"Habit maketh no monke, ne wearing of guilt spurs maketh no knight."
Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love

"Accursed thirst for gold! What dost thou not compel mortals to do?"
Virgil, The Aeneid

Chapter One - A Village Called Death

A man's face. Scarred, pox-ridden, and the rough colour of sand-paper. A finger runs a yellowing nail across untidy stubble and satisfies a long-suffering itch. A nose, half chewed off by rats in some half-forgotten cellar, twitches, breathing in the stale, stagnant air of the p'ah-lung's lair.

The man nods to his two comrades, who dismount fagged-out nags and join their friend, both drawing back complaining bow-strings and grinning their gappy grins. Stinking black furs line their coats, and the scuffed shine of ill-kept chain jangles on their chests. A ringlet rusted here, a hole torn through there, the problems of some former wearer.

Bandits, the three of them. Masterless and roving, raping and pillaging what women and boys and petty village treasuries there were to be raped or pillaged, scouring the lands like some blight or vile plague, incurred upon the meek in penance for their lowly rank.
They had come to the nameless village two days back, and through their own pleasant means had come to learn of the riches that lay beneath the murky marsh-lands in what the locals called the W'orrocoh-long, the Dragon's Wastes, as well as the bejewelled guardian that slept astride them.

Hungry for gold, and finding the village's abject poverty too dry for their tastes, the three had ridden out, wading the marshes and sharpening their blades as they came.
One, the pox-ridden man, licked the long serrated teeth of his axe. Cold steel. Rare in these times of ruin in the Eastern Lands. He crouched, slinking into the darkness beneath the marshes, into the cavernous hole that led down into the ground, and into the p'ah-lung's lair. His two friends followed, their bows taunt, their toothy grins fixed.

None of the three returned.

-

The villagers watched the three bandits make their way across the Dragon's Wastes with sallow faces. They had proved very slim pickings for the thieves indeed, with no copper coins, let alone gold to rob. They had ridden through the village, screaming their bloody war-cries and kicking those that had not the sense to hide indoors through the streets.
They had burnt their grain-hut, empty as it was, and uprooted what crops the ageing farmers grew still on the dying fields around. After finding no entertainment to come by, they rode on, whooping and hollering as they rode into the marsh-lands, calling for the head of the fabled p'ah-lung, the river dragon.

None would return. The villagers knew as much. The beast-lord of the marsh-lands would see fit to their end. But the damage to the crops would be costly.
Not one of the men and women of the village walked without some cramp or limp, wasted by hunger and wracked by age as they were, and any young that might have been had long since up and gone, seeking their fortunes elsewhere.
It was a village of the elderly and frail, those too old and broken to up and leave. Those caught in the jaws of the dragon's serfdom and doomed to their everlasting labour and tribute.
The uprooted crops had to be found again, though backs and legs creaked and groaned bitterly at the task, had to be found and replanted afore they withered and died in the baking Eastern sun.
The mouths of the village croaked in a silent plea for rice and bread, while the ever-hungry, ever-demanding jaws of the dragon roared in vocal bellows for well-fattened goats and cattle.

Da'Jin, the eldest of the village's many elders, sat in the Eastern sun and thought, long and hard, his brown habit trailing in the sandy road. He'd long since assumed authority over what village there was, being the only one to remember a time before the p'ah-lung, and had seen them through more long summers than he had teeth in his head. This was not the first to make him think so long and hard, and he doubted it would be his last, unless death finally caught up with him.
The village, nameless now, though once it had had a name in Da'Jin's youth that even he had long forgotten, was known only by the four long etchings in the stone gateway that stood in the village's heart, perhaps the relic of some lost city or ancient temple. Now it was only a gateway, the gates long rotten away and the walls around long fallen and smoothed over by barren soils. The four long etchings were carved in wild, irregular sweeps across an recognisably weathered motif, cut deep into the rock and as foreboding as the wolf's howl in a wintery forest is to the lone wood-cutter.

The four etchings were the dragon's claw marks, left as reminder of the lord of the land, the beast-king of the marshes. A warning to those that would not pay the dragon's tribute of flesh and gold.

The village had long run dry of shiny trinkets to appease the pa'h-lung with, and now paid only in the flesh of their livestock, sending an ever-thinner animal to be tied to the mouth of the creature's lair each full moon, led by the youngest of the village, slow and trembling on the journey there and fast and fleet of foot on the journey back.

The village now had no goats, nor had it sheep nor cows nor what the Western folk called Bonnacon-Bugs nor ropey old turtles to fish from what streams there were. They had no livestock, no animals, no flesh to feed the hungry jaws of their p'ah-lung master.
No flesh but their own, Da'Jin reflected, morosely. His eyes were glazed, and his breathing slow and rattling. He seemed as one about to slip into the dark-nothingness beyond.

No flesh but our own. The eldest elder clutched his elbows closer to him with brittle fingers.

This would be their longest summer yet, he knew.

-

The village had had a name, though only Da'Jin remembered it in passing. The name had been much akin to the Eastern people's word for four, which is in turn akin to that meaning death. The name was Si'lene.

Lee Hux'een, once cattle rancher on the fields to the north of the village, now too crippled and broken to walk or help on the crops, did not know this. He knew, however, that the village's name was Death. He knew because the thought inflamed what was left of his decrepit mind, and was as a gravity to all the other thoughts that circled about it.

A village called Death. Fitting. For the thought Lee Hux'een was to voice in that low, sandstone hut that served as the village speaking place was one that rang very true with such a morbid title.

"The dragon-king demands flesh. Meat," he roared, belligerent eyes looking out from a rotting body. His upper half sat propped up against the heavy stone slate that they called the speaking stage, while the lower half of his body was long gone, mauled and crushed by some heavy hoof-fall in a field of raging bulls long ago.
The people assembled murmured, in old, croaking voices. The eyes of the eldest elder, Da'Jin, didn't meet the half-a-rancher's. The oldest of them all sat out in the summer sun, roasting slowly. Out in the road, and if he was listening to the cripple's hoary calls then he showed no signs. He simply looked out to the high midday sun.

Lee licked his lips. Shouted in a wheezing roar. "We have no cattle-flesh for him now! No goat-meats! We have seen no livestock in this village since those three rogue's rode in on their scrawny nags! And the dragon must be fed! We all know what will befall us if he is not sated the next full moon! And how many days until that?"
"Four!" a swarthy elder called. Ishikawa Ipsen, the village sooth-sayer. He had long given up the pretense of enchant, and retired himself to helping plow the fields with the farmers. Any sooth-say work he did, it was in fanciful fortune-tellings, games of fate for the old wives.
Another, Hong Yu, the blacksmith and youngest of the gathering at eight and forty years, shouted in protest. The sooth-say-become-farmer shouted him down.
"'Tis four, I say! Four days as there are four claws across the gate!"
Hong fell silent, his swollen head - the product of some accident with a hammer in his smithy - shaking solemnly. Lee grinned, his wrinkled face creasing. Nerves were high. The village was scared. It reassured him, somehow. Made his own fear seem less intimate.

He waved hands in the air, almost losing balance. "Four nights! Four nights and we must have tribute in flesh for the pa'h-lung! Do you know where we can get that, shenfu-Ishikawa? Or you, lao-Hong?"

The half-man is saving his skin, Da'Jin noted. He's scared and wants to make sure the dragon stays happy. The coward.

The villagers gathered about the stone stage were silent. They knew, in part, what the cripple was to say. Some longed for it, secretly, though all abhorred what it meant.

"A lottery," Lee said, slowly. "Our names are written on rocks. We sort the rocks, and we take one at random. Thus the dragon is sated."

The villagers stared, stony-faced. Of course, Da'Jin thought, they don't like the notion. Even the half-man is not so base that he should find pleasure in it. They simply wish to survive. Like rats, they will climb over each other to escape the barrel. Except there is no barrel here. No rim to topple over. There are only the hungry jaws of the pa'h-lung, gnashing and chomping at their tails. They can climb over one another if that is their want, but in the end all shall be fed.

That the villagers argued the proposal is to be expected. That unviable alternatives were shouted is predictable. That every mind, slowly or sharply, grudgingly turned to accept the crippled rancher's words came to pass goes without question.

And so, with yet more squabbles as systems and fail-safes were fought over by the frail of the village called Death as men suspected men of trickery or somesort, the lottery was set in motion.

The eldest elder sat, watching the horizon as the whirling sands of the tundra skyline blurred and shimmered in the heat of that hot Eastern sun.

And somewhere, the dragon laughed.