“Then they die in the snow or they die in the mountains or they cheat the gods and they go down to the plains and they die in the fields and the cities.”
“This meant to make me feel better?”
“Not at all.”
They watched again. One of the men left and a short time later came back and he was carrying an ax and he stood leaning on it as if waiting for someone to see it. Then another man walked up and he was wearing a sword and he nodded to the man with the ax. A third with a bow, then another with a sword. Two young men with their picks from the mines, one wearing a dagger the length of a finger.
Brack stared at them and thought of the things he'd seen the last time and a true knight of the Springlands clad head to toe in plate and holding aloft a shield with the crest of a tiger painted in brilliant detail and in his other hand a broadsword the likes of which these men would never see in their lives and that man cooking and boiling in his armor as he struggled with fingerless hands to tear the helmet from his own head.
After a time they left the window and went to sit beside the fire and the old man brewed more tea from the leaves in the kitchen and they three sat watching the water boil and finally Brack again asked Tarek what he had come to ask for you could never ask such things enough times to be ready and then he sat back with the mug hot in his hands and listened.
He had been seeing it now for weeks. The first time trapping in the mountains and walking with the metal and rope traps rattling in his hand through snow as deep as his calf and each step adding to the pounding of his heart. His fingers cold about the traps and lashes and yet his back dripping sweat and his hair soaked under his hat. Carrying with him a handax and nothing else and the bodies of two raccoons he had taken. He had bent to set a trap at the base of a cedar and as his hands had been working it down into the snow the shadow had passed over him.
He'd seen nothing more that day, nor had he heard it. Drifting and silent perhaps on some updraft, wings unfurled and scales hot in the sun and those burning eyes casting about earth and air. But the shadow had been as large as a boat's sail even at that height and he'd shivered the entire way returning as his sweat turned to ice and his eyes always on the sky.
Two weeks later, great tracks in the snow. Three steps. Filled partially with new-fallen snow and so the edges softened, but unmistakable for what they were in that high mountain field. He'd stood at the edge of the trees for a long time just looking at them and then gone out to the field and walked about them in slow circles and stopped in front to clear some of the snow. Six inches down a long swath of blood, all ice now and hard and crimson and dark. Just blood and no animal to be seen, no parts left behind.
Lying there melting the snow around it, the lone scale. Fallen and lost and horrible.
It had come down, he guessed, dropping without a sound in that sky, its prey unaware below. Sensing it perhaps at the last moment, screeching in a horror that suddenly ate the entire world to the bone, to the heart. The animal had run and so the dragon had struck the earth behind it in three light-footed steps and grabbed it on the last and taken back to the air as the hot blood poured and hissed in the snow.
Another time: Standing on the edge of the town and looking off toward the keep at sunset and on a far peak something dark moving. Smaller at the distance than his little finger and so at first ignored. Then he realized the distance and how enormous it must be to be seen at all. Perched and watching something with the tail twitching from side to side and the head still as if cast from iron or carved from stone. Once it unfurled its wings and then brought them in again. He watched it until darkness fell and then the next morning it was gone.
That the only time he'd seen the beast itself. Ten days ago, no more.
But there had been reports. A miner sent back early who had never returned to town and when they looked for him the tracks vanished and most assumed he'd fallen and been buried in some crevasse now covered and then one of his boots was found. The foot inside it still and the cut through the bone cleaner than any sword.
Two horses found run into the trees and the hair on one scorched and blackened in a long streak along its back. Just below, the flesh blistered and bleeding. Both animals cowering and afraid and unwilling ever to leave the forest and the trees.
The third horse never found. Neither in track nor body.
“I should have told you sooner. Sent someone up to the keep before I did. But I wanted to be sure. No one's seen one this close to the cities in twenty years. They've never seen one here. You know how it is.” Tarek smiled. “I'm an old man.”
“I wouldn't have doubted you.”
“I know.” Leaning forward just slightly. “When's the last time you saw one?”
“If they're not near the cities, I'm doing what I'm meant to do.”
“But when?”
Looking through those blackened windows. The wild beyond. A vast and cursed world with in it a rampant darkness and here this fragile empire of a thousand years. Beyond, the things he'd seen that men living here could not fathom nor believe.
“Always,” he said. “I see them everywhere.”
The old man looking at him in the firelight. Heartbeats and swirling snow. That darkness twisting and growing and encroaching on this world of men as it always sought, a living thing and a dead thing all the same.
Brack had finished his tea and so he set the mug aside and settled into the chair. Looking at nothing and the whole world and the dragon out there in it. The way it had looked as it breathed fire into the tower through the arrow slits and they roasted alive above the iron door. Then he said:
“What do you think we do?”
“To kill it?” Tarek shrugged, then swirled his own tea in his mug. “Way I see it, we have two options. Maybe three.”
“Start with the worst.”
“We track it. Hunt it down.”
“And the better?”
“We wait for it. When you hunt you either draw the game in or you go to it. When you go to it, it always knows before you get there. When you bring it in, lure it to you, that's when you get the kill. You only need a moment of surprise.”
“Don't think we'll even have that.”
“Probably not.”
“And if we bring it here, they'll die.” He nodded toward the window and the men waiting outside and Juoth looked but the old man did not. Brack thought of the dragon standing in the center of this town and the snow melting and running beneath it and the carnage such a trapping would bring. He may kill it, but how many others would he kill at the same time? Most of them, surely. Those who lived would be as the men who'd lived before, voiceless and witless if luck was on their side.
“Then the third,” Tarek said. “We do both.”
Brack nodded. “It's the only chance.”
“Where?”
“That's why I came to you.”
Tarek nodded slowly and then stood and went to a shelf and when he came back he was holding a rolled map of the mountains. He unrolled it and lay it on the table before him and set his mug to hold down one corner. Brack set his also on another and held the other side down with his hand.
“Here,” Tarek said. Touching the map lightly with one finger. “There's a field before this pass. It's where I saw the tracks before. He knows it.”
“How far?”
“Four hours if you're going to walk. Less on horses.”
“I'll take a horse.”
“And we'll walk back.”
Brack shook his head. “I will walk back.”
“Brack.”
“Don't.”
Juoth had been quiet and only now spoke, his brow furrowed. Looking from one to the other and settling on Brack. “You're going to try to kill it yourself.”