The Lone Dragon Knight

by D. C. Clemens

  “The girl’s fate will be decided by the Mother of Stars.”

  “A kind of seer,” explained Aranath.

  By his request, I followed Unith into the cave, where he cast a little flame spell that hovered just above his open left palm to light our way.

  After slicing his third neck, he said, “I would have been the one to enter this cave if the stars had not aligned to have our paths cross.”

  “I’m sorry about your wife.”

  “Aye.”

  He was mute until he chirped at his feathered companion, compelling the hawk to fly back up to its domain. Unith started talking to his niece, whose back was ripped with several gashes. She had a fierce, defiant look on her face when she responded to him.

  After a few back-and-forth statements, Aranath said, “Family squabbles. According to his children, it seems Unith’s younger brother is better suited to lead their family tribe. Not the first or last time I’ll see humans crave power over blood.”

  The newly broken family conversed a while longer before Unith pulled out a thin rope he used to tie her hands together. When he was finished, he said, “You’ve done much for me already, yet I do not know what name is yours.”

  “It’s Mercer.”

  “Well, Mercer, do you mind keeping watch over my niece here as I give proper veneration to my life partner? I give you leave to end her spirit if she rebels.”

  A nod from me had him head back to his wife’s body. The hawk perched on the top of a nearby tree, keeping its powerful vision on its summoner. Whatever Unith was doing had him occasionally chant loudly in his ancient language. My charge stared at the same patch of ground for a long while. She stayed looking at it when she spoke.

  In my language, she said, “You are not us. Why here?”

  “The stars aligned or something.”

  “Kill the man and I’ll be your woman.”

  “I don’t think I’ll need a deal for that to happen. Besides, I don’t go for backstabbers.”

  Losing a battle to hold back tears, she began crying a few minutes later. I wondered if she was the one who had planned the assassination on her uncle. Or had her brother convinced her? Did it even take much convincing? Aranath said they had chosen power over blood, but had they? How much was this pushed by obligation to a sibling? Whatever the amount, if it was already this prevalent in the middle of nowhere, I shuddered to think what I would encounter in places with more than a dozen people.

  As dawn approached, Unith returned and we started a two day journey to a large campsite where more of his hunting and foraging group was located. When he learned that I was going to cross the gap, he offered me safe passage with the main caravan, but I said I preferred being alone and would only take whatever supplies I could carry. So not long after we reached the group of portable huts at the edge of the forest, I began my journey across the tundra.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My stop at Unith’s base camp gave me the chance to finally get out of my tattered garments. I wasn’t sure if I had a style, but I knew the frill of fur that went with the short brown tunic and boots I was given wasn’t part of it. At least they fit snug and were plenty warm. In fact, they were almost uncomfortably warm in the daylight. To protect the gift, I wrapped a rag around my left arm, though I did later shear the excess fur myself.

  Other gifts included a pouch of throwing knives made from bone, little bags of seeds and nuts that would provide bursts of energy when other food was scarce, and a waterskin. Unith wished to give me some coin, but he said we would have to head for the main assembly for that, which I once again declined to do.

  As for the journey itself, I kept near the woods for as long as possible, knowing there wouldn’t be many trees to offer firewood when I headed north. There was also the relative protection the trees offered from wild animals. I did eventually have to leave the woods completely, but I didn’t mind getting to sleep under the unobstructed view of the unreachable stars. I would even say that the nights were my favorite time of day. It was serene as shit to find a lone tree and make a little fire next to it as I focused on enhancing my illusion spell, or cooked a bird or mouse-like thing I caught. Once in a while I saw bigger things than rodents. Small packs of mammoth promenaded near any water source there was, and larger herds of bison and elk were never in one place for long, doing all they could to keep ahead of wolf packs and the stealthier saber-tooth cats.

  Becoming involved in other people’s complications concerned me more than running into aggressive animals, so I would lay low and hide anytime I believed I saw a human silhouette on the horizon. Since I didn’t meet a soul on my way to the mountain range’s gap, I considered the method a success. The gap itself was still a tall hill of rock compared to the flatter grasslands of the tundra, but I had no misfortune going through the mile wide route.

  The other side of the gap was more tundra, but as I made my way southward, I saw a handful of permanent settlements where some desperate or misguided farmers eked out a living from the hard, harsh land. These settlements became bigger and more common the further down the compass I went. In due course, there were small towns I had to skirt and roads I avoided. Patrols were infrequent this far north, but I didn’t want to take the chance and run into an Etoc soldier or city guardsmen. I imagined there would be questions asked to a solitary youth armed with a longsword and dressed like a nomad walking around on “civilized” trails. Likewise, roads were always good places to meet bandits who might see my sword as a nice prize.

  As the weeks leisurely passed, neither Aranath nor I became anymore talkative than before, though no sense of awkwardness grew from a muteness that could last two days straight. It seemed there was an understanding that each of our pasts didn’t need to be rehashed all at once. All the same, Aranath would occasionally let something slip during a training session—the only time we were each inclined to form consecutive sentences with more than three words in them. They were minor details, such as remembering a certain stance he saw a soldier productively implement in a fight, and they were always related to battle. I spoke a little more about my past then he did, but that was only because I was heading right for it.

  In preparation for that encounter, the near constant training I did was producing some results. My illusion spell was lasting a few seconds longer and I could even momentarily lose sight of it without it evaporating. Adding to my limited assortment of training regimens, Aranath started teaching me to better use my prana to increase my speed. He explained that he was getting better at sensing the way my prana was coursing my body and, as he put it, I was employing it in the crudest way possible.

  Instead of merely pushing prana to a foot when it touched the ground, his advice was to send the prana to the foot when it went airborne, so that I had a concentration of it by the time it came back down. It was a tricky technique to master. I basically had to manipulate prana in two different places at the same time—the gathering of prana in the midair foot and the release of prana in the foot that hit the ground. I trained in this aspect hundreds of times a day, but early evaluations had me only get the timing down a handful of occasions, and none were on purpose or perceived by me.

  Despite what Aranath called my “amateur status,” I felt ready to see Garf. However, a significant part of my plan involved me staying incognito as I tracked him down. I couldn’t do that in a guise that drew attention. So as soon as I left Unith’s camp, I was on the lookout for an opportunity to acquire more clothing. I hoped to come across a recently dead bandit with my exact size of clothing just waiting to be plundered, but no such luck. It wasn’t until I left the tundra behind and entered a region with actual blotches of forest did I get a chance at adding to my attire. It happened not long after I passed the largest town I had seen yet.

  I thought I had gotten back to uninhabited territory, but a worn dirt path heading for a grouping of trees told me otherwise. I was going to ignore it, but a woman’s shriek brought my attention back to the tree line. It wasn’t a s
cream of fear or agony, but one of those I heard a woman squeal out when someone was being rowdy with her. Again, I was about to disregard it, but the sound of splashing intrigued me.

  As I wandered closer, I began to hear one other girl and at least one guy. Passing the first line of trees had me see the shore of a small lake shimmering under the noon sun. Sneaking a bit closer had me catching sight of two girls and two young men bathing with frisky excitement about twenty yards away. It would have been a little chilly to be out swimming alone, but I suppose the youths were attaining bodily warmth by some mysterious means.

  I watched them for a minute, particularly the white haired girl with two bulbous assets, before I saw a pile of clothes on and around a nearby tree. There were boots, shirts, and pants, but catching most of my interest was a dark blue cloak flapping on a low branch. With the owners of the garments focusing on places those garments had once covered, it was easy tiptoeing to my objectives without being noticed. I snuck behind the tree and grabbed the cloak and a nice linen shirt. I concluded that at least one of these juveniles belonged to a higher class than most. I slinked back behind cover and was gone before I overheard any reactions to the missing clothes.

  Not wanting to carry it around or leave it behind, I wore the linen shirt over the fur-laced one, which was particularly useful during the cold nights. The cloak and its hood fit me well, and had the added benefit of concealing my sword.

  A couple of days later and I made the turn westward. There were more roads branching out in different directions, but sign posts guided me in my journey to Rise.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I was forced to take a flat road to make my up the steep highlands Rise rested on. This meant seeing a greater concentration of travelers, but everyone minded their own business. With less area to forage and every farmer watching their crops closely, I basically ran out of food by the time I reached Rise one early morning. Thus, my first stop was at a shop where I sold the stolen shirt for a few coins, which I then used to buy a light breakfast of bread and butter at a tavern.

  Not helping myself, I afterwards went over to the shop that old man was murdered in. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do it. Was it to find out what happened to the woman? That was really all I could learn, but that didn’t satisfy what I was feeling. I couldn’t enter the closed shop when I arrived on the desolate street it rested on, so I merely stayed observing the building from within an alleyway on the opposite side of the street. It looked abandoned, but so did the entire street.

  It wasn’t until the sun rose an hour higher did I see more people begin their daily routine. A few minutes after that and I saw five kids playing tag, which changed to hide-and-seek several minutes later, and which changed to a footrace after that.

  When one came close enough, I said, “Hey kid, do you know what happened to the owners of that place?”

  The grubby boy looked up at me for a moment before turning to look at the building my finger pointed at. He shrugged and said, “Maybe. How much can you give me?”

  I reached in the pouch and showed him one of my white throwing knives, widening his eyes. “Would this be all right?” He reached for it, but I pulled it away.

  “Oh, the old man was killed by some robbers. I think the lady moved somewhere else.”

  “Do you know the lady’s name?”

  “Ms. something Grayson. She was my mom’s friend.”

  I handed him the knife. He grabbed it and ran to show his friends. That done, I left to begin the search for Garf. The growing daylight was a bad time to go sleuthing for crime lords, and while I believed a town guard could give me some answers, I couldn’t be sure whether they were on Garf’s payroll and thus alert him to a possible problem. Even if they were on the straight and narrow, there was always a chance they would get curious about my sword and intentions.

  So with my ideas of acquiring information hours away, I decided to see if there existed a way to earn a few coins. Assuming the last several weeks hadn’t seen a dramatic shift in power, I went to the side of town Garf had not secured as his own, which contained a little business district of its own. I knew the outskirts of this district had a few businesses that were always in need of woodcutters. The first work field I went to hired me on the spot after I showed the burly fellow I could split a log with a single downswing.

  It was sweaty work that didn’t pay all that well, but in addition to killing time, it was a good way to practice manipulating the prana in my arms. I was soon at a steady, hypnotic rhythm, a rhythm that barely went unbroken when the burly man’s heavyset wife came out to offer water to the workers at the sun’s highest point. On stopping a few hours later, my employer asked if I would return the next day. After taking the coin he owed me, I answered that it would depend on the night I had. To refresh my drowsy muscles, I walked a few hundred yards out of town to grab a nap under a tree.

  I awoke with the sunlight nearly extinguished. I roamed the streets for an hour to make certain the night’s masking shadow was at its most opaque before I headed for Garf’s territory. If Garf still resided in Rise, then I figured he would be in Pirate’s Cove. The name of the inn never made sense to me. The second floor of this nest of debauchery was a place I knew Garf used as his primary dwelling after he had been out and about during the day. The inn was large, made of stone, and the nights always had his people guzzling down anything with alcohol in it. Of course, Garf kept around sober bodyguards, but I knew a few tried and true methods to remove such complications.

  The lodging was situated in the middle of town between shops and a large outcropping of homes, making it a popular destination for more than just the criminal sect after a long workday. The wide structure had two entrances in the front and one in the back that led into the kitchen. I used the front door to let myself in.

  The inside was filled with five or six dozen uproarious people. In the center of the room was a wide wooden counter where the barkeeps worked, one of whom was a man I knew as Kent Smith, the owner of the inn and a friend of Garf. We had not really interacted before, but I knew his keen eyes would recognize me if given a good look at my face, so I made sure to keep my hood up and head down as I walked away from the huge fireplace on the left side of the room.

  Next to the roaring fireplace were the flights of stairs that led to the second floor and basement levels, and next to the stairways were a couple of armed men in scale armor. They looked a bit like the city guard, but I knew they were actually employed by Garf to defend the more exclusive levels of the lodging. Whether that meant the man himself was here was not as clear.

  As I strolled to the corner, I knelt down beside one of the few empty tables and rolled a dragon stone under it. I did the same thing when I reached my own lonely table. For a time I merely watched as everyone laughed and spoke with wilder abandon at every passing minute. No one took notice of the cloaked youth in the shadowy corner. The room had a couple of people I recognized from my past life, but nobody of significance. I thought a familiar woman was giving me a curious stare at one point, but she forgot about me when one of the men she was surrounded by put his fat face in her wobbly chest.

  The drinking, joking, and smoking reached a fever pitch—the state of excitement I was waiting for. I moved myself to a corner stool by the counter, where I dropped another dragon stone.

  When Kent got within hearing range, I said, “Kent Smith, right?” I was careful to not lift my hooded head too high.

  “That’s me. What you want?”

  “Is Garf here?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “I found a valuable sword he wants.”

  “That so?”

  “Aye.” I untied Aranath from my belt and partly unsheathed the blade for Kent to see. “I would prefer to sell it to him now if he’s around.”

  “I know Garf. He won’t be bothered at this time of night, but I could take the blade off your hands now.”

  “I would prefer dealing with him personally.”

  “He neve
r deals with small fry directly.”

  Getting off my seat, I said, “I have a feeling he’ll see me face to face. I’ll come back later.”

  As I made my way toward a door, I set off the dragon stones. Someone noticed the rapidly swelling flames a few seconds later. There was screaming and a mad rush for the exits. I turned back around to see one of the bodyguards go upstairs. I pushed through the scrambling crowd on my way to the stairway. The second guard saw me coming at him and rose his hands to keep me back, but before he knew what I was up to, I ducked, pulled out my dagger, and thrust it upward. Hot blood poured out from the hole I made just above his throat. I was already climbing the stairs by the time he hit the floor.

  I heard the guard above yelling for everyone to get out of the building. Moments later and a group of six or seven people, mainly yelping women, went running past me. Many of them were lucky to be wearing a nightgown.

  When I reached the second floor, a woman in chainmail was banging on a door down the hall. She yelled, “Let’s go, Garf!” A door opened farther down the hall to show another woman attempting to put on a gown. The guard I had seen go up the stairs was running toward this woman.

  When the female guard noticed me, I yelled, “Is Garf still up here!? We have to go! The whole place will burn up!”

  She began saying something, but that’s when I squinted and lobbed an explosive stone. It flashed its striking light in front of her eyes. I then drew Aranath from his scabbard and charged forward with all speed. My first target had no chance to react as the point of the sword punctured between the scales to get to her gut.

  Then three things happened at the same time—the stabbed woman fell with a cry, the other woman screamed, and the door beside me opened to reveal Garf. Dressed only in his loose fitting breeches, Garf quickly summarized the scene in front of him and reacted by receding back into a room lit by a single candle on a nightstand. I withdrew the sword from its victim and dashed inside a room that also held one of his barely dressed mistresses.