The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  Havrain nodded, watching the smoke as well. The fire in his eyes like flame on glass. “The morning, then.”

  Brack walked slowly across that field, torn up by the dragon and the horses and the men, a sea of mud and the coming winter. The ash falling back to earth and melting into that sludge and the dragon slowly becoming the very place it had destroyed. Becoming the soil and the mud and the grass itself. Perhaps eventually the stone. Thinly, very thinly, the dragon becoming everything they knew, even the place where someday children would run and laugh and play in the summer warmth. Beneath them always the dispersed and dismantled body of this creature of darkness and fire.

  He got to what remained of the head, just shattered bones and bloodsoaked earth and a scattering of ripped flesh. Knelt there and reached into the mud and picked up one of those teeth. As long nearly as the hunting knife he wore on his calf. A small and meaningless tooth for a dragon, but enough to reach his heart. The larger ones already cast into the flame.

  He held it up carefully in the sunlight, turning it, then softly touched it to his lips. Taking from his pocket a long leather strand. Wrapping it about the tooth, knotting it, then raising it and circling it around his neck. The leather cold and hard but the tooth warm where it fell against his breastbone.

  The fingers that took that strand from him were slender and cold as well, delicately tying it so that the knot settled against his spine. He knelt there, tipping his head down and looking at the carnage around him, until he felt them slip away. The tooth hanging firmly in its place.

  Then he stood and turned, and Kayhi was there, looking up at him. This girl he knew only one way to save. One way that he hated and loathed more than anything, but also the one way he could stop hearing her mother's voice.

  Or, perhaps, the reason he was hearing it at all.

  Some things in this world impossible to know until they were behind you and it was all too late.

  You'll kill her.

  “Why?” she said.

  He didn't answer, just tipped his head to the side. Blinking away the memory.

  “Why the tooth?” she said. “Don't tell me you're taking trophies now.”

  He smiled. “No, I certainly am not.”

  “Then why?”

  “This dragon was killed before,” he said softly. “You know it. The head cut off. The body buried. It should have been gone, consumed by the earth and the water alike, but it came back.” He reached up, laid his fingers against the tooth. The heat moving through it. “Someone told me that anything that can happen once can happen again. At least now I'll know if I have to kill it a third time.”

  IV

  He stood in the spire, that pristine marble and the furs on the bed. Juoth sitting on those furs and tying on his boots. The dead girl standing and looking out the window. Turning once to look at him and her face impassive and unreadable, those pale eyes blinking twice and then turning back to the view.

  “What did you do for her?” he said.

  “For your sister?” the priest asked.

  Brack looked at him and he did not turn away. Holding his gaze unflinchingly, but with great knowledge in his eyes. Both of them knowing he lied even as he lied.

  “Yes,” Brack said. For there was comfort in lies. And he'd never met a priest who did something, no matter how small, without reason.

  The priest nodded. “She wasn't badly hurt. Just knocked unconscious. They gave her some herbs, a drink. She should be fine. There wasn't any bleeding on her brain. We didn't have to drill.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  The priest smiled.

  Brack looked again at the dead girl. She was so still as she stood in that window. Almost carved of marble herself.

  “That one,” the priest said. “What happened to her?”

  “I don't know,” Brack said.

  “Ah.”

  For the third time, that knowledge.

  “Watch her,” the priest said. Something changing in his voice. “To be sure she's all right.”

  “I will.”

  “You must.”

  Juoth rose and Brack reached a hand out to the priest. He took it carefully, and there was such strength in his grip, despite his age. The vigor of a man decades his junior. Brack had expected it and again it was a thing they both knew and he nodded and then they went out and down that spiraling iron staircase like descending some great throat in the middle of the temple and out into the courtyard. The city empty now with everyone outside still in the field. A cold wind coming up and sweeping over the walls. He almost looked up to see her and her hair caught in that wind but he did not and instead just went to the switchback stone staircase beside the gate and began to climb.

  She was waiting for them at the top, standing where the wall remained heavy and intact. Thick enough for passageways beneath their feet and a wide battlement that wrapped the city. The town sprawling out in all directions around them. They went across that cold stone and Kayhi turned for a moment to watch them come and smiled and then turned back to the world before her as they fell in on all sides.

  “Look at it,” she said.

  The dragon was nearly gone. The crimson sun rising on the horizon, the mountains far off and blood red in the light, the painted snow and ice. That same brutal light edging onto the plains where the coals and the dragon's body smoldered and hissed. A long bed of blackened bones and little flames still licking over them. This pyre where the dragon had fallen blind and screaming to the earth, the girl swinging from its neck with the arrow through its blistering eye.

  He reached for her then and she leaned against him, so small and wrapped in her cloak. He closed his eyes and saw her falling and heard her scream then over the dragon's and opened his eyes again. As if to assure himself that it was dead, that this time it was dead and only the ash remained.

  On the edge of it all the captain stood before the tent. His eyes not on the dragon's burning but on them where they stood atop the wall. That cold wind coming down off the mountains, swirling the blood red cloak behind him. The firelight on his breastplate and helmet. Behind him the ice of winter flashing coldly as the mountainborn light fell, smoke and death and carnage on that wind.

  Epilogue

  Beneath her feet the heavy churning of the machines deep within the mountains. An incessant vibration that felt as if it reached the ends of the earth. The ever-present smell of sulfur and fire and smoke as she walked the halls, the remaining stone passageways of this ancient ruin. A place crafted in ages now forgotten, hewn out of the stone by men

  (perhaps)

  so long dead that even their bones had turned to dust and the dust to stone and no more were they known or remembered. A forgotten scourge, torn out of history, shattered and destroyed and it all so long ago no one knew who had done it.

  She walked in the darkness with only the dim oil lamps lighting the stone in front of her. Those ageless marks from the picks. The darkness making it feel smaller than it was, but the stone ceiling actually a dozen feet above her, the passageway at least that wide. She did not know if they had built it this way to walk six abreast or if they had been a towering, hulking people for whom this was space for a single man.

  But she felt that she knew, all the same.

  The passage came to a bridge and she crossed it and an endless dark below her. Far, far down a faint light. Or a trick of the eyes. She would not look and crossed the bridge slowly, feeling a cold wind moving above her. Looking up and seeing that same towering darkness above and reaching on to an untold distance.

  Her sword at her side, heavy and made of rough, black-forged metal. A cruel instrument made not for looks or grace but for tearing the entrails out of a man and moving on to the next. The hilt wrapped in twisted leather. The back edge dented and chipped but the front filed to a razor's edge.

  She stopped on the other side of that bridge and closed her eyes. There for a moment a complete darkness. Feeling at her back the drop and wondering if she were to take a ste
p back and to the side if she'd open her eyes as she fell. Or if she'd just keep them closed in sleep and let herself fall and feel the wind pulling at her dark cloak as she descended into the madness below.

  She did not know. She never knew.

  The passage continued and she went on and up the great stone staircase where the lamps no longer burned. The cold growing with each step. A frost on the front edges of the stairs, thin and just felt slickly under her boots. When at last she stood at the top she could see her breath in the air and the thin light now filling the landing. A cold and meager light full of mist and ice.

  She looked behind her, into the nothing. Found her fingers on her sword and slowly put both hands into her cloak. Wrapping it and clenching the rough fabric. Then she turned and walked out the tall arch of stone and soot and frost and stood blinking on the balcony.

  Below a drop of ice and snow over black rock, falling away for a thousand feet. Just the thin stone rail between her and that soaring fall. Clouds thin and cold below her. Finally at the end the mountain sweeping out into a glacial plain as far as she could see, running off in windswept fury. The snow so hard it was just shards of ice chased in that wind, swirling across the frozen expanse. Behind her the mountains still rose, climbing into this stark wasteland to impossible heights, the highest peaks even now lost in those vicious clouds, the air gone up there and the cold so deep it would rip the breath from your lungs and leave you as stone itself to be buried and lost.

  Perhaps even now, bodies up there in the snow. Fools lost in ages past, still forever, unable even to rot.

  Far down the balcony before her, the swirling of his cape in the ceaseless wind. Everything about him white, from the eyes to the skin to the hair to the long fingers wrapped around the edge of the rail. His clothes and belt and even the leather around the hilt of the silver sword. But that cloak itself the deepest black she'd ever seen, the sky at night with no stars and no moon, a deep void of nothing, nothing.

  He turned as she stepped out, and she did not look down. His pupils alone a red like fire and ruby, burning in that dead face. Slowly, a long red tongue emerging to wet the thin and pale lips, cracked and chapped in this frigid gale.

  And yet he stood in this world, his hands uncovered. Ice in his hair and eyebrows and on his boots. Looking at her with his red eyes and not blinking at all. Not a shake or tremor. Just the slightest mist before him as he breathed, thin and shallow breaths as they passed through his filed teeth.

  She did not speak as she walked toward him, and he turned back to the frozen hell of the plain. There was ice on the balcony and she walked slowly to keep her footing. Or she told herself that was why she did it. Even believed it

  (perhaps)

  as the frost cracked, leaving thin tracks behind her.

  When she stopped at his side he did not look at her, but raised his hands from the rail, clenching them once. Those long and serpentine fingers. It almost looked as if the bones moved under pale and stretching skin but the flesh did not move with them. Almost.

  Then he snarled, just the corner of his lip twisting upward. One rotted and pointed tooth below, the skin creasing like it wasn't skin at all. A bloodless twisting. Above them the howling wind ceasing for a moment its torment. And in that brittle silence, he said:

  “Someone has killed my dragon.”