Ice Dragon rb-10

by Джеффри Лорд

  Abruptly the droning roar ceased, and what seemed in contrast a dead silence fell down on the town. But it was only in contrast. As Blade’s ears recovered from the strain, he could make out a continuous crunching and snorting from outside the walls. Then the blue-white glare also died, but not before Blade saw a pair of vast and hideous fanged heads rise on immensely long necks over the main gate of Irdna. Half a dozen muskets let fly into the sudden darkness, then the crunching and snorting in turn died. There was a moment of genuine silence during which Blade found himself holding his breath-and then a series of thunderous crashes from all around the walls. It seemed that a giant was bowling twenty-ton boulders against the town’s walls.

  More guns went off, then the crashes came again, this time in ragged synchronization. In the moment of silence that followed, Blade heard leaders yelling to their men to hold their fire until they had a clear target. As the Ice Dragons rammed themselves against the town walls a third time, now all moving together, Blade strode over to the guards facing the main gate. Their leader turned around and stared at Blade.

  «Nilando!»

  «How did you get out?» exclaimed the Irdnan. «I thought-«Whatever he thought vanished in the thunder of another thrust by the Ice Dragons, sounding as though the very glaciers that were their homes were pushing against the walls of Irdna. Nilando turned back to watch the gate until the groan of its tortured timbers had died away, then repeated his question. Blade was just about to answer when in his turn he was cut off by the battering-ram crash of the attacking monsters, and then by a wild cry that somehow rose over all the crashes and screams that should have drowned it out.

  «They’re over the east wall!»

  The east wall was invisible behind the roofs of houses and shops, but the roar and crash of falling stones and the crackle of splintering timbers told its own frightful story, as did the continuous flashes as the eastern guards fired as fast as they could load their muskets. Then Blade saw glints as they dropped their muskets and pistols, and more glints as some snatched out swords and axes. Others leaped wildly down from second-or third-story roofs, preferring broken limbs or heads to death at the hands of what was plowing into the town behind them. Another fanged head rose up, something white and shrieking writhing in its teeth. Directly ahead, three more monstrous shapes rose once again over the main gate and lunged forward in a deadly wedge. The main gate screamed in a final agony of dying metal and timber and gave inward.

  Instantly the cannon the guard party was manning went off with a tremendous flare of flame and smoke and a roar that would at other times have been deafening, but now sounded to Blade no louder than the popping of a paper bag. Then the musketeers were forming up into a single line, raising their weapons to their shoulders, and firing a savage rolling volley that made dust and stone chips spurt all around the gate as balls smashed into the wall. Some of the grapeshot from the cannon and some of the musket balls must have hit the Ice Dragons, but they paid no more attention to them than Blade would have to a mosquito bite. Behind the first three Blade saw more heads rising, and he nocked an arrow to his bow and pulled back, waiting until one of the beasts held its head motionless long enough to permit a shot at the eyes. Those antique muskets the Irdnans were using might have some advantages over a longbow, but accuracy would not be one of them. Other archers were also forming up and letting fly, both from the square and from the rooftops.

  Whether the volleys stung the Ice Dragons or, more likely, gave their Masters a moment’s pause, the massed monsters coming through the gate slowed for a moment and milled about. Blade looked off to the right, toward the broken east wall, and saw more heads looming there too, as more Ice Dragons poured through the breach and ramped and raged about amid the buildings on that side of town, snatching the last few defenders screaming from the roofs. But they showed no signs of pushing on into the town square from that direction.

  Blade looked back to the gate attack just in time to see the whole mass surge forward, a wall of flesh on a forest of tree-trunk legs, and the musketeers and archers let go another massed volley. Then the Dragon formation split apart, as two at each end of the line hurled themselves at the houses on either side of the street, like rugby players ramming a hole in the opposing defenses for the ball carrier. Blade heard timbers crack, stones cascade into the street, ponies and livestock scream as they died in the collapsing buildings, and the fighters of Irdna do the same as they fell to their deaths on the stone streets or felt fanged jaws close around them. In the darkness, Blade dimly saw the capture webs flick out, snatching still others up from the streets or down from the roofs and windows.

  The Dragons closed ranks, moved forward, opened again, and again buildings fell and men and animals gave their death cries. Now the Dragons were less than fifty yards away and their odor marched before them like a mephitic wall. Some of the men of Irdna, tough as they were, stared with panic-stricken faces at the death lumbering slowly and inexorably toward them, but most, including Nilando, simply gripped their weapons tighter, licked their lips or sipped from their canteens, and waited to die on their native earth. Then the Dragons reared up, and as one of them turned slightly sideways Blade caught his first clear glimpse of a Dragon Master.

  In every limb and feature Blade could see, the Master was human. But he was dressed from the neck down in a shimmering silver suit, slightly bagged at the joints and showing signs of extra padding on the torso, and his head was concealed in a spherical silver helmet with a dead-black visor. In each hand he carried the short stave or wand that Rena had mentioned, and as he flicked them forward and backward along the Dragon’s neck Blade could see the monster responding. The Master looked in fact like nothing as much as a cross between a moonwalking astronaut and a medieval knight, and it was easy to guess that the helmet and suit provided virtually complete protection from any missile. But if one were to close in, and strike full force at a Dragon Master with, let us say, an axe-supposing the Dragon permitted one to close-what then? Blade found he had a great desire to gather in one of the Dragon Masters and with him perhaps a few clues to the menace that threatened this dimension.

  But for the moment there was no time to do any of the planning such a move would require. The wall of Dragons reared up now once more, came down with all their legs thudding into the ground like pile drivers, then moved forward at a steadily increasing pace. Before this avalanche of flesh there was nothing except death to be found by staying, and Blade, Nilando, and the others scattered before the rush. Blade saw one man stumble over the pile of shot, and before he could recover his stride a huge head swooped down like the bucket of a power shovel and then swooped up again, with the man firmly clamped in its teeth. Others met the same fate; still others simply failed to clear the path of the onrushing Dragons and vanished under the massive feet, moving forward with a thunder that drowned out even final screams.

  «Irdna has fallen,» gasped Nilando as they reached the street that led out of the square toward the river gate and the pier and the boats beyond it. «But I think we may get many people clear if we get the river gate open and have boats ready. The Ice Dragons cannot swim and I much doubt if they can plow through virgin forest as fast as our river can take us south.» He began shouting orders to the men of the party that had been guarding the river approach to the square. Some had already fled; most were stubbornly waiting on rooftops and in windows, letting off muskets and bows whenever they thought they had a target, waiting for the Ice Dragons to finish them off. It was a determination to defend their town to the death that Blade could have admired more if it had not been so blind. Even one of their fellow Irdnans, who presumably loved his town no less than they, now felt that it was time to seek safety and the chance to fight another day.

  The men on the roof recognized Nilando and began disappearing into windows and trap doors to head downstairs, or simply sliding down the wood drainpipes at the corners of the roof. One of the first to join Blade and Nilando was Rena, with a knife in her belt and a pi
stol as long as her arm in one hand. She seemed none the worse for her experiences of the day before, although her eyes were wide and alert as she stared around her. Nilando embraced her, then sent her off toward the river.

  Backing slowly toward the gate, Nilando’s party picked up men and women in twos and threes. The screams from the square were even more hideous than before, as the Ice Dragons raged and slaughtered the people huddled against the buildings with jaws and tails and trampling feet. The roar of the dragons, the fading crackle of musketry from the remaining defenders, the crash of falling buildings, and the screams of dying people blended into a death cry from the town of Irdna.

  The Dragons in the square-or their Masters-were so concerned with systematically killing or capturing what lay within easy reach that Nilando’s party, forty or more armed men and women, was able to reach the river gate unmolested, even unnoticed. Looking up as Nilando and one of the men set themselves to turning the cranks that released the bars and opened the gates, Blade was relieved to see none of the hideous Dragon heads towering above the gate. As the gate swung open, with creaks and groans hopefully inaudible above the noise behind them, he was even more relieved to see the town’s boats still bobbing at the pier.

  «It seems the chief Dragon Master-«began Nilando, turning to Blade. But the sentence was chopped off by a hiss and a roar like an erupting geyser as a Dragon in the forest to their left gave tongue, then surged out into the open in a single lunge that toppled full-grown trees like ninepins in all directions.

  The party scattered, some toward the river, some back toward the walls. Blade stood his ground, then lifted his axe and darted to the left as the Dragon Master urged it to the right, cutting off the people running toward the boats. In a matter of seconds the Dragon’s whole right side was exposed to Blade, both beast and rider apparently completely unaware of his presence.

  Now! He ran forward, as fast as he had ever covered ground before in his life, crossing the forty yards between him and the Dragon in seconds. He leaped up onto the knee of one of the splayed-out legs, saw the Dragon Master turn toward him and shift one of the control wands, leaped again onto the creature’s back, and swung the axe full force with every muscle in his body behind it into the Dragon Master’s chest.

  The Dragon Master sailed off his perch, wands still clutched in his hands, like a shot from a cannon. He landed twenty feet away and lay motionless while several bolder spirits from the party ran in and started clubbing him savagely with their axes and stabbing and slashing at him with pikes and swords. Blade, meanwhile, was hacking furiously at the Dragon’s neck where two small metal studs protruded through the thick hide. Here was where the control wands had been applied; here if anywhere the monster might be vulnerable.

  As he kept hacking, scarring the metal and gradually chewing out chunks of scaled hide around the studs, the Dragon kept slowly on along the course which its Master had set. On its own, it seemed to have no perception of anything not directly in front of its eyes. In fact, even that seemed to be lacking, as the creature kept straight on as though running on rails until it rammed into one of the guardhouses at the end of the bridge. Stones and timbers flew.

  At that exact moment, Blade’s flashing axe finally sank through the haggled and scarred hide and severed something-flesh or metal, he didn’t know which-deep within. There was a spurt of purplish fluid that stung like acid, and an even larger cloud of blue smoke spewed from the now open wound. The creature jerked convulsively, reared up on its hind legs so suddenly that Blade slid down its back onto the tail and was tossed with bruising force by that flailing tail halfway across the clearing, then collapsed into the ruins of the guardhouse. A moment later, something in its neck exploded like a bomb, spraying bits of flesh, drops of purple goo, and unidentifiable chunks of metal in all directions. After that, two more bombs went off, one in the skull and the other near the base of the tail. Again, smoke and debris spewed up and pattered down or drifted away.

  Blade quickly recovered from his fall and ran to where the Dragon Master had landed. He would have liked to try opening the helmet and suit on the spot, but instead Nilando was at his elbow, ordering four men to seize the Dragon Master, bind him in case he was not dead, and carry him to the boats. Then he turned to Blade.

  «Blade, there will be a statue of you in the town square of Irdna when it is rebuilt. We have slain a Dragon Master, captured his body, and killed his Dragon as well. Never before have all three been done at once and by the same man.» He looked sharply at Blade. «You did not seem surprised at the explosions within the creature. Do you think that a high knowledge is at work among the Dragons, as among the Graduki?»

  Blade nodded.

  «Such has been my thought for some time. But we can talk of this later. Now it is time to flee downriver in the boats before the Dragon Masters see us, and our victory is wasted.» He turned away and began urging the laggards and those who had run away from the river toward the pier. Blade followed him, reflecting that Nilando would be a man for the Dragon Masters to reckon with, particularly if he could ever be equipped with weapons capable of slaying Dragons.

  Behind him darkness had fallen over Irdna as the last few torches on the wall went out, but Blade could see monstrous shapes still lumbering about dimly in the shadows, and hear the crashes and screams rising up from the dying town. He took a last look, then swung his purple-stained axe up on his shoulder and strode toward the pier.

  Chapter 5

  Some forty men and women got safely away from Irdna in the boats; whether there were any other survivors of the town, neither Blade nor Nilando had any idea. It seemed possible, for Irdna was a far larger community than East Pass Town and far harder for the Ice Dragons to completely surround. That the Dragon Masters had in fact been unable to do so, that only the one Dragon had been posted to guard the entire south and river sides of the town, suggested as much. The Dragons, it seemed, might be neither terribly numerous nor completely invulnerable-or if they were numerous, then their Masters were such wretchedly poor generals that they failed to use those numbers properly.

  But all these weaknesses of the Dragons were too subtle for any of the party except Nilando and Blade to be aware of, and even the two leaders knew that taking advantage of the weaknesses was a matter for the future. Most of the survivors were too glad to be alive, and too fearful of yet being overtaken by the rampaging hordes of Dragons, to think of anything but putting as many miles between them and the enemy as possible. Nilando would rather have taken them up a tributary of the river, to another large village some miles up that tributary, but they insisted on pressing on to Tengran. They preferred cramped, exhausting days of travel in the boats to the comforts of any town that might be within range of the Dragons.

  So sails, oars, and the current took the five boats steadily southward for three full days. There were fish in the river and nuts, roots, and game to eat, the water of the river ran clear, and the sun vanished only once behind a flurry of rain clouds. It was not an unpleasant trip, and during the nights, with the boats drawn up on shore and all the people except the posted sentries sleeping around campfires, Blade and Nilando had time to examine the body of the Dragon Master and his gear.

  Afterward, Blade could understand how the Dragon Masters had seemed to possess an invulnerability that could hardly fail to arouse a superstitious dread in their victims. Under the silver outer layer, itself a tough plastic-like material impossible to cut, tear, or burn, the Master wore a complete head-to-toe covering of tiny discs fastened to a heavily padded backing. It was like a medieval knight’s chain mail, except that the material of the discs was tougher and more flexible than steel, and the padding behind it both softer and stronger than the leather and wool undergarments of the knights. Neither sword blades nor axes nor arrows and musket balls fired even at pointblank range would drive through into the Master’s body. The helmet was equally invulnerable, being of the same material as the discs, with a nearly opaque faceplate. A pouch on his belt carr
ied what appeared to be concentrated energy rations, and he wore a sabre-like sword and a long dagger as well.

  Blade realized after the examination that he had accidentally hit on just the right method of dealing with the Dragon Masters-assuming that Treduk fighters could be trained to the speed and agility required. Knock the Master out of his saddle with a strong blow, then immobilize him while one pounded on him with the heaviest weapons possible. Inside that superb protection was only a human being-a strong and fit one, to be sure-and sooner or later internal injuries would take their toll. If the Treduk cannon had been accurate enough to pick Masters off the backs of their Dragons, the Treduki could have decimated the ranks of their enemies years ago. As it was, they had no weapon that could strike down a Dragon Master from a distance. Only a close-in grapple would do the job.

  The wands were interesting to Blade in another way. They represented a technology possibly as far beyond that of the suits as the suits were beyond the medieval armor they resembled. The wands were cylinders of the same tough material as the discs, about two feet long and two inches in diameter. Inside was a mass of electronic microcircuitry that Blade could not remotely understand; he did recognize that it was far beyond even what the far-seeing genius of Lord Leighton recognized as theoretically possible. Here was certainly something worth getting back to Home Dimension. If Lord Leighton were turned loose on one of the wands, he might find a way to duplicate its circuitry and put England at one bound fifty years ahead of the rest of the world in electronics.

  Blade’s respect for Nilando still further increased during those nights when they sat over the suit, the body, and the wands. Although he was quite incapable of understanding the technology involved, his knowledge of Graduk science had made him aware that such things were perfectly natural, with nothing of magic about them. This was more than could be said of some of his followers, whom Blade several times had to drive away with threats when they wanted to throw body and gear into the river, rather than risk the curses that might fall on them for carrying these things with them. Only Nilando’s authority, strained to the limit, and the awe in which Blade himself was held for having slain the Dragon and its Master, prevented ugly and perhaps violent scenes.