The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  Brack had seen much and more of the world, but this was nothing he had laid eyes on before. When he rode in front he watched the horse's steps and guided it carefully and kept an eye on its breathing and felt its lungs move in its great chest. But when he rode in back he looked all about him and drank that country and did not know what it meant that this place could exist at all.

  Looking above at times for the dragon, but never finding him.

  They camped the fourth night in a cave in the shadow of a short mountain and on the peak of that mountain an old lookout of tumbled stones. Brack went and stood among those ruins and could not date them but did find a knife made of stone with a chipped blade. Picked it up and looked at it and turned it in his hand and put it back down. But went in the end to the cave and lit a fire in the doorway and sat behind it in the warm glow with his hands to the flames.

  “We need another horse,” Juoth said. His blistered skin bright in the firelight. Both hands sitting in his lap. The one glove still on and holding that hand very still.

  “He's spent?”

  “If he's not already, he will be.”

  There had been no villages and no men and no tracks and no horses. They had the gold and could buy one but they had to find one to buy him and they couldn't.

  They watched the fire for a time. The flames moving over the wood they'd brought from the forest, scraping it free of ice and frost with their knives and a handax. Splitting it so it burned on the edges. The flames still meager but better than none, the smoke rising thinly.

  “What are you doing?” Juoth said. Just looking out over the country.

  Brack regarded him for a moment. Leaning forward to set another branch in the fire and watching as the flames licked over it and trying not to think of bones among the ashes. Then he said: “I'm hunting him.”

  “How long?”

  “There's not a beginning to it.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head and settled back. Looking at this man with whom he rode. “How much did you know about my grandfather?”

  “Only what he wanted me to know.”

  “Then you know he watched for me.”

  Juoth nodded. Nothing else needed to be said.

  “I knew he'd be looking and I came to him to find out what he'd seen,” Brack said. “I've always been able to trust him in that. He saw everything. The things you miss. He saw them. Noted them. When it left the keep and I knew he was close, I went to him.”

  “Don't blame yourself.”

  Brack sat staring for a long moment and then bent his head and put it in his hands. Holding it and thinking of all his life was and all it had become. Not wanting to raise it again and continue on this journey but also knowing he must. As all men must do the things laid before them or perish in the doing or shirk that duty and live long and fat lives hating themselves and knowing exactly what they are.

  “Who did it kill there?”

  “At the keep?”

  “Yes.”

  Brack scowled, eyes focused on nothing and everything. “My cousins. Brother and sister.”

  The other man looked at him and watched his eyes and said: “You think something.”

  Brack blinked and then nodded. Smiling in a grim fashion. As a man who has seen so much death must smile if he is to smile at all. “It's following me.”

  “You're not just hunting it. You think it's hunting you.”

  A long silence. Juoth got up and brought over more wood and cleaned it with the handax and set it on the fire. Moved it and rolled it when it wouldn't catch. Until it did at last, with the heavy wet smoke as it dried and then the thin smoke as it burned.

  “It's not hunting me,” Brack said. “I said it before and it's still true. It's toying with me. Some damned game.”

  “How so?”

  “Did my grandfather tell you about it?”

  Juoth shook his head. “I knew what he was doing. In a general sense. But did he tell me about this dragon? No.”

  “Two hundred years ago,” Brack said. “My grandfather's grandfather's father

  II

  came down into the grass plains and stood with the fall wheat blowing about him and the smell of it warm and dry on the wind and everywhere the smell of smoke. He stood with the long bow in one hand and the arrow in the other and the sword at his back and tasted the air. The beast nowhere to be seen but also everywhere and he knew it would come. It must. In the far distance the caravan moving out of the burning town and in the center of this field the crypt with the old man's gold and bones and all about the dead horses. Three of them with their bodies quartered and the blood splashed over the crypt and the smell of that blood as thick and heavy as the smoke.

  He saw first the shadow moving over the earth, running along through the grass as a ship over the choppy sea. He turned and looked and then it was gone, darting from sight. This beast so huge and still nimble, especially when in the air that it owned. And also which owned it. He moved toward the crypt and he kept the bow up and then that shadow returned and then he saw it.

  Dark and long in the air, flashing down with the wings spread wide. Muscles gleaming and slick in places with blood not its own. The eyes like fire itself above a jaw powerful enough to snap a horse in two, clean through hide and bone. It came down toward him and shrieked and there was no other sound in the world.

  This the call it had made as it drug itself from the furnaces below and stepped for the first time into the night air.

  He knew he could not kill it with the bow but he did not mean to kill it that way and he brought it up and loosed an arrow. The distance far too great, but the dragon closing. The arrow falling away beneath.

  Looking down and seeing the stone crypt, just steps away now. He ran forward and got behind it and the dragon went close over his head and it felt as if the air split. The way it felt when lightning struck the ground and everything ripped. The sound of one claw dragging hard across the top of the crypt.

  And then he was up and climbing over and not even looking at the dragon. For he had seen dragons before and he would see them again. The stone too smooth and his hands and feet slipping. But he pulled himself up and over to the other side and stood on the ledge where he could rise and shoot or drop behind as he needed.

  Both in their time.

  The dragon shrieked again, furious at the miss, and wheeled in the sky. It turned like a sail into a headwind, one wing billowing as it brought its body around, legs trailing and swinging, the neck arching and curving sharply back as if it were where the dragon wanted to be and the rest of its powerful form was a hinderance.

  He watched it turn. Swallowing once and tasting the dust on the back of his throat. Looking at it for the weakness and finding it.

  For everything had a weakness. In chariots it was the spokes of the wheels, in horsemen their very mounts. In footsoldiers their heavy armor, also their life. In kings their greed.

  In dragons it was the eyes.

  The beast came back again and he loosed another arrow and watched the dark shaft fly to its peak and then begin to fall, whistling in the air, and then the dragon lashed out with its teeth and tore it from that air, snapping it in half like a twig beneath a heel. Letting the pieces fall from its jaws to spin back to the earth. Never looking away through all of this, never blinking.

  He threw himself from the top of the crypt and behind the wall, and fire washed over. He could feel his shirt aflame and he rolled and pressed it to the stone and the very stone was hot. Like that of a stove. He laid down and the flames on him went out and he could feel his back naked and blistered and raw.

  The dragon swept by again and he repeated the earlier escape and hauled himself up and over the crypt while it turned. The stone on the far side partially melted and blisters now also on his hands as he slid over the side. The pain barely felt. For when death was so close pain was nothing and he'd never felt much pain in his long life.

  Until later. He always felt it later and the next day in t
he clutches of hell itself. But now there was nothing but the bow and the dragon and those eyes, and his body would do as it must until it fell.

  It came back at him again and he saw it for the arrogance that it was. This repetition. It did not believe it would lose or could be killed and so it would do the same thing until all others were dead, as it had all its life. For it could not fathom an outcome other. It rose up on those black wings and drew its feet up and threw itself at him.

  And again he waited just that much longer. As the range closed and he thought he could feel the dragon's heat pouring from its body as it came and he knew he couldn't but still felt that he did. The rushing wind from those wings. It opened its gaping jaws again and shrieked like a demon tearing all sound from the world and the fire swelled in those lungs and he brought the bow up and unleashed the final arrow.

  At this distance, closing instantly. Just a flash of wood and metal in the firelight, too fast to follow, and then burying itself in the dragon's eye.

  The beast fell and crashed to the earth and rolled in a tangle of wings and legs and claws and scales. Calling again now but in pain and shock and terror. The head rising up and burning blood spraying from the ruptured eye in a scalding torrent and running down that long serpent's neck. The jaws working open and closed and the dragon struggling to gets its legs under it and its wings above.

  He leapt from behind the crypt and tore his sword free and brought it around in front of him and ran at it. Perhaps in folly or courage, and sometimes he thought they were the same. But this was the one chance and the dragon would not be so foolish and arrogant again and he could not let it rise.

  Now he did feel the heat of the thing and it was like running into a parched desert and everywhere the wheat was burning. A line of ruin behind where the dragon had fallen and the rest of the field now taking up. Smoke and flame and dust in the air. The dragon's calls and the cracking of those jaws.

  He came around at it and went to the side where the eye still bled. The dragon had struggled over in the torn earth and was trying to stand and it got one wing up with the other trapped and in doing so killed itself as surely as it had by taking a third pass and not circling to come from the west. The wing rose and it could not see him and he saw the open place below with the skin soft and free of scales. Just a long thin line, a crease where the flesh must move freely as the wings beat, and in this the dragon's end.

  Stepping beneath that rising wing, that black sail, the claws on the end. Knowing what it would do if it fell and how he would be crushed and broken before he knew anything and running still as the dragon turned its head. Bringing that long and slender sword up and seeing the flame glint off the edge of the blade and the fuller and then burying it to the hilt in the dragon's side. Feeling it slide over rib and bone and into that beating inferno of its heart.

  III

  Juoth sat looking at him in the cold and windbeaten cave, the snow drifting against the mouth and the air howling in the dark night, far off through the frozen forest. “You were trying to emulate that kill.”

  Brack nodded. The pieces had been in place, the trap laid. But it had not played out as in that story now centuries old. Perhaps the dragon was wiser, or perhaps not. Maybe it had been its intention all along to kill Tarek and he could have done any damned thing he pleased in that field and it wouldn't have made a difference.

  “Now what do we do?” Juoth said.

  “We track it.”

  “How do you want to do it?”

  Brack stood and went to the fire and turned one of the logs. The embers burning down now and smoking more than producing heat and already the cave cooling. The back wall where ice glistened wetly now freezing back to that shell of crystal on stone. He took up two more logs and set them on the fire crossing each other, the heart of that cross in the flame where all of the edges could catch. The bark first smoldering and smoking and then little flames licking at the sides and growing as they moved toward the core. He stepped back and sat again.

  “The way you always track a dragon,” he said. Raising a hand to his jaw and feeling the beard growing there and wondering how long he would be traveling now in this world and seeing no end to it. “Not in the usual ways of lesser game. You track it by the swaths of destruction it leaves behind. You go from one burning hellhole to the next until you find it and you kill it.”

  Juoth smiled and it was a wicked thing on his face and all teeth and also a sheer joy in it and Brack had seen that look before and knew what it meant. “But a dragon is like a man.”

  “He is.”

  “So we can guess where he'll be.”

  Brack nodded, already feeling it and hating what he knew.

  “What is it?”

  “My sister,” he said. “It's my sister.”

  IV

  They left the cave the next morning and went on down the mountain and into a valley of stone. The snow lighter here as they descended, just a thin skim on the surface of the world, in places a dusting. Melting off in the sun. All around the stones rising high above them and in one place three inexplicably stacked, one atop the next, each seven meters tall and more than that around. The hands of gods perhaps all that could have placed them in such a position.

  They came after that to the remains of a town and it was there that the dragon had nested. Dismounting and walking through the ruin, but this an old ruin of age and time alone. No one having lived there in a generation. Everything fallen in and rotted, the beams of old homes and barns and a fence running long into a field with tilted fenceposts. A simple place for farming and the raising of animals and all now fled or killed or taken. He knew not which, but no bodies or bones remained.

  In the center of the town a scuffle of tracks in the mud and dirt. The beast's talons as long in that soil as his arm. The great depression where it had curled its tail about itself and slept with those burning eyes horrible and open in the night. Atop the remains of a barn as if seeking the straw that had long since been blown by the four winds and rotted itself.

  Perhaps the dragon felt that in a place like this it could find a home, he thought. A place of abandonment and death already. Lacking blood and fire and gold, but already little more than whispering ghosts. Where nothing lived.

  In times ancient and mostly forgotten the dragons had ruled the earth and not the men and he felt the whole world must have been like this. The eternal rangings of huge creatures brawling in the setting sun to control a wasteland and a territory. Feasting perhaps on the ancestors of the men. Turning all the world to their will.

  They did not speak in that dead town and got back on the horse on the far side and found a river running down toward a low valley. The floor of which they could not see, as it was shrouded in cloud. The water black and churning over the small stones, coming out of mountains and snowmelt and falling. They came to the bank and the horse drank and then raised its dripping muzzle and they went on along in moss and roots and scrub trees. Picking their way down in short steps and not pushing lest the horse fall and break its leg and leave them to walk an untold distance.

  It was along this river that Juoth spoke without turning back. His voice soft and light as if saying nothing at all but a hard edge to it and all the world in his words.

  “Do you know how I met your grandfather?”

  “No. He didn't tell me.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Of course.”

  Juoth straightened. Looking upward as if seeing it for just a moment. His voice in that far off place when he spoke.

  “We were slaves,” he said. “Your grandfather a prisoner of the Goldencrown War. In the islands that means you fight. Not always, but it did for us. Thirty years ago. We'd been moving all over Carrison and fighting in the rings and pits there and once in an amphitheater. All around us people cheering. There's always money when there's blood.”

  Brack was silent. He knew well the link between money and blood and he felt those bloodslicked coins riding in the bag at his hip
.

  “He'd made a name for himself, you know. Killed a hundred men. They said it, anyway. That no one could kill him. I fought once before him and won and afterward watched him. Facing two lions and a huge man from Hydone. Eight feet tall. Arms like pillars.” There was a slight grin in his voice as he spoke. “Your grandfather killed the lions and him in no less than three minutes.”

  It was a time Brack had known about but not something they ever spoke of. Something that took guts and hours or perhaps days and always the threat of those opened doors and where they led and neither he nor his grandfather chose to walk into that dark forest and see what it held, though they both knew everything there was to know. But there was no way around it and it was many years ago and he closed his eyes and saw those burned bones in the rubble and opened them again and touched his face, his cheek.

  “I was ten,” Juoth said. “Perhaps eleven. One of the youngest fighters but you do what they tell you and they were making money when I fought. And then one day I walked out into the ring and it was hot and the ring was all sand and I was thinking what it would be like for my footing and then I looked up and he was standing there and looking at me.”

  He paused, then, looking away. Beside them, the river still ran darkly over those stones and turned in a widening bed. As deep now in the middle as his waist and the dim shapes of fish moving in the hollows. Once a silver back breaking the surface and then descending again in a swirl of ripples quickly lost to the current.