He began to run. Before him the dirt-paved road, the wall of the city too far to reach on foot. On either side the houses that could not save him and a running trail of the dead. Barns and fields and carts abandoned briefly before that death came.
Ahead a single structure to which men often fled in these times, a hulking church with stone walls and a high rising roofline, dwarfed by the wall beyond but still three stories of stone and timber. The flag that had once flown from the pinnacle burned off and smoke pouring out as the dragon had filled it with fire like a stove, but the walls standing, the roof intact.
The dragon shrieked again above him and began to dive. He did not look but he could hear it, that high-pitched whistling as it fell like the moon itself had been torn from the sky and thrown to earth, some cataclysm coming on furled wings. He ran and in the street were the bodies of the dead and he could not see their faces. The great oak doors of the church standing open and burned and still thin smoke rolling from inside.
As he went up the wide steps he looked one last time and the dragon had stretched out its wings, its jaws gaping, and then he was in the church. Sprinting still and running down the scorched aisle and the banners on the wall to one god or another burned and curled and blackened skeletons fused to the pews. They'd come here to pray and there were bodies piled at the front and a sea of wax that had been candles poured down the stone steps. The dead piled and their skin like burned parchment and their faces like wax themselves, melted and ruined, and for a moment he could imagine this room as the dragon crouched with open jaws in the doorway and filled the whole of this place with liquid fire. Pews and pulpit still burning and the embers glowing red and against the far wall the blackened outline of the priest where he'd stood with arms outstretched and been entirely consumed in the single last pumping of his heart.
He ran for the far end and the burned wooden doors and the stone rooms beyond. To put anything he could between him and this horror falling and ripping the world apart. Running with his sword before him and stretching for those ten slender stone steps at the end of the room. The pews filled with the dead rushing by on each side and the sound of some gasping screams, one of these wretched souls still alive in his melted and burned body and entangled with the rest, but he could not see which.
And then the dragon came through the ceiling.
The heavy beams splintered and there was a tearing sound as if the air itself were coming apart at some invisible seams. The stone shingles cascading down and shattering around him, exploding as they rained to the floor. Running through dust and shrapnel and everywhere the sound of the dragon screaming as it plummeted to the ground. The far wall ripping from its foundations and falling in with a shattering of stained glass and the thunder as the stone blocks buried the floor and the pews and the dead.
Brack dove forward and lost his sword and picked it up again. Scrambling up the last three steps and turning back to look.
The roof entirely torn off, the smoky light pouring in. The dragon drawing itself up and beginning to stand in the piled wreckage, looking unnatural and depraved, some malevolent being hellbent on the destruction of the world, all scales and wings and teeth, cast out by gods and men alike and now rising to tear both from their place in the world and establish its own rule over all there was.
It began to turn its head to look at him and he could see the jagged hole where the eye had been, nothing but a black scar and wet, viscous redness inside. A ruin of a face on what had been a beast once beautiful in its own fashion. Now the look of some mad king or an animal caged and driven with hunger and fury.
Brack leapt down the stairs, running for it as it drew itself back up. Legs burning with each step, crashing through the wreckage and smoke. Running toward it and also to the side, keeping that ruined eye in line with him as it searched desperately for its prey. Pushing its wings out but unable to turn as quickly as it needed with the remaining walls of the church around it. Even with one fallen, this space confining and limiting.
Only for a moment. The shortest of moments in which all of life was truly lived.
Brack came up under the rising wing with both hands on the hilt of the sword and he thought he could feel for a heartbeat the tall grass against his legs. As he lived his life a second time, this endless cycle. The dragon began to turn its head and did not see him but somehow it knew, perhaps also reliving that gashing death in the field of blood and gold. Drawing in its legs, tensing to leap back into the air, that space it owned and always had, to launch itself from the pull of the world. To defy gravity and the earth itself and this man who would strip away its life and once again tear out its heart.
As the wings beat down for that savage escape, Brack slammed hard into the beast's scaled side, running headlong in desperation, and drove the sword once again into the space between its wing and its body, pushing the blade in to the hilt as the black blood poured down over his arms.
And then it was gone, throwing itself into the air, ripping the sword from his hands and leaving him drenched and shaking in the ruin of the church.
IV
He stepped through the rubble that was left of the wall, climbing those thrown and piled stones, and stood atop the heaviest of them to watch the dragon rampant in the air. Wheeling and rending that air as it screamed in fury, the very houses shaking with it. A sound so horrible it was as if it had never been meant to be heard by man, as if these beasts were supposed to have lived their time and died and then man his and never the two at once. And perhaps that the root of all the violence and killing between the two lines, as these creatures that were both meant to rule found each other battling tirelessly for the same world.
He could not see the sword but the dragon was pitched to one side. That wing not moving properly, not getting the full extension. It could fly but there was a burning torment in each beat of the wing, in every meter climbed. There embedded this blade like a thorn to a man, but white hot and ripping apart the beast's entrails.
Then it came around again, pain or not, torment or triumph. The black jaws hanging, those rows of teeth as fine as needles. The horns atop its head and twisted. The long tail curving behind it almost like some ghastly deformity, slack with the pain.
That eye deep-set and burning, never leaving him.
Brack looked to Kayhi as the dragon swung around behind the tower, meaning to pass it one last time on its way to kill him. So that she could feel that updraft as the wings beat, could smell this foul creature with a body like a rotting corpse. Could feel the heat from the furnace in its chest. Kayhi, small and lost in that shattered stone tower, standing straight as ever, her head now turning with it.
So that he in his shaking fury could see it all laid out before him.
He knew then that he would die and he knelt and took the knife out of his boot. Six inches of steel meant for cutting out a buck's heart and tearing off the hide. A tool and nothing more. A wooden handle with gold bands, the blade beaten silver. He spun it once in his hand to get the weight of it and drew himself up. No cover now with the church destroyed. One more stand and perhaps he could find some way to sink the knife in the creature's eye as it killed him.
He looked at her once more, this last child, as the dragon raged toward the tower.
Her footsteps were fast, choppy, calculated. Two steps with power as the dragon neared, and then she threw herself into the air. The beast still behind the tower, her body small and dark and falling with her hair whipping upward in the wind. A plunging wraith almost lost in that vast gray backdrop of smoke and stone and the dead city, hurdling toward the ground.
And then it was beneath her, never having seen her jump, blocked by the tower and its eye always on him. Brack could not feel his heart and it had stopped in his chest. Wanting to scream and run and bound somehow in unseen iron. Watching his daughter fall, arms and legs outstretched, her dark dress billowing in the air.
She landed on the dragon's neck. Above its shoulders, her feet and arms wrapping it as she s
truck, the impact hard and silent at this distance. A speck swallowed by the black beast, consumed by it. To anyone else invisible, but he could see the way she grasped it, strong and graceful, taking the blow to her chest that must have stripped the air from her lungs, not letting her momentum throw her aimlessly around that scaled neck but letting it carry her downward, one hand gripping a single horn on the dragon's head, the other reaching forward.
Grabbing the arrow from that torn flesh, the scar about its neck. Ripping it free in a spurt of blood.
The dragon screeched, began to pull up, swinging its heavy legs beneath and beating its wings to slow its descent. Twisting its head toward this parasite on its neck. But Kayhi just swung with the movement, arrow in hand. Light and agile and muscles like cords from countless days with him and their swords in the courtyard.
The dragon came down toward the earth in a twisting firestorm of air and dust and smoke, the frantic beating of its wings billowing everything around it. The buildings shuddering and stones pelting Brack's face, chest, arms. Black blood pouring now from both its neck and its side, some of it burning, some heavy like pitch or the blood of the long dead.
Just as it came up to land, Kayhi swung forward on that horn, ten meters above the earth and nothing but that hand keeping her aloft, throwing her body forward. Her other arm pulling back and then flashing forward like lightning, the huntress in flight with her golden spear, and she buried the arrow in the only eye the dragon had left.
V
They hit the ground and it seemed to tear it open at the deepest cracks, the fault lines, those plates wrenched apart and the inner workings revealed for what they were. Brack was thrown from the rubble of the church and everything came down around them, houses and barns and silos. Cracking stone and timber like the end of the world, the billow of dust and smoke drenching the sky.
He rolled and came back to his feet and ran. Could see nothing now but dragon's shape, dark and clouded, writhing behind that wall of dust. A tangle of wings and claws and teeth. The great tail lashing forward and then gone and then coming back to strike the ground with a snap of its own.
It was screaming and it was like no sound he'd heard from a dragon before. Nothing in it of anger or horror or mere pain, but of pure agony. The way a man screams on the field when he is caught up in the cavalry and he does not know the bottom half of his body is gone until he looks down and sees his own entrails in the mud and he does not scream long but there is a deep and real and violent way that he screams with blood in his mouth. And that was how the dragon screamed now, with the strength of a thousand dying men.
He ran into the dust and found it. First the tail swinging past as he ducked. Then a raking claw on the end of a broken wing. It smelled him and lashed out in all directions in fury and pain and still he ran. Something striking him hard in the side and the sound of his own ribs breaking lost in that scream, but he pushed himself back to his feet and stumbled the last steps and then he was at its side. Falling heavily against those hot scales, breathing this air like fire itself.
Grabbing the hilt he tore the blood-soaked sword free. With any other sword the blade would have been a splintered ruin but this steel was fine and unmarked, though covered in blood and the end glowing red hot.
He could not see her but he ran wild and gasping for the beast's head. He could hear its teeth gnashing in the air. He leapt up over the front legs and took two light steps running along its back, then jumped down beside that long serpent's neck. The scales the size of breastplates, growing smaller as they ran up toward the head.
It twisted out of the gloom and dust and then he could see it. That ruined face. Blood pouring down along the scales. Gaping holes of torn flesh where the eyes had been, smoke rising gently from them. Furious within this raging storm.
And then he felt the inward rush of air around him, the dragon drawing one final breath into that furnace. For it may not see him but it could smell him as always and as he could smell it, these two combatants intertwined over two lifetimes and in some ways always chasing each other. Ages past and still waiting for a final death. It would cover him and itself here in flame, turn him to nothing but bone and ash with its dying breath.
For that brief second, Brack thought of each of them. His children in the keep where they'd found a brief peace on the icebound edge of the world. His son now an old man as they sat drinking tea before the fire in his cabin. Kayhi as he kissed her forehead, as she dove from the broken tower.
He drew the sword back and screamed and his scream and the dragon's were the same and then he lashed out with the redhot blade, chopping it downward with everything in his body and soul. Swinging it with two hands over his head like an ax, a crude and vicious weapon, free of all elegance and skill, its only end violence and death.
The blade bit into that open bleeding scar, slicing down through tissue and bone. Cutting even in that one swing between the vertebrae of the spine, splintering the bone. Slicing arteries and veins and ripping the beast's windpipe in two.
And for the second time in Brack's life, the dragon's head fell from its body. Falling slowly forward and the jaw still working up and down and behind it pouring a river of blood and fire. The scream suddenly and completely gone and in its wake just choking blood in its windpipe and lungs. The headless body for a moment unaware and still trying to blow out that last breath.
The head landed heavily in the dirt and he could feel it shuddering the world one final time. Grinding sand and stone beneath it. The skull taller than a man standing. Rolling in that dirt and the face tipping toward him with those hollow eye sockets and the jaw moving once more, the teeth painted red and glistening.
And then it was still. All was still. The very world frozen as this beast was torn once again from its fabric. This undead abomination returned to what it was.
As the dust and smoke fell in this aching silence about the hunter, standing still himself with sword in hand, he turned to look for his daughter.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I
She could smell the fire as they came up over the hill and could not yet see the smoke against that slate morning sky but knew from far off. Something deep within the bones of man, that scent of fire on the wind. In days before time this perhaps the greatest threat and always moving before it.
The distant beat of wings in the air; sheltering in caves.
They crested the hill and stood and the horse bent eating and they were gathered before the wall of the city. How many she did not know. More standing atop that wall and leering. Soldiers leaning on their elbows in chainmail with their steel helms next to them on the wall. The poor of the city in the mud and the dirt. The others on the high ground where the hill rose gently to the orchard with its white-blossomed trees. The firewood lashed and piled and the stake rising from it and the girl in her white dress bound to it with chain.
Standing firm now, hair in the wind, the dress billowing back past the stake. The fire still far below her and rising and the smoke taken in that wind and blown from her face so she could look out on the people of this city and the last place she would ever see.
She'd watched them at the stake before and they were all different. Some stoic and silent and making not a sound until the very end when they all did. Others trying from the very first to breathe in the smoke, desperate gasping breaths. Still others screaming from the moment they were lashed and crying to be cut free and wretched before the smoke or flame got to them and only worse when it did.
With this girl she could not tell. Too far away, her small white form against the stone wall. She could have been any of them.
He drew up next to her and looked at her and looked at the city and turned and spat. “You know who that is.”
She looked a long moment and blinked and turned her head and looked again. “I know,” she said.
“He says she helped you.”
“She didn't know anything.”
The mercenary laughed. “Oh, I know. I'm not thi
s rabble. Never think that.”
The queen sat very still and felt something cold and small sinking endlessly into her. A deep winter twisting and withered.
“Why?” she said. Barely able to hear herself.
“Why? You wonder why a king kills people?” Tipping his head to the side. “You've been around this long enough to know that.”
“But why her?”
“Same reason as anyone else.”
It was growing now and she knew she would kill him and she didn't need to say it. She didn't know if he knew it as well. She had met some who would but she thought in him, with all this skill and knowledge that he had, even as someone who walked in the same world she did, was this brooding arrogance that he could not shake and would never want to and that would only be stripped from him at the very end and by then it would be too late.
“Fear,” she said.
“It's the only thing that matters.”
“That can't be.”
He rested his hands on the saddlehorn. This a man secure in his own lack of servitude, but also at his heart still a servant and the silver for it riding on his belt. But a different kind of man, and showing it in the way he held himself.
“Of course it can,” he said. “A man is what he is because he fears being something else. A king is a king because everyone fears what he can do. Whenever they stop fearing him that's when someone else rises up and then the king becomes a tarred head on a stake and someone else becomes king and then they fear him instead.” Looking at her there in the open air. “You didn't fear him enough and now look at you.”
She kept watching the twisting fire and it was too far away. They could see very little and even at a dead run in this country she'd never make it before the girl was dead. She thought of all those times this slight girl had come in and taken her to the bath, helped her with her clothes. Simply doing what she was told in life and all she'd ever known and doing it as well as she could. And now torn out to come to this end.
The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Page 23