“Well,” said Delia, and then, after a pause: “If it’s a talker, why not maybe just go up there and talk to it?”
“Talk to it.” Emery rubbed his eyeballs. “Talk to it. That’s a stupid plan, Delia. Stupid, stupid plan.”
“If it wasn’t for stupid plans, Sheriff, doesn’t seem to me we’d have any plans at all around here.”
Emery laughed in a putting-a-party-hat-on-a-sob sort of way, then sighed, then jabbed a finger at his deputy. “You and your things, in the Jeep in five minutes. If I’m going up there to speak softly, you’re coming as a big stick.”
“Wouldn’t have let you leave me behind.”
“Uh-huh. You got your running feet on today, Delia? Just in case I fuck this up?”
“I never back myself into corners, Sheriff.” She slid her reassembled rifle into its leather case and zipped it tight. “And that’s another ten cents from you.”
Everything was wrong with the air and the light on the way up the hillside. It was inside light somehow escaped outside; golden amber beams of sun that hung in the air, languid, a light so rich you all but smelled it, and tasted the dryness of dust flecks that floated in it like microscopic sea creatures, flickering in and out of visibility. It was warmer than September ought to be, at least here, where Emery walked alone up a sagebrush slope well clear of a line of birch and aspen on his left. The west Ferris Mountains reared high overhead, white cliff faces rippling softly as ever-changing cloud shadows passed over them. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was definitely wrong. Dragon weather. Things just happened around them. Winds blew harder or colder, temperatures got whimsical, snows melted in January or reappeared without shame in the middle of July.
That gitchy feeling, and the four smashed bodies he’d found about fifty yards back down the trail, told him he was close. Still, he kept his rifle slung, his stance easy, trying not to look as though he were up to something.
He found his perpetrator easily enough. The dragon was equally uninterested in subterfuge, and had some heft to back up its arrogance. Thirty-five feet, maybe, chest and front haunches slabs of bullish power, scales a shade of dusty honey slashed with networks of old scars. The creature was perched above a half-eaten cow, Hereford by the looks of it. More like Goneford, Emery couldn’t help thinking to himself.
“Ahem,” said Emery, halting at a distance of about thirty yards. Then, louder: “Excuse me!”
The beast peered at him, tapped its claws on the ground, pushed itself back slightly. Shreds of meat clung to the whorls and wrinkles of its lower jaw.
“Why do you seek my pardon, little one?” The dragon’s voice had the timbre of a bulldozer engine.
“Um,” Emery said, shivering at the straight-up weirdness of what he was doing. “I don’t. It’s a, you know, attention-getter. Means I’m sorry to have to bother you.”
“Are you, though?”
“Partly. Duty’s a hell of a thing. Look, I’m Emery Blackburn, sheriff of Carbon County, and that’s where you’re presently, well, stealing cattle, among other things.”
“The strong take,” growled the dragon, “or they prevent others from taking. I was not prevented. That is all. The meat is mine, this place is mine. You carry your fire-tube in abeyance, or you would already be slain. You may be yet. Why have you come?”
“Conversation.” Emery slid his hands into his pockets to control their desperate urge to clutch his rifle sling. “Heard you were the talking sort, figured we could maybe work something out. You, uh, killed four of my people.”
“Your kin?”
“No, uh, my constituents. It’s a thing we have. I suppose I’m responsible, for situations like this, after . . . there’s trouble.”
“The trouble was brief. Your constituents attacked me. I slew them. I did not want the strange trash they carried. I wanted the good blood of a heifer, and found it. All is well.”
“Look, is there any way I could politely ask you to just . . . leave?”
“No.”
“I do not wish to threaten you.”
“Then do not.” The dragon turned back toward its unfinished meal. “And you may continue breathing.”
“Okay. Asking politely’s out, that’s fine. Threats are a bad idea. I do enjoy breathing. Look, shit, do you know what a coin toss is? You play poker? Tic-tac-toe? Anything like that?”
The dragon’s head whipped back toward him, eyes bright, and Emery fell back a step despite himself.
“You would try conclusions with me?” the dragon said. “Assail me in wisdom? A challenge of the minds?”
“I . . . yes. Yes, I would.” Emery had a vision of a cheering crowd, the president of the United States draping a heavy gold medal around his neck, and on the face of that medal the words HISTORY’S GREATEST DUMBASS. “What the hell. I would challenge you, if it would make you leave.”
“Such could be your binding.”
“If I challenge you and win, then, I, uh, bind you . . . to leave this mountainside, in fact, to cease and desist all activities in Carbon County, Wyoming, henceforth and forever. Deal?”
“Should you lose,” said the dragon, “I shall break your every limb, snap the bones inside your thin flesh, and hang you from a tree by the roadside, where you will scream my praises to all your kind who happen by, warning them away from my territory, until the mercy of death claims you.”
“That is a vivid and straightforward promise, I suppose.”
“As I am challenged, I call the contest. Let riddles be our trial. Who wins five, wins all. Begin.”
“Riddles. Shit. Okay.” Emery felt trickles of sweat sliding down his back like little spiders. “Okay. Two, um, Americans are walking on a street, you see. Two Americans on a street. One American is the father of the other American’s son, so what’s the relation of the two Americans?”
“Wife and husband,” said the dragon. “Do I look like an idiot?”
“I decline to answer that. Wait, is that your riddle?”
“Of course not. First point is mine. Now this: What is thin as night and soft as sand, will break the teeth but not the hand?”
“I have”—Emery stared at the dragon for nearly half a minute—“Absolutely no idea.”
“Then the second point is mine. Ask your next riddle.”
“Wait, what was the answer to yours?”
“Winners get answers.” The dragon grinned, the first time Emery had ever seen such an expression of raw, undeniably intelligent smugness on a fanged snout the size of a writing desk. “Losers get broken and hung from trees. Ask your next riddle.”
“If that’s how it is.” Emery paced theatrically for a moment. “Who was the American League home-run leader during the regular 1953 season?”
“That’s no riddle,” growled the dragon. “That is historical trivia from your scuttling little world. A ploy without dignity. The third point is mine.”
“Hey, I didn’t agree to any such rule—”
“If you can’t tell what a riddle is,” said the dragon, “you are less than a child, and I shall simply kill you now.”