The Dragon's Errand Part 1

Dwellers of the Forbidden Isle — Session Two, Part One

As recorded by the Lantern of the Thirteenth Word

I see many things. Most of them never know they have been seen.

When last I wrote of this company, they had spent three days beyond the Wall. They passed beneath an arch hung with teeth and blood, crossed a gorge on a bridge that had no business holding a horse, killed sixteen rats in the dark, and were healed by the hand of a god. At the end of the road they found a pit of tar, judged it a pit of stink, and turned around.

I told you then that nothing on that island is the same the second time through. I did not know how quickly it would prove me right.

Fish and Water

They made camp on the evening of the seventh of Kerebosios, somewhere on the road back, and after dark they had visitors.

Not the kind that come out of the dark on four legs. These were fisher folk — Tzanatlani, led by one Tahua of the Tapir clan — on their way home to the gate.

I have told you that the Tzanatlani do not, as a rule, go beyond the Wall. That remains true. It is also true that fish do not know where the Wall is.

Tahua shared fish with the company, which on a hard road is worth more than coin. And Tahua told them where to find a watering hole.

Remember what month it was: the killing heat before the rains, when every waterhole on the island is shrinking and everything that drinks knows where the last ones are. To be told where the water is, in Kerebosios, is not small talk. It is the kind of gift a sensible person does not forget.

In the morning they walked on together. The low ground lay under a chill fog until mid-morning; then it lifted, and the day came on cool and clear, the wind steady out of the north-east and dust lifting off the trails. They reached the gate together, and there the fisher folk went home, and the company turned back toward the crumbled wall they had passed on their first day out.

They did not get there.

The Shadow

The first sign was the light going out.

The fog was long gone by then, and there was not a cloud in the sky, and still the sun went out — not behind weather, but behind something passing over the canopy, so that for a long moment the whole jungle floor went dim, as if evening had come early and in a hurry.

Then the canopy broke.

He came down through the trees the way a landslide comes down a hill. Limbs as thick as a man snapped like kindling, and for a moment it rained: leaves and splinters and broken branches and whatever had been living in them, crashing down all around the company. When it stopped there was a hole in the roof of the jungle, and sunlight pouring through it, and in the sunlight, a dragon.

Red. Ancient. Huge the way mountains are huge — not merely large, but large enough to change the shape of the place where he stood. His name is Xarrakixarethasar. I give it to you now so that you will have it, should you ever need to beg.

Understand the arithmetic of that moment. An ancient red dragon does not need to fight a handful of travelers. He does not even need to try. Had he wanted them dead, they would have been dead before the leaves finished falling, and the jungle would have closed over the place within a season, and no one would ever have written any of this down.

Sigwulf walked out to meet him.

He did not charge and he did not hide. He walked out into the open, where the dragon could see him, and spoke to him the way a knight of the Order of Hercules speaks to anything: plainly, and on his feet.

This is the second time I have watched this man walk toward something sensible people walk away from. The first time, at the gorge, the things in the brush crawled off on their bellies. This time the thing in front of him was considerably larger, and did not crawl anywhere.

But the dragon listened.

I cannot tell you why. Perhaps he was amused. Perhaps it was courtesy; dragons are very old, and courtesy is older. Or perhaps — and this is where I would put my own money — he had a use for them.

Because what he did, instead of killing them, was give them an errand.

There was an old tomb, he told them, cut into the side of a hill, and he told them where. He told them it had been overrun by jungle goblins. You have met their kind: small, green, thin-limbed things that lie flat in the brush beside bridges. And he told them to go and clear it out.

He did not ask.

By the standards of dragons, I suppose that makes him helpful. They lived. They were given directions. But I will tell you something I learned the long way: when a thing that size does you a favor, the favor is never the point.

Then he went back up through the hole he had made, and the light came back, and the last of the leaves came down.

Nothing else came near the company for the rest of that day. Not a bird, not a monkey, not an insect. The jungle had seen what had just passed through it, and the jungle had the sense to keep very still for a while.

The Herd

The next trouble came on the road to the hill, and it came from two directions at once.

The first was a herd of brontosaurs, the great long-necked beasts that move through the interior like weather — so large that the trees part for them and the ground carries word of them for a mile. They paid the company no attention at all. They did not need to.

The second was a herd of wild cattle, long-horned, dun and red, grazing in the low ground nearby. As the giants moved through, the cattle took it badly.

Cattle are heavy, slow and stupid until they are frightened, and then they are heavy, fast and stupid, which is worse. Eight of them broke at once and came through the jungle in a solid mass of horn and hide, and whatever stood in their path was going to end up under them.

Their path was several hundred feet off. The company did not stop to measure it. Some went up trees. Some ran for cover.

And Osbert, on his horse, did what cavalrymen are taught and almost nobody remembers in the moment. He did not ride away from the stampede. He rode across it — straight out to the side, at right angles to the herd — and let it thunder past behind him.

In my first account I said I admired a man who brings a horse into a jungle full of things that eat horses. I meant it as a joke. I withdraw the joke.

The herd passed. The dust came down. The company climbed out of the trees, gathered itself, and went on to find the hill.

The Door in the Hill

It was where the dragon had said it would be: a hill, overgrown like every hill on that island, and in its side an entrance cut into the earth by hands that had been dust for a very long time.

They did not go in. They did something wiser, which almost no one does. They made camp where they could see it, and they watched.

All day, nothing came out. Nothing went in. The door sat in the side of the hill and was a door, and the shadows went long, and the sun went down.

Azech took the first watch, and nothing happened. Osbert took the second, and nothing happened. Xavravio took the third.

That was when the stirges came.

Seven of them, out of the dark: things like small birds gone wrong in the egg, with a long needle of a beak for drinking blood and wings that make a dry, papery whir. To armed men awake, they are a nuisance. To men asleep, they are something worse.

Xavravio drew his pistol and shot one out of the air.

I want you to hear it the way the jungle heard it. A pistol is loud in a town. In the jungle at night it is the loudest sound in the world. It cracked off the trees and the hillside and came back again, and the stirge fell, and the rest of them scattered into the dark, and the echo went rolling away over the canopy.

And inside the hill, something heard it.

— The Lantern of the Thirteenth Word