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  Balur reached out, grabbed someone nearby, bit their face off, and laughed giddily as blood ran down his chin.

  This was what he lived for. This moment. This surrender. To say farewell to thought, to morals, to civility. To live beyond the boundaries of culture, and societal norms. This was life at its most pure, its most bestial. This was life without pretenses. All masks removed. Life reduced to meat, and bone, and fury.

  He pirouetted, brought his hammer up, clean through the body of… someone. Factions were meaningless at this point in the fight. The head of the hammer glistened above the fray, dripped blood. He brought it down and listened to the meaty crack of impact.

  Someone stabbed him. He felt the blade find a spot where his scales met, its tip slide inside him, puncturing muscle. He felt the pain, bright and hot. He laughed again, grabbed the sword blade, and then its owner. The sword wielder’s neck snapped in Balur’s fist.

  He descended into a bloody haze. The world was red and wet for a while. When he emerged he was, for a moment, disoriented. He pummeled a man in the face, trying to get his bearings.

  People were screaming, running, pushing to get past him. Villagers and guards alike. “Dragon!” they screamed. “Dragon! Mattrax wakes!”

  And then Balur saw it, bright and beautiful, blossoming in the back of the cave. Great gouts of fire that sparkled yellow and red in his dilated pupils.

  The dragon. That was why he had come here. To show the world that he could defeat a dragon. To make the dragon know his name even as he took its life.

  Some small, sobering part of Balur saw that fire and questioned if, just this once, wisdom shouldn’t be prevailing over bravado. A larger, drunker part of his mind shouted at that part to be fucking off. He was totally knowing what he was doing. Why was the other voice always nagging at him with its rational good sense? He was being a warrior, gods’ hex upon it. He was having to do certain things because they were being there. His actions were not having to make sense.

  He set his shoulder and charged into the depths of the cave, toward heat, fire, rage, and glory. Bodies bounced off him, scrambling to get away. All around him screams rose.

  “The dragon!”

  “The dragon!”

  “It’s going to kill us all!”

  No, thought Balur with a drunken grin. I am.

  He rounded the bend in the cave, skidded to a halt.

  Quirk stood there.

  No, floated there.

  The thaumatobiologist’s feet were a clear foot off the floor. Her robes billowed around her, rippling through the heat haze. She held her arms out, palms raised.

  And she was beautiful.

  Ribbons of fire danced from her hands. They wove together in complex patterns of slaughter. A hapless guard was caught in a stream of liquid flame. He didn’t even have a chance to scream. His blackened body skittered and danced. The dead lay all around her.

  She didn’t say anything, didn’t fix her gaze on anyone. She just wove her ribbons of fire back and forth in front of her. Where they struck the floor, explosions bloomed, spattering the bodies with glowing shrapnel.

  I, thought Balur, taking the scene in at a glance, would be totally hitting that. Then his eye fell on the dragon beyond her.

  Mattrax lay slumped over a vast hoard of gold and jewels, wings splayed in a sloppy half-collapsed pile. Drool was spilling from one corner of his mouth in a thick, ropy stream.

  Momentarily, Balur lost the power of speech. All he could utter was a single, guttural roar of hate. Rage. Bloodlust. Desire. He wanted that dragon. He wanted its blood on his skin. Its bone shards stuck into his cheeks.

  Waves of rage carried him forward, a misty cloud of hallucinogenic fury. He ducked and darted through Quirk’s tapestry of fiery destruction. Mattrax loomed in his vision, the vast face eclipsing everything else. The dragon was his world. Its death at his hands was as inevitable as the turning of the sun in the heavens. His hammer was above his head. His muscles burned with power, with the churning potential of death.

  He brought the hammer down, felt the impact run up his arm, felt the hammer head glance off the scales. He stepped back, slipping in the piles of coin that mired his feet.

  For a moment he thought he had achieved nothing. That this was all just a paltry lie, some drug-addled fantasy he had concocted to make himself feel better about the ignominy of his earlier defeat.

  But then he saw it. The thin hairline crack that ran down the scale he had struck, the clear fluid seeping out. Mattrax’s hide was not impenetrable. The dragon could be defeated. All that was needed was time.

  Balur brought his war hammer down again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.

  24

  Dragon Slayer

  Gripping his axe in both hands, Will crept into the antechamber before Mattrax’s cave. His heart sank. He had been hoping that the guard would be asleep, head sinking into his own obscene folds of blubber, soft as a down pillow. Instead, though, the guard was on his feet. Will had had difficulty imagining it before. He just hadn’t been able to work out the mechanics of those legs supporting that much bulk. And yet here it was before him.

  The guard had his back to Will, was leaning toward the door, head cocked to one side, listening. Despite the thickness of the metal, sounds of utter chaos rang out clearly: roars, screams, howls, the clash of steel, something wet and squelching. The smell of copper was ripe on the air.

  All in all, it rather reminded Will of a stag party he’d been to down in The Village. He’d stopped agreeing to go to them after that.

  Gods, what was happening down there? He didn’t know for sure, only that it was not in any part of what he had once laughingly called a plan. In fact, to the best of his memory the sound of bloody slaughter was the exact thing the plan had been supposed to avoid.

  There again, the plan had also meant to keep him out of situations like being alone in a room with one of Mattrax’s guards and an axe.

  Then Will realized that the guard hadn’t even twitched as Will entered the room. He was utterly focused on the door.

  The axe felt heavy in Will’s hands.

  Could he do it? Could he bury a blade in a man when his back was turned?

  Yes, he decided, I could. The gods killed, did they not? Hadn’t Lawl himself murdered thousands of men in fits of jealous rage? That said, Lawl had slept with Toil, his own daughter, and then Toil had married Cois, the child, so perhaps the gods didn’t always set the best example…

  Still, it was the sort of brutally practical thing that he could imagine Lette doing, and he was fairly sure this was a moment for brutal practicality.

  His palms slick with sweat, he took a step forward.

  “What do you think it is?”

  The guard’s voice rooted Will to the spot. The guard didn’t turn around, didn’t look at him. He spoke in a soft, almost conversational way.

  “Erm,” Will managed. He cleared his throat. What did you say to someone you were planning on murdering? That was a piece of etiquette his mother had never covered with him.

  “I thought it was a revolt at first,” the guard went on. “Them up top finally had enough and decided to do something about it. Happens every once in a while. Then the boss man, he cleans house. Spring cleaning, I call it.” He laughed softly to himself. A low, burbling sound like a spring brook trying to force its way through a block of lard. Then the sound skewed sideways into something less cheerful.

  “The thing is,” the guard went on, “I don’t hear Mattrax. There ain’t no roaring. There ain’t the crackle of corpses burning.” He shook his head. “No. I hear something else.” He reached back a stubby arm and beckoned to Will. “Come listen. See what you think.”

  Will hesitated. He was still holding the axe aloft. Except now that the conversation had started he didn’t feel murderous. Instead he felt terribly, terribly awkward.

  He let the axe sag, took a tentative step forward. He could get past this man some other way. Hell, he cou
ld probably open the flap and be through before the other even reacted. And with his girth, the guard certainly couldn’t follow that way.

  “Listen,” whispered the guard, still not looking at him.

  “Erm,” said Will, still not entirely sure what to say. He really had no desire to get much closer to the man.

  “I said,” the guard started, his voice rising in volume, “come here and—” He started to turn. His arm started to swing around. Will caught a glimpse of flashing steel. “Listen!” the guard bellowed.

  Will flung himself backward just as the fat guard lunged. The blade swished through the space that was until recently home to his stomach and its assorted bevy of essential organs.

  He reeled back, off-balance.

  “My house!” the guard screamed. “You bring drugged meat into my house! Feed it to my master! On my watch!”

  He was surprisingly fast for such a big man. His arm whipped back and forth, the blade a blur, slicing at Will’s stomach. Will backed up as the guard advanced, trying to get the axe in between them.

  “You tricked me,” spat the guard. His face was transformed, no longer morose, but instead contorted with rage. “It was my job to protect him. To feed him. And you poisoned him. Right in front of me!”

  The guard, Will realized, had at some point—sitting all alone in the dark and the heat—gone entirely insane.

  “Mattrax is a dragon,” he pointed out. “He controls the whole valley. I think he can get by without you.”

  This, it turned out, was not the right thing to say.

  “He needs me!” screamed the guard, and he lunged.

  Fast though he might be, the guard’s weight betrayed him in that moment. The lunge was pathetically short. Will, caught flat-footed by the abruptness of the move, felt only the slightest pinprick of the sword’s weight as it glanced off his chain mail.

  He brought his axe across his body in a short, sharp chopping motion. The blade crashed into the inside of the guard’s elbow. There was an ugly crunching sound. The guard screamed. His blade clattered flatly as it bounced on the flagstone floor.

  Will stood panting. The guard clutched at his injured arm, sprayed spittle and curses.

  Will for his part was quite proud of himself. The fourth fight in his life—the first one involving real weapons—and it had gone significantly better than the first three.

  “All right,” he said. “Sorry about that. But if you could just step aside so I can go and rob your master blind.”

  It was, he thought, a rather snappy thing to say. It had… what was the word? Panache. He wished Lette could have seen him in that moment.

  With a murderous growl, the guard flung himself upon Will.

  Although years of working in the fields had ensured that Will was not an entirely insignificant young man, he stood about as much chance as a reed before a stampeding bull. He was bowled backward, crashing into the room’s far wall. His head cracked off hard stone, the world exploded with light, and his balance pirouetted around the confines of his skull.

  As his senses returned, he became very aware of the guard’s hands around his throat. Just as his vision was starting to clear, it was blurring again.

  He was pinned to the floor. He started to thrash back and forth, trying to work himself free, but the guard’s weight was implacable and unshakable.

  His lungs were burning now, his vision narrowing down to a point that seemed to be mostly taken up by the guard’s red, spittle-splattered face.

  “He needs me, see?” hissed the guard. “Needs me to protect him from little shits like you.”

  Will thrashed harder, managed to pry an arm free. He grasped desperately about himself. His palm hit cold metal.

  Cold metal.

  And connected to it… a shaft of cold wood.

  With the last of his strength, he smashed the axe handle into the side of the guard’s head. There was a satisfying crunch.

  For a moment the weight lifted. Will gasped. Air rushed into his burning lungs so fast he almost choked on it.

  Then the guard’s weight crashed back down on him again. Will thrashed again, but this time with even less success. The axe blade was caught flat between their bodies. Fat fingers closed upon Will’s bruised larynx.

  Will fought for air, for leverage. He could feel the warm flesh of the guard’s exposed gut pressed against his knuckles. The exposed strip of skin where the guard’s chain-mail shirt did not reach all the way to his britches. His soft exposed underbelly.

  Will twisted desperately, freed one leg. He kicked out, hit the inside of the guard’s calves. Achieved nothing. His vision shrank to nothing more than a blurred pinprick.

  He bucked, fought for leverage, won it, and brought his whole leg up fast and hard between the guard’s legs. The guard gasped in pain. His fingers flew from Will’s neck.

  In the brief moment that pressure relented, vision still nothing more than a field of winking lights, Will turned the axe blade north. He sliced. He felt flesh give way. He dragged the blade along the great length of the guard’s stomach.

  Warmth spilled over him. Blood and offal splashing over him with heavy wet thuds. The guard gasped, gurgled, clutched at the spilling ropes of his intestines. And then, quite noisily, and very messily, he collapsed and died on top of Will.

  25

  Prophecy’s Bitch

  Upon further consideration, Will thought, working himself free from the guard’s very literal deadweight, I’m quite glad Lette wasn’t there to see that.

  He emerged from beneath the corpse victorious and covered with blood and offal. He bent and retrieved his axe from beneath the guard’s bulk, his boots squelching as he did so.

  He felt better with the axe in his hands. He turned it over. It had saved his life. You should have a name, he thought. In the legends, heroes’ weapons always had a name.

  “I shall call you,” he said in the empty room, “the Sense of Imminent Disaster.” That seemed fitting enough.

  Thus armed, he turned his attention to the door.

  It was, he soon discovered, not actually a door. There was no handle, and no hinges. It was simply a flap down which meat was poured to fill Mattrax’s gullet. He cranked the lever, the flap lifted, the ramp—slick with blood and grease—was revealed.

  Sounds of fighting came up to him, curiously muted. He peered down, but a dull flickering light revealed no details. Everything smelled of copper and smoke.

  All in all, it was not a tableau that boded well for his future.

  Still, Lette could be down there, could be waiting for him. And others who had put their lives in the hands of his plan. Despite his advice that they not do so. And despite that advice, he felt responsible.

  Grimacing, he pushed himself through the flap, down into darkness.

  He landed heavily. Metal clinked around his feet. He reached down, pulled up a handful of coins.

  Well, he thought, I’m rich. Now let’s see if I get to stay that way for longer than two minutes. He wasn’t entirely confident of that. Smoke and flickering firelight in a dragon’s cave did not suggest a successful attempt at drugging the beast.

  Despite the flames, light was minimal. He crept forward slowly, then cracked his nose into a wall that loomed out of the shadows and smacked at him. He stumbled back, tripped over some buried rod or scepter. Screw you too, he thought in the general direction of any gods watching him. He crawled forward on hands and knees, reaching out with his axe, trying to feel the way ahead.

  He rounded a corner—some rocky outcropping pushing up through the pile of gold, stubbing his fingers—and light bloomed before him. He froze. The sounds of a crowd were louder here. He no longer heard the sound of steel on steel but there was still shouting, sobbing, screams.

  The source of the light lay before him on a rolling slope of gold. It was a perfectly round orb—approximately the size of a bull’s head—that pushed back the shadows for a full two yards around it to reveal bloodstained coins. Beyond the fringes of i
ts light were only more darkness and screams.

  He weighed his options for a moment. A light would allow him to see, and allow for a faster exit, but it would also be much like shouting, “Here I am, come and stab me in my nethers.”

  That said, whether he had a light or not he was heading toward the voices and whatever crowd they belonged to. He would be seen soon enough either way.

  He scrambled forward, grabbed the orb. It was warm to the touch and unfortunately gelatinous. Still the light was steady, and he pushed forward faster now, no longer confined to all fours.

  Around him the gold was replaced by a grimmer trove. Bodies lay scattered over the floor, guards and villagers alike. Some were victims of considerable violence—skewered and punctured—others were burned to an almost unrecognizable crisp. Will wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know what had happened here.

  He rounded a larger bend in the cave, and suddenly its open mouth was before him.

  So was the crowd. They clogged the cave entrance, not screaming or yelling anymore, not caught in life-and-death struggles. Instead they were stumbling about, staring, wild-eyed. Some rubbed stupidly at their faces. Others shielded their eyes from the sudden glare of his light.

  Will froze, standing there, bloodied axe in one hand, glowing orb in the other, covered from head to foot in another man’s blood.

  One by one, it seemed that every single member in the crowd turned to face him, turned to see the sudden source of light.

  Grabbing that, he thought, might end up being a mistake after all.

  The crowd stood staring at him, oddly silent. The whole moment felt strangely dreamlike.

  “Look—” he started, and found he was rather interested in what would follow that word next out of his mouth.

  He never found out. Instead, a voice suddenly rose up from the crowd, loud and clear in the night air.

  “The slayer! It is the dragon slayer!”

  The crowd shuddered, seeming to push forward and draw back at the same time. The night was alive with murmurs.

  Will glanced over his shoulder. Who in all the gods’ names were they talking about?