“I can’t just let it run wild. Trebon’s only about five miles from here. And there’s smaller farms closer than that. Think of the damage it would do.”
“But how?” she repeated. “How do you kill a thing like that?”
I turned to the tiny shed. “If we’re lucky this fellow had the good sense to buy a spare crossbow….” I began to dig around, throwing stuff out the door. Stirring paddles, buckets, scrapers, spade, more buckets, a barrel….
The barrel was about the size of a small keg of ale. I carried it outside the shed and pried off the lid. In the bottom was an oilcloth sack containing a large gummy mass of black denner resin, at least four times as much as Denna and I had already scraped together.
I pulled out the sack and rested it on the ground, holding it open for Denna to look. She peered in, gasped, then jumped up and down a little bit. “Now I can buy a pony!” she said, laughing.
“I don’t know about a pony,” I said, doing some calculations in my head. “But I think before we split up the money, we should buy you a good half-harp out of this,” I said. “Not some sad lyre.”
“Yes!” Denna said, then she threw her arms around me in a wild, delighted hug. “And we’ll get you…” She looked at me curiously, her sooty face inches away from my own. “What do you want?”
Before I could say anything, do anything, the draccus roared.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Poison
THE ROAR OF THE draccus was like a trumpet, if you can imagine a trumpet big as a house, and made of stone, and thunder, and molten lead. I didn’t feel it in my chest. I felt it in my feet as the earth shook with it.
The roar made us jump nearly out of our skins. The top of Denna’s head banged into my nose, and I staggered, blinded with pain. Denna didn’t notice, as she was busy tripping and falling over into a loose, laughing tangle of arms and legs.
As I helped Denna to her feet I heard a distant crashing, and we made our way carefully back up to the lookout.
The draccus was…cavorting, bounding around like a drunken dog, knocking over trees like a boy would topple cornstalks in a field.
I watched breathlessly as it came to an ancient oak tree, a hundred years old and massive as a greystone. The draccus reared up and brought its front legs down on one of the lower branches, as if it wanted to climb. The branch, big as a tree itself, practically exploded.
The draccus reared again, coming down hard on the tree. I watched, certain that it was about to impale itself on the broken limb, but the jagged spear of hard wood barely dimpled its chest before splintering. The draccus crashed into the trunk, and though it didn’t snap, it fractured with a sound like a crack of lightning.
The draccus threw itself around, hopped and fell, rolling over jagged spurs of rock. It belched a huge gout of flame and charged the fractured oak tree again, striking with its great blunt wedge of a head. This time, it knocked the tree over, causing an explosion of earth and rock as the tree’s roots tore out of the ground.
All I could think of was the futility of trying to hurt this creature. It was bringing more force to bear against itself than I could ever hope to muster.
“There’s no way we can kill that,” I said. “It would be like trying to attack a thunderstorm. How could we possibly hurt it?”
“We lure her over the side of a cliff,” Denna said matter-of-factly.
“She?” I asked. “Why do you think it’s a she?”
“Why do you think it’s a he?” she replied, then shook her head as if to clear it. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. We know it’s drawn to fires. We just build one and hang it from a branch.” She pointed to a few trees overhanging the cliff below. “Then, when it rushes over to put it out….” She made a pantomime with both hands of something falling.
“Do you think even that would hurt it?” I asked dubiously.
“Well,” Denna said, “when you flick an ant off a table it doesn’t get hurt even though for an ant that has to be like dropping off a cliff. But if one of us jumped off a roof, we’d get hurt because we’re heavier. It makes sense that bigger things fall even harder.” She gave a pointed look down at the draccus. “You don’t get much bigger than that.”
She was right, of course. She was talking about the square-cube ratio, though she didn’t know what to call it.
“It should at least injure it,” Denna continued. “Then, I don’t know, we could roll rocks down onto it or something.” She looked at me. “What? Is there something wrong with my idea?”
“It’s not very heroic,” I said dismissively. “I was expecting something with a little more flair.”
“Well I left my armor and warhorse at home,” she said. “You’re just upset because your big University brain couldn’t think of a way, and my plan is brilliant.” She pointed behind us, to the box canyon. “We’ll build the fire in one of those metal pans. They’re wide and shallow and they’ll take the heat. Was there any rope in that shed?”
“I…” I felt the familiar sinking feeling in my gut. “No. I don’t think so.”
Denna patted me on the arm. “Don’t look like that. When it leaves we’ll check the wreckage of the house. I’ll bet there’s some rope in there.” She looked at the draccus. “Honestly, I know how she feels. I feel a little like running around and jumping on things too.”
“That’s the mania I was talking about,” I said.
After a quarter-hour the draccus left the valley. Only then did Denna and I emerge from our hiding place, me carrying my travelsack, she with the heavy oilskin bag that held all the resin we’d found, nearly a full bushel of it.
“Give me your loden-stone,” she said, setting down the sack. I handed it over. “You find some rope. I’m going to go get you a present.” She skipped away lightly, her dark hair flying behind her.
I made a quick search of the house, holding my breath as much as possible. I found a hatchet, broken crockery, a barrel of wormy flour, a mildewy straw tick, a ball of twine, but no rope.
Denna gave a delighted shout from the trees, ran up to me, and pressed a black scale into my hand. It was warm with the sun, slightly larger than hers but more oval than tear-shaped.
“Thank you kindly, m’lady.”
She bobbed a charming curtsey, grinning. “Rope?”
I held up a ball of rough twine. “This is as close as I could find. Sorry.”
Denna frowned, then shrugged it off. “Oh well. Your turn for a plan. You have any strange and wonderful magics from the University? Any dark powers better left alone?”
I turned the scale over in my hands and thought about it. I had wax, and this scale would make as good a link as any hair. I could make a simulacrum of the draccus, but then what? A hotfoot wasn’t going to bother a creature that was perfectly comfortable lying on a bed of coals.
But there are more sinister things you can do with a mommet. Things no good arcanist was ever supposed to consider. Things with pins and knives that would leave a man bleeding even though he was miles away. True malfeasance.
I looked at the scale in my hand, considering it. The thing was mostly iron and thicker than my palm in the middle. Even with a mommet and a hot fire for energy, I didn’t know if I could make it through the scales to hurt the thing.
Worst of all, if I tried I wouldn’t know if it had worked. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting idly by some fire, sticking pins into a wax doll while miles away a drug-crazed draccus rolled in the flaming wreckage of some innocent family’s farm.
“No,” I said. “No magic I can think of.”
“We can go tell the constable that he needs to deputize about a dozen men with bows to come kill a drug-crazed big-as-a-house dragon-chicken.”
It came to me in a flash. “Poison,” I said. “We’ll have to poison it.”
“You’ve got two quarts of arsenic on you?” she asked skeptically. “Would that even be enough for something big as that?”
“Not arsenic.” I nudged the oilskin sack with
my foot.
She looked down. “Oh,” she said, crestfallen. “What about my pony?”
“You’ll probably have to skip your pony,” I said. “But we’ll still have enough to buy you a half-harp. In fact, I bet we’ll be able to make even more money from the draccus’ body. The scales will be worth a lot. And the naturalists at the University will love to be able—”
“You don’t need to sell me,” she said. “I know it’s the right thing to do.” She looked up at me and grinned. “Besides, we get to be heroes and kill the dragon. Its treasure is just a perk.”
I laughed. “Right then,” I said. “I think we should head back to the greystone hill and build a fire there to lure it in.”
Denna looked puzzled. “Why? We know it’s going to come back here. Why don’t we just camp here and wait?”
I shook my head. “Look at how many denner trees are left.”
She looked around. “It ate all of them?”
I nodded. “If we kill it this evening, we can be back in Trebon by tonight,” I said. “I’m tired of sleeping outdoors. I want to get a bath, a hot meal, and a real bed.”
“You’re lying again,” she said cheerfully. “Your delivery’s getting better, but to me you’re clear as a shallow stream.” She prodded my chest with a finger. “Tell me the truth.”
“I want to get you back to Trebon,” I said. “Just in case you ate more resin than is good for you. I wouldn’t trust any doctor living there, but they probably have some medicines I could use. Just in case.”
“My hero.” Denna smiled. “You’re sweet, but I feel fine.”
I reached out and flicked her ear with the tip of my finger, hard.
Her hand went to the side of her head, her expression outraged. “Ow…oh.” She looked confused.
“Doesn’t hurt at all, does it?”
“No,” she said.
“Here is the truth,” I said seriously. “I think you’re going to be fine, but I don’t know for certain. I don’t know how much of that stuff you have left working its way into your system. In an hour I’ll have a better idea, but if something goes wrong I’d rather be an hour closer to Trebon. It means I won’t have to carry you as far.” I looked her square in the eye. “I don’t gamble with the lives of people I care for.”
She listened to me, her expression somber. Then the grin blossomed back onto her face. “I like your manly bravado,” she said. “Do it some more.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Sweet Talk
IT TOOK US ABOUT two hours to get back to the greystone hill. It would have been faster, but Denna’s mania was growing stronger, and all her extra energy was more of a hindrance than a help. She was highly distractible and prone to larking off in her own direction if she saw something interesting.
We crossed the same small stream that we had before, and, despite the fact that it wasn’t much more than ankle deep, Denna insisted on bathing. I washed up a little, then moved a discreet distance away and listened to her sing several rather racy songs. She also made several none-too-subtle invitations that I could join her in the water.
Needless to say, I kept my distance. There are names for people who take advantage of women who are not in full control of themselves, and none of those names will ever rightfully be applied to me.
Once we reached the peak of the greystone hill, I put Denna’s surplus of energy to use and sent her to gather firewood while I made an even larger fire pit than our previous one. The bigger the fire, the quicker it would draw the draccus close.
I sat down next to the oilskin bag and opened it. The resin gave off an earthy smell, like sweet, smoky mulch.
Denna returned to the top of the hill and dropped an armload of wood. “How much of that are you going to use?” she asked.
“I still have to figure that out,” I said. “It’s going to require some guesswork.”
“Just give him all of it,” Denna said. “Better safe than sorry.”
I shook my head. “There’s no reason to go that far. It would just be wasteful. Besides, the resin makes a powerful painkiller when properly refined. People could use the medicine…”
“…and you could use the money,” Denna said.
“I could,” I admitted. “But honestly, I was thinking more about your harp. You lost your lyre in that fire. I know what it’s like to be without an instrument.”
“Did you ever hear the story about the boy with the golden arrows?” Denna asked. “That always bothered me when I was young. You must want to kill someone really badly to shoot a gold arrow at him. Why not just keep the gold and go home?”
“It certainly shines a new light on that story,” I said, looking down at the sack. I guessed this much denner resin would be worth at least fifty talents to an apothecary. Maybe as much as a hundred, depending on how refined it was.
Denna shrugged and headed back into the trees for more firewood and I began the elaborate guesswork of how much denner it would take to poison a five ton lizard.
It was a nightmare of educated guessery, complicated by the fact that I had no way to make accurate measurements. I started with a bead the size of the last digit of my little finger, my guess as to how much resin Denna had actually swallowed. However, Denna had been liberally dosed with charcoal, which effectively reduced that by a half. I was left with a ball of black resin slightly larger than a pea.
But that was just the amount required to make a human girl euphoric and energetic. I wanted to kill the draccus. For that I tripled the dose, then tripled it again to be sure. The end result was a ball the size of a large, ripe grape.
I guessed the draccus weighed five tons, eight hundred stone. I guessed Denna at eight or nine stone, eight to be on the safe side. That meant I needed a hundred times that grape-size dose to kill the draccus. I made ten grape-size pellets, then mashed them together. It was the size of an apricot. I made nine more apricot-size balls and set them in the wooden bucket we had brought from the denner plantation.
Denna dropped another load of wood and peered down into the bucket. “That’s it?” she asked. “It doesn’t look like very much.”
She was right. It didn’t look like much at all compared to the draccus’ huge bulk. I explained how I’d come up with my estimate. She nodded. “That seems about right, I guess. But don’t forget that it’s been eating trees for the better part of a month. It probably has a tolerance.”
I nodded and added five more apricot-size balls to the bucket.
“And it might be tougher than you think. The resin might work different on lizards.”
I nodded again and added another five balls to the bucket. Then, after a moment’s consideration, I added one more. “That brings us up to twenty-one,” I explained. “A good number. Three sevens.”
“Nothing wrong with having luck on your side,” Denna agreed.
“We want it to die quickly, too,” I said. “It will be more humane for the draccus and safer for us.”
Denna looked at me. “So we double it?” I nodded and she headed back into the trees while I made another twenty-one balls and dropped them into the bucket. She came back with more wood just as I was rolling up the last ball.
I packed the resin down into the bottom of the bucket. “That should be more than enough,” I said. “That much ophalum would kill the entire population of Trebon twice over.”
Denna and I looked at the bucket. It contained about a third of all the resin we’d found. What was left in the oilskin sack would be enough to buy Denna a half-harp, pay off my debt to Devi, and still have enough left over so that we could live comfortably for months. I thought of buying new clothes, a full set of new strings for my lute, a bottle of Avennish fruit wine….
I thought of the draccus brushing aside trees as if they were sheaves of wheat, shattering them casually with its weight.
“We should double it again,” Denna said, echoing my own thoughts, “just to be sure.”
I doubled it yet again, rolling out another forty-tw
o balls of the resin while Denna fetched armload after armload of wood.
I got the fire blazing just as the rain started to come down. We built it larger than our last one with the hope that a brighter fire would attract the draccus more quickly. I wanted to get Denna back to the relative safety of Trebon as soon as possible.
Lastly I cobbled together a rough ladder using the hatchet and twine I’d found. It was ugly but serviceable, and I leaned it up against the side of the greystone arch. This time, Denna and I would have an easy route to safety.
Our dinner was nowhere near as grand as last night’s. We made due with the last of my now-stale flatbread, dried meat, and the last potatoes baked on the edge of the fire.
While we ate, I told Denna the full story of the fire in the Fishery. Partly because I was young, and male, and desperately wanted to impress her, but I also wanted to make it clear that I had missed our lunch due to circumstances completely outside my control. She was the perfect audience, attentive and gasping at all the right moments.
I was no longer worried about her overdosing. After gathering a small mountain of firewood, her mania was fading, leaving her in a content, almost dreamy lethargy. Still, I knew the aftereffects of the drug would leave her exhausted and weak. I wanted her safely in bed in Trebon for her recovery.
After we finished eating I made my way over to where she sat with her back against one of the greystones. I cuffed up my shirtsleeves. “Alright, I need to check you over,” I said pompously.
She smiled lazily at me, her eyes half-closed. “You really do know how to sweet talk a girl, don’t you?”
I felt for her pulse in the hollow of her slender throat. It was slow, but steady. She shied away a little from my touch. “You tickle.”
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Tired,” she said, her voice slightly slurred. “Good and tired and a little cold….”
While this wasn’t unexpected, it was still a little surprising considering the fact that we were only feet away from a blazing bonfire. I fetched the extra blanket from my bag and brought it back to her. She snuggled into it.