Chapter 6: The Midnight Wyrm

Leofric came back at dusk on the eighth day, riding hard at the head of a column of thirteen. The rangers were dusty and grim and carried their spears wrapped in oilcloth, and they had the look of men who had been told what they rode to and had come anyway. Leofric was grinning again. He had not grinned when he left.

"Twelve and me," he said. "The best I could raise in four days."

"It is enough," Erlich said. "Stable them. Feed them. We move at full dark."

Godwin had the ground ready. He had worked it for the eight days they waited, and Tomas had worked beside him. The pasture where the goats had been taken was a square of flat trampled earth with the stockade wall at its back and the river meadow open before it. Godwin had the villagers dig a shallow trench across the open side and bank the earth behind it, and behind the bank he set torches in iron baskets, unlit, and behind the torches a bristle of spears. Two ranks. The first rank with spears braced against the earth, points low. The second rank with shields and shorter spears, to hold the line if the first buckled. Godwin's six best bows he set on the stockade wall, high and angled, where they could shoot down into the beast.

In the middle of the pasture, tied to a stake, stood a steer.

It was Tomas's. The last of his stock, a red yearling he had been saving. He brought it out himself at evening and tied it to the stake and did not look at it again. His face was white, but his hands were steady.

"It took my goats," he said. "It took my cow. Let it try this one."

"Stand back," Erlich said. "Get behind the wall."

Tomas went.

Full dark came. The torches stayed dark. The rangers crouched behind the bank and on the wall, and they did not talk, and they did not move, and the steer lowed once in the middle of the field and was silent.

They waited.

Near midnight the ground trembled.

It came in the way Godwin had said it would — low, heavy, the belly-furrow trenching the soft earth of the meadow, the drag-marks scored behind. But seeing it was not the same as reading it in the mud. It came out of the dark grass like something a man would see in a fever: thirty feet of scaled serpent, grey-brown and dull, thicker through the body than a horse, with a blunt wedge of a head and a mouth that opened wide enough to take the steer whole. It moved wrong for its size, faster than it had any right to, the body pulling itself forward in a long smooth rush.

It struck the steer. The beast went over without a sound, folded into that mouth, and the wyrm began to swallow.

"Now," Erlich said.

The torches lit. The baskets flared up along the bank and the light ran out across the pasture, and the wyrm flinched from it, the head swinging, the body threshing. The rangers on the wall loosed. Godwin's arrows went into it — into the thick of the body, into the neck, and one, the best shot, into the eye. The wyrm threw its head back and the sound it made was not a hiss and not a roar but something between, a wet heavy threshing that shook the air.

It charged.

It came straight at the bank, low and fast, and the first rank braced. Six spears butted into the earth, points angled low. The wyrm hit them. Two spears splintered at once. The body drove over the bank and into the line, and men went down, shields cracking, and the second rank closed up and drove their shorter spears into the side of it, again, again. The beast threshed and rolled and a ranger was caught under the coil and Godwin was shouting from the wall and the bows were loosing into the throat.

Erlich had the killing spear.

He had carried it since Westreach, wrapped in oilcloth, the spear that had gone into the Black Dragon's brain. He had not wanted to carry it. He had not wanted to use it. He was under the beast now, somewhere in the crush, and the body was threshing above him and the scales were slick with blood and the smell of it was iron and mud.

He saw the head. The one good eye was gone, Godwin's arrow in the socket. The other eye rolled, wild, blind with pain. The mouth was open. The fangs were as long as his hand.

He set the spear.

Leofric was beside him. Of course he was. The joker, the cheat, the man who drifted into hives of villainy — he was there with his shield up, fending the threshing head, and he had hold of the spear shaft below Erlich's hands, and together they drove it.

The point went in behind the skull, between the scales, and found the brain.

The wyrm went rigid. Then it threshed, and threshed, and the field went flat under it — grass and stakes and the trench and the bank, all of it threshed to mud. A coil caught Erlich across the chest and threw him. He came up bleeding, and the beast was still thrashing, and then it was not.

It died hard, the way wyrms do. It took a long time. The torches burned down and were replaced, and the beast threshed smaller and slower, and at last it lay still in the ruined pasture, thirty feet of dead scaled flesh, the killing spear standing out of its skull.

Dawn came. Erlich stood over it. He was cut across the chest and his arm was hurt and he had mud and blood in his hair. He did not care.

He said, sparely, to the baron and the reeve and the village that had gathered at the gate: "The scale. The drag-marks, wider than a man. No blood, no bone — prey taken whole. It grows with every meal. That is what hunted you. That is what we read."

Haden wrote it down in his slate.

They harvested the corpse. That was the work the crown paid them for, and the work that paid for the work. The hide came off in long strips, scaled and tough, worth a fortune to the wizards of the capital. The fangs were cut out, four of them, each as long as a man's hand. The flesh was mana-rich — a magical beast draws its magic from what it eats, and the flesh of it was soaked through — and the bone was better still. Rangers fund themselves this way. The King's taxes buy the spears and the horses, but the beast-corpse sales keep the rangers in the field. This one would keep a company for a year.

Baron Aldric came down from the hall and offered Erlich a purse and his thanks, and this time he meant both. Erlich took the purse. He did not take the thanks long.

They rode out at midday, fifteen rangers and a wagon of beast-parts, and the village of Eastbrook stood whole behind them.

Erlich did not look back. He was thinking of the Black Dragon, and the spear in its brain, and the three days it had lived after, razing a city. He had sworn off that work. He had come to Eastbrook to do anything but. And the thing in the pasture would have grown, Vaelin had said — grown fat and slow and large enough to swallow a nation, if no dragon came to curb it. It would have grown into the very thing he had sworn off. There were no dragons here to stop it. There was only him.

He had done the work. Not the glory. The work. The spear and the mud and the reading of clues he had pocketed and ignored. That was the point of it. Not the name, not the kill, not the purse. The work.

He rode home.