Jonathan Schlosser
The Dragon Hunt
For Fitz and Fin
and all the adventures to come
Chapter One
In the half light darkly the horse twisted and called into the night and the fireflame some shriek unknown to him or to any other, but perhaps at the heart of that call raged the feeling of torment and horror combined and no one needed to understand it to know it for what it was. Brack stood watching in the doorframe and smelling all about the rising smoke and seeing the men running in to grab those reins and finally one getting them and bringing the horse down and speaking to him and pulling him from the burning yard.
All about the smoke and darkness as one and a living thing within it, the fire and embers like tendrils of some evil tearing the fabric of the world and unleashing that hell upon the living.
His expression in that flickering light that cast all as orange and dusk did not change. He stood stark and silent and his chest just moving as he breathed. Heavy about him the leather and the breastplate of darkened steel and his hand raised above his shoulder and resting on the hilt of a blade he did not draw. Feeling the power within it just from that touch and knowing all else was futile and past. He wore beneath the plate his fur which had been for warmth in this blistering winter and was now too much as the world turned to fire, but he did not remove it or wipe the sweat glistening on his face. For this was nothing to pay.
He heard her come and did not turn to her. “Kayhi.”
“They say it's gone.”
“They know or they think?”
“A farmer says he saw it. Going east and very high.”
“In this light.”
“Brack.”
He lowered his hand and turned at last and smiled at her, but it was a grim smile with those weathered lines and in it neither humor nor grace. Something else there and turning in those eyes as the horse had twisted in the yard. “Does it matter, Kayhi? We've lost it all.”
She looked to the floor, this small girl in a thin gown showing below the heavy fur of her coat. Her hair dark and hanging to her slender shoulders and in her face. Many years his junior and still a girl, he thought, a girl who had until this night known what he was and not known what he was. A child growing while he was gone and only in the last year learning to treat him as her brother, some lost vagabond who was hardly a brother at all. The dirt of the world embedded in his skin.
He reached out and raised her chin with his fingers. “They're riding?”
“They're forming at the gate. Grunel's leading them out. Two of them said you were killed.”
The traces of the smile faded and he nodded. “Go with them. Tell Grunel I'm alive and that they should go through the gap at Taron. Down to the plains where there are real cities. Cabele and Darish-Noth. Either one is the same.”
“What about you?”
“I'll meet you at Taron if I can. If not, I'll ask about where you went and go down into the plains. You'll all be safe there.” He pulled her forward and kissed the top of her head and her hair smelled of smoke. “Go.”
He watched as she left, running in her boots down the long stone walkway and looking back only once. He could hear down below the shouts and the horses and the creak of the wagons and the gate rising. All this far too late. He listened to it for a moment and then went through the door and to the stone stairs beyond. These both rising and falling, one to the left and the other to the right. He touched the sword at his shoulder again quickly and then went left and up and felt with each step the weight of all that stone and scowled for it had done no good at all.
Above, a second doorway. The same timber frame now blackened and smoke drifting upward like something inside was devouring it and then the rungs of the iron ladder in the wall. This the last stand against invading armies, incursions of men. Before an ancient destroyer fell upon them, for which iron ladders and trap doors meant nothing. He climbed it quickly and felt the burning in his arms and pushed up on the iron door at the top and went through.
This one building of stone in all of the small town, this tower the last retreat and fallback position. Round and as wide as two men lying down and with arrow slits in the wall. In the afternoon, light falling through like beams of molten gold; in this night, just the flickering of a bed afire, the thick and acrid smell of the smoke and something deeper as well.
Flesh burnt to bone.
The bodies were huddled against the far wall and he stood looking at them and there was nothing left to tell who they had been. Their clothes gone, the flesh blackened and cracked, the skin lost or curling like birch bark in the hearth. The hair burned and each eyeless head smoking softly. Lips pulled back from charred teeth and burned away. Each pressed against one another and fused where the fire had raged hottest and the white of bone beneath it all.
Brack stood looking and blinked and wet his lips against the heat. It filled this room as if it were a furnace recently extinguished. He took one step toward the bodies and then stopped and cursed and blinked again and went back to the trap door. He could move them if he wanted, but what good was there in it now?
As with those fleeing through the gate and for the mountain pass, it was all too late.
He'd run for them when it came, but it had been perched and hulking on the tower before he even got to the keep. Breathing that fire down through the arrow slits and flames exploding out of the others as they filled the pinnacle until it burned like a fallen star. He'd stopped on the wall with his cloak black and wrapping around him this unnatural hide and it had looked at him and raised its head and shrieked. The sound enough to drive him to his knees. Then it had lifted silently into the air and its black skin was lost to the night and he'd stood on the upper balcony looking out into the yard and fighting with himself to climb the iron ladder.
He stood now in the darkened room a moment more and then turned back to the ladder. Feeling for it and unable to see. The air outside cold as ice on his skin. Descending until his feet found the walkway again and then leaning on it and heaving and holding himself there for time untold. Perhaps days or just the space of a breath. For it was one thing to know and another to see. Raising himself up at last and passing through an interior door to the other side of the tower, this thin and decimated defense, where he could see the snowwashed foothills.
The landscape all about flat and barren as the wind tore across it, the snow covering all but the dark crags of stone where they stood in violence and refused that coating. Appearing small from his vantage but some outcroppings taller than the tower itself, rising until a man at their feet was simply a spec against the wasteland. In the far distance the mountains rising and already on their tops the flashing sunlight of the next day. That light blasting them in radiance and still hours from touching the midnight in the valley.
Below, the caravan made its way forward in the snow. Smaller and more desperate than he had hoped. These men and women and children and wagons pulled by weary oxen already frail. Perhaps half would make the gap and perhaps half again would descend into the rich green plains beyond.
Those plains where cities slumbered in peaceful bounty. Walls of whitewashed stone rising and clusters of villages in the fields beyond and gardens of stunning beauty with stone bridges and clear brooks. Nothing like this place of hewn wood walls and one stone tower now cracked and shattered.
If she was with them when they reached those cities, she may live. It was only a chance, but everything was only a chance.