Dark and Stormy Knights

by P. N. Elord

“Um . . .”

  “Put your weight on it, bend it, and slip the loop over the top into the groove.”

  She blinked, as if she’d never heard of such a thing—and perhaps she hadn’t!—and started to try to bend the thing. It wasn’t easy; Dragonkiller had been made for a man’s strength. She threw herself into it, though, pushing harder and harder until the form finally began to bend.

  She strung the bow.

  Panting, she looked at it and smiled. A pure, delighted smile of victory, one I remembered smiling myself, upon a time, as the bow bent beneath my hands for the first time. She looked up at me.

  I smiled back. It was not voluntary; there was something so purely triumphant in her that it dragged approval out of me, all unwilling.

  I transformed it to my usual scowl as swiftly as I could. “Give it here,” I said, and snatched it out of her hands. “Don’t think that bending the damn thing makes you a master of the bow.”

  “I don’t,” she said meekly enough. “I want to learn. I always thought bows were cool.”

  She wouldn’t think they were when her fingertips were shredded and bleeding, when her inner forearm was raw from the snap of the string. But I approved of her mind-set.

  “This bow,” I said, “is made of dragonbone, and—”

  “Whose bone?” she interrupted me.

  “What?”

  “Which dragon’s?”

  I thought for a moment. “Aedothrax,” I said. Godric had killed him seventy years before I had been chosen as his apprentice; the bow had seen good service by a dozen Dragonslayers before and since and had come back to me. “Dragonbone is excellent for these kinds of weapons. Very springy, but resistant. It never breaks.”

  “Dragons never break bones?”

  “Not under normal circumstances. I told you, they are tough bastards.”

  Ellie nodded, taking in the information with her usual concentration. I pulled the bow back to its full extension, a use of strength I hadn’t attempted in years. I only just managed, but I refused to allow the strain to show. I loosened it just as slowly, then handed it back to Ellie and took out a quiver from the other half of the wooden case. In it were a dozen handmade arrows, all of the same dragonbone, tipped in sharp iron with viciously pointed heads. The fletching was a vivid red, as hot as it had been the day I’d stripped and dyed the feathers. It hadn’t faded at all.

  Unlike me. But then, I hadn’t been shut up in a box for a hundred years. It only felt that way.

  Ellie reached for it. I pulled it back out of reach. “Not yet. First, you learn to string and unstring the bow. Then we go on to target practice.”

  “But I want to learn to shoot!”

  “Of course you do,” I said, and rolled my eyes. “And I’m certain you know nothing at all about it. Your generation is taught nothing that’s of any practical use at all, are you?”

  “Hey, I’m really good with computers!”

  “I rest my case.” I nodded at a heavy padded target in the corner. “Fine. I’ll let you shoot—carefully. Carry that, too. We’re going to practice.”

  Ellie’s face screwed up in frustration, but she managed to balance target and bow without much difficulty. I carried the quiver, a folding chair, and the water bottle. Comfort and survival. Let the apprentice do the heavy lifting.

  In the car, as we drove out to our usual desert practice area, I found myself saying, “How do your parents feel about your new calling?” Small talk? Whatever demonic spirit had just possessed me to make small talk? I stared straight forward through the dusty windshield, frowning, appalled at myself.

  Ellie, though, responded instantly like a puppy to a pat. “Mom’s very devout, so, you know. Just the fact that the Pope actually called the house . . . I mean, even Dad was impressed by that. And the money, of course. Everybody’s impressed by money.” She sounded a little bitter and ironic about that. I approved. “Mom’s worried about me, though.”

  “You’ve not told her!”

  “Oh, no—I mean . . . no. I said I was doing some training. Like Special Forces stuff. Army of God, all that stuff. She won’t tell anybody.” Ellie fell silent, nervously tapping fingers on the steering wheel. “Hey, Lisel?” When I didn’t answer, she swallowed and continued. “Do I get to have, you know, friends? Boyfriends? A life?”

  “Can I stop you?” I turned my face away, staring out at the passing desert. The flickering landscape connected to something else, and I changed the subject. “Are you using the Dragon’s Eye as I told you?”

  “I check it every day,” Ellie said. “For about an hour. He doesn’t do much, does he?”

  “He’s old,” I said. “And tired.”

  “But I thought he was clever and dangerous!”

  “Oh, he’s those things as well. Dragons can lie dormant, consumed by their own affairs, for a hundred years or more, and then suddenly take a notion to destroy half of Chicago. Never assume that lazy equals weak.”

  “Did you ever make that mistake?” she asked. Which was a very good question, and one I did not want to answer.

  “Once,” I finally said.

  “What happened?”

  “London,” I said shortly. “In 1666.” She gazed back at me with perfect, milk-fed blankness, a placid cow of the new age rich with information and remarkably poor in actual knowledge. “The Great Fire of London.”

  Then she surprised me with a very small smile. “I thought it started from that guy’s bakery. On Pudding Lane.”

  “And I thought children your age knew only what appeared on your Twitter page about history.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t on Twitter.” She lifted one shoulder in a charming, self-deprecating shrug. “I started reading up on disasters. I figured some of them must have been caused by dragons, right? I wanted to know what I was up against.”

  I pulled in a deep breath. The child had actually done something intelligent. “The decision to put the blame on poor Master Farriner was made at the highest levels of the court, but actually, the blame rested on me. I’d wounded the dragon, and it had fled to nurse its wounds. I didn’t chase. I thought—I thought she had learned her lesson, and would stay well away from humans, at least for a few hundred years.” I felt myself drifting on memory, rich and bright. “She was beautiful, Heliothrax. So beautiful. Her scales were the color of twilight, and her eyes blazed like flame. They are beautiful, you know. It’s a shame they are so savage.”

  “So you tracked her down and killed her.” Ellie’s voice had gone soft and quiet, and her face was turned away from me, wind whipping her hair across to hide her expression.

  “Yes,” I said. It was the one thing I had ever done that still haunted me. She had been wounded and afraid, and alone of all the dragons I had ever killed, she had transformed herself at the last into a human. A human child, crippled and trembling and weeping. “So many innocent people died in London, even though they didn’t keep good counts. There was so much destruction. I had no choice. I had to put her down.”

  The car arrived at the turnout and bumped off from tarmac to soft, hissing sand. The same track we’d taken dozens of times by now; there was a definite road being formed by the grooves of Ellie’s tires. She was silent until we arrived at the training spot and then shut off the engine and listened to the quiet tick of the metal cooling before she said, “How did you know it was her? Heliothrax, I mean?”

  “She was the closest.”

  “What if she didn’t do it?”

  I sighed. “Does it really matter which of them did it? They were all deadly, all dangerous, all bent on killing us. A response had to be made. I made it.”

  That shape-changed dragon, looking up at me with a child’s tear-filled, burning eyes. Trying to speak but not knowing how, because that was knowledge that Heliothrax had never bothered to acquire.

  “I made it,” I repeated, and got out of the car to walk stiffly in circles, loosening up my ancient bones and muscles. Ellie opened the trunk, and I began pulling out our train
ing supplies—two folding chairs now, since I had decided she had advanced sufficiently that there was no need to keep her in discomfort when resting. Ample water. A small bag of food, enough to last two days, since I always plan for emergencies. I left the emergency shelter equipment in the car and removed the weapons and training bag.

  We began the day as we had all other days—katas to loosen and center, sword practice (at which Ellie was becoming—much to my surprise—acceptable), knives. Then I opened the case that held Dragonkiller, unstrung, and handed the weapon to her to bend and string. I walked out with the target and placed it a child’s training distance away.

  “We’ll start slowly,” I said, adjusting the target slightly to be sure it was just so. “Before you touch the arrows, I want you to—”

  Something hissed past me, over my shoulder, and buried itself in the dead center of the concentric rings. I dodged aside, breathing hard, and stared at the quivering arrow, the vivid fletching.

  I looked back to see Ellie standing, tall and straight and beautiful, bracer on her forearm, plastron strapped to her chest, leather glove on her hand, fitting another arrow to the bowstring.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for teaching me so well. I admit, there’s a certain thrill to it, isn’t there?”

  She no longer sounded like Ellie Cameron, shallow teen struggling to swim in shark-infested waters.

  She sounded like the shark.

  Ellie sighted, stretched the string, and released with perfect form, classical as Diana hunting a doe.

  The arrow drove into the target within a breath of the first. Ellie methodically drew another from the quiver.

  “You’re probably wondering right now what’s happening,” she said. She set the arrow on the string but didn’t draw. Her blue eyes were wide and calm and fixed on me. “That’s the feeling of every hunted beast, Lisel. The anger, the hurt, the anguish, the confusion. Even a rabbit will bite, at the end. Did you know that? Even the mildest of animals will fight to live.”

  I had an awful feeling growing in my chest, like a malignancy, like the illness I had avoided all these long centuries. She was right: I was hurt, I was angry, I was afraid and confused. And all I could force from my lips was, “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am, Lisel,” Ellie said, and smiled. Her eyes changed slowly, blue fading and somehow brightening into the lick of pale flame. “You know.”

  Karathrax.

  I didn’t hesitate. I threw myself sideways, behind the archery target, and in the same instant, Karathrax pulled and fired, a snap shot that should have gone wide but would have instead punched through my body if I hadn’t managed to get the target in the way. I rolled, pulling the target with me, and got into a crouch. The target was a heavy, awkward shield, but it was better than nothing, and I used it as I ran for the nearest genuine shelter, a heavy cactus that leaned near a dune.

  Ellie—no, Karathrax (I had to stop thinking of him as a human now) was calmly setting another arrow to the bowstring. In no particular hurry, nor did he need to be. He had trapped me, dissembled perfectly.

  “When?” I shouted to him. “When did you kill the child?”

  “Before she ever reached you,” he said. “I kept her alive for quite some time, to learn from her so I could impersonate her appropriately. She’s buried quite near here, actually. I didn’t eat her.”

  “Kind of you.”

  “I’ve been waiting, Lisel. Waiting for the opportunity to face you and talk. Talk as Heliothrax would have, if you’d not slaughtered her without mercy.”

  I needed to get to the weapons. There was little chance for me, but what there was lay in the weapons cache, the water, the emergency shelter. Karathrax was suited to the desert, and he could shed this human form and assume his dragon form at any time. Once he did, he would be . . . invincible.

  I had killed my dragons with cleverness, from concealment, with poisons and treachery. I couldn’t take him in a fight, and we both knew it.

  But even a rabbit bites.

  I needed a distraction, something that would make Karathrax believe that he was on the verge of realizing all his hundreds-of-years-old dreams of destroying me.

  Focus, I told myself. You have weapons you haven’t told him about. That was true; there were levels of training, of ability, that Karathrax had never seen, because he’d believed he’d seen all he needed.

  He’d not seen this.

  It was the most treacherous and difficult skill I had ever learned, and the most chancy; it required levels of commitment and fearlessness that most never mastered. I had scars from it, many scars, and some of them had been all but fatal.

  I closed my eyes a moment, centered myself, and then stood up from concealment. I didn’t speak. I needed all my focus on Karathrax.

  He didn’t wait. Ellen Cameron’s slender, tanned fingers tensed, the bow stretched, and I read the tremor in her arm as the muscle began to release.

  Timing was everything to this. I’d gained barely enough distance to make it possible, but my concentration, my reaction time, had to be perfect.

  No thought.

  Nothing but the action.

  I felt a sharp sting as my hand closed, just a bit early, on the arrow, and the barbed, sharpened head sliced furrows in my palm and fingers. That was all right. The important thing was to catch and stop the arrow, slow it so that if it did penetrate my skin, it would do so shallowly. The blood on my hand would only help sell the illusion, if I had gotten it right.

  I had, barely. The arrow was lodged in my chest, sunk in to the depth of perhaps half an inch, but the illusion of it was solid. I screamed, dropped onto my side, curled around the arrow. Blood from my cut hand smeared a gory mess across the front of my tracksuit.

  Karathrax waited a long, long moment, then took the bait, walking through the sand and nocking another arrow along the way. He wanted to kill me with the bones of his kin, not something human, like a sword. I understood that.

  I played dead, and slowly, with just the tiniest play of muscles, worked the arrow free of my skin. Blood wicked through the cloth covering my chest, vivid evidence of my wound. Even better.

  I felt cool relief from the hot sun as Karathrax stood over me, nearly as tall as the towering cactus with its defiant spikes. Ellie Cameron’s pink shoe rolled me over onto my back, and I made sure my eyes were half-open, fixed, unmoving.

  One more thing I could do to sell the illusion.

  I let my bladder loose, the way the dead do. The sharp smell of urine filled the clear desert air.

  Overhead, a vulture riding the thermals shifted its course.

  Karathrax’s eyes were eerie in Ellie’s face, merciless and cold. This was the moment of true danger; if he had a doubt, even an instant’s doubt, he would simply shoot me again. In fact, if he’d let me train him any further, I’d have trained him to do just that. Never assume something is dead, I would have told him. Never approach without administering a coup de grâce, preferably in the head.

  As old as he was, he might have known that, but as a dragon, he likely had never had to fear much. Only humans. And even then, only a few. His instincts were wired differently. Dragons didn’t care whether their prey was alive or dead; the death was inevitable once they began to eat.

  I heard the creak as the bowstring relaxed. Karathrax laughed softly.

  “Dead in your own filth,” he said in Ellie’s soft, girlish voice. “What an ignoble end you all find, you humans. I think I’ll take your skin for a trophy. I’ll use it in my cave, as a rug.”

  My eyes were burning from dryness, and the urge to blink was almost unbearable, but I abstained until he’d shipped the bow over his shoulder and glanced away to reach for the knife holstered in leather at Ellie’s belt. Ellie. A child, waylaid and destroyed, purely to provide Karathrax with the appropriate opportunity.

  When he shifted to draw the knife, I focused my concentration again to a pinpoint. There could be no fumbling, no wasted motion, no hesitation—I visualized t
he motion, and then in the next shadow-second I copied it with muscles and will, turning the arrow, dragging it through cloth, and slicing its razor edge deep through the Achilles’ tendons on both legs, just above the heels, left vulnerable by cute pink athletic shoes with their appliquéd hearts.

  Blood burst out in a flood, and Karathrax/Ellie let out a yelp of pure surprise and shock, wavered, and then I saw the pure horror on the face as the fine, precise engineering of the legs ceased to work. His body toppled, arms flailing, and he lost the knife as he hit the ground face just inches away. I flung myself across him, found the knife, and closed my bloody fingers around the gritty handle.

  “No!” Karathrax roared, and I heard all the things he had described in that voice—anger, hurt, anguish, and confusion. Even a rabbit will bite.

  I was no rabbit.

  Karathrax twisted beneath me, and I knew I had seconds to finish this. He could shed this vulnerable human form, fortify himself inside a dragon shell, and though he would carry his crippling injury with him, he would be fiendishly difficult to hurt or kill again.

  Our eyes met. I put the knife to the fragile human throat, the girl’s throat, Ellie’s throat, and I remembered the child, the crying child that Heliothrax had become at the end.

  “She was my mate,” he said. “You slaughtered the one you call Heliothrax for nothing. For nothing. Our females didn’t fight. Didn’t kill. Didn’t burn. None of them did. But you didn’t bother to tell one dragon from another, did you? We were all the same threat.”

  “You killed our women. Our children.”

  “You were prey,” he said. “We didn’t understand you could think, not for a long time. We didn’t understand you communicated. We do it differently, in ways you would never perceive, in color and light. These crude sounds you make, they were beyond our senses. Heliothrax tried, in the end. I watched you kill her.”

  “And did nothing.”

  His golden eyes blazed. “I was half a world away! I saw through her eyes.” Odd. It had never occurred to me that the Dragon’s Eye, the orb I looked through, was truly just that—the eye of a dragon. But perhaps it was true.