This is a roosting hall, said the dragon in a satisfied tone.
As Twoflower watched, one of the shapes far above detached itself from the roof and began to grow larger…
Rincewind watched as Lio!rt’s pale face dropped away from him. This is funny, gibbered a small part of his mind, why am I rising?
Then he began to tumble in the air and reality took over. He was dropping to the distant, guano-speckled rocks.
His brain reeled with the thought. The words of the Spell picked just that moment to surface from the depths of his mind, as they always did in time of crisis. Why not say us, they seemed to urge. What have you got to lose?
Rincewind waved a hand in the gathering slipstream.
“Ashonai,” he called. The word formed in front of him in a cold blue flame that streamed in the wind.
He waved the other hand, drunk with terror and magic.
“Ebiris,” he intoned. The sound froze into a flickering orange word that hung beside its companion.
“Urshoring. Kvanti. Pythan. N’gurad. Feringomalee.” As the words blazed their rainbow colours around him he flung his hands back and prepared to say the eighth and final word that would appear in corruscating octarine and seal the spell. The imminent rocks were forgotten.
“-” he began.
The breath was knocked out of him, the spell scattered and snuffed out. A pair of arms locked around his waist and the whole world jerked sideways as the dragon rose out of its long dive claws grazing just for a moment the topmost rock on the Wyrmberg’s noisome floor. Twoflower laughed triumphantly.
“Got him!”
And the dragon, curving gracefully at the top of his flight, gave a lazy flip of his wings and soared through a cavemouth into the morning air.
At noon, in a wide green meadow on the lush tableland that was the top of the impossibly-balanced Wyrmberg, the dragons and their riders formed a wide circle. There was room beyond them for a rabble of servants and slaves and others who scratched a living here on the roof of the world, and they were all watching the figures clustered in the centre of the grassy arena.
The group contained a number of senior dragon lords, and among them were Lio!rt and his brother Liartes. The former was still rubbing his legs, with Small grimaces of pain. Slightly to one side stood Liessa and Hrun, with some of the woman’s own followers. Between the two factions stood the Wyrmberg’s hereditary Loremaster.
“As you know,” he said uncertainly, “the not-fully-late Lord of the Wyrmberg, Greicha the First, has stipulated that there will be no succession until one of his children feels himself - or as it might be, herself - powerful enough to challenge and defeat his or her siblings in mortal combat.”
“Yes”, yes, we know all that. Get on with it,” said a thin peevish voice from the air beside him.
The loremaster swallowed. He had never come to terms with his former master’s failure to expire properly. Is the old buzzard dead or isn’t he? he wondered.
“It is not certain,” he quavered, “whether it is allowable to issue a challenge by proxy-“
“It is, it is,” snapped Greicha’s disembodied voice. “It shows intelligence. Don’t take all day about it.”
“I challenge you,” said Hrun, glaring at the brothers, “both at once.”
Lio!rt and Liartes exchanged looks.
“You’ll fight us both together?” said Liartes, a tall, wiry man with long black hair.
“Yah.”
“That’s pretty uneven odds, isn’t it?”
“Yah. I outnumber you one to two.”
Lio!rt scowled. “You arrogant barbarian-“
“That just about does it,” growled Hrun. “I’ll-“
The Loremaster put out a blue-veined hand to restrain him.