“However, I suggest we start with the one in the trees over there.”
“Sorry, but-“
“You can’t leave them to their fate!”
Rincewind looked surprised. “I can’t?” he said.
“No. You can’t. Look, I’ll be frank. I’ve worked with better material than you, but it’s either that or-have you ever spent a million years in a coal measure?”
“Look,I-“
“So if you don’t stop arguing I’ll chop your head off.”
Rincewind saw his own arm snap up until the shimmering blade was humming a mere inch from his throat. He tried to force his fingers to let go. They wouldn’t.
“I don’t know how to be a hero!” he shouted.
“I propose to teach you.”
Bronze Psepha rumbled deep in his throat. K!sdra the dragonrider leaned forward and squinted across the
clearing. “I see him,” he said. He swung himself down easily from branch to branch and landed lightly on the tussocky grass, drawing his sword. He took a long look at the approaching man, who was obviously not keen on leaving the shelter of the trees. He was armed, but the dragonrider observed with some interest the strange way in which the man held the sword in front of him at arm’s length, as though embarrassed to be seen in its company.
K!sdra hefted his own sword and grinned expansively as the wizard shuffled towards him. Then he leapt.
Later, he remembered only two things about the fight. He recalled the uncanny way in which the wizard’s sword curved up and caught his own blade with a shock that jerked it out of his grip. The other thing - and it was this, he averred, that led to his downfall - was that the wizard was covering his eyes with one hand.
e had a man, things would be different Someone who, for preference, was a big strapping lad but short on brains. Someone who would do what he was told.
The biggest of the three now fleeing the dragonlands might do. And if it turned out that he wouldn’t, then dragons were always hungry and needed to be fed regularly. She could see to it that they got ugly.
Uglier than usual, anyway.
The stairway passed through a stone arch and ended in a narrow ledge near the roof of the great cavern where the Wyrms roosted.
Sunbeams from the myriad entrances around the walls cries-crossed the dusty gloom like amber rods in which a million golden insects had been preserved. Below, they revealed nothing but a thin haze. Above…
The walking rings started so close to Liessa’s head that she could reach up and touch one. They stretched away in their thousands across the upturned acres of the cavern roof. It had taken a score of masons a score of years to hammer the pitons for all those, hanging from their work as they progressed. Yet they were as nothing compared to the eighty-eight major rings that clustered near the apex of the dome. A further fifty had been lost in the old days, as they were swung into place by teams of sweating slaves (and there had been slaves aplenty, in the first days of the Power) and the great rings had gone crashing into the depths, dragging their unfortunate manipulators with them.
But eighty-eight had been installed, huge as rainbows, rusty as blood. From them the dragons sense Liessa’s presence. Air swishes around the cavern as eighty-eight pairs of wings unfold like a complicated puzzle. Great heads with green, multi-faceted eyes peer down at her. The beasts were still faintly transparent. While the men around her take their hookboots from the rack. Liessa bends her mind to the task of full visualisation; about her in the musty air the dragons become fully visible, bronze scales dully reflecting the sunbeam shafts. Her mind throbs, but now that the Power is flowing fully she can, with barely a wander of concentration, think of other things.
Now she too buckles on the hookboots and turns a graceful cartwheel to bring their hooks, with a faint clung, against a couple of the walking rings in the ceiling.
Only now it is the floor. The world has changed. Now she is standing on the edge of a deep bowl or crater, floored with the little rings across which the dragonriders are already strolling with a pendulum grit. In the centre of the bowl their huge mounts wait among the herd. Far above are the distant rocks of the cavern floor, discoloured by centuries of dragon droppings.
Moving with the easy gliding movement that is second nature Liessa sets off towards her own dragon, Laolith, who turns his great horsey head towards her. His jowls are greasy with pork fat. It was very enjoyable, he says in her mind.
“I thought I said there were to be no unaccompanied flights?” she snaps.
I was hungry, Liessa.
“Curb your hunger. Soon there will be horses to eat.”
The reins stick in our teeth. Are there any warriors? We like warriors.
Liessa swings down the mounting ladder and lands with her legs locked around Laolith’s leathery neck.
“The warrior is mine. There are a couple of others you can have. One appears to be a wizard of sorts,” she adds by way of encouragement.