And then far off in the field he heard a horn sounding. One long note, clear and ringing in the air, and then another. He could almost hear the banners flapping in the wind, the rattle of the armor and swords, the soft thud of the horses' hooves magnified to a dull thunder as they came on.
The horn paused for just a moment and then called out again.
Beside him, Kayhi opened her eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I
He stood in the field with the sword heavy on his back and he could smell the blood and the dragon burning. The grass beneath his feet cracked and withered from the heat. The smoke rising thick and gray into the morning sky.
They'd quartered it before dawn, working in the moonlight. At first just him and Juoth with sword and ax. Then others coming and joining. A solider with an ax of his own. Two carpenters with hatchets. A group of men and women from the forest with a long, two-handled saw. Dragging on either end and singing as they worked, some song in a language he'd never heard, surely as crude and vile as he thought it was from the light in their eyes and the roaring laughter every time they hit the refrain. Laboriously hauling that saw through flesh and bone and the blood splattering all down the front of their clothes.
He'd dragged the head aside as they worked. Looked once again at those darkened sockets, just two pits where the eyes had been. He'd seen this same beast die twice and now as he pulled the head aside he couldn't help but feel like the jaws were going to open again. That the furnace was going to burn, even with the head torn from its body. And so he'd taken his sword and swung in long, sure strikes to cut the flesh and hide and skull itself into pieces.
And then he'd carried them over and started the fire. There were plenty of logs and beams from this battered town, and half of them had just burned. It did not take long until it was raging and he could hear the dragonflesh sizzling as they threw it on. Committing this beast that was so much fire itself to a last inferno. Turning finally to ash. One last time through the flames.
Now he stood and watched and there were more people than he could count. Perhaps all here to extract in this way some vengeance on this creature that had come for them. That had killed their families and torn apart their walls and brought on them some dark wrath they'd thought was only found elsewhere. In the hinterlands. The mountains. The wastes. He'd killed the red dragon before the Ringed City's gates just two decades ago but it was not the first time that he'd seen a lingering disbelief in this stretching world, nor would it be the last.
As with most things too terrifying for men to believe, they never really did until it was upon them. Always believing the dragons would come for someone else until they lay dying among the slaughtered masses of a burned city and only then knowing that, if given the time, the dragons would come for them all.
Once it had been quartered they'd begun flaying off pieces of flesh. Ten men carrying them and covered in blood. Children walking with splintered bones and flaps of skin. Stacking them all on the fire like kindling and logs, watching as it burned. That black blood turning to steam, and the flesh and bone rising as smoke.
When it was done there would be nothing left but charred and blackened pieces. Nothing that could ever draw breath again.
Though he still felt himself looking to the sky, waiting for the hammering of wings in the air.
She came slowly across the field, walking in her white dress among the twisting, maddened crowd. These butchers that they were. The smoke a wall behind her, the dirt and mud and bootprints a maze in all directions. A flurry of activity, and yet she looked only at him as she walked.
“Kayhi,” he said as she stopped in front of him. He'd sat with her all the day before, leaving the dragon to rot and cool. Just sitting with her, then staying up half the night before tearing himself away to set to this gristly work. He didn't feel it was real there in the spire, surrounded by marble and doors he couldn't see, and he didn't feel it was real here on the field of battle. That she was real.
“How are you?” he said.
“Fine.”
“I told you to stay there.”
She smiled. “I know what you told me.”
He looked out again to where the company of soldiers sat on the edge of the field. All from the Ringed City, and what a march it must have been. Their armor sleek and smooth, the same deep silver of his own, like the slate gray of a morning sky on the water. The furs they wore underneath, and those dark helmets. Some with rising horns or antlers or wings, others smooth and unadorned. Red capes blowing in the wind.
It was their warhorn that Kayhi had heard.
“Should we go with them?” she said.
“I don't know.”
“What do you want?”
He waved a hand out before him, where the carnage continued. Two women walked by with a split leg bone between them, carried like a slain deer. Walking toward the spitting fires. “I want to burn this thing and be done with it.”
“You know that's no answer.”
“Some damned type of daughter you are.”
“I blame my father.”
“Then tell him what you think.”
She shrugged, also looking at the soldiers. Those who had come unannounced, but had left for this city long before word of the dragon could have reached them. Long before the keep fell in fire and snow. More than half a year they had to have marched to get this far.
“I think,” she said, “that you can pretend that this is the end all you want. You, a dragon killer, just doing what he was made to do. But you know that it's not the end. You don't kill a dragon twice and think that's all there is to it. Or you'll be killing them all twice and then all three times and then you'll be dead.”
“You think it'll happen again.”
“Anything that happened once can damned well happen again.”
He licked his lips, chapped and covered in soot and sweat. Closing his eyes and thinking of riding down in the snow, of the dry fields and dead cattle, of the forests and the plains. All that for one dragon that he didn't know where it came from or how it was alive. And now it was dead again and he knew just the same and perhaps less.
And she was right. Everything he'd done would be done eternally if killing a dragon no longer meant tearing it out of existence. If it meant anything less than finality, he was lost.
They were all lost.
II
He went into the tent, still smelling the caribou in the dried furs, their tireless muscles in the frozen wastelands of the north, and stepped into the lamplight. His eyes not needing to adjust to this darkness, always as they were ready for any light. The warmth thrown about on the walls, dried and taught, from two lamps on the ground.
Havrain stood looking at him with his arms folded across his chest. He wore his thin furs and the long red cape but his armor and helmet lay piled on the cot. There were no tables for the soldiers of the Ringed City cared nothing for appearance and everything for warfare; one less table was perhaps one more sword, one more crossbow. They brought only what they needed when they marched and nothing more and when the land behind them was red mud with their enemies lying slain in it, they left with just as little.
“Captain,” Brack said. Raising his closed fist briefly to touch his chest. A salute he'd not done in a long time.
“Forget the titles, Ironhelm.”
Brack scowled, but there was a light in his eyes. “Some army you've let this become.”
“It's as much an army as it needs to be.”
“That it is. And I'm glad to see it.”
“You'll always be a soldier.”
Brack looked across the cot. Sparse as the tent, the white furs still rolled at the foot. Lashed together with a leather strand. A pack of clothes tossed at the other end as a pillow.
“First you're late,” he said. “And now you're not staying.”
Havrain nodded, pressing his lips together. “Not any longer than we have to. Tonight if I have my way.”
“You march all
the way from the Ringed City for two nights watching a dead dragon burn, then you march back? And through this land, too. You know they could take this as an act of war in Kraestal.”
The captain snorted, shaking his head. “If that coward they have on the throne wants to stand against the Ringed City, let him stand. It'll take us all of three days to raze that place to the ground. Two if we fight past dinner.”
“That's asking for a mutiny.”
Havrain laughed. “I suppose.”
“But you're skirting it,” Brack said. “Who sent you? We both know it was before the dragon was in the plains. So you're not hunting it.”
“No, we're not.” The man reached down with arms powerful from years in this world, adjusting a swordbelt that didn't need it. “We didn't know of the dragon until two weeks ago. We pushed on as hard as we could, but we already were and there was nothing more for it. Doesn't look like you needed us anyway.”
Brack was silent for a moment, watching him. Then he scowled again and looked back at the flap to the tent. “Then you're here for me.”
“We are,” Havrain said. Quietly. Looking at Brack now, but not looking like a man who enjoyed it.
“Was it Wayland?”
“Wayland's dead.”
“Then who runs the priesthood?”
“Carron. But it wasn't the priesthood. It was Marazene.”
He tried not to let it show on his face but he felt that it must, even with this captain who was only human in the dimly lit tent. He could feel the heat from that lamp now, smell the oil burning and the hides so thick and full of years and must.
“The emperor himself,” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you want a drink?”
Brack looked at him a long moment, then nodded. “Do you have ice?”
“It has been too long since you were a soldier.” Havrain went to a bag lying next to the cot and the furs, untied the pulls around the top, reached in, and pulled out a stout glass bottle that could only be from the South Sea. The cork in the top, the gold lettering. He held it up in the light so that Brack could see the warm, rich color of the bourbon inside the glass, then stood and handed it to him.
“This is a drink?”
“We don't have cups. That bottle itself is a foolish luxury.”
Brack pulled the cork out and turned the bourbon in the bottle once and raised it to his lips and drank. It tasted like dragonfire. He lowered it and handed it across and the captain drank and handed it back.
“Tell me,” Brack said.
“Two years ago we lost a company in the mountains. The whole thing, not a sound. Nothing recovered. Two teams spent a month each looking for them and the most we ever found was a dagger with the blade broken off. Buried in the snow. Then the winter came on and we called it off and in the spring no bones turned up. Just gone like ghosts.”
“A whole company.”
“We waited that spring for war and nothing came. Even after the passes were clear. The watchtowers on the spine didn't see anything. We moved a company to the old fortress to watch the underground river, but it was as silent as it's been in a thousand years. Since Earmond's army died in their burning ships. Everything was quiet, from every direction.”
“And a solider hates peace.”
“When my men are dead I damned well hate it.” Havrain motioned for the bottle back, took it and drank again. As unflinching as he'd ever been. “We didn't know who would come but we thought someone would. Then that fall we lost another company, this one in the foothills. Doing maneuvers. A green unit but still a company of the ironclad and not prone to being killed to the man. All dead. We went out when they didn't report and found them. The heads, anyway. In a clearing of dead birches, all on stakes. The skin stripped off of them and the eyes eaten by the birds. The helmets and armor all gone, just a ring of dead men's skulls.”
“A ring.”
“I know.”
“What was the third one?”
“You know there was a third?”
“Marazene doesn't send for me unless there's a third. If there are more it's worse than you're letting on.”
Havrain nodded and Brack watched him drink again. Thinking of that snowswept country around the Ringed City. The jagged foothills of stone, the forests of cedar and birch, the spine of mountains rising up into their far off and snowdrenched fury, a white backdrop running up to the harsh blue of the ice sea.
“The third time,” the captain said. “The third time, they killed Crathe. Two companies and the entire town. Nothing left alive. Had to be five hundred people dead, maybe more if there were ships in port. We don't know how many there were. They burned the whole thing to the ground. We found two ships on fire and floating, all hands dead. Men lashed to the masts and railings, chained belowdecks. All alive when they put the ships into the current and lit them up.”
“So they're coming down the coast.”
“We don't know. We don't even know who did it.”
“And he sends for a dragon hunter.”
“It wasn't a dragon,” Havrain said. “I went to Crathe. I saw it. It wasn't a dragon.”
“But I still am what I am.”
Havrain raised an arm, fire playing now in his eyes. A bridled fury just below the skin. “You tore that thing from the sky and now it's just burning pieces of flesh and bone. That beast that destroys cities at its pleasure. Whatever is coming for the Ringed City, you can wade through it like a god. I've seen you do it.” Nearly snarling now. “Marazene isn't sending for a dragon hunter, he's sending for the man who stood on the wall at Terrorth and killed five hundred men before sunset. He's sending for the man who rode alone into Keelok and rode back out not an hour later with the king's head. That's who he sent me for.”
Brack was silent, closing his eyes. Smelling the caribou again and flashing quickly in his mind that house in the mountains, sitting there with the wine and the warm glow of the sun. Then thrown back to this, a march toward winter and some unknown enemy, standing in darkness and obscurity, surrounded by a ring of staked heads.
“It's an abuse,” he said at last. “You know that. It's an abuse of what I am.”
Havrain looked past him, the fury fading somewhat, but settling into a grim determination that was this man in every memory Brack had of him. Enlisted once and now a captain on the back of that sweat and focus and singleminded will.
Then he reached up and he touched his closed fist to his own chest. His hand just slightly shaking. “We need you,” he said. “We all need you.”
III
Brack stood outside the tent feeling the bourbon in his bones and skin and looked to where they still carried pieces of the dragon to the flame. Kayhi stood between him and the fire, her back to him, the smoke rising all around and above her. This girl who had really killed the dragon, the only family he had left in this world. A man who had lived the lives of ten men, and he had one daughter left alive.
You'll kill her, Ironhelm. You'll kill her.
But he hadn't. He'd come this far to save her and she'd saved them all and now he was being asked to leave her again. All the time he had and it was never enough.
He kept waiting for her to turn and see him but she did not. Watching the burning of the dragon, its hewn body turning to ash and smoke, the great killer of the world finally drenched in a death of its own.
As he stood looking Havrain came out and stood next to him. His arms folded. The sun flashing in that red cape and off the hilt of his sword. This a sword unadorned, not the sword of a king set with jewels and forged into the rampant form of a lion or a horse or an eagle with outstretched wings. A simple tool, the sword of a man who used it to kill and then cleaned it and then used it again and who did not think of the way it looked but only of what it could do and what he could do when he held it.
“I'm not asking,” he said quietly.
“I know you're not,” Brack said.
He'd known since he hear
d the horn and knew again when he saw the company. The captain could tell him any damned thing he wanted about where they were or why they were marching, but he'd come with a company because it was an order, not a request.
They knew something of what he was in the Ringed City. Perhaps half of it. Hunters there were talented killers. Men with years of training. When one rode in the ranks on a field of battle, men looked to him. Whispered about what he could do and waited for the slaughter. A single hunter riding with an army could rally them all because they felt, deeply within themselves, that the hunters had no equals.
But, always, they thought those hunters were men.
He didn't know how old Havrain thought he was. But the things he'd spoken of had happened so recently. There were many other things Brack had done, things now passing into legend, attributed to hunters most believed to be dead. Other men living other lives. Things that made the stand on the wall of Terrorth seem like nothing at all, the blood pouring down that wall like a mere pinprick.
A company could never take him. Even in the place where they bred their hunters, almost no one knew what they truly were.
But the company meant they would try.
“Let me finish this,” he said then. Still watching Kayhi with her back to him. “Let me burn this dragon. I'll come to you in the morning and we'll talk.”
“We ride in the morning. We have to.”
“Then we ride. But give me this first. I hunted this thing down from the mountains and it killed my cousins, my grandfather. Let me burn it.” He turned and looked at the captain, his thick beard the same color as the furs he wore, a man so entrenched in who he was that he'd never sit quietly before a fire in old age, closing his eyes in the silence. He'd sit with a sword across his knees and a scowl on his lips.
Or he'd not live to old age at all, because someone equally entrenched would someday arrive and tear out his throat and then move on toward his own end.
The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Page 26