Sword and Sorceress 30

by Waters, Elisabeth

  Keeva lead her horse around a rocky outcrop to reveal a wide stone shelf tucked against the mountainside, almost like a broad road. At the end of the shelf yawned a dark cave. Shackles hung on an iron post near the cavern’s entrance, no doubt where the village elders left sacrifices in hopes of placating the dragon.

  Keeva’s father and the other hunters had tied their horses to a bush jutting from the rock. They were stalking forward with their weapons, keeping their bodies close to the mountain, trying to blend with the rocks. With luck, the men would catch the beast slumbering. Keeva’s father had told her most dragons sleep after a large meal, and just this morning a shepherd had reported two lost from his flock and a great winged beast circling the sky.

  The hunters were halfway to the cave’s mouth when Keeva heard the first whispers of the dragon’s roar. At first she didn’t know what the faint sound was, but the hissing grew to a steady rumble and she remembered her father saying a dragon’s voice was like thunder.

  But something was wrong. The roar never paused, never stopped for the dragon to refill its lungs. Instead, the sound grew louder and louder, becoming deafening. The ground shook beneath Keeva’s feet. A scatter of pebbles rushed by her to hurtle over the mountainside.

  This is no dragon’s roar, thought Keeva, it’s a…

  “ROCKSLIDE!” she screamed.

  She didn’t know if the hunters heard her, but the group broke into a mad sprint back to their horses…. Too late.

  Keeva watched in horror as a wave of boulders, trees, and rubble poured from the mountain above to sweep the slayers and their steeds off the rocky shelf. She started forward to help but recoiled as a blast of dust accompanying the slide dimmed the sun and burned her throat.

  “Dad!” she croaked out.

  She waited, listening for any sort of reply. Keeva was about to call again when she heard a noise coming from the dust. Afraid it was another slide, Keeva tensed to run, but then she spotted something massive and dark moving in the haze: yard after yard of hard scales, sharp talons, and dagger teeth.

  A dragon picked its way down the mountainside, slinking with an imperfect grace. For every three catlike steps, there was a fourth stumble. One of the beast’s hind legs was missing, the stump covered with pale scars. The dragon moved liked it kept forgetting its lost limb, twisting awkwardly to compensate.

  Sliding from the mountainside, it flopped heavily onto the rocky shelf, pausing briefly before moving to peer over the cliff. The dragon’s scales were so dark they seemed to suck the yellow from the sun. Gray smoke twined from its nostrils.

  Focusing her attention on the beast’s exposed flank, Keeva noticed a gap on the dragon’s scaly hide. A skilled hunter could exploit the chink to bring down the beast. Keeva committed the location to memory, then noticed another breach and memorized it as well. Spotting yet another flaw, she paused a moment to regard the whole creature.

  Dragons could live for thousands of years, it was said, but this one wasn’t just old, it was ancient, its hide a tangle of patched skin and broken scales. A blind slayer could bring down the beast.

  At that very moment, a wounded hunter with his arm hanging limp exploded from a pile of stones behind the dragon. Rage and pain distorted the man’s face. Pulling a broken spear from the rubble, the hunter sent the barb streaking toward the dragon. The beast tried to plant its missing leg on the rock shelf and stumbled. The spear buried itself deep into the creature’s chest.

  The dragon roared. Flame geysered from its jaws to engulf the wounded hunter. Then the blazing stream sputtered, and the dragon bent over, hacking and coughing. When the dragon’s fire dissipated, the man was charred flesh, frozen in a pose of agony.

  Everything grew still on the mountain except the wheezing dragon. It used its talons to dig the broken spear from its chest, sending sizzling blood spattering onto stone and the barb clattering to the ground.

  “You murdered them,” said Keeva in a quiet voice, too shocked with grief for caution. “You murdered my father.”

  The dragon swung its massive head toward Keeva and filled its lungs for another fiery blast, but it aborted the attempt in a fit of wheezing spasms. The monster spat a wad of reddened phlegm from its teeth instead and sat heavily on its haunches, regarding Keeva with yellow, slitted eyes.

  “Murder is a strong word, girl,” said the dragon in a voice that reverberated like a war drum. “Did I travel far from my home in hopes of slaughtering your father as he slept? Did I kill his mate and children seasons ago, ensuring he was the last of his line? I killed them, yes, but I murdered no one.”

  “You eat people!” shouted Keeva.

  The dragon spat again. “Faugh! I haven’t tasted human flesh in centuries,” it said. “Humans are vile. Too much bone, too little meat.”

  “Liar!” Keeva shouted, pointing to the iron post and shackles. “What about the maidens?”

  The dragon went still for moment, then nodded. “Yes, of course I ate the girls. I discounted them, since they were such small morsels.” Chuckling, it said, “Though very few of them were virgins.”

  The dragon stalked toward Keeva and the young woman felt her breeches grow wet. She flinched as the dragon’s great claws swept away the spear she’d forgotten she had in her hands. The beast then scooped up Keeva’s terrified horse and popped the animal into its mouth, chewing it with great, wet crunches. The dragon turned away, thudding back towards its cave.

  “Begone, girl,” it called over its shoulder. “While your father still has at least one living child.”

  Keeva watched the monster retreat for a few moments, then she sprinted after the dragon, slowing only to scoop up the broken spear still smoking with the dragon’s blood. The creature didn’t notice her as it ducked into its cave. Keeva scrambled to the side of the entrance where the dragon had stacked boulders to seal itself inside if it chose. She found a narrow gap between two great rocks and wriggled the broken spear and her body out of sight, then waited for the dragon to slumber.

  Keeva listened, muscles tensed, as hours passed and the light of day waned. But sleep did not come easily for the dragon. Instead of the creature’s growling snore, Keeva heard the beast tossing in its cavern, exuding small, whimpering moans as it thrashed.

  Only when it grew too dark to see, did Keeva allow her eyes to droop. She would have to wait until dawn to kill the monster. Only the dead thought their eyes better than a dragon’s in darkness.

  ~o0o~

  Keeva woke to an unexpected sound in the morning light: a crying infant. Peering from her hideaway, she saw a young woman in a woolen shawl carrying a swaddled babe in her arms. The woman strode across the rock shelf in dawn’s scattered rays. Keeva looked desperately for a stone to throw so she could warn the woman of her danger without revealing himself to the dragon. But even as her fingers gripped a sharp-edged rock, the woman called out, “Grandfather! It’s Elayna. Are you all right? We saw the cloud of dust and worried.”

  “Must you call me Grandfather?” boomed the dragon’s voice. “No blood of mine mingles with yours.”

  “It’s how my people honor our elders,” said Elayna.

  “I have years enough for the world to name me Grandfather,” said the dragon.

  The babe’s unhappy cries turned to a piercing yowl. The woman shrugged her shawl from her shoulder and pressed the infant against her breast to silence it.

  “I begin to see why your elders brought you to me, girl,” said the dragon. “Surely that wriggling creature must be a banshee. Nothing natural makes such noise.”

  The dragon laughed and pushed itself from its cave to hold its head close to the young woman. Squinting, Keeva spotted a dozen gaps on the beast’s scaled neck where she could thrust her barb and pierce the great artery feeding the dragon’s brain.

  “You say this of all infants,” said Elayna, smiling. “That jest is almost as old as you.” The woman’s smile faltered. “Grandfather, you’re hurt!”

  “A scratch,” replied the drago
n. “Courtesy of fools.”

  Keeva gripped the spear so tightly her knuckles popped.

  “Come back with me,” said Elayna, pleading. “It’s not safe for you here.”

  The dragon puffed a smoky sigh. “You are not the first to ask this of me, girl, but hunters know this to be a dragon’s mountain. And they know where to find me because I make no attempt to hide. If I vanish, where would they look next? What else could their prying eyes discover?”

  “But they’ll kill you.” Elayna’s face glistened with tears.

  “Bah!” said the dragon. “My furnace will grow cold long before I lose wits enough to be taken by slayers.” The dragon pushed his snout close to the babe who had finished suckling. Delighted, the infant cooed and reached a chubby hand to yank the dragon’s nostril.

  “Go now, Elayna,” said the dragon, grinning at the baby. “There may be more hunters on the mountain. It would not do for you to be found here.”

  Elayna rested a palm on the dragon’s scaled snout. “Farewell, Grandfather.”

  “Remember to seal the way behind you if you must,” said the dragon. “Promise me.”

  The young woman nodded and walked back across the stone shelf with her child. The dragon lingered a moment, then retreated back inside its cave.

  Keeva emerged from her hiding place. Pools of fresh dragon’s blood smoked on the rock before the cavern’s entrance. The young mother had nearly disappeared from view. Keeva looked to the cave, then to the woman.

  I must know what the dragon hides, she thought. Leaving the spear hidden in the rocks, Keeva followed the woman.

  A path between the crags and boulders ran through the mountain, the way barely wide enough for goats. She tracked the young mother and her child by following their sounds until eventually a long silence convinced Keeva she’d lost them.

  Resting to catch her breath on a granite outcropping, she cursed her foolishness. She’d lost the woman, and avenging her father’s death might now prove impossible. She had a better chance of waking in the underworld with her father than approaching a dragon’s cave a second time, undetected.

  Pushing herself from the rock, she turned her head away from the sun’s sudden glare. Her eyes widened at a sight that had moments before been hidden in shadows. A tunnel stretched into the mountain. Stepping cautiously inside, Keeva stopped, allowing her eyes to adjust.

  Soft light emanated from crannies in the passageway. To the side of the entrance was an iron wheel attached to a spool of chain. The links disappeared into a hole in the tunnel’s ceiling. Stepping back into daylight, Keeva blinked, shielding her eyes with her hand until she spotted a sloped field of rubble resting precariously above the tunnel’s entrance. It looked as if the slightest nudge could bring the boulders crashing down.

  Returning to the passage, Keeva followed its path downward. The air was cool and moist. A shallow stream continued the slow work of nature, carving away the mountain’s rock, grain by grain, but in places Keeva could see where a dragon’s claws had widened the way.

  She estimated she’d walked more than an hour before she exited the passageway’s pale luminescence. A tiny village lay beyond the tunnel in a valley ringed by high peaked mountains. Men, women, and children went about their day in the bright sun. But there was something odd. The women outnumbered the men, ten to one, and while some women appeared elderly, most of the men were no older than Keeva. Many of the villagers were dressed in drab, woolen clothes, but some still wore patched white dresses: virgin shrouds.

  Keeva gaped. In a wide field smoldered a dozen fires, each burned to coals and embers. At the center of each fire lay a wide dragon’s egg. Hatchling dragons bounded and played with human children in another nearby field. A mix of piping dragon voices mingled with the excited shouts of children. The old dragon lied, thought Keeva. Grandfather dragon was not the last of its line after all.

  Keeva hid herself in a thicket and watched the people in the village gather water, work their crops, and do the mundane tasks of village life—a life Keeva’s father had never wanted for himself or his only surviving child. Instead of learning to tend livestock, Keeva had studied the poisons dragons could smell and which they could not. Instead of sharpening plow blades, she’d kept hunting spears honed and ready. And instead of sharing the spoils of her adventures with those she loved, she’d helped her father dig graves.

  Keeva watched the villagers until the sun showed noon, then she rose cautiously from her hiding spot. There is wealth here, she thought. Pots and pans and tools of iron looked new, though she’d seen no town smithy. The wood frames and shingled roofs of the houses showed little wear. Keeva knew enough carpentry from building siege engines to see that the timbers in the homes could not have come from the soft yellow wood of the nearby pines. Had the dragon carried the timbers to this hidden place itself, or had it spent some of its horde for the wood and wares, paying a premium for the silence of others?

  Yes, there is wealth here, she thought, but what isn’t here are fathers. What men there were in the hidden village were too few and too young to account for all the children she observed. This is a community of bastards, thought Keeva. The missing fathers were likely living comfortably in the village on the opposite side of the mountain, protected from the consequences of their adultery by the village’s Grandfathers and Grandmothers. The elders must have hoped the dragon would dispose of their inconvenient women, and if not for the dragon’s mercy, the people in this hidden place would be dead.

  Keeva turned back to the passage and started the long climb back up the mountain, her thoughts in tumult. It was well past midday by the time she made it back to the dragon’s cave.

  “Dragon! Peace!” Keeva shouted. “I would speak to you of your hidden village. Why would a monster protect such a place?”

  When the beast did not answer, Keeva stepped carefully into the dragon’s lair. Grandfather dragon lay still, its eyes closed. Keeva placed her hand on the creature’s skin. The dragon’s flesh was cold.

  ~o0o~

  The ancient dragon guarded no horde of jewels and gold—Keeva knew where the wealth had gone. A few purses of copper and silver, probably scavenged from recent hunting parties, was all she found in the dead dragon’s cave, but the coins were more than enough to buy a team of oxen, a sledge, and a long timber saw from shepherds living on the mountain’s slope.

  When Keeva brought the old dragon’s head to rest in the square of the Grandfathers’ and Grandmothers’ town, the elders kept silent, but the other peasants cried with joy, dubbing Keeva “Dragon Slayer,” despite her protests.

  Revelers bought her an ale and a meal at the very tavern she’d hoped to visit. Keeva spent the rest of her new, meager wealth buying the villagers ales of their own, regaling them with tales of her father’s exploits and stories from Keeva’s childhood.

  Some asked slyly of the dragon’s horde, and she told all who asked the truth; the monster had died a pauper. But despite her assurances, Keeva saw greed gleam in the villagers’ eyes. No doubt by next midday the mountain would be crawling with treasure hunters.

  So even before the great party in her honor had ended, Keeva slipped away. In the light of the moon, she rode her team of oxen back up the mountain, the animals navigating better than she ever could in the darkness.

  As dawn broke, Keeva stood again in front of a cave, but not Grandfather dragon’s lair. Stepping inside the hidden tunnel, she moved to the iron wheel and began to turn the chain. The noise outside started as a whisper, then quickly grew as loud as a dragon’s roar.

  With boulders and broken rock crashing outside the tunnel’s entrance, Keeva the Dragon Slayer started down the passageway toward a very different life than she had ever imagined.

  Liars’ Tournament

  Pauline J. Alama

  On the Isle of Sorcery, Isabeau was a powerful sorceress. But now that she has been freed from her slavery there and left the source of her power behind, does she have any of her abilities left?


  Pauline J. Alama is the author of the fantasy quest novel The Eye of Night (Bantam Spectra 2002), a finalist for the Compton Crook Award. A former medieval scholar, she admits the setting of her chivalric tales owes more to fantasy than history. She has contributed stories to seven prior volumes of Sword and Sorceress, as well as numerous other publications, most recently Fantasy Scroll Magazine and the anthology Just So Stories. The main characters of “Liars’ Tournament,” sword-wielding Ursula and sorceress Isabeau, sprang into being for a story called “No Tale For Troubadours” (first published in Realms of Fantasy, reprinted in Fantasy Scroll Magazine) in which a former warrior maiden and her sidekick come out of retirement for one more adventure. But these two irrepressible women clearly had a long history together, so “The Damsel in the Garden” (Sword & Sorceress 28) revealed how this odd pair got to be partners. “Liars’ Tournament,” the second of their youthful adventures, takes up the story soon afterward—from Isabeau’s perspective, for a change.

  Maybe someday, long years from now, when I have grown as old and cynical as my lady grandmother, troubadours may sing of this, my first adventure outside the Garden of Delights on the Isle of Sorcery. Maybe. But I doubt it.

  They will sing, no doubt, of gallant golden Ursula, the Maid of Révie: how she faced dire peril and fought a cruel sorceress to free the Damsel in the Garden from ignominious servitude in the Garden of Delights.

  They will sing of Ursula not only because she deserves it—she is gallant, and she did free me from slavery to my grandmother—but also because she flutters her eyelashes at them and goes all moonshine-and-starlight at the sound of their voices. Ursula likes troubadours.

  I do not bat my eyelashes at anyone, not anymore. Grandmother made me simper and flatter and kiss all those knights to enchant and enslave them, but I am done with that.