The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Read online

  Chapter Four

  I

  She stood on the wall overlooking the wide grounds where a young boy spun furiously upon an unbroken horse. All about him a ring of men laughing and yelling him on and the boy clinging as if death itself waited and perhaps it did. The dust rising slowly from the spot and so far below that she could cover them all with her finger if she so desired. Out beyond the green hills rising in the soft and warm light of evening and the orchards and vineyards there in the foothills and the women and men in loose-fitting clothes moving between them.

  He leaned on the edge of the wall beside her and took out his knife and spun it between his fingers in an absent way and she thought twice that it would fall but it did not and it seemed to move without effort in the hands of this boy of hers. The light in the fringes of his hair and turning it to gold and his body slender and well and never sick. A child nearly a man now and taking for granted this life of ease and luxury that others had bought for him with blood as they held in their entrails on battlefields of mud and screamed curses beneath a churning sky.

  Below them, the men were moving out as one and behind them the company of archers and the wagons well provisioned and commands called to the cattle and horses and rising thinly to them atop the wall. She watched the column move and he did not for to him they were nothing but men he had sent away and there were many others and if pressed he would not be able to give the names of those he'd sent.

  “You still don't believe them,” she said at last.

  He looked up from the knife and even then it did not stop moving in his hands. “No.”

  “There are many things in this world.”

  “Save your stories for the fools.” He smiled and put the knife in his belt. That oiled leather. “Dragons are nothing. An invention of the ancients for what they didn't understand. A scare tactic used by priests to keep us chained to the gods.”

  “Then all the stories are myth.”

  “When there are stories of dragons and no dragons, what else could they be?”

  “Histories.”

  “Histories written by people both stupid and deceived. Someone saw a shadow or couldn't explain a fire in a barn and said the word and it moved from mouth to mouth and eventually it came around and grew and there were more who'd seen it than the one who started it.”

  “Just lies from the peasants.”

  “Happens all the time.”

  “Some say the same thing about the Whispermen.”

  “And they should.”

  “The Whispermen are real. Ask anyone in Erihon.”

  He leaned back on the wall and crossed his arms and looked at her. His back to this kingdom he ruled and these people his own. “Of course they're real. But that doesn't mean they're what everyone says they are. Probably nothing at all. Deranged hermits in the damned forest. A dead people. Once they were something and now we don't even really know what and the stories grow.”

  “Do you believe in anything?”

  “I believe in what there is. Give me nothing else.”

  She looked away from him. The column leaving had reached the bridge over the moat and they were halfway across on those timbers with the men on either side standing with chains in their hands. Some dogs called out and then one answered somewhere else. She couldn't hear the sound of the hooves on the wood but she knew it deep and hollow and below the shallow water waiting for foes who had not besieged this land in generations.

  Perhaps somewhere a withered old man who knew of the death and destruction those wars wrought. Who had once been young and holding an ax or a sword and striking down those on the field and calling to rally other men to him and charging into their hearts.

  But more likely not. For those men were dead men and they were no more. If there was a withered old man with the scars of battle those scars were on his back and he would not talk of the fight and looked endlessly at the fields as if forever seeing there something unseen to all others.

  “Trading gold for fever dreams,” he said. “We can't lose.”

  “You can always lose.”

  He laughed. “I think you've had enough fresh air for the day.”

  She did not look at him and the guards came up the stone walkway side by side between the walls and took her arms and she did not protest and they led her back down and to the stairs. Hands rough on the tops of her arms. She looked back at him as she got to the stairs and he was still leaning with his back to the land and once again spinning the knife and then she was around the corner and going down the wide stone steps and she could see him no longer.

  When they reached the cell the door was closed and one man let her go and took the keys off his belt and unlocked it. She had at first looked around when they took her out for a means of escape but she did not now. The one held the door and the other stepped with her into the room and they closed the door again.

  “Come on,” the man said.

  She closed her eyes and took off the dress and the jewelry and the shoes and all. Standing naked in the cold and the floor slick beneath her feet with mud and everything else. A thin layer over the cold stone and moving up already between her toes. She opened her eyes and they were just looking at her and one grinning but this time they did not touch her and then at last the one handed her the rags she'd worn before. Watched her again as she pulled those rags up over her head and slid them on. The feeling against her skin of canvas, the heaviness of the dead and decayed.

  The one nodded at her and she went over that thin dark bridge to the wall and stood with her arms at her sides and he put the cuffs on her wrists. The chain rattling in the dark. Above the light faint now and failing. The metal so cold. He tugged on the chains to see that she had enough to lie down on the straw mat and he grunted and looked her up and then down once more despite the rags and grinned and then they turned and went out. The bolt fell in the door.

  And the queen stood for a moment with her eyes closed and then sat and looked into the darkness and it was all silence and yet she knew in it the other watched her and she it.

  II

  She dreamt that night and it was a dream of some great worm coming from the depths of the earth. Eyes so far across she would need both arms to span them and a mouth of small teeth that ground the stones and dirt as it came up, that dirt showering off, the body pirouetting in the tunnel, thrusting its huge bulk upward and upward and the tail trailing behind until finally it was free of the earth and fell with a sound heavy and wet into the moat. The bridge snapping and breaking as it fell, the thing pulsing with the beat of every heart within.

  For worms had their sections and within each a heart and if torn in two one would live and in this beat hearts like horses and it could not die.

  She woke sweating and lying up against the cold wall and the chains about her and she opened her eyes and shook and lay for a time just looking at that wall. The marks on the stones of tools older than the castle above. This the ancient world, for when men built a city the first thing they built was a place to put other men and they put them in the ground with stones and water and bars and chains. And then built above them the thing both had perhaps wanted to see. The other held below as if in death until that itself came for his escape.

  Turning then with the rattling chains she sat against the wall. The only light from the door and the lanterns without burning and that light falling through the bars. In this world the dark was ever present and the eyes accounted for it but even so she could not see it out there in that dark. And yet she knew it was there.

  “Talk to me,” she said. “Talk to me.”

  III

  She moved down the wall and knew not what time it was and sat next to the body. This also in chains, though the life had long fled it and all that remained were skin and bones. The chains loose about those ankles and wrists and running up the wall to the bolts driven into that stone with their eyehooks and they were perhaps never to be undone. This body bound forever in the dark and underground. More fitting in that
way for the dead than for her, and yet she still felt the anger rise in her heart at seeing his condition.

  The old rags just as hers. Nothing on the feet but leathered skin. Here in the damp the smell of it so thick. The chains holding them just out of each other's reach, though his life had fled him there at the end of his chains and she could now sit as closely as hers allowed, two bodies stretching for one another. As they had in time gone by and in life and now would do eternally.

  She did not cry and had not in longer than she knew. She'd heard it said that a person could grow used to anything if they were given enough time and she now knew that was true. For he was a fixture of this place as much as chain and stone and dark, and that which had at first horrified her now brought a sick type of comfort.

  The sameness of it, the consistency.

  She sat and spoke to him. First of their son and the way he had stood with his back to the kingdom and the men going out below him. Also of the court and the way he held himself and the way others saw him for it. Some of these mannerisms of a king and others not. The actions of a boy learning to be a king on his own and with no one to teach him and that incredible power to wield.

  Standing and working as she spoke. She was six stones up now and three removed. Every other, with those between remaining. Crude steps or a crude ladder, climbing just the height of her body. Working over her head and in the faint light of that barred window above.

  Pushing the spoon into the mortar, the heavy handle first, feeling that mortar break and shatter. Older than the city, this crypt. Old and fragile in that age, as were the bones of the dead. Mortar had once been made from the ground bones of slaves and she did not doubt that this had been some of the same. Each flake just adding to his body there below and someday all mingled together, slave and ruler alike, all arriving at that same fate in this same place.

  A cruel irony in that.

  She pushed the spoon and felt the mortar break again and brought it back toward herself and removed a section the size and depth of her fingernail. Almost nothing at all. Brought the spoon back and repeated the motion. And again. An endless chipping and scratching in the dark. The mortar flaking and coating her fingers, the feeling of them dry against one another making her skin crawl. She almost laughed at that, the involuntary shudder over that grating dryness when all about her lay death and solitude, but she did not. She didn't know who was listening.

  Continuing her speech as she worked, covering what faint sounds she made. Telling her dead husband of the word of dragons out of the northwest, in the stone cities. The man from Mraok with his long robes and fear in his eyes, begging for archers. Talking of burning outlands and dark shadows in the night sky and saying he'd also sent word to the Ringed City. As if the rust kings could still save them, the dead hunters rising from the ashes. Her son giving the man a small company and letting him go, stripping him of gold he never thought needed to be spent.

  She asked him what he thought, working a pebble loose from the mortar. Did he think the dragons had returned, or was it just fear that had returned? Would the archers die or bring it down or stand in boredom on the ramparts until they were sent back?

  Other things she could no longer say. Things she did not know. But always now deeply within her. Blinking that pain like sand in her eyes. Ground in. Blood slick on her cheekbones.

  The pebble came free, fell with a clatter to roll across the stone floor. She stopped and waited for his answer and listened to it roll and he did not say anything.

  Returning to her work. Feeling the stone move now, ever so slightly. The stones all about the same size but with vastly different shapes. Field stones plucked from the mud when the cells had been built, thrown together as they could be with that slave mortar. She moved it up and down with her thumb and nodded and commenced prying the mortar from the left side. It went easier there, where the water had been running and wearing it away before she had begun her work. Before she had been born.

  At last, telling her husband about the place she still held. For the line ran through her and it was her blood in the boy made him what he was and he kept her alive for that blood. Were it all drained from her body and she left pale and cold in the damp, he'd have no further use for her. But as her heart beat and royalty moved in her veins, she still ruled this land. Until he was old enough to gather power and they couldn't take the throne from him.

  Her husband knew. He knew but she told him and it covered the sound as the mortar fell.

  She did not know how many were behind it. Were the common people in the village asked who ruled, it would have been her name on their lips and they would have spoken of her riding through the orchards on a white mare with a gold dress and apple blossoms in her hair and smiling on them with favor. An event that had not happened but which became as it passed from the lips of advisors to bards and to the people themselves.

  They'd perhaps talk of the king's tragic death in the wastelands to the north, falling before a dark army even as he turned it back. Those black riders on their black mounts with armored horses and spines on their helms and swords forged in the fires of hell. How he'd been struck down fighting to save them with his white cape flowing behind him and the gold crown still on his brow and the city's name on his breath.

  An absurdity, to be sure. For he'd never left on such a campaign and would never have fought in the snowdrenched mountains in cape and crown, but the bards made it what they made it. A scene painted in poetry that people would cling to and repeat and allow to grow. For people inevitably believed what they wanted to believe and so they still believed they were ruled by the queen with the apple blossoms and her gloriously slain husband.

  The stone moved again, and she stepped back to work it with both hands. Close, so very close. She could move it now to both sides and up and down but it was like pulling that last tooth that clings to the bloody root when it should fall. She stepped back up and pressed the spoon sideways into the crack.

  Those people would not know that she lived here in this underground. That her husband had withered here in agony and his own filth to die upon the stones at last, in the dark and apart from his people with his throne chamber far above. Too far like the light and air to a man caught and drowning. That his own son had at last poisoned him when starving him became too much and his death was loud and long and horrible.

  That his queen sat and stretched just to wipe his brow but he could not lean close enough. That she spoke to him until the end. Her hair full not of flowers but of dirt and her dress not gold but these rough canvas rags.

  She pushed upward on the spoon and the stone twisted and ground in its housing and then she felt it come loose. She pushed harder and it slid forward and she reached up quickly with the other chained hand to keep it from falling and grabbed the edge and carefully put the spoon down at her feet. Straightened again and took the stone with both hands and gently played it back and forth with the mortar raining down and scattering toward the bones and then it was in her hands. She drug it from the wall and held it and looked at it and closed her eyes and opened them and looked at it again.

  Turning, she set her teeth and listened and when she thought no one was there she threw it lightly. The stone spinning in the air and everything so quiet and then clattering off into the dark. Into the deep shadows behind the bones.

  She looked up, then, at the others she must remove. She had counted their number once and now did not for counting them was too much and made the task seem larger than her and she contented herself to look only at the next stone. This one rounded on the bottom and flat on the top. High enough that she'd have to reach over her head with the chains swinging from her wrists to work on it.

  Another step, another notch.

  The queen took up the spoon again and thought of that woman on the horse with the flowers in her hair and the blood in her veins and how she had been married when she was fifteen to the steward of this city so that he would become a king and an alliance would be built. Two city states up
on the corpse of the dead empire, trying to forge out something more. A peace built by their fathers' fathers after the Second War of the Splintering. Perhaps riding into the town that day with eyes wide and palms covered in sweat she had last felt like that girl she had never truly been.

  But now, in the dark and the bones, she worked back toward that lie again. The girl she'd been now dead twenty years and replaced by a woman who knew far more of the world and who had truly found just what her blood would buy her.

  She stepped up to the wall and worked the spoon into the crack and brought it toward her along the wall and felt the mortar drift down as dust in her hair, in her eyes.

  Chapter Five

  I

  Outside the men standing in the dark and swirling snow and more of them now under the cracking sky than there had been all night and some with torches and all talking to each other and moving in a fashion both aimless and menacing. Brack watched them and drank the dark tea Tarek had brewed and felt it move through him and watched them still. These who would not come closer but would wait until he stepped out.

  Not to fall upon him in anger, but to plead. For their very lives, they felt. He knew it as he had seen it before and would again and the way men looked when they felt only another man could keep them from death and whatever hell waited was something he could not shake.

  “What do they think I am?” he asked. Raising the tea and drinking again and still unable to determine the type but knowing full well what it did to the blood in his veins.

  “Exactly what you are,” the old man said.

  “They think I'm more than I am.”

  “I don't see it that way.”

  Brack turned slowly and looked at him and did not blink. “You know what happened last time? You know how many men died? Screaming and clawing at the air and some burned the way a pig looks on a spit with their flesh blackened and eyes gone and still running. Not dying. For how long? Seconds, minutes, it's all the same.” He pointed back toward the window. “All of them looked like those men before it. Only a handful looked like it after, and even they weren't the same. One of them doesn't speak anymore and another, when he does, nothing he says makes any damn sense.”