The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  He looked at Brack, his eyes strong and alert and never leaving Brack's face, not for the crowd or for a glimpse of the dragon beyond the wall. Then he turned slightly aside and held out the arm with the dagger into the dark heart of the temple.

  “Bring her,” he said.

  II

  They went inside and the temple was a maze of black steps leading up and down and iron rails, all cast in that orange torchlight. A long thin passage running forward, perfectly straight, and far down an open space with a raised dais. But the priest motioned to the side, to a long staircase without a railing, and began ascending.

  Brack followed. Behind him, the doors started to close again, though he could not see the chains or what it was that moved them. He could just hear the sound of those chains somewhere within the walls.

  They went up the stairs until they were high enough that a fall would kill any of them but Brack, all trailing in a line with the dead girl between them and Juoth at the end. Glancing back over his shoulder at the doors, looking just once over the edge of the staircase.

  When they reached the top it was not the end, but just the bottom of a spiral staircase, made of iron. Sheer vertical. Rising up fifteen feet through nothing at all, just blackness and air, and then going through a round opening in the stone ceiling. The priest began going up and they followed.

  As they went through, the stone surrounded them on all sides, but with space between it and the staircase. More torches hung on the walls, far enough out of arm's reach that he didn't know how they lit them or changed them, but they were new and burning all the same. The feeling of it disorienting as they went around more times than he could count. Rising in this upright tunnel of stone and firelight. Finally coming out at the top and stepping into an open chamber.

  Here in the heart of the spire it was all white marble. The floor, the ceiling, the walls. The frames of the windows on either side; the pedestal for the bed under the nearest window. That bed draped in white sheets and furs, the pillows as pure white as snow in the mountains where men couldn't reach. Next to the bed a small hearth and a fire burning and sunlight falling in through both windows.

  “Put her here, Ironhelm,” the priest said. His voice holding no age at all.

  “She's bleeding,” he said. Suddenly feeling the ash and dirt and blood covering him as they stood in this place that looked entirely untouched.

  The priest smiled. “Don't think of the sheets. Put her down.”

  He went across and laid her gently on the bed. Her body so small and frail now in this near death and the furs swallowing her. Her head drifting to the side, her dark hair falling in all directions. He slowly slid his arms out from under her and thought for the shortest moment of kissing her forehead when she left, the horse rearing in the fireflame as the keep burned, and then he rose.

  “They'll be here,” the priest said.

  Brack turned. “Who?”

  “The healers.”

  “You can't help her?”

  The priest turned both of his palms upward, lowering his head. The dagger was gone and Brack did not know where to. “I am afraid I cannot. But those who can are coming.”

  “She might die.”

  “I know,” the priest said. “Who is she to you?”

  “My sister.”

  The priest looked up at him slowly and Brack did not look away but he felt something in him when he met those eyes. He had stood and looked at more men than he could remember who tried to look him in the eyes and make him fear them but most of those men were dead now and he'd never felt anything like this.

  “You don't have to lie to me. I know who you are.”

  He swallowed. “My daughter. She's my youngest daughter.”

  “You know he should have killed you.”

  “Who?”

  “The dragon.”

  Brack nodded. “I know. Many times.”

  “Then why?” The priest looked at Kayhi on the bed, her chest moving just slightly. “Why did he wait for you here?”

  “Did you see it?”

  The priest nodded to the windows of the spire.

  “Dragons are just men,” Brack said. “They're just men and they fight for revenge the same as any man and it makes them just as foolish. It wanted me to watch her die and so she killed it.”

  “You think that's all it was?”

  “If it wasn't, I'd be dead.”

  The priest was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps,” he said at last. “Perhaps.”

  Two women came in through a door in the wall. Brack had not seen the door and did not know how it could be, having seen the spires rising into empty air from outside the temple, and yet it was. A seam in the marble bricks slowly sliding aside at the far end of the bed and both of them stepping into the room. Each wearing robes the same as the priest's, but theirs as red as blood. Their hair cropped close to their heads. One with skin nearly as white as the marble and the other as dark as those towering doors below.

  “You see,” the priest said, nodding with a faint smile. “They're here.”

  The women went to Kayhi and knelt and began to work. One wiping her lips of blood and lifting her head. The other running her hands down the girl's face and neck and ribs. Holding her hand against her stomach and then her breast to feel both the breathing and the heartbeat. Then nodding to the first who took from her pocket a small vial, removed the cork stopper, and poured what appeared to be no more than water into Kayhi's mouth. Just a thin trickle, then holding her head again as she worked to swallow.

  Brack turned and Juoth was not watching them but watching him and he stepped past him and went to the far window and looked out. He could hear them working still behind him and the wretched breathing that was his daughter and he looked far out over the wall to where the dragon lay. He could not see it for the wall but could see far off the people gathering and staring. This thing that had once been near to killing them now headless and broken, and in that some gruesome attraction.

  Or perhaps merely the draw of disbelief.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned and the women stood together in front of him. Like the priest, they did not look away or shy back from him, did not appear to think him anything more than a man. Or did not care what he was.

  “We've done what we can,” the woman who'd touched him said, speaking softly. “We'll know in the morning. If she dies, it will be tonight.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  The woman looked at him for a long moment. “Stay with her,” she said. “All of you.” Then, turning, they went back out the way they had come, through the door in the wall of the spire. Slipping through that marble as though they had never been. He could not see what lay beyond.

  When he turned from them, the priest also had left. Faintly his footsteps descending on the metal of the spiral staircase, treading that iron down into the dark.

  III

  He hadn't thought of her mother in a long time. The strongest memory right after leaving the keep, that place blackened with fire, sheltering in the snow-buried cave and dreaming of her that time by the river. Her face in the warm sunlight and the riverside garden around them. In that dream he had only seen her for a moment and then she was gone and he'd woken in the snow and the cold.

  That night in the marble spire, he dreamt of her again. Kayhi's mother, with the same long dark hair and that thin but strong frame, the same power and fire in her eyes. A woman the girl had never known but that she had become nonetheless.

  He finally saw her again but this time it was not in the garden or near the river. Nor was it in the Ringed City or the fields and vineyards beyond.

  After they'd married they'd rented a house in a high mountain pass. The town so far below them they could barely make it out. The dirt path to this place walking in stones along the spine of the mountain range, the open green fields falling off on both sides. From below they looked like fields you could lie in on a summer afternoon but when you got up to them they sloped away so steeply and
then fell into stark cliffs and walking all along that spine was just a step or two either way from a drop of a thousand feet.

  The house was small and made all of stone and set in a place where the spine dropped into one last true field, a hundred yards of grass and flowers in either direction. Behind the house a stand of tall trees where treading in the moss and browned fallen needles they sometimes saw rams and mountain sheep with their spiraled horns and heavy coats. Inside the house a single room with a hearth and a bed and the fire always crackling warmly and the sunlight falling in through the windows.

  He dreamed of her sitting in that field and the time he'd taken the wine in their stone mugs, each filled so full he thought they'd spill because this was not a place where you worried about the conventions of pouring, and he'd walked out to her. Looking at her in that yellow dress with the wind pulling it back and her hair also and her looking out over the wooded mountains, far over the town, to the distant mountains where they reached all the way up into snow and winter. But here the heat of the sun and when he sat beside her and handed her the wine she smiled and leaned and kissed him and waved a hand out at the world before her.

  Look at it all, she said, both then and in the dream.

  He'd smiled and said nothing and drank the wine which was cold and good. The sun on his neck. The weight that was always on his back for this day gone. Finally gone.

  Where do you want to go? he'd asked her.

  She leaned over and put her head on his shoulder and just looked out at it. The dark rock crags that fell away and the thick green forest and the other path far below them, twisting in the treeline. A beautiful and tranquil place, set above the real world as if this was somehow another world entire up here, another plane in which men could choose to live if they wanted. Where the things that harvested the men below could not reach them and perhaps nothing was real and perhaps it all was.

  And now in the dream she said: You'll kill her, Ironhelm. You'll kill her.

  He woke and it was dark and he was lying on his back on the marble floor. One of his furs rolled under his head, his arm against the base of the raised bed Kayhi lay on. He could see instantly in the dark as always and he looked and did not even need to for he could hear her breathing in the night. Still that harsh and strangled sound, but still breathing.

  His own heart in his chest pounding and all around him that long ago mountain field fading, the stone house behind them and the soft pressure of her head on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and it was gone and he scowled in fury. At what he knew not. Perhaps just himself. For the warped and shattered memories he carried and the way his dreams now twisted them in the night.

  Because that day she'd not spoken at all of a girl who would not be born for nearly a year, a small and furious girl thrust screaming into the world two months before her time and writhing and strong even so. On that day when they'd actually sat looking out at the world below them, soaring over it and everything it was, she'd said:

  Nowhere. Nowhere at all.

  IV

  When he woke the next morning they were in the room and he did not move, watching them in their red robes as they worked over her. He did not think they knew he was awake but then without turning one of them said to him:

  “She's alive.”

  What a world it was, he thought, where that was welcome news. He sat up slowly and stiffly and looked over to where Juoth and the dead girl were also waking and then pulled himself to his feet. He thought how quiet it was and then realized her breathing had softened and he looked at her and some of the color had come back to her face. Her eyes closed, her lips parted and free of blood. Her chest just rising and falling.

  One of them turned to him then while the other helped her drink again from the vial, and she said:

  “I can't tell you what the future is for her, but she won't die today. She may not die at all from this. She's very lucky. You both are.”

  “I know,” he said.

  They finished with her and he watched and felt helpless, so lost in this. The opposite of his trade. Something he knew nothing of and never would and in that some hopelessness but it was what it was. When they were done they both nodded to him but did not speak and went out the way they always did and it was silent in the spire.

  Juoth came over and stood in the window and then they just sat for a long time. Something they had not done in he did not know how long. Since eating with the farmer who was now dead by the fields that were long burned. Perhaps then. Other times as well but nothing like this.

  Every time after he hunted he felt empty. It was a thing that wrapped him up and consumed him and became the entire world. The stalking and baiting and lying in wait. Listening for black wings in the air or standing in the scent of smoke distant and drifting. Planning the kill and working with arrow and blade to be ready and then it was all fire and steel and the eternal screaming as a being nearly eternal itself was slaughtered. A fraction of a breath compared to the whole hunt, and then a ringing silence and nothing left for his ravenous appetite.

  “Are they always like this?” Juoth said. Looking down at his gloved hand, flexing it there in the pale light.

  “Like what?”

  “I saw them. The way they watched us in the street. The distance they gave you.”

  Brack smiled sadly. “Yes,” he said. “In the cities. They always are.”

  “Do they know what you did?”

  “Of course they know what I did.”

  “Then there should be a damned feast. Not these cowards shuffling in the dirt.”

  Brack shook his head. “Most men cannot kill other men,” he said. “The men who can, can't kill dragons. I'm a man who kills dragons.”

  “And so you terrify them.”

  “I don't blame them.”

  “You should. You damned well should.”

  In the rising sunlight the dust and smoke had settled beyond the wall. People were in the streets again, more people than he could believe were crawling from this rubble. Thousands living in the dark and shattered stone and now finally clawing to the daylight with the dragon dead. He knew there were more in the fields beyond, probably with their tents thrown and fires roaring and camping even now all around the cold body of the beast. As if in that they could claim some of the kill. A piece perhaps of another history that would in time be forgotten.

  Juoth looked at him again. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Who says I'm going to do anything with it?”

  “All this time. Don't think I think you're a fool.”

  “I have what I came for.”

  “So you're going to take this chance again? Two hundred years and you didn't learn a damn thing? Two hundred from now you want to stand in front of some other city and kill this thing again.”

  He was quiet, thinking. Looking at Kayhi. She did look better but she had not opened her eyes and it was those eyes he wanted to see.

  “All right,” he said. “I'm going to do something.”

  “You going to tell me what it is?”

  “I'm going to have you do it is what I'm going to do.”

  Juoth grinned and looked off over that battered world and nodded. The skin on the side of his face healing but pale where it would scar. In that a constant reminder of that town burning to the ice, the old bones in the ash. The hair growing back thin and the color of smoke.

  “You were wrong,” he said. He did not look at Brack as he said it.

  “I've been wrong about a great many things.”

  “About the dragon.” An aching pause. “And your daughter.”

  “When?”

  “What you told me. What you told the priest. It's a small room.”

  “I told him what I saw.”

  “Then your eyes aren't Tarek's eyes.”

  Brack felt the flinch in his own jaw and for a heartbeat sat holding it and knowing what it was and then closed his eyes and breathed and opened them again.

  “It never wanted to kill her in
front of you,” Juoth said. “This whole time that's what you said and the whole time you were wrong. She'd be dead if you weren't. That tower like a torch. That's what you saw.”

  Another breath. Then: “I know.”

  “Well.”

  “It was to force me to make a mistake. I ran in alone, with a knife and a sword. Me. A hunter all these years. Like a child to the slaughter.” Looking behind him. That small body on the wide bed. “And it would have worked.”

  “I spent years with your son,” Juoth said. “And he told me one thing more times than I can count.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There's always more,” he said. “When you think you've found it there's always more.” Looking over at last. “There's a depth to everything in this world. It may be endless. Everything we believe is there on the top and it floats and dies but what is real is somewhere lower. In the shadows of what we see. And all that matters is what's real.”

  “You add that part yourself?”

  “Listen to me.”

  Brack reached, put a hand on his shoulder. Nodded once and felt that depth all below him as it had always been and also felt that no matter how deep he swam in the murk and the dark all he did was find that it was deeper and deeper, some cavernous expanse swallowing time and fate and desire and the world itself as it moved out in all directions and everyone he'd ever known mired in it and out there somewhere swimming silently the passing shadow of a great and unknown beast, a leviathan toward which they all descended.

  “I am listening,” he said.

  The morning burned on and after a long time he finally felt hungry. He knew he had eaten in the field but he could not remember it and he did not know what it was he'd eaten. Could not remember a single meal since he left the keep. As it always was. Knowing the tables he'd sat at and the fires he'd cooked over but nothing more.

  He went to the bed and stood. Thinking of the moment of her birth and the way she'd looked at him with those eyes and the blood in her hair. Her weight the first time he held her.