There Be Dragons

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Jessamine Bell climbed each step holding to that hope, that today was such a day. She kept a steady rhythm to her steps. Her footfalls, echoing and re-echoing, were the only sound that came to her ears. Except for the light of her candle lantern, the tower’s stairwell was black as pitch.

The lowest floors had been empty but for a few spiders that were far more shocked at her presence than she was at theirs. Still, she kept her short sword in her hand. A year before, she had met a bear on another tower’s stair, but it had been more intent on escaping the well than attacking her. There was always the danger of another scavenger, but humans were rarer than bears in these parts.

Above the fourth floor, she increased her pace: ten steps, turn; ten steps, turn; another floor done. Every twenty-five floors the stairwell ended. Then there was a double-doored connecting room that slowed her down, and then she would start the next well of stairs. If she kept her pace, she could reach the top in less than an hour.

Her friends called her Scraps, and she climbed the Towers alone. Each of her sisters had come with her once. Alexandra and Eleanor both had found the dark wells frightening and the long stairs exhausting. Each, for their own different reasons, had ceded the heights of the Towers to her. They would accompany her to the first few floors; but once confident that she was safe from the threat of anything living, they left her to her own devices against the dangers of the heights.

Under her breath she sang a song to the rhythm of her steps. The darkness was something to be pushed through, something to be pierced. Daylight waited on the other side.

Stair after stair she climbed through night.

The last stairwell was different from the rest. The promise of daylight filtered down from the topmost floor. The light was dim at first, a glimmer shining down the center of the stairwell from eighteen floors above. Where daylight found its way into the stairwell, water followed. The steps were slippery in places and visibly worn in others. With the passage of time, the cycle of freeze and thaw had cracked the otherwise adamant stonework. Near the top, rubble had almost blocked the stairs, and Scraps had to carefully pick her way around and over it.

Scraps’ legs were burning, her chest heaving in great breaths of air as she reached the one hundred and ninety-third floor. Above, the stairwell opened to the sky. Long ago, dragonfire had cut deep through the tower at an angle and sheared through its uppermost heights. The top of the northeast tower was gone; it lay in shattered ruins to the east on the Valley’s floor. Alexandra and the horses were down there, sheltering in the shadow of the wreck. On this landing, the door out of the stairwell was partly open and held unmoving by heavy rubble.

Scraps squeezed through the door’s gap, momentarily shifting the pack from her back to slip through. A sudden gust of wind struck her and threatened to lift her from the floor. She gripped the door’s handle and steadied herself until the wind had passed. Then, from the side of her pack, she drew a length of strong, supple rope sufficient to hold her weight. Reaching back through to the stairwell, she anchored her cord to the stair’s top post; the cord’s other end she tied to her belt with a bowline hitch.

Long ago, the stair’s door had opened on a central diamond-shaped hall. Half of that hall was now gone. The floor ended abruptly near the center of the tower, the stone of its structure melted and distorted by the unimaginable heat of dragonfire. On the east side of the tower, the hundred and ninety-third floor and hundred and ninety-second were gone. In their place, Scraps now beheld the wide view of the snow-covered Morgan Mountains.

The Morgans formed the eastern wall of the Valley. The north and south branches of the Immern River flowed out of the Morgans’ foothills to join and empty into the Mersa River just north of the Towers. Her father’s house in those high foothills overlooked the northern branch of the Immern. That river’s course was her surest guide home.

Scraps set down her small pack and opened it. She retrieved the goggles and the compact binoculars her father had given her. The binoculars particularly were a rich gift and almost irreplaceable. The binocular’s strap went around her neck; the goggles went on her head, but she did not yet pull them down over her eyes.

She brought the binoculars up instead. Working carefully from north to south, she searched for any sign of dragons. There was a simple rule: if you could see a dragon, it could see you. If it could see you, it could kill you and everyone around you.

Trees—willows, sycamores, cottonwoods, and oaks—marked the edges of the Immern’s course as well as the many tributary streams and brooks that wandered across the grasslands between the foothills and the Towers. She reached the southernmost extent of her view eastward. She saw no dragons.

Satisfied, Scraps lowered her binoculars and looked about her at the fire-scarred floor and walls. Dragonfire had left nothing of value here to scavenge. She turned around and walked down the passage that led to the west side of the building.

The load-bearing walls of the inner core ended, and the passage opened to a wide floor dotted with an arc of supporting pillars that upheld the outermost elements of the floors above. Here, the outer skin of the tower was entirely gone; this floor was open to the wind, rain, ice, and snow. Scraps walked to the ragged edge of the tower’s floor. On this half of the tower, the ceiling remained, though the two remaining floors immediately above were mostly rubble.

The outer edge of this floor showed cracks. The adamant stone had begun to fragment after a century of exposed weathering. A meter-wide block had separated but was still precariously held to the tower by rods that were bent and cracked. She stayed clear of failed stonework and moved to the very edge of the floor.

She was facing across grasslands toward the low coastal mountains and the sea beyond them. Below her was a breathtaking drop, whose beauty exhilarated her in a way she could never effectively communicate to her sisters. The Valley lay in a wide panorama. Far below, the ribbon of the Mersa River flowed in a lazy loop around the foot of the Towers, the four marvelously tall spires that still stood from the times before the Dragonfall, before the old world of Smyrna died.

The wind gusted again; it made her sway and pulled tears from her eyes. She drew her goggles over her eyes and looked north. The headwaters of the Mersa River flowed down from the mountainous northern fences of the Valley, down out of the hills and across the Valley’s wide northern savanna. The Mersa’s tributaries, particularly those that flowed out of the high Morgans eastward, swelled its course—particularly now, at the end of the rainy season.

Mountain-fenced clouds obscured all but the savanna’s southern reaches where they gave way to the Ricelands. On that border, in the very center of the Valley, a tight fist of mountains thrust upward from the surrounding lowlands; those mountains, the Yannons, marked the northern border of the Five Hans—the only kingdom of any moment in the whole of the Valley. Scraps could clearly see rain falling aslant from the dark rainclouds over the Yannons and the canal watered fields and marshes of the northern Ricelands.

Westward of the river, the Ricelands spread down from the Yannons all the way to the wide delta that lay well south of the Towers. There the Mersa of the north interwove with the much smaller Santi River that flowed out of the Valley’s long southern arm. There broken clouds cast slowly moving shadows over the southern Ricelands.

Scraps lifted her goggles enough to bring the binoculars to her eyes. As she had done on the eastern side, she methodically searched for any sign of dragons. She had never seen one to the east of the towers, but westward she had. If there was a dragon in the Valley, she had to leave, get down to her sister as fast as she could, and retreat east to the mountains. Her climb would have been for nothing.

There were tracks; the dragons were so massive they left deep furrows in the Valley’s floor in which nothing would grow. Most tracks were old, and only a few ran north of the delta. At this distance, even with her binoculars, the tracks were thin lines running to the horizon.

One track was new. It came out from the hills west of the Valley, south of the delta. It disappeared southward. Scraps' eyes followed the retreating course of the Santi River. South of the delta, it disappeared into grasslands that decayed into arid desert in the Valley's farthest southern reaches.

Scraps bounced on her toes. Today there were no dragons in the Valley.

She lowered her binoculars.

In that moment, a blur of motion above sent a shock of terror through her. She fell backwards instinctively. The beast struck the side of the tower, its wings blocked out the daylight, and its elongated jaws—large enough to devour Scraps whole—snapped shut on the space just above her where she had been standing the moment before. She rolled away desperately. The beast’s wing claws scrabbled over the stone of the tower. Gaining purchase, it sprang after her, squeezing itself between the floor and the ceiling. Scraps' roll turned to a scramble on hands and knees then to a lunge to her feet toward the passage to the stairwell.

As she sprinted she could feel the drag of her safety line. It had wrapped around her right foot as she rolled. The line went suddenly taut, and she fell hard to the floor. She kicked, trying to untangle her foot. Looking back, she saw the wrap of the line around her ankle; the line ran back to the beast's right wing claws that hooked around it.

Her father called such things Azdarks. It was massive, crouched between the floor and ceiling; its long spear-like head sat atop a longer neck. Its wide wings were folded enough to allow it to crawl into the tower in pursuit of her.

Scraps got the cord off her foot and unsheathed her sword.

The clawed digits of the Azdark’s right wing got purchase on the line and gave a mighty yank that pulled her skidding back toward the beast. She thrust her sword upward at its head, and its toothed jaws closed around the blade and ripped it from her grasp. Her momentum carried her beneath the beast and beyond, almost off the edge of the tower.

Scraps came to a sudden stop, caught by the safety line, on top of the fragmented floor block. She started to unbuckle her belt, and the floor tilted beneath her as several of the cracked metal rods supporting the block bent and snapped. She grabbed the edge of the block and pulled herself upward onto the main floor.

The Azdark was now directly between her and the passage. The beast turned around. It saw her and lunged toward her. The metal post in the stairwell rang. The safety line now wrapped round its right wing claws had run to its limit.

Scraps grasped the line at her belt and worked her bowline hitch free.

The Azdark pulled hard against the cord, tightening the loop around its claws. The safety line sang with tension.

Scraps turned to the stone block. It was tilting; its weight slowly tearing it away. A bar broke and another. The two broken and bent rods jutting from the black were still just within her reach. With a snap of her wrist, she wrapped the rope around the rods and started a new hitch.

The Azdark slammed its full weight against the length of the safety line anchored to the stair post. The line split. The beast surged toward Scraps. She kicked against the block with all her weight. The last bar snapped. The block fell, pulling the safety line behind it.

Scraps' momentum took her over the edge. The rough stone cut at her clothes and flesh. In desperation, she caught hold of a projecting rod. The falling block struck the edge of the floor below and rebounded out into the void, pulling the still entangled Azdark behind it. The beast just cleared Scraps as it launched out into the void.

For several long moments Scraps hung from the ledge. She reached up with her left hand and scrabbled around until she found another handhold. Sobbing with effort, she pulled herself back up onto the floor. At last, huddled on the adamant stone floor, she said aloud, “Stupid, stupid, stupid." So focused had she been on looking down, she had not considered a threat from above. She looked up. The sky was clear. Painfully, she rolled to her side and looked over the edge.

Far below, the tumbling Azdark suddenly righted itself. It spread its wings. It was free of the block. It beat its great wings once, then settled into a long glide westward.

“And don’t come back,” Scraps whispered.

Slowly, she sat up and examined herself. She was scraped. Her shirt had taken the worst of it. She climbed to her feet and doggedly retrieved the gear she had lost.

Another gust of wind swayed her. She started toward the stairwell. Without a safety line, she needed to move down to a more enclosed floor of the tower to look for salvage.

She paused at the entrance of the stairwell and looked once more toward the snow-capped Morgans. The Towers were dangerous. But the view. The view made it worth it.