by Paul Collins
‘… a hundred times the speed of a marching man,’ muttered Osric. ‘Hold a moment. That’s as fast as S’cressling.’
‘Yes,’ said Jelindel. ‘We must be sure to stay clear of them.’
Daretor leaned over the side of the palanquin. ‘Remember that town that was running along the ground? Well now it’s taken off and flying.’
‘Osric, we’re still descending,’ said Jelindel. ‘You were meant to keep S’cressling near the clouds so we could hide quickly.’
‘Well you could have told me.’
‘Flock of two or three hundred airliners about to intercept,’ reported Zimak.
‘Climb!’ shouted Jelindel. ‘Tell S’cressling to climb for the clouds.’
For the next few minutes nothing more was said. S’cressling beat her wings, gaining dozens of feet in height with every stroke. The squadron of airliners spread out like a vast net in the sky.
‘They climb faster than we do,’ said Osric. ‘How can that be?’
‘They are bred to do nothing except fly and run,’ explained Jelindel. ‘Nor do they have the weight of a head and neck.’
‘No head,’ said Osric. ‘That means they will not have echo location like S’cressling does. Once we are in the clouds they will be blind yet she can still locate them.’
‘All very nice as long as we can reach the clouds,’ said Daretor, stringing the only bow on board. ‘We have two dozen arrows.’
‘Three hundred airliners, ten archers on each, that’s odds of three thousand to one,’ said Jelindel. ‘Sufficiently bad odds for a gloriously heroic battle, Daretor.’
‘Is that meant to cheer me up?’
‘I’d not dream of it.’
The first of the arrows began to whiz past. The cloud base was still hundreds of feet above. S’cressling was beginning to tire after the frantic climb, for most dragon flight is achieved by riding air currents. Only occasionally do they flap their wings to gain a little height, change direction, or find a better air current. Daretor was certainly no match for the best of the enemy archers. Most of his shots fell short of their target, and would probably not have hit even if they had made the distance.
Occasional arrows were hitting S’cressling, but all bounced off her scales.
‘Can’t you ask S’cressling to spray them with fire?’ demanded an exasperated Daretor.
‘That takes energy, and she needs all she has to out-distance our foe. If they get any closer, we will be shot full of arrows in a thrice,’ replied Osric. ‘Besides, they could – argh!’
An arrow had struck the youth’s arm, pinning it to the wooden saddle frame. Jelindel was beside him in an instant, cutting through the shaft and pulling it out.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Just winged me,’ gasped Osric. ‘Why is it always me who gets it in the arm?’
‘Just lucky I guess,’ Jelindel said, smiling. ‘Hold still, I’ll need to staunch the blood.’
‘Make it quick, please.’ He winced. ‘We need to take evasive action.’
No sooner had the wound stopped bleeding than S’cressling banked sharply. A grotesquely large chicken, wearing a streamlined cabin nearly collided head-on. But for S’cressling’s exhalation of fire, which incinerated the airliner, they would surely have crashed into one another.
‘That is what I feared. Suicide attempts,’ shouted Osric. ‘A collision with something as large as that will kill even a dragon. They’re not invulnerable, after all.’
‘But the riders would be killed too,’ said Daretor.
‘They only have to jump clear, and other airliners could swoop down to catch them.’
They ascended into the mists of the cloud base. S’cressling was suddenly the only one not flying blind. Damp, chilly, but concealing mists swept past.
‘S’cressling says that the airliners are already far behind,’ Osric reported.
‘So, at least we saw the foundation of Fa’red’s plans and survived to tell of it,’ said Daretor.
‘All the more reason to keep the dragonsight out of his hands,’ said Jelindel.
‘Never thought I’d be so happy to fly in clouds,’ said Zimak. ‘Osric, she is cheeping, isn’t she?’
‘Indeed she is.’
‘One matter still puzzles me,’ Jelindel admitted. ‘Why didn’t Fa’red take control of the dragons when he had the dragonsight?’
‘Because the dragonsight is only half of it,’ explained Osric. ‘One also needs to control the Sacred One. Fa’red could not do that; the Sacred One is too big to carry away. When the dragons are free, they could take the Sacred One back home. Or they might stay – it is all conjecture. If they go, I suspect Fa’red will be unstoppable.’
Jelindel and Daretor hung on grimly as the night air whistled around their heads. The turbulence was the worst they had encountered. Zimak looked morbidly into the darkness on either side. The dizzy rush of wind, the sense of something massive just off in the darkness, was profoundly unsettling. All three were close to collapsing. Although Jelindel was as spent as her companions, she secretly syphoned off some energy to them.
S’cressling was navigating through the canyons of the massif. It was a feat dangerous by day and almost suicidal by night, even by the light of three moons. Osric had insisted S’cressling knew the canyons like his tongue knew the roof of his mouth, and that she could fly them blindfolded. At which point Zimak had asked, ‘So how many times has she flown them blindfolded?’
‘Zimak, shut up,’ Jelindel chided.
Thus they were shooting along narrow canyons. Walls rose sheer on either side for thousands of feet, blocking out what little starlight there was, for the moons, unfamiliar to S’cressling, were casting multiple shadows. The canyon was only a few yards wider than the dragon’s wingtips. The sense of rushing speed between the formidable and unforgiving barriers was breathtaking and frightening. One wrong move and they would be dashed to pieces in midair, their pulverised bodies falling through inky blackness to the jagged rocks below.
The Q’zarans were never entirely comfortable flying on the back of the dragon even in daylight. Despite the chill night air they sweated, sitting rigidly on the deck, clutching guy ropes and stanchions.
‘If we get through this,’ Zimak said, ‘I’ll never fly again.’
‘Then you’ll have a long walk home,’ said Daretor.
‘Fine. Dragonfrost exists no more.’
‘There are other dangers now, though,’ Daretor replied. ‘Nevertheless, I’ll be with you.’
‘You sound like a couple of nagging spinsters,’ said Jelindel, without trace of conviction.
The massive slabs of darkness continued to rush past. Those on the deck did not dare to move as the dragon banked first one way and then the other, the sickening aerobatics wracking their stomachs with nausea. The nightmare continued for what seemed an eternity.
In the pilot’s saddle, Osric grinned to himself. He had not bothered to tell his companions that the flight was not quite as dangerous as they thought. Although dragons had astonishing farsight, they were often almost blind in close quarters, and would peer at objects, especially people, first with one large unblinking eye and then the other, trying to bring them into focus. Thus, even in day time, S’cressling would not have used her eyesight for such delicate and dangerous manoeuvres to any great extent. She used a combination of innate knowledge of the canyon layout and her wingtips, which acted like a cat’s whiskers. S’cressling’s speed was more apparent than real. In the confined space, she flew at a leisurely pace, which was exaggerated by the wind and darkness.
Several times she deliberately let her wingtips brush the canyon sides, as though familiarising herself with the walls due to the unfamiliar shadows now cast by Q’zar’s moons. In addition, she used a process not unlike that used by bats; sounding distances by echoes. This was Osric’s ‘cheeping’; the sound S’cressling bounced off the canyon walls was at too high a frequency for mortal ears to hear.
Th
e truth was that there was far less danger than the Q’zarans imagined, but S’cressling was unaware that she could have put their minds at rest. After all, they did not ask her.
She flew like this for some time before, finally, turning into a canyon that ended in a cul-de-sac. She flew for another fifteen minutes, enjoying the sense of coming home. Ahead lay a place that she had not visited in some time. There was a great joy in her heart at the thought of returning.
At the mane, Osric knew they were almost at their destination. He called back to the others and told them the news. Zimak grunted in relief even as he coughed up blood into a rag. The poison had been acting on his system severely.
Moments later S’cressling banked hard, dropped some three hundred feet, and flared her wings to kill speed. Then they were on firm ground again.
The three Q’zarans rose unsteadily to their feet. It was still too dark to see much, and they knew they were somewhere halfway up the side of a canyon wall. They could just make out round blobs of deeper blackness where the mouths of great tunnels gaped in the stone walls.
‘Well, we’re here,’ said Osric from the darkness nearby.
S’cressling moved deeper into the tunnel at whose entrance she had landed. The tunnel went straight for two hundred yards then turned at right angles. They saw a glimmering of light. When they rounded the bend, an enormous cavern opened before them. It was almost a dragon city, and contained over a hundred nesting dragons, all of whom turned to scrutinise the newcomers.
Recognising S’cressling, several called out greetings in deep-throated trumpeting sounds. S’cressling answered.
‘So this is a dragon nursery,’ Zimak murmured to himself.
‘Remember what I said,’ Osric reminded them. ‘Do not leave S’cressling even for a second. Dragons are lethal when protecting their young.’ He looked at his bandaged arm. ‘And they smell blood,’ he added, keeping a straight face.
‘Are we safe here?’ Jelindel asked, picking up on Zimak’s unease.
‘We’re safe for as long as S’cressling keeps us safe.’
‘Good old S’cressling,’ said Zimak, uncharacteristically patting the dragon on the flank. He nervously eyed the horde of dragons that diligently eyed him back. ‘I’ve always said, you can’t beat S’cressling, a dragon among dragons, honest, friendly, loyal …’
‘Zimak?’
‘Yeah, yeah. I’m shutting up, okay? See? I’ve shut up.’
S’cressling made her way through the vast cavern, wending her way between the great rocky nests, all the time heading for the mouth of another tunnel that opened in the far wall.
Sometimes she stopped to exchange greetings with a dragon sitting on a clutch of eggs. The long-vowelled sonorous tongue of the dragons was hypnotic to the ear, even oddly reassuring. It made Jelindel feel strangely safe, as a child might in the dark night, when she suddenly hears the familiar tones of her father’s voice. She wondered why this should be. It was apparent that Daretor and Zimak felt the same way.
Only once did Jelindel glimpse a dragon egg. She was not surprised to see that it was like a polished stone, something made from the bones of the earth and shaped into a smooth, gleaming ovoid by a trick of nature. She could hardly believe that such a solid-looking object could house new life, or indeed that it could even be hollow.
Osric later told her that she was lucky to see an egg. The dragons jealously guard them from view, even from dragonkeepers, with whom they generally have a good relationship. ‘It is probably because they sense magic in you,’ he said. ‘In some way, they see you as a kindred spirit.’
Before long they left behind the great nesting cavern and entered the tunnel that led to a vast rookery in which dragons sheltered with their young. The young dragons were actually far more dangerous than their elders, though not by design. They were not malicious, just big and strong.
‘They could bite you in half, though not mean to,’ said Osric.
After a while they came to a series of smaller tunnels, clearly intended for men. After brief farewells, Jelindel, Daretor and Zimak lit smoky torches and entered the tunnels. Osric returned with S’cressling to the canyons.
Jelindel and the others had not gone far when a dreadful odour washed over them.
‘By all the gods, what is that foul smell?’ Zimak asked, gagging.
‘Perhaps if you listened when things were explained to you, you would know,’ said Daretor, whose own nose was screwed up in disgust.
‘You mean Osric’s little speech before we landed? For your information, I was trying valiantly not to throw up on everyone, so I was a little busy.’
Jelindel, breathing through her mouth, waved them to silence. ‘Creatures live here,’ she said. ‘Scavengers that keep the dragon caves clean.’
‘And I suppose they’re huge, with great teeth and unpleasant dispositions?’ Zimak said.
‘Not at all,’ said Daretor. ‘They’re blubberous and irritating and they talk too much.’
They came to a wide cavern studded with stalactites and stalagmites. The stream running in the middle was ink-black. Even when a torch was held above its surface, its depth could not be guessed.
But that was not what held their attention.
‘I’m not walking through that,’ said Zimak. ‘I’m not.’
‘Fine. Go back and say hello to the dragons for me,’ Daretor said, despite the fact that he himself looked ill at the thought of crossing the cavern.
They stared in dismay at the cavern floor. It was covered in pools of seeping, pulpy matter that heaved and pulsed and smelled like putrefying flesh. Whole segments seemed to be dissolving slowly into ropy threads of saliva-like liquid that glistened noisomely in the torch light.
‘I’m not crossing that,’ Zimak said again.
Jelindel was squinting. ‘Maybe you won’t have to,’ she said. ‘If we climb that rock we can reach the stream. Assuming it’s not too deep we should be able to follow it to the other side.’
‘Gah, assuming it’s not packed with nasty things just lying in wait for the unwary.’
Jelindel looked at Zimak. ‘Can you stop being so negative?’
Zimak shrugged. ‘Just pointing out the obvious dangers.’
Jelindel did not reply. Instead, she clambered onto the rock and crawled along to a point where she could, with some difficulty and a badly skinned knee, lower herself into the water.
Daretor stood on the rock looking down at her. His face was grim. ‘Zimak could be right,’ he said. ‘We should test the water first.’
‘We have nothing to test it with,’ said Jelindel. ‘Except me.’
She started splashing with her feet. ‘Jelli!’ cried Daretor, suddenly alarmed. ‘Have you gone mad?’
The dark waters lay still all around. ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s get moving.’
With many sideways glances at the dark stream, Daretor and Zimak climbed down and followed Jelindel along the shore, about six feet out from the bank. Here the water was up to their hips. They moved quietly and said little. It was hard enough to breathe the stinking air without trying to talk as well.
They were almost within reach of the exit tunnel when the things attacked. They appeared to be giant water rats with thin, elongated snouts, almost like a species of alligator, and armed with many lethal teeth. The creatures came surging up from the inky depths, water cascading from their furry backs, jaws snapping. Jelindel would have been pulled under at once if Zimak’s reflexes had not been faster. Finding it difficult to walk he was using his sword as a staff. In one quick move he thrust it deep into the mouth of the animal as it lunged at Jelindel.
A great thrashing began in the water as dozens of the creatures surged forward. There were so many they got in each other’s way. Zimak and Daretor’s swords flashed and thrust. Blood added a deeper flush to the dark stream. Jelindel spat weak binding spells, adding one that tripled a creature’s weight so that it sank to the bottom.
‘This way,’ yelled Daret
or, scrambling onto a rocky outcrop. With the last of his energy he dragged Jelindel out of the water, then they covered for Zimak. In seconds, they were several feet above the stream. Below them was a frothing sea of snapping jaws.
‘It doesn’t look as if they are much into climbing,’ Jelindel said, trying to regain her composure. She gulped in air to stay conscious. An indefatigable fatigue was sweeping through her.
Zimak hawked some bloodied bile down at the slavering creatures. ‘If blood’s what they want, they can have it.’
Daretor forced himself to stand. ‘Give them all you want,’ he said. ‘I’m saving mine.’
They climbed over more rocks, putting as much distance between themselves and the maniacal animals as they could. Oddly enough, the creatures did not pursue them into the pulpy mass. The humans understood why soon enough. Daretor had spotted a tunnel in the wall and made for it. It led for a moment toward the stream. An over-eager creature surged partly out of the water and onto the bank, its forepaws sinking into the putrefying mass. With a speed that was frightening, knotted tentacles whipped out of the mass and dragged the creature into the sodden depths. The amphibian squealed once and was gone.
‘What in Black Quell’s pit was that?’ Zimak demanded shakily.
‘Let’s not find out,’ said Jelindel. They hurried towards the tunnel mouth, taking extra care not to come within reach of the morass.
Behind them, the water creatures were enjoying a feeding frenzy.
‘They’re eating their dead,’ Zimak gulped.
The three climbed wearily into the tunnel. Here a faint breeze blew in their faces and brought a warm earthy smell free of taint. They breathed easy for the first time in a while. The tunnel bore them quickly and effortlessly through the remainder of the barrier wall into a narrow ravine on the floor of the inner crater. Some miles away, across the crater, could be seen the single tall pinnacle of rock, atop which sat the Tower Inviolate. They stopped for a rest.
The path ahead looked dry, but forbidding and long. Nor was danger far off. Dragons patrolled the airways, circling the tower, while single dragons looped around the crater. Osric had explained that the only way to reach the tower unseen and uninvited was via the network of narrow ravines on the crater floor. These ravines were often no more than six or seven feet across and as much as forty feet deep. No dragon, Osric had said, flying normal patrol, could see to the bottom. Nevertheless, he had cautioned them not to look up, in case their pale faces became visible. He’d also cautioned them to hide all shiny gems and buckles. This done, they set off.
