My horse, Archimedes, was fitted with armor and a heavy saddle, neither of which he was accustomed to. He complained about it bitterly.
“God speed, Lord Venice,” Lance said as I climbed upon Archimedes. He handed me my sword and helped fix the crossbow to the side of the saddle.
“And you, Lord Harsigny,” I replied. “I expect I’ll see you in the morning, but if I don’t, take good care of the castle for me or I shall be forced to haunt you.”
A signal to the stable hand and the stable door was pushed open.
“And don’t follow me, my friend,” I added. “Some things are best left unseen.”
“I can barely see as it is,” he smiled.
I shook his outstretched hand. One way or another, I didn’t expect to be returning to Coucy-le-Chateau. I think we both knew it.
I rode hard through the small town and reached the gates in a matter of minutes. A casual onlooker might have assumed I was a messenger on a grave mission of some sort, which was fine.
Once past the gates I trotted alongside the wall for a ways before coming to a stop. I listened. The night was dead silent. Perhaps Lance had decided to take me at my word that it was best he not follow. More likely he’d wait an hour, rally his bloodhounds, and track me. But there wasn’t anything I could do about that.
Momentarily, I was joined by Eloise. She dropped from the wall and landed before Archimedes, who nearly unhorsed me in surprise.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, trying to calm down my mount.
“It’s a worthy battle.” She put a hand on Archimedes’ head. Most animals don’t react well to vampires at all, but Eloise seemed to offer him a soothing influence. “And I owe this beast for what he did to Louisa.”
“Would you like to ride up here with me?”
“I can keep up.” She looked at me appraisingly. “You know my motives. But why do you do this? You are no warrior.”
“It killed a woman,” I said simply.
“No, there is more. Something personal?”
“Can’t I do something noble out of an innate sense of duty?” I offered. Honestly, I didn’t know why I was doing it either.
“Perhaps.” She lingered.
“Are you trying to talk me out of this?”
“I am trying to figure out who you really are.”
“Same man I was last night.”
“Last night you smelled like turnips. Tonight you smell of leather and mystery.”
I smiled at what I took to be a compliment. “We’re wasting time. Can you still track him through the fresh snow?”
“Of course,” she said, bounding off. We followed.
There is something beautiful about vampires on the hunt. If they want to, they can outstrip a horse in full gallop, all the while appearing to move effortlessly. Like most vampires, Eloise did not run like a human might. She employed her arms as well as her legs, looking a bit like a large bloodsucking rabbit.
Every few minutes she would come to a full stop, listening and smelling the cold air for traces of an odor I had no hope of picking up myself. These moments were followed by a slight change in direction. We soon found ourselves at the edge of the woods.
I miss woods. It wasn’t at all long ago that much of the world was covered by forest. Now I have to hop on a plane to get to a decent one. This particular set of woods wasn’t terribly large but it was lush, and in the summer months utterly dark at all times. Visibility improved in the winter only ever-so-slightly. Our saving grace was that it was the second night of the full moon.
“It lives here, in these woods,” Eloise said, sniffing. “Precious little else does.”
“No wolves?”
“None I can detect. This thing could have frightened them off. It is large enough.”
The implication that there was such a beast that could have scared away a pack of wolves from its natural feeding ground would no doubt have terrified a lesser man. Okay, it scared the crap out of me too, I won’t lie.
She pushed on at a slower pace out of respect for Archimedes, who found it difficult to maneuver between the trees. Eventually we penetrated deep enough into the forest to make me question precisely where it was I had initially entered. At least Eloise seemed to know where we were going, although at times it appeared she had us traveling in circles. She stopped when we reached a small clearing.
“We are being followed.”
I looked behind us but saw nothing. “It may be Lord Harsigny. He’s probably got his hounds on my trail.”
“No, milord, not a man. The thing we hunt is hunting us.”
“For how long?”
“The past hour.”
I examined the clearing. It was the largest we’d come across since entering the woods. Visibility would never be better.
“We make our stand here,” I said.
She agreed. “You should turn; it comes from behind.”
I trotted Archimedes to the farthest point in the clearing and turned us around. Eloise stood in front of us in the center of the clearing and fell to a crouch.
“Can you smell it?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted.
“It reeks of brimstone. What manner of thing is this?”
That was what I was afraid of.
I lifted the crossbow and loaded a bolt. I could hear it now. It must have known we’d stopped and concluded stealth was no longer necessary. I could see trees quivering as it closed the distance.
And then it burst into the opening.
It was huge. I was eye-to-eye with it from atop Archimedes. It was covered head to food in leathery scales that I knew from prior experience to be greenish in the daylight but which appeared to be a shade of brown in the moonlight. Its face was triangular, ending in a large jaw with a slightly rounded snout, its nostrils emitting a gust of steam and its body a quiver of muscles. It was humanoid only in the most superficial sense, although it did stand upright. Its fingers—four of them, and no opposable thumb—ended in talons that looked like impressive weapons.
“Now you have seen it,” Eloise yelled over her shoulder as the creature fell forward onto its front paws and prepared to charge. “You tell me what it is!”
I raised my crossbow. “That,” I said, “is a dragon.”
* * *
Like so many other legendary creatures, humankind never quite got dragons right. Number one, they didn’t fly. Number two, never saw one breathe fire, although their breath was awful and they did smell like sulfur for reasons I have never been clear on, so people probably embellished that just a little bit. Number three, they averaged out at between eight and ten feet tall, which is a far cry from the enormous dinosaur-like monstrosities of myth.
Dragons weren’t traditionally very smart, which may have been a contributing factor in their eventual extinction. You’d think something this brutally predatory should have figured out a way to stick it out otherwise, like the demons have. But most dragons would just as soon eat each other as anything else, which is not the brightest survival approach I’ve ever heard. They were not, however, so massively stupid that they made a habit of eating humans. Even on some basic level, most of them understood that killing a human will attract more humans, and more humans is invariably bad. This one must have been pretty desperately hungry, then, when it went after Albert’s Louisa. And since it never got to eat her, we must have looked like filet mignon to him.
It was a male of the species—male dragons tended to be bigger—and he was considerably larger than average. Large enough to make me wish I’d brought a few dozen more people with me, plus maybe an extra vampire or two.