Dragons of the Autumn Twilight - Margaret Weis [201]
Seeing their wide eyes focused on his body, Berem instinctively pulled his shirt over his chest. Then, loosening his hold on Sturm’s arm, he turned and ran for the gates. Eben scrambled to his feet and stumbled after him.
Sturm leaped forward, but Tanis stopped him.
“No,” he said. “It’s too late. We have others to think of.”
“Tanis, look!” Caramon shouted, pointing above the huge gates.
A section of the stone wall of the fortress above the massive front gates began to open, forming a huge, widening crack. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, the massive granite boulders began to fall from the crack, smashing to the ground with such force that the flagstone cracked and great clouds of dust rose into the air. Above the roar could be dimly heard the sound of the massive chains releasing the mechanism.
The boulders began to fall just as Eben and Berem arrived at the gates. Eben shrieked in terror, instinctively and pitifully raised his arm to shield his head. The man next to him glanced up and—it seemed—gave a small sigh. Then both were buried under tons of cascading rock as the ancient defense mechanism sealed shut the gates of Pax Tharkas.
“This is your final act of defiance!” Verminaard roared. His speech had been interrupted by the fall of the rocks, an act that only enraged him more. “I offered you a chance to work to further the glory of my Queen. I cared for you and your families. But you are stubborn and foolish. You will pay with your lives!” The Dragon Highlord raised Nightbringer high in the air. “I will destroy the men. I will destroy the women! I will destroy the children!”
At a touch of the Dragon Highlord’s hand, Pyros spread his huge wings and leaped high into the air. The dragon drew in a deep breath, preparing to swoop down upon the mass of people who wailed in terror in the wide-open courtyard and incinerate them with his fiery breath.
But the dragon’s deadly dive was stopped.
Sweeping up into the sky from the pile of rubble made when she crashed out of the fortress, Matafleur flew straight at Pyros.
The ancient dragon had sunk deeper into her madness. Once more she relived the nightmare of losing her children. She could see the knights upon the silver and golden dragons, the wicked dragonlances gleaming in the sunshine. In vain she pleaded with her children not to join the hopeless fight, in vain she sought to convince them the war was at an end. They were young and would not listen. They flew off, leaving her weeping in her lair. As she watched in her mind’s eye the bloody, final battle, as she saw her children die upon the dragonlances, she heard Verminaard’s voice.
“I will destroy the children!”
And, as she had done so many centuries before, Matafleur flew out to defend them.
Pyros, stunned by the unexpected attack, swerved just in time to avoid the broken, yet still lethal teeth of the old dragon aiming for his unprotected flanks. Matafleur hit him a glancing blow, tearing painfully into one of the heavy muscles that drove the giant wings. Rolling in the air, Pyros lashed out at the passing Matafleur with a wicked, taloned forefoot, tearing a gash in the female dragon’s soft underbelly.
In her madness, Matafleur did not even feel the pain, but the force of the larger and younger male dragon’s blow knocked her backwards in the air.
The rollover maneuver had been an instinctive defensive action on the part of the male dragon. He had been able to gain both altitude and time to plan his attack. He had, however, forgotten his rider. Verminaard—riding without the dragon saddle he used in battle—lost his grip on the dragon’s neck and fell to the courtyard below. It was not a long drop and he landed uninjured, only bruised and momentarily shaken.
Most of the people around him fled in terror when they saw him rise to his feet, but—glancing around swiftly—he noticed that there were four, near the northern end of the courtyard, who did not flee. He turned to face those four.
The appearance of Matafleur and her sudden attack on Pyros jolted the