Dragonslayer

His bow floated past. Kemir let go of the jetty support long enough to snatch it and drag it through the water towards him. The gold dragon had already flown past. The darker one, though, the black one, crashed into the shore at the end of the jetty. More fire. More screams, short, snuffed out in a blink.

‘You cannot touch me, dragon!’ Someone was shouting loud enough to be heard over the explosions of fire from around the town. ‘You know what this is!’

The blood-mage?

There were times when curiosity and valour were both fine things, but, as Sollos used to say, more often than not they both got you killed. Heroism or bravery were for fools; what usually got Kemir in trouble was the curiosity bit. That and getting up and doing things without thinking beforehand. One moment he was bobbing up and down in the Fury, trying not to swallow any more water than absolutely necessary, watching burned bits of people bob about in the water beside him; the next he’d just finished shimming up a slippery pole and was hauling himself up by his fingertips onto the splintered stub of what had once been a wooden jetty. He dropped into a crouch, as low as he could manage without actually lying down. The crowd on the waterfront was a mass of blackened bodies at his feet – those that weren’t down in the water. The market stalls were splinters and ash.

Fifty feet away from him was a dragon, a black one he’d never seen before. The dragon was nose to nose with the blood-mage Kithyr.

‘You know what this is!’ roared the mage. At least the words came from the Kithyr’s mouth, but they didn’t sound anything like him. He held the spear high, poised to throw it. ‘Do you remember us, brother? Do you remember what we are?’ There were other men around the mage, slack and stupid-looking. For some reason they weren’t running away. Kemir couldn’t for the life of him imagine what that reason could be. Climbing to his feet, he slowly took an arrow and nocked it. The arrow flights were wet. The string was wet. Not good.

The black dragon lifted its tail, reached over its head, picked up three of Kithyr’s men and ate them. The rest, at last, ran away, and the blood-mage faced the dragon alone.

No, not quite alone. Suddenly there was another man standing next to him. Kithyr screamed and his hand, the one holding the spear, just seemed to fall off his arm. He crumpled to his knees and toppled over.

So much for that then. An arrow saved.

No, wait. That’s . . . That’s the Picker.

Bastard.

Kemir lifted his bow and aimed as best he could with a buggered arm, but by now the dragon had its tail wrapped around the Picker. And what were you going to to do, anyway? Shoot him before he gets eaten? Get back into the water and hope they don’t notice you, you idiot.

Fat chance of that. The gold dragon circled, over the town, already half wreathed in flames. It smashed down into the ground beside its black companion, shaking the earth with such force that Kemir nearly fell, and slashed back and forth with its tail. Walls cracked and tumbled as it cleared some space for itself. At first Kemir thought it hadn’t seen him, hadn’t felt him, but then it looked his way. Only a glance, but one that left no room for doubt. It knew he was here. And this one Kemir had seen before. One of the dragons Snow had freed from the Mountain King’s riders at the cliffs where the Worldspine met the sea.

He looked down into the water. Kat was still there, craning her neck to look back at him.

‘Stay where you are,’ he called. ‘No matter what you hear. No matter what happens to me, you stay where you are until they’re gone.’

The gold dragon was looking at him. I feel you, little one called Kemir. I know the taste of your thoughts.

Kemir lifted his bow again. ‘And I remember you too. Come and get me, dragon!’

The Picker threw his spear at the black dragon. There was a blur and a dragon’s scream and a flash of light so bright that Kemir reeled and fell. He screwed up his eyes and blinked, hard. When he could see again, the Picker was on the ground with the spear in his hand again. Kemir saw him throw it at the second dragon, saw him vanish into thin air, saw the dragon bat the spear away and lash at something with its tail.

The spear tumbled lazily through the air. It came down, jammed itself point first in the wood at Kemir’s feet and quivered.

Take us!

The voice in his head this time was no dragon. This was something else. Some things else. He took a step forward. Up close he recognised it. The Speaker’s Spear.

The black dragon was strangely still.

We kill dragons, said the spear.

On the shore, the gold dragon had the Picker impaled on the end of his tail. He dropped him into his mouth, bit him in half and turned to look at Kemir.

Leave, little one.

Kemir took the spear in both hands this time. Ignored the cold shiver that ran down his spine, the electric tingle that touched his skin. He wrenched it free of the planks and raised it high. Behind the dragon, Hammerford lay wreathed in smoke. A pall of it hung in the air, drifting slowly towards the river. He could hear the distant flames, the sounds of beams cracking and groaning, of buildings tumbling. There were probably lots of people noises too, shouting and screaming and cursing, but he couldn’t hear those over the roar of the town’s death.

The spear.

Amid the rubble and the bodies something moved. The figure of a man. In a flash, the dragon snatched him up. It took Kemir a second to realise that the dragon was holding Kithyr.

You know this one.

‘Yes. It’s all the same to me if you eat him, but don’t blame me if he doesn’t taste very nice.’ As he spoke, he could see the dragon’s claws turning slowly orange. Blood, perhaps. The dragon dropped the mage as though he’d been stung. He stamped on him twice, still holding his fore-limb out in front of him. Kemir felt the pain and the rage pulse out of the dragon in waves. What have you done to me?

The dragon’s claws, he saw, were melting. Little curls of stream rose from the talons and drops of something dark dripped from them and splashed onto the waterfront.

‘I’d go and see to that if I were you.’ He readied the spear to throw. The dragon turned, furious, but still didn’t strike. It stared at him.

You may keep your life if you give me the spear.

‘You’re running out of claws to hold it.’ The dragon’s fore-limb was little more than a stump now. The steaming had stopped, though.

You know what I am, little one called Kemir. I have seen your thoughts before and I see them now. Throw your spear if you wish. It is the Spear of the Earth. If your aim is true, nothing will turn it and I will die. If you miss, I will kill your mate first, the one who hides in the water beside you. I will roast her slowly. I will crush your bones and then you will listen to her screams. I will leave you beside her. You will be alive but you will be broken, so broken that you can barely move. The river will quench your thirst. For food I will leave you the roasted flesh of your mate. I will leave you alive to choose whether you eat her or starve. The other one was closer than you are now and the spear did not save him. Now give it to me!

There were probably the best part of couple of hundred corpses littered about. Kemir took a step and then stopped. He lowered the spear and then raised it again. If the dragon wanted him dead, why was he still alive? It could burn him from the air. Could burn him from where he stood right now. Could pick out pieces of building and throw them at him. He might evade the first boulder, the first blast of fire, but sooner or later the dragon would get him.

How long will your mate remain down there in the river? She is tired, Kemir. And cold. Give me the spear, little one. That is all I desire of this place. Give it to me and I will be gone. I will tire of this soon enough and then I will kill you for it.

It dares not strike you. Kemir jumped. The new voices in his head were the spear itself, harsh and violent and metal. We will protect you. Strike at us and we strike back. That is what we are. The dragon knows this.

The dragon twitched and Kemir felt its anger. Give it to me, little one. It is not what you think.

An interesting thing to say, since he hadn’t the first idea what it was that he did think. He waited, but the spear stayed silent. He could feel it, though, a gentle power coursing down his arm, filling him with certainty. What are you then? What are you supposed to do?

Give it to me and I will go. The dragon turned to face Kemir squarely. It rocked back on its hind legs and flapped its wings a couple of times. Its tail flicked restlessly from side to side. Readying itself to spring.

He was moving before he even knew it. Wasn’t even sure why, except that simply standing rooted to the spot while a dragon pounced on him was stupid. He was running, screaming, spear raised. The dragon drew its head back and Kemir’s arm did the same. Kemir’s arm and the dragon flew forward in the same moment. The spear lanced through the air and vanished into a blossoming cloud of fire. Kemir hurled himself sideways, rolled across the jetty and fell over the edge. He closed his eyes. Fire filled the air. Heat seared his skin and then the water reached up and sucked him down into its cold roar. He thrashed blindly. Near him something vast smashed into the river. The dragon, it couldn’t be anything else. For a moment the world filled with light, one great flash of it. He pawed at the water, flailing helplessly until his hands touched something solid; he pulled himself towards it and then hurled himself to the surface. His head burst back into the air. The last fragments of the jetty were gone, smashed to splinters. The golden dragon lay half in the water, half out, head raised, wings and claws outstretched and reaching right over Kemir’s head. It wasn’t gold any more, it was grey. Turned to stone.

Kemir stood up. Here by the shore the river water came up to his chest. He wasn’t going to die after all. He wasn’t going to drown and he wasn’t going to burn and he wasn’t going to be torn to pieces.

I killed a dragon. The thought hit him like the river. Me. I killed a dragon.

He was grinning like an idiot. ‘Kat! I killed a dragon! Look . . .’

The grin faded. Where the jetty jutted out into the water, where he and Kataros had hidden themselves, nothing was left except shattered wood. He splashed towards where she had been. His feet slipped out from under him and he fell back into the water. He sank under, thrashed and flailed, hauled himself up again, spluttered and splashed and pulled himself towards the shore. It took him another few minutes to find a place where he could climb up out of the water and make his way back to where the dragon lay.

‘Kat!’ There was no sign of her. The post that they’d both clung to was gone. The spear was gone too. Sunk beneath the water or stuck into the petrified dragon somewhere where Kemir couldn’t see it. He couldn’t bring himself to climb onto its stone back to look for it. Even touching the dragon felt strange. It was cold. He’d never known a dragon be cold.

He ran up and down the riverbank but there was no sign of her. Bits and pieces of debris, bodies and the shattered remains of boats littered the shore. The air was thick with smoke now, bitter and choking. He could barely see between blinking his eyes clear of tears, but the river was quiet and dead. No one splashing about and shouting for help.

Kataros was the one who’d pushed him into the water in the first place. She was the one who’d helped him find the pile to hold on to. She could swim; he’d seen her. Maybe . . . Maybe when she was knocked free, she had swum down the river away from the fire. Maybe she was just fine. A little cold but otherwise just as perfect as ever.

And maybe holding that spear for a while made me the new speaker. He cleared his eyes once more and peered out at the dark water. I tried. I really did try. Blindly, he set off downstream along the bank. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Kat, in another life where endings were happy and when unexpected things happened they were sometimes good. Or her body. At least then he’d know she was dead and he wouldn’t be left to choose between guilt and futile hope.

Or the spear, if he was feeling absurdly optimistic. Whatever that thing was, no one was going to say no to something that could turn live dragons into statues. That would be worth passage on a Taiytakei ship, wouldn’t it? Passage for two even.

‘Kat! Kat!’ What could turn a dragon into stone. There was a story about that, wasn’t there? Dragondale, pox-ridden ghost town on the edge of the Blackwind Dales on the Evenspire Road. A nothing place except for the statue there. A dragon, life-sized. He’d seen it once. Impossibly detailed. Turned to stone by Narammed, the locals said. Narammed the Dragonslayer, first Speaker of the Realms. Rubbish. Everyone who travelled the Evenspire Road knew that. Joked and laughed about the inbred peasant folk of Dragondale who never left their own villages.

Rubbish. Yeah. And what would Narammed’s Spear be doing out here anyway?

‘Kat!’ His heart was beating fast, still. She couldn’t be dead. He’d promised to look out for her. He stopped, opened his mouth, let out a roar. ‘I killed a dragon for you! Don’t you fucking dare be dead!’

No one answered. After an hour of looking, he finally gave up. The tears in his eyes were dry again by then, turned to salt. After that, as he wandered the riverbank, he was mostly looking for a boat. The town was dead, burning nicely. The villages and farms around it would fill up with refugees. There would be people begging for food and a place to sleep, people with money prepared to pay whatever it took and being charged everything they had. There would be thieving, mugging, probably the odd murder, maybe a lynch mob or two. And then there’d be him, a sell-sword from the mountains. A boat would take him away from all that. A boat would take him to Furymouth.

Alone.

Could have taken us both.

No. She couldn’t leave him alone. Not now. He wasn’t even looking properly any more, just wandering aimlessly, thinking about her. Wishing for something different.

‘Hey!’ The sound of another voice battered into his thoughts. When he turned, he saw a cluster of ragged ash-streaked men peering out from a copse of trees. There must have been about a dozen of them. Instantly his hand went to his knife, only to discover he’d lost it. They were unarmed as far he could tell, but there were quite enough to take him to the ground if they were desperate enough.

‘Hey.’ He’d lost his bow too. Pity. The nearest of the men, the one who’d come out into the open, was no more than thirty feet away, but that would still have been far enough to put a couple of arrows in him before he closed the distance.

The man lifted up his hand. Now, too late, Kemir saw the stone he was holding. ‘Dragon-rider!’ The man spat a curse, threw his stone and charged. Behind him, more townsfolk poured out of the trees. He saw enough of them to realise he’d been wrong: there were more like twenty, maybe even more than that. He turned and ran.

‘I’m not . . .’ Stupid armour. Should have dumped it. Should have . . .

A hand caught his shoulder. He jabbed an elbow behind him. The hand let go, but it cost him a precious moment. A second later another hand clawed at him, missed, then another, and then something snatched his legs from under him and hurled him forward. He rolled, tried to pull away, but they were on him, far too many to stand and fight, raining down fists, punching and kicking him until finally he let go and everything went quiet and still.