The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  They were in the road now and many others as well and lights on in the buildings. She put her head down and ran hard across the roof and tried to gauge the distance to the lower one and almost did and landed hard on it. Pain flaring through her ankle. She didn't know if they'd seen the way she ran or if they were still looking at the roof, but she knew they'd heard that and she rolled down to the edge and jumped. Below her the rocky falling shoreline running down to the river and there the dock and the road going to it.

  She landed in the shrubs and rocks and when she got up her forearm was numb and she stumbled down toward the river and then he was on her. She heard him before she felt him and she tried to stop and he hit her in the small of the back with his shoulder. Driving them both to the ground. She felt his hand coming up and she grabbed it both with the hand she could feel and the one she could not and she brought her head down to it and bit into the flesh at the base of his thumb. The taste of blood and salt and sweat and the man screaming. The knife falling from his hand.

  Twisting over she threw him aside and pushed herself away, scrabbling in the dirt and gravel. He rolled and came up hunched and holding his hand. She looked for the knife and did not see it and looked back. In that moment all still and quiet and a decision before her that must be made instantly and the whole world turning on it. Or sitting perhaps on that driven axis and waiting to see which way it would turn.

  The river flowing blackly behind her and the forested bank beyond. The man on his knees with his bloody hand and him not looking for the knife but just reaching to his belt to draw his sword.

  The world waiting.

  She threw herself at him. Rising and stumbling and then pushing twice hard in the sliding gravel with her feet. Just those two chopping steps for force and lowering her shoulder.

  She hit him hard in the jaw as he looked up, the sword free and in his hand. The bone splintering under her shoulder and the cracking as his teeth came together and a great guttural sound from him that was neither scream nor cry but something deeper and more real than either. The pain flaring and all the air going out of him and the noise involuntary in his torment.

  They both went over in the dirt and she rolled to her feet with her shoulder screaming its own and his eyes were nothing but white. Both legs bent under him and the sword in the dirt at his side. A loose-wrapped black hilt and rusted blade.

  She picked it up and turned and ran back up the alley to the street. There were people on the porches and she heard the horse and knew he was coming and what that meant. The crossbow must already be in his hands and if there was any distance when he saw her it would be no fight at all and so she must erase that distance now before she could see it and so she ran. Her body a machine thrust into this primal combat that would pay later but that now responded as it must and wrenched on.

  Leaping up to a wooden porch running the length of the building. The wood hollow and loud under her feet. People watching her and others the road where he was coming. She listened for the horse and adjusted her gait just slightly, her eyes on the corner. He was rounding it tightly and fast and she stepped up onto the bench at the end of the porch and then pushed hard with one foot off the railing and threw herself into the air as the horse came around the corner.

  She hit him in the side with her full body and he did not make a sound. At the last moment starting to turn toward her with the bow but it was too late and she knew it. They went over in a tangle of limbs and the horse stumbling back and she ran that rusted sword up to his neck as they fell. Not feeling it bite and pushing and then they hit the ground with her on top and that was what it took. Her body slamming into the blunted back edge of that blade and it pivoting through the side of his neck and both of them awash in blood.

  She stood after a moment, trembling and covered in the hot blood. Her fingers tingling and not feeling like her own. All about the townspeople staring at her and everything very quiet.

  Without a word she walked over to the man lying unconscious with his eyes rolled back and she put the sword through his neck until it stuck into that packed dirt of the road below. The blood boiling again and a thundering sound in her head.

  She did not look at the people watching her and she turned and walked in that roaring silence to the river.

  Chapter Twenty

  I

  They walked through the desolation and the dead. This city of absolute ruin. The white and gray stones of the walls torn and blackened. The bodies between them lying in all states, some half burned, others rent as if by a great sword too large for any but a god to wield. In other places just pieces of the dead as they'd been torn limb from limb and all those parts scattered.

  The dragon had descended on this place and brought down that thin veil between this world and hell and for perhaps an hour hell had reigned.

  They had fought, Brack knew, for there were soldiers and a scattering of weapons. Archers with broken bows. Arrows littering the ground, a sword with the blade snapped cleanly in the middle, the handle of an ax with the head torn off. Some of them had stood and fought and others had run and then turned to fight as it fell upon them and still others had just run and now lay dead with the marks of those claws in their backs.

  In the end they were all the same and they were all dead. For that was how a dragon left a place when it came in fury on the wing and desired to kill. He'd seen ranks of men told for days they could kill it and aligned perfectly and armed with blades said to be made specifically for dragonflesh and he'd seen them all swept aside in the beast's first pass. He'd seen men rise up in desperation with nothing else but stones and field tools in their hands and he'd seen them torn apart.

  It did not make a difference. It never did and it certainly had not here.

  A main cobblestone road ran through the city from one wall to the other and it was that road that they took. The gate at the far end made of iron, lying off its hinges. Canted to the side and with enough room to let them pass under the wall. A deceptive distance that they could see as they walked but which would take them an hour to reach.

  “How do you know?” Juoth said. His voice cracked and loud in this forsaken place.

  “Look,” Brack said.

  Juoth was quiet a moment. “You can know you haven't found her. But you can't know she's not here.”

  Brack looked at him grimly, then nodded. “It's not hope, if that's what you think. I'm not that much of a fool. To say she's not here simply because she's dead and I can't face it. If she were I'd be looking for her body.”

  “I didn't mean that.”

  “You did mean it and you were right to.” Brack pointed ahead, over the wall. “But look there.”

  Beyond the wall there stood a black tower of smoke, thick and condensed like a pillar. Swirling straight up into the sky and looking as if it could pierce the clouds. A writhing, living thing. Or very nearly.

  Juoth stopped, and the girl beside him. Brack did not and when Juoth spoke his voice was faint. “Where is it?”

  Brack stopped then and turned. Looking first at Juoth and then locking eyes with the girl. Something in them he had not seen before, a flickering as she watched him. This mute girl with fair hair who had been dead in that river.

  “Darish-Noth,” he said softly. “The dragon is at Darish-Noth. And that's how I know she's not here. Because he's tormenting me with her. He wouldn't just kill her and leave her like this.” He pointed with his sword at the looming tower of smoke. “That's for me. Telling me where he is and where she is and what will happen to her. Just like this entire city.”

  The girl began walking forward first, still silent. Stepping in bare feet among the rubble and shards. Juoth watched for a moment and then followed her, trotting quickly and passing her. Stopping right by Brack and hissing:

  “Then you think it's a trap.”

  Brack smiled. “Not precisely. But yes. After a fashion.”

  “And you're going to go anyway?”

  Brack was quiet. Then he nodded. The girl ha
d come up and stood looking at him and he met her eyes and had to look away for what was in them.

  “Yes,” he said. “I'm tired of being hunted. If it wants to hunt and it wants to use my sister to taunt and bait me, then so be it. I'll go and it will find out exactly what type of prey it has drawn out.”

  They went on and the pillar of smoke seemed to grow before them. Brack did not watch the sky but knew the dragon must sense them. Perhaps had known they were in the field while they slept. And it waited for them, content in this knowledge.

  It was a foolish way to kill, he thought. For there had been many other times when the kills would have been easier and faster. Going back to the keep in the burning yards and billowing clouds of steam as snow and ice a hundred years old melted. Or in the road as they went up from the farmer's house. Or it could have faced him in the ice field, could have come to that quartered horse as an equal combatant and brought on what end would be.

  A thousand more besides.

  But he had always felt that men longed to be dragons for what dragons were and what they could be, this beast the realization of all that men craved. And in that also a spiteful arrogance, found likewise in so many men. As it had chosen to kill those around him and to burn cities and to drag him on toward Kayhi so that it could kill her in front of him.

  Perhaps in this a deep-seated knowledge of the response such a thing would elicit, forcing him into sleeplessness and rage and waiting for him to make a mistake because of it. For a weary hunter seeing his life torn apart in front of him would not hunt the way he needed to hunt to kill a dragon. Instead clumsy and reckless. He'd seen others die this way and would see more do so. As all emotions and thoughts fell aside but anger and pain and very quickly those things became the hunter's undoing.

  But he did not think so. He thought this was something else entirely, a vile torment being wrought for its own sake. To torture him and nothing more.

  And he would not let himself think of what that must mean as he walked on toward that second pillar of smoke and the beast hulking at its base, breathing into it the heat of both life and destruction and waiting with black wings to shred the air and fall on him in fang and fire, a raging molten heart beating in its chest and driving it to this final stand.

  II

  They camped that night in the middle of the plain and still the dragon waited. Something had shifted within him and Brack felt no compulsion to run or push himself on. He knew now what this was. If it was going to kill her before he got there then she was dead already. But it would wait for this was the game that it played and there was no timeline within it. Their meeting would arrive when it did and be resolved how it would and they were both now marching to that end.

  The camp was simple and they sat on the ground about their fire. The bedrolls long lost. The girl looking at them in endless silence but something within her still changing. Juoth watching in the firelight the distant city. The pillar of smoke now lost to the night but the fire burning bright at its base. The dragon fueling it and perhaps crouching in that same night and looking out long across the plain to their own small fire flickering in the stillness.

  There was a peacefulness to it and he'd felt it before battle and other times besides. Always the next day drowned in blood and chaos. But this was as simple as anything could be.

  For when a man thought he would die in the morning only then was his mind free of all that which usually enslaved it, all thoughts of what life held or what he must do to build toward some imagined end that he had determined he wanted or been told he wanted and all of life then a struggle to obtain it. Wondering all the time if the obtainment would be bitter when it was not what he thought it would be.

  But with death standing in the doorframe all of that fell away and he was no longer blind nor bound and an immense weight was lifted. He'd seen men smile on the eve of battle who had never smiled in their lives and the next day they were run through or hacked into pieces and he felt they'd known that night before what would happen and that was why they smiled.

  He looked at the girl. She was holding her hair over one shoulder in her hands and turning it with her fingers and looking at it curiously as if close to remembering something. Some way of tying it, perhaps.

  “What's your name?” he said.

  She looked at him and she blinked and said nothing. He met her eyes at first and felt there was the faintest trace of a smile or some bemusement on her lips and then he looked away. When he looked back she was folding her hair again and twisting it about her fingers.

  “I thought you'd take seeing her differently,” Juoth said.

  Brack smiled softly and moved a log on the fire. Sparks rising in the night air. “Think I'd run screaming? Try to put an arrow in her?”

  “Maybe that's too far. But you know what I mean.” He motioned to the side at her with his head like some paralytic. “This girl was dead.”

  “I know she was.”

  “And now she's not.”

  “And now she's not.”

  Juoth scowled. “That's just what it is where you come from?”

  “You told me you don't believe in magic. Said there's no such thing.”

  “I know what I said.” The scowl deepening, then fading into something like resignation. “But that's not it. You think I'm a fool?”

  “I know you're not a fool.”

  “That so.”

  “And that's why you believe in it. You saw the boy, now this girl. You know I'm not a liar and I told you that dragon died two hundred years ago. Yet it's also alive.”

  Juoth was silent.

  “I'll tell you what I think if you want to hear it.”

  “I'll hear it.”

  “You don't want to believe in it,” Brack said. “So you try not to. You're not alone in that. All men do it. I met a man didn't want to believe in the plague and told me it wasn't real and it wasn't coming on the ships. But I saw the way he watched the harbor. Even met some who told me there was no such thing as dragons, despite the dragonskulls decorating the walls of the Ringed City. It always comes back to power.”

  “In what way?”

  “A reduction. A man is nothing in the face of a plague, a dragon.” He met Juoth's eyes. “Of magic. There is nothing we want more than that control and having a say in our lives and making them what we want them to be. Wars have been fought over it too many times to number. But against some things there is no solution and it's then that men refuse to believe. Because believing in something that takes that power and control away, and against which one cannot stand, well, that's enough to break a man.”

  “You think I don't want to be broken.”

  “If you do, you'll be the first person I've met who did. No one does. Me, you, her.”

  “So I'm the liar, then. Is that all this is?”

  “I think you said what you wanted to believe.” He leaned in, keeping his face calm. “But you always believed what was real. No matter what you said. Because you're not a fool.”

  Juoth sat back and Brack watched him. For a while nothing on his face but many things working in his eyes. The shadows of those things within. Then finally he smiled and said:

  “You're a son of a bitch, you know that? Never met a man who told me something, then I told him he was lying, then he told me I was lying about the lying and why I was doing it. Never met a man who'd do that in my life.”

  Brack said nothing but grinned also as he turned again the log in the fire. They sat then in the silence for a time and it started to burn down and he didn't put anything else on it. The dragon was close enough that there would be no wolves. They would sleep and then rise and finally they would do what they'd been brought here to do. Whether it was what he thought they'd come to do or what the dragon thought they were there to do – to die – they would know soon enough.

  III

  He could see its shape in the twisting ruin of that spired city before the others, his eyes bred for this so that he and the dragon could watch each other acros
s the distance when other men would walk unknowingly to their deaths. It sat on the shattered pinnacle of a short tower, the stones clutched in those talons that cut it as if made from diamond, the other towers rising around it like some thin and mangled forest of stone. Its black wings folded against its back. Before it rising with each breath a simmering glow and embers sweeping upward. He felt that he could see the scar around its neck where the head had once been cut from the body but he did not know if he saw it or if he only knew it was there. Either one the same in the end.

  Juoth was watching him watch it. Glancing cautiously and his hand on the hilt of his sword, trying to look at Brack when he would not be caught and failing. He couldn't see it but he could see Brack's eyes and that was enough.

  The girl walked with them in silence. Her gait easier now, he thought, but still a shell stripped of what had been within. Perhaps being filled from some unknown well inside herself or perhaps not.

  Perhaps he had carried this dead girl to the field merely for her to die again. This time in flame and writhing agony. Would she scream if it came to that, or would she die mute with her mouth agape as the flesh melted from her bones? Was it that torment that would bring her back fully, if only for a moment, so that it could be stripped away again? He knew much of the world and fate and cruelty, but he did not know that.

  Juoth walked closer to him and turned his eyes to the city. “What if it comes now?”

  “It won't.”

  “It could kill us in the field.”

  “I'm telling you it won't.”

  “We're too exposed.”

  He looked over. “Do you think that matters? You just walked through a city burned to the ground. Not two stones left standing. Everyone dead and scattered.”

  Juoth was silent.

  “But it won't,” Brack said. “Because it wants me to see her as it kills her.”