She tried to speak and could not. He was nearly lost to shadow. She wanted to close her eyes and the air was so thin and she didn't close them because she knew she'd see the pit and hear those chains clanking against the wall and she held them open as this unsteady ground moved below her. Some shifting of the earth's core deep within it, the broken pillars of the world.
There was one thing left and she knew it as surely as she'd known anything. Standing unsteadily to her feet. He did not move or she didn't think he did. But she knew only one way to make this darkness recede. Gasping now and sweat pouring down her face. She closed her eyes for just a moment and saw those bones in that grasping darkness and then she screamed, a bitter and shrieking sound tearing at her throat, something primal and furious and all that she had in her, and she ran at him with the knife raised in front of her and looking for that flashing sword.
She had been right about one thing: She did not see him move. There was only the faintest sound of the cloak and a grinding of stone and then his fist caught her hard in the temple one time. All that dark was replaced for just the barest moment with a flashing light, and then it was dark again and she was falling and spiraling through it and she could still hear herself screaming as the world broke.
III
She woke at last and everything was pain and she closed her eyes again and lay still. Feeling the rope around her wrists, tying her hands. The stone beneath her. The cold sound of the water dripping on the face of the rainswept cliff. When at last she opened her eyes she was lying where she'd fallen on the floor of the cave. The world sideways. His boots in front of her on the cave floor, him sitting where he'd been as if nothing at all had happened.
“This will be what you make it,” he said.
In her mind she could feel a sort of humming sound, deep and vibrating in her skull. It was not a noise but something more. As if perhaps her skull itself were moving, like a bell that had been struck. The pain flaring all down the side of her jaw where he'd hit her. She closed her eyes and opened them again and that's when she knew it wasn't from being hit. It was something else within her that was stirring and she did not know what and she wanted to scream in a way that ripped apart her insides but she could not.
He was still speaking. “If you want to play this game, we'll play it. If you want to be silent while I take you back to the city, it will go a lot better. But don't put any of it on me. It's all on you and it has been this whole time.”
She was not closing her eyes now but she felt like she was. She could see the swirling black and in her stomach there was that feeling of falling, of headlong downward flight. A lack of control. The whole world rushing around her and past and perhaps some world other for it never ended. The darkness moving and alive, a thing of fire and wings. First there and then gone and then somewhere else and always present. Writhing and tearing at the air.
Another voice. “I don't think she's awake.”
“Her eyes are open.”
“I know, but look at them.” The sound of boots, one of them stepping closer. “She's not there.”
The humming was swelling and growing and it was everywhere in this misshapen world of shadow and mist and the unknown. The molecules of the air itself thrumming with it. Pulsing and turning. She opened her mouth and then closed it again and it felt like the sound was in her body and perhaps she was producing it. Her tongue numb with it.
“What did she say?”
“I don't know.”
Silence.
And then suddenly it all returned and everything was very clear and she felt herself sitting up. All about the sharp edges of the world, vibrant and brilliant and each edge glowing with some light of its own. In all the background that brooding darkness. The humming was gone and there was a dead silence and it felt like a lake of ice, the whole of the world about to shatter with the first plummeting stone and she felt if she looked up some burning horror would be falling on her to destroy that lake and everything would be shards with edges like razors and it would rip her apart, body and blood and all she was, cutting her to pieces. All of them shredded under this hailstorm, a torrent of wind, pelted with broken glass.
She could feel herself speaking and she could not hear the words. Her jaw working up and down and the cold stone floor below her, but she could not see the cave properly for the sheer brightness of it and everything else and she could not close her eyes.
And then there was a snapping sound like lightning falling at her feet, that cracking strike where the whole world was fire and so very bright and the acrid burning of the air and for just a second before it all went dark she could hear herself and she was screaming and she was saying over and over the ice, the ice, it's under the ice and it's so thin, it's under the ice.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I
He was bred for this and he felt in him the rising fire as he always did, walking across that plain toward the ruin of the city where the black dragon perched on the shattered tower, curled and serpentine and vile with those claws twisted into the stone, the eyes burning as it watched him. He felt it in his chest and in the sword before him and he gave himself to it.
There was nothing else but the dragon and not even himself. For a man worried about himself would die and the only one who could kill a dragon was the one who thought of nothing else but the slaughter. Who lived in this world of bone and blood and ash and carnage and who deep within himself loved it exactly as the dragon loved it. The two one and the same in that, their passion for this world of horror and death. For nothing else but the same depravity could rid this world of the creatures that haunted it, and if he must be so to end it, then he would.
And within that burning core of his body, of spine and heart, were he and the dragon both ripped open by the gods themselves, those gods would find no difference at all. When they met it would be as brothers to the same fire and the same destruction and they'd let all else fall as it may.
The dragon rose from the tower and he could hear its wings hammer the air and he did not look away from it as he began to run. Faster, his feet pounding the dirt and ash beneath his boots. He did not feel the sword in his hand for it was just the very metal of his body and his heartbeat as he ran was as even as if he slept. His breath measured in this smoke-tinged air.
It climbed before him and pivoted in the sky. The talons dark on the ends of the wings. Watching him as he came, one side of its face turned away. Holding there in the air as easily as it stood on the ground for it was a creature of every realm but the sea and moved effortlessly wherever it chose and then it threw its head back on that long neck and shrieked once, loud and ripping the air, and flicked its wings up to dive at him.
And then he saw her. In that brief moment as the beast turned in the air and came for him, he saw her standing impossibly small on the top of that tower. The very peak sheered off and smoke rising all around her and the drop endless below as she stood on what had once been the floor. Tall and straight and unafraid, her black hair curling behind her in the wind. Watching him as he ran and seeing these two sides of her fate rush toward each other to wage a war that would never end.
For one heartbeat, there was nothing. All the world holding still and silent. Air and smoke and the dragon itself.
And then it was between them, this shrieking beast falling toward him like a star torn from the heavens and teeth flashing in the firelight of the city it had killed. He blinked and he could see again the dead around him, on both sides. The bodies charred and mangled. Piled in the road and the yards. More no doubt beyond that tall stone wall before him as he neared the city, a wall made for men that could have withstood an army ten thousand strong and had meant nothing to this creature of the air. Archers and spearmen torn from the walls and thrown into screaming headlong flight, not knowing even as they fell whether they were whole or if their legs were gone to fuel this terror and the furnace within it that burned on blood.
It came down at him and he watched its face and thought for jus
t a moment of how it had hung in the air. As it had pivoted and watched him before driving itself at him. And as it reared its head back to burn his body, to fuse him into the ground itself until there was nothing left, he threw himself to the side. Twisting, falling in the dirt and mud. The flashing of metal and a short stone wall. Pressing against it and the grit in his teeth.
And then the tide of fire flowed through, rolling and burning and the heat everywhere. Like a churning forest fire condensed into liquid, tearing into the ground and washing over the stones.
But it missed. The dragon thundered by, pulling its wings back to slow itself and then beating them hard, twice, as it rose and turned and screamed again that unquenchable anger into the air. To break perhaps the very sky.
Lying behind the wall that would never save him, Brack smiled. Pushing himself to his feet, pulling the bow and arrow from the body of the dead archer. This man not burned but missing his arm and the right half of his chest, the metal of his breastplate and his very flesh cut exactly the same, jagged edges and a deep red hollow inside.
He'd been bitten and thrown from the wall. His heart gone, turning in the air. Brack did not know if he'd lived long enough without that heart to feel the fall, the wind, the rushing ground. Or if he'd been a corpse already and merely raining into the dead below, his blood a red mist behind him.
But even in death he had held his bow, an arrow clenched in his fist. The next to be drawn, held as he'd been taught when he had to loose two as quickly as he could. Against this creature he'd not had the time, but the weapons had fallen with him, unbroken.
The bow simple and hewn with a taught string. Nothing like the power or reach of the crossbow that he should have carried but in his haste had not. But it would be enough against this half-blind creature that turned in darkness and fury, swinging around with only one burning eye left in its head. The other torn out generations ago on another field, ruptured and lanced as Brack had run forward to drive the sword into the open place under its wing.
Each time he'd seen it at a distance, the fire still burning in that socket, the illusion of life where nothing lived. The dragon a revenant, but incomplete. The scar about its neck where he'd cut the head off, the flesh crudely fused. But the eye, that ruined eye, still nothing but a gaping, smoking hole in the side of the beast's skull.
II
It circled again to come back at him but it took the turn wide and high, beating its wings against the air. Cutting far out around and calling once loud and like a hawk and then sweeping around behind the tower where Kayhi stood tall and straight and alive. He could see her face and her eyes wide and she was staring at him and only him, not following it as it circled, and he loved her more then than he ever had and he did not think of the dead but just of her. The last and youngest and the one he could save.
It swung behind her and closed and flashed the side of the tower in flame. Almost nothing, just enough to scorch the stone and leave it black and smoking. Never a danger to her.
But he watched it, for this wasn't what a dragon would do. The whole time he'd felt it. That something in this was wrong and wretched and he hadn't known what it was. From the moment it fled him at the keep, having torched the tower. It could have killed him then and had not. And again when it burned his son while he watched, leaving nothing but an old man's blackened bones in the melting snow of that desecrated village. Then too it could have killed him but had run again, leaving a clear trail of destruction that he could wade in with blood up to his ankles, living in the land of the dead.
He'd known then that it was going for Kayhi, but this had not been a race for it was never one he could win. Had it just wanted her dead it would have been here in hours and not bothered with Cabele at all and left him a corpse, dead and rotted when he arrived days later.
And now it could kill her again, if it wanted, but it forever toyed with him. Even to this end. In that there was spite and dragons knew spite and fed off of it just as men did. But men were fools and dragons were not. Never were they fools. If it meant to kill her she would be dead now and he could not stop it, but it did not mean to kill her, only to give the illusion. Putting her there on the tower, soaking it in flames too far away to do her any harm.
He stepped out into the street again as it came down. He knew it would try to kill him but he no longer understood what it was and that terrified him more in some ways than if it had just been a dragon and nothing else.
It dropped down again on those black wings and he leapt to the top of the short wall. Sliding his sword home over his shoulder and raising the bow, arrow already nocked and drawing as he brought it up. Feeling the flex of the wood beneath his fingers. It trusted its armor and did not move off of the line but bore down, bringing its claws up underneath. Each longer than his sword and just as sharp and it could cut him to ribbons or impale him as it had done with many others. Just a gasping second and wrenching pain in his gut and spine.
But he also trusted himself and he raised the bow and sighted down the length of the arrow. Feeling it and letting the bow become part of himself. The death it dealt an extension of his will. Wanting to scream as every nerve stood on edge, but staying silent and still. Dropping the arrow slightly, holding it, finding that remaining eye.
With the slightest movement, letting the arrow loose.
The snapping sound of it leaving the bow was nearly lost in the creature's scream and the wind of its wings, but he heard it anyway. His ears trained to hear everything of the hunt, even as he threw himself again to the side, this time off of the wall, falling and rolling on his shoulder toward that dead blind space to the beast's left. Knowing it would be just the slightest bit slower tracking him that way and also knowing he only needed those fractions of an inch, of a second, to live.
It came through like a tempest, a great thundering roar, and he could see the firelight on the claws as they raked the air. Could hear the beams of a house crack under the downdraft alone, the roof falling in with an uproar of dust. He turned as he rolled, instinctively ducking and pulling his arm down as it lashed out frantically with its wing and the clawed end, flailing at him but just too late. He could smell the leather of the wing as it went over his face, could have touched it if he'd just reached out.
He knew it even as he turned. The arrow had missed. Had he hit his mark, the beast would have been screaming and falling and rolling in the dirt and ash, but it was not. It was screaming in fury at the missed kill, but rising already and turning to circle again and descend for a third pass, just as it had two hundred years ago.
He saw the shaft, just for a heartbeat as it arched its neck, looking for him and trying to find him as it turned. The arrow had struck in the throat, embedded in that scar where there were no more scales, where he'd sheered them away as he'd hacked the head from the dead body. In that other life. Perhaps the bow was off, shooting low; perhaps the beast had moved its head at the last moment, trying to focus and read the depth with only one eye. He did not know but the shot had been low and it rose with the arrow like a needle, lost and insignificant, buried in the throat but far too small to be anything but an annoyance to a monster of fire and night.
He hit the ground hard and was up again and drawing the sword without thinking. Throwing the bow aside. There were no other archers near him and if he ran for one it would take him in the road with the rolling fire and that would be the end. He had to stand now with the sword and the sword alone.
It had been done, and he'd trained for it. How to move under it and bring the sword into the underbelly, looking for a weakness in that armor. How to lunge for the killing zone beneath the wing. If it was foolish enough to come with teeth bared and try to take him that way, he could go for the scar itself, tear the throat out and leap on it when it fell.
He looked back at Kayhi, so far above him, and he felt something in him change. He'd been a reckless fool to run in without the crossbow, without a plan, leaving his only ally guarding a dead girl on the edge of the killing field
. But he'd been late at the keep and watched his children roasted alive in the tower; he'd been careful and smart at the town and watched his son and countless others burn on the horizon.
So this time he'd been reckless. And now he was going to die for it.
He raised the sword in front of him, felt the weight of it. That flawless steel forged to an edge that never dulled. A sword that had tasted blood a thousand times and thirsted for more as he watched the dragon sweeping around to dive again, a hurling black star in the open expanse of the sky.
He would die, but he wouldn't die alone.
III
The dragon washed the tower again in flame and then hung for a moment in the air, watching him, the smoke rising around it and fire glinting off those black scales like pitch burning on the water. It did not try to remove the arrow and he did not know if it felt it. But it watched him all the same, the sails of those wings moving slowly and rhythmically to hold its place, and then it began to rise. Gaining altitude and distance but never turning its back on him.
And suddenly he knew what it meant to do. How it would drop on him in anger and weight and crush him to the earth, bones breaking and splintering. Rendering that sword useless for even if he pushed the blade through that space beneath the wing and into its heart he would still be killed beneath it. For in many ways men and dragons were the same except in this: A man was fragile. Even a hunter. In this an inherent weakness thus spawning the myths of a race of giants as men sought through invention to cure their one fatal flaw, imagining a man as tall as a tower who could rule uncontested.
The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Page 22