Chapter 1: The Empty Byres

Tomas woke to the goats screaming, and then to the silence that was worse.

He took the lantern out into the wet dark. The gate of the pen hung whole on its leather hinges. Inside, three goats stood trampled and shaking against the far rails. Two were gone. The mud was scored with deep drag-marks, broad as a man's arm, running clean through the gate and down toward the river meadow. No blood. No bones. No hair. The goats that were left would not stop shaking.

He found the cow gone from the byre an hour later. Same marks. Same silence. The door was unbroke. Whatever had come had not needed to break anything.

By the time the sun came up, Tomas was in the reeve's yard, shaking.

Reeve Haden wrote it down. That was what Haden did. He kept the tally of the village — births, deaths, the lord's dues, the count of stock against the count of mouths. He wrote down two goats and a cow, taken in the night, no blood, no body, drag-marks wide as a man. Then he went to look at the mud himself, and he wrote down that it was true.

Three nights later, the Dellwood boy did not come home from the lower pasture. They found his staff in the grass, and the drag-marks running off into the dark earth. No blood. No body. No boy.

A sennight after that, it was old Brennan, taken from his own threshold. His wife had slept beside him. She woke to cold bedclothes and the door standing open and the same broad scars in the mud of the yard.

Baron Aldric sent to the capital that day. His man rode hard with a sealed letter and a purse, and the letter said what letters from frightened barons always say: something is taking my people, and I cannot stop it, and the crown owes me an answer.

The King's Rangers came twenty days later. Three of them, on tired horses, dusty from the river road. The lead rider was tall and lean and sat his horse like he was bored of it. He carried a spear wrapped in oilcloth across his back, and a sword at his hip, and a shield painted with no device at all. His face gave nothing. The baron's steward met them at the gate and tried a speech; the tall man cut him off with two words and rode on through.

Godwin came next, broad across the shoulders and easy in the saddle, a short bow lashed to his pack. He nodded to the steward, smiled at a kitchen girl, asked after the stabling and the price of feed. Leofric came last, average in every way a man can be average, already looking past the steward's shoulder toward the tavern sign down the lane.

They stabled the horses. They came up to the hall. Baron Aldric met them at his own table, with Haden standing behind him holding a slate.

"Captain Erlich," the baron said. He was a proud man, and he did not like that he had needed to send. "I am glad the crown remembers Eastbrook."

Erlich did not answer that. He stood by the hearth and let his eyes move over the hall — the smoke, the dogs, the baron's people standing uneasy along the walls. He had not taken off his traveling cloak.

"Tell me," he said.

So Aldric told him. Livestock first. Then people. Always at night. Always gone whole — no blood, no bone, no hide left behind. Always the same drag-marks scored deep into the mud, wide as a man is tall, running off toward the dark and stopping at no burrow and no lair anyone could find. He told it stiffly, like a man defending a ledger.

Erlich heard him out. He asked two questions. The answers were: no, no one had seen it; and no, no one had found where the marks ended.

"Reeve," Erlich said.

Haden stepped forward and laid the slate on the table. The tally was neat. Three goats. Two cows. A horse. Two men. Then, last, a woman's mark — Brennan's wife had died of the fright of it, if not the beast itself, and Haden had counted her too.

"All night-takings," Haden said. "All the same marks. All gone without a trace."

Erlich looked at the slate for a long time. His face still gave nothing. He had killed the Black Dragon of Westreach four years ago, driving a spear into its brain and watching it live three days longer, razing a city in its dying. He did not like to be reminded of dragons. He did not like mud, or frightened villagers, or barons who expected him to be grateful for the work. He liked even less the look of those drag-marks, wide and clean and patient.

Godwin came up beside him and read the slate over his shoulder. "Broad marks," he said. "No blood. No burrow."

"Yes," Erlich said.

"Could be goblins," Godwin said, because he knew his captain, and because it was the thing Erlich always said first.

Erlich said nothing to that. He pulled the oilcloth off his spear and set it in the corner of the hall.

"We'll see the byres at first light," he said. "Godwin, with me. Leofric—" He paused. Leofric was already gone. Godwin grinned.

"He's found the tavern," Godwin said.

"Let him," Erlich said. "Taverns know things."

He looked once more at the tally on the slate — the neat columns, the missing, the silence where the bodies should be. Then he turned his back on it and went to see the steward about a bed.

Outside, the dark was coming down over Eastbrook again. Somewhere in it, broad marks were already running through the mud, and something hungry was waking up.

Chapter 2: Goblins, Always Goblins

Dawn came grey and wet over Eastbrook. Erlich walked the byres with Godwin at his shoulder and the reeve a step behind, and Tomas trailing them like a man afraid the dark would take him back if he let the rangers out of his sight.

The goat-pen told the same story the slate had. Gate whole on its hinges. Mud scored deep with drag-marks, broad and even, running clean through and down toward the river meadow. Erlich crouched and laid his spread hand inside one of the scars. It was wider than his fingers reached. He stood and said nothing.

"The byre," he said.

Tomas led them. Same marks there. Door unbroke. Stall empty. Godwin walked the line of it to the stockade ditch and on past the fence, and came back shaking his head.

"No burrow," he said. "No hole, no tunnel. The marks run out into the grass and just stop."

"Goblins don't need burrows," Erlich said.

Godwin looked at him. "Goblins dig, Captain. It's what they do. And these marks are twice too wide for any goblin drag."

"Then it was a lot of goblins."

He said it the way he always said it. Goblins were the answer Erlich kept ready for anything that moved in the dark — the cheap answer, the one that let him put his hand to work. He had blamed goblins for a barn fire once, and a dead sheep on a hill, and a missing child who turned up a week later with a tinker's wife. Erlich did not much care when he was wrong about goblins. Goblins were common, and common things were the work of common men, and Erlich had no wish to be anything but a common man with a spear.

Haden laid the slate out on the fence-rail. The tally was neat, in his careful hand. Three goats. Two cows. A horse. Two men — the Dellwood boy and old Brennan. Brennan's wife had died too, of the fright, but she had not been taken, so Haden had not set her among the gone.

"All night-takings," Haden said. "All the same marks. No blood, no body, no bone. Not so much as a hide left."

"Prey taken whole," Godwin said.

"Goblins take whole prey," Erlich said.

Godwin let it lie. He knew his captain.

Tomas had been standing by the fence-post, working something loose with his thumbs. He held it out. His hand was shaking.

"Found it the morning after," he said. "Caught in the post, where the marks went through."

It was a scale. A single scale, dull and thick, curved like a shallow bowl, bigger than a man's spread hand. Grey-brown, the color of river mud, smooth on the outside and rough on the inside where it had torn away from whatever bore it. Erlich took it, turned it once. Heavy for its size, and cold.

He did not look at it long. He put it in his pouch and drew the string tight.

"Bone, maybe," he said. "A bit of old harness. Could be anything."

Godwin opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Goblins," Erlich said, and that was the end of the scale, for now.

They worked the village through the morning. Haden took them to every yard that had lost a beast or a man, and every yard told the same tale — the dark, the silence, the broad scars in the mud running off to nowhere. The villagers watched Erlich the way people watch a man they have paid too much for. They had sent for a dragon-slayer, and they had gotten a tall lean man who would not meet their eyes and kept saying goblins.

Godwin slipped off after the third yard and went to walk the stockade edge alone. He came back at midday with mud on his boots and a set face.

"Whatever made these tracks is heavy," he said. "Heavy and low. The prints aren't footprints — they're belly-marks, with drag-scars behind. Come and see." He took them to the ditch. In the soft mud there was a long smooth furrow, wide as a man's body, the drag-marks running down the middle of it. "Nothing walked here. Nothing with legs. It pulled itself along."

Erlich looked at it. "Goblins carry things," he said. "A band of them could drag a goat. Could drag a man—"

"Not a cow, Captain. Not whole, and not without a drop of blood. And not leaving a furrow like that."

Erlich said nothing. He did not like furrows made by things with no legs. He put it off his face and turned back toward the hall.

Leofric found them there at evening. He had been gone all day and came in smelling of smoke and cheap ale, with a grin on his average face that said he had found something worth the telling.

"Tavern," he said, by way of excuse. Erlich waved him on.

"The baron keeps a wizard," Leofric said. "A hedge wizard, lodged up in the keep. Master Vaelin. The villagers don't like him. They say his tower stinks of bone and smoke, and that he works at night, and that servants go in and out carrying jars."

"Wizards always have bones," Godwin said. "They collect them. Trade goods."

"I know what wizards are," Leofric said. "I'm telling you what the village says. They say necromancy. They say he's the reason the dead don't stay dead and the missing don't stay found."

Erlich looked at him. "And the river?"

Leofric's grin widened. "There's a river, Captain. And across the river, they say, there's orc-sign. Old camps. Scraps of meat. The herdsmen won't drive their beasts down to the lower ford anymore."

A field of suspects. Erlich stood by the hearth and counted them on his fingers, the way a man counts coins. Goblins — his answer, the cheap one. The wizard — the village's answer, the frightened one. And orcs across the river — the answer a soldier gives, the one that smelled of war.

"Goblins," he said again, but quieter this time, and not quite like he believed it.

He pulled his cloak about him. Outside, the dark was gathering once more over Eastbrook, and in his pouch the heavy scale sat where he had put it, forgotten already, waiting to be read.

Chapter 3: Bones in the Tower

Erlich went to the wizard the next morning. The village had given him the name, and a frightened village's name was as good a place to start as any. He took Godwin. Leofric he sent to the river.

The keep rose at the back of the hall, a square tower of pale stone with a door banded in iron. A servant let them in and led them up a tight stair. The smell hit them halfway — bone-dust, char, something acrid beneath it, the reek of a working that had not long been put out.

Vaelin met them at the top. He was a small man, narrow and dry, with a wizard's long hands and a wizard's long face, and he looked at the rangers the way a man looks at dirt tracked onto a clean floor.

"The King's Rangers," he said. "The baron did not tell me I was to be inspected."

"Not inspecting," Erlich said. "Looking."

"Then look." Vaelin stepped aside, offended already, and waved one long hand at the room.

It was a wizard's tower, and it looked as wizards' towers look. Shelves ran floor to roof on every wall, and on the shelves stood jars and pots and boxes, and bones. Bones in bundles, bones in baskets, a long yellow curve of something too big to be a cow's rib leaning in the corner behind the furnace. Skulls, some wired together, some loose in crates. A table was covered in the mess of a working — ash, a burnt ring, a pestle, a dish of dark powder, the stub of a candle.

"Godwin," Erlich said.

Godwin moved through the room slow, the way he moved through brush, touching nothing, reading it with his eyes. He knew what wizards were. He knew the bones were trade goods. He looked anyway, because that was the work.

"Dragon-bone," Godwin said, stopping at the long rib. "This end of a spine, too. Beast-bone." He lifted the lid of a crate, set it down. "Wolf, I'd say. Maybe troll. All of it old, all of it worked or ready to work."

"A wizard collects bones," Vaelin said, sharp. "Dragon-bone. Beast-bone. It is the trade I am in. The baron knows. The crown knows. It is not a crime to keep what I have paid for."

"Where do you get it?" Erlich said.

"Where does any wizard get it. I buy it. Rangers bring it, sometimes, and hunters, and men who dig where old beasts have died. I pay silver for it and I work it and I sell the working. That is my living." Vaelin's eyes were hard and bright. "It is not your villagers, Ranger. I have not stolen any herdsman. I have not eaten any man's cow."

Erlich said nothing to that. He walked the shelves once more. The jars held powders and dried things and one pale mass floating in oil that he did not stop to name. The smoke of the working still hung at the roof. It all looked the way necromancy would look, if a frightened village had to draw it. He could see why the tavern talked.

He stopped at the table and picked up the dish of dark powder. He did not know what it was. He set it down.

"Where were you," he said, "the night Brennan was taken? The night the Dellwood boy went?"

"In my tower," Vaelin said. "As I am every night. Ask the baron's steward. Ask the servant who brings my evening meal. I do not leave this room after dark, Ranger. The stairs are steep and my eyes are not what they were, and the dark outside this keep is no longer safe. I have heard the talk. I know what the village says. They say necromancy." His voice went bitter on the word. "They say it because they do not know what a wizard is. They see bones and they think death. A bone to a wizard is lumber to a carpenter."

Godwin came back to Erlich's side. He shook his head, very slightly. Nothing here. Nothing that matched a cow gone whole in the dark.

"He's clean," Godwin said, low.

Erlich did not like it, but he nodded. Vaelin was miserly and sour and his tower stank, and none of that was a crime. The bones were trade goods, the way Godwin said, the way wizards always said. Erlich had no reason to hold him, and no wish to. He had no wish to be in a wizard's tower at all.

"You'll stay in the keep," Erlich said. "After dark. Until this is done."

"I am not your prisoner," Vaelin said.

"You are your own," Erlich said. "Stay in at night. That is advice."

He left the wizard glaring after them and went down the stair.

They found Leofric at the river crossing, east of the village, where the ford ran shallow over flat stones. He was sitting on a rock eating an apple, and his boots were wet to the knee. He grinned when he saw them.

"I have been busy," he said.

"Show me," Erlich said.

Leofric led them down to the water's edge and across at the shallows. On the far bank the ground rose into a thicket of scrub and dead willow. He had found the camps. Old fire-scars, trampled earth, a midden of bones — fish bones, mostly, but here and there a longer bone, cracked for the marrow. Scraps of dried meat hung on a thornbush, forgotten or left.

"Orcs," Leofric said. "Been here a while. Came and went by the water, I'd say, in the night."

"Orcs eat meat," Godwin said, slow. "They need it. Cattle would do. A man would do, if they caught one."

"Yes," Leofric said. "It would."

Erlich stood in the trampled camp and felt the pieces move in his head. The river. The night-takings. The drag-marks running down toward the meadow and the ford. Orcs came by water in the dark, took what they could carry, dragged the rest. It was the answer a soldier would give, and Erlich was a soldier when he was not being a dragon-slayer, and he liked the shape of it. It had weight. It had a war in it, and wars were something he understood.

"The marks," Godwin said. "Captain. The belly-marks. The furrow."

"Orcs drag their kill," Erlich said. "A party of them, hauling a cow. Heavy feet, a heavy drag. It would trench the mud."

Godwin looked at the midden, at the cracked bones. He did not say what he was thinking. He had said it before, at the ditch, and the captain had not heard him.

"We watch the river," Erlich said. "Tonight. All three of us. If orcs come across, we take them at the water."

Leofric winked. "I'll bring the bow."

They waded back over the ford and up to the village. Erlich's hand went to his pouch once, in the crossing, and found the weight of the scale still there, and his fingers passed over it and let it be. He had a river to watch now. He had a theory with a war in it. The scale could keep.

That night they took their posts at the crossing, three dark shapes in the willows, and watched the water run shallow and silver under the moons. The dark gathered. Nothing came across.

Chapter 4: What the Dark Took

The night came down cold and clear. The two moons tracked over the willows and the river ran shallow on its stones, and nothing came across.

Erlich had set them in a line along the bank — himself upstream where the ford was widest, Godwin among the roots at the water's edge with his bow across his knees, Leofric downstream where the brush thinned. They did not talk. They did not move. Three dark shapes in the dark, watching the wrong border.

The cold came up off the water and settled in the bones. Once an owl went over. Once a fish broke the surface. Apart from that, nothing. The river ran, and the moons turned, and the night did its work somewhere else.

Dawn came grey. Erlich was stiff and cold and had seen nothing, and he was beginning to feel the shape of a wrong thing in his chest when the boy came.

He came running down the lane from the village, a boy of ten or eleven, barefoot in the mud, and he was shouting before he was close enough to be understood. Godwin caught him by the arms and held him still.

"Slow," Godwin said. "Slow. What is it."

The boy could hardly get it out. "The stockade," he said. "In the night. The dog — Edric's dog is gone. And the reeve's man. The stable-hand. Gone. There's marks, there's—"

Erlich was already moving.

They ran. It was not far. The lane climbed the low rise to the palisade gate, and the gate was open, and people were standing in the yard in their bedclothes staring at the mud. Haden was among them, and his face was the color of the dawn.

The yard told the story before anyone could. The belly-furrow was there, the broad smooth trench running across the trampled earth, with the drag-scars scored down its middle. It crossed the yard from the stable to the palisade wall and went under — under the bottom rail, where the posts were set wide and the ground was soft, and out the other side into the ditch beyond. No blood. No bone. No hide. The dog was gone. The man was gone.

"Edric's dog was tied at the gate," Haden said. His voice was flat, the way a man's voice goes when he is holding himself together by the edges. "He bayed at something in the small hours. Edric thought it was the moons. He did not get up. In the morning the lead was bitten clean through and the dog was gone." He stopped. "My man, Wulf. He slept in the stable loft. The loft is empty. The ladder is down. There are marks on the floor where he was dragged to the door."

Erlich looked at the furrow. It was the same furrow. The same width as a man's body, the same smooth drag down the middle, the same clean trench as the goat-pen and the byre and the ditch at the stockade edge. The same marks, and the same silence where the blood should have been.

Godwin was already at the palisade. He came back. "It went under," he said. "The posts are set too wide at the corner. The ground's soft there. Something low and heavy pushed through and pulled itself across the yard and out again. No gate opened. No wall scaled. It went under, and it came back under."

"Goblins," someone said, from the edge of the yard. It was one of the villagers, hopeful and faint.

Erlich turned on him. "Goblins don't scale a palisade," he said. "Goblins don't go under a stockade wall and take a man from a loft and a dog from a lead and leave no blood and no sound. Goblins dig, and there is no dig here. There is a furrow, and the furrow was made by something with no legs."

He had said it before he knew he was going to. The words hung in the cold air. Godwin looked at him. Leofric looked at him. He had just undone his own answer, and he had done it out loud, in front of the village.

He stood in the trampled yard and let the silence work.

"Vaelin," he said, because the habit of suspicion was still on him.

"The steward's word," Godwin said. "I set one of the baron's men on the tower stair before we left, Captain, the way you bid. The wizard did not come down. The servant brought his evening meal and his morning meal. He has not left the room."

"Then not Vaelin," Erlich said.

"Not Vaelin," Godwin said.

Erlich looked at the furrow again. It ran from the stable to the wall and under, and beyond the wall it ran into the ditch and out into the grass and stopped, the way it always stopped, at no burrow and no lair. He thought of the river, and the long night of watching it, and nothing coming across. Whatever had done this had not crossed the river. It had been inside the stockade the whole time they watched the water. It had walked — no. It had pulled itself, low and heavy, across the yard of the village while every ranger stood at the wrong edge.

Tomas was there, standing at the back of the crowd, and his face was white. He had seen this before. He had seen it the morning the goats were gone. He had lived with the fear of it for weeks. Now it had come inside the walls, and there was nowhere left in Eastbrook that was safe.

"The tally," Erlich said to Haden.

Haden pulled out his slate. His hand was not steady. He added a line. A dog. A man. Wulf, the stable-hand. He did not say anything. There was nothing to say.

Erlich stood in the yard with the cold in his bones and the wrong thing solid in his chest, and he did what he almost never did.

"I was wrong," he said. Flat. Not loud. "It is not orcs. It is not goblins. It is not the wizard. Something else hunts here, and I have been watching the wrong border."

Godwin came up beside him. He did not say anything kind, because Erlich would not have stood for it. He said, "What do we watch now, Captain?"

Erlich looked at the furrow, and the wall it had gone under, and the trampled yard. His hand went to his pouch, found the weight of the scale still sitting where he had put it, and his fingers closed on it for a moment and let it go.

"The hall," he said. "All of it. The tally, the marks, the scale. We are going to read it again, and this time we read it right."

Chapter 5: The Overlooked Clue

They went to the hall. Erlich had the baron clear it — steward, dogs, serving men, all out — and Haden set the slate on the table in the grey morning light. Godwin laid out his notes, the scratched map of the stockade and the ford and the river camp. Erlich put his pouch on the table and opened it and took out the scale.

It sat there on the oak between them, dull and grey-brown and heavy, the size of a man's spread hand. He had been carrying it for days. He had turned it over once in Tomas's yard and put it away and not looked at it since.

"Now," Erlich said. "Read it."

Haden read the tally. Three goats. Two cows. A horse. Two men — the Dellwood boy, old Brennan. The dog. Wulf the stable-hand. All night-takings. All gone without blood, without bone, without hide.

"No blood," Godwin said. "No bone. Nothing left behind."

"Prey taken whole," Erlich said. He said it the way Godwin had said it in the yard, days ago, when he had not been ready to hear it.

"And the marks," Godwin said. He pointed at his map. "The furrow. Wide as a man's body. Smooth. Belly-marks, drag-scars in the middle. Nothing with legs made those marks, Captain. Something low and heavy, pulling itself. Something that drags its prey whole."

"And this," Erlich said. He picked up the scale and held it flat on his palm. It was thick, dull, curved like a shallow bowl, rough on the inside where it had torn away. Serpentine. There was no other word for the shape of it. "Tomas found it caught in the fence-post where the marks went through. I put it in my pouch and I said it was bone, or harness, and I did not look at it again."

Godwin said nothing. Leofric, in the corner, said nothing. There was nothing kind to say, and they would not have said it if there had been.

"It is not bone," Erlich said. "It is not harness. It is a scale."

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he put it back in his pouch and stood.

"Send for the wizard," he said.

Godwin raised an eyebrow. "Vaelin."

"Vaelin."

Leofric went. He came back in a quarter-hour with the wizard in tow, Vaelin climbing down from his tower in the morning light with the offended look still on his long face. He came into the hall and saw the rangers standing around the table and the slate and the map, and his eyes went sharp.

"You have work for me," he said. It was not a question. Wizards could smell a fee the way a dog smells meat.

"I have a question," Erlich said. "It has a price. Name it."

Vaelin named a price. It was a high one. Erlich did not haggle. He counted the silver out of the baron's purse — the baron had left it on the table and gone — and pushed it across.

Vaelin swept it into his sleeve. "Show me."

Erlich put the scale on the table.

Vaelin went still. His long hands came out of his sleeves and took the scale up, and he turned it the way Erlich had turned it, and then he did what Erlich had not done: he held it to the light, and he scraped the rough side with a thumbnail, and he held it to his nose. His face changed.

"Where did you find this," he said.

"A fence-post," Erlich said. "In a yard where something took a goat and a cow whole and left no blood. Where the drag-marks are wider than a man is tall."

Vaelin set the scale down. He looked at Erlich the way a man looks at another man who has been holding a lit match and not known it.

"This is a wyrm scale," he said.

The word sat in the hall.

"A wyrm," Vaelin said, slow, the way wizards say things when they are earning their fee. "A great serpent. Not a dragon — do not make that error. A wyrm is a beast, not a thinker. No fire, no hoard, no mind. It is hunger given a body. It eats without ceasing, and it grows with every meal. It kills by fang and by constriction — it is not venomous — and it swallows its prey whole." He tapped the scale. "This is why you have no blood and no bone. It does not leave scraps. It does not leave anything. It takes the whole beast, or the whole man, and it grows."

"How big," Erlich said.

"At a guess, from this scale?" Vaelin turned it over. "Thirty feet. Maybe more. It has been feeding for weeks. It will be larger now than when it took the first goat."

"How large does it get."

Vaelin looked at him. "Large. The old books say the great ones can swallow nations. Left unchecked a wyrm will eat until there is nothing left to eat. Ordinarily—" he paused, and a thin smile crossed his face—"ordinarily the dragons curb them first. A wyrm grows fat and slow and a dragon takes it. There are no dragons here, Ranger. Not near Eastbrook. So this one grows."

Erlich stood very still. He was thinking of the Black Dragon of Westreach, and the spear in its brain, and the three days it had lived after. He was thinking of how he had sworn off that work, and how the work had found him anyway, wearing another face.

"Not goblins," he said.

"Not goblins," Vaelin said.

"Not orcs."

"Orcs do not take a man from a loft and leave no blood, Ranger. A wyrm does."

Erlich picked up the scale and put it in his pouch. He looked at Godwin, and then at Leofric.

"Leofric," he said. "Ride. Now. Hard as you can. Bring back every ranger you can raise. A dozen, if there are a dozen to be had."

Leofric straightened. The joker was gone out of his face. "The capital is four days at a hard ride."

"Then ride four days. And four back. We will hold it until you come."

"Three men against a thirty-foot wyrm," Godwin said. It was not a protest. It was a sum.

"Three men do not kill it," Erlich said. "Three men lure it and hold it and keep it from feeding until there are enough spears to put it down. We do not fight it. We hold it."

"How do we hold a thing like that," Leofric said.

"We bait it," Erlich said. "We set out what it wants and we keep it on the hook. It comes for the bait. We keep it coming." He looked at Godwin. "You will work out the ground."

Godwin nodded, slow, already turning it over behind his eyes. "Tomas's pasture," he said. "The pen it gutted. Open ground, one way in, the stockade at our backs. We pen a steer there and we hold the edges with fire and spears until Leofric comes."

"Do it," Erlich said.

Leofric was already at the door. He turned once. "Four days out, Captain. Four back. Hold it."

"Hold it," Erlich said.

Leofric went. They heard his horse on the lane, and then the hooves at a canter, and then nothing. Erlich stood in the hall with the scale in his pouch and the wizard's word in his ear, and the wrong thing in his chest had turned solid and cold and had a name now, and the name was a beast that ate without ceasing and grew with every meal, and there were no dragons here to curb it but him.

Chapter 6: The Midnight Wyrm

Leofric came back at dusk on the eighth day, riding hard at the head of a column of thirteen. The rangers were dusty and grim and carried their spears wrapped in oilcloth, and they had the look of men who had been told what they rode to and had come anyway. Leofric was grinning again. He had not grinned when he left.

"Twelve and me," he said. "The best I could raise in four days."

"It is enough," Erlich said. "Stable them. Feed them. We move at full dark."

Godwin had the ground ready. He had worked it for the eight days they waited, and Tomas had worked beside him. The pasture where the goats had been taken was a square of flat trampled earth with the stockade wall at its back and the river meadow open before it. Godwin had the villagers dig a shallow trench across the open side and bank the earth behind it, and behind the bank he set torches in iron baskets, unlit, and behind the torches a bristle of spears. Two ranks. The first rank with spears braced against the earth, points low. The second rank with shields and shorter spears, to hold the line if the first buckled. Godwin's six best bows he set on the stockade wall, high and angled, where they could shoot down into the beast.

In the middle of the pasture, tied to a stake, stood a steer.

It was Tomas's. The last of his stock, a red yearling he had been saving. He brought it out himself at evening and tied it to the stake and did not look at it again. His face was white, but his hands were steady.

"It took my goats," he said. "It took my cow. Let it try this one."

"Stand back," Erlich said. "Get behind the wall."

Tomas went.

Full dark came. The torches stayed dark. The rangers crouched behind the bank and on the wall, and they did not talk, and they did not move, and the steer lowed once in the middle of the field and was silent.

They waited.

Near midnight the ground trembled.

It came in the way Godwin had said it would — low, heavy, the belly-furrow trenching the soft earth of the meadow, the drag-marks scored behind. But seeing it was not the same as reading it in the mud. It came out of the dark grass like something a man would see in a fever: thirty feet of scaled serpent, grey-brown and dull, thicker through the body than a horse, with a blunt wedge of a head and a mouth that opened wide enough to take the steer whole. It moved wrong for its size, faster than it had any right to, the body pulling itself forward in a long smooth rush.

It struck the steer. The beast went over without a sound, folded into that mouth, and the wyrm began to swallow.

"Now," Erlich said.

The torches lit. The baskets flared up along the bank and the light ran out across the pasture, and the wyrm flinched from it, the head swinging, the body threshing. The rangers on the wall loosed. Godwin's arrows went into it — into the thick of the body, into the neck, and one, the best shot, into the eye. The wyrm threw its head back and the sound it made was not a hiss and not a roar but something between, a wet heavy threshing that shook the air.

It charged.

It came straight at the bank, low and fast, and the first rank braced. Six spears butted into the earth, points angled low. The wyrm hit them. Two spears splintered at once. The body drove over the bank and into the line, and men went down, shields cracking, and the second rank closed up and drove their shorter spears into the side of it, again, again. The beast threshed and rolled and a ranger was caught under the coil and Godwin was shouting from the wall and the bows were loosing into the throat.

Erlich had the killing spear.

He had carried it since Westreach, wrapped in oilcloth, the spear that had gone into the Black Dragon's brain. He had not wanted to carry it. He had not wanted to use it. He was under the beast now, somewhere in the crush, and the body was threshing above him and the scales were slick with blood and the smell of it was iron and mud.

He saw the head. The one good eye was gone, Godwin's arrow in the socket. The other eye rolled, wild, blind with pain. The mouth was open. The fangs were as long as his hand.

He set the spear.

Leofric was beside him. Of course he was. The joker, the cheat, the man who drifted into hives of villainy — he was there with his shield up, fending the threshing head, and he had hold of the spear shaft below Erlich's hands, and together they drove it.

The point went in behind the skull, between the scales, and found the brain.

The wyrm went rigid. Then it threshed, and threshed, and the field went flat under it — grass and stakes and the trench and the bank, all of it threshed to mud. A coil caught Erlich across the chest and threw him. He came up bleeding, and the beast was still thrashing, and then it was not.

It died hard, the way wyrms do. It took a long time. The torches burned down and were replaced, and the beast threshed smaller and slower, and at last it lay still in the ruined pasture, thirty feet of dead scaled flesh, the killing spear standing out of its skull.

Dawn came. Erlich stood over it. He was cut across the chest and his arm was hurt and he had mud and blood in his hair. He did not care.

He said, sparely, to the baron and the reeve and the village that had gathered at the gate: "The scale. The drag-marks, wider than a man. No blood, no bone — prey taken whole. It grows with every meal. That is what hunted you. That is what we read."

Haden wrote it down in his slate.

They harvested the corpse. That was the work the crown paid them for, and the work that paid for the work. The hide came off in long strips, scaled and tough, worth a fortune to the wizards of the capital. The fangs were cut out, four of them, each as long as a man's hand. The flesh was mana-rich — a magical beast draws its magic from what it eats, and the flesh of it was soaked through — and the bone was better still. Rangers fund themselves this way. The King's taxes buy the spears and the horses, but the beast-corpse sales keep the rangers in the field. This one would keep a company for a year.

Baron Aldric came down from the hall and offered Erlich a purse and his thanks, and this time he meant both. Erlich took the purse. He did not take the thanks long.

They rode out at midday, fifteen rangers and a wagon of beast-parts, and the village of Eastbrook stood whole behind them.

Erlich did not look back. He was thinking of the Black Dragon, and the spear in its brain, and the three days it had lived after, razing a city. He had sworn off that work. He had come to Eastbrook to do anything but. And the thing in the pasture would have grown, Vaelin had said — grown fat and slow and large enough to swallow a nation, if no dragon came to curb it. It would have grown into the very thing he had sworn off. There were no dragons here to stop it. There was only him.

He had done the work. Not the glory. The work. The spear and the mud and the reading of clues he had pocketed and ignored. That was the point of it. Not the name, not the kill, not the purse. The work.

He rode home.