“It's true?”
“About where I'm from?”
“Yes.”
“Truest thing I've told you.”
“Only thing you've told me.”
“That's true as well.”
Brack sat again and finished his ale and set it down. “How did you get all the way up here? This is a long way from the islands.”
“Everything's a long way from the islands.” Juoth pushed his own glass aside and took from his pocket a small metal coin and flipped it and caught it with one and the same hand and then set it upon the face of the table. That side showing a ring. On the other Brack knew there to be an impression of a helmet in relief with down the side a winding crack as if split with an ax but still holding. He looked at it for a long moment and then reached over and turned it in his hand to show the helmet and set it back down.
“Money.”
“Why does any man go where he goes?”
“You can stop with that.”
“With what?”
“You tell me something, you just tell it to me.”
“All right. Tarek is in the mines and he'll be here. He always comes here. I didn't know who you were but I've seen him and now I've seen you and so I know.”
Walking into the town he had asked again about the old man and the spearman had said they'd ask around and the islander had said this was the place to ask and they'd all laughed for there were no other places in a town like this and in they'd come. Brack had thought then of demanding more and had not done so for he had been gauging in these men different things which he still did not know, and when thus concerned he had found many times that caution was best. Especially with a man who came to a place for gold alone and little else for there was much a man could do for gold.
“Thank you,” Brack said. “I haven't heard anyone call him Tarek in a long time. I'll never forget the first time I did.”
Juoth turned and raised a hand and the barkeep scowled and made to come across with two ales and then he turned back and said:
“So tell me about this dragon before they've told everyone.”
He came up the stairs and the sound of it was everywhere and the horses were screaming. About him in the low streets the women and children running and a man just standing and looking aloft with in his hand an ax and holding his other hand before his face and all the fingers gone and only blackness in their wake like curled meat fallen in the fire and when he turned the whole of his face a ruin and lost and then he fell to the side and the sound his body made when it struck the stones was like it weighed as much as all the earth together.
He ran past the burned man and the wings were beating and his sword was heavy and so he drew it to run and knew it would do nothing, for you did not kill something like this with a sword alone. He looked up also and could not see it for the smoke and it was like running beneath a sky of flowing coal and everywhere. The smell of hair burning perhaps the worst of it and the sounds from within that smoke. People unseen and in an agony he could feel to the bone.
Reaching the wall he mounted the steps and at the top were the bodies of two men and then he saw it was just one man and he had been bitten in half and both halves left here with blood between them and connected as they were by his entrails. The legs were still but the mouth moving and blood on his chin and the man trying to say something as Brack went past and up onto the wall.
There a wide path of blackness burned into the stones and he could see the direction in which it went and he ran then and he was shouting for it to come to him, to come to him. This far in there were no more guards and all scattered. The pounding of those stones under his feet as he ran. Knowing it and not wanting to know it and calling for it to come to him.
When he reached the yard where the horses were screaming he looked above and it was curled on the tower with its great claws buried in the stone itself and the tail wrapped below it and the wings unfurled and raised. Its scales black and red as if its molten blood flowed to the surface and up its back a ridge like jagged mountains thrust with violence through the crust. The tongue a lick of flame rising and curling and the heavy jaws wide and the muscles bulging as that jaw worked. The ring about its neck flexing as it looked at him.
The eyes red and burning and full of an ancient knowledge and also some great and horrible laughter. Something wrong with its face but he couldn't place it as in its fury the flames flowed from those eyes and licked up the scales but something very deeply wrong.
Then it lowered those jaws once more to the smoking arrow slits of this tall and smoldering furnace.
“And it flew,” the islander said.
“And it flew.”
“Then tell me this, Ironhelm.” He leaned forward on the table and his ale gone and tapped his fingers and said: “A dragon is a beast. Reacting as all beasts do. When a wolf comes he has prey and he eats but a dragon is not a wolf. Not like this. A dragon also eats but he does not eat man. He kills. A predator and little else where it concerns men. Not even a predator. Just a killer.”
“You've seen others?”
“I mean this one. The one you told me.”
“All right.”
“Then if a dragon kills and does not eat he kills for some reason other. Call it sport or spite or what it is. He kills men and he knows he can and then he leaves. When does he choose to leave?”
“He leaves and kills as he wants.”
“But how does he decide what he wants?”
Brack looked at the man a long moment and turned and thought of it. Thought of that laughter in its eye. For a dragon was not a beast as a beast usually was. Perhaps more man than beast. Perhaps what a man wished he could be or aspired to. How many men, if given the choice, would elect to be that winged creature with a heart of fire instead of a weak and landbound man with a heart of blood? Thousands, surely. For in all ways but that they were already the same.
“You think he came after them.”
“I think he did,” said the islander.
“Not any men. Them.”
“Yes.”
“And that's why he looked at me and left when he did.”
“The hunt was over. What do you do at the end of a hunt?”
“I take my game.”
“But the dragon doesn't hunt to eat. For him the game is done.”
At long last Brack smiled but it felt heavy on his face and he reached up and rubbed his eyes and could not remember the last place he slept. Or the length of that slumber. “So you do know dragons.”
“No. I know how to think.”
“Then why are you in this town?”
“Why are you?”
“Not for gold.”
“And that we have in common.”
The blind man had stopped playing and he was doing something to the instrument. Cleaning it, perhaps, or adjusting some part to change the sound of it. Across from him the other girl was gone and two of the men and the barkeep was running a cloth over the top of the bar. Bringing down the glasses. The spearman and the other still talking and with new mugs now set before them and always closer to what they were going to do. Lifting those glasses and drinking the dregs and turning to that which was fresh.