The tip of the black sword was hovering over K!sdra’s throat, What was odd was that the wizard was obviously struggling with it, and it appeared to be singing to itself.
“Psepha!” K!sdra shouted.
The dragon roared in defiance, but pulled out of the dive that would have removed Rincewind’s head, and flapped ponderously back to the tree.
“Talk!” screamed Rincewind.
K!sdra squinted at him up the length of the sword.
“What would you like me to say?” he asked.
“What?”
“I said what would you like me to say?”
“Where are my friends? The barbarian and the little man is what I mean.”
“I expect they have been taken back to the Wyrmberg.”
Rincewind tugged desperately against the surge of the sword, trying to shut his mind to Kring’s bloodthirsty humming.
“The Wyrmberg. There is only one. It is Dragonhome.”
“And I suppose you were waiting to take me there, eh?”
K!sdra gulped involuntarily as the tip of the sword pricked a bead of blood from his adam’s apple.
“Don’t want people to know you’ve got dragons here, eh?” snarled Rincewind.
The dragonrider forgot himself enough to nod, and came within a quarter-inch of cutting his own throat.
Rincewind looked around desperately, and realized that this was something he was really going to have to go through with.
“Right then,” he said as diffidently as he could manage. “You’d better take me to this Wyrmberg of yours, hadn’t you?”
“I was supposed to take you in dead,” muttered K!sdra sullenly.
Rincewind looked down at him and grinned slowly. It was a wide, manic and utterly humourless rictus that was the sort of grin that is normally accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out picking scraps out of the teeth.
“Alive will do,” said Rincewind. “If we’re talking about anyone being dead, remember whose sword is in which hand.”
“If you kill me, nothing will prevent Psepha killing you,” shouted the prone dragonrider.
“So what I’ll do is, I’ll chop bits off,” agreed the wizard. He tried the effect of the grin again.
“Oh, all right,” said K!sdra sulkily. “Do you think I’ve got an imagination?”
He wriggled out from under the sword and waved at the dragon, which took wing again and glided in towards them. Rincewind swallowed.
“You mean we’ve got to go on that?” he said. K!sdra looked at him scornfully, the point of Kring still aimed at his neck.
“How else would anyone get to the Wyrmberg?”
“I don’t know,” said Rincewind. “How else?”
“I mean, there is no other way. It’s flying or nothing.”
Rincewind looked again at the dragon before him. He could quite clearly see through it to the crushed grass on which it lay but, when he gingerly touched a scale that was a mere golden sheen on thin air, it felt solid enough. Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.