The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  It was a very old forest and thick and in it gnarled trees as old as the city and some behemoths amongst them rising like the towers of the gods. So wide around it would take fifty men with arms linked to circle them, the rough bark like the sheer face of a cliff. No branches to be seen on this lower level and all very straight and rising like spears thrust from the earth. She had stood the horse at the base of one and looked up and it went through the canopy and was gone and she could not see the top.

  There were those who could climb them, with ropes and picks, the way they climbed mountains. She had seen once when she was a girl a man who climbed to a hundred feet and then fell screaming and turning in the air, then a lithe girl so adept she climbed after the man and tripled his height and then went beyond and they lost her in the fog and mist and branches and never saw her come down.

  She'd ridden in that dark and tangled forest as the night grew deep around her. It had been dusk when she left and she only had the light for a short time and even then it was gray. The boulders looking like beasts hulking there in the dark. Every branch or limb a rider on a horse, coming through the forest toward her. And then even that was gone and she rode through a thick valley in the meager moonlight that fell through the branches, everything in shadow. Pausing to listen to what moved out there and trying not to think of what it was and cursing him for not getting her a sword.

  In the end it was that which caused her to stop. It was not the wolves she was afraid of in this forest, but there were worse things than wolves and many things that could kill her, and so she'd come up out of that valley and ridden a half hour more through a sweeping and level area where the trees at last spread out just slightly and she'd found the one to which she tied the horse and then walked to the one she now lay in, looking at that night sky above and far to the east one of those oldest trees rising pale and endless until it was gone.

  The forest moving about her. Insects clicking to each other, the high-pitched calls of the bats. Somewhere far off one of the wolves howling, faint and shrill. Another answering.

  It went in waves like this, sometimes quiet and then sometimes rising in a chorus about her. It was not the noises that worried her, but the silence. For everything was prey to some creatures and when everything fell quiet, what silent and snarling beast stalked along the forest floor, winding between the trees and staring from the shadows, driving all else to hiding?

  She saw nothing, but that did not mean that nothing was there. In each stifling silence perhaps the slow breathing of something that waited and watched. If it saw where she lay lashed to the tree she did not know. Or if it only smelled her in the forest, smelled the warmth of her blood and heard the beat of her heart.

  Each time that silence gave way to the sounds of the night, it was like a blanket lifting. And again she would breathe and check the knots and listen and wait with everything in her for the morning sun on that distant horizon.

  II

  She woke and he was sitting against the foot of another tree, looking up at her and picking at his fingernails with his knife. The sun had risen already and was bright and orange in small patches as it came down through the trees. Chasing away all that was the night and making her wonder for just a moment if everything she knew lurked and lived in that night was real after all, or if she'd imagined everything and passed the night in safety with only her mind creating about her the illusion of death.

  But she knew not to give in to those thoughts, for those who did were those who were dead.

  He looked up when she moved to untie the knots and shook his head and kept picking at his fingernails. “For someone who's wanted by half the kingdom, you're certainly finding a lot of time to sleep.”

  She didn't answer, but pulled the rope through the last of the knots and looped it through her belt and dropped to the ground. Hanging for a moment from the high limb of the tree to shorten the distance and then letting go and falling into moss and underbrush. He didn't move or look at her the whole time and then stood when she fell.

  “Thank you for the horse,” she said.

  “Looks like you lost him.”

  “I didn't lose him.”

  “Then I'm blind in my old age.”

  She nodded her head back the way she'd come. Noting as she did that he did not have a horse either. When she'd known him before he'd walked tirelessly in full plate and she wouldn't have been surprised if he could walk to her in the simple leather and chain armor he wore now, but his comment about his age was only half in jest. The way most things had a heart of truth in them and would never even be said if they didn't.

  “I tied him to a tree. Didn't want to give away where I was.”

  He looked down at himself and then at the tree. “Well done.”

  She scowled. “If they had you I wouldn't have bothered.”

  He held out a hand as she started back for the horse, and she stopped and looked at him. He shook his head. “You've lost him,” he said.

  She looked at him a long moment and felt something in her move and heard again that silence in the night. It had not even screamed. That scared her more than if she'd lain in that tree listening as it was torn to pieces. Because then it at least would have died the way things were supposed to die.

  “I'm sorry,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I knew when I sent you here.”

  “At least they won't follow.”

  “Not without a company.”

  “What have you seen?”

  He looked off into that deep forest and adjusted his belt. The sword long and ancient at his side, the same he'd carried all his life. In what felt to her a previous life. “They're all over the road. Gated the city last night and didn't open it. Word is he's out riding and looking for you himself. But I don't think that's true.”

  “He wouldn't do it.”

  “He may not care.”

  “Not care?”

  “That you're gone.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “How will you stop him?”

  “I don't know.”

  “And that's why he doesn't care.”

  She stepped forward then, putting a hand against his chest, pushing him back against the tree. Feeling in her a surge of anger and violence like she hadn't felt for a long time. The air perhaps, or something else. Speaking through gritted teeth. “You don't think I can do it?”

  He raised both hands at his sides. “I didn't say that.”

  “Then what is it you said?”

  “I'm just saying he might not think you're a threat. If he wants war, he can get it with you or without you. He'll send men after you, but he's not going to ride out himself. He has enough power now. They'll follow him.”

  She stepped back from him. This her oldest and perhaps only friend. For how else had this world changed and shifted as she lay underground? The dead rising from the fields would have felt the same, cast suddenly into some new life and finding everything around them different, the very stones beneath which they'd been buried broken and gone.

  “I can't let him,” she said.

  “Then what will we do?”

  She had been turning it in her head for a long time and she knew one thing she could do and hated it and yet knew nothing else. Every turn just bringing it into a fuller view.

  “If he wants a war, we'll show him he can't win.”

  He grunted. “You and I? Buy some bows and march on the gates, maybe? Never mind that you killed our horse.”

  “No,” she said. “It's what you said before. He'll be slaughtered. I'll just show him it before it happens. We'll go to the Island Kingdoms, to Erihon. To Mannkaran in the mountains. To Callhud and Jaskerat and The Peak.” She swallowed. “To the Whispermen.”

  He did not speak for a long time and when he did she could barely hear him. “You're insane,” he said. “What did they do to you down there?”

  “It's the only way and you know it. If he wants war, he won't listen to words. But he'll listen to force. We'll gather a
ll the armies and march them down into the valley. Blockade the river by Stoneguard. Show them how pointless it is. Show him that he doesn't want war.”

  “You'll bring them down on your own people. It'll be a bloodbath.”

  “I'll bring them down on him. No one has to die.”

  “But they will. You think he'll just throw it away and let you climb back on the throne? You think it will be that easy?”

  “He's a fool. He's not suicidal.”

  He leaned forward and there was something in his eyes born of years and wars and battles and the type of knowledge that only those who survive such things can have. For most die and those who don't simply die the next time and rare is the man who has waded through so much death and come out himself alive and washed in blood and a man like that knows things other men can never know, and it was that which lived in his eyes.

  “There is nothing,” he said, “that is more dangerous than a caged king who does not care if others die.”

  III

  They walked that day through the forest in the lingering light that filtered through the canopy, falling deep into this shadow world in long beams and moving through them dust and insects and birds. The flittering of animals who would in the night be as hidden as they could, buried in trees and burrows and underground. All holding their breath. Giving these two travelers a wide berth but always about now as the world turned.

  There was no path but he found a trail used by deer and others and they took it along for the distance that it went where they already wanted to go. She did not know where they were but did know the general direction in which they traveled. Behind them the castle and far to their right the fields and plains and after that the rising sawtooth of the mountains breaking the world's crust. Beyond even that the towering stone behemoths of the true mountains where black stones rose for miles and dwarfed all below and these monstrous peaks with sheer cliff faces thousands of feet high and glaciers miles upon miles long that no man could cross and snow deeper than the city walls. Snow enough in some places to swallow all that was her kingdom as if it had never existed.

  But so far removed were they here in this forest and the heat of midday, walking on this path of dirt and trampled grass where deer nervously stepped with their tails flicking and their black glass eyes wide. Coming to a river that they crossed on stones, then later a deep canyon where they walked along until a fallen tree bridged it. Him going across first and then nodding and her running those four steps in sheer terror. So few steps but below a fall of a hundred feet and the sounds of the water running.

  They did not talk as they walked and this was how it always had been between them and she felt herself fall years back in her own life. To other trips and campaigns and worlds that they'd traveled. Some in danger and some in luxury. Another life, one she had almost forgotten she'd lived.

  A life that had ended, she realized then, walking through a wide field of moss with a lone tree standing in the middle, a heavy trunk so far around it looked like a guard tower and great swaying branches holding an immense canopy. She had been thrown into that dungeon with her husband as the boy took the throne and she had fought to live even as he had died. Fought bitterly and with everything she had. Finding then the resiliency that she had within her to continue her life at all costs, to hold nothing back and to demand with every breath simply to live. Some streak in her of iron will.

  And yet she had not lived, not as she was. The warrior she had been and the queen she had become, both dead. That life ended. Now walking with a man from that life she felt the difference keenly and knew how dead it was. Buried in the earth under the castle.

  Her body alive, but living now a second life. A life that she did not know what it was and would have to find out for herself. A world she did not know.

  Perhaps she had died before, she thought. Perhaps pieces of her died every time she moved from one point to another and perhaps it was that way for everyone. Life really no more than the whittling and shaping of a body, a soul. And with that whittling all excess lost. Those parts dead and gone and something new revealed beneath that moved until it too was cut and transformed into something else. This pattern for time eternal, until death claimed it.

  IV

  They made camp that night on the edge of the forest. It was cold as the night came on but they did not make a fire because of the light and they looked out from the treeline over a wide plain with roads running in it and far off the lights of a small city. A lantern bobbing in the night as someone worked his way slowly along down toward the river. Fireflies in the tall grass. Once the dark and running form of a wolf, low and silent, sweeping across the world to some end unknown.

  Before them the foothills rising. These heavily forested in a different type of tree. No longer the towering oaks and tangled branches. Instead everything of short cedar and spruce, the paths between them carpeted with red needles. Here and there the white of a birch. The soil too thin in this rising land of rock and stone to support anything larger. A place where in winter the snow clung to every bow in heavy coats but here before the winter the soft scent of the trees on the air and the warm soil and somewhere far off a fire burning.

  He had some dried meat with him and fruit and he took these out and set them on his bag and looked at them and took up some and handed it to her. Both of them sitting next to a long tree recently fallen, the trunk not yet decayed. Maybe a tree grown too close to where the soil thinned out, she thought, trying to break the boundaries of the deep forest and only finding as it grew too tall for support that it had asked for the impossible as the wind swirled and rose.

  She sat rubbing her scabbed wrists where he'd helped her take off the shackles and closed her eyes, thinking of those chains buried in the mud as she'd pushed them down with her boot, then opened her eyes again and took a bite and it was better than she'd imagined. So long she'd been down there and this meager food a feast and all the world changed. What could all be in it she did not know and she did not think anyone did. A meaninglessness in that and also the great and intrinsic heart of the world.

  He ate in silence for a moment and when he spoke in the dark he did not look at her.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She stopped eating and looked at him and still he did not turn. She could see the whites of his eyes in the coming moonlight. “I thought you said I was foolish. Insane.”

  “You thought right.”

  “And now?”

  “I still think it.”

  “You still think it.”

  He looked at her then and his face was calm, relaxed. A man who had seen so much that nothing he saw now struck him as anything that could not be believed or defeated. The world emptied for him of its secrets. Or so he thought.

  “I'll do what you want,” he said. “I don't have to like it.”

  “Tell me what you think.”

  “That we should do?”

  “Yes.”

  He took another bite, chewed. Thought. Turning it in his mind so much that it was on his face. Then he said: “If he wants a war, he's the only one. They always are. Those in charge waging war with others' lives. He'll make them want it, but they don't now. If we remove him, the war ends.” He shrugged. “It's not like other wars, where there's something at stake and no choice. Someone invades and you protect your home. It's just a war for him and what he wants. As long as he's the only one who truly wants it, he's the key.”

  It was treason to say and she looked at him and wondered how many others had said the same about her at times and if all rulers had to live knowing such things were spoken about them. Or if somewhere there was a ruler everyone wanted to live. And what that land was like.

  “Just us,” she said.

  “It wouldn't be easy.”

  “It couldn't be done.”

  “Anything can be done,” he said.

  She looked out into the night. The lantern moving down the road was gone now. Either extinguished or inside the city walls. She listened
for the wolf to see if he would call at the moon but he was silent.

  “It's too much of a risk,” she said. “Too easy to fail.”

  “How?”

  “Any of a thousand ways. A guard sees us and we're captured. We can't get to him. Archers shoot us from the walls. We get in and he's not in the city. The guards kill us in the attack. You know the ways.”

  “Then we plan for it.”

  “But you can't plan for everything. A loose board on a stairway creaks and a guard looks and it's all over before it begins.” She shook her head. “I can't risk that. I can't do something that will fail.”

  “Anything can fail.”

  “You just said anything can be done.”

  He laughed. “It can. Anything can be done and anything can fail.”

  She bit down on the meat and it was good but tough. Tearing it sideways with her teeth. Feeling it stretch and then rip. The salt of it. The sinews. Chewing it there in the dark, her jaw working. Finally swallowing and feeling it still in her jaw.

  “It needs to be more than me,” she said. “More than you. So that if we are killed, it can happen without us. It has to be an army. It's the only way to know we can force him to stand down. To do it alone risks the lives of everyone.”

  “Marching an army on your own city does something else?”

  She looked at him and her eyes were bright and she blinked and looked again. “I have to hope it does,” she said. “I have to hope it does.”

  V

  He left the next day with the parchment in a bag at his side. Walking out to the road and not looking back and turning to the city. She watched him go, standing by that great fallen tree that had overstepped its own world and in doing brought about its own end. Only after it had grown to a great height and looked to all the world as if it could never fall. Now a broken thing sheltering those who ran from death and perhaps to it at the same time.