The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Page 5

  The old man crossed to the window and stood with him. The other sitting on the far side of the room with his eyes closed and smoking his pipe in this early morning.

  “And what happened in the end?” Tarek said.

  “You know what happened.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Brack was silent for a moment. Chewing it and turning as they both thought of it and what he would say. Then he said: “I killed it.”

  “You killed it.”

  “But they think I can save them. I damn well can't do that. I never have.”

  Tarek took out his own pipe and lit it with slow and careful hands and raised it lightly smoking to his lips. The scent of that within rich and yet fresh at once. Filling the room and adding to the scent of the tea in a way that intertwined the two and made one scent new and all its own. Brack waited in silence while he did it and the sun rose.

  “They think they'll die without you.”

  “They'll die with me.”

  “Then what difference does it make?” He smoked. “Are you here to kill it?”

  “Don't question me.”

  “That's not an answer.”

  “You know I'm here to kill it.”

  “That's what they know, as well. The spearman told everyone who you are and they know why you came from the keep. You can't be what you are and also expect no one to think it means something.”

  He drank his tea and the mug was cooling in his hands and he went over to the fire and filled it from the kettle and came back. Wiping his hand on his pants where he had spilled the tea and not feeling it but knowing it was at least hotter than it had been. The fire burning down now toward the core of the logs and no one adding more to those flames. Perhaps for the reality of true fire lurking out in that hinterland.

  “If they know I was at the keep, then they should look at the keep,” Brack said. “All there burned and dead. A handful fled for the gap. Will they join them?”

  “Still, they know. You came to kill it and now they want you to kill it.”

  Brack stood silent for a moment and then he closed his eyes and opened them again. “That's not what they want.”

  “Then what do they want?”

  “They want to live. All men just want to live.”

  “Is that why you're here?”

  “No. I'm here to kill it.”

  “There's no way that can be the same?”

  “It never is.”

  Juoth stood and came over at last. His pipe left on the arm of his chair but the smell of it still in his breath, hair, clothes. He too looked out at the roving crowd and slowly licked his lips and did not look at Brack or the old man as he spoke. “Let's go out to them.”

  “And tell them what?”

  “Tell them to go home.”

  Brack laughed, the sound harsh and clipped. Took another drink of the new tea already cooling. “Go tell them.”

  “You have to.”

  “And they'll go.”

  “They won't. But when they die, you'll have told them to go.” The man shrugged and his face did not change. “These men will die. All men die, but these ones. These ones die today. Tomorrow. Next week. It doesn't matter. If it comes here, they die here. Might as well have it on their own heads.”

  At long last Brack smiled and shook his head, then tipped it back and looked at the ceiling. There the wooden beams hewn from trees in these very mountains and the roof pitched hard against the piling snow and the chimney rising in stone and shadow, the firelight flickering at its edges, to go through mortar and wood to that open air. Somewhere above the howling of the wind over the opening of that chimney.

  “So I shouldn't care?”

  “Men do what they do. They die how they die. You can't save them all and you know it and they're fools if they don't know it. So go tell them they're fools and let them be fools. You're not going to kill it if you're thinking about anything else. Wash your hands of them.”

  “I could send them to the gap.”

  The islander snorted. “You can't send everyone running for the gap.”

  “I can't?”

  “Then they die in the snow or they die in the mountains or they cheat the gods and they go down to the plains and they die in the fields and the cities.”

  “This meant to make me feel better?”

  “Not at all.”

  They watched again. One of the men left and a short time later came back and he was carrying an ax and he stood leaning on it as if waiting for someone to see it. Then another man walked up and he was wearing a sword and he nodded to the man with the ax. A third with a bow, then another with a sword. Two young men with their picks from the mines, one wearing a dagger the length of a finger.

  Brack stared at them and thought of the things he'd seen the last time and a true knight of the Springlands clad head to toe in plate and holding aloft a shield with the crest of a tiger painted in brilliant detail and in his other hand a broadsword the likes of which these men would never see in their lives and that man cooking and boiling in his armor as he struggled with fingerless hands to tear the helmet from his own head.

  II

  After a time they left the window and went to sit beside the fire and the old man brewed more tea from the leaves in the kitchen and they three sat watching the water boil and finally Brack again asked Tarek what he had come to ask for you could never ask such things enough times to be ready and then he sat back with the mug hot in his hands and listened.

  He had been seeing it now for weeks. The first time trapping in the mountains and walking with the metal and rope traps rattling in his hand through snow as deep as his calf and each step adding to the pounding of his heart. His fingers cold about the traps and lashes and yet his back dripping sweat and his hair soaked under his hat. Carrying with him a handax and nothing else and the bodies of two raccoons he had taken. He had bent to set a trap at the base of a cedar and as his hands had been working it down into the snow the shadow had passed over him.

  He'd seen nothing more that day, nor had he heard it. Drifting and silent perhaps on some updraft, wings unfurled and scales hot in the sun and those burning eyes casting about earth and air. But the shadow had been as large as a boat's sail even at that height and he'd shivered the entire way returning as his sweat turned to ice and his eyes always on the sky.

  Two weeks later, great tracks in the snow. Three steps. Filled partially with new-fallen snow and so the edges softened, but unmistakable for what they were in that high mountain field. He'd stood at the edge of the trees for a long time just looking at them and then gone out to the field and walked about them in slow circles and stopped in front to clear some of the snow. Six inches down a long swath of blood, all ice now and hard and crimson and dark. Just blood and no animal to be seen, no parts left behind.

  Lying there melting the snow around it, the lone scale. Fallen and lost and horrible.

  It had come down, he guessed, dropping without a sound in that sky, its prey unaware below. Sensing it perhaps at the last moment, screeching in a horror that suddenly ate the entire world to the bone, to the heart. The animal had run and so the dragon had struck the earth behind it in three light-footed steps and grabbed it on the last and taken back to the air as the hot blood poured and hissed in the snow.

  Another time: Standing on the edge of the town and looking off toward the keep at sunset and on a far peak something dark moving. Smaller at the distance than his little finger and so at first ignored. Then he realized the distance and how enormous it must be to be seen at all. Perched and watching something with the tail twitching from side to side and the head still as if cast from iron or carved from stone. Once it unfurled its wings and then brought them in again. He watched it until darkness fell and then the next morning it was gone.

  That the only time he'd seen the beast itself. Ten days ago, no more.

  But there had been reports. A miner sent back early who had never returned to town and when they looked for him the tracks van
ished and most assumed he'd fallen and been buried in some crevasse now covered and then one of his boots was found. The foot inside it still and the cut through the bone cleaner than any sword.

  Two horses found run into the trees and the hair on one scorched and blackened in a long streak along its back. Just below, the flesh blistered and bleeding. Both animals cowering and afraid and unwilling ever to leave the forest and the trees.

  The third horse never found. Neither in track nor body.

  “I should have told you sooner. Sent someone up to the keep before I did. But I wanted to be sure. No one's seen one this close to the cities in twenty years. They've never seen one here. You know how it is.” Tarek smiled. “I'm an old man.”

  “I wouldn't have doubted you.”

  “I know.” Leaning forward just slightly. “When's the last time you saw one?”

  “If they're not near the cities, I'm doing what I'm meant to do.”

  “But when?”

  Looking through those blackened windows. The wild beyond. A vast and cursed world with in it a rampant darkness and here this fragile empire of a thousand years. Beyond, the things he'd seen that men living here could not fathom nor believe.

  “Always,” he said. “I see them everywhere.”

  The old man looking at him in the firelight. Heartbeats and swirling snow. That darkness twisting and growing and encroaching on this world of men as it always sought, a living thing and a dead thing all the same.

  Brack had finished his tea and so he set the mug aside and settled into the chair. Looking at nothing and the whole world and the dragon out there in it. The way it had looked as it breathed fire into the tower through the arrow slits and they roasted alive above the iron door. Then he said:

  “What do you think we do?”

  “To kill it?” Tarek shrugged, then swirled his own tea in his mug. “Way I see it, we have two options. Maybe three.”

  “Start with the worst.”

  “We track it. Hunt it down.”

  “And the better?”

  “We wait for it. When you hunt you either draw the game in or you go to it. When you go to it, it always knows before you get there. When you bring it in, lure it to you, that's when you get the kill. You only need a moment of surprise.”

  “Don't think we'll even have that.”

  “Probably not.”

  “And if we bring it here, they'll die.” He nodded toward the window and the men waiting outside and Juoth looked but the old man did not. Brack thought of the dragon standing in the center of this town and the snow melting and running beneath it and the carnage such a trapping would bring. He may kill it, but how many others would he kill at the same time? Most of them, surely. Those who lived would be as the men who'd lived before, voiceless and witless if luck was on their side.

  “Then the third,” Tarek said. “We do both.”

  Brack nodded. “It's the only chance.”

  “Where?”

  “That's why I came to you.”

  Tarek nodded slowly and then stood and went to a shelf and when he came back he was holding a rolled map of the mountains. He unrolled it and lay it on the table before him and set his mug to hold down one corner. Brack set his also on another and held the other side down with his hand.

  “Here,” Tarek said. Touching the map lightly with one finger. “There's a field before this pass. It's where I saw the tracks before. He knows it.”

  “How far?”

  “Four hours if you're going to walk. Less on horses.”

  “I'll take a horse.”

  “And we'll walk back.”

  Brack shook his head. “I will walk back.”

  “Brack.”

  “Don't.”

  Juoth had been quiet and only now spoke, his brow furrowed. Looking from one to the other and settling on Brack. “You're going to try to kill it yourself.”

  “I am.”

  “You can't do it.” He held up a hand. “I mean no offense. But it's not possible. You'll need all of us and some of them if there's going to be any hope.”

  “I'll go alone.”

  Silence fell in the small room and Juoth looked at Tarek and the old man looked back for a long moment and then nodded once and Juoth's eyes grew larger and he sat back and shook his head and looked at the far wall. What he saw there invisible to the other two.

  Tarek touched the map again. Something almost reverent in it. “You think it will be enough?”

  “I'll bring gold,” Brack said. “He'll come to a horse and gold.”

  “He'll know you're there.”

  “He already knows I'm here.”

  “How will you take him?”

  Brack thought for a moment and looked back at the map and traced along it with his finger. Tapped a place when he found it. “A crossbow from here. One shot. An eye if I can. Then the sword.”

  “And if the bow misses?”

  “Then the sword.”

  “Look,” Juoth said, leaning forward. “What you're saying is going to get you killed. Is this some sort of joke?”

  “Not at all,” Brack said.

  The old man smiled softly and stood, looking at Juoth. “It's not what you think it is. He can do this.”

  “The one he killed at the city was different.”

  Brack stood as well. “You know dragons,” he said. “So you know there's no easy way to kill them. Yet I've done it. I'll do it again.”

  “In land you don't know, with a crossbow and a sword.”

  Bending, Brack picked up the mugs and the map curled into itself and rolled to the edge of the table. He watched it roll and thought of what he'd seen and how far it was and how the blood had been under the new snow and then he said: “Think maybe I should leave the crossbow. Just so it's a fair fight.”

  III

  He woke the next day at early light and they were gone from before the cabin, but they had left a man. Clad in fur and canvas, holding himself against the cold. As Brack stepped from the doorway the man looked up and his eyes widened and he turned and ran and shouted something as he ran that was lost and taken by the wind.

  Brack watched him go for a moment and shook his head and turned to where the old man was bringing the horse up from the small stable behind the cabin. A big black pack horse, the type used to bring the wagons through the country. Nothing like the lean and powerful horses he'd ridden on the field in front of the Ringed City when the red dragon had stood roaring in a sea of mailed men burning and dying as they ran with pikes and swords, the arrows so thick on the beast's back until he raked his wings and tore them free or sheered them off and then the rolling wave of fire as he bent and killed whole companies at once.

  But a horse nonetheless, one that would get him where he needed to go and serve its purpose well enough. This not a dragon he would fight with long charges and a lance and then the sword.

  In his other hand Tarek held the crossbow, made of wood and leather and the string fresh and new. Three bolts in the quiver. Brack looked at them and thought how if he had time for even the second something had gone quite differently than he'd planned and very wrong but it was all the same. Better to have the bolts and never fire them than to find time to loose them and run out. He reached out and took the bow and patted the horse's flank while it eyed him and began to attach the bow to the rough saddle.

  “You remember where it is?” Leaning closer to Brack. Urgent and calm and fire all together. Juoth stood back by the cabin watching and when Brack looked at him he looked away.

  “I do,” Brack said.

  The old man reached and put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him for a moment. “I didn't get to see you kill the one at the Ringed City. I wish I could see you do it now.”

  Brack smiled. “I'll show you it when it's done.”

  “That's not the same.”

  “I know.”

  “You're sure I can't come?”

  “It's better this way. Try to slow them down if you can.”

&nbs
p; “I'll tell them you went toward the river.”

  “Even better.”

  Brack stepped forward and embraced the old man and felt his strength through fur and leather and armor and then released him and turned and put his foot in the stirrup and pulled himself onto the horse. The iron helmet hanging on the far side of the saddle, opposite the crossbow. His other armor already on and heavy but not too heavy for this horse. He looked out at the path before him and then back.

  “Listen,” he said. “Anything else happens, you leave here. All right? Don't try to come kill it.”

  “Nothing else will happen.”

  “If it does.”

  “If it does I will.”

  “Take as many as you can. They'll want to stay but you have to tell them. Get down to the plains.”

  “You know what a city is for a dragon.”

  A feeding ground, Brack thought, but he said: “Walls are better than none. If it kills me, it's going to track me back here. There won't be anything left when it leaves. You need to be gone before that. Ignore the cities if you want, but get to the plains.”

  “I will.”

  “And tell Kayhi.”

  “I won't have to.”

  Brack nodded, then looked up and raised a hand toward Juoth. The islander raised his hand briefly and then turned and went into the cabin.

  He turned the horse and rode out. The spine of the ridge tall and dark before him, the top blown free of snow and just black rock jutting in jagged relief. As if bathed in fire and smoke and now burnt all to the core. The trees stunted and dead. He rode and the horse struggled in the deep snow here in the valley and then found the path and when he turned back the town had been consumed by the wilderness and snow as if it did not exist and it was just he and the horse and the dragon, alone and all three being drawn together by the movements of fate or the world and when those paths came to the same point two would die and one would live and all moved to that intersection to see which those would be.