AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Vertebrate prey were most vulnerable there. If you got a good grip, you opened windpipes and blood vessels, and they couldn’t bite or gore you back. Her teeth closed, and she tasted blood and heard a strange high wheeze. The man’s hands raked at her face but found a nostril instead of her more vulnerable eye or ear holes.
He went limp.
She dropped the crushed neck, the man’s eyes dry and empty. She opened his gut with her saa to make sure of him, and his body gave a reactive twitch. . . .
The corpse twitched again as she found his liver.
Tearing the oblong organ loose, she raised her head and let it slide down her throat in two big gulps. She sucked blood from the wound, and saw something in his hand shining in the sun. Tarnished gold or brass—either would be welcome. She nibbled it free from the leather thong fixed to it that the man had wrapped about his wrist.
It was a thin round device of hammered heavy metal, a hominid figure in a circle. Hominids had strange superstitions and believed in invisible forces that attracted or repelled evil or good. Was this some kind of proof against dragons?
She licked it. No sharp taste of poison, just the thick metal-saliva. Satisfied, she sent it down her gullet to join the liver, where it would gravitate to the pocket of her innards that absorbed metals.
Smelling, listening, she picked her way south.
All the way across the next flat, the terrified, dead eyes of the man stayed with her. She’d killed a hominid from ambush. Rainfall might call it murder. While hungry, she wasn’t starving, and attacking him had been a foolish risk.
The fact of the matter was, she’d let her temper get the better of her and killed to spite the beaters behind.
She heard a faint, wailing horn. The beaters had probably come across the body. Two more blasts, some kind of signal?
The wind out of the southwest whistled as it cut through the thick thornbushes all around her. The gorge must be near; she couldn’t see any more hills to the south.
A faint and rising sound of hoofbeats came across the wind. Wistala found a rock and climbed near the top, keeping to the shadow side so light wouldn’t reflect off her scales.
Riders! A dozen at least, traveling in pairs, their horses and legs garbed in some sort of leather tenting, perhaps to keep out the thorns, trotted through the brambles, lance-tips sparkling in the sun.
All moved to cut her off from the south. She heard howling; they had dogs with them. Even if the riding men blundered past, the dogs would smell her out.
The thane’s men no doubt wanted her hide in return for some burned shingles and draperies! From Rainfall’s description, Hammar wasn’t the sort to leave an account unsettled.
Wistala gulped, the blood she’d wetted her throat long since caked over by the dry dust she breathed. Her thoughts felt slow and thick as her blood. The men would probably . . .
Dry!
She came off the rock, spat one jet of flame into the tangle right, then trotted a few steps and started another fire left.
The thin branches supporting the thorns caught fire easily, and the wind pushed the flame northwest.
She’d set up a signal to every beater in sight.
But the men would keep from downwind if they knew what was good for them.
Wistala walked along between her two columns of conflagration, nostrils held low to keep out the smoke. At new thickets, she helped spread the flame with another torf or two.
Horns, more confused signals from beyond the smoke. But most of the noise was well behind her.
Now the fire raged so she couldn’t hear anything but its crackling. Her scales reflected the worst of its heat, but she still panted, trying to see through the smoke. A stand of pine, a little above the flat, was burning, and she made for it.
The flame had already consumed the dropped needles; only the tops of the trees burned now. The tough old pines would be green again next spring, but if she wished to be breathing in a year’s time—
Wistala took a deep, lung-filling breath from below the smoke layer, picked a gap, and dashed. She felt flames licking at her flanks. The betweens of sii and saa burned in the hot soil, and she instinctively closed her digits, and she was through, coated with nothing but a thick layer of soot.
And suddenly she breathed cool, dry air, the inferno behind eating its way northwest under a mountain of smoke. From far to the west, she heard more calls as the hunters searched in smoke and confusion.
Wistala got her bearings, noted happily that the sun had fallen almost to the horizon, and moved toward the river.
She negotiated the gorge and swam downriver to the bridge and the landing where they’d tried to smash the troll. The river refreshed after the heat, ash, and dust.
