A Dragon at Worlds' End (10 page)

Another flash. This time lightning forked down and struck the plain in the distance. The thunder was loud. The fire guttered in a sudden wind out of the north.

Lumbee had awoken. She sat beside him without a word, staring at the oncoming clouds. He could feel the emotions running high in her. The rains were coming.

"We are too late," she said after a while.

Relkin thought she might be right. It seemed impossibly unfair. They'd come all this way and they'd run a good race; how could they be about to lose now? On top of which they were about to get a soaking. More lightning struck down, much closer, followed by an ear-rending crack of thunder that brought Bazil out of his slumber and automatically reaching for his sword.

The big eyes blinked. "Where did that come from?" he hissed.

"We're in for a bit of a blow," said Relkin.

He proved correct in this assessment. The wind grew fierce and they had to stamp out their fire to make sure it didn't spread to the wildly waving grass all around.

The clouds came on. Several lightning strikes came down around them. The crackling and booming became earsplitting. There was so much noise that at first they didn't notice the change. Something had become different, however. After a while, though, they felt the ground shuddering. Relkin looked up and met the dragon's gaze.

"No volcano here," said Relkin.

Bazil's head snapped up. Relkin turned.

Along the top of the rise there was movement.

"Aiyee!"

Lumbee was on her feet pointing. The first rain came down. It was warm and was hurled by the fierce wind so hard that it stung their faces.

"Stampede!" Relkin was on his feet, grabbing his pack and bow.

"Run," said the dragon.

Almost lost in the rain was a lightning-flash glimpse of the long slope up to the line of acacias. It was rapidly filling with an endless sea of animals, all in motion.

The rain was patchy. It would come down hard for a half minute or so and then cut off. But the wind was relentless as they ran through the waving grass. Ahead of them, in lightning flashes, they could see a seemingly flat and limitless plain. The stampede was spread out on a wide front, and there was no chance that they could get around to the side and out of its way.

They were joined in this judgment by a couple of the huge red-browns, which were stalking along at a rapid clip ahead of the stampeding herd of three-horns. It seemed they knew, too, that their only hope for escape was a flat-out run. The three-horns could not gallop, but they could move quickly nonetheless, and they could keep it up for a long time, which was worse.

There was nothing for it but to run, for as long as they could keep it up. Anything else would mean death under the feet of the onrushing wall of muscle and sinew. Not even a dozen dragons, wielding dragonswords, could long hold off a panicked herd of five-ton beasts.

And then Relkin noticed that the plain ahead came to a sudden halt. They were on the edge of a canyon so deep its bottom was lost in the dark. The walls were almost sheer.

They turned. Behind them came the wall of death. The pujish had stopped at the brink and gave out great roars of fear and rage. One approached the travelers head swinging frantically as it sought for some way to get down.

Relkin was looking for the same thing. The canyon was huge and cut right across their line of flight. The three-horns were close. He examined the cliff line and was rewarded a moment later when he spotted a place where a rock shelf jutted out from the cliff about ten feet down from the top. Farther along, the shelf ran beneath a large outcropping that overhung the canyon.

"There!" he pointed. There was salvation. Lumbee saw it at once, then she whirled back.

"But how can Bazil?"

Bazil stared down at the ledge. It was a drop of more than his own height. That was a huge jump for a leather-back wyvern. He might easily break his legs or stumble over the edge of that shelf, which was no more than ten feet wide at any point, and go hurtling all the way to his death below.

But, on the other hand, a glance over his shoulder showed him that he couldn't stay where he was. The three-horns were five hundred feet away and still coming at full speed. They had not yet noticed the canyon. Lightning flashed brightly and he saw a forest of waving horns and neck frills.

The big red-brown was roaring at them in its fear and frustration.

Relkin tugged on his arm.

"Baz, watch what I do. We've got to slide down and then run over to that overhang. You see it?"

"I see it. I don't believe it."

"Believe. Come on."

Relkin sat on the edge, facing out into the canyon, then tossed down his pack and bow and then dropped over the edge, hands pinwheeling, and dropped onto the rock shelf and rolled onto his side to dissipate the force.

Lumbee had already climbed down. She pulled him to his feet.

Bazil got down on the edge. The rock shelf looked very small; the canyon yawned black beyond it. The approaching pujish was screaming and snapping those huge jaws together. There was no time for regrets or recriminations. He pushed himself off and felt himself sliding down the rock. It was ripping the hell out of the joboquin and his scabbard. He bounced off something hard and was in free fall for a long moment and then landed with crunching power on the rock and pitched off his feet, to land with a bruising crash on the flat stone.

For a moment he lay there, unable to breathe. Then he struggled to move his limbs.

"You did it, Baz!" Relkin shrieked into his ear while trying to get him up. Bazil felt that it might be the last thing he did. That fall had driven the air right out of him. Still, the three-horns were coming, and they wouldn't stop at the edge, he knew. Somehow he got his heavy legs beneath him. His tail tip grabbed for a support on the cliff wall. His arms pushed and he lurched upright just as a terrific flash of lightning ripped the sky apart. The thunder rolled long and violent almost immediately.

He was just in time to see a red-brown pujish go flying off the edge of the cliff, just ahead of the first group of three-horns. The pujish fell with a despairing bellow into the dark, and was followed by the three-horns, five of them, right off the outcrop over the overhang.

"Run, Baz, run." The boy and Lumbee were already under the overhang. He thrust himself forward; it was hard. His feet hurt horribly, there was no breath in his body, but he knew death would be hurtling over the cliff onto him in a moment if he stayed put. He got a step and another and was on his way when he felt himself trip. He fell, sliding almost off the edge of the rock shelf, and only by luck did his outstretched claws dig into a crack in the rock, keeping himself from slipping out into the void.

Something huge smashed into the rock ledge just behind him and then went on, tumbling to its death. He pulled himself to all fours, threw himself forward the last few feet, and collapsed beneath the overhang. The boy and Lumbee danced back out of his way.

The rock shelf shuddered again and again as huge bodies impacted briefly before continuing the long fall into the canyon below. The storm lashed the land, lightning flashed, and the torrent of huge animals continued crashing over the cliff, bouncing off the ledge and disappearing into the darkness. Parts of the rock ledge fell, but the part they stood on remained standing, and at last the stampede petered out. The remaining three-horns in the vast herd had stopped themselves on the brink. They milled there, groaning and crying, as the storm waned and the rain became gentler and finally ceased altogether.

Dawn found the travelers huddled together beneath the overhang. To their left the ledge had vanished, destroyed by the torrent of huge three-horns. On their right, fortunately, the ledge had survived. The cliff above overhung it farther and the doomed animals had missed it on their plummet into the depths. They could see that their ledge extended along the cliff with a downward trend. A quick look informed them that it was out of the question for the dragon to climb back up to the top of the cliff. The only way out was to go along the ledge and hope it went down all the way.

Immediately beneath them was a charnel mound of dead three-horns, with occasionally one still groaning out its death agonies. Relkin was appalled at the enormity of the slaughter. The scene was worse than a battlefield on the day after.

At first things went well. But the ledge narrowed, and progress for Bazil became difficult, then next to impossible. The dragon had to ease himself along, his belly to the cliff wall and his talons clinging to whatever holds Relkin could identify for him. For a while Relkin feared they wouldn't be able to make it, but after a couple of hair-raising passages they came to a place where the ledge itself and much of the cliff wall had collapsed, forming a jumble of stone blocks piled up to the same height as the ledge. With care and concentration, they were able to use these to descend the rest of the way to the canyon floor.

"Look," said Lumbee, pointing back. The mound of meat was already attracting hungry animals. Everything from dog-sized two-legged critters to huge red-brown pujish was converging on the carrion. The huge pujish were roaring at each other. The smaller ones were ignoring the giants and just running in for a few bites before they moved away again to safer territory where they could chew the meat a little before bolting it down.

At Relkin's urging the travelers joined the harvesting, cautiously taking claim of an outlying three-horns carcass that had fallen quite a ways from the main pile. A nearby pujish roared threats at them from a quarter-mile away, but stayed beside the much larger mound to which it had taken possession.

They detached a hind leg for Bazil and some hefty pieces for Relkin and Lumbee and then they resumed their journey. They worked their way down the canyon and came out on a wider valley. A river, still very low from the dry season, snaked along in the middle. Lumbee pointed off to their right. "The river runs to the great lake. The pujish will all be by the lake, where most of the herds are."

Giving the lake a wide berth, they headed due south. When the moon rose they walked again, for it was more important than ever that they hurry. The storm had quickly cleared. Their hopes began to build again. If the real rains held off for just a few more days, they might yet get a chance.

The night was clear and cool. The grass was a constant silvery presence, rustling slightly in the whispering breezes. Clumps of trees formed darker bulks here and there, patches of intense darkness. Above them the stars glittered, while a crescent moon rode across the heavens.

At dawn they halted for a quick meal, roasting thin slices of the tough, chewy meat over a small fire. The only water in the vicinity was a dried-up pond. Relkin dug in the ground at its center and soon uncovered a small pool of gritty water. They drank what they could, then walked until the heat grew so intense they drew up beneath some acacia trees. They built a larger fire and set their meat to slow baking on hot stones. While it baked they dozed, snacked on nutlike pods that Lumbee had collected around the trees, or visited a muddy little water hole at the center of the clump of trees. Despite Relkin's fears, no pujish visited their grove. As Lumbee had suggested, the pujish were away down by the lake, where the herds of herbivores were concentrated.

They slept through the rest of the day, awoke at dusk, and walked all night under the moon.

Relkin continued to ponder their options. He questioned Lumbee closely, trying to dredge up anything she might have heard concerning the conditions in the slave camps. Lumbee had heard a wild mishmash of rumors with a few facts thrown in. The camps were big places, of this Relkin was sure, but he was unsure just how big was big. For Lumbee, any group larger than a couple of dozen was an alien concept. The Ardu were clannish, slow-breeding folk. Lumbee had never seen more than forty or fifty people gathered together at spring festival. But she had heard that the camps were filled with hundreds of captives, chained up in pens. She had also heard that the camps stank, that they were places of terrible cruelty and disease. These things Relkin was sure were true; the rest he could not be sure of yet.

He and Bazil conferred and agreed that if the camps were small enough they would try a surprise attack, perhaps at night. One dragon with a sword could raise complete havoc on unprepared men, especially in the dark. Relkin would watch the dragon's back and let him concentrate on sword work.

For four more days and nights they marched through the singing grass until they reached the margins of the southern forest. At an oasis pool Bazil slew an aggressive green and black pujish that was about his own size, but filled with nothing but ferocious hunger. Against Ecator, however, not even two tons of agile ferocity could stand a chance.

They took the opportunity to feast and rest up for one day. Then they pushed on, into the thickening forest.

The next day clouds came up, the first since the storm. They were low, hurrying gray clouds, wispy and empty of moisture, which they had dropped long before. They were harbingers, however. The real rains would arrive any day now.

That night the travelers' progress was slowed by poor light and an increasing density of vegetation. The acacias were gone, replaced now by larger trees, and there were more and more of them. There were also pools of water amid the reed beds, and streams rather than empty courses.

They camped by a river the next day and at dusk smelled the smoke of someone else's cooking fires. Immediately Relkin and Lumbee probed downstream, before the light failed completely. They were rewarded with the distant gleam of fires, which told them they were close to a slavers' camp.

They got back to a hungry dragon, waiting by their own fire.

"Slavers are just on the other side of the next bend in the river, perhaps an hour's walk," said Relkin.

"The gods of Ardu folk are watching out for my people," said Lumbee in a solemn voice.

Relkin didn't want to start thinking about what the effect of the Ardu gods might be. How did they get along with Caymo? Or the Great Mother who was worshiped in the east? Or the other things that were interfering in Relkin's life? Theology was an endlessly complex subject and one that Relkin wished he might be spared for a while.