Juoth was watching him watch it. Glancing cautiously and his hand on the hilt of his sword, trying to look at Brack when he would not be caught and failing. He couldn't see it but he could see Brack's eyes and that was enough.
The girl walked with them in silence. Her gait easier now, he thought, but still a shell stripped of what had been within. Perhaps being filled from some unknown well inside herself or perhaps not.
Perhaps he had carried this dead girl to the field merely for her to die again. This time in flame and writhing agony. Would she scream if it came to that, or would she die mute with her mouth agape as the flesh melted from her bones? Was it that torment that would bring her back fully, if only for a moment, so that it could be stripped away again? He knew much of the world and fate and cruelty, but he did not know that.
Juoth walked closer to him and turned his eyes to the city. “What if it comes now?”
“It won't.”
“It could kill us in the field.”
“I'm telling you it won't.”
“We're too exposed.”
He looked over. “Do you think that matters? You just walked through a city burned to the ground. Not two stones left standing. Everyone dead and scattered.”
Juoth was silent.
“But it won't,” Brack said. “Because it wants me to see her as it kills her.”
“Your sister.”
“It could have killed us a hundred times if it just wanted to kill us. This is the point. This is what it wants, and it won't strip itself of that by killing us in the field an hour from the city.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Always with the plans.”
“So you don't.”
Brack was quiet. He had been turning one in his head and he did not know if it would work but he did not know what else he had. “Not a lot of use for plans when you hunt dragons. They always last for about two breaths and then the dragon does something to ruin it and if your plan was all you had, you die.”
“Better two breaths than none at all.”
“Would you just be quiet for once?”
“You think I'm wrong?”
“Just for one damned minute.”
The bodies were scattered at first. Blackened bones and bent armor and missing limbs. Two or three lying together, one by itself. Part of a body that you couldn't tell which part. A sheath of arrows dropped and scattered in flight. The dead ranks slowly swelling all around them until it was men piled on men and women and horses and carts and everything burned. The wagons splintered and destroyed and the horses gutted and many of the men killed with talon or teeth before the fire, but all burned eventually and lying in the mud.
In the earth long furrows where it had come down with its claws. Sweeping to the side and dragging them. Another curving line where its tail had swung and torn the soil and risen and then crashed down and trenched out an area the size of a horse. This cavity now filled with blood and bone. The ground about littered with swords and axes and spears and all that men carried so often to their own deaths.
The kings of old had believed you took what you were buried with into the next life and they built huge tombs filled with gold and jewels and young girls entombed to die with them. If there was an afterlife and you took what you had with you when you died, he thought, it was a whole world filled with shattered swords and rent armor and scorched earth.
It all began to thin out after a time and then they left the dead in their wake. The second city of the plain rising up before them. This one a city of dark stone and sweeping walls and spires slender and soaring. Flags had once flapped on the tops of those towers but the dragon had torn them down. The iron gates lay twisted before the walls. Around the top of that wall and below the battlements an endless line of proud and intricately carved men at arms and gargoyles with their twisted bodies and horses rallied for war. All in darker stone even than the walls and these ancient carvings still intact though they had not preserved those inside.
She's the only one, he thought. She's the only one in there.
He stopped then with the city three hundred yards before them and slowly the dragon rose and showed itself. Stretching with exaggerated sloth and arching its back, the black tail moving serpentine in the air below the tower, curling about like something else entire and alive in that air. A ball on the end cracked and harder than stone. The scales were black and the underbelly as well and its face slender and flaring out near the forehead. Those eye sockets set and burning now with the hatred it carried within it, the light flickering off the horned forehead, the spikes running up over the crown of that head and down its back.
That dead circle clear now about the neck. Free of scale and spike, just twisted and angry flesh, hideous and mutated. The dragon for all its horror and vileness holding a strange sort of beauty, but that scar a wretched and ugly reminder of what it truly was.
“Let me go alone,” Brack said. “Stay with her.” Not taking his eyes of off the beast as it opened the great canopy of its wings into the air.
“Tell me something.”
“This isn't the time.”
“Why is it you?” Juoth said. “Why is it you that it wants? Your family that it's killing?”
Brack drew in a breath and he could taste the smoke and sulfur and he knew it well and felt all the world was in that breath. Holding it burning in his lungs. For there was nothing else and had been nothing else and in between just times waiting until this again was the world. All that lay before him and all that he was.
“It's not just killing my family,” he said at last. “It's killing my children. One and then the next until there are none left.” A burning in his eyes that was not the smoke, a twist of his lip. “Kayhi is the only one I can save and if I can't then there's nothing else for me. And it knows that.”
It was deathly silent. A high wind whipping above the plain and in the spires and pulling at the edges of the dragon's wings. It felt as if there was heat lightning in the air and all about and every hair on his body standing on edge.
“My great grandfather didn't slay that dragon two hundred years ago.” He reached back over his shoulder and drew his sword in one smooth motion, the blade ringing on metal and flashing in the air. Never taking his eyes from the beast now standing and waiting for him to come. That twisted and mangled scar about its neck where the head had been severed. “I did.”
Chapter Twenty-One
She stood on the cliff edge and all below her a forest of deep green and a river cutting through it and everything so far away there was no way to descend. This cliff of sheer rock falling back to the forest. Below her an eagle gliding beside the shelves of gray stone. She thought she could hear the river a long way off but it could have been something else. Beneath her feet the tangled roots of a tree standing against this drop with those roots ancient and penetrating into cracks in the stone, into thin dirt and moss. An improbable place as it arched itself out over the nothingness but a tree older than her and she did not know if it would grow this way for all time or if it was only standing until that inevitable day when the roots gave one after another like old ropes lashing a ship in a storm and the whole thing fell with a terrible slowness to tumble end over end until it was lost from view.
It had been two days in the forest and she was very hungry. She'd followed the river from the town and no one had pursued her with the dead bodies in the street but she knew she'd underestimated him. The first time running she'd felt stupidly invincible after not seeing her pursuit and spending one night in the forest and it'd taken him almost no time at all to track her down. Without luck on her side she would already be dead or chained again in the pit.