Dragonslayer

by Matthew Lang

  “Adam, this is no time to be a hero!” Duin snapped.

  Grabbing his lover’s face in both hands, Adam kissed Duin fiercely. “I know. I’m just going to distract her long enough for you to get everyone clear of here. Tell them it’s an order or something.”

  “From who?”

  Adam yanked off the spider-eye pendant Esmeralda had given him and pressed it into Duin’s palm. “Say it’s from the princess,” Adam said as he started to climb the stairs, pushing against the crowd of people pouring down the stairs and walkways in an attempt to get to the ground.

  THE SOUND of splintering wood grew louder as Adam ran higher into the tree, passing the lower areas where simple sleeping quarters had been hollowed out for families and then past the dormitory-style rooms that housed single haerunwoln. A fletcher and weaver were next, all with the arboreal gardens that provided much of Boolikstaad’s food. As he pushed past the priests’ dwellings to emerge at the council chambers, he was breathing heavily, although thankfully the press of jostling bodies had abated somewhat.

  From the empty amphitheater, he could see the rest of the tree city’s canopy, the leafy roof now rent and torn, allowing the red light to stream in. Charred embers fell around him, singeing his face as he stared out at the destruction. The great tree that had fallen crashed into the upper branches of the tree next over from the council tree, and Adam saw the doorways and tilted windows that had once housed Elder Jirsca and her extended family. Her carefully tended gardens had been smashed or uprooted in the fall, and the lantern berry bushes had withered in the fire that had consumed much of the dead branches, causing the fresh green wood to smoke. In the midst of it all, wreathed in smoke, was a beast. A great golden beast.

  She was as big as the proverbial barn—although she put Adam more in the mind of the Union building at university, with its multiple stories, purple walls, and downstairs food court. Admittedly, the dragon was more scales, fangs, and bat-like wings, but that was the closest Adam could think of in terms of size. Khalivibra’s neck was short, proportionately closer to that of a lizard than the long serpentine neck he had always pictured from The Hobbit. Her head was wide and triangular, making Adam think of a large-scaled toad or a squat-jawed crocodile, and her body was compact and muscled like that of a pit bull. Her golden scales glittered in the reds and yellows of twitterlight and flame. The tail was shorter than he had imagined, perhaps only half as long as her body. With four clawed arms she gripped the tree, muscles flexing beneath her skin as she reached out to claw at a branch that blocked her way with talons longer than Adam’s boot knife. Her wings were folded tightly against her back as she climbed higher in a sinuous wriggle that reminded Adam of a riding lizard stalking a giant tree spider.

  Looking ahead of the dragon, Adam could see a small figure climbing desperately up through the branches, striving to reach the next tree among the twisted and shattered walkways, the movement of the dragon causing the treetops to shake beneath the haerunwoln’s feet. He or she was wearing a delicately embroidered silk wrap, although between the fire and sunlight, their features were far more thylacine than human, with a silver-flecked chestnut muzzle and clawed hands very much evident. As the figure darted past a still intact stone glow, Adam recognized the embroidery as that adorning the robes of Elder Jirsca.

  Unslinging the shortbow from his back, Adam pulled an arrow from his quiver. He sighted along it, took a deep breath, then released the arrow on his exhale. It flew straight and true, arcing toward the dragon before clattering off its scales and falling into the foliage. Khalivibra appeared not to notice, and climbed on after the fleeing elder, her progress slowed by her attempts to remove the larger branches that blocked her path. As Adam drew another arrow, it seemed that Elder Jirsca would escape, but then the dragon reared up, drew back her head, and belched forth a stream of fire that caught the entire crown of the tree, the delicate weeping needles disintegrating into ash as they burned through, going from green to a gray-black in moments. Elder Jirsca’s screams died away as her burning body fell from the branches, and the tree slumped farther down, gouging into the bark of the other.

  As her tree slid several meters before being caught by a heavy bough, Khalivibra spread her wings, the shock wave from their heavy beating cracking through the air as she strove to keep her balance. Forcing himself to act, Adam drew another arrow and sent it flying. The projectile punctured the dragon’s wing, and if the indignant roar she let out was anything to go by, found a chink in her scales.

  The giant triangular head swung toward him, her yellow eyes glaring balefully up at him. Almost in slow motion, Adam saw her brow ridges narrow as she focused in on him, and her muscles bunched as she clawed her way back into the canopy. As her head wove back and forth, a long forked tongue flickered out toward him, and her mouth opened, revealing fangs as long as his forearms.

  His brain swimming in terror, Adam reached back for another arrow, only to have it jerk from his hand as the arrowhead hit the netting at the top of the quiver. Cursing at this clumsiness, Adam threw himself to the ground just in time as Khalivibra’s return volley of flame licked at the living wood around him and withered the carrot tops and the fragrant bushes that Adam had always thought of as wild peppermint, despite its slightly waxy leaves.

  Crawling along behind the first row of benches, Adam grabbed for support as the tree shook again, and the fencing and planter boxes burst inward as Khalivibra scrambled into the courtyard. With a burst of speed, Adam rolled to his feet, then darted behind her. Taking hold of Wyrmbane with both hands, he sliced at her tail. The blade moved faster than any he had ever used and sank through her scales like butter, shearing through the bone and striking down to the wooden floor itself. Grunting, he yanked it from the ground and ran on, only to be swept off his feet as the dragon turned around, the tail stump drenching him in blood and slamming him into the far wall. The blood was hot, thick, and stung his eyes, and it left a coppery taste in his mouth as he spat it out. Wiping his face with his left hand, he saw the dragon rounding on him, her claws leaving sap-oozing gashes in the floor.

  Adam scrambled to his feet and all but fell through the door leading to the guest quarters. Turning, he ran up the stairs just as Khalivibra burst through the door—or at least, her head did, splintering the deadwood of the door, one large hand scrabbling in to find him. Adam stood, transfixed, against the mezzanine wall as the dragon came toward him. Stale breath wafted out, bringing with it the smell of ash and overcooked meat. One more strike and the dragon would have him, batting him down like a child’s toy and slicing him in two or three, depending on how many of the razor-sharp claws connected. One more wriggle and she’d be close enough.

  Khalivibra lunged, and there was a loud thunk that shook the entire tree. The great claws stopped a few meters shy of him, and he looked up, shrinking away as a roar echoed around the hallway. As the dragon tried to push closer toward him, straining at the confines of the doorway, he understood and ran up the rest of the stairs and into the suite that had been his room. All he had to do was run past his bed and wardrobe and out onto his balcony and jump onto her back, which should be there if she was still trying to get through the door to him. Pushing through the flimsy balcony doors, he skidded to a halt as the great head rose to greet him, its yellow eyes sly.

  “Only if I was still trying to get to you through the door.” The words blasted into his mind.

  Adam backed away slowly and brought Wyrmbane up defensively before him.

  “Stay out of my head,” he snapped.

  “But it’s such an interesting head,” Khalivibra said. “So many thoughts swimming below for me to fish out and devour.”

  “Then come and get it,” Adam suggested. “I mean, why not? I’m sure you know what this is. Can you feel it? I can feel it. Apparently some old prince created it to kill your lover.”

  “That is not the Sword of Fernando.”

  “No, but it cut through your tail like butter. What do you think it’ll
do to your precious wings?”

  The dragon’s eyes narrowed, and she pushed away from the tree, great wings unfurling and launching her into the air, the downdrafts buffeting Adam back as the tree swayed from the force of her launch. Grasping the doorframe for support, Adam stumbled back, cursing at the dragon’s flight. How had Fernando done it all those years ago? Had he stood at the edge of his parapet and waited, trusting his reflexes to get one lucky thrust before the dragon’s attack struck home and killed him? How could a blade, one blade, be of any use against a creature with such bloody great wings? The thought flashed across his brain in moments, and then his eyes widened, and he ducked back into the room just in time as the dragon’s bulk slammed into the council tree, rocking it down to its roots. The tree groaned around him as the furniture slid against the far wall and then rushed back, nearly crushing him. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the curved wall of the rooms, he would have been flattened. Then the furniture slid away and a second impact rocked the tree, sending him crashing into the door of the wardrobe, still full, he remembered irrationally, of the fine clothes he and Duin had been gifted with for the duration of their stay in Boolikstaad.

  As the tree swung back, the wardrobe shifted and slid across the room, bearing Adam in front of it as it came to rest just before the still-closed door leading out into the main corridor. He could make it to the door and out into the main amphitheater. He might even make it to the stairs.

  “Ah, but will you make it to the ground in time?” Khalivibra’s voice rang in his mind. “Will I pick you out of the foliage, Sir Adam? Or will you simply die when the trees come down?”

  The next impact threw Adam into the wall, where he hit his head and slumped to the floor. Luckily for him, he never felt the impact as the greatest tree of Boolikstaad smashed into its neighbor, both heading toward the ground.

  Chapter 22

  WHEN ADAM came to, he was in the dark, and the air was stale and heavy. He was lying on something soft—well, mostly soft—and there wasn’t so much as a pinprick of light to see by. Automatically his hands went to his pockets for his Zippo lighter, only to remember he hadn’t found a place in his armor to hide it yet, and it had been stashed in his gym bag and stowed among the packs on Zoul’s back. His body also took the opportunity to remember the beating he had given it, and all of the aches and pains from his fight came flooding in, along with the taste of drying blood that still flecked his lips. Hopefully not his blood. Running his tongue around his lips, he felt a couple of splits, as well as a large swelling where his face had been mashed against something hard, so some of it was probably his blood.

  Resisting the urge to panic, Adam felt around a bit more, finding the hilt of his sword, smooth silk fabric and the slightly scaly texture of lizard leather. Reaching above, he felt some round wooden pegs, and suddenly he knew exactly where he was. Bringing his knees to his chest, he pressed his feet to the door of the wardrobe and pushed. The door was heavier than he remembered, but when fine particles of ash and dirt spilled onto his body, he stopped pushing, coughing as he pawed at his eyes. Taking a deep breath caused another coughing fit, and he fished around until he could pull a corner of a shirt over his face. Bracing his legs against the door again, he paused.

  If he was buried far underground, letting the dirt in would mean letting the air out, and quite possibly suffocating himself. On the other hand, the door was moving. Under normal circumstances, with rest, a proper inclined gym seat, and no injuries, Adam could easily leg-press over two hundred kilos, and even if these weren’t normal circumstances, he was hoping two hundred odd kilos of debris wouldn’t be enough to suffocate him. If nothing else, he had no idea if anyone would find him before he ran out of air. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath through the silk and pushed with as much strength as he could muster, his legs protesting every inch of the way. Dust and ash fountained into the small space, and when Adam finally kicked the door open, he rose spluttering in a cloud of soot, forcing himself to stay standing as he coughed into the shirt still wrapped around his nose and mouth.

  Staring at his surroundings, he found himself back in his Boolikstaad room, standing on the wall near the entry door. The bed lay off to one side, twisted in a broken heap, with the remnants of the mattress falling in blackened piles through the slats of the bed. It had been a simple bed, even compared to cheap Ikea or two-dollar-shop furniture standards, but Adam had found out that by Boolikstaad standards, having a frame to put a mattress on was luxurious. The majority of Boolikstaad’s inhabitants had slept on mattresses of piled rushes and a bracken-like fern held together with a thick cover of woven silk. The blankets were much the same as his had been, simple silk stuffed with the fluffy seed filling of a forest tree, and his had burned to ash along with the mattress, the remnants falling over the baked end of the dragon’s tail, which must have fallen in when the tree fell.

  The main door was blocked by the wardrobe beneath him, and walking across to peek into what had officially been Duin’s room showed that the small window there was pressed into the ground. The large doors to the balcony that he had expected Khalivibra to come bursting through however long ago were up where the ceiling would have been, and largely covered by blackened branches and leaves. Thankfully, Adam was a tall man, and the room, while plush by Boolikstaad standards, had been no larger than a small hotel room. Standing on the closed wardrobe doors, he threw his sword out the doorway and onto the now horizontal outside wall, trusting Wyrmbane wouldn’t let anyone else pick it up. Then he jumped, caught the edge of the door frame, and pulled himself out onto the charred wood that had once been his bedroom wall.

  The sight that greeted him was one of devastation. The proud trees of Boolikstaad were no more, most of them having been reduced to still-smoking embers or smashed into raw kindling. Here and there the corner of a planter box protruded, or the carved stone of the green glows they used for light could be seen poking out of the devastation, the dim light lost in the red that poured in through the hole in the canopy. The soft chanting that he was so familiar with rang in the air still, but it was a thin lone voice off to one side, rather than the constant chorus he had become used to.

  Turning his head, Adam saw two haerunwoln sitting in the shade of a small pine, swathed in their robes of undyed silk and surrounded by vigilant guards. One protector and one spare, apparently, but somehow the two men seemed a frail shield from the ravages of the dragon. Across the former city site, men and women worked to salvage belongings and tools that had been left behind in the exodus, or dug to recover the bodies of loved ones. A pall of dust and smoke hung in the air, but worse still was the grim silence with which work progressed, all the time with lookouts keeping an eye on the skies. A shout went up when he was spotted, and by the time he carefully navigated his way back down to the ground, Duin was there, looking as furred and pointy eared as he had on their journey north, his short muzzle stained with soot.

  “You really need to stop doing this, Adam,” Duin said, as he pulled away from their hug. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam said, gratefully accepting Duin’s shoulder in support. “I guess so. Nothing feels broken, but I ache everywhere.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I got knocked into the wardrobe when she was demolishing the tree,” Adam said. “I must have passed out.”

  “That probably saved you,” Duin said. “She can’t read your mind if it’s not thinking. That and the fact that you’d have hit a lot of other trees before hitting the ground. When the others fell, there was nothing to break their fall… almost no one survived the drop.”

  “But you got everyone out of the lower levels?”

  “Yes,” Duin said. “Most of them anyway. Some panicked, but that couldn’t be helped.”

  “Where will you go?” Adam asked.

  “With you,” Duin said simply. “You gave Joeri quite a shock, you know.”

  “How? Did he think I was going to run away like a cowardly rabbit?”


  “A whattit?” Duin asked. “Wait, never mind. I probably don’t know it anyway. No, he just… when you… before you… you know….”

  “Oh?” Adam’s eyes widened. “Oh. Right,” he said, nuzzling into Duin’s neck. “He can bite me; I don’t give a crap.”

  “I don’t think he wants to bite you,” Duin said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I just fought a dragon,” Adam said, reaching down to pick up his sword, which he attempted to wipe clean on the sleeve of a silk shirt to little effect. “Everything hurts, and I should be dead right now, so no, I’m not all right, but I don’t think I could be any better.”

  Duin sat Adam down on a large flat rock by the steaming hot stream flowing from the hot springs. They were in what once had been the kitchens of Boolikstaad, by the looks of the pots and cauldrons half buried in the dirt of the forest floor. On the far side of the stream, the roots of the tree Adam had always thought of as “the one with the stables” clawed at the air, the inner network of roots a dark, sprawling cave mouth that rose out of the broken ground. Twisted root ends thrust out of soft mounds of soil like teeth in a monstrous wooden maw. Adam was propped up against a mostly intact log, and Duin carefully removed his helmet. “I’m amazed the carapace isn’t more dented,” he said, tugging carefully as Adam’s bloodied hair pulled away from the inside of the leather helm—or in some cases pulled away from his head, stuck to the inner padding.

  “She never actually hit me,” Adam said, wincing as Duin put the helmet down and started on the buckles of his armor. “If she had, I’d be dead.”

  “I guess you got lucky, then, even with the head wound.”

  “I don’t have a head wound,” Adam said. “Most of that is blood from her tail.”