AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Now unguided, the dragon turned and fled, passing over the bridge this time.
A Firemaid spread her wings to pursue.
“No!” the Copper called, landing. “There’s another waiting out there.”
Alert Firemaidens guarded each end of the under-construction bridge and the tunnel in the center. The Copper felt confident they could deal with the remaining rider, even if the dragons assisted. They didn’t seem like well-trained tunnel fighters, judging from their performance as soon as the walls closed in.
“What’s your name?” he asked his rescuer.
“Asleea, your honor.”
“Asleea, there’s a rider down out there. If he’s still alive, bring him back that way. If he’s not, bring his body and whatever dropped weaponry you find. I’ll fly above, close to the cavern ceiling, and keep watch. If they come down on you, turn tail and fly like the wind. Perhaps I can surprise them.”
As it turned out, they retrieved the corpse without incident. Perhaps, having lost two riders, the remaining one flew back to wherever they came from to report.
He was a squatty sort of man, tanned and dark-haired, very different from the thin, darker, well-formed men of Anaea. His beard was almost as full as a dwarf’s, and he had several layers of clothing on to protect him from the cold.
Rayg was most interested in the crossbow quarrels he found in a leather case strapped on the man’s thigh. They were wooden, with nickel-silver tips, and two thin glass tubes to either side just behind the arrowhead containing a clear liquid.
“I’m guessing that’s poison,” Rayg said.
He carefully emptied the glass tubes on the ground, rinsed out the glass, then put them back in the sides of the quarrel. He wrapped his hand in a bit of leather and drove the quarrel into the dirt.
“Fascinating,” he said, extracting the point.
“Yes?”
“When the head strikes it slides down the shaft, just the width of my thumb. But it’s enough to shatter the glass, putting both vials into the wound.”
The Copper thought back to the fight over Anaea. “I saw FeLissarath pass over one. He died within a few seconds. I thought an arrow found one of his hearts, but it could have been one of these.”
“A few seconds, you say? That’s a deadly toxin, to bring down a dragon so fast.”
“Perhaps it found a heart after all.”
“You should take that into consideration when fighting these dragon-riders. The quarrels are light; I suppose every bit of weight counts when you’re loading a dragon. Unless they were fired from a very close range, they probably wouldn’t go through scale without a lucky shot.”
“‘Close’ and ‘probably’ are not exact enough that I wish to bet my life on it. I’m exhausted. I need a meal. Oh, and find one of my bats. I’ll give him a nip of blood if it would hurry him down the tunnel in search of the Drakwatch.”
The Copper sent messenger bats in both directions on the western road looking for Drakwatch patrols, bearing a request to hurry to Anaea and assist the Upholder’s mate and the Firemaid at the cave mouth.
Upholder’s mate. His mate. Sickly little Halaflora. So much depended on a cripple and a weakling. Whatever Spirit had put into dragons’ nature the desire to contest every mouthful, with the weakest dying off, must be having a good, ethereal laugh at that.
Rayg found one other item on the dragon-rider and brought it to him before one of the Firemaids ate it. It was an odd little pendant on a thin chain, a tiny figure of a man standing with his arms and legs outstretched within a circle.
“I wonder what that could mean?”
“Man’s first destiny,” Rayg said.
“You know that symbol? Where does it come from?”
“The barbarians in the far north. I’m…familiar with them. They’ve got a few prophets and shamans who say life is like a great game between gods of each of the races, and we’re all just pieces dropped into the world and taken up again when we fall to an opponent’s piece.”
“That’s a grim way to think about life.”
“The ones who wear this believe man is destined to rule the earth—worlds, Upper and Lower, as dragons think of it. Man will eventually remove all the blighters, the elves, the dwarves—”
“Dragons too?”
