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Silly Green and Canny White. If she could surprise Canny White, down him before he knew she’d joined battle, she’d be able to handle Silly Green.
A coiling serpent, dark as a pit viper and mindlessly purposeful as a stream of ants, could be seen on the road outside the cave-mouth. Men on horseback, with banners at intervals, red leading silver followed by a purple, the third higher than the rest, with a rather dispirited green bringing up the rear. It must be a vast number, at least in the thousands, to fill such a length of road. She could hear the steady thunder of their hoofbeats on the old grass-stitched stones.
The sun climbed as though eager for a better view of the contest.
It would take too long to crawl. She went forward, glide-rest, glide-rest, in a series of barrel rolls, keeping to the darkness in the shade of Krag’s great roof. The attacking dragons harried the disorganized blighters, their quarry rallying only to be dispersed by one of White’s dives and then running again.
They must have known a dragon lurked in the area, but neither seemed very watchful. Perhaps they were carried away by the excitement of alternately smashing and driving the blighters, or assumed that since she hadn’t yet shown herself, she never would. Did they think she was some roaring male, who would announce his presence half a horizon from the fight?
Canny White saw some blighter archers falling back toward the rear of his cave. He must have decided that he’d rather fight them from the air, despite the arrows sticking out of neck and arms. Blighter bows were better for bringing down deer than dragons; while they made decent enough bows and stout strings out of mountain-lion sinew, their heads and shafts weren’t as sharp and true as elvish arrows or dwarvish bolts, and they lost velocity quickly when fired upward. Despite the arrows, Canny White swept behind them, and flapped briefly atop a broken old three-level home to push roof and chimney down on the blighters in the lane below.
Wistala saw her chance. She dove, wings folded like a hawk, gaining deadly velocity with every length in the vast cave.
She struck Canny White square at the base of his neck with a body blow. Being thick and muscular had its advantages—he bent like one of the blighters’ recurved bows and crashed into a house on the other side of the road, sending white scales flying off and falling like snowflakes.
Ha!
Wistala opened her wings and turned toward the other, resisting the urge to admire her handiwork beyond seeing Horblikklak, who’d kept his archers and a few other blighters fighting as a disciplined unit, send spearmen toward the white twitching under the fallen walls.
Arrows sang up and struck. Luckily they didn’t penetrate much farther than a full-grown scale-nit. Stupid fools, shooting at their ally!
Wistala rose toward Silly Green, who hung in the air at the entrance as if puppeted by strings. Wistala flapped hard and shot toward her like a dwarvish javelin.
Silly Green didn’t care to meet her. She turned tail and fled, with Wistala fast behind.
Probably by accident, Silly Green did the one thing that could have saved her—she headed almost straight up once out of the cave. She was more lightly built than Wistala, and the heavier green couldn’t quite match her angle of ascent. Wistala just bit off a mouthful of tail and banked to see the riders below.
They were almost to the old pylons covered with etchings of proud blighter faces and sealed casings of war-trophies. Wistala wondered how best to loose her flame.
A third dragon’s silhouette swooped out of the sun. Three! They’d kept a reserve outside in case she appeared. The sun was too bright for her to make out much, save that he was big and heavy about the forequarters and therefore most likely a male.
She turned back for the cave. An open-air fight would be difficult, especially if Silly Green joined the stranger.
As she passed over the head of the column she loosed her flame and the riders scattered—well, most of them. The scream of horses followed the twin whorls of smoke in her wake. Poor horses! They hadn’t chosen this battle.
She felt arrows pluck at her wings and break off in her side, and she chanced a glance back. The column of riders had divided into a fork, circumnavigating the pool of dragonflame. Archers had dismounted and were firing from the—what was that military term again? Flanks, that was it. Some dwarf who’d started off in life as a butcher and become a general had codified war in his volume describing the long, grinding war against the Charioteers.
Strange how the mind raced in battle. An arrow stuck through her tail like a crossbar. She didn’t even feel it.
She flapped up to the cavern roof and alighted on one of the great pillars, built up with clay cisterns and lead pipes of an old gravity-well that had fed the king’s citadel, a sort of triangular fortification anchored by rocks carved into shapes like mammoth-tusks. The Fireblades under their war-chief manned what was left of the battlements there, with long slides greased on both of the remaining towers. Strong young blighters stood ready to send stones down the slides, which could be turned and tilted to better aim the dropped projectiles at those beneath the walls.
The riders streamed in, and the two columns turned into three, the thickest heading straight down the wide road for the citadel. Their hoofbeats echoed in the cavern like the roar of a waterfall, and the sun glinted off of polished helm, shield, and spear-tip.
Too few blighters. Too few. Perhaps they would content themselves with plundering the ruin. Except there was no plunder, just old broken brick and bat-haunted roof.
The third dragon appeared again, bearing a cylinder that looked like a sawed-off tree trunk. She couldn’t quite make him out, silhouetted against the sun. He flapped hard, gained a little height, and at last she could see him.
A reddish copper color that might be called orange, broken by dark stripes, six good-sized horns—
DharSii!
She knew him. They’d met, briefly, years ago in Sadda-Vale, where she’d searched for others of her kind. She’d found only a handful of indolent dragons, comfortable and uninterested in the world outside their steaming valley.
Her thoughts, racing a moment ago on two wings and all four legs, stilled, fading like the ink on one of those ancient scrolls in NooMoahk’s cave.
DharSii carried a heavy column of stonework, one of the columns that flanked the road near the entrance to the old city. He flapped one more time, strain on his face, and dove for the citadel.
She dove as well, leaping from her perch, wings open only enough to allow her to guide her fall. If he saw her he gave no sign of it. Instead he released his load, which fell like a huge arrow toward one of the old towers. She just managed to strike the stone as she crossed under him.
