The Name of the Wind (65 page)

It moved its thick head back and forth working its wide mouth open and closed, tasting the air.

Then there was a burst of blue flame. The sudden light of it was blinding, and I heard Denna cry out beside me. I ducked my head and felt a wash of heat roll over us.

Rubbing at my eyes, I looked down again and saw the thing move closer to the fire. It was black, scaled, massive. It grunted again like thunder, then bobbed its head and breathed another great gout of billowing blue fire.

It was a dragon.

I
N THE WAYSTONE INN, Kvothe paused expectantly. The moment stretched out until Chronicler looked up from his page.

“I'm giving you the opportunity to say something,” Kvothe said. “Something along the lines of, ‘That can't be!' or ‘There's no such thing as dragons….'”

Chronicler wiped the nib of his pen clean, “It's not really my place to comment on the story,” he said placidly. “If you say you saw a dragon…” He shrugged.

Kvothe gave him a profoundly disappointed look. “This from the author of
The Mating Habits of the Common Draccus?
This from Devan Lochees, the great debunker?”

“This from Devan Lochees who agreed not to interrupt or change a single word of the story he is recording.” Chronicler lay his pen down and massaged his hand. “Because those were the only conditions under which he could get access to a story he very much desired.”

Kvothe gave him a level look. “Have you ever heard the expression white mutiny?”

“I have,” Chronicler said with a thin smile.

“I could say it, Reshi,” Bast said brightly. “I haven't agreed to anything.”

Kvothe looked back and forth between them, then sighed. “There are few things as nauseating as pure obedience,” he said. “Both of you would do well to remember that.” He gestured for Chronicler to pick his pen up again. “Very well…. It was a dragon.”

“I
T'S A DRAGON,” Denna whispered. “Tehlu hold and overroll us. It's a dragon.”

“It's not a dragon,” I said. “There's no such thing as dragons.”

“Look at it!” she hissed at me. “It's right there! Look at the huge Goddamn dragon!”

“It's a draccus,” I said.

“It's Goddamn huge,” Denna said with a tinge of hysteria in her voice. “It's a Goddamn huge dragon and it's going to come over here and eat us.”

“It doesn't eat meat,” I said. “It's an herbivore. It's like a big cow.”

Denna looked at me and started to laugh. Not hysterical laughter, but the helpless laugher of someone who's just heard something so funny they can't help but bubble over with it. She put her hands over her mouth and shook with it, the only sound was a low huffing that escaped through her fingers.

There was another flash of blue fire from below. Denna froze midlaugh, then took her hands away from her mouth. She looked at me, her eyes wide, and spoke softly with a slight quaver in her voice, “Mooooo.”

We had both gone from terrified to safe so quickly that we were close to laughing from sheer relief anyway. So when she convulsed with laughter again, muffling it with her hands, I started to laugh too, my belly shaking as I tried not to make any noise. We lay there like two giggling children while below us the great beast grunted and snuffed around our fire, occasionally sending up gouts of flame.

After a long several minutes, we regained control of ourselves. Denna wiped tears away from her eyes and drew a deep, shaky breath. She slid closer to me until the left side of her body was pressed close up against my right. “Listen,” she said softly as we both looked over the edge of the stone. “That thing does not graze,” she said. “It's huge. It could never get enough food. And look at its mouth. Look at those teeth.”

“Exactly. They're flat, not pointed. It eats trees. Whole trees. Look at how big it is. Where could it possibly find enough meat? It would have to eat ten deer every day. There's no way it could survive!”

She turned her head to look at me. “How the hell do you know this?”

“I read about it at the University,” I said. “A book called
The Mating Habits of the Common Draccus.
It uses the fire in a mating display. It's like a bird's plumage.”

“You mean that that thing down there,” she groped for words, her mouth working silently for a moment, “is going to try and tup our campfire?” She looked for a moment as if she was going to burst into laughter again, but she drew a deep, shuddering breath instead, regaining her composure. “Now that's something I have to see….”

We both felt a shudder in the stone underneath us, coming up from the ground below. At the same time, things grew noticeably darker.

Looking down, we saw the draccus rolling in the fire like a hog in a wallow. The ground shook as it wriggled around, crushing the fire underneath itself.

“That thing must weigh…” Denna stalled out, shaking her head.

“Maybe five tons,” I guessed. “Five at least.”

“It could come get us. It could push over these stones.”

“I don't know about that,” I said, slapping the stone under my hand, trying to sound more certain than I really was. “These have been here for a long time. We're safe.”

While rolling in our overlarge campfire, the draccus had scattered burning branches around the top of the hill. It now wandered to where a half-charred log lay smoldering in the grass. The draccus snuffed, then rolled, crushing the log into the earth. Then it came back to its feet, snuffed the log again, and ate it. It didn't chew. It bolted the log whole, like a frog getting a cricket down into its gullet.

It did this several times, moving in a circle around the now largely extinguished fire. It snuffed, rolled on the burning pieces, then ate them after they were extinguished.

“That makes sense, I suppose,” Denna said, watching it. “It starts fires and lives in the woods. If it didn't have something in its head that made it want to put out fires, it wouldn't survive very long.”

“That's probably why it came here,” I said. “It saw our fire.”

After several minutes of snuffing and rolling, the draccus came back to the flat bed of coals that was all that remained of our fire. It circled it a few times, then walked over it and lay down. I cringed, but it just shifted back and forth like a hen settling into a nest. The hilltop below was now entirely dark except for the pale moonlight.

“How can I never have heard of these things?” Denna asked.

“They're very rare,” I said. “People tend to kill them because they don't understand they're relatively harmless. And they don't reproduce very quickly. That one down there is probably two hundred years old, about as big as they get.” I marveled at it. “I bet there aren't more than a couple hundred draccus that size in the whole world.”

We watched for another couple minutes, but there was no movement from below. Denna gave a jaw-popping yawn. “Gods, I'm exhausted. There's nothing like the certain knowledge of your own death to tucker you out.” She rolled over onto her back, then onto her side, then back facing toward me, trying to get comfortable. “Lord it's cold up here.” She shivered visibly. “I can see why it's cuddled up on our fire.”

“We could go down and get the blanket,” I suggested.

She snorted. “Not likely.” She shivered visibly, wrapping her arms around her chest.

“Here,” I stood up and took off my cloak. “Wrap up in this. It's not much, but it's better than the bare stone.” I held it out to her. “I'll watch you while you sleep and make sure you don't fall off.”

She stared at me for a long moment, and I half expected her to beg off. But after a moment she took it and wrapped it around herself. “You, Master Kvothe, certainly know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Wait until tomorrow,” I said. “I'm just getting started.”

I sat there quietly, trying not to shiver, and eventually Denna's breathing leveled off. I watched her sleep with the calm contentment of a boy who has no idea of how foolish he is, or what unexpected tragedies the following day will bring.

I
WOKE WITHOUT REMEMBERING when I had fallen asleep. Denna was shaking me gently. “Don't move too quickly,” she said. “It's a long way down.”

I slowly uncurled, nearly every muscle in my body complaining at how it had been treated yesterday. My thighs and calves were tight, hard knots of pain.

Only then did I realize I was wearing my cloak again. “Did I wake you up?” I asked Denna. “I don't remember….”

“In a way you did,” she said. “You nodded off and tipped right onto me. You didn't even flicker a lid when I cussed you out….” Denna trailed off as she watched me slowly come to my feet. “Good lord, you look like someone's arthritic grandfather.”

“You know how it is,” I said. “You're always stiffest when you wake up.”

She smirked. “We womenfolk don't have that problem, as a rule.” Her expression grew serious as she watched me. “You're serious, aren't you?”

“I rode about sixty miles yesterday, before I met up with you,” I said. “I'm not really used to that. And when I jumped last night I hit the rock pretty hard.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Especially in my everywhere.”

“Oh,” she gasped, her hands going to her mouth. “Your beautiful hands!”

I looked down and saw what she meant. I must have hurt them rather badly in my wild attempt to climb the greystone last night. My musician's calluses had saved my fingertips for the most part, but my knuckles were scraped badly and crusted with blood. Other parts of me hurt so much that I hadn't even noticed.

My stomach clenched at the sight of them, but when I opened and closed my hands I could tell they were just painfully skinned, not seriously injured. As a musician, I always worried that something might happen to my hands, and my work as an artificer had doubled that anxiety. “It looks worse than it is,” I said. “How long has the draccus been gone?” I asked.

“At least a couple hours. It wandered away a little after the sun came up.”

I looked down from my high vantage on the greystone arch. Last evening the hilltop had been a uniform expanse of green grass. This morning it looked like a battlefield. The grass was crushed in places, burned to stubble in others. There were deep furrows dug in the earth where the lizard had rolled or dragged its heavy body across the turf.

Getting down from the greystone was harder than getting up had been. The top of the arch was about twelve feet off the ground, higher than was convenient for jumping. Normally I wouldn't have worried about it, but in my stiff, bruised condition I worried I'd land awkwardly and turn my ankle.

Eventually we managed it by using the strap of my travelsack as a makeshift rope. While Denna braced herself and held one end, I lowered myself down. The sack ripped wide open, of course, scattering my belongings, but I made it to the ground with nothing more serious than a grass stain.

Then Denna hung from the lip of the rock and I grabbed her legs, letting her slide down slowly. Despite the fact that I was bruised all down my front side, the experience did a lot to improve my mood.

I gathered up my things and sat down with needle and thread to sew my travelsack back together. After a moment Denna returned from her brief trip into the trees, pausing briefly to pick up the blanket we'd left below. It had several large claw rents from when the draccus had walked over it.

“Have you ever seen one of these before?” I asked, holding out my hand.

She raised an eyebrow at me. “How many times have I heard that one?” Grinning, I handed her the lump of black iron I'd got from the tinker. She looked it over curiously. “Is this a loden-stone?”

“I'm surprised you recognize it.”

“I knew a fellow who used one as a paperweight.” She sighed disparagingly. “He made a special point of how, despite the fact that it was so valuable and exceedingly rare, he used it as a paperweight.” She sniffed. “He was a prat. Do you have any iron?”

“Fish around in there.” I pointed to my jumbled possessions. “There's bound to be something.”

Denna sat on one of the low greystones and played with the loden-stone and a piece of broken iron buckle. I slowly sewed up my travelsack, then reattached the strap, stitching it several times so it wouldn't come loose.

Denna was thoroughly engrossed by the loden-stone. “How does it work?” she asked, pulling the buckle away and letting it snap back. “Where does the pulling come from?”

“It's a type of galvanic force,” I said, then hesitated. “Which is a fancy way of saying that I've got no idea at all.”

“I wonder if it only likes iron because it's made of iron,” she mused, touching her silver ring to it with no effect. “If someone found a loden-stone made of brass would it like other brass?”

“Maybe it would like copper and zinc,” I said. “That's what brass is made of.” I turned the bag rightside out and began packing up my things. Denna handed me back the loden-stone and wandered off toward the destroyed remains of the fire pit.

“It ate all the wood before it left,” she said.

I went over to look too. The area around the firepit was a churned-up mess. It looked like an entire legion of cavalry had ridden across it. I prodded a great piece of overturned sod turf with the toe of my boot, then bent to pick something up. “Look at this.”

Denna came closer and I held something up for her to see. It was one of the draccus' scales, smooth and black, roughly as big as my palm, and shaped like a teardrop. It was a quarter inch thick in the middle, tapering to the edges.

I held it out to Denna. “For you, m'lady. A memento.”

She hefted it in her hand. “It's heavy,” she said. “I'll go find one for you….” She skipped back to prod through the remains of the firepit. “I think it ate some of the rocks along with the wood. I know I gathered more than this to line the fire last night.”

“Lizards eat rocks all the time,” I said. “It's how they digest their food. The rocks grind up the food in their guts.” Denna eyed me skeptically. “It's true. Chickens do it, too.”

She shook her head, looked away as she prodded in the churned-up earth. “You know, at first I was kind of hoping you would turn this encounter into a song. But the more you talk about this thing, I'm not so sure. Cows and chickens. Where's your flair for the dramatic?”

“It does well enough without exaggeration,” I said. “That scale is mostly iron, unless I miss my guess. How can I make that more dramatic than it already is?”

She held up the scale, looking at it closely. “You're kidding.”

I grinned at her. “The rocks around here are full of iron,” I said. “The draccus eats the rocks and slowly they get ground down in its gizzard. The metal slowly filters into the bones and scales.” I took the scale and walked over to one of the greystones. “Year after year it sheds its skin, then eats it, keeping the iron in its system. After two hundred years…” I tapped the scale against the stone. It made a sharp ringing sound somewhere between a bell and a piece of glazed ceramic.

I handed it back to her. “Back before modern mining people probably hunted them for their iron. Even nowadays I'm guessing an alchemist would pay a pretty penny for the scales or bones. Organic iron is a real rarity. They could probably do all sorts of things with it.”

Denna looked down at the scale in her hand. “You win. You can write the song.” Her eyes lit with an idea. “Let me see the loden-stone.”

I dug it out of my bag and handed it to her. She brought the scale close to it and they snapped sharply together, making the same odd, ceramic ring again. She grinned and walked back over to the firepit and started pushing the loden-stone through the debris, hunting for more scales.

I looked out toward the northern bluffs. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, pointing off to a faint smudge of smoke rising from the trees. “But something's smoldering down there. The marker stakes I planted are gone, but I think that's the direction we saw the blue fire last night.”

Denna moved the loden-stone back and forth over the ruins of the fire pit. “The draccus couldn't have been responsible for what happened at the Mauthen farm.” She gestured at the churned up earth and sod. “There wasn't any of this sort of wreckage there.”

“I'm not thinking about the farm,” I said. “I'm thinking someone's patron might have been roughing it last night with a cheery little campfire….”

Denna's face fell. “And the draccus saw it.”

“I wouldn't worry,” I said quickly. “If he's as clever as you say, he's probably safe as houses.”

“Show me a house that's safe from that thing,” she said grimly, handing me back my loden-stone. “Let's go have a look.”

 

It was only a few miles to where the faint line of smoke rose from the forest, but we made bad time. We were sore and tired, and neither of us was hopeful about what we would find when we reached our destination.

While we walked we shared my last apple and half of my remaining loaf of flatbread. I cut strips of birch bark and Denna and I both picked at them and chewed. After an hour or so, the muscles in my legs relaxed to the point where walking was no longer painful.

As we got closer our progress slowed. Rolling hills were replaced with sharp bluffs and scree-covered slopes. We had to climb or go the long way around, sometimes doubling back before we found a way through.

And there were distractions. We stumbled onto a patch of ripe ashberry that slowed us down for almost a full hour. Not long after that we found a stream and stopped to drink and rest and wash. Again my hope for a storybook dalliance was thwarted by the fact that the stream was only about six inches deep. Not ideal for proper bathing.

It was early afternoon before we finally came to the source of the smoke, and what we found was not at all what we expected.

 

It was a secluded valley tucked into the bluffs. I say valley, but in truth it was more like a gigantic step among the foothills. On one side was a high cliff wall of dark rock, and on the other was a sheer drop-off. Denna and I came at it from two different, unapproachable angles before we finally found a way in. Luckily the day was windless, and the smoke rose straight as an arrow into the clear blue sky. If not for that to guide us, we probably never would have found the place.

Once it had probably been a pleasant little piece of forest, but now it looked like it had been struck by a tornado. Trees were broken, uprooted, charred, and smashed. Huge furrows of exposed earth and rock were dug everywhere, as if some giant farmer had gone raving mad while plowing his field.

Two days ago I wouldn't have been able to guess what would cause such destruction. But after what I had seen last night….

“I thought you said they were harmless?” Denna said, turning to me. “It went on a rampage here.”

Denna and I began to pick our way through the wreckage. The white smoke rose from the deep hole left by a large maple tree that had been tipped over. The fire was nothing more than a few coals smouldering in the bottom of the hole where the roots had been.

I idly kicked a few more clods of dirt into the hole with the toe of my boot. “Well, the good news is that your patron isn't here. The bad news is…” I broke off, drawing a deeper breath. “Do you smell that?”

Denna took a deep breath and nodded, wrinkling her nose.

I climbed up onto the side of the fallen maple and looked around. The wind shifted and the smell grew stronger, something dead and rotten.

“I thought you said they don't eat meat,” Denna said, looking around nervously.

I hopped down from the tree and made my way back to the cliff wall. There was a small log cabin there, smashed to flinders. The rotting smell was stronger.

“Okay,” Denna said, looking over the wreckage. “This does not look harmless at all.”

“We don't know if the draccus was responsible for this,” I said. “If the Chandrian attacked here, the draccus could have been lured by the fire and caused the destruction while putting it out.”

“You think the Chandrian did this?” she asked. “That doesn't fit with anything I've ever heard of them. They're supposed to strike like lightning then disappear. They don't visit, set some fires, then come back later to run a few errands.”

“I don't know what to think. But two destroyed houses….” I began to sift through the wreckage. “It seems reasonable that they're related.”

Denna drew in a sharp breath. I followed her line of sight and saw the arm protruding from under several heavy logs.

I moved closer. Flies buzzed up and I covered my mouth a bit in a futile attempt to stave off the smell. “He's been dead for about two span.” I bent and picked up a tangle of shattered wood and metal. “Look at this.”

“Bring it here and I'll look at it.”

I brought it back to where she stood. The thing was broken almost beyond recognition. “Crossbow.”

“Didn't do him much good,” she said.

“The question is why did he have it in the first place?” I looked at the thick piece of blue steel that made the crossbar. “This wasn't some hunting bow. This is what you use to kill a man in armor from across a field. They're illegal.”

Denna snorted. “Those sorts of laws don't get enforced out here. You know that.”

I shrugged. “The fact remains that this was an expensive piece of machinery. Why would someone living in a tiny cabin with a dirt floor own a crossbow worth ten talents?”

“Maybe he knew about the draccus,” Denna said looking around nervously. “I wouldn't mind a crossbow right about now.”

I shook my head. “Draccus are shy. They stay away from people.”

Denna gave me a frank look, gesturing sarcastically at the wreckage of the cabin.

“Think about every wild creature in the forest,” I said. “All wild creatures avoid contact with people. Like you said, you've never even heard of the draccus. There's a reason for that.”