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Arrows flew up, peppering both dragons, with no more effect than the flowers tossed at young blighters passing through the end of their final mating ceremony.
The stone tumbled, missing the top of the tower, where it would have smashed the blighters and their rock-slide into gory streaks. It struck the wall below, sending rubble falling into the city and out into the gate-lane in front. Dust clouded the air.
Each dragon completed half of a double-loop.
DharSii gaped at her, hardly moving his wings. He alighted on an old terrace, rows of garden-troughs thick with shadeweed. His ribs heaved as he caught his breath.
Wistala returned to the cavern roof.
Some of the riders chased their quarry like rabbits through the old streets and alleys, vaulting obstructions with wild cries.
Blighters streamed down from their battlements. With the wall in the old citadel broken, they hurried for some old hole, she guessed. The city had any number of ancient undercourses for the disposal of waste or retention of water. Perhaps they made for some secret bolt-hole.
Canny White had retreated to a corner near the entrance, blood making dark stripes on his sides even more vivid than DharSii’s natural ones. He did not seem eager to rejoin the fight. As for Silly Green, she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she was soaking her tail-tip in the chill of a mountain stream.
She had to delay the riders. Wistala mastered herself. One more effort, and then she would return to the back of the cave.
DharSii cried out as she flew, but whether he was calling to her or summoning the white she couldn’t know.
The front of the column fell into confusion as she came at it, wings beating hard. Carts and horses wheeled—
A presence behind, coming fast—must be DharSii.
She banked a little to stay out of striking distance, took a breath so she might better press her firebladder—
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Sparks and smoke and rattling—what evil was this?
Three projectiles like the oversized javelins dwarves fired from their war machines flew toward her, not arcing like arrows but spinning like a playful squirrel running along a straight branch. They trailed smoke and flapping lengths of line with ugly barbed hooks.
“Down!” she heard DharSii shout. He struck her on the haunch.
Why he warned her, she couldn’t say. She struck some old roofs, scattering rotted thatch like dandelion tufts.
The missiles passed howling and sparking just above her, their ugly flail-tails thick with barbs and hooks dancing a mad jig in their wake.
She banked to the rear of the cave and made for her old hole lest some other aerial monstrosity be launched at her.
DharSii thrashed, entangled in one of the things, raising dust and debris in an old plaza.
Wistala saw ugly sights in the streets below as the human warriors discovered a little hovel of Fireblade females and their babes. Hominids must love death for death’s sake—there was no other way to explain the bloody scene there.
She returned to the rear of the cave and the tunnel to the old downshaft and library. Only a few elderly warriors remained, calming frightened mates and wailing spawn.
“The city is lost,” she told them. “If there’s some secret tunnel where you can flee, you may wish to take it. I can delay them here for a few moments. Then they will come.”
A grizzled one-handed blighter began to give orders. Most obeyed, but one or two of the females ran into the ruins, whether in search of their mates or because they thought they could escape through rubble and rooftop, Wistala didn’t know.
She settled herself at that last, half-built wall, tried not to listen to the screams and clatters echoing from farther out in the vast cavern. And always, always was that waterfall echo of hooves.
A dragonback moved among the ruins, wing-spurs high and proud. DharSii surmounted a fallen building and rested between two vast chimneys. His snout and neck and shoulder bled, but not profusely, and one sail of wing hung, cut into ugly tatters. He’d taken worse from those terrible contraptions than she had.
He came within a dragon cry.
“Wistala, I remember,” he said.
“DharSii of the Sadda-Vale. How is your aunt and the rest?”
