Dragonslayer

by Matthew Lang

  “They may as well be dead,” Adam murmured as they gathered in the broken shell of what had once been an inn, going by the rusted sign that still bore the faint lettering reading The Crown and the Moon. The inn had been one of many in the area surrounding the castle to be damaged, and the roof and second floor had largely collapsed into the first, leaving a pile of blackened masonry covering the still visible stone that had been the bar, although the rest of its furniture had apparently been redistributed or cut up for firewood.

  “Zombies, you mean,” Duin said.

  “Actually I meant dead, but zombies work,” Adam muttered. “I don’t think I saw a single smile on any of their faces.”

  “If you were living under the claw of the dragon, would you be smiling?” Duin asked.

  “No, but are you honestly telling me a mother cradling her baby wouldn’t have love for her child? Or sing them a lullaby?”

  “Perhaps Khalivibra does not see such acts as necessary to keep her chattel alive,” Thera suggested.

  “Yeah,” Adam said. “That would make sense.”

  “So… now what?” Duin asked.

  “We go in,” Adam said. “Although I will be honest and say I hadn’t quite planned this far ahead.”

  “Let me go,” Joeri said. “I’ll find a way.” Before anyone could protest he had urged his mount into a quick dash up the wall and back along the shadowed western wall of the inn and what appeared to have been its stables.

  “I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Adam grumbled.

  “Did you have a better idea?” Duin asked.

  “Not really, but that’s not the point. I just don’t like being surprised like that.”

  “Do you want me to go after him?”

  Adam sighed and shook his head. “No need to make us more of a target.”

  Chapter 25

  THEY WAITED in silence, staring out the ruined windows to the equally ruined keep, which sat with one side pressing against the northern wall. According to the haerunwoln scouts, the hill the castle was on fell away sharply on the far side of the wall, creating a natural defense point that the keep sat upon, watching over what had once been a great road, if the large paving stone slabs were anything to go by. From their hiding place, Adam could see the dragon’s guards up on the walls in old rusted armor and bearing halberds that had probably once been ceremonial. In truth he might have missed them, if not for the breeze that blew the hem of one of their dark cloaks fluttering into the air. They stood spaced evenly along the wall, still as statues, looking out toward the north and dark west, and Adam found himself wondering if they were even allowed to blink.

  “Look at them up there,” he murmured softly.

  “The guards?” Duin asked.

  “Yeah,” Adam said, slightly crestfallen. “You already saw them.”

  “Yes,” Duin said. “But I’m impressed that you did.”

  “They look like statues,” Adam said. “But why would a dragon even need guards?”

  “Keeping a lookout for us, perhaps?” Duin said. “Bern said some of the walls were patrolled.”

  “If that’s a patrol, I’m straight,” Adam muttered.

  “What?”

  Adam shrugged. “Never mind. I’ll explain later.”

  “Okay,” Duin said with a grin and crawled over to the window to keep watch, absently rubbing Hele’s eye ridge as the lizard curled up next to him.

  Adam shook his head and crept back away from the windows. “He’s calmer than I am,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

  Thera laid a comforting hand on his arm. “Try not to let the waiting get to you, Sir Adam. Otherwise this old lady is going to fall apart in no time.”

  Adam turned and smiled at the proud woman. “I sincerely doubt you’ve ever fallen apart in your life, Waur Thera.”

  “I do not think I have ever been tested so in my life until now, Sir Adam,” Thera said. “So I have not previously had much cause to truly be scared.” Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she smoothed the silk of her robe over her legs—a useless gesture given the raw silk crumpled back almost immediately. “I feel I owe you an apology, Sir Adam,” she said carefully.

  “Why?” Adam asked, sitting down next to her.

  “When you first came to us, I did not think of you as a hero. I did not want you to be the one to wield Wyrmbane.”

  “Well, if you recall, I didn’t want to be a hero either—or wield Wyrmbane,” Adam said with a smile.

  “Yes, but you did not wish to do so because you feared for your life—and I suspect you still do,” Thera said. “I did not wish you to wield Wyrmbane because it meant an end to our way of life, one way or another.”

  “With all due respect, Waur Thera, that’s exactly what happened,” Adam said gently. “And I don’t think it was for the best.”

  “Selune turned her back on us for reveling in our own glory and ignoring her will,” Thera said. “When I tried to take Wyrmbane from you, I wanted to control it. I wanted to use it for my own people, in our fashion, not in the way that it has been foretold.”

  “I think I understand your meaning,” Adam said. “But I don’t see how that has anything to do with Selune’s will.”

  “There is more to the writings of Ignatius Solmento than the defeat of Khalivibra,” Thera said. “They end with the return of Selune to our skies. If I deny Wyrmbane and your place in the prophecy, I deny Selune her glory and my people their place as her guardians. And I would have done all that because I was frightened of change, because the risk was too great.”

  “I saw Waur Jirsca burnt alive by Khalivibra,” Adam said, his gaze fixed on the pointed rooftop of the building on the opposite side of the street. “All the people who left Aergon with Esmeralda are dead, and I only met two of them. I don’t even know how many of your people perished when Boolikstaad fell. I know I didn’t meet them all before the city…. Do you really think the risk was not great?”

  “It has been great,” Elder Thera agreed. “But perhaps it has not been too great.”

  “That’s a very fine distinction to put on a ‘perhaps.’”

  “Did you know Aergon is dying?”

  “Isn’t Aergon a city? Cities can’t die. They’re not alive.”

  “Of course they are,” Thera said. “The people who live in them are the life of the city. Without people—well, you get places like this.”

  “Okay, fair enough. But how is Aergon dying?”

  “They have a hard life, harder than we do, even. Khalivibra knows exactly where they are, and the kanak raid frequently—which makes sense given what you and Duin encountered in the rainforest. They lose people who forage outdoors to kanak or slasherclaws, to the spiders that prowl their caverns, and then they send maybe one in every ten children to the surface to die.”

  “Ah.”

  “Exactly,” Thera said. “Every cycle, more and more of Aergon’s caverns empty, and more and more zombies join the front lines of their defenses—or did, if Magister Xavier was indeed the last necromancer. Their city is dying, Sir Adam. They need this to succeed more than we do.”

  “So why not wait until they’re all dead and you can face the dragon on your own terms?”

  “That was my first thought,” Thera said candidly. “But what then? Where is the benefit in that? We’d still need to face the dragon and her thralls, and even if we succeed without the Aergonites, who will greet the sun should she rise each morning, as she hopefully will? Who will speak for Helene?”

  “I’m surprised that’s important to you.”

  “The arrogance of Selune’s Children led to her abandoning this world and turning our punishment over to her sister,” Thera said. “What would she think if the self-same arrogance of her Children prevented her return?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam said.

  “Neither do I,” Thera said. “Which is why I owe you an apology for my actions—and my thanks. I was wrong, and I need to thank you for giving our people the chance to be the Children of Se
lune again in deed, rather than only in name.”

  Adam nodded. “You’re welcome, Waur Thera. But you must know I’m still scared shitless.”

  “And yet, you’re still here,” she said.

  “Well, it seems my choices are possibly die now fighting a dragon or resign myself to a long slow wasted life that will probably end badly eventually if I run away from it all,” Adam said with a shrug. “I couldn’t live like that.”

  “And yet that is the life both the Children and the Aergonites have been working toward in our own fashions for generations, even if we claimed not to see it. We need a new way.”

  “Yeah, well, you lot can argue all of that after we win, right?”

  Elder Thera nodded. “Yes. I am sure the debate will be invigorating.”

  THEY HAD not waited much longer when the soft slither of lizard on stone heralded the return of Joeri. “Sir Adam, I think you should see this.”

  “What is it?” Adam asked.

  “Come,” Joeri said, turning his mount around to ride back up the wall.

  After climbing back into the saddle of their lizards, Adam, Thera, and Duin followed Joeri out of the inn and onto the roof of the building next door, although Adam had no idea what it might have been way back when. From the far side of the roof, he found he was looking out into the central square at the foot of the castle walls. Once it had probably been a grand space from which the king could address his subjects—possibly in the fashion of the pope in the Vatican, if the small balcony was anything to go by. Adam could all too easily imagine the square bedecked in festive bunting and crowded with people cheering as they jostled to catch a glimpse of their monarch.

  For a moment he saw himself standing on the balcony, the stone of the castle around him cleaned and restored until it gleamed in the sunlight. He could see himself dressed in robes of the finest silk, boots of the softest purplish leather, and a regal crown bedecked with jewels. The cloak around his shoulders was slightly indistinct at first, but the hazy image coalesced into a heavy fur cape that trailed nearly to his feet, and his wife, the Princess—nay, Queen—Esmeralda stood at his side as they raised their hands to wave their benediction over the cheering crowd.

  Adam shuddered and pushed the thought as far out of his mind as possible, although like many things once seen, it proved near impossible to unsee, the mental image hanging around the edge of his thoughts for far longer than he was comfortable with. When he finally managed to clear his head, he saw the people of Aer Goragon had been silently filing into the space. In the center of the square, a large platform had been erected through the simple expedient of pushing a number of old crates together.

  From the gatehouse came a tortured squeal, followed by metallic clanking as the drawbridge lowered across a moat that was now more grass and rubble than watery defense. Two lines of guardsmen marched silently from the castle courtyard and out into the outer square in their rusted armor and black cloaks, two of them all but carrying Princess Esmeralda between them. She was dressed in a silk robe finer than any Adam had seen her in, and wore a necklace that was more a collar of gossamer filigree and diamonds than a gemstone on a simple chain. Her dark hair had been swept back to fall over one shoulder, interlaced with strings of white pearls, and her pale features enhanced with lines of kohl and the faintest of blushes on her cheeks. Her expression, however, was docile, even glassy, and Adam wondered how much of her was still inside that dolled-up form. When the soldiers carrying her reached the platform, she stepped onto it without any prompting and stood there, facing the crowd with the same stillness as that of the guards on the walls.

  It didn’t feel real to him. In any other crowd, there would have been a buzz, a frisson of apprehension or anticipation or impatience or anything, not just a flat, empty nothingness. It wasn’t even disinterest; rather it was a sense of incomprehension, as if the drama unfolding before them might as well have been a blob of paint drying on a suburban fence in the hot summer sun.

  Then came the thudding wingbeat that reminded him all too much of the sound of drums, and the walls of the city literally shook as the dragon came to rest on the old keep wall, casting a shadow over the tiny balcony Adam had so admired only moments ago. A shower of sediment rained down onto the square as the great beast folded her wings neatly against her spine, perching haughtily on the parapet as she overlooked her domain. She sat proudly on the old stone, her head swaying gently backward and forward as she surveyed the scene before her, the reddish sunlight casting her long shadow across the keep’s walls.

  As one the crowd raised their heads to stare up at her as she puffed out her chest and roared, the noise echoing around the square and in at least one case causing a man’s hat to blow off. Again the people bore the experience with a passive indifference that was more frightening than anything the dragon could muster. For a moment, Adam envisioned the great beast flying down into the crowd and wading through the square in an orgy of bloodletting while the people stood there unheeding and unmoving.

  When the dragon spoke, her voice rang inside their heads. Unlike when they’d met at the top of the council tree in Boolikstaad, here, it was smooth and melodious, powerful, rich, and wheedling.

  “Sir Adam,” Khalivibra said, the force of her words near knocking him from his saddle. “Sir Adam, we should speak.”

  Wordlessly, Duin, Thera, and Joeri all turned to look at Adam, who shrugged.

  “I know you are here, Sir Adam, and I believe we should talk. Look at me!” Khalivibra demanded, stretching to her full height and turning so her scales caught the sunlight. “I am life perfected. I am Khalivibra, Guardian of Aer Goragon, Voice of Helene, and Keeper of the Light in these dark times. Look at my people. I am not an unkind ruler, but I am born to rule.

  “Have they filled your mind with injustice? With the whinings of spoilt children wanting what they never had the right to keep? I alone remember the days of the Fall. I alone was there when the pride of the Children forced the hand of the Mistresses. Did they tell you to stand, quaking in your borrowed boots to fight the battles they have been too weak to attempt? That the slavering beast will only be satisfied with your last breath?” she asked, punctuating her words with a bellow that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

  “Did they forget to speak of mercy?” she went on in a calmer tone. “Did they truly think I could not have hunted down every last one of them as they cowered in their forest warren? That I could not burn the brush out from beneath them until none of Selune’s chosen remained? You have seen what I can do, Sir Adam. Do not make the mistake of seeing what I will do if angered, for Helene is as vengeful a goddess as she is merciful.”

  High up on the parapet, the dragon subsided, settling into a calmer posture, her wings once more closed against her back. “Look before me,” she said. “See your promised bride, Princess Esmeralda of Aer Goragon. I have kept her safe for you. Come, take her hand and rule this kingdom wisely and fairly, and I can give this realm what it needs—protection from the barbarians of the rainforests and peace from which to be born anew, a place for the Children of my Mistress’ sister to live in safety without fear of persecution.”

  Khalivibra’s voice was gentle and cajoling, promising the unwavering knowledge that what was offered could truly be given—would truly be given. All he had to do was go down, relinquish Wyrmbane, and the world would truly be his oyster—or whatever the name of the local river mollusk was.

  His mind in a whirl, Adam rode from the building and out into the square, and the people parted before him like the Red Sea before the biblical Moses. He rode on, up onto the ceremonial platform, until Zoul stood shoulder to shoulder with the slack-jawed princess, who continued to stare out into the gathered crowd.

  “Are you all right?” Adam asked, reaching out to take her hand, half expecting it to be cold.

  Her head turn was jerky and the pressure on his hands sudden and fierce. The slow blink of her glassy eyes was not unlike how he would have imagined the tale of Sleeping Be
auty to have gone—if Sleeping Beauty had awoken to a state of languid half awareness tinged with an undercurrent of fear and a dash of panic. Then the expression was gone, so quickly he felt as though he could have imagined it—he must have imagined it—and Esmeralda smiled warmly at him, lowering her eyelids coquettishly.

  “Accept my aid, Sir Adam,” Khalivibra said, her voice now a benediction. “May your rule be long and untroubled.”

  Adam closed his eyes and smiled as visions of himself as king danced through his head. “Your immense scaliness,” he said, opening them once more. “That’s a decision that cannot be rushed. Tell you what, I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Come on, Your Highness,” he added, pulling Esmeralda up onto the saddle behind him and urging Zoul into the fastest near-gallop the lizard could muster. They bulled their way past, between, and in one or two cases, right over the crowd, who stood, mouths agape and as expressive as shop mannequins, and suddenly all thoughts of kingdoms, crowns, queens, and rulership fled from his mind. In its place, a babble of confusion threatened to derail his thoughts, followed swiftly with a mounting anger.

  “Gotcha, you big scaly bitch,” he muttered as he guided Zoul around a building and up along the far wall, heading east away from the crowd. Keeping a tight grip on Esmeralda, he urged Zoul through the maze of buildings as a deafening scream of rage rent the air. Then the sounds of stone crumbling and the shock wave of the dragon’s downbeat burst through the air, followed by the first sound of human voices.