Chapter Five
It was, without question, an oddity, and it set local tongues to wagging for days. Those villagers fortunate enough to see the late-night procession pass by were delighted to spread a story that required neither embellishment nor exaggeration to be splendidly strange; while those who didn’t see it with their own eyes soon believed that they had, and said so firmly, adding layers and twists to the tale. In the end almost no one remembered it the way it really happened, except for six of the seven who made up the formation; and four of those would have much preferred to forget.
Leading the way, at a pace as slow as an apology, was King Antoine, his attention focused primarily on not spilling anything from the cooking pot he carried. This was made trickier by the jounce and roll of his horse’s back as the animal carefully found its footing in the moonlit dark, and the fact that the King couldn’t resist lifting the pot’s lid from time to time in order to sniff deeply of its contents. Just behind him, in a line, rode the four princes. Each of these worthies was deeply preoccupied: first, by personal embarrassment at the task the King had assigned; second, by a profound sense of the wrongness of the world in general (there are some things princes simply shouldn’t have to do—ask any prince, he’ll tell you); and finally, by the determination to get even with their prospective father-in-law at the earliest opportunity, should that relationship ever become real instead of frustratingly potential. As it was, with every step the King’s imposition grew more galling.
Prince #1 had been told to carry Robert behind him on his horse, even though Robert had declared a preference for walking, and such close proximity to a social inferior chafed the prince. Even so, he felt himself luckier than Prince #2, who now carried Ostvald—Ostvald, who had cost them another hour, this night, to be wakened and dressed, then negotiated with; then bought free (in an even lengthier negotiation) from his coming day’s obligations to the builder Yager, only to top it all off by falling cheerfully asleep while riding, his head and chest pressed heavily forward against his suffering companion.
Meanwhile Prince #3 quietly cursed something he normally took pride in, the bloodline of his Percheron, since the dark brown warhorse’s size and strength had made it the obvious choice to tow Robert’s rattletrap tool cart. From the prince’s point of view there could be no greater insult, and he hoped the Percheron would forgive him.
And Prince #4, the one with the torn leggings, had been given the worst task of all: to follow at the end of the line, doing nothing. It made him stand out all the more, somehow, implying that he wasn’t good enough to be used, even badly, by the King. He had started this day the eldest son of a noble family, a young man with glittering prospects and all the self-absorption of his breed. He was ending it a rich fool in need of tailoring, and the feeling unsettled him. It was only the last tiny shred of his self-respect that kept him from pelting homeward on the spot.
On reaching Castle Bellemontagne, the party was met, late though the hour, by the Queen and the castle’s chamberlain. Both looked rather cross, though only the Queen really meant it. She loved her husband—more deeply than she would ever allow herself to say out loud—but he did dawdle so. How could a simple errand have taken so long? She eyed the iron pot in his hands with suspicion.
“Milady wife,” the King said gently, looking down at her.
“Milord husband.”
“I have brought the exterminator and his tools.”
“And?”
“Well. Had to go through all kinds of bother on the way, so I brought us some soup. You’ll like it.”
“Right now I’m thinking that my mother was right about you. For your sake, that pot had better hold something fit for our Lord and every one of His angels.” The Queen’s frown grew deeper, but her eyes gave her away, as she knew they must. Antoine had always understood what part of her face to pay attention to as she spoke. It was half the reason she’d chosen him, all those summers ago.
“And our new guests?” he asked.
“Abed like sensible people, unless Cerise has dragged Reginald off for another private conversation. However…” Now Hélène’s eyes grew as tense as the rest of her features, and Antoine realized that she truly was worried. But about what?
The Queen stepped close and lowered her voice, speaking just to him. “Make of this what you will, and I hope not too much, but his man insisted on the two of them sleeping in the stables. Said it was Krije’s decree. Tried to lay it all to the discipline of the noble quest, and smiled brightly enough as he spoke, but I wonder…”
Antoine leaned close as he could, handing his wife the pot as cover for his action. “We will discuss that inside,” he whispered. Then he turned to the chamberlain, and in a normal voice said, “Please see the exterminator and his fellow to their task. The Queen and I must retire.” Finally he sat up straight, twisting stiffly in his saddle until he could see all the princes. “As for you, gentlemen, I am well gratified by your support this day. Good night and good morrow… and if any of you should feel like joining the Crown Prince of Corvinia in his choice of accommodations, by all means, please do! There’s nothing like the smell of hay and horse dung to make a man; my own father swore on it.”
He dismounted then, and the princes dismounted smartly in turn, cold, blank smiles on their faces. Put their horses to rest in the stables? Assuredly; but that was the end of the matter. Better a warm scullery cabinet or broom closet than a drafty barn, no matter whose daughter you were seeking to wed.
Robert slid clumsily backward to the ground and rushed to catch Ostvald. Without benefit of royalty to lean on, his friend, still asleep, was slipping farther sidewise by the second.
“It’s going to take bloody forever to clean out a place this size.”
Robert grunted without answering, and joined Ostvald in pushing the cart deeper into the expanse of the Great Hall. When they got to the center, where shadows pooled and danced just beyond the reach of the room’s scattering of torches, they stopped and stood back from their burden, looking up. To Ostvald the view was overwhelming. He felt lost and insignificant under the looming, bird-spattered pillars. High above, the aviary ceiling erupted in warning cries and cackles at the approach of strangers; while with each step he and Robert took, the gaps in the ancient carpets under their feet seemed to spread like puddles. On these rugs, the normal clatter of the cart’s wheels was hushed, and Ostvald was surprised to discover that the lack of this familiar irritation disturbed him most of all.
“I started coming along to help when I was nine,” Robert said softly. A faint echo shaded his words. “Elpidus would cover the place from top to bottom in a single day, four times a year—once every season, give or take.”
Ostvald sneezed. “Wasn’t enough.”
Robert stood still, listening. “They’re in the walls,” he said. “The walls and the air shafts. Been no one in since Elpidus died, or I’d have heard, and that gave the cauds a chance to burrow. There’ll be fifteen or sixteen species here now. Vegrandis, skashins, misher-tails for sure. Snap-so’s and thivettes. Hundreds of dragons just in this hall, gods rot it—maybe a thousand or more in the whole castle. All dust and bellows work, and we’ll be at it the week.” He drew a single deep breath in through his nose and held it for a moment. “Smell that? They’ve even got tichornes.”
“The blue ones with the green teeth?”
“No, those are vechts. Think skashins but bigger, six claws instead of four, three times the teeth, and fire that water won’t extinguish. You have to cut the flame off from air with something thick and powdery, like flour. We’ll need to get some from the kitchens.”
Ostvald shook his head. “Next time you come to my door after sunset, I’m going to make my brother tell you I’m dead of plague.”
“Next time I’ll send the King in to catch it from you.”
The two young men spent hours examining and marking the Great Hall. Much of the time they were on their knees. Every gap, every hole, every crack and crevice in the floor and walls had to be uncovered or identified, examined for claw marks, both faint and obvious, and tested for scaleflakes or other residue of a dragon’s passing. Every gap, hole, crack, and crevice had to be probed with the stiffly bendable metal pokers of Robert’s trade, which allowed him to measure and trace the tunnel’s inner angles; then they had to be tracked even further by a trick of tapped soundings—a wide, flat hammer covered with cured doeskin to thud the wall, and two cupped ears pressed against it, alternating high and low, to puzzle out the meaning of the sound. It was noisy work, and the dragonlets in the walls had given up on sleeping. A few even skittered forth to see what was going on. These brief sightings made Robert raise his estimates. Some of the curious were species he had never seen outside the importer’s cages at Dragon Market, presumably carried here, unwittingly, by visiting trade caravans and dignitaries from neighboring kingdoms.
Eventually Robert felt that he had a reasonable grasp of the main passages and most likely escape routes. It was never possible to reach a complete understanding, of course, and in a job as big as this there would inevitably be some repetition and backtracking, as dragons retreated into burrows yet to be discovered, or made their way back to old haunts despite fear of the poison that had driven them out. But the first step was now obvious. Moving quickly—it was always good to leave the tedium of marking behind—Robert and Ostvald blocked off certain exit points with gravel and glue from the buckets in the cart, then pegged smooth, carefully chosen river stones into place to strengthen the seals. Other crevices they left open but barred with intricately wrought constructs of folding metal that clamped down across the irregular edges of the hole. The idea was always to herd, if possible: the fewer dead dragons left in a wall at the end of a job, the sooner a space became livable again. That made the right combination of barred and blocked holes essential—part of the art of the work—as these choices determined what air currents the panicked dragonlets would taste and follow in their hurry to get away.
“We don’t have cages enough for this, you know.” Ostvald looked directly at Robert. “It’s trap and kill, not trap and catch.”
“We’ve got enough to start. I’ll tell the chamberlain to bring in more. Not like they can’t afford the hire.”
“You know what I’m saying, Robert. This many dragons. This big a job. This much mucking poison. We’re not going to be pushing the cart off to Dragon Market at the end of this, making a few deals to sweeten the pot and buy another round at Jarold’s. We’re going to have to bury the whole bloody lot off in the woods someplace, or shove the carcasses into the caves back of the cliffside. You’ve never done one like this, Robert. I bet your da never did, either.”
“Maybe not, but he would have loved it. I never will.” Robert shook his head. “Enough of that. There’s a princess waiting, or so I’m told, and we’ve enough troubles without her turning cranky. Let’s lock down the traps and get on with it.”
It took fifteen minutes to unfold the six metal cages to their largest extent, then strap them down solidly into position, their entry portals braced snug and tight against the dragons’ most likely exit points. When that was done, it was finally time for Robert and Ostvald to change clothes. Ostvald, relegated to support in the task to come, had it relatively easy: a suit made from supple leathers backed with dragonskin strips, a fireproof dragonskin smock, a thick hood to pull over his face if needed, and gloves just heavy enough to be a compromise between protection and flexibility. His role was to back Robert up, quickly bringing him the proper tools from the cart as they were called for. Anything that made him slower than he already was would be bad, and unless things went horribly wrong—for which there were other measures—Ostvald would never need any greater protection.
Robert’s working costume was more formidable. He was dressed head to toe in three thick layers of dragonskin, cut to cover everything, including even his face, except for a grill of thin slits over his mouth and both eyes. Under the suit he wore soft cloth padding, to help soften the impact that could get through the dragonskin layers in a fight, even if teeth and claws and fire couldn’t; and extra layers of cotton-and-dragonskin strips wrapped around knees and ankles and elbows, neck and groin—the weak places any larger dragon would instinctively strike in close quarters. As for his metal-studded gloves, a hard blow with just one could make a wild boar reconsider charging, but so far he’d never had to use them that way.
It was Elpidus’s suit, and it didn’t quite fit, but Robert hated it too much to have it changed. In some strange way it seemed to him that if it ever felt comfortable, he would become Elpidus, and lose all hope of any other life than this.
“Ready?” Ostvald asked.
“Ready. Put the big bludgeon and the snatcher by that cage. That one, there.” He pointed at the one to the south. “I’ve got a feeling. Then bring me the bellows and a bottle of drachengift. And be careful. We’re both tired, I know, but I’d much rather not go to sleep permanently, thank you.”
When Ostvald returned to Robert, he was carrying a patched old bellows with brass handles that had been in the Thrax family for five generations, a thick green bottle with a wax seal on one end, and a heavy cloth bag lined with parchment and oiled leather. Under Robert’s watchful supervision, Ostvald gently cut away the wax on the bottle. Then he poured the bottle’s contents, an evil-smelling powder, into a special pinholed chamber built into the front of the bellows. When the bottle was empty, he put it inside the cloth bag, cinched the bag tight shut, and closed and locked the port on the bellows. Done at last, he stepped away, a tingle of relief licking at his shoulders. Loading the bellows was the one part of the job he truly hated. Drachengift became deadly poisonous on exposure to air, but its efficacy fell off sharply after only ten or fifteen minutes, and was entirely gone in a few hours. There was no way for Robert to make the pour while suited, no way to use the drachengift safely when not, and too much time wasted in pouring first and dressing second: so it had to be Ostvald.
Now Robert stepped forward, his face somber but set beneath his mask. He fitted the tip of the bellows into the small hole he’d deliberately left in the first sealed gap and pumped the bellows several times. Then he moved to another hole to repeat the process, and so on across the wall, listening carefully as he went. Choosing the right holes to poison was also part of the exterminator’s art, and Elpidus had taught him well.
By the time Robert had covered one section of one wall, he and Ostvald could hear a range of sounds coming from behind the stone cladding: chittering squeaks and grunts, scrabbling claws, the rushing tumble of small armored bodies scrambling to escape the drachengift even as their own growing agitation spread it farther. The noise built in one place, then another. As it did, Robert moved stiffly with it, choosing his bellows points with care, like a surgeon seeking to tease a great gallstone loose from his patient’s body.
The first dragonlet came stumbling free of the deadly wall, straight into the cage that Robert had indicated to Ostvald. It was a bright purple camai, a youngling with all three vestigial wings still intact. A moment later its caudlings came scrabbling after it, and the trickle became a tide. Soon every cage in the room was filling up with frightened dragons, white and blue, black and golden, green and red, packed so tightly they could barely cry out, even if so many hadn’t been suffering from the first paralytic symptoms of their poisoning. A few could still manage to breathe fire, but their exhalations were short and weak—more spark than flame, and no real threat to anyone.
The work went slowly and arduously, and it seemed to Ostvald—who was not introspective—that his friend was somehow poisoning himself, as well as the creatures they had been hired to destroy. At one point Ostvald saw Robert lift his dragonskin mask and wipe the sweat from his eyes: in the sputtering light of the tallow-coated torches along the walls, Robert’s face looked increasingly gray and bleak, gaunted as though with illness. Ostvald suggested more than once that he stop to rest, so they could go outside and breathe in the cold, clear night air, but each time Robert bluntly dismissed the notion. “I want it done. So many of them… too many of them. I want it done.”
Neither the bludgeon nor the snatcher—Robert’s own invention for snaring dragons without hurting them—ever came into use. The dragons they had driven out were sick and dying, too weak now to break free or wriggle loose. But still Robert found himself reaching out as he passed the cages, placing gloved hands on the glittering bodies crushed up against the bars. Several of the dragons died as he watched. He stroked each one softly, whispering, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
There were never tears in his eyes. But after a while, mask or no, Ostvald could not bear to look into them.