The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

“Your sister.”

  “It could have killed us a hundred times if it just wanted to kill us. This is the point. This is what it wants, and it won't strip itself of that by killing us in the field an hour from the city.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Always with the plans.”

  “So you don't.”

  Brack was quiet. He had been turning one in his head and he did not know if it would work but he did not know what else he had. “Not a lot of use for plans when you hunt dragons. They always last for about two breaths and then the dragon does something to ruin it and if your plan was all you had, you die.”

  “Better two breaths than none at all.”

  “Would you just be quiet for once?”

  “You think I'm wrong?”

  “Just for one damned minute.”

  The bodies were scattered at first. Blackened bones and bent armor and missing limbs. Two or three lying together, one by itself. Part of a body that you couldn't tell which part. A sheath of arrows dropped and scattered in flight. The dead ranks slowly swelling all around them until it was men piled on men and women and horses and carts and everything burned. The wagons splintered and destroyed and the horses gutted and many of the men killed with talon or teeth before the fire, but all burned eventually and lying in the mud.

  In the earth long furrows where it had come down with its claws. Sweeping to the side and dragging them. Another curving line where its tail had swung and torn the soil and risen and then crashed down and trenched out an area the size of a horse. This cavity now filled with blood and bone. The ground about littered with swords and axes and spears and all that men carried so often to their own deaths.

  The kings of old had believed you took what you were buried with into the next life and they built huge tombs filled with gold and jewels and young girls entombed to die with them. If there was an afterlife and you took what you had with you when you died, he thought, it was a whole world filled with shattered swords and rent armor and scorched earth.

  It all began to thin out after a time and then they left the dead in their wake. The second city of the plain rising up before them. This one a city of dark stone and sweeping walls and spires slender and soaring. Flags had once flapped on the tops of those towers but the dragon had torn them down. The iron gates lay twisted before the walls. Around the top of that wall and below the battlements an endless line of proud and intricately carved men at arms and gargoyles with their twisted bodies and horses rallied for war. All in darker stone even than the walls and these ancient carvings still intact though they had not preserved those inside.

  She's the only one, he thought. She's the only one in there.

  He stopped then with the city three hundred yards before them and slowly the dragon rose and showed itself. Stretching with exaggerated sloth and arching its back, the black tail moving serpentine in the air below the tower, curling about like something else entire and alive in that air. A ball on the end cracked and harder than stone. The scales were black and the underbelly as well and its face slender and flaring out near the forehead. Those eye sockets set and burning now with the hatred it carried within it, the light flickering off the horned forehead, the spikes running up over the crown of that head and down its back.

  That dead circle clear now about the neck. Free of scale and spike, just twisted and angry flesh, hideous and mutated. The dragon for all its horror and vileness holding a strange sort of beauty, but that scar a wretched and ugly reminder of what it truly was.

  “Let me go alone,” Brack said. “Stay with her.” Not taking his eyes of off the beast as it opened the great canopy of its wings into the air.

  “Tell me something.”

  “This isn't the time.”

  “Why is it you?” Juoth said. “Why is it you that it wants? Your family that it's killing?”

  Brack drew in a breath and he could taste the smoke and sulfur and he knew it well and felt all the world was in that breath. Holding it burning in his lungs. For there was nothing else and had been nothing else and in between just times waiting until this again was the world. All that lay before him and all that he was.

  “It's not just killing my family,” he said at last. “It's killing my children. One and then the next until there are none left.” A burning in his eyes that was not the smoke, a twist of his lip. “Kayhi is the only one I can save and if I can't then there's nothing else for me. And it knows that.”

  It was deathly silent. A high wind whipping above the plain and in the spires and pulling at the edges of the dragon's wings. It felt as if there was heat lightning in the air and all about and every hair on his body standing on edge.

  “My great grandfather didn't slay that dragon two hundred years ago.” He reached back over his shoulder and drew his sword in one smooth motion, the blade ringing on metal and flashing in the air. Never taking his eyes from the beast now standing and waiting for him to come. That twisted and mangled scar about its neck where the head had been severed. “I did.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I

  She stood on the cliff edge and all below her a forest of deep green and a river cutting through it and everything so far away there was no way to descend. This cliff of sheer rock falling back to the forest. Below her an eagle gliding beside the shelves of gray stone. She thought she could hear the river a long way off but it could have been something else. Beneath her feet the tangled roots of a tree standing against this drop with those roots ancient and penetrating into cracks in the stone, into thin dirt and moss. An improbable place as it arched itself out over the nothingness but a tree older than her and she did not know if it would grow this way for all time or if it was only standing until that inevitable day when the roots gave one after another like old ropes lashing a ship in a storm and the whole thing fell with a terrible slowness to tumble end over end until it was lost from view.

  It had been two days in the forest and she was very hungry. She'd followed the river from the town and no one had pursued her with the dead bodies in the street but she knew she'd underestimated him. The first time running she'd felt stupidly invincible after not seeing her pursuit and spending one night in the forest and it'd taken him almost no time at all to track her down. Without luck on her side she would already be dead or chained again in the pit.

  Too long, she thought. It had been too long since she'd done this. She'd forgotten what a king was. Even a waste of a king had the power of the kingdom at his fingertips and commanded men far better than him and in that a sort of omnipotence.

  She did not know where she was. The plan had been Erihon but plans were made to be cast aside and so it was. She had thought for the first day that this was the way to go and now knew that it was not and needed just to find anything at all. A town or a crossing or anything. Without which she would starve in this wilderness and then they would never find her.

  She smiled. How long would he live if that happened, looking always over his shoulder? Seeing her in the shadows, waiting for her to rise against him. Knowing he hadn't caught her and fearing always that each meal was poisoned, each messenger an assassin, each banner raised against him her final arrival with an army at her back.

  When really her bones rotted and turned green with mildew as the forest ate her body. All returning to what it had been.

  A ghost truly in her haunting.

  She crouched and looked out over that land and she thought far off she saw smoke, but she couldn't be sure. Perhaps a town or perhaps nothing but a fire, raging until it burned itself out. But it was below the cliff and she knew she needed to forget that and turn and follow it but even then she did not know where to turn. What lay before her. Walking as a blind woman with neither dog nor stick and hoping in that darkness to stumble upon that which would save her.

  For she didn't want to be a ghost. She didn't want to haunt him in some abstract fashion that drove him mad. She wanted that madness to come from what the world really was for him, with her pacing an
d rising from those shadows. She wanted it vested in the truth. At that last moment when his fear tore him apart she wanted it to become real as she came down on that city and dragged him into the streets before all so that they'd know what happened to those who stole the throne.

  Your boy, something deep within her whispered. He's still your boy.

  She closed her eyes and the roots beneath her feet felt like her husband's bones, scattered in that pit where his labored breath had stopped and the silence had been horrible and complete and she'd known she was screaming but could not hear herself.

  No, she did not want to be a ghost. For it was far better to haunt him like a demon, a twisted black shape in the night, running its talons along the stones of the hallway as it walked to the door and hunched outside, a curved black blade in hand, ready to right the scales of the world. For those scales were weighted with nothing but death and only death could put them even again.

  Your boy, that voice said.

  Faint and drifting and unreal.

  Your boy.

  She could hear it but she could feel that she was losing it. Like something once known but now not hard enough for what the world had become and slowly within her everything cracking and breaking and perhaps all that was real and true eventually lost to these ravaging fires that tore like a storm at her soul and consumed all that was and against which nothing could stand. Perhaps the foundations of men and women and the very world alike and all destined in the end for the same madness.

  II

  She followed all day and the next the top of the cliff. Always with the fall below her to remind her what she was. She caught a rabbit in a snare and ate it and tore roots from the earth. Eating leaves that she could not remember if they were poisonous or not but did not think so. Just one at first and then two hours later when she was still alive the rest.

  The fire still burned in the woods and never changed and she knew it wasn't one fire, but many. The smoke of chimneys and a town and a mill and what all else they'd built there in the forest. She could not descend this long cliff but she could follow it and she looked always for the way down. It was a small hope but she needed something and she clung to it.

  It was on the third day that she knew she was being followed. They were careful but she had been stalked many times and she could sense it above all else. A deep coldness within her. She had been asleep and she woke suddenly and she could hear them. She thought there were three but it could have been more. She was huddled in the hollow of a tree and they could not find her and she listened to them walking in the light rain and trying to be dead silent so that they'd be on her before she heard them.

  She did not breathe and it was an eternity. They passed her and worked their way on, but soon she heard them slowing and understood what they were. More than just soldiers walking in the woods on blind hope. They had lost the trail and knew what the absence meant and they began to circle back.

  They did not find her that night. She moved her position and was careful not to leave a trail and lay in the branches of a sprawling tree looking down at where she had been in the hollow. She thought once that a dark shape moved through between her and that place but she could not be sure. It was only there for a moment in shadow and then gone. A rainslicked cloak. A flash as lightning played in the clouds, features harsh and cold. Then nothing.

  She left that morning before the sun and went down a thin trail along the face of the cliff. Climbing down until the rock rose ten meters over her head. The stone walkway just as wide as both of her feet together. Clinging to the edge with dirt and small stones skittering and falling and disappearing into the darkness. Below that horrible emptiness. But she could see ahead of her a small open area that protruded out into the air like some natural balcony and she thought it was the edge of a cave.

  Perhaps this trail not as natural as it appeared, but carved by those ancient and long dead. Or perhaps those dead ones had just found it and used it. Like so much of the world it was impossible to know. But she did not think she was the first to traverse it and she knew she had to leave the forest. Here the stone hid the signs of her passage in a way dirt and soil never could.

  Reaching the bottom of the trail she stepped on the wide ledge and felt the world move around her. Suddenly one misstep would not send her gasping and clutching into nothingness. She settled herself back against the wall where she would not be seen from above and breathed and looked it over.

  A yawning cave mouth. The old remains of a fire on the surface of the ledge, scarring black onto this gray stone. Markings on the walls of the inside of the cave, just lines and figures. Crude and telling in that crudeness. She saw no other way out, not up or down. The trail that may have been carved ended here and nothing fell away below it except the smooth stone and the trees and the river in miniature below.

  She wondered what those trees would look like as they rushed up to meet her, if the speed of her fall would seem to increase or if the nearby wall screaming past would swallow that illusion. But then she saw that dark and mutated shape again, felt the crushing wrench of a heart refusing to beat in a chest with the air ripped out, and she stepped back into the cave.

  It was a place to live, she thought. They would not come down the same path or it would be too easy for her to knock them from the cliff face and send them crashing into that far-off forest. But it was also a place she couldn't live, for it was an empty stone cave with nothing for food, for water. They could camp at the top with their swords standing in the dirt and wait for her to come back up and she would either starve here or go up to them.

  The back of the cave was shrouded in shadow. She stood at the entrance letting her eyes adjust and a thousand thoughts moved within her. Perhaps a whole system of caves, which she could navigate one and then the next, crawling through the tight little entrances and worming her way in utter darkness until she stepped back into the sun in some distant place, lost and tired and free. Perhaps a tunnel carved by whoever had carved the walkway down, trenching in this earth to create a second escape. Perhaps that path along the face of the cliff was the second escape itself and those long-dead had used some other passage she had yet to find.

  She'd filed her way from iron bondage, climbed a wall of brick and stone, slept in a forest that ate the living, killed those who pursued her. Those things flashing before her eyes as she blinked and the shadows slowly dissolved. Perhaps this was just one more step to take before she could return to that field with the army at her back and some banner flying in the air and the smell of horses and men and the warm earth and the call of horns on the wind.

  She stepped forward to find that redemption and he was sitting in the back of the cave. He had a slender short short out and across his knees. His leather cloak wet and pooled around him. He'd pushed the hood back from short-cropped blond hair and he had no beard and he looked like a child but he was here. She did not know him but she knew a thousand like him and she started to step back out of the cave.

  “Don't,” he said. “Koetter is at the top. It's over.”

  She stopped and stood looking at him. She'd worked with assassins before and she knew what this man was from his eyes alone and had she seen them torn from his body she still would have known. There was another way and he'd seen her working her way down and taken it. Maybe in some manner she hadn't noticed he'd forced her here, herding her like a dog herding sheep, but silent and from the shadows. All to give himself this edge, this advantage in this place where there was nothing she could do.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Sit down.” He did not change the way he said it but something changed in the way he held the sword and she sat carefully on a rock at the front of the cave. He watched her the whole time. He did not appear to be tense but she knew how fast he would be on his feet and she would not see him or the sword until it had gone into her and come out again and she was standing wide-eyed with her heart in two pieces and still trying to beat beneat
h skin and bone.

  “Did they tell you?” she asked.

  He smiled softly and it was a horrible thing. “Those two fools in the town? No. There are a thousand of them looking for you and they are all the same.”

  “Then how did you find me?”

  The smile broadened a bit. “There's only one of me.”

  She looked at him. “You don't have to do this.”

  “Of course I do. I'm being paid incredibly for this.”

  “I have money.”

  “You have nothing. You're a dead queen.”

  “I will have money.”

  “I'd be a fool also to take a deal like that. The hope of a promise or actual gold.” He tipped his head to the side and there was something feline and dangerous in it. “What do you think I am?”

  “I know what you are.”

  “Then why offer me that?”

  Because there is nothing else to try, she thought. It felt all around her like the world was growing smaller and compressing and some great force outside bearing down and crushing it all in slowly and with unstoppable power. The confines of the air itself clutching about her chest. She blinked and it was not this cave anymore but the pit and the iron shackles and the bones in the mildew and dirt and then she blinked and it was the cave and she could not see out of the corners of her eyes.

  “How are we going to do this?”

  “Listen,” she said. Her voice did not sound like her own. “He's not a king. He stole what he has. You don't have to follow him.”

  He did not move his head but he laughed and it was a dead sound and sharp and no humor in it.

  “You think I care about kings?” he said. “I don't give a damn about kings. What king hasn't stolen what he has? You're all the same and the world is the same and it always has been and always will be. You and your damned honor and it's all just a front for power and money. Nothing more. Kings live and die and when they die other kings replace them until they too die. I don't care which king it is who pays me. All I care is that the king of the moment is the one with the money and he pays and when someone comes and severs his head from his shoulders and dips it in tar and puts it on a stake over the front gate, only then will I go find out who he is and how much money he has.”