Dragon Slayer

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Fifteen dragons dead in less than a century.

Rumaad, a different kind of dragon, collects information about the killings the way some dragons collect jewels. Perfectly suited to see the differences in the latest crime scene, he investigates the murder of a dragon he knows all too well.

What he sees convinces him something changed in his world—and not for the best.

"[Rusch's] short fiction is golden."

—The Kansas City Star

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Dec 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386838685

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

Dragon Slayer

Dragon Slayer

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

WMG Publishing

Contents

Dragon Slayer

Newsletter sign-up

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About the Author

Dragon Slayer

Fifteen dead in less than a century, and not one of them by natural causes. The corpses were always found in some stage of mistreatment, headless being the most common. Occasionally, though, fangs would disappear, and sometimes the right foreleg. Or a wing. And once, just once, the tail.

I collected information on the killings just like I collected sapphires. One corner of my lair was strewn with various death relics—a broadsword, a gauntlet, even a lock of hair found between a victim’s back claws.

Something had changed among the humans, something which now made them deadly to dragons.

Fifteen dead in one hundred years was some kind of record. If the killings continued at that rate, we would be extinct within a millennium. Unlike most animals, we didn’t breed whenever we glanced at each other. We had rituals, timing, and our own natural infertility working against us.

The infertility concerned the Lair Fathers the most, but it didn’t bother me much. It seems logical, if you examine it. Impregnation takes time—and there’s often a year between that event and the laying of the egg.

The lairs themselves are the other problem. We’re not social creatures; we don’t like to live too close together. Only a few caves are large enough to accommodate one of us. If we wanted to dwell in the same area, we’d have to suffer through rock outcroppings or move into abandoned human dwellings—the large stone kind with towers, poorly built because they crumble after a century or two of neglect.

Still, despite our distance and our solitude, we have our communities, rituals, and ceremonies. Every twenty years, the Lair Fathers hold the governing council. Mostly it is an excuse for everyone in the Five Regions to assemble, catch up on the news, maybe do a little bargaining. But sometimes we have serious business, like the time Vascan’s youngest took to looting to increase his hoard.

The youngling was banished to the hinterlands, but apparently didn’t survive the trek. The Lair Fathers were called in to look at that corpse, but it was too decayed to determine cause