The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Read online

  The Dragon Hunt

  Jonathan Schlosser

  For Fitz and Fin

  and all the adventures to come

  Chapter One

  I

  In the half light darkly the horse twisted and called into the night and the fireflame some shriek unknown to him or to any other, but perhaps at the heart of that call raged the feeling of torment and horror combined and no one needed to understand it to know it for what it was. Brack stood watching in the doorframe and smelling all about the rising smoke and seeing the men running in to grab those reins and finally one getting them and bringing the horse down and speaking to him and pulling him from the burning yard.

  All about the smoke and darkness as one and a living thing within it, the fire and embers like tendrils of some evil tearing the fabric of the world and unleashing that hell upon the living.

  His expression in that flickering light that cast all as orange and dusk did not change. He stood stark and silent and his chest just moving as he breathed. Heavy about him the leather and the breastplate of darkened steel and his hand raised above his shoulder and resting on the hilt of a blade he did not draw. Feeling the power within it just from that touch and knowing all else was futile and past. He wore beneath the plate his fur which had been for warmth in this blistering winter and was now too much as the world turned to fire, but he did not remove it or wipe the sweat glistening on his face. For this was nothing to pay.

  He heard her come and did not turn to her. “Kayhi.”

  “They say it's gone.”

  “They know or they think?”

  “A farmer says he saw it. Going east and very high.”

  “In this light.”

  “Brack.”

  He lowered his hand and turned at last and smiled at her, but it was a grim smile with those weathered lines and in it neither humor nor grace. Something else there and turning in those eyes as the horse had twisted in the yard. “Does it matter, Kayhi? We've lost it all.”

  She looked to the floor, this small girl in a thin gown showing below the heavy fur of her coat. Her hair dark and hanging to her slender shoulders and in her face. Many years his junior and still a girl, he thought, a girl who had until this night known what he was and not known what he was. A child growing while he was gone and only in the last year learning to treat him as her brother, some lost vagabond who was hardly a brother at all. The dirt of the world embedded in his skin.

  He reached out and raised her chin with his fingers. “They're riding?”

  “They're forming at the gate. Grunel's leading them out. Two of them said you were killed.”

  The traces of the smile faded and he nodded. “Go with them. Tell Grunel I'm alive and that they should go through the gap at Taron. Down to the plains where there are real cities. Cabele and Darish-Noth. Either one is the same.”

  “What about you?”

  “I'll meet you at Taron if I can. If not, I'll ask about where you went and go down into the plains. You'll all be safe there.” He pulled her forward and kissed the top of her head and her hair smelled of smoke. “Go.”

  He watched as she left, running in her boots down the long stone walkway and looking back only once. He could hear down below the shouts and the horses and the creak of the wagons and the gate rising. All this far too late. He listened to it for a moment and then went through the door and to the stone stairs beyond. These both rising and falling, one to the left and the other to the right. He touched the sword at his shoulder again quickly and then went left and up and felt with each step the weight of all that stone and scowled for it had done no good at all.

  Above, a second doorway. The same timber frame now blackened and smoke drifting upward like something inside was devouring it and then the rungs of the iron ladder in the wall. This the last stand against invading armies, incursions of men. Before an ancient destroyer fell upon them, for which iron ladders and trap doors meant nothing. He climbed it quickly and felt the burning in his arms and pushed up on the iron door at the top and went through.

  This one building of stone in all of the small town, this tower the last retreat and fallback position. Round and as wide as two men lying down and with arrow slits in the wall. In the afternoon, light falling through like beams of molten gold; in this night, just the flickering of a bed afire, the thick and acrid smell of the smoke and something deeper as well.

  Flesh burnt to bone.

  The bodies were huddled against the far wall and he stood looking at them and there was nothing left to tell who they had been. Their clothes gone, the flesh blackened and cracked, the skin lost or curling like birch bark in the hearth. The hair burned and each eyeless head smoking softly. Lips pulled back from charred teeth and burned away. Each pressed against one another and fused where the fire had raged hottest and the white of bone beneath it all.

  Brack stood looking and blinked and wet his lips against the heat. It filled this room as if it were a furnace recently extinguished. He took one step toward the bodies and then stopped and cursed and blinked again and went back to the trap door. He could move them if he wanted, but what good was there in it now?

  As with those fleeing through the gate and for the mountain pass, it was all too late.

  He'd run for them when it came, but it had been perched and hulking on the tower before he even got to the keep. Breathing that fire down through the arrow slits and flames exploding out of the others as they filled the pinnacle until it burned like a fallen star. He'd stopped on the wall with his cloak black and wrapping around him this unnatural hide and it had looked at him and raised its head and shrieked. The sound enough to drive him to his knees. Then it had lifted silently into the air and its black skin was lost to the night and he'd stood on the upper balcony looking out into the yard and fighting with himself to climb the iron ladder.

  He stood now in the darkened room a moment more and then turned back to the ladder. Feeling for it and unable to see. The air outside cold as ice on his skin. Descending until his feet found the walkway again and then leaning on it and heaving and holding himself there for time untold. Perhaps days or just the space of a breath. For it was one thing to know and another to see. Raising himself up at last and passing through an interior door to the other side of the tower, this thin and decimated defense, where he could see the snowwashed foothills.

  The landscape all about flat and barren as the wind tore across it, the snow covering all but the dark crags of stone where they stood in violence and refused that coating. Appearing small from his vantage but some outcroppings taller than the tower itself, rising until a man at their feet was simply a spec against the wasteland. In the far distance the mountains rising and already on their tops the flashing sunlight of the next day. That light blasting them in radiance and still hours from touching the midnight in the valley.

  Below, the caravan made its way forward in the snow. Smaller and more desperate than he had hoped. These men and women and children and wagons pulled by weary oxen already frail. Perhaps half would make the gap and perhaps half again would descend into the rich green plains beyond.

  Those plains where cities slumbered in peaceful bounty. Walls of whitewashed stone rising and clusters of villages in the fields beyond and gardens of stunning beauty with stone bridges and clear brooks. Nothing like this place of hewn wood walls and one stone tower now cracked and shattered.

  If she was with them when they reached those cities, she may live. It was only a chance, but everything was only a chance.

  He watched them for a long time. As light came down the mountains and worked its way over, chasing shadows from the valley. Their progress impossibly slo
w. Taking only what they could carry in fear and flight and leaving the dead behind to inhabit forevermore this place on the edge of the world. Where the bodies and walls alike would slowly freeze and then be covered over in snow and ice. He watched them until they were too small to see and swallowed by the snow and he could look out at the crags as if he were alone in the world and no one to hear him scream.

  II

  He walked in that snow-draped land, a man forsaken and desolate. The horses taken with carts and riders for the mountain pass the day before. He in his heavy boots walking endlessly, a thing he'd grown accustomed to in a former life of marches and miles and blood. Keeping always those mountains to his right and knowing the path well, though the road had blown under the crystals and ice and he slipped at times on the hidden sheets where water had briefly run and then frozen.

  Only once did he stop to look back in that stinging air, his neck taut with a scream that ripped his flesh but soundless in his fury. The keep nothing but a black spot on the horizon, smoke rising and hanging still in the air like a dark rope between this world and some other. Perhaps a heaven but more likely one of greater death and decay than this. He'd returned to the tower and taken down the bodies and buried them, along with the others abandoned where they fell, but he could not see the line of grave markers. As if they'd been drawn out of existence.

  As the town would be, in time. A town of decades erased in a night of fire and sulfur and the beating of wings.

  And so on he walked and as the night fell again he found a cave in which to shelter. He thought of walking all night and knew that if he did so he would not wake in the morning and his body would be found years later as a corpse encased in ice and perhaps perfectly preserved and so he went into the cave and started a small fire in its center. A hole in the ceiling allowing the smoke to channel. Not much for warmth, but enough to char the dried meat on a stick and he ate in those shadows with his hands and then lay back.

  It was in that night that she returned to him. He saw her as he last had and her eyes were closed and upon her face the sun as he had never seen it since. The sound of a rippling water he could not see and all about the green of the garden and life and beauty. Thrust upon him in greater intensity by the dead and frozen world in which he now toiled. He looked upon her and then she was gone and the world slowly receded until he woke in the cave and it was very dark.

  Above him, he could hear the wings.

  The fire had gone out and he was glad of it and lay in the dark very still. Wanting within himself to take up his sword and cast aside helm and armor and scabbard and stalk out into the night and scream to it. Draw it to himself and then slay it there in a swath of red blood, pouring like pitch and fire over that white snow. He could see himself hacking out its throat and cutting those wings off to the bone and mutilating that which haunted him in a vengeful wrath.

  But he did not, for he knew what it was and what it would do to him. Here in the open and the night that it owned. How short that stand would truly be.

  One moment of heat in the heart of winter. And then nothing. Or perhaps the rushing of those wings increasing in a flurry as it fell and swept low over the ice fields and then took him up in its claws, the talons of some monstrous bird, rending his armor and flesh. Carrying him higher than the mountains with below him his blood falling and scattered by the wind.

  To drop him from heights a man should not know to fall spinning toward the earth for time eternal until the ice again consumed him.

  How short and how wasted.

  So he lay as still as he could and breathed slowly. It was said they could hear a heartbeat but he did not believe it. But it could hear all else and he made no sounds and finally the wings were gone, moving into that black void above. He knew if he looked there would be no stars and so he did not look.

  At last he slept and he did not know when or for how long but he saw her again in that garden and this time he felt he could smell some fragrance on the air, of the garden flowers or her perfume or the two together and then when he woke again there was light at the front of the cave. A light cold and thin, but outside harsh and blinding on the snow.

  He gathered what little he had and again he set out and the snow beneath his boots was brittle like bone powdered and cast upon the world by the gods in that heaven of the dead above.

  III

  It was two nights after he came to a ridge and when he topped it the town lay in the valley before him. Still a league off but a town all the same. The light already nearly lost and the lanterns and fires of that town glowing warmly in the dark. He felt he could hear the crackle of those fires but he knew he could not, and he flexed frozen hands. No more than two dozen buildings, set together about a square. The far edge of the town against a small mountain of solid ice. He could hear a long way off a dog barking.

  He went down the ridge slowly, picking his way through the drifting snow. Below pitfalls and crevasses covered in blown snow where a wrong step would cause all to give way and he would be falling in the dark with the ice high around him and snow falling about as he plunged toward the cold and dark heart of the world. But in his care he felt for them and made his way around and down to the flat plain before the town. That which in a place with summer may have been field or water, but in this place was always ice.

  They saw him before he reached the town. He heard a man call out and could not see the man and then there was another dog barking and the light of a lantern bouncing as it was carried down a frozen street. He walked on. The lantern was gone and then returned and another with it and the two men came out to meet him at the town's edge. A third behind without a lantern.

  They were hard men and thickly bearded against the winter and wrapped as he was in furs and leather. The tallest standing in front with a spear in hand and the point afire in the lantern light and his pulse quickened at that image and he looked away. The other with heavy arms crossed and a handax in his belt and the third behind with skin as dark as that falling night itself. No weapon on him visible, though Brack knew it to be there all the same.

  The spearman held up a hand to stop him. “You have a name?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “I could run you through to the ice and leave you for the wolves.” There was little malice in the way he said it. Just two men here exchanging facts in the bitter wind of that which they could do if they so chose. In this world those things less of an affront than perhaps they were in Cabele or the Island Kingdoms. The details of lives as hard as the iron the men who lived those lives carried.

  Brack nodded, though, and put his hand forward. “Therros. From the Ringed City.”

  The man stared at his hand and didn't reach for it and then looked up to meet his eyes. “Ironhelm?”

  “If you have to.”

  Reaching, the spearman took his hand and grasped it firmly for a moment and then released it and stepped back. His posture changed and loose. One of the dogs still barking somewhere behind him in the dark and faces pressed to the lit glass of the windows. “You walked from the keep?”

  “The keep's gone. Burned.”

  “Is anyone still alive?”

  “Everyone who lived is gone. I walked here myself. Told the rest to run for the gap.”

  “Burned. You said it burned.”

  At this the man without a lantern stepped forward and reached and took Brack's hand. A gentle touch, almost, but something in those eyes. A merriment, perhaps, as he smiled, but something else as well. As if that merriment were driven by a dark and terrible knowledge.

  “Of course it burned. Haven't you heard the wings?”

  Brack regarded him for a moment without speaking. He was tall and slender; even his furs could not hide that build. His head shaved on the sides and the hair thick and a knuckle long in the center. The lanternlight on his face shining like fire on water in the dark of a starless night.

  “You know, then,” Brack said at last.

  “We feared. We didn't kn
ow. You never know until it's too late and knowing or not knowing is the same.”

  Brack nodded once at that. “It's been here?”

  “Not yet. But passing over. I've heard it half a month now. When did it come to the keep?”

  “Four days ago. Fell on the tower and killed them. Lit the town. We saved what we could and ran. I stayed until they were gone and left myself. Buried the dead as if we'd be back, but the keep is lost.”

  “Flown?”

  “I don't see what you mean.”

  “Was it flown?” the man asked. Looking at the sky now and that lanternlight also in his eyes.

  “No,” Brack said.

  “Ah.”

  The spearman stepped forward again. His boots heavy in the snow. The smaller man beside him did not speak nor did he look as if he wished to. But his eyes were on the mountains and the sky equally, darting in something that was beyond simple fear.

  “Why'd you come here?” the spearman asked.

  “I'm looking for a man. My grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather lives here?”

  “If he's still alive, he does. This was the last place I left him.”

  “Seems like we'd know if someone from the Ringed City lived here. You sure you have the right town?”

  “I'm sure.”

  “Well, how about you come on in and we get you a beer and a fire and we see what we can find.”

  “I'd be grateful.”

  “And then you tell us where it came from so that we can go out and kill it.”

  Brack was silent. Thinking over this man and what he would do if faced with such a creature as that. Standing now tall and proud with the spear in hand and perhaps the only man in the village who would make that boast. Perhaps never bested by all who tried. As with men the world over, that bred confidence and confidence bred stupidity. Something that would come true in a rushing sort of way when the pieces fell into place, but which the man could neither know nor accept until the reality was forced upon him in all of its true horror and he could not deny it as his body turned to flame.