“Jesus fucking- duck!Duck!” My throat was so dry and hoarse with fear I couldn’t even tell if my words made it into the air or not. The borog was too big to land inside the narrow bottle neck of this part of the valley. Instead, it landed atop the two walls of stone, the width of its body easily spanning the distance.
It raised its terrible head.
Then smashed it down.
Zaria shouted. Tilly and I grabbed at each other for balance. The thing was smashing into the stone above and on either side of us with all its might.
“Go, go!” I screamed at Zaria, pulling Tilly forwards. We couldn’t stay in this spot. The rocks were going to come down right on our heads. At least if we kept moving…
If we kept moving, then what? The borog would merely follow us and confront us on the ground where the way was wider. Above us, it roared its fury, smashing its head down once more. A man-sized chunk of stone was sheered away, landing afew metres behind us with a bone-rattling boom, blocking the path back to the others. Two spears soon followed it – Oxriel’s and Zoren’s – obviously thrown at the borog with little effect.
“What do we do?” Tilly cried. “We’re trapped!”
Our only hope was that the borog would get distracted and fly away again, giving us precious seconds to escape. But that didn’t seem to be happening. The stone around us trembled with its attacks.
I might die here.
In that moment, I thought of Thaleo.
But only for a moment. More stone was cracking overhead – directly above Zaria.
Zaria, who’d been so welcoming and generous to us. Zaria, who was so blissfully happy now that she was mated to Arton. Zaria, with her precious little baby on the way.
I didn’t think about it. I didn’t even have to. I let go of Tilly and sprinted ahead, connecting hard with Zaria’s back and shoving her with everything I had, sending her stumbling forward.
When the rock came away from the wall, it was so loud that it sounded like gunfire. Maybe itwasgunfire. Something hit the back of my head with the force of a bullet. There was no pain. Only a spray of bright stars across my sputtering vision.
No, not just stars. Sight stars.
Thaleo?
He must have caught me. I never felt myself hit the ground.
19
THALEO
Warrek and I had already turned ourselves homeward after a day of flying when we saw it. Something else in the air. Something big.
It was not Valeria’s shuttle. We’d already seen the shine of that in the distance, heard the whine of its human power source. Seeing that shuttle a little earlier – knowing it had landed, and had brought her back to me – was part of the reason I had called Warrek off and turned us about. My heart beat like the wings of my braxilk knowing that she was back in my mountain.
Now, it beat for another reason entirely as my eyes tried to make sense of what I saw.
Whatever it was, it was heading the same direction we were. Straight for our mountain.
“I see it, Gahn!” Warrek called to me before I even had the chance to ask him. Simultaneously, we urged our braxilk as fast as they could fly. But the thing, whatever it was, was closer to our mountain than we were. It was so huge that my sense of the distance was warped.
But though it was closer, we were faster. Slightly, anyway. Never letting our mounts slow for even a moment, slowly, we gained on it.
It was a living thing. A flying creature, with a wingspan of brain-boggling proportions. Its body was heavy and huge and ominously familiar. It almost looked like…
“A borog!” Warrek shouted.
No. It could not be. Borogs did not have wings. This was something else.
Could it be some dark cousin of the Vrika?
But the closer we got, driving ourselves and our mounts to their greatest limits, the more its shape came into familiar focus. That powerful, lumbering body, which seemed like it should have been impossible to hoist into the air. That snapping tail that could kill a man with a single blow. The huge head meant for scraping, pummelling.
