Grabbing the arrow from that torn flesh, the scar about its neck. Ripping it free in a spurt of blood.
The dragon screeched, began to pull up, swinging its heavy legs beneath and beating its wings to slow its descent. Twisting its head toward this parasite on its neck. But Kayhi just swung with the movement, arrow in hand. Light and agile and muscles like cords from countless days with him and their swords in the courtyard.
The dragon came down toward the earth in a twisting firestorm of air and dust and smoke, the frantic beating of its wings billowing everything around it. The buildings shuddering and stones pelting Brack's face, chest, arms. Black blood pouring now from both its neck and its side, some of it burning, some heavy like pitch or the blood of the long dead.
Just as it came up to land, Kayhi swung forward on that horn, ten meters above the earth and nothing but that hand keeping her aloft, throwing her body forward. Her other arm pulling back and then flashing forward like lightning, the huntress in flight with her golden spear, and she buried the arrow in the only eye the dragon had left.
They hit the ground and it seemed to tear it open at the deepest cracks, the fault lines, those plates wrenched apart and the inner workings revealed for what they were. Brack was thrown from the rubble of the church and everything came down around them, houses and barns and silos. Cracking stone and timber like the end of the world, the billow of dust and smoke drenching the sky.
He rolled and came back to his feet and ran. Could see nothing now but dragon's shape, dark and clouded, writhing behind that wall of dust. A tangle of wings and claws and teeth. The great tail lashing forward and then gone and then coming back to strike the ground with a snap of its own.
It was screaming and it was like no sound he'd heard from a dragon before. Nothing in it of anger or horror or mere pain, but of pure agony. The way a man screams on the field when he is caught up in the cavalry and he does not know the bottom half of his body is gone until he looks down and sees his own entrails in the mud and he does not scream long but there is a deep and real and violent way that he screams with blood in his mouth. And that was how the dragon screamed now, with the strength of a thousand dying men.
He ran into the dust and found it. First the tail swinging past as he ducked. Then a raking claw on the end of a broken wing. It smelled him and lashed out in all directions in fury and pain and still he ran. Something striking him hard in the side and the sound of his own ribs breaking lost in that scream, but he pushed himself back to his feet and stumbled the last steps and then he was at its side. Falling heavily against those hot scales, breathing this air like fire itself.
Grabbing the hilt he tore the blood-soaked sword free. With any other sword the blade would have been a splintered ruin but this steel was fine and unmarked, though covered in blood and the end glowing red hot.
He could not see her but he ran wild and gasping for the beast's head. He could hear its teeth gnashing in the air. He leapt up over the front legs and took two light steps running along its back, then jumped down beside that long serpent's neck. The scales the size of breastplates, growing smaller as they ran up toward the head.
It twisted out of the gloom and dust and then he could see it. That ruined face. Blood pouring down along the scales. Gaping holes of torn flesh where the eyes had been, smoke rising gently from them. Furious within this raging storm.
And then he felt the inward rush of air around him, the dragon drawing one final breath into that furnace. For it may not see him but it could smell him as always and as he could smell it, these two combatants intertwined over two lifetimes and in some ways always chasing each other. Ages past and still waiting for a final death. It would cover him and itself here in flame, turn him to nothing but bone and ash with its dying breath.
For that brief second, Brack thought of each of them. His children in the keep where they'd found a brief peace on the icebound edge of the world. His son now an old man as they sat drinking tea before the fire in his cabin. Kayhi as he kissed her forehead, as she dove from the broken tower.
He drew the sword back and screamed and his scream and the dragon's were the same and then he lashed out with the redhot blade, chopping it downward with everything in his body and soul. Swinging it with two hands over his head like an ax, a crude and vicious weapon, free of all elegance and skill, its only end violence and death.
The blade bit into that open bleeding scar, slicing down through tissue and bone. Cutting even in that one swing between the vertebrae of the spine, splintering the bone. Slicing arteries and veins and ripping the beast's windpipe in two.
And for the second time in Brack's life, the dragon's head fell from its body. Falling slowly forward and the jaw still working up and down and behind it pouring a river of blood and fire. The scream suddenly and completely gone and in its wake just choking blood in its windpipe and lungs. The headless body for a moment unaware and still trying to blow out that last breath.
The head landed heavily in the dirt and he could feel it shuddering the world one final time. Grinding sand and stone beneath it. The skull taller than a man standing. Rolling in that dirt and the face tipping toward him with those hollow eye sockets and the jaw moving once more, the teeth painted red and glistening.
And then it was still. All was still. The very world frozen as this beast was torn once again from its fabric. This undead abomination returned to what it was.
As the dust and smoke fell in this aching silence about the hunter, standing still himself with sword in hand, he turned to look for his daughter.
Chapter Twenty-Three
She could smell the fire as they came up over the hill and could not yet see the smoke against that slate morning sky but knew from far off. Something deep within the bones of man, that scent of fire on the wind. In days before time this perhaps the greatest threat and always moving before it.
The distant beat of wings in the air; sheltering in caves.
They crested the hill and stood and the horse bent eating and they were gathered before the wall of the city. How many she did not know. More standing atop that wall and leering. Soldiers leaning on their elbows in chainmail with their steel helms next to them on the wall. The poor of the city in the mud and the dirt. The others on the high ground where the hill rose gently to the orchard with its white-blossomed trees. The firewood lashed and piled and the stake rising from it and the girl in her white dress bound to it with chain.
Standing firm now, hair in the wind, the dress billowing back past the stake. The fire still far below her and rising and the smoke taken in that wind and blown from her face so she could look out on the people of this city and the last place she would ever see.
She'd watched them at the stake before and they were all different. Some stoic and silent and making not a sound until the very end when they all did. Others trying from the very first to breathe in the smoke, desperate gasping breaths. Still others screaming from the moment they were lashed and crying to be cut free and wretched before the smoke or flame got to them and only worse when it did.
With this girl she could not tell. Too far away, her small white form against the stone wall. She could have been any of them.