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  Dragon Slayer

  February 28th, 2011

  Fifteen dragons have died in less than a century. Rumaad, a different kind of dragon, collects information about the killings the way some dragons collect jewels. So he’s perfectly suited to see the differences in the latest crime scene, the murder of a dragon he knows all too well. What he sees convinces him something has changed in his world—and not for the best.

  A fantasy story by USA Today bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and in other e-bookstores.

  Dragon Slayer

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Fifteen dead in less than a century, and not one of them by natural causes. The corpses were always found in some stage of mistreatment, headless being the most common. Occasionally, though, fangs would disappear, and sometimes the right foreleg. Or a wing. And once, just once, the tail.

  I collected information on the killings just like I collected sapphires. One corner of my lair was strewn with various death relics—a broadsword, a gauntlet, even a lock of hair found between a victim’s back claws.

  Something had changed among the humans, something which now made them deadly to dragons.

  Fifteen dead in one hundred years was some kind of record. If the killings continued at that rate, we would be extinct within a millennium. Unlike most animals, we didn’t breed whenever we glanced at each other. We had rituals, timing, and our own natural infertility working against us.

  The infertility concerned the Lair Fathers the most, but it didn’t bother me much. It seems logical, if you examine it. Impregnation takes time—and there’s often a year between that event and the laying of the egg.

  The lairs themselves are the other problem. We’re not social creatures; we don’t like to live too close together. Only a few caves are large enough to accommodate one of us. If we wanted to dwell in the same area, we’d have to suffer through rock outcroppings or move into abandoned human dwellings—the large stone kind with towers, poorly built because they crumble after a century or two of neglect.

  Still, despite our distance and our solitude, we have our communities, rituals, and ceremonies. Every twenty years, the Lair Fathers hold the governing council. Mostly it is an excuse for everyone in the Five Regions to assemble, catch up on the news, maybe do a little bargaining. But sometimes we have serious business, like the time Vascan’s youngest took to looting to increase his hoard.

  The youngling was banished to the hinterlands, but apparently didn’t survive the trek. The Lair Fathers were called in to look at that corpse, but it was too decayed to determine cause of death. The child could have died of exposure, and been torn apart by animals. Or he could have been murdered and mutilated, like the others.

  There was no real way to tell, not without a bit of hair between the claws or a broadsword broken off in the hide.

  Failure to determine cause of death didn’t make the situation any less of a tragedy, though. The Lair Fathers had to reconsider the punishments they’d established throughout the regions.

  The theory being, of course, that punishment didn’t teach our people things if no one survived the lessons.

  ***

  We were heading into Nae The Loch’s Centennial Trade Show and Swap Meet when news of the sixteenth victim hit. Most of us were already in flight—too late to cancel plans even if we’d wanted to.

  I didn’t want to. I was verging on my first half-millennium, and I was heading to Nae The Loch with more than bargaining on my mind. For the past decade or more, I’d been thinking of adding an egg or two to my stash, and I finally had a large enough hoard to impress a mate.

  Females are particular about the places they stash their eggs, a fact I’ve never understood. Females are never involved with the raising of the hatchlings, preferring to move off to new venues long before the little ones appear. Apparently there is some biological imperative, however, something that makes these flighty creatures particular about egg storage.

  Females rarely pick a young male with a small hoard. They seem to prefer males with some experience behind them, and a stash the size of a small mountain.

  My father used to say it was because the eggs had to cool under the hoard before hatching—and the bigger the hoard, the safer the egg. But I was never sure of that.

  After all, females left eggs all over the countryside. In their fecund period—which can last as long as two millennia—healthy females can drop as many as one hundred eggs, always leaving them in pairs. Rarely do both eggs hatch, and sometimes neither do, but that doesn’t negate the sheer irresponsibility of it all.

  If females had to feather their nests with food as well as gold, they might not be so quick to abandon their communities.

  But to be honest, there isn’t a male among us who doesn’t envy the female her freedom. All of us wish we could spend our lives exploring the world; we just don’t have the wingspan or the stamina to do so.

  Besides, we are the only ones who can breathe fire. Until they develop wings of their own, hatchlings require cooked food. It isn’t until adolescence that a dragon acquires the ability to eat raw meat without causing serious illness or death.

  Most males never acquire a taste for raw food. We prefer to cook our own. Females haven’t the time or patience for it. A few of my friends, in their early courting years, tried to seduce a female with a carefully prepared meal of cooked meat, only to have the female turn away in disgust.

  I wasn’t planning to make that mistake at Nae The Loch. I hoped for a quick courtship, a few months of passion, and then solitude. I wasn’t even going to follow the serial seduction plan used by most males so that they would have an egg hoard the size of their jewel hoard. I wanted to take time with my children, and bring one set to adolescence before I risked having another.

  Nae The Loch was a good three days flight from my home in Montagneux. Despite the long and difficult flight, I enjoyed Nae The Loch as much as the rest of my people did.

  The site was the most protected in the Five Regions. The lake existed inside the highest mountain peak known to dragon. The peak had once been pointed, but several millennia back, steam and pressure broke the peak open, sending boiling lava down the mountainside.

  The lava cooled, reinforcing the strength of the exterior mountain, but the inside became something else. Gradually, a lake formed inside the crater. Cool, and deep, and blue—deeper than any lake we had ever encountered—the lake became a courtship destination long before the local males decided to hold the Centennial Swap Meet.

  Even though Nae The Loch had a lot of flat land deep within the crater (all of it surrounding the lake), no males could live there. The caves ringing the lake were too small for a proper hoard, but they provided good accommodation for a summer’s long trading festival.

  Females often stayed in Nae The Loch on their way to other destinations. Rather than drive the females from the area, the Swap Meet brought them. It made meeting males easier, and often prevented difficult encounters on the male’s home territory. Too many males fell in love with their mates, and tried to coerce them into staying.

  Some females were known to stay for as many as five years. But all were gone long before the eggs began to crack, leaving some males broken-hearted and incapable of proper hatchling care.

  As usual, my arrival at Nae The Loch left me breathless, and not just because I rarely flew to such heights. My body could not take more than three days’ flight. My wings always ached during the first week of the Swap Meet.

  Still, I enjoyed the view as I dove into the crater. Nae The Loch stretched before me as far as I could se
e. In the center, the lake, a perfect reflection of the pale blue sky. Around it, the black land, covered with flat-top rocks brought centuries ago to serve as tables.

  Even from my height, I could see the glitter of gold, the flash of diamonds as the sun struck them. Bits of hoards, no longer wanted, brought for upgrading. I had a few rubies stuck in my pouch. Not a lot, because I couldn’t afford much.

  At the farthest end of the Swap Meet was the area that interested me. The none-glittery collectibles—a few hand lettered books (I particularly fancied those done in gold leaf); portraits of humans, often framed in gold; and instruments—lutes, pipes, and horns. I fancied a harp one day. At a Swap Meet in La Mer some fifty years before, I had seen one whose frame had been made of gold leaf and whose strings were done in a material strong enough to withstand a small dragon’s claws.

  Dragons circled the flat area on the longest side of the lake, waiting for their turn to land. All flew at low altitudes so that they couldn’t be seen over the mountain peaks.

  I joined the throng, bobbing and weaving on the air currents, and trying not to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of my fellows. It sometimes took me as long as a week to be able to handle the crowds, but once I became used to them, I was able to stay for months at a time.

  Fortunately, my stash was well hidden, my cave guarded by traps as well as some spells purchased centuries ago from wandering unicorns. I’d allowed nearby vegetation to overgrow the entrance. No one could see the cave but me.

  The air up here was thinner, and I had been breathless when I had arrived. I was wheezing after several turns, and I wasn’t the only one. The older, heavier males also seemed to have trouble keeping themselves aloft.

  One, a grizzled male whose scales had gone from youth’s green-gold to age’s burnished copper, kept swerving across my flight path. I had to veer sideways twice to avoid hitting him. Finally, his right front claw hooked onto my tail. He didn’t pierce the skin, but I lost my balance and would have toppled if two other older males hadn’t caught my forearms and held me steady.

  “Rumaad?” one of the males said.

  I looked up, stunned. I had never been recognized at one of these things before. Most of my friends stayed away, tending their eggs. I was the last of among my peers to think of finding his first mate.

  “Yes?” I said, trying not to let my surprise show. Still, I couldn’t control the nervous plume of flame that emerged from my left nostril. “Can I be of service?”

  “Actually, you can.” The dragon who had caught my tail had managed to stop in front of me. He managed a perfect mid-air hover, something few males could accomplish. What had originally seemed like out of control flying must have been his attempts to catch my attention.

  I couldn’t hover. The males beside me kept me suspended, so that I wouldn’t fall to the ground.

  “I’m Avagas,” the old male said. “I hear you have a stash from the murders.”

  Avagas. One of the Lair Fathers, a former leader of the Regional Council, and leader of the Rebellion that —three millennia ago— had made the Five Regions the most powerful nation on the Four Continents.

  I was embarrassed that he’d heard of my unorthodox collection. I held my breath, trying to hide my shame, but tendrils of smoke slipped between my back teeth anyway.

  “I’m not going to chastise you, boy.” Avagas sounded faintly amused. “I think your knowledge might be useful.”

  I took a small breath. His words surprised me. “How?”

  “You’ve heard of the sixteenth victim?”

  I had heard at my usual daytime rest stop in the Reed Marsh. The Reed Marsh was deep enough to allow a dragon to submerge himself in mud as protection from the sun, and wide enough to keep his presence a secret from the smaller mammals who would carry the news to the humans.

  Four other dragons had chosen the Marsh as their rest stop that day and, as twilight fell and we grew restless, one of the travelers had mentioned the newest death.

  “The murder occurred near here. We would like to take you to the body, see what you think of this latest death.”

  I glanced at the ground below me. I wanted nothing more than to land, lumber into the cave I had reserved at the previous Nae The Loch and nest for a day or two.

  But one did not say no to the Lair Fathers, especially one as famous as Avagas.

  “I do not know how I can help you,” I said.

  “You have seen the other bodies, have you not?”

  I had no idea how he learned of that. I had visited the other corpses long after the Lair Fathers finished their investigations. The other corpses had been left, according to Five Regions custom, until scavengers had picked the bones clean and a young male, too young to have known the victim, took over the lair.

  The hoard would have been scavenged too, but only by family and close friends. By the time, I had seen most of the corpses, the only things remaining in their stashes were the imprints the items left in the ground.

  “I’ve seen most of the bodies,” I said, because I knew better than to lie. “The early ones were already scattered when I developed my interest.”

  I didn’t tell him though that it was at the early sites where I found the most interesting items—a rusted scabbard picked clean of jewels; rings of metal which I later learned were part of something the humans called chain mail; and a long thin needle coated in ichor.

  “Good,” Avagas said. “You will come, then?”

  “May I rest first?” The shame that had receded rose again. I was tired and this gray eminence, who had lived six times as long as I had, showed no exhaustion at all.

  “We shall rest near the corpse,” he said. “Come along.”

  He spun, leaving his place in the landing line, and flew up the cliff face. His companions let go of me, and I bobbled for a moment, before my wings caught the breeze.

  It was easier to move forward than it was to try to hover. I managed to keep up with the trio only because one of them would wait for me at each turn.

  We went through three passes, all of them part of the peaks that formed Nae The Loch. The passes were narrow and snow-filled, but the chill air felt good to my burning lungs. The flames, which I never controlled well when I was exhausted, shot out unexpectedly twice, once melting snow on the ground below, and once causing a tiny avalanche that tumbled all the way down the mountainside.

  From this height, the corpse was easy to spot. It sprawled at tree line, forelegs spread, and tail pointed downhill. The head tilted backwards at an unnatural angle, the unmistakable sign of a broken neck.

  As we got closer to the victim, I realized the corpse was unusually large for a male. Then we circled above, and the chill air cooled all the flames in my throat.

  The corpse wasn’t male at all. It had the silver and black scales of a female in her prime.

  Avagas circled and landed on a flat rock far from the corpse. His companions landed beside him, leaving no room for me.

  I wasn’t going to land beside the corpse. The body rested on snow, and the ground beneath sloped steeply downward. As tired as I was, I might topple, scale over tail, to the forest below.

  Instead, I found a second flat rock, some distance from Avagas. I landed harder than I expected, my wings giving out on the descent. I was very out of shape and much too tired. I extended my tongue, stuck the fork into the nearby snow, and shoveled a pile into my mouth.

  Cool, refreshing, and much needed. I shoveled another mouthful inside, and felt some of my energy return.

  The chill of the mountainside felt good against my scales. I had been overheating as well as exhausting myself. I clambered across the snow, glad that it wasn’t that deep here. Otherwise, I would have had to use my wings to keep my weight off the snow, and I didn’t think they were up to the task.

  I folded them against my back and lumbered toward the corpse.

  It looked even bigger up close. Females still scared me—their sheer size was imposing—almost twice the size of males. At
first, I stayed back, studying the scene.

  Avagas and his companions approached, using their wings to keep themselves slightly above the snow, probably so that the cold wetness wouldn’t seep between their claws.

  “I told you to look,” he called to me while they were still a distance away.

  “I am looking,” I said. “Stay behind me.”

  “I do not understand. Why—?”

  “Do you want me to find out what happened?”

  “We want you to find out how the human reached this height, how close it came to Nae The Loch, and whether or not our most secret place is in danger,” Avagas said. “How much time could that take?”

  His demands did not surprise me, although he had not stated them before. We had all had the unspoken fear that the humans had found Nae The Loch. It had even been part of the discussion at the Reed Marsh.

  “It could take a great deal of time,” I said, even though I had never done anything like this before. I had a hunch, though, that the best way to understand what had happened was to study the details.

  “What would you have us do?” Avagas asked.

  I swiveled my head, trying not to show my surprise. I did not expect him to ask me for instructions.

  If I had been with my birth-year companions, I would have given a different answer—a more strident one, which did not take their feelings into account. But, for all his interest, Avagas was a Lair Father. I could not order him about like an equal.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “it would be best if your companions brought us the evening meal. I have been flying all day, and I’m sure this crisis has occupied you. We shall be here for some time. Nourishment would be advised.”

  Avagas waved a claw, not even bothering to repeat my words. The other two males flew off.

  “And me?” Avagas asked.

  “Observe,” I said. “Between the two of us, we might decipher what happened here.”

  The snow around the corpse was littered with small holes. The corpse had hit hard, sending ice chunks and debris into the air. They landed in a splatter pattern around the body.

  “Your caution amazes me,” Avagas said. “I would simply like to find the human source of our troubles and slay him before he makes our situation worse.”