He chuckled, and Lukasz cracked his knuckles. Ironic, he thought. Bieleć wanted to criticize Wolf-Lords when there was an Apofys running amok upstairs?
“But all we know,” Bieleć murmured, lowering his voice, “is this: In the end, only ten Wolf-Lords remained. Only ten came down from the Mountains.”
The map trembled in place for a moment. Then Bieleć made a small signal, and the slide changed, the projected image shuttering up and out of sight. A photograph took its place, black pigment stained brown with age.
“These ten men were the Brothers Smokówi.”
The photograph had been taken from a distance, with a low line of black trees cutting a stark line in the background. In the foreground, ten men were seated on black warhorses. Nine of the ten horses each had a set of antlers on their bridles: some ending in elegant curls, others simple and spiked. The men had serious faces. They wore leather and fur.
They looked, in a word, barbaric.
“These ten,” whispered Damian Bieleć, “became the Brygada Smoka.”
A crest ratcheted onto the screen: a wolf’s head, flanked by crossed antlers. Below the image ran lettering familiar enough that even Lukasz could recognize it.
ZĄB LUB PAZUR
“Tooth or claw,” translated Damian Bieleć. The projector’s beam cast his face in alternating light and shadow. “The motto of the Wolf-Lords. And later, the motto of the great Brygada Smoka.”
Lukasz placed a cigarette between his teeth and fished out his lighter. Almost reflexively, he ran his fingers over the case. He knew the etching by heart: crossed antlers and a wolf’s head.
When he looked up again, he could have sworn he saw Bieleć’s head twitch toward the lighter’s flash. The professor paused a split second before he resumed his talk.
“Their—their beginnings were modest enough.” He faltered. “The brothers began by hunting lesser dragons, collecting bounties on Lernęki. Living off the troves of Dewclaws.”
There was a skittering sound overhead, and a few pinpoints of dust fluttered down from the vaulted rafters. None of the listeners looked up, but Lukasz’s focus shot to the chandelier and the shadows beyond. A wisp of smoke, scarcely larger than a cat, rolled across the rafters and disappeared into darkness at the far end of the hall.
He relaxed. Just a dola. Nothing more.
Lukasz settled back against the doorframe, watching Bieleć through the hazy air.
“And then,” continued Professor Bieleć. His knuckles were white on the lectern. “The brothers arrived in the town of Saint Magdalena, where for three hundred years, a Faustian had terrorized the countryside.”
The slide changed again. Amid the wreckage stood a man and a boy. A Faustian dragon sprawled behind them. This photograph had been taken among the ruins of a cathedral—now nothing more than splintered pews, shattered glass, and scorched stone. So fresh was this kill that its antlers had not yet fallen, and its still face was crowned with glittering, staglike horns. . . .
Darkness tipped one of the tines.
The man in the photograph was tall. He was handsome and hawkish, smiling and savage in leather and fur, broadsword strapped across his back. He beamed, like a proud father, arm around the boy, as if congratulating him.
Lukasz knew better. The man was holding the boy up on his feet. It did not show up in the monochrome photograph, but the boy’s pant leg was soaked through with blood. At the memory, pain stabbed through his knee.
On went the professor.
“The last of the Wolf-Lords.” The professor’s voice fell to intonations usually reserved for worship. “Their exploits are chronicled in photographs and newsprint. But we know so little of who they were. Of how they must have felt—how lonely they were—the last of their kind in a world like ours.”
The slide changed. The brothers in one of Kwiat’s famous bathhouses, cast in shadow by flames burning in the stone pool behind them. The image shuddered, disappeared, was replaced. Brothers standing on a dock, while behind them a pair of Tannimi hung nose-down from cranes like enormous, grotesque salmon. A click, and a new image appeared. Brothers smoking with swords propped on their shoulders, a Ływern stretched out across the cobbles beside them. As the photographs changed, the brothers changed: from leather and fur to sleek black uniforms, from wild beards to fashionably short hair. From savages to celebrities, each moment captured. Immortalized on celluloid film, even if they were dead.
As the slides changed, Bieleć’s voice became hushed and hallowed.
“Bound together by blood, by fire, by the loss of the world they’d left behind and the fear of the world they’d entered. Cursed, lonely, destined for the outskirts of civilization. By tooth or by claw, they promised. The Brygada Smoka. The last of the Wolf-Lords, and the greatest dragon slayers in the world.”
The whole room held its breath, with the exception of Lukasz. Then again, he thought, perhaps this is worship.
Lukasz glanced down at his hands. Realized, a little distractedly, that he’d forgotten his gloves. When he looked up again, the slide had changed once more.
The last pair of Smokówi brothers smiled for the camera. They wore black army uniforms trimmed in silver braid and gleaming with medals. One had spectacles and artistically messy hair that did nothing to soften the brutal slant to his cheekbones. The second man was younger, with black hair and eyes whose blue had evaded the colorless camera flash. All the same, they had a wicked glint.
Lukasz knew those eyes very well.
They were his.
“But then,” whispered Professor Bieleć. He spoke, it seemed, into Lukasz Smoków’s very soul. “But then the Brothers Smokówi began to disappear.”
Lukasz waited for the auditorium to empty before he strode to the front of the room, where Professor Bieleć was folding his notes into a briefcase.
Lukasz could feel the Apofys in his bones. He’d spent the morning reciting its curriculum vitae: the demonic taxidermy collection devoured, the pagan amulet exhibition plundered, and four Unnaturalists gutted. And Damian Bieleć, newly promoted department chair. By default.
“Dewclaws don’t have troves,” observed Lukasz, snuffing out his cigarette in an ashtray. “Only bits of metal and trash.”
Bieleć shot bolt upright. Up close, he did not seem quite as impressive. He was small and pale and, without a podium or a captive audience, even a little pathetic. He’d probably escaped the dragon because he simply wasn’t very appetizing.
Bieleć took in everything from the black army cap on Lukasz’s head to the tall leather boots.
“L—Lieutenant Smoków—” he began. “I didn’t realize—”
While Bieleć gathered his wits, Lukasz licked his fingertips and reached into the projector to snuff out the gaslight. He didn’t mind the tiny sear of pain. If you hunted dragons, you got used to burns.
Lukasz interrupted:
“Heard you’ve got an Apofys on the loose.”
Bieleć wiped sweaty hands on his elegant suit, eyes running down to the old-fashioned broadsword at Lukasz’s side. What was it Eryk used to say?
Lukasz remembered the eyes, darker than mountain skies. The laugh, easier than a falling blade. Teeth brighter than dragon bones.
Dress us like gentlemen, and we’ll hunt like wolves.
“Aren’t there two of you?” Bieleć was asking. “It’s really quite a dangerous creature—”