A Dragon at Worlds' End (3 page)

By now Bazil's patience was sure to be stretched to its limit. Relkin took a deep breath and said a little prayer to old Caymo, the God of Luck. Then with a loud shout he jumped and advanced on the beast, waving his arms. He would have laughed at the sight if he'd been able to see it from an observer's viewpoint. A two-legged critter less than six feet tall charging an animal that stretched thirty feet from head to tail tip.

The munching ceased, the head came up surprisingly swiftly, and one eye focused on Relkin.

He came on, screaming like a maniac.

The beast uttered a strangely soft snort, pushed back with its front legs, and reared up onto its hefty hind legs. The muscular tail was now pressed to the ground. It challenged him by bashing its stubby foreclaws together. Come closer and get hugged, it said.

Relkin slowed his step. It weighed three tons at the least. There wasn't a hell of a lot he could do to it with just a short sword. He kept his arms waving to hold its attention as long as possible. It was up to the dragon now.

Bazil was on the move, working through the trees without a sound. He had the sword swinging loosely in one hand. All it would take was one good overhand. And then they would eat. He doubted that he'd want to wait for cooked meat, either.

He took another long step and moved into the direct sunlight of the clearing. Instantly there was a reaction from the other side, among the taller trees. An enormous neck swung out of the woods and a moment later it was followed by a vast bulk, at least ten, perhaps twenty times Bazil's size. Anxious parental eyes glittered at the sight of the dragon, and the huge bulk was thrown sideways. With a great cracking sound, the whiplike tail erupted from the nearest brush and lashed at Bazil's head.

He dodged back as the tip cracked only a few inches short of his nose. The beast towered over him. Bazil retreated. Even with Ecator in hand he wasn't certain of killing something this large with a single blow. There wouldn't be time for a second blow before he was trampled. That tail was coming again; Bazil flung himself low and felt a wind pass over him as eight feet of bony tail tip swept through the air with a huge droning sound.

A moment later, there was a tremendous cracking and crashing of vegetation and a second enormous beast emerged behind the first. There was a small herd of the things over there, silently resting up during the heat of the day.

Scrambling back onto his feet, Bazil staggered away as quickly as he could. Relkin came barreling out of the undergrowth a few seconds later while huge tails zoomed above his head, beating hell out of the cycads and the fern trees. Bazil picked up speed, Relkin moved up beside him running full tilt. They pushed their weary bodies as fast as they could through the thickest area of trees, while the giants followed, crushing the forest wholesale beneath them.

Fortunately, it soon became apparent that the giants were not prepared to expend that much energy on them. After two hundred yards the huge beasts had ceased to pursue. They knocked over a few large trees and trampled them and then they ambled back to the clearing and the youngster, which had gone back to gorging itself. The rest of the herd resumed its midday snooze.

Bazil and Relkin slowed, breathing hard, taking time to lean back against a thick-trunked pine.

"How did those things manage to hide so well?" muttered the dragon at last. There was no hiding the shock in his voice.

"We're getting stupid, Baz, something to do with being so hungry. We should have known that little one would have protection around. We've got to work harder."

"Got to eat."

"I know."

Glumly they stumbled on through the jungle, steering south and east as much as possible. This was the seventh day since they had beached on the forest strand and headed into the jungle in search of food. At first Relkin had been sure they were somewhere on the eastern shore of the Inland Sea. He recognized the strange forest, which was the same one they had traversed during the epic march of the Legions from Og Bogon to the shores of the Inland Sea. Relkin had thought they should be able to catch some of the more unwieldy animals they had seen during that voyage down the great river.

On both scores he had been wrong.

During that hungry week Relkin had come to realize that instead of being on the eastern shore of the ocean, they were in fact on its southern margin. Seven days of heading in an easterly direction had brought them that morning down to an inlet laid out north to south. Down the inlet lay the ocean. Clearly they were moving eastward along an east-west shore, which meant that they were a very long way from the rest of the Argonath army. They were truly alone, and would have to rely on themselves on the long journey ahead. It was even possible, as Relkin was reluctantly coming to accept, that they might never rejoin the army, not until they got all the way back to Bogon on the east coast. One thing he had refused to even consider was that they might never make it back at all.

All in all it was a dire situation, and each of them had been working hard to keep the other's spirits up. The sight of the young monster in the clearing had been intoxicating. Unfortunately, it had led to nothing and they were hungrier than ever.

They entered a marshy area and on a mudbank Relkin surprised a scarlet, amphibious beast the size of a cat. His sword pinned it before it could reach the water. In a few moments it was gutted and cleaned and broken into pieces, while Relkin looked around for firewood. There was something wrong, though, a strange smell that made the hair on his neck stand up.

The dragon looked askance at the chopped-up, red-skinned creature.

"I don't think this is a good idea," he said carefully, knowing full well how hungry Relkin was, but distrusting that awful smell.

Relkin cut off some hunks and threw them into a nearby pond where some small fish were circling. The fish attacked the chunks briefly. Two or three were almost instantly stricken with paralysis and floated to the surface, bellies up.

With a sigh of frustration Relkin told his stomach to forget it. He wiped his sword carefully in the sand and washed his hands very thoroughly before they went on.

The mires thinned out and they moved through tropical heathland, with a thin forest cover of dwarf pines. The going became considerably easier and they moved along at a steady pace, eyes peeled for some sign of prey. Ahead were white limestone cliffs.

Relkin heard it first.

"Uh-oh," he groaned.

On a breeze from the south came a distant medley of wailing cries.

"Those things again," grumbled the dragon. "They are too damn common in these parts."

Hurriedly, they moved due east, trying to put a lot of space between themselves and the source of the noise. They had seen a pack of creatures that made those cries, and they had faced their ilk on the ramparts of the Legion camp. They had no desire whatsoever to come to grips with them—a horde of yellow-skinned killers, each with deadly sickle claws on its hind feet that were used to disembowel prey.

They pushed on, working eastward along a ridge of drier ground, where the forest cover stayed thin and it was relatively easy to make good time. The wailing cries died away for a while, and the two travelers were starting to think they'd left them behind, when they were renewed, this time nearby.

They were being tracked. They increased their speed, and now came to an area cut up by the karst canyons of a limestone landscape. Ledges and pinnacles were abundant.

The cries were directly behind them now. Cursing, they shuffled along, pushing tired bodies into a redoubled effort. A fault had thrust limestone up in a sharp cliff that barred their way. There was no time to waste here; the killers would be on them very shortly.

Panting with exhaustion and fear, Relkin noticed a crack in the cliff face they could ascend, legs on one wall, shoulders on the other. Bazil had learned to climb this way when he was a sprat back in Blue Stone County, although it had been a long time since he had tried it.

They climbed. For Bazil it was an exhausting ordeal, and his energy reserves were already low. Still the chimney was almost ideal for this purpose, being big enough for a wyvern dragon to wedge his feet up on one wall and his shoulders on the other.

Relkin was too small to get the benefit of the chimney effect, but he was able to scale the wall anyway. He, too, felt the weakness that came from lack of food and found himself drained by the time he hauled himself out on top of the cliff.

The pack of sickle-claw killers had emerged from the forest and formed a stolid, goggle-eyed audience down below them. The killers made no sound, except an occasional keening cry of disappointment.

When Relkin reached the top, he looked down at the stiff-legged pack. He counted more than ten of them, waiting patiently, with their long arms drooping to the ground, their tails held out straight behind them, and their big eyes fixed intently on himself and the dragon. Slowly Bazil inched his way up to the top of the chimney. He was sobbing for breath with each heave of his big body up the rock. At last he got a shoulder over the top. The maneuver at the end was the worst for him, since he was already drained of strength and this required the maximum effort from his upper body.

Bazil took a deep breath, twisted, and let his feet leave the opposite wall. His arms and shoulders took the entire strain for a moment, while his claws gouged out dust from the rock face beneath him, and then he managed to boost one leg up and get a talon grip on the edge. For a moment he teetered there and might have fallen back, but for a final convulsive heave, plus Relkin's frantic hauling on his joboquin that brought him over the edge and left him panting flat out on the upper surface.

The mob of killers below were still staring up at Relkin with solemn eyes. He was tempted to find some rocks to heave at them.

Bazil got back to his feet with a groan or two.

"Time we was moving on," whispered Relkin.

Carefully the boy and the dragon inched backward from the cliff until well out of sight from below. Then they rose to their feet and retreated across the plateau to the far side. The limestone region formed a scarp with the steep side facing east. They came to the top of this steep slope and found the country spread out below them. Dimly, far off to their left, Relkin glimpsed an expanse of blue that he knew at once was the Inland Sea. Directly ahead lay a river plain, with the river's serpentine coils spread across it.

His fears were confirmed then. They were way to the south of the Legions and essentially on their own.

"What now?" said Bazil, whose own grasp of geographic details was considerably vaguer than Relkin's.

"Got to get down this slope, get across the river, and continue east. Somewhere over there we ought to find the big river we came down from the mountains on. Maybe we can hook up with the Legions. Find where we left the rafts."

"Not going to be so easy to take a raft up the river as it was to float down."

"I know. But it'll still be easier than walking the whole way."

The dragon fell silent, struck by the hard, obvious truth of this statement.

"Come on. Let's take this carefully; don't want a fall."

"By the fiery breath," grumbled the leatherback, but he fell in behind Relkin as they started down.

Cautiously they descended the steep slope, scrambling down through thickets and dense patches of vines. By late afternoon they were far down the slope, deep in a murky forest fed by springs rising at the bottom of the scarp slope. At one spring they paused to take a drink. Behind the spring Relkin discovered a cave that went back into the hill a considerable distance. The air coming up from the cave was cool. Relkin detected nothing more than the smell of moist stone. Bazil noted the presence of some bats in a side cave, but nothing else. They huddled there for a moment, to get their breath back and plot their next move.

"I think we should stay here, sleep, and move on in the morning."

"You not as hungry as this dragon."

"I'm not so sure about that, but the river's too far for us to reach it before dark. I bet there'll be a lot of mosquitoes down there. You know what the witches said about mosquitoes and the plague."

Bazil remembered the plague too well. He shuddered. "We stay here tonight," he said.

They cut down some boughs and made nests for themselves just inside the entrance. Relkin went off to scout for small game.

He passed down by the spring, which had formed a wide circular pool at the base of a cliff of white limestone. Palms grew around it in a grove that trailed off into the deeper woods where the conifers grew thick.

He wended his way down this path, eyes seeking something small that he could hit with a stone, of which he had a half dozen nice smooth ones, picked up earlier. There were lizards, but they were high in the trees and wary. At the sight of him they flitted upward. He groaned and shifted weary limbs on down a path lined with palm trees. They really had to find something to eat or he was going to get too weak to carry on. Relkin could have wept for his lovely little Cunfshon bow. These fat lizards would have fed him well and given the dragon a little something to stave off the worst pangs of hunger, and with the bow the lizards would have been easy targets.

Suddenly he heard a triumphant shriek behind his back. Three of the yellow-skinned carnivores stepped out of concealment. Another shriek came from ahead and there were the rest of them. He was trapped.

Relkin didn't hesitate. He hurled a stone at the nearest and scored a good hit high on the forehead. The creature hissed and shook and he was gone, running for his life through the conifer forest beyond the palms. The forest was a mass of young fir trees no taller than Relkin. He was able to force his way through and stay ahead of the ululating pack, but they were right on his heels.

Soon he was running through larger trees. He ran bent over low and managed to get along beneath their lowest branches. The predators were not as agile here; they bulled through with their heads and they were inevitably slowed. Relkin sensed after a while that he was gaining.