Stepping beneath that rising wing, that black sail, the claws on the end. Knowing what it would do if it fell and how he would be crushed and broken before he knew anything and running still as the dragon turned its head. Bringing that long and slender sword up and seeing the flame glint off the edge of the blade and the fuller and then burying it to the hilt in the dragon's side. Feeling it slide over rib and bone and into that beating inferno of its heart.
Juoth sat looking at him in the cold and windbeaten cave, the snow drifting against the mouth and the air howling in the dark night, far off through the frozen forest. “You were trying to emulate that kill.”
Brack nodded. The pieces had been in place, the trap laid. But it had not played out as in that story now centuries old. Perhaps the dragon was wiser, or perhaps not. Maybe it had been its intention all along to kill Tarek and he could have done any damned thing he pleased in that field and it wouldn't have made a difference.
“Now what do we do?” Juoth said.
“We track it.”
“How do you want to do it?”
Brack stood and went to the fire and turned one of the logs. The embers burning down now and smoking more than producing heat and already the cave cooling. The back wall where ice glistened wetly now freezing back to that shell of crystal on stone. He took up two more logs and set them on the fire crossing each other, the heart of that cross in the flame where all of the edges could catch. The bark first smoldering and smoking and then little flames licking at the sides and growing as they moved toward the core. He stepped back and sat again.
“The way you always track a dragon,” he said. Raising a hand to his jaw and feeling the beard growing there and wondering how long he would be traveling now in this world and seeing no end to it. “Not in the usual ways of lesser game. You track it by the swaths of destruction it leaves behind. You go from one burning hellhole to the next until you find it and you kill it.”
Juoth smiled and it was a wicked thing on his face and all teeth and also a sheer joy in it and Brack had seen that look before and knew what it meant. “But a dragon is like a man.”
“He is.”
“So we can guess where he'll be.”
Brack nodded, already feeling it and hating what he knew.
“What is it?”
“My sister,” he said. “It's my sister.”
They left the cave the next morning and went on down the mountain and into a valley of stone. The snow lighter here as they descended, just a thin skim on the surface of the world, in places a dusting. Melting off in the sun. All around the stones rising high above them and in one place three inexplicably stacked, one atop the next, each seven meters tall and more than that around. The hands of gods perhaps all that could have placed them in such a position.
They came after that to the remains of a town and it was there that the dragon had nested. Dismounting and walking through the ruin, but this an old ruin of age and time alone. No one having lived there in a generation. Everything fallen in and rotted, the beams of old homes and barns and a fence running long into a field with tilted fenceposts. A simple place for farming and the raising of animals and all now fled or killed or taken. He knew not which, but no bodies or bones remained.
In the center of the town a scuffle of tracks in the mud and dirt. The beast's talons as long in that soil as his arm. The great depression where it had curled its tail about itself and slept with those burning eyes horrible and open in the night. Atop the remains of a barn as if seeking the straw that had long since been blown by the four winds and rotted itself.
Perhaps the dragon felt that in a place like this it could find a home, he thought. A place of abandonment and death already. Lacking blood and fire and gold, but already little more than whispering ghosts. Where nothing lived.
In times ancient and mostly forgotten the dragons had ruled the earth and not the men and he felt the whole world must have been like this. The eternal rangings of huge creatures brawling in the setting sun to control a wasteland and a territory. Feasting perhaps on the ancestors of the men. Turning all the world to their will.
They did not speak in that dead town and got back on the horse on the far side and found a river running down toward a low valley. The floor of which they could not see, as it was shrouded in cloud. The water black and churning over the small stones, coming out of mountains and snowmelt and falling. They came to the bank and the horse drank and then raised its dripping muzzle and they went on along in moss and roots and scrub trees. Picking their way down in short steps and not pushing lest the horse fall and break its leg and leave them to walk an untold distance.
It was along this river that Juoth spoke without turning back. His voice soft and light as if saying nothing at all but a hard edge to it and all the world in his words.
“Do you know how I met your grandfather?”
“No. He didn't tell me.”
“Do you want to?”
“Of course.”
Juoth straightened. Looking upward as if seeing it for just a moment. His voice in that far off place when he spoke.
“We were slaves,” he said. “Your grandfather a prisoner of the Goldencrown War. In the islands that means you fight. Not always, but it did for us. Thirty years ago. We'd been moving all over Carrison and fighting in the rings and pits there and once in an amphitheater. All around us people cheering. There's always money when there's blood.”
Brack was silent. He knew well the link between money and blood and he felt those bloodslicked coins riding in the bag at his hip.
“He'd made a name for himself, you know. Killed a hundred men. They said it, anyway. That no one could kill him. I fought once before him and won and afterward watched him. Facing two lions and a huge man from Hydone. Eight feet tall. Arms like pillars.” There was a slight grin in his voice as he spoke. “Your grandfather killed the lions and him in no less than three minutes.”
It was a time Brack had known about but not something they ever spoke of. Something that took guts and hours or perhaps days and always the threat of those opened doors and where they led and neither he nor his grandfather chose to walk into that dark forest and see what it held, though they both knew everything there was to know. But there was no way around it and it was many years ago and he closed his eyes and saw those burned bones in the rubble and opened them again and touched his face, his cheek.
“I was ten,” Juoth said. “Perhaps eleven. One of the youngest fighters but you do what they tell you and they were making money when I fought. And then one day I walked out into the ring and it was hot and the ring was all sand and I was thinking what it would be like for my footing and then I looked up and he was standing there and looking at me.”
He paused, then, looking away. Beside them, the river still ran darkly over those stones and turned in a widening bed. As deep now in the middle as his waist and the dim shapes of fish moving in the hollows. Once a silver back breaking the surface and then descending again in a swirl of ripples quickly lost to the current.
“He didn't have a weapon,” Juoth said. “He was just standing there and looking at me and I came out with the spear and knife and stood looking back at him and thought of what he'd done to the lions and I realized they wanted me to kill him. And he knew it. We both looked at each other and we both knew it and then he looked to that raised gate behind me.”