by P. N. Elord
Ellie started to ask the obvious question, but then I saw her shift sideways. I liked that. She’d be clever and not easy to predict. “You’re not talking about real dragons, right? Like with wings and scales and grrrrrr?” She made a kittenish attempt at a predator’s face and hooked her fingers like claws. It was moderately amusing.
“Oh yes,” I said. “Huge, vicious, fast beasts. They breathe fire. Their scales are as hard as diamonds. If you catch their gaze, they can freeze you in place for the kill. They’re smart, cold, and utterly without mercy.”
Ellie thought I was lying. It was written all over her milk-fed, self-confident face. I’d grown up in a grim world, rocks and hard edges, steel and muscle and violence. We’d thought it civilized at the time, but now that I look back on it, it was a savage time, and I’d taken to it like a duck to water.
I couldn’t imagine this child surviving half a day in that time, even without a dragon’s threat hanging over her. She’d have been slaughtered by the first cutpurse fortunate enough to stumble over her.
“Dragons,” I said with cool precision, “can also take other forms. And when in other forms, they are vulnerable, without their natural defenses.”
“Other forms,” Ellie repeated. I could see that regardless of what she’d been told, whatever papal letter she’d received, whatever counseling from her local bishop, she was sure that I was a batty old lady. “Right. Like—what?”
“A particular favorite of Vixariathrax was to assume the form of a cow grazing in a field. He dispatched four separate Dragonslayers that way. Of course, cows were as common as dirt then.” I shrugged, although my shoulder was beginning its daily rhythmic dull ache.
“A cow.” Her face was a study in doubt. “Then how did you figure it out?”
“It was the only cow in the field.” I smiled slowly. “Cows come in herds, girl. Vixariathrax was a hungry old bugger. One placid cow, left standing in a field trampled by dozens? Something was definitely wrong.”
“How did you kill him?”
“Same way I killed them all,” I said. “With cleverness. For him, I shot him from cover. He never saw me coming until it was too late. Poisoned arrows. When he changed back to his dragon form, the poison was trapped inside. He thrashed himself to death out in that field. Took a while, but it was effective enough.”
Ellie had gone quiet, frowning. I saw revulsion in her now. “Doesn’t sound very . . .”
“Honorable?” I put all the scorn I could into the word. “There’s nothing honorable about killing dragons. Nothing brave about it. You put them down, or they kill you. That’s all there is to it.”
“But—” She licked her lips. “How many are there out there to fight?”
“One.”
Ellie opened her mouth, closed it, looked even more reluctant.
“Oh, don’t be so squeamish. One’s enough,” I said. “One dragon has the power to destroy a million people, more if he’s grown angry. He’s a flying, unstoppable, calculating nuclear bomb. He could destroy a city a day, every day, and there would be almost nothing that could stop him once he was going about it.”
“They could put him in a zoo or something.”
“Zoo,” I repeated. “Do you imagine that is a better end for something so magnificent than a decent death? To be gawked at by thousands, millions, trapped for eternity in a small, inadequate cell? And no zoo could hold him, girl. No prison could hold him, for that matter. You could bury him under a mountain and he would dig his way out.”
She swallowed. “Modern weapons—”
“They have weapons,” I said flatly. “Us. Dragonslayers. We’re the weapons, and we’re so effective that in two thousand years, we have hunted dragons from thousands down to one. One last, old, lonely, angry dragon. If that distresses you, get your ass out of my chair and leave. I don’t have time to train some weak-livered baby sentimental about a killing machine who’d gladly rip you apart and pick his teeth with your ribs, if given half a chance.” I was not exaggerating. I’d seen it happen to my predecessor, Godric. Harenthrax had taken his time about the dismemberment, starting with pulling away tiny bits like fingers and toes and eating them like appetizers before starting to disarticulate the man’s limbs. Godric had stopped screaming only when his lungs failed. I was not sure how long it had taken him to really die after that. I’d grown numb. In the end, I’d fallen asleep, shameful as that was, and woke only when the screaming had stopped.
She got up, the girl, and stood there staring down at me. Her lips pressed into a thin line. “You’re a mean old bitch,” she said. The sheen of politeness was completely gone. Good. I had no real use for manners.
“Oh, yes, I am all that. ‘Old’ being the operative word. I survived the worst four dragons could throw at me. I survived politics, wars, husbands, and the death of everything I ever loved. Because I am smart. Because I am ruthless. If you think that is a character fault, you have no business being a Dragonslayer. You’ll be dead before you smell your first whiff of sulfur.”
She headed for the door.
“Go on,” I called after her. “Be sure to tell God you’re an idiot when you get to heaven. Probably tomorrow.”
That stopped her in her tracks. “What?”
“The Holy Father handpicked you,” I said. “I didn’t. I don’t get any say in who comes after me, and I’m stuck with whoever they send me. So if you walk away today and don’t learn anything, fine, no skin off my ancient nose, is it? I’m retired. I’ll be training your replacement tomorrow, and telling him about your suitably gruesome, gory death. Because if I know who you are, most assuredly old Karathrax already knows as well.” I picked up the Dragon’s Eye—it was surprisingly heavy, about the weight of a good bowling ball—and shuffled over to thrust it at her. She took it, wide-eyed. “There. Consider yourself trained. Now get the hell out.”
“But—” She stared at the crystal. “What is it?”
“Your problem,” I said. “You don’t want to listen to the mean old bitch, fine. Figure it out yourself. Now shoo!”
I shoved her right out the door, slammed it, and started the tedious process of locking it all. Around lock number two, she started knocking tentatively on the door.
By lock number four, she was pounding on it. “All right, all right, stop making such a racket!” I yelled through the door, and unlocked it again. I let the girl in. This time, I left the locks unturned because I might want to eject her, quickly. With force. “Now, are you willing to pay attention?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ellen said, but I read a simmering resentment in her expression, in the tense set of her shoulders. “Sorry. Um, here, could I set this down . . . ?” She lifted the heavy weight of the Dragon’s Eye.
“No,” I said. “You can stand there and hold that out in front of you, for the next hour. Consider it punishment duty.”
And training, for what would come next.
Ellen bit her lip, then stretched out her arms, and almost immediately the shaking began.
I sat down, refilled my coffee cup, and picked up the paper.
She wasn’t completely hopeless. For one thing, she wasn’t a complainer; I can’t abide complainers. She did everything she could to fulfill whatever task I set her, even the impossible ones, and she didn’t whine even when she was sore, bruised, cut, exhausted, and ready to drop. I think it became a personal mission for her, to wear me down.
Good luck, little girl. Even as old and feeble as I was now, I was Lisel Dragonslayer. She’d woken something in me, a fierce pride, a desire to stretch myself. I abandoned the old-woman robes and house scuffs; I began dressing in loose running suits, suitable for fighting, and sturdy athletic-type shoes. Velcro closures. Greatest thing in the world.
I started her out training with a staff, because she could do herself the least damage with that, and I could do the most to her without maiming. Fun all around. Ellie was surprisingly strong and fast, but then, I supposed the Pope hadn’t just picked her name out of a hat; they ha
d an entire council of researchers working on things like that, identifying potential Dragonslayers, filtering them, vetting them, prying into every corner of their lives. Much easier in my day, when your lord and master pointed a bony finger your direction and said, “Take that one.” In my case, my lord and master had been my husband. I’d gotten along better with the dragons, frankly.
Ellie was out of school, and the Church was fronting her family a lot of money—hush money—combined with a dizzying cocktail of faith and flattery. I didn’t know if the Pope actually took any of this seriously; they all professed to it, but none of the pontiffs I could remember had ever actually seen a dragon. Then again, their trade was to believe in things unseen. And they’d never tried to cut me out of the papal budget, so far as I knew, which must have meant something significant. Even the Pope has downsized.
I knew, because I asked, that Ellie’s family had been promised a million dollars a year for the next ten years, all squirreled away in some Swiss account, with allowances funneling to her parents through some byzantine arrangement of shell companies. It was a pension, supposedly. Both her mother and father had retired from their jobs. Ellie got a stipend that would keep her in anything her heart desired, barring haute couture fighting gear.
I certainly hadn’t been paid that excessively, but then, I supposed the standard of living was much lower in my day. I’d never hungered or lacked for shelter or comfort. Same basic thing, I supposed. There was no point in being bitter that the budget for the newer generation was more luxurious than in my heyday.
The training proceeded apace. Ellie took two weeks to reach a mastery of the staff sufficient to convince me to let her graduate to edged weapons. Blade proficiency took a bit longer, but she came every day, training her pretty little heart out . . . first with a dull practice blade against a post, then against me. That was humiliating.
For her, of course.
The fourth time I disarmed her without breaking a sweat, she got a mulish, angry look as she swiped up the fallen sword. “I thought you said you don’t kill a dragon with swords!” she spat. “Why do I have to—”
“Because I said so,” I interrupted. Sometimes I love being old. “Now shut up and fight.” It was the closest she’d come yet to real complaints, and I wasn’t surprised; by this time, I’d been a screaming banshee, shouting abuse at Godric like a fishwife at a wandering husband. It was hard bloody work, especially since we conducted our business out in the desert, far from prying eyes and passing motorists curious about what a pair of women might be doing with medieval weapons in the hot sun.
She settled into a fighting stance, with a firm two-handed grip on her sword, and advanced. This time she was a little better; it took me three parries to find an opening, but this time I didn’t settle for stripping away her sword; I slammed the point of my weapon hard into her chest, knocking her back to the ground. She lay there on the dusty soil, blinking up at the desert sun, and tears trickled out of her eyes to cut clean lines through the dirt on her face. She was weary, sweaty, and so very young.
I hesitated for a second, then slammed my sword blunted point down into the sand hard enough to make it stand upright and reached down to offer her a hand. She stared at it for a second, gasping for breath, and then gripped it and let me haul her to her feet. Sand showered out of her clothes in an ocher flow and clung to her sweaty skin in clumps.
“You need all your skills,” I said. “Strength. Agility. Quickness of body and mind. Discipline. Patience. Ruthless dedication. That is why I’m teaching you. Not how to chop wood with a sharp edge. Any fool can do that.”
She thought about what I said. I could see the wheels turning. Over the past few weeks, she’d impressed me as much for her thoughtfulness as for her athleticism, which was considerable. I wondered how bright the girl really was. Brighter than most modern simpletons, I would guess; she questioned everything, accepted nothing without turning it this way and that. One would almost think rhetoric was still a skill possessed by the common man.
I reached in my pack, tossed her a bottle of water, and opened one for myself. We sat in the shade of a spiky bush—one of the few around—and swigged. She didn’t speak at first. Neither did I.
Eventually, she said, “The dragon. The one who’s left. You haven’t told me anything about him.”
“You’re not ready,” I said. “Learning about dragons is the last thing you do.”
“Why?”
I almost smiled. She asked why more than any child I’d ever known. “Because I say so.”
“Mrs. Martin—”
“Lisel,” I said.
Her cheeks colored slightly. “Lisel.” It sounded stilted and forced. “Why is knowing about him dangerous?”
“I didn’t say it was dangerous. It’s distracting.”
“Why?” Her huge eyes were fixed on me in challenge.
I surrendered, for the first time. “All right. I’ll tell you about Karathrax, but it doesn’t mean you can cut your training short to go after him.”
“Yeah, I know. Luke had to go back to Yoda, too. No jumping the gun.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Her flush deepened. “Sorry. Go on.”
“It’s not known how old Karathrax is,” I said. “He was in the earliest records handed down among the Dragonslayers. What is certain is that he was the cleverest of all of them, and the most patient. He waited once for fifty years, pretending to be mortally injured, simply to destroy the Dragonslayer who wounded him.”
Ellie’s eyes got even wider. “How many people has he killed?”
“In general? Thousands, certainly. The destruction of several medieval cities was ascribed to Karathrax, as the dragons began to wage a coordinated war against the Dragonslayers. He’s been responsible for the death of almost a dozen of us, over the centuries.”
“But before you.”
“I’m just the last one left alive,” I said. “I wasn’t the only one when I was chosen. I was one of almost a hundred. By the time Karathrax was the last, so was I.”
She said nothing to that. We drank our water in silence, and then she finally ventured, “But he must have done something terrible, right? I mean, not just being a dragon. Something to make us hunt him down like this.”
“Are you deaf? I said he killed thousands. Destroyed almost a dozen Dragonslayers!”
“I know,” she said softly. “But that’s war, kind of. They were fighting for their survival. Why were we killing them in the first place?”
She understood nothing. Nothing at all. The water in my mouth suddenly turned from sweet to bitter, and it was all I could do to choke it down. “Never you mind,” I said sharply, and got to my feet. My aches and pains, accumulated slowly over all the centuries, reminded me yet again of the years. “Get up and fight.”
Ellie stared at me for a few exhausted seconds, bottle raised halfway to her lips, then deliberately took another drink, replaced the cap, and climbed up with her sword in her hand.
I hurt her a few more times, pushing myself as much as her, and as she drove us back to my apartment, I saw tears cutting silently through the dust on her cheeks. She looked small, tired, and dispirited.
I got out, hefted the equipment bags, and trudged back to my apartment, feeling as sore as she must have been. When I looked back, Ellie was slumped over her car’s steering wheel, forehead resting against the leather-wrapped surface. Gathering the strength to drive away, I presumed. It was getting dark, and the clear sky was cooling from hot blue to the icy color of the deep ocean. Stars flickered like glitter thrown by God.
It was dark enough, and she was distracted. I dropped the bag into the grass, removed something from a side pocket, and slipped quietly back down the path, keeping to the blackest of the shadows. I circled the back of the idling car, moved up beside the driver’s side, and slowly lowered the gun in my hand to touch the side of Ellie’s head.
“You’re dead,” I told her. I wasn’t angry, only a little disappointed. She flinched and looke
d up. Her eyes were red and running with tears, her face burning with the force of her self-pity. “You think I’m dangerous? I’m an old woman. I’m nothing. Karathrax is your enemy, and he is cold and eternal and clever, and he will not have mercy on you. He will steal up on you in the dark, just like this, and end your life. You can be hurt. You can be killed. You understand?”
She did. I saw the fury and hurt slip over her expression, but then it melted away.
She nodded without saying anything.
I slipped the .38 back into the pocket of my running suit and shuffled back to where I’d left the training bag, opened the door of my apartment building, and greeted a couple of my elderly neighbors shuffling along on their walkers.
I needed a drink, a hot bath, and an evening of game shows.
I was in the tub, thinking how nice it was to have steaming, scented water without having to lug heavy buckets to a cauldron, when the bathroom door opened silently and Ellie stood there looking at me. She wasn’t crying anymore. She hadn’t showered, she hadn’t changed clothes, she hadn’t even washed the dirt from her skin. She looked a little savage, and in her hand was the gun, which she’d taken out of my training bag, I assumed.
“Bang,” she said. “You’re dead. See? I can sneak up on people, too.”
She closed the bathroom door, and I heard her leave, slamming the door behind her.
I relaxed and let out a long, satisfied breath.
She was ready for the next level.
“This,” I told Ellie the next morning, “is Dragonkiller.”
I opened up a long wooden box lined with velvet and took out a bow made of carved, yellowing bone. A thick string of sinew dangled from the bottom. I held it in both hands, ceremonially, and handed it to Ellie, who accepted it the same way. Instinct, I assumed. I hadn’t made a production out of it, although it was a ceremony of sorts.
A rite of passage.
“It’s a bow?” She sounded uncertain. I sighed.
“Of course it’s a bow,” I snapped. “String it.”