in revolutions without end. How long it had done so or how many revolutions it had made Brack knew not and thought that no man could know and there was something in that.

  He had never seen it in another time but he could imagine what it had been. Everything along this forgotten road now abandoned where once men and horses and cattle and wagons had moved. Women and children also and calling out to one another in the warm sun. Sheep perhaps being driven, carts full of goods. This road the heartblood of some world and seeming to all who used it as if it had always existed and always would and now the lie put to that for few men knew its path and fewer used it.