The Dragon Book (45 page)

Picking his teeth after gnawing the last of the meat off a roasted unicorn rib, Kyosti asked Uluots, “What do you suppose eats them when no Mussalmian expedition’s in the neighborhood?”

“What do you mean?” Uluots asked.

Kyosti waved. “Well, there aren’t many natives in these mountains, and the ones who do live here are a sorry lot. The gang we brought up from the savanna puts them to shame. You can’t tell me that the local savages kill a lot of unicorns.
Something
must, though, or the unicorns would have eaten up all the scrub; and then they would have starved.”

“Ah. Now I see where you’re riding. Clever.” The other savant nodded. After a moment’s thought, he brightened. “Maybe dragons eat them!”

“Well, maybe they do,” Kyosti admitted. To say he hadn’t thought of that would have been an understatement. “We haven’t seen any dragons swooping down on them, though.”

“Not yet,” Uluots said. “My guess is, we need to go higher.”

Kyosti’s guess was that Uluots was talking through his hat. If dragons swooped down on unicorns from the sky, the explorers would already have spotted them flying across it. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name. But who said dragons had to fly? Maybe they were too big and heavy to get off the ground. Sunila had thought of overgrown snakes and lizards, after all. If that was what they were, they might still linger in caves or valleys somewhere in these barely explored, almost uninhabited mountains.

They might. After all, if dragons didn’t eat unicorns, what did? Something had to. If nothing did, this country would be hip deep in them or without them altogether. It was neither.

So maybe dragons did prowl farther up the slopes. Maybe. But Kyosti still had a demon of a time believing it.

ULUOTS delivered another cloth-wrapped package to Kyosti a couple of days later. “Now I know what eats unicorns,” the savant announced.

“What?” Kyosti asked, wrinkling his nose. This package was smellier than the one Uluots had had him preserve before.

“Whatever makes these.” With more of a sense of drama than Kyosti thought scat deserved, Uluots whipped back the cloth. Kyosti eyed the formidably large, formidably odorous turd with distaste. Not noticing, Uluots went on, “I’ve found unicorn teeth and crunched-up unicorn bones in here. No possible doubt about it.”

“Happy day,” Kyosti said. “You want me to preserve it?”

“That’s right,” the savant affirmed.

“Well, I will, then.” Kyosti both was and wasn’t enthusiastic about the task. He was because sorcerously preserving the turd would make it stop stinking. He wasn’t because … because here he was, using his sorcerous talent to preserve a big, smelly turd. As soon as the job was done, he asked, “What
does
make scat like that? Something like the big striped cats we saw down on the savanna?”

“Not if the tracks I found mean anything,” Uluots answered. “They aren’t cat tracks—not even huge cat tracks. Whatever the thing is, it’s got long, skinny feet with three toes, and they all have claws, big claws, especially the middle toes. And I think—I think, mind you—the beast goes on two legs, not four.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Kyosti said.

“Neither had I.” Uluots proved his enthusiasm could stretch to other things besides scat. “They could be the kind of tracks dragons leave!”

“That’s—” Kyosti stopped. How could he be sure it was nonsense? People had dug up what they called dragon bones in the Empire of Mussalmi. Some of the skeletons they assembled from them looked to be of two-legged creatures. And, now that he thought of it, didn’t some of those creatures have long, skinny feet with clawed toes? He wasn’t sure if they had three toes on each foot, but he also wasn’t sure that they didn’t. With a barely perceptible pause, he finished, “—very interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it? Gives us something new to think about, too,” Uluots said. “How do we go about catching one of these beasts?”

“Set out something they want to eat for bait,” Kyosti suggested. “We haven’t got a live unicorn—maybe one of the natives would do.” He was kidding—but, then again, he wasn’t. Killing a man to capture an animal was a bad bargain. Anyone could see that. Killing a worthless savage to gain precious knowledge of a fabulous, mystical creature … When you put it
that
way, how the pans of the scale balanced seemed less obvious.

Still, he and Uluots didn’t propose the arrangement to Baron Toivo. Kyosti didn’t know why the other savant didn’t. As for himself, he feared that the leader of the expedition might take them up on it.

Instead, the Mussalmians sacrificed the next unicorn they killed to the cause of learning, not to the stewpot. Several of their finest marksmen crouched downwind from the carcass, ready to open up on whatever came to investigate the bounty. Kyosti hoped something did before the carcass got high. He already knew more about vultures than he’d ever wanted to.

Nothing happened. More nothing happened. Still more nothing happened. And then, quite suddenly, something did. Two green-gray creatures leaped down from the green-gray rocks and ran toward the dead unicorn. Till they moved, none of the explorers had the slightest idea they were there. How long had they waited, watching, weighing, wondering? No way to know.

As Uluots had guessed they would, they ran on their hind legs. Had they stood erect, they would have been taller than men, but they didn’t. They leaned forward instead, their long, scaly tails counterbalancing heads and torsos.

They hissed and snarled at each other as they hurried toward the carcass. They might have been a couple of dogs squabbling over a bone in the street. A little to Kyosti’s surprise, they both reached the carcass. One at each end, they started tearing gobbets of meat from it with their great, tooth-filled jaws. Eating preoccupied both of them too much to let either stay angry at the other.

The marksmen opened up then. One of the—dragons?—sprang into the air in alarm as missiles cracked past it. Then it fled, dodging and jumping with what Kyosti would have called impossible agility had he not seen it for himself. And the other would have done the same, were it not down and thrashing with what was obviously a broken leg.

“We got it!” the marksmen cried. They ran forward with a net to immobilize the wounded creature. Kyosti loped behind them, with a spell ready to immobilize it for good. The beast’s hisses sounded like hot metal dropped into a cold sea.

It thrashed and hissed all the more when the explorers cast the net over it. The weights around the edges made sure the creature couldn’t get loose—its struggle only entangled it more thoroughly.

One of the savants bent toward it for a closer look at its head. That should have been safe enough. He still stood two or three feet away, and had the net’s stout fibers between him and those formidable jaws. Kyosti panted up just in time to see the creature’s catlike yellow eyes fix on the closest of its tormentors with a deadly glare.

Then … something shot from the beast’s jaws. The savant let out a horrible shriek and reeled away, both hands clutched to his face. “It burns!” he screamed. “It burns!”

“Preserve the beast!” Baron Toivo yelled at Kyosti. “Then it won’t be able to do … whatever the demon it just did.”

“Right,” Kyosti said tightly. And Toivo
was
right: no doubt about it.

Kyosti tried to make himself into a man of metal, casting his spell as if the burned savant’s cries and wails didn’t still echo in his ears. When he did, he felt a certain resistance to his magic—not nearly so much as he had from the
tsaldaris
in the jungle, but more than a simple animal should have been able to show. Which meant that the horrible thing under the net wasn’t only a simple animal. But it also wasn’t strong enough in spirit to withstand him. A last hiss cut off halfway, and it froze forever.

Then Kyosti could turn away from it and ask the question that really mattered: “How’s old Piip?”

One of the guardsmen crouching by the injured savant looked up and shook his head. “Not so good,” he answered. “It spat some kind of vitriol at him, I think. His eyes … His face …” He shook his head. Then he got up and walked over to Kyosti. In a low voice, so Piip couldn’t overhear, he went on, “If he lives, he’ll be a horror the rest of his days, but he’ll never see himself again, so that’s a mercy.”

Kyosti had got one brief glimpse of the curdled flesh running out between Piip’s fingers like soft cheese. It was a glimpse he would gladly have forgone, but the gods didn’t give choices like that. “Sorry devil,” he said, also softly. “Who would have thought …?”

“Piip sure didn’t,” the guardsman said. “One thing—he’ll never have the chance to make such a big mistake again.”

“These beasts, these terrible lizards, must be—
must
be, I say—the origin of the legend that dragons dwell in these mountains,” Baron Toivo declared. Sunila would have said the same thing: had already said it, in fact. Here, Toivo’d gone right on thinking about the expedition when everyone else’s mind was on Piip. Inexorable as a boulder crashing downhill, the baron continued, “They look much as dragons are said to look. And, just as dragons are said to do, they spit fire, or something all too much like fire. This we have discovered, to our distress.”

It wasn’t
their
distress. It was Piip’s. His shrieks went on and on. Did they sound strange, as if even his mouth …? Kyosti’s stomach lurched. He wished he hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t want to know.

Oblivious to it all, Baron Toivo blathered on: “Now we have at last captured and preserved one of the beasts the Emperor charged us to discover. Gentlemen, our mission is a success!”

He seemed offended when he got no cheers. Kyosti wondered whether Piip thought that their mission was a success. But he couldn’t ask the other savant now, and the question never crossed Toivo’s one-road mind.

PIIP died four days later. As far as Kyosti was concerned,
that
was a mercy. Piip could neither eat nor drink. By the time oblivion claimed him, he smelled bad, too.

They buried him in the rocky soil of the upper slopes and piled boulders on his body so the dragons could not disturb it. And then, with the preserved specimen they’d taken, they started downslope for home.

They were still in the foothills a couple of days after that. One of the marksmen brought down a unicorn. This one wasn’t a specimen—it was supper. While the savory aroma of roasted meat filled the air, Kyosti hunted up Sunila. “I want to talk to Galvanauskas,” he said. “Give me a hand.”

“What do you want to say to him?” Sunila asked. “Why do you want to say anything to him? He’s only a savage.”

“That’s why, and I want to rub his nose in it,” Kyosti said. “Come on.”

With a creaky sigh, the linguistic sorcerer climbed to his feet. “I suppose I’d better,” he said resignedly. He might have been a wife giving in to a husband of many years, knowing he would get to be unbearable if she didn’t.

Galvanauskas and the bearers he led shared food with the Mussalmians. But they ate apart from them and generally kept their distance unless they needed to deal with one of the men from the Empire. The skinny little blonds looked up in surprise as Kyosti and Sunila strode over to where they squatted.

“What do you want?” Galvanauskas asked, as they loomed over him. He stood up, but they both still overtopped him by a head.

“To show you something,” Kyosti answered through Sunila.

“Is that all?” The headman sounded apprehensive, even if Kyosti couldn’t understand his words without Sunila’s cantrip.

“By the gods, it is.” Kyosti raised his hand as if taking an oath in one of the Emperor’s courts.

Galvanauskas’ sigh might have been patterned on Sunila’s. “Well, I will come, then.”

They’d got halfway to where they were going when another earthquake struck. Even though Kyosti was out in the open, where nothing bad was likely to happen to him, it was frightening enough and then some. Quakes were rare up in the Empire of Mussalmi. When they came, all too often they worked havoc; buildings of stone and brick crashed down in ruin, crushing some people and pinning others in the ruins. And the fires that followed could do as much harm as the quake itself—sometimes even more.