by Dragon Lance
A huge black dragon, fully three times as long as Elgan in dragon form, perched on the edge of a roofless cottage, peering in like a carrion crow. He turned a cold eye this way and that as he checked the corners. He peered down at Elgan, who had stopped well back. “Who is it now?”
“Just me, Elgan.” He licked his lips, which felt suddenly dry.
“Elgan?” The black dragon looked Elgan up and down, not smiling and not frowning. Jaegendar waved a red-stained claw. “Never mind; it’s obvious. You’re here to fight me?”
“I seem to have to” — Elgan could feel his ears reddening — “because, well, the other night, I might have said something about knowing how to fight dragons —”
“You were bragging.” A noise, half scream and half wail, sounded from inside the cottage. “Excuse me.” Jaegendar tracked something this way and that, striking down swiftly like a crane into a stream. There was another scream, and another as Jaegendar thrust his head up and down inside the cottage.
“And I was wondering,” Elgan said, suddenly ashamed of himself as he said it, “if, since you might not want a real fight and all, if we could stage just enough of a mock fight to satisfy —”
“Let me guess.” The black dragon rose up, wiping his mouth with a claw. “A lady has bound you to fight me. And she wants you to kill me because of my cruel ways, is that it?”
“Well, she has her own motives – mostly monetary —”
Jaegendar smiled, yellowing fangs showing suddenly. “Ah. Beldieze? Why am I not surprised?” There was blood on one of his fangs. Jaegendar said, “Excuse me, again.” His tongue flickered across the tooth, licking it clean. His eyes half-closed like a purring cat’s.
When he opened them again he said, “And I can’t dissuade you from this... fight?”
Elgan said honestly, “I wish you could.”
“Well, let me try.” Almost casually he flung a stone the size of a kender at Elgan. As Elgan ducked, Jaegendar threw another, and another.
Elgan scrambled frantically, searching for cover. Moments later, cowering in a ditch and half buried under building stones, he heard mocking laughter and felt a cold wind as Jaegendar rose and flew off.
Something rolled down the pile of stones toward him; he put up an arm to ward it off. The thing that hit his arm was soft, wet and pulpy. Elgan shuddered and struggled under the stones.
Several of them rolled free and Koryon’s head appeared. “I saw him fly off. Big brute, isn’t he? How did it go?” He cocked his head, sniffing the air. “I smell blood. Are you all right?”
Elgan reached up. “Pull me free. Then let’s think of a strategy for tomorrow.” He looked at the black dot in the distance. “A very good one.”
*
Elinor had buried her head against her mother’s sweater, and was peeking out with one frightened eye.
In a single smooth gesture, before her mother could object, Kory popped Elinor onto his shoulders, grabbed the cider ladle, and charged at Gannie, who flapped his arms in mock panic and fled through the inn. They spun and ducked, making spiral turns and leaps near the fire and quick dives in the cold air near the door. From time to time one or the other of them shouted: “Glide!” “Stall!” “Plunge!” “Loop!” Elinor waved the spoon and tried to hit Gannie. She was very happy.
But Peilanne, Darien, and the customers watched nervously, and nobody missed that Gannie paused by the window to scan the sky intently.
When Kory paused breathlessly by the table and set the girl down, Annella grabbed her and held her tight. Elinor waved her arms enthusiastically. “They know all about dragons!”
“Quite a bit,” Gannie admitted. The other adults in the room looked less convinced about this, turning to Darien for confirmation.
“What would I know?” he said irritably. “I run an inn.”
After a moment’s silence he admitted grudgingly, “But I know a little about dragons – the way a man like myself might hear things – and yes, all the details sound real.”
Gannie sat beside Brann, who shrank back from him. “Are you cold?” Gannie gestured at the fire, which was dying to embers. “Soon it’ll be covered with gray ash, like someone waking by a burned-out campfire in the morning...”
*
They woke covered with a light pall of ashes, as from a burned-out campfire; they looked down the valley and saw that much of it was hidden by smoke. They washed up quietly, not looking at each other.
They headed downhill slowly, in human form, carrying the lance and the saddle. When they reached the villagers, no one glanced at them or wondered at their load; everyone was burdened.
Some were empty-eyed and blank, some were angry, some weeping. All of them carried trunks, awkward and badly tied parcels, or grain sacks packed hastily. Many of them carried children too young or too tired to walk.
Ahead of them the sign for the Inn of Road’s Ease rocked as it flamed, the letters glowing as they burned.
The innkeeper was one of the refugees, half-stumbling as he walked. On his back he bore a rack of pewter ale steins.
He tripped on a rock in the road. Koryon leapt forward to steady his load and hold him upright. “Are you all right?”
The innkeeper looked at him as though he hadn’t understood the words. “He burned our buildings, our farms.” He pointed to the opposite hill, where the ruins of cottages and outbuildings were visible through the smoke. “He burned the second cutting of hay that we needed for the winter.” His brow furrowed. “He said he was warming up for a special fight.”
Koryon and Elgan watched him stumble down the valley. Elgan rubbed his arm where the contract still clung.
Koryon stepped quickly behind the ruins of the grain storage and tossed a coin. “Call it.”
A moment later he muttered darkly and changed forms. “Put the saddle on me.”
Koryon, with Elgan on his back, used the morning wind to drift up the opposite hillside toward the outskirts of the town. A barn, hayrack beside it, blazed in front of them. Elgan tugged on the left rein. “Circle it to the left, hold your wings still to not make any noise, spiral up to the right on the thermal rise from the fire —”
“I know how to fly.”
Elgan shut up as Koryon dropped toward the blaze. A woman, running back and forth in front of the barn, screamed at the sky, waving a baby aloft. The baby didn’t move. Elgan shut his eyes. “Hurry up.”
As Koryon glided into the edge of the thermal, his right wing tipped up, full of rising air. He rolled toward it and spiraled up, moving in a little at a time until they were running a tight spiral upward. Elgan checked the lance swivel for the ninth time, looking around constantly. “Koryon?”
“Mmm?” Koryon had his lips pressed tight over the bit, swinging this way and that nervously.
“I think he knows —”
“Of course,” a voice beside them said coolly, and Elgan slammed the reins to the left as a dark figure streaked through the space where they had been, claws raking empty air.
“— everything we’re going to do.” Elgan held the lance close to himself, grateful he hadn’t dropped it. As Koryon swung around, he held up a finger automatically, at arm’s length like a wing tip, and tested the breeze. It felt cold.
They hung under the cloud cover, looking this way and that, seeking Jaegendar.
Elgan said finally, “What’s the classic maneuver out of a failed lunge?”
“Stoop, gain velocity, cup wings at the bottom, slingshot upward, flap hard and find an updraft, rise into clouds” — Koryon scanned the low-lying cloud cover frantically — “where you hide and wait for an advantage,” he finished slowly.
“He had to use another updraft. The wind by the mountains, or —” Elgan stopped as the flaming ruins around them snapped into perspective. “Kory, this place is Jaegendar’s playground. He laid out a whole system of updrafts for himself.... Get up high, shifting from thermal to thermal, and see if we can fool him.”
“I don’t think we can fool him,
” Koryon said gloomily. Clearly they didn’t. For his next attack, Jaegendar dropped out of the clouds like a stone, leaving a small jagged hole before the cloud closed behind him, and swerved toward them with barely a flip of a wing tip. Elgan shouted and threw himself flat; Koryon, inelegantly, stalled and let himself tumble.
Elgan hung on desperately. “Get close to the clouds. At least he can’t dive like that again.”
Koryon flapped up, avoiding the obvious updrafts. The weather was restless; crosswinds shook them and required Koryon to make constant corrections just to stay over the hillside. This far up, their breath came out in white plumes.
Elgan tapped Koryon’s side. “Look.” Jaegendar, ahead, was moving slowly away at an angle as he scanned the sky below him.
“So, where do we hide?” asked Koryon.
“We don’t,” Elgan said. “We charge, diving with no wing-noise and lots of speed. Pull out at the last minute. I have an idea.”
When he had finished explaining his plan, Koryon said, “This isn’t an inn, and he doesn’t want to be entertained.”
Elgan looked at Jaegendar’s effortless flight. “We have to try something.”
With a sigh of misgiving, Koryon moved forward, catching a last breeze to rise and then drop, gaining momentum. Elgan watched their target cautiously, ready to call off the attack. He never looked their way. Jaegendar was nearly motionless, wings wide to catch an updraft and spilling slightly when he rose too high. He was a perfect target as he looked intently down at a circular pond, deep and rimmed with steep limestone in the green hills below him.
Elgan looked down as well. The pond was completely calm, untroubled by any ground-level breezes. It was like a mirror – Elgan saw, to his horror, that both dragons were clearly visible in the pond.
“Break off!” Elgan screamed but he was already pulling the reins in a vicious left. Koryon banked immediately, the steepness of the turn pressing Elgan down into the saddle.
Jaegendar spun, his teeth showing in a terrible smile. He aimed for the point where Koryon would have to pull out of the turn or stall.
Elgan tugged the reins hard to the right. Koryon muttered, “All right,” and flipped nearly over, his left wing high where the right had been. Elgan grabbed for the saddle as they spun off in a foolish, energy-wasting, clumsy maneuver that saved their lives as Jaegendar shot past them, his claws close enough to ruffle Elgan’s hair.
Elgan said quietly to Koryon, “We’re dead.”
Koryon agreed. “If we’re very lucky.”
“Hide in the clouds?”
“He’d only follow us in. He can go anywhere we can.” Jaegendar was moving toward them again, gaining speed.
They heard a rumble of thunder. A storm, climbing over the mountains, was dropping in low. The clouds were very dark, ragged underneath with whirling winds.
Elgan leaned down to Koryon and said, “Cloud-suck?”
“What a rotten idea. We’ll be thrown around like toys.” Koryon added, “No dragon in his right mind – Oh, Right.” He turned toward the storm. “Watch my back.”
“Aim to the left of the storm, zigzagging.”
As they moved directly under the cloud, Koryon quit beating his wings. The thunder was deafening, close, the air rough enough that Elgan had to clutch the saddle swivel and squeeze his legs tight to hold on. The air rushed upward around them. In seconds they were inside the thunder cloud.
They rocked about in darkness, illuminated by flashes. Koryon corrected constantly to stay upright. Elgan hung on, remembering a story in the lore of a dragon who had been knocked unconscious by the buffeting and expelled, head down, from a storm.
A particularly bright flash showed Koryon turning to look back at Elgan. He looked afraid. He said apologetically, “I can’t do this forever. I’m getting tired.”
“So will Jaegendar, and he’s old. Aren’t you in better shape than he is?”
“Jaegendar,” Koryon said firmly, “doesn’t have a rider.”
Elgan considered, then spoke through cupped hands over the thunder. “Drift forward, then to the left and down. It’s time.”
“If we have to,” Koryon said glumly.
As they broke free of the clouds, they saw that the burning buildings below them had subsided. Elgan tugged Koryon’s right rein, directing him toward the ruined granary where they had left Beldieze.
The wind tore the clouds apart. Elgan said in relief, “We’ll have sunshine soon, I think.”
“Will that give us some kind of advantage?”
“It’ll give someone an advantage,” he said vaguely. “Don’t go straight to the granary; circle around and check for signs of him. Go leftward,” he added hastily. This was not a time to use the classic patterns.
Koryon banked left, then spilled air from his wings to drop. Elgan grabbed the lance pin tightly. “Where are you going?”
Before he could answer, Elgan looked up and said tightly, “Company to our left.”
Without waiting to check, Koryon banked dizzily to the left.
Jaegendar swooped out of one of the remaining clouds, then vanished, but there was no question that he must have seen them.
Koryon finished his turn and leveled off. “What next?”
“He’s not to either side.” The remaining clouds had nearly dissipated except for the thunderhead hanging over the valley.
In full sunlight, Koryon nearly hovered in place, craning his neck up and down.
“Below?” He peered. “Above?” He squinted. “Nope. We lost him, I hope.”
A shadow fell on them, growing darker every second. Elgan shouted in sudden panic, “He was in the sun! He was in the —”
Koryon jerked sideways as Elgan brought the lance straight up. Jaegendar, smashing down past them, scraped his left wing on the lance.
But after the shock of impact, Elgan dropped the lance. It passed under Koryon’s body and out of sight.
They rose up close to the cloud cover again. Jaegendar slowed and turned, watching them, roaring out as he saw Elgan empty-handed. Koryon, his neck stretched out straight, straining, flapped his wings frantically sideways as fast as possible.
When they looked up, the thunderhead had drifted over the valley; Jaegendar, circling just under the darkest clouds, descended toward them. His black body was silhouetted in the flashes of lightning.
Koryon said in nearly his natural voice, “Oh, good, you made him mad.”
*
“You made him mad?” Darien said in disbelief, caught up in the story in spite of himself. “What kind of fool’s trick is that?”
“A fool’s trick,” Gannie said grimly. He drifted to the right of the window, peering out without leaving a silhouette. Elinor had fallen asleep on Kory’s back; he swooped forward and dropped her into Peilanne’s arms without waking the child.
“Still,” Gannie said thoughtfully, “An angry enemy isn’t a thinking enemy. The one hope left is that you can trick him...”
*
“He tricked us,” Koryon said, scanning the sky frantically. “Where did he go?”
“He dove toward us, then slingshotted back into the clouds while my body hid him from you. He’s that good.” They dove, picking up velocity.
Koryon flapped forward, dropping slightly to gain velocity from the dive. His body was still rigidly straight. “This is awkward. Do you think he knows you haven’t got the lance?”
“He saw me drop it. I’m sure of that.” Elgan flexed his empty arms, trying to relax.
The circular pond lay ahead. Koryon banked toward it, spilling air from his left wing to drop as he turned. He watched their shadow on the grass, tracking until he was nearly between the pond and the sun, directly overhead.
In the blinding moment when the pond was a fiery golden disk, Koryon saw, or thought he saw, a second small black dot reflected above them. He hissed to Elgan, “Look up. Now.”
He looked. “I can’t see a thing —”
“Hold your thumb up, block the sun out
with it, and look for wings to either side.”
Elgan shouted, “There! Straight up, in the sun, diving for us. He’s dropping – closer – closer – Gods, his claws —”
Koryon shouted, “Hang on.” Curving the front edges of his wings into his body, he turned his downward velocity upward, a slingshot effect of his own. He clutched his claws tightly to his body as though shielding himself in panic.
Jaegendar, directly over him, flexed his huge claws and roared with anger and pleasure as he dropped —
“Catch!” Koryon lifted his head, revealing the lance he had hidden under his body, and tossed it back to Elgan. Elgan deftly caught it and threw it forward like a spear, using all their momentum and his full strength.
The air whistled around the lance as it struck Jaegendar in the breastbone, sailing in as easily as if it had struck a black cloud.
Jaegendar fell, end over end, slowly, crashing on a pinnacle of rock. The impact alone should have killed him. Koryon dropped lower, grateful that the trick had worked —
*
“Would a trick like that work, sirs? Specially against another dragon?” Brann was asking for information, not objecting.
Gannie regarded him coldly. “Against a stupid, arrogant one who hadn’t been challenged in a long while? It was easy.”
Brann subsided quickly, putting a cup to his mouth as much to hide behind it as to drink.
Gannie went on, “Or at least it worked as well as they could expect. Koryon flew low...”
*
Koryon flew low to see if Jaegendar were dead.
His body, on the cold grass, raised a mist like a hot spring or water on a fire. The lance, passing through his body, pinned him to the earth.
“We did it,” Koryon said with relief.
There was a rustle as the contract dropped from Elgan’s forearm and crumbled to ashes. The breeze caught the ashes and sent them swirling past Jaegendar’s nose —
Where they rose suddenly in a quick puff. Jaegendar, breathing heavily, opened one eye. “Very good,” he said coldly.
Koryon and Elgan, on the ground, froze.
“It nearly worked. A better throw and I would be dead” — he glanced down — “instead of in great pain.” Know,” he said in a low hiss, and coughed. “Know this. I will heal. And I will find you.”