Chapter 166: Bloodbath
Simon didn’t arrive near the top of the peak by dawn, and by then, he was completely spent. He’d been up for more than a day, counting the ride back to the smith, and half of that time was spent walking around in full plate, which had not been one of his better ideas.
So, rather than keep going, he found a patch of grass off the beaten path before the treeline and passed out to grab a short nap. His sleep was fitful, and he woke up many times, but by noon, he could no longer sleep, even in the shade. Instead, he got up and kept going.
It turned out that he didn’t have far to go. He realized that as soon as he saw many of the wagons parked next to each other near the top. A few minutes later, he noticed the giant cave entrance, which led into the creature’s lair, and right after that, he saw the dead dragon lying there.
It was an awful sight, made even worse by the awesome nature of the beast he’d seen the night before. Even lying on its side, dead to the world, the giant corpse would have covered a football field. From nose to tail, it might even be longer. He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t see too well from here.
What he could see was that it was impossible to see how the dragon had died now because they’d already carved away too much of the corpse. At first, he didn’t really understand what they were doing and why they were using tools more appropriate to felling a tree than butchering a corpse, but then he saw the way they were carefully slicing away the scaled skin and pulling out the teeth and horns. Then, it all made sense. That stuff was probably worth as much as the glittering hoard he could see in the distance.
Beyond that, though, everything was blood. Blood flowed out of the giant open wounds that these men were carving into it. It was splattered on the walls, sprayed across the treasure, and pooled on the floors so high that the men in boots waded in it up to their ankles. It had been a giant among mortals, but now it was just a giant mess, and lines of men were gathering it up and buckets and then walking out to the edge of a cliff where they were dumping it out.
As he passed the line of wagons and approached the entrance, one of the men with an air of authority yelled at him. “We aren’t paying you to stand around, old man. If you want a piece of this, get to work. That blood won’t get itself out of there!”
For a moment, the urge to kill the man was strong, just because of the bloody nature of the scene. He resisted, though. If these guys thought he was just another hand, well, there wasn’t a better disguise to get close to things that he could think of, so he went with it.
Simon spent the next few hours doing exactly what everyone else was doing: dumping the blood of the dragon into the valley below. As the day wore on, a giant flock of carrion feeders gathered above them, making the whole scene even stranger.