The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Read online

  “Why didn't you take a horse?” the man asked at last.

  Brack looked to him and took a drink. The ale very heavy and cold and good. “You going to tell me your name or are we waiting on something?”

  “What would we wait on?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Then I guess we can't.”

  “I guess not.”

  The man did not extend a hand, but he did grin. His face slender and his eyes bright, the irises an amber color Brack had never before seen. His dark skin smooth and flawless. When he smiled he appeared childish and when he did not he appeared aged so that Brack could not figure out his true age and it seemed in this duality to move based on mood or perhaps desire. The impression in the world he chose to carve out for himself. Shifting that carving as fit his needs.

  “You can't pronounce my name,” he said. “But they call me Juoth.”

  “That's it?”

  “That's it.”

  “And where are you from?”

  Juoth finally let his chair tip forward and come down hard. One of the women looked over and then looked away. He grinned again. “Seems to me I asked a question first.”

  “They needed them.”

  “What?”

  “The horses. They needed them. Those I sent to the gap.”

  “So you're gallant.”

  “If that's what it means I'd ask about your judgement.”

  “Travii. I'm from the island of Travii.”

  Brack looked at him carefully and swirled his ale in the glass and looked at it and drank. Letting it run cold down his throat and then warm him. He drank it half down and stood. “I'll see you around.”

  Juoth canted his head to the side and looked at him. “Something wrong with Travii?”

  “Who do you take me for?”

  “I'm not sure I follow.”

  “Travii was destroyed fifty years ago. There's nothing left but stones. Shattered buildings. No one's from Travii.”

  Juoth shrugged. “Be that as it is. I am.”

  “You're a liar.”

  “Some of the best men are liars.”

  “And some of the worst.”

  “And there we have it,” he said. “All men are liars. So why don't you drink with this one and so will I.”

  Brack looked around the room. In the corner the blind man was playing a new song and the sound of it swelling and the man with the woman on his lap had gone out with her and the other woman was sitting up at the long bar and down from her the spearman and the other were talking closely and looking around with before them many mugs. They had all four come in together and those two had taken their leave and Brack had watched them at first and now knew what would come of it but could not stop it. He turned back.

  “It's true?”

  “About where I'm from?”

  “Yes.”

  “Truest thing I've told you.”

  “Only thing you've told me.”

  “That's true as well.”

  Brack sat again and finished his ale and set it down. “How did you get all the way up here? This is a long way from the islands.”

  “Everything's a long way from the islands.” Juoth pushed his own glass aside and took from his pocket a small metal coin and flipped it and caught it with one and the same hand and then set it upon the face of the table. That side showing a ring. On the other Brack knew there to be an impression of a helmet in relief with down the side a winding crack as if split with an ax but still holding. He looked at it for a long moment and then reached over and turned it in his hand to show the helmet and set it back down.

  “Money.”

  “Why does any man go where he goes?”

  “You can stop with that.”

  “With what?”

  “You tell me something, you just tell it to me.”

  “All right. Tarek is in the mines and he'll be here. He always comes here. I didn't know who you were but I've seen him and now I've seen you and so I know.”

  Walking into the town he had asked again about the old man and the spearman had said they'd ask around and the islander had said this was the place to ask and they'd all laughed for there were no other places in a town like this and in they'd come. Brack had thought then of demanding more and had not done so for he had been gauging in these men different things which he still did not know, and when thus concerned he had found many times that caution was best. Especially with a man who came to a place for gold alone and little else for there was much a man could do for gold.

  “Thank you,” Brack said. “I haven't heard anyone call him Tarek in a long time. I'll never forget the first time I did.”

  Juoth turned and raised a hand and the barkeep scowled and made to come across with two ales and then he turned back and said:

  “So tell me about this dragon before they've told everyone.”

  II

  He came up the stairs and the sound of it was everywhere and the horses were screaming. About him in the low streets the women and children running and a man just standing and looking aloft with in his hand an ax and holding his other hand before his face and all the fingers gone and only blackness in their wake like curled meat fallen in the fire and when he turned the whole of his face a ruin and lost and then he fell to the side and the sound his body made when it struck the stones was like it weighed as much as all the earth together.

  He ran past the burned man and the wings were beating and his sword was heavy and so he drew it to run and knew it would do nothing, for you did not kill something like this with a sword alone. He looked up also and could not see it for the smoke and it was like running beneath a sky of flowing coal and everywhere. The smell of hair burning perhaps the worst of it and the sounds from within that smoke. People unseen and in an agony he could feel to the bone.

  Reaching the wall he mounted the steps and at the top were the bodies of two men and then he saw it was just one man and he had been bitten in half and both halves left here with blood between them and connected as they were by his entrails. The legs were still but the mouth moving and blood on his chin and the man trying to say something as Brack went past and up onto the wall.

  There a wide path of blackness burned into the stones and he could see the direction in which it went and he ran then and he was shouting for it to come to him, to come to him. This far in there were no more guards and all scattered. The pounding of those stones under his feet as he ran. Knowing it and not wanting to know it and calling for it to come to him.

  When he reached the yard where the horses were screaming he looked above and it was curled on the tower with its great claws buried in the stone itself and the tail wrapped below it and the wings unfurled and raised. Its scales black and red as if its molten blood flowed to the surface and up its back a ridge like jagged mountains thrust with violence through the crust. The tongue a lick of flame rising and curling and the heavy jaws wide and the muscles bulging as that jaw worked. The ring about its neck flexing as it looked at him.

  The eyes red and burning and full of an ancient knowledge and also some great and horrible laughter. Something wrong with its face but he couldn't place it as in its fury the flames flowed from those eyes and licked up the scales but something very deeply wrong.

  Then it lowered those jaws once more to the smoking arrow slits of this tall and smoldering furnace.

  III

  “And it flew,” the islander said.

  “And it flew.”

  “Then tell me this, Ironhelm.” He leaned forward on the table and his ale gone and tapped his fingers and said: “A dragon is a beast. Reacting as all beasts do. When a wolf comes he has prey and he eats but a dragon is not a wolf. Not like this. A dragon also eats but he does not eat man. He kills. A predator and little else where it concerns men. Not even a predator. Just a killer.”

  “You've seen others?”

  “I mean this one. The one you told me.”

  “All right.”

  “Then if a dragon kills and
does not eat he kills for some reason other. Call it sport or spite or what it is. He kills men and he knows he can and then he leaves. When does he choose to leave?”

  “He leaves and kills as he wants.”

  “But how does he decide what he wants?”

  Brack looked at the man a long moment and turned and thought of it. Thought of that laughter in its eye. For a dragon was not a beast as a beast usually was. Perhaps more man than beast. Perhaps what a man wished he could be or aspired to. How many men, if given the choice, would elect to be that winged creature with a heart of fire instead of a weak and landbound man with a heart of blood? Thousands, surely. For in all ways but that they were already the same.

  “You think he came after them.”

  “I think he did,” said the islander.

  “Not any men. Them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that's why he looked at me and left when he did.”

  “The hunt was over. What do you do at the end of a hunt?”

  “I take my game.”

  “But the dragon doesn't hunt to eat. For him the game is done.”

  At long last Brack smiled but it felt heavy on his face and he reached up and rubbed his eyes and could not remember the last place he slept. Or the length of that slumber. “So you do know dragons.”

  “No. I know how to think.”

  “Then why are you in this town?”

  “Why are you?”

  “Not for gold.”

  “And that we have in common.”

  The blind man had stopped playing and he was doing something to the instrument. Cleaning it, perhaps, or adjusting some part to change the sound of it. Across from him the other girl was gone and two of the men and the barkeep was running a cloth over the top of the bar. Bringing down the glasses. The spearman and the other still talking and with new mugs now set before them and always closer to what they were going to do. Lifting those glasses and drinking the dregs and turning to that which was fresh.

  “I want you to ask him,” Brack said. “Tell him what you told me.”

  “Your grandfather.”

  “When he gets here.”

  Juoth considered this and took from his pocket a pipe and neither filled nor lit it and put the end into his mouth and chewed it. A thing of wood and paper. Then he took it out and he held it in one hand and said:

  “Your grandfather already thinks everything I've said. He agreed when I told him.” Tapping the pipe against his own cheekbone. “Perhaps not in these specifics but we've thought it of dragons for a long time now.”

  Brack lifted his own mug and drank and then placed it on the table. “He sent you.”

  The man nodded.

  “Where is he?”

  “He'll be here.”

  “When?”

  “I see you have his patience.”

  “You're about to find out just how thin it is.”

  Behind the islander a door opened. The barkeep did not look up but the blind singer turned toward the sound. The spearman also though he was now little better than blind himself.

  The man who stepped through the door could have been Brack in an older life. Tall and thick in the shoulders and arms, but with his hair and beard stark white instead of the rich brown shot through with red that it had once been. Standing straight and wearing the dark leather and fur of this place. Unarmed to the eye but walking as a man armed. He came forward and Brack stood and went to him and embraced him and stepped back and the man did not release his shoulders.

  “I'm sorry about what happened to them.”

  Brack nodded. His face tight.

  “We sent a man. To tell you what we'd seen.”

  “You saw it before?”

  “Only once. More often traces of it. Fires in the forest and bones and dark shapes in the night sky. Enough to send a man.”

  “He never came.”

  “It was only days ago.”

  “Sit with us,” Brack said. “It's good at least to see you.”

  They sat and the old man leaned forward with his arms on the table and bent at the elbows and the barkeep came over with mugs for all of them and grunted and left. The blind man took up his song again and it was an older tune that had many words that changed depending on where you were when you sang it and here he sang about the mountains and the snow but elsewhere Brack had heard it sung of sun and sand and birds on the wing and forests thick with trees and endless plains.

  “I sent him out to make sure you stayed,” he said. Nodding to the islander. “I had to get something to show you.”

  Brack closed his eyes for just a moment. In all the times he had heard something like that the thing he'd been shown had never made his life any easier. He felt he could still see the firelight in the darkness and he opened his eyes again. The spots still dancing.

  His grandfather reached into his cloak and took out what appeared to be a small black stone. The light bright off the slick surface. Too perfectly shaped and thin to be a stone and the surface itself moving like pooled ink. He raised it and handed it across and already Brack new what it was and he took it.

  It was heavier than it should have been. Something ancient and unnatural in that weight. Still warm from the heat that would perhaps never fade. He turned it in his hands and there was no blood on it at all. Shed the way a snake sheds its skin. Death and decay and rebirth. Under it all moving a wretched sickness.

  Holding the scale against his palm. Feeling in it a great many things and below it all his own wrath and sorrow and that scorching heat. Pressing his fingers into it as if to snap it in half and feeling it bend just so.

  “You're going after it,” his grandfather said. “That's why you're here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Juoth.”

  “Of course.” The man stood and went to the bar and sat and the barkeep looked at him for a moment and then handed him another ale.

  “You don't trust him?”

  “I trust him with my life. But you don't. Not yet.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He works with me. I'm not as young as I was.”

  “You thought this was coming.”

  “Didn't you?”

  Brack turned, looking to the window. Everything outside was dark but for the snow that blew against the glass and stood in stark whiteness and piled along the outer sill. All else lost. But somewhere out in that swirling cold the beast curling with its eyes alight and the snow about it melted in a wide circle to withered grass.

  “You'd have fought it. With him. If it came here first.”

  “Someone has to.”

  “It would have killed you.”

  “I know.”

  “Does he?”

  The old man smiled. “You talked to him.”

  “How much? Of us.”

  “Nothing. I mean, he knows what everyone else knows of you. I haven't told him anything else.”

  “All right.”

  “So why do you need me? I'm just an old man. You could have gone to the gap with the rest of them.”

  Brack shook his head. Tapped the scale on the table and then handed it back across. “I needed to see if you knew anything. Patterns. Movements. I didn't know it was here until we heard the wings coming up the slope and there was no mistaking it and everything was destroyed before I could get there. I don't know how I missed it. Got careless.”

  “Or it got careful.” Putting the scale away into his cloak, this thing of fire and hatred and age. “Knew you were there and hid and struck when you were gone. That's what I'd do.”

  “So you haven't seen it?”

  “Just what I told you. We knew one was around and saw little signs but nothing you can track. I don't think it's been here long. I don't know when it got here or if it's nested or where.”

  Brack leaned back in the chair. “Then I'll just hunt it the old way.”

  “You want an old man's advice?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don't hunt it at all.”
<
br />   Neither spoke for a moment. All about them the room now fuller than it had been and the door behind opening and closing as more came in to escape the cold. The fire raging in the hearth in the far wall and the blind man playing on and on and the barkeep passing the glass mugs down the length of the bar and someone laughing and one of the women now back from above and that man leaving as others entered. Brack listened to it, this life and fullness and then said:

  “I have to.”

  “I know that. As I have to tell you not to.” His eyes bright as he tapped the table with a finger. “There have always been dragons in this world and men have always hunted them and they're still here. If you think you can change that, then you're a fool.”

  “I don't,” Brack said. “All I can do is balance it.”

  This man, so long lost but bound always by blood and something deep in that like an intangible knowledge, looked at him a long moment. Nodding in the way that they both shared. Then he took up his mug and drank it all and set it back down again. Wiped his beard with the back of his hand and smiled, his eyes still bright. “If I were really your grandfather,” he said. “Then maybe you'd listen to me.”

  Brack grinned at that and stood. “Maybe I would.”

  And it was in that moment that the spearman finally did what he had been meaning to do and stood and climbed unsteadily atop his chair and raised his mug above those below and yelled to them. The voices in the room fell to nothing and the blind man alone kept on playing and the spearman yelled about dragons in the mountains and the keep burned and all dead. These lies but he had not asked for the truth and gave this version of it.

  Protests at first from those below, and then laughter, and then nothing. A sort of horrible and wrenching silence as they saw he was more than a man drunk and they turned as he pointed to where Brack stood. Eyes full of fear and realization. But Brack and the other two had already gone to the door and they went out into the night and could hear still the spearman yelling about what would come to them. This doom and destruction called down from the heavens or up from the pits of the earth where the dragon was born in fire. As they walked through the snow toward the cabin Brack was for just one moment again in the burning yard and watching the horse screaming and twisting in the fireflame, and he knew everything the spearman had said was true and had merely yet to come to pass.