Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [109]
She searched shadows, crevices, high bare trails and thorny hillside tangles. Her mate and the troll had disappeared.
To the winds with the plan!
She narrowed her wings and descended toward the jagged shadows of the ridge.
Wistala flew, more anxious with each wingbeat. She should have met DharSii by now. Visions of her mate, lying broken and half-devoured by the troll, set her imagination running wild to years of empty loneliness without him. No chance at more hatchlings, to raise as their own, no more long conversations, no more uncomfortable throat-clearings when she scored a point . . .
Dust gave them away. Dust and a noise like glacier ice cracking.
She followed the telltale feathers of kicked up dust to a boulder-littered hummock in the ridge. Here the ridge broke into wind-cut columns of rock like ships’ sails, with brush growing wherever soil could find purchase out of the wind.
The dust flung into the air came from DharSii’s wings, beating frantically at a monstrous figure riding his back. His whipping tail struck limestone as he turned, sending more flakes and dust into the air.
The troll squatted astride DharSii, as though riding him. It’s great arm-legs gripped DharSii’s crest at the horns, pulling him in ever-tightening circles.
Wistala’s fire-bladder pulsed at the sight, at the same time feeling her hearts skip a beat in shock.
DharSii—oh, his neck is sure to be broken! The troll is too strong!
Trolls were put together as though by some act of madness by the spirits, to Wistala’s mind. Their skin was purplish and veined, like the inner side of a fresh-cut rabbit-skin. Their great arms functioned as legs, tiny legs hung from their triangular torso more to steady the body and to convey items to the orifice that served as both mouth and vent. Great plates covered lungs on the outside, working like bellows to force air across their back, and their joints bent in odd and disturbing directions. Worst of all, they had no face to speak of, just a soggy mass of sense organs on a gruesome orb alternately extended and retracted from the torso like a shy snake darting in and out of a hole.
This troll used its thick, powerful leg-arms grasping the horns of DharSii’s crest to wrench her mate’s head back and down. Wistala braced herself for the inevitable, terrible snap that must come.
Wistala had killed a troll once before by breathing fire onto its delicate lung tissue. But dragon-flame, a special sulfurous fat collected and strained in the fire-bladder and then ignited when vomited by a saliva spat from the roof of the mouth, could hurt DharSii just as much as the troll. Dragonscale offered some protection, but DharSii’s leathery wing tissue could be burned, or he could inhale the fire, or it might pool and run under his scale.
If she couldn’t use her fire, she could still fight with her weight.
She folded her wings and turned into a tight dive, perhaps not as neatly as a falcon but with infinitely more power.
This “Long-fingers” was perhaps as experienced against dragons as she was against trolls. It had DharSii by a dragon’s weakest point, it’s long neck.
She swooped around jagged prominences, risking skin of neck, tail, and wing. Heedless of the danger to her wing—a hard enough strike might leave her forever broken and unable to reach the sky again—she flew to DharSii’s rescue. This was no longer a simple hunt to exterminate vermin, but a death-struggle between dragon and monster.
Pick it up—drop it from a height. Stomp and smash!—warring instincts raged.
Teeth would be next to useless on a creature that size, her neck just didn’t have the power to do much more than score its hide. Better to strike with her tail, or there might be two dragons with broken necks. She altered her dive as though trying to reverse directions, so that the force of her swinging tail might send the troll flying right out of the Sadda-Vale.
The troll, showing the uncanny sense of its kind, threw itself