DRAGON’S TEETH

by Alex Irvine

* * * *

Alex Irvine is best known for his novels A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier, The Narrows, and Buyout. His story “Wizard’s Six” in our June 2007 issue marked his first venture into High Fantasy genre. Now he returns to the same milieu with a story that is neither a sequel nor a prequel, or maybe it’s both. It’s a broader tale, and elements of “Wizard’s Six” are encompassed in it, so if anything here seems familiar to you, that’s just an old memory echoing in your head. (And if you want to check it, go to our Website, where “Wizard’s Six” will be posted for a month.)

I: The Tomb

They brought the singer to the obsidian gate and waited. A sandstorm began to boil in the valley that split the mountains to their west. Across the miles of desert, they watched it rear and approach. Still the singer did not sing. She was blind, and had the way of blind singers. They were as much at the mercy of the song as anyone else.

All of them were going to die in the sandstorm. At least the guard captain, Paulus, hoped so. If the sandstorm did not kill them, whatever was in the tomb would. Of the two deaths, he much preferred the storm. Two fingers of his right hand touched his throat and he hummed the creed of his god, learned from the Book at the feet of a mother he had not seen since his eighth year. The reflex was all that mattered. The first moon, still low over the mountains, vanished in the storm a moment after the mountains themselves.

The singer began to sing. Paulus hated her for it, but with the song begun, even killing her would not stop it. In one of the libraries hung the severed head of a singer, in a cage made of her bones. No one living could remember who she was, or understand the language of the song. The scholars of the court believed that whoever deciphered the song would know immortality.

They were at the mouth of a valley that snaked down from the mountains and spilled into a flat plain that once had been a marsh, a resting place for migrating birds. The tomb’s architect, according to the scholars, had believed that the soul’s migration was eased by placing the tomb in such a place. In the centuries since the death of the king, his world had also died. The river that fed the marshes shifted course to the south; the desert swept in. Paulus scanned the sky and saw no birds.

At first he found the song pleasing. The melody was unfamiliar to him, in a mode that jarred against the songs he remembered from his boyhood. Then all the gates in his mind boomed shut again. He was not a boy taken into the king’s service who remembered the songs his mother might have sung. He was the guard captain Paulus and he was here in the desert to have the singer sing her song, and then to die.

Why, they had not been told. The tomb was to be opened. Paulus was a soldier. He would open the tomb. In doing so, he would die, but Paulus did not fear death. He had faced it in forms seen by few other men, had survived its proximity often enough that it had grown familiar. Fatalism was an old friend. The song made his teeth hurt; no, not the song, but some effect of the song. In this place, it was awakening something that had slumbered since The Fells was a scattering of huts on the riverbank. This king had died so long ago that his name was lost. At his death the desert had been green. The world changed, aged with the rest of them. In the desert, you breathed the air of a world where everything had happened already, and it made you feel that you could never have existed.

The obsidian gate shifted with a groan and the wind rose. Sand cascaded down the walls, revealing worked stone, as the singer’s song began the work of undoing a burial that had taken the desert centuries to complete. The dozen soldiers with Paulus shifted on their feet, casting glances back and forth between the gate and the approaching storm. They rested hands on sword hilts, gauged the distance to their horses; Paulus could see each of them running through a delicate personal calculation, with the storm on one side and a deserter’s crucifixion on the other.

At the mouth of the tomb, at the end of his life, Paulus had only gossip to steer by. Someone important, a merchant named Jan who had the king’s ear, wanted to free the spirit that inhabited the tomb. The king had agreed. Paulus wondered what favor he owed that made him willing to cast away the lives of a dozen men. Perhaps they would not die. Still, they had ridden nine days across the desert, to a tomb so old and feared that it existed on maps only through inference; the desert road bent sharply away from it, cutting upward to run along the spine of a line of hills to the north before coming back down into the valley and following the ancient riverbed up to the Salt Pass, from which a traveler could see the ocean on a clear day. Paulus wondered what in the tomb had convinced the road builders to believe that three days’ extra ride was worth it.

The singer wept, whether in ecstasy or sorrow Paulus could not tell. Swirls of sand reared in the figures of snakes all around them, striking away in the rising wind. The obsidian gate was open an inch. The wind scoured sand away from the front of the tomb, revealing a path of flat stones. Another inch of darkness opened up. The singer’s vibrato shook slivers from the gate that swept away over their heads like slashes of ink inscribed on the sky. Slowly the gate shivered open, grinding across the stones as the singer began to scream. The soldiers broke and ran; Paulus let them go, to die in whatever way they found best. A sound came from the tomb, answering the singer, and the harmony of voices living and dead burst Paulus’s eardrums. Deaf, he felt the wind beat his face. Darkness fell as the storm swallowed the sky. The air grew thick as saliva. The sand undulated like a tongue. From the open gate of the tomb, Paulus smelled the exhalation of an undead spirit. He drew his sword, and then the sandstorm overtook them.

* * * *

When it had passed, Paulus fumbled for the canteen at his belt. He rinsed his eyes, swished water around in his mouth and spat thick black gunk ... onto a floor of even stones. He was in the tomb, without memory of having entered. Water dripped from his beard and he felt the scrape and grind of sand all over his body. He was still deaf. His eardrums throbbed. Where was the rest of the guard? He turned in a slow circle, orienting himself, and stopped when he was facing the open doorway. A featureless sandscape, brushed smooth by the storm and suffused with violet moonlight, stretched to an invisible horizon. The skin on the back of Paulus’s neck crawled. He turned around to face into the tomb, growing curious. He had enough oil for a torch. Its light seemed a protective circle to him as he ventured into the tomb to see what might have been left behind when the spirit emerged into the world. What it might do was no concern of his. He had been sent to free it; it was free. The merchant in The Fells had what he had paid for.

Torch held off to his left, sword in his right hand, Paulus walked along the narrow entry hall. He went down a stairway and at the bottom found the open sepulcher. The ancient king’s bones lay as they had been left. His hair wisped over a mail coat that caught the torchlight.

Am I to be a graverobber? Paulus thought. The spirit was fled. Why not?

He took a cutting of the king’s hair, binding it with a bit of leather from the laces of his jerkin. Arrayed about the king’s body were ceremonial articles: a sword pitted and brittle with age, jars that had once held spices and perfumes, the skeletons of a dog and a child. Paulus went through it all, keeping what he knew he could sell and ignoring anything that looked as if it might be infected with magic. He worked methodically, feeling distanced from himself by his deafness. After an hour’s search through the main room of the tomb and an antechamber knee-deep in sand from the storm, he had a double handful of gold coins. Everything else he saw—a sandstone figurine with obsidian eyes, a jeweled torc obscured by the king’s beard, a filigreed scroll case laid diagonally into a wall alcove just inside the door—made him leery of enchantment. The gold would do.

Leaving the tomb, he stumbled over the body of the singer, buried in a drift of sand just inside the shattered gate. There was no sign of the rest of his men. It disturbed Paulus that he had no memory of entering the tomb as the storm broke over them, but memory was a blade with no handle. When it failed, best to live with the failure and live to accumulate new memories. He took another drink, scanned the desert for sign of the horses, and gave up. Either he would walk back, or he could cross the mountains and sail around the Cape of Thirst from the city of Averon. The boat would be quicker and the coastal waters less treacherous than the desert sands. Paulus turned west.

* * * *

II: The Fells

In three days, he was coming down the other side of the pass. Two days after that, he was sleeping in the shadow of wine casks on the deck of a ship called Furioso. On the twelfth day after walking out of the tomb, Paulus stepped off the gangplank into the dockside chaos of The Fells, and wound his way through the city toward the Ridge of the Keep. He wondered how the merchant Jan would know that the spirit was freed, and also how Mikal, the marshal of The King’s Guard, would react to the loss of his men.

To be the sole survivor of a battle, or of an expedition, was to be presumed a liar. Paulus knew this. He could do nothing about it except tell what portion of the truth would serve him. Any soldier learned that truths told to superiors were necessarily partial.

Mikal received his report without surprise, in fact without much reaction at all. “Understood,” he said at the end of Paulus’s tale. “His Majesty anticipated the possibility of such losses. You have done well to return.” Mikal wrote in the log of the Guard. Paulus waited. When he was done writing, Mikal said, “You will return to regular duties once you have repeated your story for Jan Destrier.”

So Paulus walked back through The Fells, from the Ridge of the Keep down into the market known as the Jingle and then upriver past the quay where he had disembarked from Furioso, to tell his story to a man named for a horse. In the Jingle he remembered where as a boy he had performed acrobatics for pennies, and where his brother Piero had saved his life by changing him into a dog and then saved it again by trading one of his eyes for a spell. Paulus had not seen his brother in years. So much in one life, he thought. I was a boy, feeding chickens and playing at being a pirate. Then I was in The Fells, rejected from the King’s service. Then I did serve the King, and still do. I have fought in his wars, and killed the men he wanted killed, and now I have released the spirit of a dead king into the world to satisfy an arrangement whose details I will never know.

But whom have I ever stood for the way Piero stood for me?

Jan Destrier’s shopfront faced the river across a cobblestoned expanse that was part street and part quay. There was no sign, but Paulus had been told to look for a stuffed heron in the doorway. He could not remember who had told him. Mikal? Unease roiled his stomach, but his step was sure and steady as he crossed the threshold into Jan Destrier’s shop. The merchant was behind a counter through whose glass top Paulus could see bottles of cut crystal in every shape, holding liquids and pooled gases that caught the light of a lantern hung over Jan Destrier’s head. He was a large man, taller than Paulus and fat in the way men allowed themselves to get fat when their lives permitted it. At first Paulus assumed the bottles held perfume; then he saw the alchemical array on a second table behind the merchant and he understood. Jan Destrier sold magic.

At once Paulus wanted to run, but he was not the kind of man who ran, perhaps because he did not value his life highly enough to abase himself for its sake. He hated magic, hated its unpredictability and the supercilious unction of the men who brokered its sale, hated even more the wizards of the Agate Tower who bound the lives of unknowing men to their own and from the binding drew their power. Once, drunk, Paulus and a groom in the castle stables named Andrew had found themselves arguing over the single best thing a king could do upon ascending the throne. Andrew, hardheaded and practical, wanted a decisive war with the agitating brigands in the mountains to the north; Paulus wanted every wizard and spell broker in The Fells put to the sword. The conversation had started off stupid and grown worse as the bottle got lighter.

Now here he was in the shop of a broker, sent by a superior on business that concerned the king. Paulus could spit the broker on his sword and watch him die in the facets of his crystal bottles, but he himself would die shortly after. It was not his kingdom and never would be. He was obligated to carry out the orders he had been given.

“Jan Destrier,” he said. “Mikal the king’s marshal sent me to you.”

“You must have something terribly important to tell me, then,” Destrier said. “Tell it.”

“I led a detachment of the Guard out into the desert, where the Salt Pass Road bends away from the dry riverbed,” Paulus said. “We had a singer with us. She opened a tomb, and the spirit of the king buried there was freed.” He felt like he should add something about the deaths of the singer and his men, but Jan Destrier would not care. “As you requested,” he finished.

“There has been a misunderstanding,” Destrier said. “I did not wish the spirit to escape.”

Paulus inclined his head. “Beg pardon, that was the order I received.”

“As may be.” Destrier beckoned Paulus around the counter. “Come here.” Paulus did, and the merchant stopped him when he had cleared the counter. “What I wanted was for the spirit to come here. That was what the singer was for. Well, partly.”

“Then permit me to convey my regrets at the failure of the King’s Guard,” Paulus said. “The spirit came out of the tomb, but I did not see it after that. There was a storm.”

“I’m sure there was,” Destrier said. “There almost always is. Never fear, the spirit arrived just as I had hoped.” He held up a brass instrument, all curls and notched edges. Paulus had never seen its like before. “You were kind enough to bring it along with you. Or, perhaps I should say that it was kind enough to bring you along with it.”

No, Paulus thought. If the spirit was there, then it saw me robbing the tomb. He closed his fingers around the cutting of the king’s hair, thinking that if he could destroy the fetish—crisp it in one of the candle flames that burned along the edges of the merchant’s table—that perhaps the spirit would no longer be able to find him. Already he was too late. The spirit, enlivened by some magnetism of the merchant’s, drained the strength from his hands. Paulus felt the whisper of its soul in his brain, like the echo of wind in the black silence of a tomb. His legs were the next to go. His arms jerked out looking for something to hold onto, but nothing was there, and when the numbness crept past his knees, Paulus crumpled to the floor. He felt the paralysis like a drug, spinning his mind away from his body until at last he lost touch even with his senses and fell into a dream that was like dying.

“I thought it would ride the singer,” Jan Destrier said. “How odd that it chose you instead.”

* * * *

He did not know how long the stupor lasted. When he regained his senses, everything about him was as it had been before: the table littered with alchemical vessels and curling parchment, the border of pinprick candle flames, the batwing eyebrows of the merchant shadowing his eyes. The merchant looked up as Paulus stirred. “You have performed admirably,” he said. “It’s not every man who would have survived the initial possession, and even fewer live to tell of the extraction.”

There would be nothing to tell, Paulus thought. He had no memory of it.

“Where has the spirit gone, then?” he asked. It would come for him, of that he was sure. It had ridden him back to The Fells and now that it was free it would exact some revenge for his spoliation of its tomb. Perhaps it would ride him back, if by coming it had fulfilled whatever geas the merchant had laid on it. Then it would abandon him in the sands to die, the way he had thought he would die when the first notes of the singer’s song had begun to resonate in the stones of the tomb.

“I have it here.” Destrier produced a cucurbit stoppered with wax, and filled with a swirling fluid. “The stopper is made from the catalyst. When I apply heat, it will melt into the impure spirit, and the reaction will precipitate the spirit into another glass. This essence is my stock in trade. You are familiar with the magic market?”

“I know of it,” Paulus said. “I have never made use of it.” This was a lie, but Paulus had no compunction about lying to merchants, who were in his experience congenital liars. Twice in his life, his brother had spent magic on him.

“Well, do keep me in mind if you ever find yourself in need,” the merchant said.

Paulus’s curiosity got the better of him. He framed his question carefully, already outlining a strategy for evading and defeating the spirit. But first he had to know as much as possible about its nature. “Is there magic in the spirit because it died having not used its own? How do you know it has any?”

“Magic is more complicated than the nursery rhymes and old wives’ tales would have it,” the merchant said. “Yes, every human is born with a spark, and may use it. But other forms of enchantment and power inhere in the world. In stones, in articles touched by great men or tainted by proximity to unexpected death. These can be refined, their magic distilled and used. This is what I do. In the case of spirits, and whether their magic results from unused mortal power or something else,” he went on, “it is not what the mathematicians would call a zero-sum endeavor. By trapping the spirit, I trap the potential for its magic that it has brought back from the other world. Distilled and processed, this magic can be sold just as any other. Although the nature of the spirit makes such magics unsuitable for certain uses.”

The echoes of the possession still sounded in the hollows of Paulus’s mind. He heard the merchant without active understanding. “We are finished here?” he asked.

“Quite,” the merchant said. “Do convey my commendation of your performance to your superior officers.”

“A commendation would carry more weight coming from yourself,” Paulus said.

The merchant scribbled on a parchment, folded it, and sealed it. “Then let us hope the weight of it does not overburden you,” he said. Paulus left him setting small fires under the alembic that would purify the spirit’s essence into a salable bit of magic.

* * * *

He delivered the merchant’s commendation to Mikal because not to do so would have been stupid. Then he set about shaping a plan to get that distilled element of magic back from the merchant before he sold it, and in its use an unsuspecting client became a tool for the spirit’s vengeance on Paulus. He did not have enough money to buy the magic and knew that he could not trade his own; the essence of the undead spirit was doubtless more powerful. He could take it by force, but he would have to kill the merchant, and then leave The Fells—and the King’s service—forever. The cowardice of this path repelled him. He owed the King his life. Twice over. He did not love the King, but Paulus understood obligation.

It was obligation that brought him to the seneschal’s chamber after word of the merchant’s commendation circulated through the court. Mario Tremano had once been the king’s tutor. Now much of the court’s business was quietly transacted by means of his approval. He was a careful man, an educated man, and a cruel man. Paulus feared him the way he feared all men who loved subtlety. It was tradition in The Fells for scholars to wield influence, but it was also tradition for them to overreach; as Piero often joked, the scholar’s stooped posture cried out for straightening on the gallows. Paulus went to Mario Tremano’s chamber wondering if Jan Destrier’s commendation had made him useful, or doomed him. The only way to find out was to go.

Nearing seventy years of age, Mario cultivated the appearance of a scholar despite his wealth and the raw unspoken fact of his power. He wore a scholar’s simple gown and black cap, and did not braid his beard or hair. “Paulus,” he said as his footman escorted Paulus into his study. “You have attracted attention from powerful friends of the King.”

“I have always tried to serve the King,” Paulus said.

“And serve the King you have,” Mario said with a smirk. Paulus noted the insult and folded it into his understanding of his situation. It was hardly the first time he had heard cutting remarks about the part of his life he’d spent as a dog. The more venomous ladies of the court still occasionally yipped when they passed him in the castle’s corridors. Eleven years had done little to dull the appeal of the joke. The seneschal paused, as if waiting for Paulus to react to the slight. “Now, in our monarch’s autumn years, you have a glorious chance to perform a most unusual service,” he went on.

“However I may,” Paulus said. He had heard that the king was unwell, but Mario’s open acknowledgment suggested that the royal health was on unsteadier footing than Paulus had known. He was ten years older than Paulus, and should still have been in the graying end of his prime.

“Your willingness speaks well of you, Captain.” Mario spread a map on a table below a window that faced out over The Fells and weighted its edges with candlesticks. Paulus saw the broad estuary of the Black River, with The Fells on its western side. The great Cape of Thirst swept away to the southwest, ending in a curl sheltering Averon. To the north and west, Paulus saw names of places where he had fought in the king’s wars: Kiriano, Ie Fure, the Valley of Caves. This was the first time he had ever seen such a map. It made the world seem at once larger, because so much of it Paulus had never seen, and smaller, because it could be encompassed on a sheet of vellum.

The seneschal tapped a location far to the north. Mare Ultima, Paulus read. “How long do you think it would take you to get there?”

Paulus looked at the distance between The Fells and Averon, which was twelve days on horse. Then he gauged the distance from The Fells to Mario’s fingertip, taking into account the two ranges of mountains. “Six weeks,” he guessed. “Or as much as eight if the weather is bad.”

“The weather will be bad,” Mario said. “Of that you can be sure. Winter falls in September in that country.”

It was late in June. Paulus waited for the seneschal to continue his geography lesson, but a sharp question from the chamber door interrupted them. “What have you told him?”

Paulus was kneeling as he turned, the rich tones of the queen’s voice acting on his muscles before his brain registered what had been said. He dared not look at her, for fear that he would fall in love as his brother had. This fear had accompanied him for the past eleven years, since he had reawakened into humanity. She had done it, bought the magic to restore his human form, as a reward to his brother for his long service as the king’s fool. His brother was blind now, and loved the queen for her voice and her scent and the sound of her gown sweeping along the stone floors. Paulus carried a mosaic of her in his head: the fall of her hair, caught in a thin shaft of sunlight; a line at the corner of her mouth, which had taught Paulus much about the passage of years; a time when an ermine stole slipped from her shoulder and Paulus caught his breath at the sight of her pulse in the hollow of her throat. He believed that if he ever looked her full in the face, and held her gaze for a heartbeat, that love would consume him.

“Your Majesty,” Mario said. “He has as yet only heard a bit about the seasons in the north.”

“Rise, Captain,” the queen said. Paulus did, keeping his eyes low. To the seneschal, the queen said, “Well. Perhaps you should tell him what we are about to ask him to do.”

“Of course, Your Majesty. Captain, what stories have you heard about dragons?”

Paulus looked up at the seneschal. “Of dragons? The same stories as any child, Excellency. I think.”

Mario retrieved a book from a shelf behind his desk. He set it on the map and opened it. “A natural history,” he said. “Written by the only man I know who has ever seen a dragon. A source we can trust. Can you write?”

Paulus nodded.

“Then you must copy this,” Mario said, “while we instruct you in the details of your task.”

Paulus took up a quill and began to write. Dragons are solitary beasts, powerful as whales and cunning as an ape. They mate in flight only, and the females are never seen except at these moments. Where they nest and brood, no man knows.... At some point during the lesson that followed, the queen touched Paulus on the shoulder. It felt like a blessing, an expression of faith. His unattainable lady who had given him back the shape of a man was now setting him a quest, and though he would probably die, he would undertake the quest feeling that she had offered him a destiny.

His task was this: in the broken hills between the northernmost range of mountains and the icy Mare Ultima, there lived a dragon. Extremes of heat and cold are the dragon’s love. In caves of ice and on the shoulders of volcanoes, there may they be found in numbers. Once, before ascending the throne, the king had hunted it, and survived the failure of the hunt. It was the queen’s wish that before he died, her husband should know that he had outlived the dragon. A dragon might live hundreds of years. No man can be certain, because no man lives as long as a dragon. It was to be her death-gift to him, in thanks for the years they had spent as man and wife. “He has lived a life as full as mortal might wish,” she said. “Yet this memory hounds him, and I would not have it hound him when he is in his grave.”

“Your Majesty, it will not,” Paulus said. Whether he meant that he believed he would kill the dragon, or meant only that worldly desires did not accompany spirits, he could not have said. Many tales and falsehoods exist regarding magical properties of the dragon’s blood. These include...

“How are we to know it is done?” the seneschal said.

“What token would His Majesty wish, as proof of the deed?” Paulus asked the queen. He kept his eyes on the page, and the nib of the quill wet ... language of birds, which some believe to derive their origin from a lost race of smaller dragons quite gone from the world.

“On the king’s thigh is a scar from the dragon’s teeth,” she said, “and under his hair a scar from its tail. I would have its long teeth and the tip of its tail. The rest you may keep. I care not for whatever treasure it might hoard.”

In fact, according to the seneschal’s book, dragons did not hoard treasure. They care not for gold or jewels, but such may be found in their dens if left by those who try to kill a dragon and fail. It is said that such treasure grows cursed from being in the dragon’s presence, but place no faith in this superstition. Paulus copied this information down without relaying it to the queen. “Captain,” Mario said. “Jan Destrier spoke well enough of you that you perhaps should visit him before you embark. He certainly would have something to assist you.”

“Many thanks, Excellency,” Paulus said. “Would it be possible to put something in writing, that there is no confusion on the merchant’s part?”

“I hope you do not express doubt as to my word,” the seneschal said.

Although the dragon is said to speak, it does not. Some are said to mimic sounds made in their presence, as do parrots and other talking birds, but I do not know if this is true. Paulus was almost done copying the pages. His hand hurt. He could not remember ever having written three pages at once. “Beg pardon, no, Excellency,” he said. “I doubt only the merchant’s memory and attachment to his wares, and I have no gold to buy what he refuses to give.”

This was a carefully shaded truth. Gold Paulus had; whether it was enough to buy any useful magic, he did not know.

“Well said, Captain,” the queen commented.

The seneschal was silent. Out of the corner of his eye, Paulus could see that he was absolutely still. Paulus’s soldier instinct began to prickle on the back of his neck and he hesitated in his copying as his hand reflexively began to reach for his sword. There was bad blood in the room. It is said that a dragon recognizes the man who will kill it, and this is the only man it will flee. Contrary to this saying, I have never observed a fleeing dragon, nor expect to. Paulus would never be able to prove it, but in that instant he knew that when the king passed from this world, Mario Tremano would attempt to send his widow quickly after. He resolved without a second thought to kill the seneschal when he returned from his errand to the Mare Ultima. The dragon’s scale is fearsome strong, and will deflect nearly any blade or bolt, but its weaknesses are: inside the joints of the legs, near the anus, the eyes, under the hinges of the jaw.

“Yes. Apparently being around the court has taught you some tricks, Captain. You must leave immediately,” Mario said when Paulus finished copying. He handed Paulus a folded and sealed letter. It could have been a death warrant for all Paulus knew. “Our king must know that this is done, and his time is short.”

Paulus rose to leave, rolling the copied pages into a tight scroll that he slid under his belt. Twice now, the seneschal had slighted him. “You may choose any horse,” the queen said. “And the armory is yours.”

“Your Majesty’s generosity humbles me,” Paulus said.

“Apparently so much that you act the peasant in my presence,” she said, a bit archly. “Will you not look me in the face, Captain Paulus of the King’s Guard?”

I would, Paulus thought. How I would. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I fear that if I did, I would be unable to go from you, and would prove myself unworthy of your faith in me.”

“He certainly is loyal,” said Mario the seneschal. Paulus took his leave, right hand throbbing, slighted a third time in front of his queen. One day it would come to blades between him and the seneschal.

That was a battle that could not yet be fought. First, he must survive a long trip to the north and a battle with a dragon. It was said that only a king or a hero could kill a dragon. Paulus was not a king and he did not know if he was a hero. He had fought eleven years of wars, had killed men of every color in every territorial hinterland and provincial capital claimed by The Fells, had survived wounds that he had seen kill other men. Perhaps he had performed heroic deeds. If he survived the encounter with the dragon, the question would be put to rest.

He chose a steel-gray stallion from the stable, young but proven in the Ie Fure campaign the summer before. Andrew, emerging from the workshop where he repaired tack, said, “Paulus, you can’t mean it. That one’s Mikal’s favorite.”

“Andrew, friend, if the horse doesn’t come back, I won’t be coming, either. And if both of us do come back, I’ll have the court at my feet. So I have nothing to worry about from Mikal either way.”

“Court at your feet,” Andrew repeated. “How’s that?”

“The queen has sent me to kill a dragon.” Paulus said.

“There’s no such thing as dragons,” Andrew said.

“The queen thinks there are, and she wants me to kill one of them.” Paulus swung up onto the horse. “So I will. Now come with me to the armory.”

Paulus had never fought with a lance, but he had thrown his share of spears. He took three, and a great sword with a blade twice as wide and a foot longer than the long sword he’d carried these past six years. He added a short butchering knife with a curve near the tip of its blade, which he imagined to be a better tool for digging out a dragon’s teeth than his dagger. A sling, for hunting along the way, and a helmet, greaves, and gauntlets to go over the suit of mail that lay oiled and wrapped in canvas in one of Paulus’s saddlebags. The book had said nothing about whether dragons could breathe fire. If they could, none of his preparations would make any difference.

“Two swords, spears, knives,” Andrew said. “I’ll wager a bottle you can kill it just with the sling.”

“That’s not a bet you make with a man you think is going to survive,” Paulus said. Andrew didn’t argue the point.

“If I’m not back by the first of November, I won’t be back,” Paulus said. He clasped hands with Andrew and rode out of the keep into the stinking bustle of The Fells. The sun was sinking toward the desert that began a half-day’s ride west from the Black River’s banks. Paulus thought of the tomb, and the spirit, and grew uncertain about the plan that was already forming in his head. Twenty minutes’ ride through the city brought him to Jan Destrier’s door. He tied the horse and went inside.

The spell broker was cleaning a tightly curled copper tube. “Ah, the bearer of spirits is returned,” he said. “To purchase, no doubt.”

Paulus held out the letter from Mario Tremano. After reading it, the broker said, “I see. I am to assist you.”

“I am leaving on a quest given by the queen Herself,” Paulus said.

“A quest. Oh my,” Destrier said. “For what?”

“For something I will not be able to get without help from your stores.”

“Specificity, O Captain of the Guard,” Destrier said. “What is it you want? Luck? Do you wish not to feel cold, or fire? Thirst? Do you wish to be invisible, or to go nine days without sleep?”

“I wish the essence of the spirit I brought back to you,” Paulus said.

Destrier laughed. “I might as well wish the queen’s ankles locked around the back of my neck,” he said. “We’re both going to be disappointed.”

It was not Paulus’s life that mattered. Not his success or failure at killing the dragon. It was the murderous guile he had sensed in the presence of Mario Tremano and what that meant for the life of the queen after her husband was no longer there to be a useful asset to the seneschal. For her, Paulus would do anything. He stole nothing after killing Jan Destrier; he used the fetish of the dead king’s hair to find the essence of the spirit, which was an inch of clear fluid in a brass bulb the size of a fig. He tied it around his neck with a piece of leather, threading the binding of the fetish into the knot that held the bulb.

There would be consequences. If Paulus brought back the teeth and tail of the dragon, he would survive them; if he did not, it would not matter. On the street, he made no effort to hurry. Most of those who had heard Jan Destrier die would be more interested in plundering his expensive wares than in reporting that the killer was dressed in the livery of the King’s Guard. He rode for the North River Gate and out into the world beyond The Fells.

He did not know how much power was in the spirit’s essence, or of what kind. He did not know whether any of its soul survived inside the brass bulb. But he had a token of the body it had once animated, and he had six weeks to find out.

* * * *

III: The Quest

With ten days left in August, Paulus came down out of the mountains into the land that on Mario Tremano’s map looked like a thin layer of fat between the mountains and the Mare Ultima. He had seen snow three times in the mountains already and heard an avalanche on a warm day after a heavy storm. He had been traveling fifty days. Twice he had cut his beard with the butchering knife. He had killed one man so far, for trying to steal his horse. Mikal’s horse. He had hunted well, and so eaten well, and even traded some of his game for cheese and bread and the occasional piece of fruit at farmsteads and villages along the way.

He had also learned something of the nature of the spirit in the brass bulb that hung next to the fetish around his neck. If there was anything Paulus mistrusted more than magic, it was dreams, but nevertheless it was through dreams that he had begun to learn. He was sitting in front of a campfire built in the ribcage of a dragon, listening to the bones speak, telling him he knew nothing of dragons. Your book is full of lies, the voice said.

The Book is about faith and learning, Paulus replied, touching two fingers to his throat. The Journey and the Lesson. It was what his mother had taught him.

Idiot, the voice said. Your book about dragons is what I mean.

It may be, Paulus said.

It is.

He awoke from that first dream with the brass bulb unstoppered and held to his lips. “No,” he said, and stoppered it again. “So you do know me.”

He would have to be careful, he thought. Something of the spirit remained and he could not know whether it wished him good or ill. He would learn, and when the time came to face the dragon, he would hope he had learned enough.

The second dream took him after he rose in the night to piss into a creek in the foothills of the first mountain range that lay between him and the Mare Ultima. As he drifted back into sleep, he dreamed of walking out into that creek, trying to wash something from his skin that burned and sickened him. This is what you will feel, said the voice of the water over the rocks. This and much worse.

Paulus stopped and stood, dripping and naked, letting the feeling inhabit him, imagining what it would be like to withstand it and fight through it. How much worse? he asked ... and woke screaming in a predawn fog, with the gray stallion a shadow rearing at the agony in his voice.

The night of the first snow, as he crested the first pass and descended into a valley bounded by canyons and glaciers that curved like ribs into sparkling tarns, he was reminded of the first dream. He cut a lean-to from tree branches and packed the snow over and around it, then huddled under his blanket with a small fire at the mouth of the lean-to. When he slept, the voice was the sound of tree branches cracking under the weight of snow. I have killed dragons.

What does that matter to me? You cannot kill this one for me, and even if you could, it would shame me to permit it.

Shame, the voice cackled. It looks very different when you are dead.

Someday I will know that, Paulus said. But not soon.

Sooner than you wish, unless you listen.

Then talk, so I can decide if what you say is worth listening to.

You cut hair from my body, and took gold from my tomb, the voice said.

All the more reason to be suspicious of you.

With a cackle, the voice said, How much you think you know. Who guided you to the broker’s? And when you came back to the broker’s—do you think you found me? No, mortal man. I brought you to me. I would kill a dragon again.

A cold, shameful fear made Paulus moan in his sleep. The queen—

No. Her mind is her own. I was a king, and would not meddle with others of my station. You, on the other hand....

Paulus woke up. In the pages he had copied from Mario Tremano’s book, it was said that kings of old had killed dragons, and driven them to the wastes of the north and west. He rolled the brass bulb in his palms. The spirit had said that the book was full of lies. If the spirit told the truth, then kings of old had not killed dragons, which meant that the spirit was lying.

That is man’s logic, he thought, remembering a story from the Book in which a man tried to reason with lightning. Yes, the lightning had said. There is no flaw in your thought, save that it is man’s thought, and I am lightning.

Shaking out the blanket and refolding it over the horse’s back, Paulus found himself in the same position. In a week, or perhaps ten days, he would find the dragon. Then he would discover which lies the spirit was telling.

With ten days left in August, he came down out of the mountains and began asking questions. The people who hunted seals and caribou along the shores of Mare Ultima spoke a language he knew only from a few words picked up on campaigns, when mercenary companies had come down from this land of black rock and blue ice, bringing their spears and an indifference to suffering bred at the end of the world. He pieced together, over days, that there was a dragon, and that it slept in a cave formed after the eruption and collapse of a volcano. He worked his way across the country, eating white rabbits and salmon and the dried blubber of seals, building his strength, until he found the dragon’s cave.

The mountain still smoked. Standing on a ridge that paralleled the shore, some miles distant, Paulus looked south. The mountains, already whitening. North: water the color of his stallion, broken by ice floes all the way to a misty horizon. East: coastal hills, green and gray speckled with snow. West: more mountains, their peaks shrouded in clouds. The people he had spoken to said that in the west, mountains burned.

This was as good a place as any to find a dragon, Paulus thought. As good a place as any to die.

The dragon’s cave was a sleepy eye perhaps a half-mile up the ruined side of a mountain. The top of the mountain was scooped out, ringed with sharp spires; a waterfall drained what must have been an immense lake in the crater, carving a canyon down the mountainside and a new river through the hills to the Mare Ultima. Paulus could smell some kind of flower, and the ocean, and from somewhere far to the west the tang of smoke. He dismounted and began to prepare. First, the mail shirt, still slick with oil. Gauntlets, their knuckles squealing like the hinges of a door not hung true. Greaves buckled over his boots. The great sword across his back. Shield firm on his left forearm, spear in his right hand, long sword on his hip. The butchering knife sheathed behind his left hip.

Then he thought, No. This is man’s thinking, and I am going to fight the lightning.

He stabbed the spear into the ground, and let the great sword fall from his back. Setting his shield down, Paulus took off the gauntlets. He snapped the leather thong around his neck and unwound the binding of the fetish. With the butchering knife, he cut a tangled lock of his own hair. There was more gray in it than he remembered from the last time he had looked in a mirror, but he was forty-five years old now. He twisted the two locks of hair together into a tangle of black and gray long enough that he could wind it around the base of the middle finger on his right hand, and then in a figure-eight around his thumb. He bound it in place, and unstoppered the bulb. As he tipped a few drops of the fluid onto the place where the figure-eight crossed itself, he heard the voices of ice and snow, rocks and water, bones of dragons. He put a gauntlet on his right hand over the charm and tipped a few more drops into its palm. The rest he sprinkled over the blade of the sword. Then he cast the bulb away clinking among the stones.

It would work or it would not. Picking up his shield and holding his sword before him, Paulus picked his way at an angle up the slope toward the dragon’s cave. A voice in his head said, Now you know why I did not ride the singer.

* * * *

Afterward, he was screaming, and when she came to him, he thought he was being guided out of his life. She spoke, and soothed him, and left him there in his own blood, writhing as the dragon’s poison ate its way under his skin. The spirit was gone. In the echoes of its departure Paulus felt the slash of the dragon’s claws, shredding his mail shirt and the muscle underneath. When his body spasmed with each fresh wave of poisoned agony, the grating of the mail links on the stone floor of the cave was the sound of the dragon’s scales as it uncoiled and raised its head to meet him. The white of his femur and his ribs was the white of its bared fangs crushing his shield and snapping the bones in his wrist. And when he arched his back in seizure, as the poison worked deeper into his body, the impact of his head on the ground was the blinding slap of its tail and then the shock of his blade, driven home and snapped off in the hollow underneath its front leg. The dragon was dead and Paulus soon would be. He thrashed his right arm, flinging the bloody gauntlet away, and caught the fetish in his teeth. His face was slick with the dragon’s blood and his own tears. Gnawing the fetish loose, he spat it out. Free, he thought. Free to die my own death. O my queen....

And she was back, with a sledge freshly cut and smelling of sap. Paulus recognized the language she spoke, but couldn’t pick out the words. When she dragged him over the stones at the mouth of the cave, pain blew him out like a candle.

The next thing he could remember was the sound of wind, and the weight of a fur blanket, and the rank sweat of his body. He was inside, in a warm place. A creeping icy draft chilled his face. Paulus opened his eyes. The woman was stirring something in a pot over a fire. He tried to sit up and his wounds reawakened. The sound that came out of him was the sound wounded enemies made when the camp women went around the battlefield to kill them. The woman laid her bone spoon across the lip of the pot and came over to squat next to him. “Shhhhh,” she said. Black, black hair, Paulus thought. And black, black eyes. Then he was gone again.

It was quiet and dark when next he awoke. He heard the woman breathing nearby. He flexed his fingers, wondering that he could still feel all ten. Under the blanket, he began to explore his body. His left wrist was bound and splinted, and radiated the familiar pain of a healing broken bone. Heavy scabs covered the right side of his body from just below his shoulder all the way down to the knee. He wiggled his toes. Something was sticking out of the scabs, and after puzzling over it Paulus realized that the woman—or someone—had stitched the worst of his wounds, with what he could not tell. He was going to live. He knew the smell of infection and his nose could not find it. He had clean wounds. Bad wounds, but clean. They would heal. He would walk, and he would live. He saw details in the near-perfect darkness of the room: the last embers in the fire pit, the swell of the woman under her blankets. His fingers roamed over his body, feeling the pebbled scars where the dragon’s poison had burned him and the strangely smooth expanses that were without wounds. He flexed the muscles of his arms, and they hurt, but they worked. When he moved his legs, the deep tears in his right thigh cried out. Not healed yet, then. Putting that together with the way his wrist felt, Paulus guessed that it had been two weeks since the woman had found him in the mouth of the dragon’s cave.

The teeth, he thought. And the tail.

He must not fail the queen.

“The dragon,” he said to the woman the next morning. She shushed him. “I have to—”

Again she shushed him. Paulus sank back into the pile of furs and skins. He still had no strength. He watched her move around, taking in the details of her home. It was made of stone and wood, the spaces between the stones stuffed with moss and earth. One wall was a single slab of stone; a hillside, with three manmade walls completing the enclosure. Timbers slanted from the opposite wall to rest against the natural wall, covered with densely woven branches. Paulus couldn’t believe it could contain warmth, but it did. He threw his covers off, suddenly sweating in the fur cocoon. The woman did not react to Paulus’s nakedness. She opened a door he hadn’t noticed and the interior of the house lit up with sunlight reflected from deep drifts of snow. The snow must be waist-deep, Paulus thought. Perhaps the dragon’s cave was buried. Perhaps no one here wanted trophies from its carcass. Exhausted again, he did not resist when the woman settled covers back over him and went about her business. “Why did you save me?” Paulus asked her.

She shushed him, and again he fell asleep.

Gradually over the winter he learned more of her language, and she bits and pieces of his. From this he learned that she had hauled him to her home, put him on the pile of furs, and tended his wounds with skill that few surgeons in The Fells possessed. Or she was fortunate, and Paulus was strong. Perhaps he would have lived in any case, given shelter and food. He would never know.

His horse was outside, kept in an overhung spot along the bluffs that also made up the fourth wall of the house. As soon as he was strong enough, he went out to see it and found that someone in this icy wilderness knew something about horses; it was brushed, its hooves were trimmed. If these people had mastered ironworking, Paulus thought, the horse would have new shoes. The hospitality was humbling. He thanked her and asked her to thank whoever had taken care of the horse. About the dragon, she appeared confused when he finally made her understand that he had traveled for two months just to get pieces of it to take home. “For my queen,” he said. Though she understood the words, the concept made no sense to her. Arguing with lightning, Paulus thought. Her name meant Joy in her language. She lived alone. Her mother and father were dead, and this was their house. In the good-weather months, she fished and wove and tanned hides; in the winter, she kept to herself and wove cloth to sell the next summer. There was a village twenty minutes’ walk away. A man there wanted to marry her, but she would not have him. He was the one who had cared for the stallion.

Paulus thanked her again. She shrugged. What else would she have done?

Growing stronger, he went out into the snow dressed in clothes Joy made. He met a few of the villagers, who lost interest in him as soon as they confirmed that he had not made Joy his wife. The dragon, it seemed, had made little difference in their lives. It ate caribou and sea lions. There were plenty of both to go around. In The Fells, should he survive to return there, Paulus would be celebrated; here, he was a curiosity.

On one of the first spring days, smells of the earth heavy in his nose, Paulus went out from Joy’s house with the butchering knife tucked in his belt. He found his way to the dragon’s cave and went inside. It lay more or less as he had left it. His broken sword blade, its edges now rusted, protruded from behind its left front leg. Marveling, Paulus paced off the length of its body. Fifty feet. It was mostly still frozen. He laid out the canvas sheet he’d used to protect his armor and set to work hacking into the carcass with the butchering knife. Four fangs for the queen, and the tip of the tail. Then he gouged out most of the rest of its teeth, leaving those that broke as he worked them free of the jawbone. In the pages he had copied from Mario Tremano’s book were recipes for alchemical uses of the dragon’s eyes, as well as a notation that its heart was said to confer the strength of giants. The eyes came out easily enough; the heart was another matter. Paulus went to work prying loose the scales on its breast until he could crack through its ribs. The heart, larger than his head, was pierced six inches deep by the blade of his sword. Sweating in the cold, he cut it out and put it with the eyes. Then he added several dozen of its scales, each the size of his spread hand.

When he was done, he walked back to Joy, who was outside bartering a roll of cloth for the haunch of a moose killed by a villager who would have gladly given her the haunch, and anything else, if she would accept him. That night, Joy and Paulus ate moose near the fire. When they were done, she got up to put the bowls in water. He handed her his dagger, slick with grease, and she looked at it for a moment before slashing it across his right forearm.

Paulus sprang away from her, hand instinctively dropping toward a sword hilt that wasn’t there. “Joy!” he shouted, squaring off against her, glancing around for something he could use as a weapon. He had no doubt that he could overpower her, even weak as he still was, but no man ever went unarmed against an opponent with a knife if there was even a stick nearby that could improve the odds.

She pointed at his forearm. Unable to help himself, he looked. The skin was unmarked. Paulus looked back at her. She made no move to approach him; after a moment, she turned and dropped the knife into the pot of water with the bowls.

It is said of the dragon’s blood that washing in it renders human flesh invulnerable to blade or arrow, the seneschal’s book had said. Paulus had read over those lines the way he had the rest of the more fanciful passages, skeptically and with no effort to keep them in mind. But it was true. He had felt the blade hit his arm. It should have opened him up to the bone.

“Dragon,” Joy said, and began to wash the dishes.

She knew, Paulus thought. She was showing him. Not just the transformation of his skin wetted with the dragon’s lifeblood; she was showing him that he had survived.

“How,” he began, and stopped when he realized he had too many questions to ask, and no words to ask them, and that she had no words to answer. He watched her dry his dagger and set it aside on the table. Before she could pick up another dish, he caught her wrist and drew her toward him. Her expression changed and he thought she would pull away, but she let him draw her down into the furs. She kept her eyes locked on his. Paulus—who had once been a dog, and who had spoken to the dead, and who had winterlong danced on the line between life and death—knew that when she looked into his eyes, she was seeing a dead man she had once loved.

For him, too, she was someone else. The spill of her hair across his chest was the queen’s hair, caught in sunlight. Her body moving against his was the queen’s body, pledged to another. Her eyes shining in the last light of the fire were the queen’s eyes Paulus never dared to meet.

“He died out on the ice,” she said when he asked, a few days later. “Hunting whales.”

How long since he had had a woman? Nearly a year, Paulus thought. And he did not want to let this woman go. For her, perhaps longer. She said that her man who died hunting whales was her first, and only. The way she spoke of him made Paulus conscious that he had never felt that way about any woman but the queen, whom he could never have. The queen, with her dying husband and the seneschal Mario Tremano plotting against her. He had come to the ends of the earth, slain a dragon, to realize the futility of his desire. If he could not have her, he could at least save her. This, too, Joy had taught him. Paulus was stronger now. The time was coming when he would have to leave. The dragon’s heart and eyes were almost dried. He had carefully cleaned the bits of gum and blood from its teeth, for presentation to his queen. But he was not ready to leave yet. He started obliquely, and over the early weeks of spring more directly, gauging her reactions to the idea of coming south. He described the city, the Keep on the Ridge, the queen, his brother the fool. Subtlety never came easy to him and was impossible to maintain; on the first day in May, he told her that his errand was not yet complete. He must return to The Fells.

“I would have you come with me,” he said. They were tangled in a blanket and in each other’s scents. Night was falling. She would never know what it had cost him to speak the words. Having Joy meant acquiescing to the caprice of Fate that kept him apart from the queen he would love. Having Joy meant being a curiosity at court, the guard captain who had once been a dog and now had a wife with callused hands from a distant land, who had never seen silk. But he was willing. He would take her if she said yes.

“I would have you stay here,” Joy said. “But I know you will not. Go.”

“In a little while,” Paulus said.

Joy shook her head. “If you know that you are going, go,” she said. “Go to your queen. Go.”

“You saved my life,” he said. Meaning that he felt an obligation to her, but also that he believed she too was obligated, that once she had held his life in her hands, she was no longer able to stand back from him and watch him go. Man logic, he thought. And she is lightning.

“I am from this place,” Joy answered. “Someday when I am done mourning, I will take a man from the village, and there will be children in this house. I would take you if you would stay; but if you will not, go to your queen.”

There was nothing to say to this. Paulus was not going to stay and Joy was not going to go. She had nursed him back to health, but she did not want him. She wanted a fisherman, a black-haired hunter of moose and caribou, a second chance at her man who had died on the ice. Not a soldier from a foreign land, nearing his forty-seventh year, determined to finish a quest he had begun in honor of a woman he could never have. They both knew what it was to find solace for a little while and then reawaken into the desire for what they could never have, or never have again.

The next morning, Paulus saddled the horse and packed into its saddlebags the teeth and tail of the dragon, the scales, the heart, and the eyes. His sword and shield were broken, his armor shredded, his spear taken to hunt seals, the great sword ruined by a winter under snow. He had a thousand miles to cover with a knife and the sling, and a good horse. Mikal would be glad to see it, but not at all glad to see Paulus.

Perhaps the queen would be glad to see him. Perhaps.

Joy came out from the house with jerky and a fish. “I caught it this morning before you woke up. Your first meal when you ride away from the ocean should always be a fish,” she said. Paulus thought he understood. He swung up onto the horse and did not look back as he rode south, up the hill track toward the mountains.