Suddenly the old Upholders flipped over on their backs, practically bending their spines in half. Tails a blur, they struck their lead pursuer, one high and one low.
The Copper saw an object fall, turning cartwheels as it plummeted to the plateau. He suspected—no, rejoiced—that it was one of the hag-riders. The dragon they struck convulsed in the air and fell, limp-winged.
But the two following avoided their quarry-turned-hunters and broke, one high and to the right, one low and to the left, a terrible perfection in their evolutions.
The male swung under his mate again, guarding her, and the low-flying dragon passed under him. FeLissarath twitched in midair, turned sideways, and began a stiff-winged fall to the surface.
The female flew to the aid of her mate, diving, but that just gave the one who turned high an opportunity. It dove on her, claws extended like a hawk after a duck, and raked her across the back.
The Copper saw one wing rise, fluttering.
But she wasn’t done yet. She lashed up with her neck, got her teeth in her opponent’s tail, and folded her wings. With her weight clinging to him, the other dragon couldn’t stay aloft, and the pair began to fall, whirling around and around to destruction on the plateau. The female pulled herself up her opponent’s tail and dug into his belly, trading bites as they went down.
So passed the Upholders of Anaea.
The Copper swung around toward the remaining hag-ridden dragon. He was descending to the aid of the other rider. But he saw another formation of three coming in, late to the fight but arriving before he could.
He couldn’t match the flying of the FeLissaraths, let alone the guided enemy dragons working in concert. No flame, almost blind in one eye, and a bad wing. He wouldn’t even get one. He turned east for the Lavadome.
But in his ascent, watching the aerial duel, he’d passed out of the shadow of the mountain and into moonlight. He realized it too late.
The three hag-ridden dragons flapped their wings in unison as they turned toward him.
Chapter 25
They made no great effort to catch up to him as he fled east. After closing to two-score dragonlengths, they seemed content to trail him.
The long flight exhausted him. He passed over unfamiliar country, dry and rocky and dotted with widely spaced patches of vegetation clinging precariously to what he suspected were seasonal water supplies. There was little sign of habitation in this waste.
Thanks to his injury, he couldn’t manipulate his wing to take the wind at a favorable angle, and he suspected he was ex-pending as much effort just to glide between beats as he would climbing. His strength would fail before dawn.
And on and on glided the pursuit. Didn’t they have buildings to burn and gold to steal? Why didn’t they close and put an end to him?
Painful beat-glide. Painful beat-glide. Painful beat-glide. On and on through the night.
A black scar broke the moonlit ground ahead.
Could it be the Tooth Cavern? He knew it opened to the sky not far north of the bridge at the Lower World. He altered his course a little south.
Fool! More the fool! The change proved to be a telltale to the pursuing dragons. They beat their wings harder, closing.
He expended what strength he had left trying to stay ahead; still they closed.
And still they fired no weapon, just kept him under observation.
At last the cavern was in his glide-path. No elegant flying, just a simple turn and descent. He closed his wings a little to hurry it, making for the canyon floor.
The leading two followed. The third stayed above, watching the action.
He looked frantically for some sign of the tunnel, the enclosure of the Lower World, but there was none. Columns of rock could be seen ahead; perhaps they were the beginnings of the teeth.
Reaching the stone columns, he swerved around one, the next painfully bashing his wing tip when he miscalculated his turn. Now the lead flier was closer behind, his companion a little farther back, and the Copper didn’t dare roll his good eye toward the sky lest he hit the cavern’s side.
There. Darkness ahead. As a dragon he could see well enough. He wondered how good the night vision of the riders was. Would they let their fliers choose their own path?
He whipped into darkness, and the first pursuer drew even closer.
These rocks he knew. He’d flown around them often enough in his practice flights as Rayg tested the joint brace.
The fat one ahead, in fact, had a deceptively wide but shallow route around the east side, and a narrow but deep channel to the left.
He approached the fat rock as though going around the east, then at the last moment rolled and shot through the west gap. But instead of continuing down the cavern he stayed in the turn, hoping to meet his pursuer coming around the other side—anything but nose-tip to nose-tip.A flash, a thump in his wing, and they were past each other.
He found himself flying headlong toward the second hag-ridden dragon. The rider put a shimmering piece of metal to his shoulder and something whirled past his ear, turning tight circles as it cut the air—a crossbow bolt.
The Copper dove for the surface, and so did his opponent. He rose to turn and the opposing dragon lashed out with a saa as they passed, opening a wound in his belly.
He turned back south for the bridge.
Now the third dragon descended, its rider leaning over and struggling with his weapon. The Copper made for the tunnel, but the second pursuer banked in front of him. The rider hurled some kind of apparatus of chain and steel balls but missed, thanks to the tight turn his mount was making in the narrow walls of the canyon.
Ahead the Copper saw the first dragon shooting out of the mouth of the cave, the strapped-on leather chair hanging askew and reins loose and flying free in the breeze. He’d dismounted the rider!
Now in the cave he saw the hag-rider sprawled on the floor, unconscious or dead. He flapped into the canyon, the darkness promising safety, but still one dragon followed.
He didn’t have time to wonder what had happened to the third.
The chasm descended sharply and he banked around a bend, and there ahead was the bridge.
He loosed a bellowing war call: “Firemaidens, cry havoc!”
He turned for the south side of the bridge and a crossbow bolt punched through his wing.
Under the bridge and up, he saw two shapes hiding at the openings of the short tunnel through one of the rocky “teeth” on the new bridge. As the dragon trailing him closed they loosed their flame and spread it.
The dragon closed its wings, and the rider crossed shield-elbowed in front of the Copper’s face. They passed through flame together, the oily, burning mess sliding off dragonscale but clinging to the rider’s exposed surfaces. The dragon flipped over, whether by orders, instinct, or accident, allowing the fire to fall off.
Until a stalagmite clipped off its rider from the waist up as neatly as a blade.
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.”