Dragon Chrysalis

Big Ed Bailey stuck his shovel into the mud, scratched the back of his neck and squinted up at the sky. “You know what lads? I reckon it’ll rain tonight.”

Their laughter was without humor, a muddied, crumbling thing, drowned out by the relentless downpour. Of course it would rain that night, just as it was raining now, just as it had rained the day before, and the one before, just as it seemed it would go on raining from now until the end of eternity.

Through it all, they dug: Big Ed Bailey, Sam Carver, Naylor the Bandarroan, Inman and Cartwright, Fletcher, Sexton and Ward, and half a hundred others whose individual faces and features the rain had slowly dissolved into an indifferent, undifferentiated, sullen, swearing mass.

A month they’d spent digging trenches in the marshes about the city of Geor, and the sky had spent a month undoing their labor in a steady, unceasing deluge, washing away their makeshift walls and ramparts, making rivers and lakes of each excavation, defying every attempt to hold the waters back.

As though they were the ones trapped and under siege. In need of rescue.

“’Ere, Bailey, weren’t we supposed to be on the way to the Hallowed City?” asked Carver.

Bailey clapped a palm to his forehead in mock astonishment. “Hang on, I reckon you’re right there, Carver. We were on the way to the Hallowed City.”

“Oh, right then.” Carver went back to shoveling. Then stopped, frowning. “Is Geor the Hallowed City?”

“Not last time I checked, no lad.”

“Ah, good, good, thanks for clearing that up.” Carver bent to his task again. Another pause.

“So, that being the case and all, what exactly is it that we’re doing here?”

“Well, that’s the thing.” Bailey itched again at the oddly hard and crusted skin of his scalp and neck. “I heard the Duke couldn’t pay the Vorozh for the ships to ferry us, so he’s agreed to take Geor for them instead.”

“Oh, good-o.” Carver nodded, thoughtful. “Still, bit of a rotten deal for them, innit? Us being the Shriven ‘ost, off to smite the heathen and whatnot, and the Georri not being partic’ly heretical. I mean, what have they ever done to us?”

“Er, other than building their stupid bloody city in the middle of the swamp, causing us no end of grief and hardship?”

“Oh right. The bastards.” Carver agreed mournfully. Then, savagely: “Death’s too good for ‘em.”

Grey-haired Cartwright put down his shovel and held his back with both hands. “Yer right there, Carver. Who builds a city in such a miserable place?” Rain ran from the brim of his hat like a waterfall, straight down the neck of his tunic. “What do they even grow here?”

“Mud, mosquitoes and the morning flux,” Carver ticked them off three morose fingers.

“Speaking of which, Inman still down with it?” asked Bailey. “Didn’t make out of the tent today.”

“The only thing he’s making is a puddle of brown water.”

“In this weather, how can you tell?”

Cold chrysalis laughter followed, the empty shell left after life had flown.

A dragon.

The heathen Shayathids had roused a dragon. A mindless creature, born to war, thirsting for destruction. They had summoned it to break the walls of the Hallowed City and burn the defenders. They had prayed and it had come. A great wyrm, a serpent with horny black and green hide, with a hundred razor-taloned claws, with teeth like knives, breath like a poison wind.

There had been tales of dragons before, drawn to war and strife like sharks to blood in the water. There were tales of dragon slayers too, mailed knights on horseback with shining steel in their hands and virtue in their breast.

What chance did they have? They’d eaten most of the horses, sold most of their steel.

The Shriven Host they called it: The armies of Zuharia, Bandarroa, Garessea and half a dozen other lands, purified by the Lustrates, united to retake the Hallowed City.

The reality was somewhat grimmer. A ragged band of starving, sickly mercenaries and hunters, peasants and tradesmen, stuck for a month in a sucking mire, hundreds of leagues from home, thousands from their goal.

Duke Kelmar’s symbol was the dragon, too. Five purple, roaring dragons on a gold field. They marched up and down his pennons, and endlessly round and round the fabric of his great, gilded tent.

An ill-omened sigil, given what waited for them, but Kelmar brushed aside such misgivings. It was a symbol of fortitude, the Duke said. “A dragon cannot be slain by blade or arrow,” he’d proclaimed. “So it is with us.”

“Very smart of the Georri not to rely on blades or arrows then,” muttered Carver. “Canny, that is. I notice the Duke is suspiciously silent on what dysentery does to dragons.”

They’d had dragons on their jerkins, too, stitched above their hearts. The dragons might still be there, somewhere on the inside, under the layers of grime and dirt, waiting to emerge again.

The days ran together like water, eroded into weeks, melted into months.

The trench was supposed to be a bowshot beyond the walls of Geor, though there were as many feathered shafts sprouting from the ground behind it as in front. Bored archers on the battlements amused themselves by taking potshots at Big Ed Bailey and the rest.

They’d shot pasty little Fletcher through the arm not a week before. The unlucky lad had clambered to the lip of the trench for a look at the city, and raised a hand to shield his eyes against the rain. Then he was slipping, slithering, tumbling bonelessly back down again, writhing like a snake, a blood-splattered shaft sticking out of his upper arm.

Carver and Naylor had held him down as Bailey had broken the shaft and pulled it out, but the wound had festered since, the skin turning black and reeking of rot. Even so, feverish, sweating, stinking Fletcher refused to stay in his tent, trailing after them each day, though they cursed at him and yelled at him to stand downwind. He could hardly lift a shovel, managing to do little more than rearrange the mud into slightly more aesthetic piles.

Bailey let him be. He could hardly complain about anyone falling sick. They all had the flux, Inman worst of all, and truth was Bailey’s hair was coming out in clumps each morning, the skin beneath hard and lumpy as a turtle’s shell. More and more, each day, inching down his spine like a serpent.

Time flowed on, carrying the men along in its current like krill into the insatiable leviathan jaws of the siege and the city.

Their camp had no visitors, save the day they found a harpy rooting in the mud around the back of the tents. Harpies were scavengers that fed on the run-off of humanity, with the body and head of a girl, the wings and talons of a great eagle. This one was small, a child perhaps, dirty and bedraggled, feathers clumped together. Cartwright and Sexton held it by either wing, but it made no struggle, no attempt to escape, just watched them dully with empty eyes.

“What should we do wif ‘it, Bailey?”

The big man shrugged his shoulders. “Search me. I don’t need another child. Got three at home already lads, but thanks for offering.”

“No, but like, should we string it up? As a warning to others?”

Bailey waved his hands around in a great circle. “What others, lads? Nothing loony enough to live for leagues around here but rats, midges and us.” He squatted on his haunches before the child, a hand on either thigh. “Where’s your family then? Your mam and pa?”

The harpy stared at the top of Bailey’s head.

“Don’t think it speaks Garessean, Bailey.”

“No food here. No food, understand?” The harpy might as well have been carved of granite. Bailey sighed in irritation. “Just let ‘im go, lads. We aren’t beasts.”

“’Cept Mason,” offered Carver. “He’s a right pig.”

They let go the wings, shouted at the harpy and tried to shoo it away. It stood for a long moment, watching Bailey silently, then in a clear girl’s voice, in perfect Garessean, she said: “The dragon will consume you, too.”

And then spread her great wings, took two steps and launched herself into the air, circling high overhead before disappearing into the leaden clouds. They looked away, save black-armed Fletcher, who watched it disappear with something like envy.

“No respect for their elders, these days,” sighed Carver. “If a dragon’s gonna et me, wish it’d bleedin’ well ‘urry up.”

They put down their shovels and watched as Duke Kelmar inspected the siege lines from the back of his great roan horse. His squire followed behind on a pony, wobbling aloft a long, lank dragon pennon. A Lustrate rode after, holding aloft three fingers to bless the men. They glared back under dripping hats and plastered hair.

Kelmar rode a little further on, stopped his horse. Drew his sword and waved it over his head. They watched his mouth move, though the rain drowned out all sound.

“What’s he on about now?”

“Can’t hear a thing.”

Big Ed Bailey coughed and spat. “I ‘spect what he’s saying is, ‘My word, this is quite the most marvellous trench I have ever beheld. A thousand crowns to each man wot who dug it.’ I ‘spect that’s what it is.”

“I’m insulted,” sniffed Carver. “We aren’t no bleedin’ Bandarroan mercenaries. No offense Naylor.” (“None taken”) “It’s all about professional pride, innit?”

“Right you are, Carver,” agreed Bailey. “Right you are. Artists, is what we are. Sculptors of the earth, maestros of mud. Experts in excrescences. Eh lads?”

“Aye, Ed, that we are. Doing it for love, not money.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Naylor.

“Shh.”

“And piety, don’t forget the piety.”

“Absolutely. Great steaming, stinking sacks full of piety.”

“Oh, bugger.”

“What?”

“Think he just said something about attacking tomorrer.”

“Oh.” A thoughtful silence. “Bugger.”

The men contemplated the city walls, draped with prayer flags and pennons to remind the Shriven Host whose city they besieged. Between their siege lines and the towering walls was nothing but bare ground, over a hundred paces wide. A forest of spear-points bristled from the battlements. Nods all around. ‘Bugger’ did seem to cover it.

There was a distant rumble of thunder.

“Nice day for it,” sighed Bailey.

At dusk they slopped and staggered back to the camp, nearly wriggling through a growing gloom that clutched at them as surely as the mud. The only light the beacon of the braziers about Duke Kelmar’s grand tent. A dragon’s fire, flame without comfort, offering only the promise of worse to come.

They bowed their heads and carried on, back to dark, damp tents that leaned groggily against each other and leaked like incontinent oxen.

“What’s for dinner then, Mason? Rabbit stew? Roast guinea fowl?”

“Even better,” Mason the cook beamed, holding out a grubby hand, in which sat a few moldy, misshapen lumps. “Turnips and onions.”

“What, raw?”

“Oh no, good master, let me just heat them up using my enormous stockpile of dry wood I just happened to have set by for this occasion,” snorted Mason. “Yes, of course bleedin’ raw. Unless you’d like to ask the Georri to cook ‘em? I’m sure they’d be willing to throw down some hot oil for you. Very hot, if you take my meaning.”

“At least you’d die warm,” said Carver, wistfully. “Wouldn’t ‘ave to eat any bleedin’ turnips, neither.”

“Shurrup. Good healthy food, vegetables is. Now if you don’t want yours, there’s plenty others that do.”

They rinsed them off as best they could in the muddy water, and gnawed in silence.

“Ow, bugger,” groaned Naylor, reaching into his mouth. “Fink I brofe a toof.” He spat a wad of blood and a small yellow chip, soon lost in the oozing mud. “Good healthy food, he says.”

“Well, look on the bright side,” Bailey tried to rally them. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Carver snorted at that. “At this rate, we should all be demigods.”

The meal done, they huddled together in a circle, like an ouroboros, a snake devouring its own tail, their faces and names scribbled into nothing, inked into anonymity by the darkness.

“Tell us about the Hallowed City, Naylor.”

Naylor the Bandarroan, was a mercenary and the only one who’d ever seen the City.

“Like a giant bowl it is, scooped right from the ground,” Naylor cupped his hands to demonstrate. “A round valley ringed by mountains on all sides. White alabaster walls with multicolored roofs, and flags, flags, prayer flags and devotion pennons, red ones, blue ones, yellow ones, ones of every color hanging everywhere. When the wind comes whistling down the valley you can’t talk for all the flapping noise.”

“Mountains all ‘round? Then how do you get in?”

“A narrow gap at either end of the valley. Triffic’ly defensible, y’see.”

“How’d the Bayarenes lose it then?”

“Quite careless, that,” said Carver. “Misplacing a whole city. You think they’d’ve noticed.”

“On account of the dragon, weren’t it?” Naylor said simply. “Aye, a terrible thing it was. Bigger’n’a barn, stronger than a hundred men, hide like stone, teeth like blades. It burned the Kritarch of the Bayarenes before the gates and blew ‘em from their hinges with a lash of its tail. Nearly got me ‘ead knocked off by a flying stone. I ran, not ashamed to say, we all did. Them’s that didn’t died, all of ‘em, every last one.”

“Sounds handy,” nodded Carver. “Think it’d pull Geor’s gates down if we asked?”

“Ask a dragon?” Bailey shook his head. “Be my guest, lads.”

“Oi Naylor, whossappen with your tooth then?”

“Wotcher mean?”

“Gorra new one, looks like.”

Naylor frowned and probed his jaw with a finger, then jerked it back with a yelp. Sure enough, the missing tooth had grown back. Long and pointed, sharp as a dagger.

Big Ed Bailey dreamed of a snake with Duke Kelmar’s face.

Bailey was standing in quicksand, slowly sinking, while the serpent circled about him, effortlessly gliding on the surface. Kelmar’s laughing eyes watching him as it turned. Around and around, endlessly. The sand was up to his knees.

“Just a nibble?” asked the snake. “Ask me nicely, and I might. Say ‘please.’”

Bailey tried to swat it away. He’d sunk to his thighs now. The other lads were there, sinking just like he was, Carver and Naylor and all the rest.

“It’s the only way out of this, you know. If not for yourself, then for their sake.”

Bailey ignored it, just he tried to ignore the rising tide of mud and guilt. He looked for a root, a branch, anything to pull himself out. The sand was up to their waists.

“It’ll only get worse the more you put it off.”

He wouldn’t listen. He’d done bad things, terrible things, but he’d always tried to do right by the lads. See as many of them home safe as he could. Up to his armpits. You did what you had to, to stay alive, to keep the men together. “Hang on, lads.” They’d let the harpy go, hadn’t they? That counted for something.

“Less than you think,” said the snake. “There is such a thing as fate. Not much you can do to alter destiny.”

That didn’t seem fair. It had been for a good cause, the only cause, a righteous and just one. Up to his chin. A divine cause.

“Sure about that?” the snake laughed. “Whoops, there goes one now.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Bailey saw Fletcher’s head slip beneath the surface, then Naylor, and then the sand was rising over his own mouth. Bailey took a deep breath, tried to hold it as the level rose over his nose, screwed shut his eyes against the pain and pressure, and he was suffocating, suffocating, his lungs were fire. He could hear the others screaming, strangled crying as they sank, too.

Bailey jerked his head back and freed his mouth for an instant. “Please!” he screamed.

The snake smiled, a satisfied smile, rearing above him as enormous and unstoppable as a mountain. It unhinged the cavern of its jaw, stooping down, and plunged Big Ed Bailey into blackness as thick as tar.

Big Ed Bailey awoke to screaming. Not his own. Outside.

The Georri came boiling out of the morning mist like a swarm of midges. Leaping from flat-bottomed boats they’d rowed up to the edge of the camp, they came bellowing, red torches and cold steel in hand.

Bailey staggered from his tent, shovel raised over his head. A company of crossbowmen they’d been, once, but they’d lost, sold or traded most of their weapons away. Instead they brandished mallets and tent pegs, butcher knives and cudgels.

They stood in a bewildered knot in the middle of the tents, with shadows, screams of anger and cries of pain curling about them like the scales of a snake, growing steadily closer, squeezing about them. Each man jostled, trying to get back from the cries, trying to press back further into the circle, until bodies merged in a blurry tangle, like a single beast with a hundred legs.

The Georri came in a sudden rush and bodies were falling, tangling, disappearing into the mud. Bailey laid about him with his iron shovel in great, sweeping circles, catching one of the Georri under the chin and shearing his jaw away. A face appeared before him and Bailey smashed it with the flat of the shovel, only later realizing it had been Sexton.

A massive stone came hurtling down, striking Bailey on the side of the head, where it smashed into shards, murderous slivers spinning away like the blast of a bombard. Bailey shook his head, held up a hand to the side.

Was mildly surprised when it came away without any blood.

A tall Georri charge straight at Naylor, knocking him off his feet, then bore down, pressing Naylor deeper and deeper into the mire. Naylor lashed about madly, but his arms and legs were pinned by the giant man. Naylor arched his back, lunged his neck forward, and brought his teeth down on the man’s neck, shaking him like a wolf with a rabbit in its jaws, tearing out his throat in a rain of red.

The Georri flung oil and put torches to the tents, blue flames stuttering hesitantly before catching on the damp cloth. Fletcher came staggering, coughing, his arm held across his mouth. The arm was mottled green, from fingertips to shoulder, swollen and distended, cracked and oozing pus. Even the fingernails had turned horny and yellow. Fletcher’s bloodshot eyes looked everywhere, seeing nothing.

A raider running past paused, lip curled, and raised an axe two-handed over his head.

Fletcher, poor pale little Fletcher, reached out with his diseased hand to block the blow. His hand closed about the shaft of the axe, and snapped it splintering in two. Pasty little Fletcher, barely more than a boy, smiled and lifted the stunned Georri, lifted him off his feet by his neck, and squeezed. Squeezed and squeezed, as the man wriggled and flopped like a fish, mouth and eyes agape. Squeezed and squeezed until the man was still.

The Georri ran for their boats.

Exhausted eyes watched them go without any great emotion. Finally, with effort, they shook themselves into motion: There was work to do. They laid the bodies out, side by side. Grey old Cartwright, Ward and Sexton, his face squashed and purple. A dozen others.

They linked arms and stood in silent vigil amid the ruin and wreck of the camp. Even Fletcher, his arms rippling like a thing alive, even Naylor, still blood-splattered from chin to chest. No words were spoken, none needed. Their thoughts ran like a pulse from fingertip to fingertip among them, from heart to heart. They’d fought and died together. They were one.

They parted to let the Lustrate in, and while he sang over and shrived the dead, they debated what to do. Not enough wood for a pyre, no ground that would hold them longer than the next rains. No stones for a cairn.

The enemy dead were loaded into trebuchets, and hurled across the battlements.

Their own, they gave to Mason. Even in death, they were one.

Inman started screaming in the middle of the night.

Bailey found the men standing outside his tent, refusing to go in. He opened the flap, and immediately recoiled from the stench.

“Fetch the Lustrate.”

They begged, pleaded and pulled the white-robed man, step by dragging step, to the shambles of their tents, brought him to stand over Inman’s writhing, shrieking body. The Lustrate gagged and held a cloth across his mouth and nose.

“Can’t you do anything for ‘im?”

The Lustrate looked down, gave a shrug. “Dig a hole. I believe you’re good at that.”

“Shrive him, at least. The least you can do.”

The Lustrate took a deep breath, wrapped the cloth around his face and tied it at the back.

Cinched it tight. Knelt beside Inman, three fingers held above the man’s head for a moment, then dropped his arm and shook his head.

“Nothing to shrive,” he said, voice muffled. Disgusted. “He’s good as dead already. There’s nothing left but a husk.”

Inman gripped weakly at the Lustrate’s knee, clutching at the robe. He whispered something.

The Lustrate bent down. Breathed in.

Inman breathed out.

The Lustrate began to choke. A cough, another. A gasp, a hissing rattle for air. Then he was tearing, tearing frantically at the cloth about this mouth, ripping it away. The skin of his cheeks, mouth, around his eyes blackened, blistered, smoked. His eyes bulged, jaw working soundlessly as his flesh boiled away, consumed in a cloud of greasy smoke, the body pitched backwards, still on its knees, back arching in a frozen rictus of agony.

They watched the Lustrate until he stopped twitching. Carver toed the body with a boot, beyond shock or horror. “No great loss. He wasn’t one of us.”

They growled in agreement. Bravado, though. The Lustrate’s death sealed their fate, regardless of what happened on the morrow. They were as good as dead.

Bailey sank to his knees, his horny head in his scaled hands. There was no escape, not for

them, only a choice of death on the walls tomorrow or death on the gallows tonight. They’d tried, Lustrates knew they’d tried, building defenses against it, walling it off, but it was as relentless and inevitable as the rain. There was no escape, not for little men like them.

He felt Fletcher’s hand on his shoulder, the bloated, clawed hand on his rocky shoulder, and felt no revulsion. “No your fault, Big Ed,” he said. Empathy maybe, sympathy, acknowledgement of a shared fate. The scales on Bailey’s skin seemed to twitch, arching up towards Fletcher’s touch.

Fletcher’s skin rippling, moving, ropy tendrils reaching across Bailey’s back. Not diseased, no, how wrong he’d been. Adapted, like the harpy, becoming what it had to be.

“Gather around, lads,” said Bailey. He knew what needed to be done. “We’ve just got to stick together.”

“Aye, but--”

“Close together. Closer. Take hold of me lads, take hold. And Fletcher there, and Naylor. Inman, too, bring him here. Can’t you feel it?”

(“It’s the only way out of this, you know.”)(“It’ll only get worse the more you put it off.”)(“There is such a thing as fate.”)

The darkness closed about them like a cocoon.

The sky dawned clear, for the first time in months. When Kelmar’s heralds blew the trumpets to summon the host, they came.

Together. As one body.

A single, great, lumbering body, shaking the earth with each stride. Its arms were Fletcher’s arms, black and blistering, its skin Bailey’s skin, hard and scaled. Its teeth were Naylor’s teeth, its breath was Inman’s breath.

It killed the heralds, and the knights too, before they’d had time to put on their mail or mount their horses. It burned Duke Kelmar in his gold and purple tent, crushing its own likeness under a great, taloned foot.

It left the crusted, crumbling tents behind. A cold chrysalis camp, a dragon nest, the shell left after life had flown.