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?”
