by Rick Shelley
"I suppose the farmer said that his dragon was as big as a mountain," I said.
"He said it was big. It was scaring his family and his livestock."
"A real dragon?" Aaron asked, excited.
"It could be," I told him. "There are real dragons around here."
"Can I go see it?"
"I don't think so, sport." I grinned. "Dragons can be dangerous."
"You gonna kill it?"
"That's what everyone expects of me. Maybe after it's dead you can have a look. I'll have to check with Parthet first." Parthet and I really hadn't finished our argument over Aaron's future, but for the moment at least, the wizard had claimed guardianship over Aaron. After our previous go-rounds, I didn't want to haul Aaron off anywhere without checking with Parthet first. Although I hadn't admitted it to myself yet, I guess I had already given in to Parthet's arguments.
"Did Lesh come through with you?" I asked Joy.
"No. He was still trying to calm the farmer when I left."
I had been wolfing down the food as quickly as I could. The platters were getting low. I got down a little more before I resumed the conversation.
"I'd better go see what's up. Why don't you stay here with Aaron? When Parthet gets back from his running around, let him know where I've gone. I'll get back as soon as I can."
I started to get up, but Joy put her hand on my arm. "You think there really is a dragon?" she asked.
I hesitated, then nodded. "The way things are going the last couple of days, there probably is."
"Be careful, Gil."
My smile may have flashed and vanished too quickly, but I assured her that I would be careful-as careful as possible. That was a major qualifier.
I stepped through to Cayenne and went down to the great hall. Lesh and Harkane were waiting for me there, all duded up for combat. Timon was down in the ground-floor stable with the horses. For the first time, he was dressed for fighting too, ready to claim his new status as my squire. I grinned at him, tousled his hair, and let him help me put my armor on-chain mail over a padded leather tunic, and a steel and leather helmet with a long, curved strip of iron that comes down over my nose. I hate that helmet. Most times, I prefer to substitute a Cubs cap for it, but I was riding out to do battle with a dragon-possibly-and dragons aren't to be trifled with. With my luck, I'd run into one that rooted for the Cardinals.
After more than three years of Varay, I no longer felt quite as foolish riding out to do battle as I had at first. I had my two elf swords, a dagger with a foot-long blade, a compound bow with a full quiver of razor-headed arrows, and a.458 magnum big-game rifle. Dragons are the biggest game there is. The remaining major snag is that firearms only seem to work about one-third of the time in the buffer zone, less often than that when things are really critical. I had bought the rifle after my first two encounters with dragons, but I had never had a chance to test it on a live dragon. Believe me, I never even considered going out looking for a dragon just so I could test-fire the weapon. A Hero doesn't get to be an old Hero by looking for trouble he doesn't absolutely, positively have to face.
"How far are we going, Lesh?" I asked.
"About an hour's ride, lord," he said. He pointed off into the foothills, toward the higher ridges of the Titans beyond.
"What did you make of this farmer's story?"
"He's seen a dragon, right enough, lord, close enough for details. He gave me a good description," Lesh said.
"How big did he say it was?"
"Said when it put out it wings it covered his whole farm."
"I hope he was exaggerating."
"I'm sure he was, lord," Lesh said. But, like as not, the dragon was still large enough to be a major pain.
I tried not to show it-putting on a brave front is essential PR for a certified Hero-but, to phrase it as concisely as the language permits, I was scared shitless. The traditional lore in Varay was that no mortal could slay a dragon and live through the experience. I had killed two of them, though the first really didn't count, since an elf warrior had done at least ninety percent of the job first. But the elf was about to crap out permanently, and he told me to take his sword and finish the job. I did, and got to keep the sword to boot. That was how I got Dragon's Death. The second dragon came during the Battle of Thyme. That dragon was a weapon controlled by the wizard of the Etevar of Dorthin, brought in to try to get rid of me and scare off the Varayan army so that the Dorthinis could conquer Varay. That dragon was pretty much my own kill, though the fight was too close for me to do any gloating over it, so the new and improved "traditional" wisdom was that only a mortal who had killed a dragon could kill one. But if the next dragon I met had me for brunch, the Varayans would simply move on to "Release 3.0" of the new and improved traditional wisdom to cover the situation, maybe something like "Three dragons and you're out," or something equally half-witty. I was pushing the odds so far out of shape that even Lloyd's of London wouldn't cover my kind of risk.
There isn't much level ground in the region surrounding Castle Cayenne. "Flat land" is the top of a hill or the narrow valley between two ridges. The roads, such as they are, tend to follow the valleys-when the many spring-fed streams in the area leave room for paths or trails. In the spring, when snowmelt from the mountains is added to the normal flow of water, the hills can be more like chains of islands scattered around like bead necklaces. But even at the flood, the waters rarely get dangerously deep. Just pesky.
The farmers of Varay are good at land conservation, though. They follow the contours of the terrain to minimize erosion. Back home, even with all the scientists working on agriculture and soil retention, some farmers don't bother with such elementary steps. And even though Varay remains technologically in the early Middle Ages, the farmers get almost modern yields from their fields. To feed us all as much as we need to eat in the buffer zone, the farms have to be extraordinarily productive. Part of it, according to Parthet, is simply the magical nature of the seven kingdoms, but I'm never willing to slight the importance of the people out working the fields nine or ten months a year. They do the visible magic.
We stopped a couple of times to talk to farmers who were out working. I asked if they had seen this new dragon in the region. One was sure that he hadn't. "I'd sure a-known if I had." The other wasn't certain, but he thought that maybe he had seen a dragon flying in the distance the day before.
The sky was clear, with just a few wispy cirrus clouds off in the west, and it wasn't all that hot yet as we rode out. The breeze was from the north and still carried a faint hint of the cool it picked up over the Mist, hundreds of miles away. Wearing twenty-five pounds of armor and padding makes a person very sensitive to temperature. With the sun out, wearing armor does for you about what a wrapping of aluminum foil does for the potato you throw in with the coals on your barbecue.
"We're getting close," Lesh said about the time I was wondering how much farther we had to go. I didn't do so much horseback riding that I was really comfortable with it. I rarely went anywhere in Varay that I couldn't get to through one of our magic doorways. I had done enough riding for the year on my tour of our western neighbors. I wasn't eager for another marathon ride.
I had been watching the sky since we left Cayenne. Dragons aren't forced to stay anywhere they don't want to stay. The two I had close experience with hadn't come near the ground except to attack. On a few other occasions I had seen dragons flying high. Those hadn't even bothered to attack.
What I didn't expect to find was a dragon squatting on the ground building a nest.
Something about this dragon didn't look quite right. I thought that it was just some trick of perspective at first, but then I realized that the "problem" was simply that the dragon was relatively small-far smaller than the two dragons I had killed. It had used its claws to scrape a shallow depression in the top of the next hill, but the dragon was still only fifty or sixty feet long, a midget compared to the other dragons I had met up close and personal.
&nbs
p; "A runt!" Lesh said. He sounded as relieved as I felt.
I chuckled. "You want to handle this one?" I asked.
He looked to see if I was serious and decided that I wasn't. Oh well, it was worth a try.
"There's something nobody has ever said anything to me about," I said. "Nobody ever said anything about dragons building their nests right here in Varay. It's always They come in from the Mist, or They come in from the Titans. "
"I don't go lookin' for them!" Lesh said.
"Very wise attitude," I said. "But what do we do with this thing?"
"You have your gun," Lesh reminded me.
If it decides to work, I thought. I wasn't optimistic… and I wasn't sure that a gun would make the slightest impression on a dragon if it did work. It might just make the damn thing mad.
I estimated the distance to the dragon at about three hundred yards. I would probably have to get a lot closer if I wanted to have any hope that the gun would be sufficiently effective. Using an elephant gun on a sixty-foot dragon might be as useful as plinking at an elephant with a.22. And closer would give me a poor angle for the shot through an eye toward the middle of the back of the head, the only target that seemed to have any chance of dropping any dragon.
I dismounted, and my companions did likewise. Timon took the reins of all four horses and moved them back a few paces. Harkane held both the rifle and my bow, waiting for me to make my choice. Maybe I should have a golf bag, add a couple of wedges.
"You suppose it's the sporting thing to do, shoot the damn thing while it's just sitting there?" I asked. It was a rhetorical question, I suppose. I sure as hell wasn't going to walk over, give it the ringer, and make rude noises to get it mad. The dragon knew that we were there. It kept its eyes on us. but it wasn't making any threatening gestures. It was just watching, the way any wild animal might, as long as you stay outside its flight distance.
"Well, I might prefer the dragon to be sleeping, myself," Lesh said. "But don't count the teeth on a free horse."
"Yeah." I realized that I was stalling. The other times I had faced dragons, I didn't have much choice in the matter, especially the second time. The dragon in question was looking to use me for chewing exercise. But this dragon was just sitting there in its nest-getting ready to lay eggs with baby chickens in them for all I knew.
"Give me the rifle," I said.
The rifle was a Mannlicher bolt-action with a four-shot magazine. I took it, ran the bolt to get a shell into the firing chamber, and took aim. The telescopic sight brought the dragon's face right up close. There was no way I could miss. I could look right into that bloodshot amber eye and see the blood vessels along the surface. The dragon didn't even blink.
I moved forward a half-dozen paces, a little lower on the slope. When I started to lose my angle on the dragon's head, I stopped and lifted the rifle again. I aimed, took a breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened, just a click. I ran the bolt and tried again and got a popping sound like somebody stepping on a paper cup. There was no recoil, but when I ejected that round, all that came out was the cartridge case. Lesh bent down and picked up the slug, maybe eight inches in front of the muzzle.
"Your father never had much luck with guns here either," Harkane said. "Except once when he used a rifle as a club."
I left the bolt open while I looked down the barrel. Light glinted off my thumbnail, so I knew that the barrel wasn't blocked, so I tried one more shot. This time I got a slightly louder plop and just a hint of recoil.
"I saw the bullet fall," Harkane said. "It went about three horse lengths."
I handed him the rifle. "I guess I have to go over there and do it the hard way," I said. Harkane handed me my bow. I was going to have to get a lot closer to the dragon to do any good with it, though. And I didn't have any hope at all of actually killing a dragon with an arrow. All I could hope for was to weaken it a bit, blind it with a little luck. Then I would have to finish the job with Dragon's Death.
We all made the trek except Timon. I told him to stay with the horses and watch from our hilltop.
Going up the opposite slope, I tried a couple of arrows, but I was at the wrong angle to have a good shot at either of the dragon's eyes. I hit its snout once, and then it waddled backward, out of sight. I gave the bow to Harkane and drew Dragon's Death. As I continued up the hill, the sword's eerie battle tune started winding its way up out of my throat as usual.
Harkane notched an arrow to the bow. Lesh had his spear extended, ready to use that. But all that either of them might be able to do was distract the dragon while I did the important work with my six-foot cleaver.
The dragon was up on all four feet when I could see him-her-it again, still backing away, groaning mightily. I pulled my other elf sword and rattled the two blades together, then went back to just Dragon's Death. I couldn't see trying to fight with both of those oversized steak knives at the same time.
Finally, the dragon quit backing up and hurled itself forward. I brought my sword up and braced myself, ready to meet the charge, but the dragon flapped its wings desperately and flung itself into the sky, clearing my head by a good ten feet, well beyond the range of Dragon's Death. The dragon climbed, circled once, then flapped away toward the south and the higher peaks of the Titan Mountains.
I took a deep breath and sat down.
"I never heard of anybody scaring off a dragon afore," Lesh commented while we watched the beast flap its way off into the distance. The dragon looked awkward in flight from our vantage. "It's like it knowed you're a dragon killer."
"You missed your true calling, Lesh," I said. "You should be working on Madison Avenue, hawking deodorant and cereal and stuff like that."
"Lord?"
"Nothing, Lesh. Here, help me up." I raised an arm, and Lesh helped me to my feet. With all the armor, it's impossible to look graceful getting up off the ground. The dragon finally faded from our view, angling off behind one of the nearer peaks, quite a few miles away. I walked a little higher on the slope. There were no eggs in the depression that the dragon had scooped out.
"Let's go home," I said as I turned and started back down the hill. We started walking back toward our horses. Timon met us in the valley between the hills. We mounted up and started back to Castle Cayenne, a lot more relaxed than we were riding out.
I left my armor and leather padding at Cayenne and stepped through to Basil. Life appeared to be getting back to normal in the great hall there. No one was bitching about calamities lurking in the victuals for lunch, and the smells of cooking food made it out of the kitchen to tempt appetites-not that they needed blandishments. I asked around and learned that Parthet had returned. He and Kardeen were closeted somewhere still trying to figure out what dragons in chicken eggs might mean. Joy and Aaron were chatting at the head table, either still or again. Joy always gets on well with kids, better than I do. I stopped off with them for a couple of minutes, long enough to kiss Joy and to tell Aaron that there was no dead dragon for him to see, before I wandered off on my own again.
At first, I did just wander. I had no conscious goal in mind when I left Joy and Aaron. Parthet and Kardeen would keep for a while. But when I found myself near the stairs that lead down to the cellar and crypt, I decided to stop in to have a few words with Dad. That may sound crazy, but whenever I feel lonely, or just feel a need to talk out a problem, I tend to go down under Castle Basil to the room where all the Kings and Heroes of Varay are buried. I can stand there by the end of Dad's niche and tell him what I've been up to, or whatever is bothering me. Sometimes I even chat with Vara, the first King and Hero of Varay.
Do I believe in ghosts? Do I think that they really hear me? I'm not sure how to answer that. Before I came to Varay, the answer would have been an easy no. But when things got rough, just before and during the Battle of Thyme, I found doubt. Two nights before the battle, I had a dream or a vision-I'm still not sure which it was. In this whatever-it-was experience, I found myself in the crypt. All of the
dead Heroes were sitting around a table, waiting for me to join them. Vara told me that he had vowed that no Hero of Varay would ever die alone again, the way he had. When my time came, and Vara indicated that my time had indeed come, the whole Congregation of Heroes would be there to welcome me.
A dream? A vision? I don't know. But getting things off my chest down in the crypt always seems to help.
The catacombs are deep under Castle Basil, down in the solid rock on which the castle sits-not all that far above the level of Basil Town. Torches are kept burning on every landing along the stairs, replaced by the duty guards. There are two cellar levels that are used for larders and wine cellars and the like, then one more level, smaller and considerably below the others. That was where I headed.
I heard noises coming from the catacombs as I descended the stairs-barely audible at first, but slowly becoming quite distinct. I stopped for a moment and checked my reach to the swords slung over my shoulder. The elf swords are in what are, in effect, speed rigs. There are no scabbards that have to be cleared. Each sword is held in place by two spring-loaded C-clamps. If I had to pull five feet of blade out of a scabbard before I could use it, I'd never finish a draw.
Usually, I have complete privacy when I go down to the burial chamber. No one else has ever seemed interested in my sort of routine pilgrimage-people don't lay flowers for the dead or anything like that in Varay-and since only kings and official Heroes are buried there, funerals are rare. But someone was down there now, maybe more than one someone.
The stairway was six feet wide, against a wall on one side, but without even a banister on the other. I moved as softly as I could on the stairs. The noises were real, and they were definitely coming from inside the burial chamber.
I had been stabbed too recently to take anything for granted, even in Basil's crypt. Dragon's Death was the first thing I stuck into the room. I moved in quickly behind the sword, and stopped just inside the doorway, ready for anything.
There were two workmen inside, preparing a new burial niche at the kings' end of the room. One worker noticed me and dropped his chisel. It clattered off the stone. The other worker turned to look. Neither had heard me coming.