Nunzio showed up at my side. He put a small studded wand into my hand. “It’s a controller. Gleep has never needed one to behave, but it’s a way for you to keep in touch with him over distance. If you push this button,” he indicated a baby-blue stud, “he’ll stop. The red one will make him sit down, and the green one will make him run back to you wherever you are. That will help if you get lost.”
“I don’t get lost,” I growled, mentally crossing my fingers that I wouldn’t have to eat those words.
Nunzio nodded. He knew me. “Right. The other thing you’re gonna need is this.” He gave me a red, football-shaped mass the size of my hand. “In case one of the dragons gets out of hand. Toss it into its mouth or into its flame. The smoke will paralyze it. Good luck.”
I tucked away my aces in the hole and clenched my reins. Mass assassination by dragon was by no means out of the question as a way to win this contest. If none of the hunters was out to cut the others’ throats, we all ought to be perfectly safe, but better to consider the worst possible scenario in advance than later while they’re trying to identify your remains to return to your family.
The Master of the Hunt blew a fanfare on his horn. “My lords and ladies, the hunt will now commence! Forth the quarry!”
Gloriannamarjolie grinned at the assembly, then leaped off the dais. Before our eyes, she seemed to vanish. I heard rustling in the undergrowth.
The Master of the Hunt held up a wrist sundial and waited until the shadow shifted slightly. He raised a finger, giving her a long count of a hundred, then brought it down. “Forth the hounds!”
The dragonmaster blew a sour blatt on a duck whistle. In unison, the sixty dragons raised their noses to the sky and howled, some of them belching gouts of flame into the air. The sight was enough to send half the non-hunters scurrying for the safety of the castle. I stood my ground. I wasn’t too worried about my own safety: I had the D-hopper, Nunzio’s gadgets, and a few little tricks of my own, but I kept thinking about the princess’s well-being. She had a tough job ahead, staying far enough ahead of an army of killer dragons to finish the course.
“Forth the hunters!”
Hearing the cry, Fireball leaped forward. Cursing, I held on with both hands and both legs to keep from being bucked off as the rotund beast thundered after the pack of bigger ’hippuses.
In the sparse forest outside the courtyard the riders spread out behind the dragons. The firebreathers were sniffing the ground for the princess’s scent. I’d never seen control like it. Normally, adult dragons would be straining against the controllers, fighting to get loose to kill and loot. These behaved like a troop of experienced bloodhounds. Then I gave myself a mental slap on the forehead: they were experienced bloodhounds. These dragons and their owners rode on hunts all year round. Only those in the hands of strangers like Alf who were here only for the prize had to hang on tight and keep their dragons on the job. Gleep, swift-footed and smaller than the others, kept dashing underneath the feet of the big ones, smelling a patch of ground here, nibbling a leaf there. I swear at one point he looked up and gave me a wink.
Naw. Couldn’t be. Must have been dust in his eye.
I didn’t have much of a chance to concentrate on the dragons. Just staying on my mount took all my attention. The trees that weren’t hammered down by the stampede of dragons whipped at us with blade-sharp twigs. I spat out leaves and hunkered grimly over Fireball’s neck. Not a hundred yards out of the courtyard I saw riders dropping out of sight and heard their yells—the first fence and ditch had claimed its victims. I calculated from my approach vector my ’hippus was going to have to gather himself and leap up six feet and forward twenty. As if he could read my thoughts, he danced sideways and cast an eye over the fence into the pit, where a dozen of his fellows and their riders were crawling out of the mud.
“Come on, Fireball.”
It peered back at me, and distinctly shook its head. That tore it for me. I grabbed a handful of its mane, shoved its face into the fence rail.
“Come on, you mangy barrel of shark bait!” I shouted, giving it my full lung power. “Jump that fence or I’ll throw you over!” My voice echoed in the forest, momentarily drowning out the dragons. Fireball’s head swayed, as though its ears were ringing. With an expression of new respect, it backed up slowly, then broke into a steadily increasing gallop. I braced myself, and we sailed over the rails and the ditch, landing a dozen feet clear. My spine jarred heavily. I saw a couple of my fellow hunters grin at me, as they stood up in their stirrups to absorb the impact with their knees. Jerks.
Fireball didn’t miss a step, going straight from that balletic leap into a full canter.
The landscape cleared almost at once from thick forest to open scrubland. Miles ahead of me the dragons had already fanned out with their noses to the ground. In the midst of the red, green, gold, or black giants was a little blue form, scooting back and forth like a mouse under elephants’ feet. An ouroboros, its tail still tucked in its mouth, lay on the ground twitching, probably trampled by one of its big cousins as it tried to roll among them. Pages from the palace ran out with a stretcher and a medical kit. I felt a momentary qualm. If Gleep got squished Skeeve’d be upset. I’d better look out for the little guy.
In the meantime I had to keep an eye on the rest of the hunters. The head count before we’d ridden out was twenty. I could still see the other nineteen. Unless one of them had left behind an illusionary twin, that was. I peered at each one, trying to see if any had fuzzy edges or were repeating the same actions over and over. Nothing so far.
I’d have hated to see this landscape during spring floods; it would be so soggy you could grow cranberries. As it was, the going was messy. Fireball’s big hooves caked with mud that went suck-pop! whenever he picked up a foot. Prince Bosheer halted to take a look around, and his ’hippus sank up to its belly, and we all learned an important lesson about this field: if you stopped you got mired. I kept my heels ready to kick if Fireball looked like he was slowing down.
“Bad luck,” I called, as I suck-popped past him.
“No problem,” he said, cheerfully, freeing a field shovel from his saddle pack. He climbed off and started digging. Quite a guy. I had to have respect for somebody who could be philosophical about a situation that could put him out of the running so early in the contest.
The dragons collided as they charged toward a gap that led out of the meadow into the hills. Two of the firebreathers who wanted to go through at the same time started to fight. One of them hauled back his head and let out a jet of flame that incinerated a stand of trees. On the way it hit the other dragon square in the face, and annoyed him. It tore up cart-size clawfuls of earth and heaved it at its opponent, following up with a huge blast of lightning from its own throat. The first one let out a roar that shook the ground. The Master of the Hounds charged directly at the two dragons and started shouting commands. The rest of the dragons and hunters milled around in the muck waiting until the owners came forward with control wands to pull the combatants apart. That traffic jam wasn’t going to clear for a while. I looked around. There were several other gaps to try. I could take one and hope that the paths met up again after a while. It would be easier than waiting here.
The judges seemed to have the same idea. I saw five shapes go overhead. One of them was Massha’s familiar roundness. She gave me a thumb’s-up as she veered to the right. I turned to the left and lost sight of her.
Beyond the lip of the valley hills closed in on the path until I was threading a round-topped maze. Hoofprints told me at least one of the others had come this way, too. It had been a brilliant idea, but I didn’t flatter myself that it was unique. I kicked Fireball into a trot. We rode along the bed of a foot-wide stream, kicking pebbles. I didn’t care if Glory heard me; I wasn’t in the running for the prize, nice as it would be to have. I was there to see that there wasn’t any funny stuff. So far I had not lost track of any of the hunters. I took a small device that Massha had given me out
of my belt pouch (you can’t get into pants pockets in the saddle) and flipped it open.
The flat screen was as neat as any tracker you could buy in a hunting and fishing shop on Perv: the tiny blips superimposed over a map of the landscape indicated the contestants, the dragons, the observers and the palace staff. We’d purposely unblipped Glory so that if the device fell into someone else’s hands they couldn’t use it to find her. I traced the trails. Yes, sooner or later they all met up ahead. I’d just go and wait up there for the confusion to clear up. Nothing was in my way. Except one blip, almost directly ahead of me. I looked up.
“You! What are you doing out here?”
“Hello, Aahz.”
“Massha, look to your left! Fine that rider five points. He’s cheating!” Carisweather ordered. The big fluffy guy pointed. I looked down. The fancy-pants dude in the turban had slipped a gizmo out and was twisting a dial on the face of it. You couldn’t call me big know-all when it came to hunting contests, but if I’m an expert in anything, it’s magikal gadgets. I knew a variable-output controller when I saw it. The silky snake was breaking in on the spells being used by hunters trying to control their dragons and, by the smirk on his scaly face, he was enjoying the resultant chaos. With a flick of my flight ring I dropped down next to him and picked it out of his hand.
“Naughty, naughty,” I said, waggling my finger at him. In fury, his forked tongue flicked in and out of his mouth. “Promises, promises,” I sighed, and flew up to join my fellow judges. Three of the four had big grins on their faces, but Carisweather shook his head.
“We’re only observers, Mistress Massha,” he said, disapprovingly.
“You can say that if you want, big chief,” I told him, “but one of those dragons could kill somebody.”
“That, alas, is one of the pitfalls of the contest,” Carisweather said, mournfully. “These are blood sports, and, once in a while, blood runs.”
“That should be when it’s unavoidable, Hot Pants,” I said, in a huff. I can’t stand it when people give me that “accidents of war” garbage. “This is avoidable. Short of searching everybody, we can’t find these tricks until they try to use one, but that doesn’t mean they get to keep it once we see it.” I tossed the disk in the air and caught it again. “He can have it back at the end of the race.”
Carisweather sighed. I looked around again for Glory. She had shot away on foot from the starting position so fast I hadn’t seen which way she went. Once we hit the skies I saw her prints on the soft ground. She had always been a good runner when she was a little thing, able to outdistance elk-deer and wrestle them down with her bare hands. She told me she’d been training hard for more than a year to make this the best contest Brakespear had ever seen. I wanted it all to work out for her.
With only suspicions on her part and Aahz’s spotting of that mystery figure in the woods it was tough to figure out who to keep a eye on. None of them had a good-conduct prize coming that I could see. Besides Snake-dude trying to mess up the dragons, we’d already spotted the scrawny-butt black-furred nymph scattering slow-weed for the other ’hippuses to eat, making sure they’d all be too groggy to run after Glory in the backstretch I knew was up ahead, and both Deveels had tried to make alliances with other riders to let them win.
The noon sun beat down on my back like a hot towel. I wanted to show the colors for Glory, but I’d have been happier in my usual lightweight clothes. A girl my size doesn’t need the extra insulation; we generate a fair bit of heat on our own. How she kept moving the way she was amazed me.
If I levitated high above the forest I could see her in the distance, sure-footed as a unicorn. Not the only thing she had in common with that fabled beast, if you get my drift. Once in a while when she crested a ridge the others could see her, too. That Prince Bosheer practically bounded out of his saddle-ridge every time he spotted her. That boy had it bad for her. He must have been bitten by the love-bug the second he set eyes on her. I wondered if Glory knew it.
Silly me. She must have known it even before he did. I knew when Hugh fell for me; Crom knows I waited long enough for Mr. Right that I was certain I recognized that look on a man’s face when it finally happened. I was seeing it in front of me at this very moment. I started rooting for him to win.
It wasn’t going to be easy. The Cosus of Elova had easily the fastest steed, bought directly out of Glory’s dad’s stables not two weeks ago. The big white ’hippus knew the terrain and didn’t have to be magikally adapted to the local atmosphere and gravity as some of the others did. He was in the lead, spurring Sugarpie every time Glory’s blond head became visible amid the sparse trees. The others fought for distance, galloping heavily behind him.
The occasional peeks were for the benefit of the riders, she’d told me. The dragons were following her own scent plus the spoor she laid down from the brimstone pellets in her belt pouch. One of the big reds suddenly got frustrated with having to thread its way through the trees and let out a blast of fire. With an expression on his big chops I can only call smug, he slithered forward on his belly over the smouldering ashes. The rest of the dragons followed his lead, and the king had a head start on this year’s controlled burn. I had a coughing fit as the wind carried clouds of hot cinders up into the sky, so I missed Belizara, a Weeka from Sowen, zoom down on her broom to break up a disagreement between a pair of contestants as to who got precedence to cross a bridge.
Riding alongside but not with the group was the king. He rode a handsome black stallion. Behind him, a litter slung between two beasts carried the prize. No one accompanied him; I mean, who was going to bother the king? Nobody would, especially not a king as well prepared for an attack: Hank was in full armor, carrying a sword, sixteen spears including the famous Broken Spear, a dagger in his belt and each boot, bandoliers of throwing stars, a shield, a mace, and a morning star. So far, everything was running well. With Aahz keeping an eye on the action down below, and me up here, nothing should go wrong.
“You!” I demanded, as Nunzio slunk out of the shadows. “What are you doing here? You ought to be back there keeping an eye on Gleep.”
“He doesn’t need me, Aahz,” the Mob enforcer said. “I had to talk to you in private.”
I eyed him. “What’s going on that you couldn’t ask me back there? Who don’t you want to hear you?”
“Massha,” Nunzio sighed, sitting down on a stone and fanning himself with his broad-brimmed hat. “She’s queering the whole deal.”
“What deal?” I glanced over his head. No sign of the dragon pack yet, but they couldn’t be too far behind me. “Talk fast.”
“The safe, the first prize, isn’t supposed to be in circulation. It was going to be stopped, but there’s been a mix-up.”
“What kind of mix-up?” I asked. “Who doesn’t want it out there?”
“The Council of Wizards.”
“Uh-huh,” I nodded, thinking hard. The COW was a transdimensional advisory board that had a representative for every gateway to a dimension that used magik. They did a pretty good job of helping keeping items out of a place that wasn’t ready for ’em, but there were occasional slip-ups.
“Yes. The safe was a prototype, designed to protect irreplaceable artifacts, but once the scientists let the critics get a look at it, they figured out it was just too easily used for ill-gotten gains,” Nunzio said. “Think of what would happen if you put loot from a . . . business transaction into it. Law enforcement could retrieve the merchandise, but all a perpetrator would have to do to get it back again was to reach into the safe . . .”
“I get it,” I said. I let out a long whistle. “Pretty smooth. Another case of technology running too far ahead of the law. So of course they’ve got to get it out of circulation again. You’d think something like this would have a major APB out. I never heard anything about it.”
“You might not have, perhaps because you’ve been a little out of the loop lately.” Nunzio looked abashed, thinking he’d hurt my feelings. I felt a t
winge, but he was right: I had had a lot of other things on my mind.
“So the transaction’s going to take place where no one can see it. Who’s out there?”
“Someone from COW,” said Nunzio. I shrugged again. Who was I to disagree with COW? “They’re going to stick up the king.”
“What?!!?” My voice echoed down the narrow valley.
“Let it happen,” Nunzio said, quietly. “He’s the one who called COW in the first place and told them he had it. He’s an honest man. A crook would never have let it go.”
I peered closely at Nunzio. “So he never intended to give it away at this race?”
“The race is good cover,” the enforcer said. “So’s a robbery. Otherwise there might have been too many questions asked, the king just giving up a choice piece of merchandise like that. It’s a shame that Princess Glory caught some mention of it. She called Massha, Massha called you, and here we are, where none of us ought to have been in the first place.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded, as all the pieces fell into place. “So that’d explain the figure in the woods.” Another truth dawned on me. “So I’m getting saddle sores for nothing ?” I bellowed. Fireball danced under me, responding to my outburst. Nunzio looked really embarrassed. “All right. All right! I’ll look the other way. Crom save me from future eavesdropping princesses.”
Myth-Told Tales Page 13