The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  Juoth and the boy rose alike and came to stand next to him and he said nothing and held the sword in his hand with the tip pointed not at the ground but down along the hillside and toward that far-off grave of fire and ash. Muscles taut, both arm and sword like stone, as if he were some vengeful statue looking out over a world it must and would bend to its will even if that stone had to be washed in blood for it had an unquenchable thirst and nothing in this world or the next could hold it back.

  The boy said something then and Brack did not know what it was and did not look at him. Juoth was silent for he knew dragons and there was nothing to say. He stood waiting and would move upon the next order but Brack did not know what to give and finally he turned and stalked back to the horse. Grabbing it and pulling himself on.

  He looked at Juoth. “Get everything and then come. You'll find me there.”

  “You can't fight it alone.”

  “No one else can fight it now.”

  “Brack.”

  A silence. Brack did not think of putting away the sword but pulled the horse around on its own twisting neck. Feeling the weight of that steel in his hand.

  “It's waiting for you to ride to the city,” Juoth said. Handing up his bag, his clothes, his belt.

  “You think I don't know that?”

  “And if it comes?”

  He scowled and it was the first thing that had passed across his face since he woke and smelled the smoke.

  “Then I'll kill it,” he said.

  II

  He rode hard and he did not see that which he passed. Going fast over the rise in the dust and smoke and the horse not yet breathing hard. On down that slope and into the grass sea and the city like a smoldering beacon ahead of him in the waxing light that drew him onward. A carrot perhaps, but one he welcomed and would not shy from. He leaned down low on the horse and pushed it and the animal responded both to that and his body itself, the beating of his heart and the sound of his breath and it ran hard for him with the yet unburned grass flashing around its legs.

  Seen or not, the world passed about him and the charging horse. A thin river with black stones that they crossed by fording and the hoofs beating in water only ankle deep. A copse of trees and in the center of them what had once been a dwelling and was now rotted wood and nothing. All fallen in on itself. The remnants of a road leading away and then swallowed by the plains. Farther on a scattering of small creatures with long necks and legs and thin bodies covered in fur, all standing at the sound of the horse and then running in great confusion to burrow into the dirt.

  He left the old road behind, for it moved in a serpentine way through these plains. Sweeping long and wide to the east before coming back. Brack knew he would meet it again before he reached the city but he did not need it and he prayed with every hoofbeat that the horse would not find a crevice or stone to turn its foot and leave him there running like a man lost. But to take the road would have been more time and he did not have it and he could smell in the smoke the dead of the city burning.

  All this a funeral pyre left for him. The sole guest invited and asked to speak over them all and commit them to some world other.

  He whispered to the horse as he rode. Asking it to go faster and pleading with it and talking to it to keep calm. Saying things that had no meaning but in such a way that they pushed animal and rider in their headlong flight. Raising his own head to look at that towering pillar that guided him, smoke rolling from earth to sky, and then looking down to the endless earth that was all the same and gave no reprieve.

  He could smell the smoke here but again he was smelling the keep where he had seen her last and the dead there and listening to that horse rising on its hind legs and screaming in the yard. Smelling also the fires long dead that he had seen in his life and knowing what they meant. Always the death and destruction the same and so very complete.

  These memories a curse he'd always bear and no choice in it. As with many curses and certainly with the worst of them. He would not let it consume him—he could not—but he let it push him as he had all his life.

  The city did not seem to change and the horse's sides became wet and lathered and his own also. Each time he looked up the world storming by in perpetual motion and still that city so far off as it burned. Smoke all he could see and the fire now just low and consuming the little that was left. He looked back only once and could tell the distance he had gone but it was the damned plains and they swallowed everything and made distance maddeningly nothing at all. He could have traveled all his life or mere minutes and the city would look the same as it died before him.

  And still he kept on. There had been many a ride like this in his life and he knew that the thing was not to look at the end but to find a place between. A standing boulder in the grass that he could find a quarter of an hour later by his side. A glint of water off a pond that he could mark as it went by. A small cluster of homes and fields where men and women and children stood holding their scythes and hoes and rakes and axes and looking up at him as he went through with mouths gaping and one woman raising her hand to him as he paid her not a second glance.

  In that way, the distance would pass. The gnawing feeling that he was still as far away as he had ever been would leave.

  But he could not do it. He had eyes only for Cabele and the smoke and flame that she was and every time he looked up he looked at her alone and she burned to nothing while he watched.

  III

  They came upon the body of the horse when the sun was straight above them and the day very hot. The body covered in white foam and lying on its side in the tall grass. He got down and touched its neck and went around in front and looked at it and then looked back at the boy. The boy said something that was not a word and looked at him as if it were. The girl strapped behind him. He stood for a short time next to the horse and looked out into the plains to see if there was anything to see and then he climbed back up and all three went on again.

  IV

  Always in his head now this swirling storm. Once as a boy he had gone to the cliffs. This in the old days and before it all and he had stood alone on the rock that ran along the top of the cliff. Seven hundred feet below the sea breaking against that same rock. Layers and layers of it with different colors and broken lines in it and all piled and moving down to the ocean where more rock fell away under a sea dark and fast and broken with crashing waves of white ice.

  A storm had come from far off and he had watched it come. The dark banks of clouds growing and swelling and the thin wisps of fog moving before them. Seeming to pull the storm forward as if drawn by the ghosts of horses. The reins snapping in the wind. All around him the temperature falling so quickly he could feel it and his skin puckered and shivering and then the clouds breaking. With neither thunder nor lightning. Just an endless outpouring, a torrent as the dark hearts of those clouds wound themselves together in a blotted sky.

  He had stood there as the rain fell about him cold and bitter and looked down into that sea and felt the same way he felt now. The world around him moving and threatening to pull him under and he would not let it. He had run for a time after the horse died and then he could not and he had fallen and stood and now he walked on legs shot through with pain. The sword strapped again to his back and the city burning before him.

  Those clouds now the twisting smoke. The ghosts of those it had slaughtered.

  He stopped then and closed his eyes. He could feel his heart beating in a way it had not for so long and within him the boundless rage. Wanting to open his eyes and throw himself forward and scream at it to come down on him, to try itself against him. Perhaps he would die and there was no difference in it. He would rather fight it and be killed and his body torn open or burned or consumed than this endless dance.

  But he stood. Arms shaking in the haze. Chest moving like a bellows. And when at last he opened his eyes the rage had solidified and sharpened and he began to walk again. Still the same distance between him and the city, but a di
stance he felt now that he could cross.

  For it must be there, and it would wait for him, to make him the end of this hunt. And he would be. For one of them would die and either way he would be the end.

  He cursed it then in a language he had forgotten, and he walked on. There was no pain and no world and nothing but that shrouded city and the beast that must be straddling its heart, crouched on twisted claws and its eyes burning as it stared out to the plains and waited for him. For what was to be and had always been since they two had begun to move about one another. Hunter and prey indistinguishable. Only in their meeting their true roles shown for what they were.

  Until then each something else to the other, until flame and steel and fate lay bare that which already existed in that hidden realm where only time moved and ages passed in all directions and history and future the same. In that place all knowledge. But they here could only find it in one direction and moved as slaves to find out what end awaited them.

  V

  They found him where the old road came back across the plains and ran its way through his path. Here it was thicker and paved with old stones and the mud of years between them and he was kneeling on one of those stones as if beseeching some god he did not name and holding his sword now in hand and looking at the city.

  Juoth dismounted and went to him. It was late afternoon now and they had ridden the whole day. He knelt beside him and Brack at first said nothing and would not look away and only at last did he turn.

  “It's too far,” he said.

  “I know,”Juoth said. He did not look at the city but felt that it could burn forever and it would never go out. The smoke still billowing upward.

  He'd thought the whole time that they would come across people who had fled. Mothers and children and merchants and farmers. Archers and soldiers and perhaps knights who had stood to fight and then seen the thing wheeling in the sky and lost their nerve and turned and fled. For against some things a man could stand and against others he would do nothing but save the one life he had. A dragon was eternally one of those others.

  At least it was for most men.

  Brack tried to stand and could not and Juoth held the water up for him and helped him drink. He needed more than they had, and food as well, but mostly he needed rest. But he drank and it was something and then he could stand. The boy got down off the horse and took the body of his sister down after him. Juoth looked at him closely and he looked all right. He laid the blankets out and began to gather wood for the fire. In the plains the sun a long time going down but they would camp where they must.

  Looking back he could see the line where they'd come down. Only now a distance of any size, any consequence. Halving the distance between the mountains and the city, as the farmer had said. All around them the dry grass and now before them the stones of the old road and if he laid down he could look along it and it went straight all the way to the gates of the city.

  Or where there had been gates. What stood there now he could not imagine to be more than ash.

  It took some time to get the fire going and when he did at last it was dusk everywhere and the smoke had made it come early. Sinking everything into an unnatural dark. He had once before seen a city burn like this and it had not been from a dragon but the smoke was the same. The way it was everywhere. Men had left that countryside because of it and never returned.

  The campfire guttering in the splintered wood. They had with them more of the dried meat and he took it out and handed it to each and they all ate. The boy sitting with the girl's wrapped body at his side as if she were a bedroll. When he handed the boy his food their fingers met and the boy's were very cold. Colder than they should have been even at night and without a fire.

  “There's a ripping,” the boy said.

  He looked at him and then looked away and cursed and looked back.

  “In the world. And air full of eyes. Have you seen the eyes?”

  He did not answer and wouldn't. Putting his hand on the knife at his side and looking at the licking flames. Across the fire Brack slept already and he could see his chest rising and falling and his lips moving. Not an easy sleep. His grandfather had slept the same way and Juoth knew what it looked like and that he would not remember his dreams when he woke.

  “Have you seen the eyes?” the boy said again. Almost pleading now. Leaning forward with the rest of the meat uneaten in his hand and reaching for him. Fingers open and nodding his head as if to bring about the response he sought by mere suggestion. “The air is full of them.”

  “Go to sleep,” Juoth said.

  The boy took this as affirmation and nodded and smiled and it was a horrible thing. His eyes were vacant and his smile didn't reach them and it was as if the boy didn't exist behind them. He dropped his dried meat and it fell in the dirt and he did not pick it up.

  Juoth laid down himself and the boy watched him as if learning and then laid also on the ground. No blanket or pillow. His arms straight at his sides, next to the body of his dead sister. Both in this same pose and their heads fallen at an unnatural angle toward the ground. Juoth closed his eyes. Held them for a breath and then opened them. The boy was still looking at him in the night and smiling that fixed and broad smile that did not reach the rest of his face but only stretched the skin.

  Then, while he watched, the boy slowly raised both of his own hands. Raising them straight-armed at first and only at last bending the elbows. Moving slowly and not making a sound and all the while looking not at what he did but at Juoth.

  “Have you seen the eyes?” the boy said. “The air is full of them.”

  And then he reached and plunged his fingers into each socket, two of them together and straight like they were made of steel. Not making a sound the whole time, not to scream or cry out. The wide smile never faltering. He pushed his fingers into the insides of the sockets and there was a wet ripping, sucking sound and blood all in the air and down his hands and face and then he clenched his thumbs and ripped his eyes off at the stalks.

  Juoth yelled and tried to rise and fell and then got up. The boy had one eye in each fist and he'd crushed them and his face was a horror of blood and it was pouring into the dirt. He was still smiling and his face as white as pooled candlewax and he was opening and closing his fists. The stalks of his eyes hanging down his cheeks. He was saying something but it wasn't a word.

  Juoth grabbed the boy and rolled him over and knew there was nothing to do. The blood already slowing as it only did when there was very little left. He could hear Brack getting up across the fire and the sound of the sword coming out of its sheath and the world buckled beneath his legs. He fell to one knee and caught himself and there was the boy's blood now on his hands and pants and he looked at Brack across the small fire and then back.

  The movement of rolling the boy had pulled the blanket from the body of his sister. Her with that thin hair and indistinguishable age, the dead body they'd carried through river and mountain and plain to get to a city now full only of other bodies. Perhaps not even those remaining in the pyre it had become. Bringing the dead to the dead.

  He reached with his gloved hand to put the blanket back over her head. He did not know why and it wasn't something done because there was a reason. Except perhaps that the gasping boy at his feet with the ravaged face and his own eyes crushed in his hands was little more than a corpse, and this girl with her thin and blooddrained face was the same. And maybe, maybe he could bear it if it was only one, but he could not see two at the same time and so he reached to cover her again as instinct and self preservation.

  And as he did so, the dead girl opened her eyes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I

  She slept that night in a tree. Lying in the darkness and a web of branches with the stars bright above her and moving in the air in flittering little jaunts the fireflies with bats swooping among them. She had not been able to hide the horse but had tied it to a tree a half a mile distant and could do nothing but hope that the wo
lves did not find it and if they did she would walk.

  She would know if the wolves found it without having to go back. It would not be the first time she had heard a horse scream in the night and known what it meant. Once along the Caariligan where the river poured down through the stone fields the wolves had gotten to the edge of the camp and taken one down and she'd thought for the first moments of sheer terror as she jolted awake that it was a person screaming in the camp.

  By the time they'd run the wolves off the horse had been dead and the blood running down in rivulets along the rock toward the river.

  She took a rope from the saddlebag and tied herself to the tree. The place she chose was very high and the bows wide and wound together and she did not think she would fall but she tied herself all the same. Lashing it about her waist and knotting it and then wrapping it around both branches—should one break—and tying it again. It may not prevent the fall but she thought it would hold at least enough to save her if she did.

  The forest was very quiet and she lay looking back toward the city.

  The flight from those walls had turned out to be nothing at all. The whole way her heart hammering in her chest. Pulling back on the horse lest it run and riding calmly from the gate as if she were no more than some merchant's wife or a merchant herself. Her wares sold and the money in the saddlebag and heading down the road through the Trappers' Gate. She did not turn her head in case the guards were looking and she would never know if she'd slipped out while they'd changed shifts or if they'd watched her and not known it was her or if something else entirely, some other good fortune she could never have planned, covered her escape.

  When she reached the trees she had held her pace for five minutes and then bent and put her feet into the horse. Riding hard all evening up along the river plain and into the fields and vineyards heavy with grapes and when she hit the true forest beyond, the Huralon, she'd left the road as she'd been told and slowed the horse and picked her way through the woods itself.