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One of the archers shouted, “niy!” and an arrow tapped off a rock next to him. The channel he climbed closed to something like a notch a dozen body-lengths above. If he could reach that, the archers would have trouble getting an angle on him, and their bows might not throw the missiles that high.
He felt something pull at his haunch, and looked down to see an arrow piercing the thin webbing between leg and stomach. These were not elven arrows, but ugly black shafts with barbed points and red fletching. Auron looked back: two archers stood shoulder to shoulder, speaking to each other out of the sides of their mouths as they drew marks.
Auron heard the bows twang, and he threw himself to a new fissure. He felt the passage of the arrows before they hit bare stone where his chest had been, sending sparks from their steel heads. Auron flattened himself into a crevice, painfully snapping the shaft in his leg. If only he were a real armored drake! By now he would have scales on his back that would allow these assassins to rain all the arrows they could at this distance, without effect unless they caught him in the throat or eye. The fissure protected him from arrows for the moment, but it did not run up farther than a neck-length or two.
A bow twanged again, and it would be hard to say who was more surprised at the hit: the archer or Auron. The drake felt something like a horse-kick in his side. An arrow stood out from his chest, its black shaft projecting from his rib cage, blood welling around the edges of the wound. Auron took a surprised breath, and pain racked the right side of his body. He lost his grip and tumbled from the cliff.
He righted himself in the air and landed on his feet, among men with spears. A silver-helmeted man managed to skewer his tail, holding him pinned while the others closed in to kill.
Auron spat fire in a great arc at the spear points closing in and was rewarded by screams louder than the air-eating roar of his flame. He turned to bite at the one holding the spear in his tail. The man put up an armored forearm, and his mouth closed on that, but he was free of the pinning grip. Auron clawed the man across the legs and leaped away into the rocks before others could get him from behind.
Wriggling between cliff walls and boulder, careful to keep the arrow shaft from striking rock, Auron was leaving a blood trail, and he knew it. The screams of a dying man gave him grim satisfaction. He felt short of breath, weak but content. He might be trapped, but he had taken his share of hunters and their animals.
“Dragon!” someone called in Parl, a booming roar that might have come from a bear. “Dragon! Come out and face me. Bring fire, tooth, and claw, foul creature.”
Foul creature, indeed! Auron thought. Even bleeding, he was cleaner of skin than any of the greasy men or flea-hosting dogs hunting him.
“Demon spawn! Plague of women and children! You face a man this time, not a child. Come and try to take me.”
The voice was at least ten body-lengths behind, somewhere among the rocks. The hunter would see the blood trail soon. Best to distract him.
Auron lowered his head and tried to sound as much like Father as possible. “Do you throw a spear, man, or just insults?” Auron said in Parl, doing his best to rattle his griff as loudly as a winged dragon might.
“I throw Byltzarn, ‘white spear of lightning’ in this tongue, and wield Dunherr, ‘the thunder’s edge.’ Their bearer is known as the Drakossozh, ‘the dragon blade.’ Hear my name and despair, for I hunt your kind up and down these hills!” The voice moved away from the cliff’s edge. Auron heard words hissed back to another voice using the human tongue.
Auron extended his neck around another rock. “Noble titles. Kill me today, and you will have earned them.”
“I will only have dispensed justice, child-snatcher. It’s been a hell of a spring for me. I killed two dragons plaguing the Burning Wheel dwarves at the Highlake: a great bronze male and a young female. I’ve been on your trail since the coast, when you did murder to the village of Sarsmyouth and killed old men and boys trying but to feed their families. ‘The sooner a blood debt is collected, the better,’ as my grandsire Odlon used to say.”
Auron froze against his stone. Wistala, Father, it had to be! His fire bladder filled even as his heart went cold. He heard a heavy tread among the boulders. He finally saw Drakossozh, a tall man with shoulders like a draft ox. The Dragonblade wore a shining silver helm marked by two curving wings sweeping up and meeting like two crescent moons above a spiked face mask. His spear gleamed white even in the gloom of the morning mist; his sword handle was formed like an open dragon’s mouth. The wide blade of Dunherr projected from it like a dragon’s tongue before ending at twin points. He wore scale armor, also shaped like that of a dragon’s, though if they were dragon scales, some craftsman had carved and polished them into art. A red sash was thrown over his shoulder, human ideograms stitched into it in a series of white dots, and tied at his sword hilt.
Auron thumped his wounded tail, hard, on the reverse side of the rock. The man whirled, but only a small portion of Auron’s head and neck was visible. He watched the man through one barely open eye. “Will you face an armed man, creature, as fiercely as you did a child hardly able to walk?” The man’s spiny helm searched to and fro, moving like a weather vane rather than like living flesh.
Auron faced him, shooting his head forward and vomiting flame. The man threw his armored elbow before the eye slits in his armored mask as he knelt behind another rock, but too late. Auron’s fire coated him in a cascade of yellow-orange liquid. Spent and pained, Auron inhaled smoky air into his one good lung and slipped off the rock.
He saw a tower of flame rise. The fire slipped from the Dragonblade’s armor like surf from a sea turtle’s back. Somehow, the man lived. Drakossozh came at him, spear point held to skewer and kill. “All you’ve burned is the sash, with the names of those in Sarsmyouth you murdered stitched into it. But they remain in my memory. Tirea, the child, Guldan, the fisherman . . . ,” he recited, swinging the sword to kill.
Auron writhed under the blade and shot between two rocks, snapping off the arrow in his side in a flash of red pain. The man brought his sword down as Auron ran, lung filled with blood and agony, and he felt as though his tail had been stepped on. It did not hinder him, and Auron leaped atop another rock. An arrow shot under his neck.
The Dragonblade shouted, and Auron saw silver helmets and spear points bobbing among the rocks. The Dragonblade hopped upon the tallest boulder, leaping as nimbly as an elf even in his smoldering armor, and he continued to bellow orders. They were answered by the archers—one fired a flaming arrow in Auron’s direction. It struck a tree trunk and burned, throwing off bright sparkles that hissed as they landed on mist-wet stone.
Each breath was agony, and Auron ceased running so he could get air in his body. A mountain man blew his horn, and Auron saw spears pointed in his direction. He noted dully that a third of his tail had been chopped off.
“Why you’re hardly worth skinning!” Drakossozh bellowed, laughing. “Those fishermen made you out to be a sea monster of awesome size and ferocity. When I found one of your teeth, I wondered. I’m proved right. Again.”
“Do you always talk your dragons to death?” Auron said, further pain coming with the words.
“No. But with your death, I will have taken all the colors, save black. There will be feasting and dancing tonight, as you rotate on a spit. Headless, for I must have my trophy.”
Auron flirted with the thought of whipping his neck down to shatter his skull on a rock, but turned so that the man might try to take his head. He cried the best dragon roar he could, but it was hardly loud or fierce, and it ended with a bloody cough.
“Your men wait for you. None seem eager to approach,” Auron said. The men ringed him, but none threw spear or shot arrow.
The Dragonblade jumped down from his perch and strode toward Auron, a wisp of smoke or two still coming from nooks in his armor. Mountain men fell in behind him, gripping their climbing picks two-handed.
Horses screamed in the distance and thundered out of the mists. Auron turned his head, trying to pierce the fog that had turned the land into shadow and hint. A boy with a torch ran among the horses, looking fearfully over his shoulder. Two dogs trailing their leashes ran for the rocks, tails tucked beneath legs. Pairs of glowing eyes reflected light from the gloom.
“Firelong! Firelong!” a voice in the fog howled. “Tell me you still live, or I’ll tear out the throat of every man, dog, and horse here. Answer, O my good wolf.”
