your dragon-hunters have arrived.'
Yoldi's eyes, Sir Andrew thought, had seen more than she had announced.
Chapter 9
Nestor, struck on the head with stunning force for the second time in as many minutes, lost consciousness. But not for long. When he regained his senses he found himself being carried only a meter or two above the surface of a fogbound marsh, his body still helplessly clutched to the breast of a flying dragon of enormous wingspan. His left shoulder and upper arm were still in agony, though the animal had shifted its powerful grip and was no longer holding him directly by the damaged limb.
He thought that the dragon was going to drop him at any moment. He knew that a grown man must be a very heavy load — five minutes ago he would have said an impossible load for any creature that flew on wings and not by magic. And obviously his captor was having a slow and difficult struggle to gain altitude with Nestor aboard. Now the mists below were thick enough to conceal flat ground and water, but the tops of trees kept looming out of the mists ahead, and the flyer kept swerving between the trees. No matter how its great wings labored, it was unable as yet to rise above them.
From being sure that the creature was going to drop him, Nestor quickly moved to being afraid that it was not. Then, as it gained more altitude despite the evident odds, he progressed to being fearful that it would. Either way there appeared to be nothing he could do. Both of his arms were now pinned between his own body and the scaly toughness of the dragons. He could turn his head, and when he turned it to the right he saw the hilt of the sword, along with half the blade, still protruding from between tough scales near the joining of the animal's left leg and body. The wound was lightly oozing iridescent blood. If Nestor had been able to move his right arm, he might have tried to grab the hilt. But then, at this increasing altitude, he might not.
The great wings beat majestically on, slowly winning the fight for flight. Despite the color of the creature's blood, its scales, and everything else about it, Nestor began lightheadedly to wonder if it was truly a dragon after all. He had thought that by now, after years of hunting them, he knew every subspecies that existed… and Dragonslicer had never failed to kill before, not when he had raised it against the real thing. Could this be some hybrid creature, raised for a special purpose in some potentate's private zoo?
But there was something he ought to have remembered about the sword… dazed as Nestor was, his mind filled with his shoulder's pain and the terror of his fantastic situation, he couldn't put together any clear and useful chain of thought. This thing can't really carry me, he kept thinking to himself, and kept expecting to be dropped at any moment. No flying creature ought to be able to scoop up a full-grown man and just bear him away. Nestor realized that he was far from being the heaviest of full-grown men, but still…
Now, for a time, terror threatened to overcome his mind. Nestor clutched with his fingernails at the scales of the beast that bore him. Now he could visualize it planning to drop him when it had reached a sufficient height, like a seabird cracking shells on rocks below. In panic he tried to free his arms, but it ignored his feeble efforts.
Once more Nestor's consciousness faded and came back. On opening his eyes this time he saw that he and his captor were about to be engulfed by a billow of fog thicker than any previously encountered. When they broke out of the fog again, he could see that at last they had gained real altitude. Below, no treetops at all could now be seen, nothing but fog or cloud of an unguessable depth. Overhead, a dazzling white radiance was trying to eat through whatever layers of fog remained. The damned ugly wounded thing has done it, Nestor thought, and despite himself he had to feel a kind of admiration…
When he again came fully to himself, his abductor was still carrying him in the same position. They were in fairly smooth flight between two horizontal layers of cloud. The layer below was continuous enough to hide the earth effectively, while that above was torn by patches of blue sky. It was a dream-like experience, and the only thing in Nestor's memory remotely like it was being on a high mountain and looking down at the surface of a cloud that brimmed a valley far below.
The much greater altitude somehow worked to lessen the terror of being dropped. Once more the sword caught at Nestor's eye and thought. Turning his head he observed how, with each wingstroke, the hilt of the embedded weapon moved slightly up and down. A very little blood was still dripping. Nestor knew the incredible toughness of, dragons, their resistance to injury by any ordinary weapon. But this…
He kept coming back to it: A dragon can't carry a man, nothing that flies is big enough to do that. Of course there were stories out of the remote past, of demon-griffins bearing their magician-masters on their backs. And stories of the Old World, vastly older still, telling of some supposed flying horse…
The flight between the layers of cloud went on, for a time that seemed to Nestor an eternity, and must in fact have been several hours. Gradually the cloudlayers thinned, and he could see that he was being carried over what must be part of the Great Swamp, at a height almost too great to be frightening at all. The cloud layer above had now thinned sufficiently to let him see from the position of the sun that his flight was to the southwest.
Eventually there appeared in the swamp below an irregular small island, bearing a stand of stark trees and marked at its edges by low cliffs of clay or marl. At this point the dragon turned suddenly into a gentle downward spiral. Nestor could see nothing below but the island itself which might prompt a descent. And it was atop one of those low, wilderness cliffs of clay that the creature landed.
Nestor was dropped rudely onto the rough ground, but he was not released. Before his stiffened limbs could react to the possibilities of freedom, he was grabbed again. One of the dragon's feet clamped round his right leg, lifted hirri, and hung him up like meat to dry, with his right ankle wedged painfully in the crotch of a tree some five meters above the ground. He hung there upside down and yelled.
His screams of new pain and fresh outrage were loud, but they had no effect. Ignoring Nestor's noise, his tormentor spread its wings and flapped heavily off the cliff. It descended in a glide to land at the edge of the swamp, some fifteen or twenty meters below. There, moving in a cautious waddle, it positioned itself at the edge of a pool. Placid as a woolbeast, it extended its neck and lapped up a drink. It continued to ignore the sword which still stuck out of its hip.
When it had satisfied its thirst, would it wish to dine? That thought brought desperation. Nestor contracted his body, trying to pull himself up within grabbing distance of the branches imprisoning his leg. But his right arm, like his whole body, was stiff and sore, and his left arm could hardly be made to work at all. The fingers of his right hand brushed the branch above, but he could do no more, and fell back groaning. Even if by some all-out contortion he were to succeed in getting his foot free, it might well be at the price of a breakbone fall onto the hard ground at the top of the cliff.
Sounds of splashing drew Nestor's attention back to the swamp. Down there the dragon had plunged one taloned foot into the swamp. Shortly the foot was brought out again, holding a large snake. Nestor, squinting into his upside-down view of the situation, estimated that the striped serpent was as thick as a man's leg. It coiled and thrashed and hissed, its fangs stabbing uselessly against the dragon's scales. The head kept on striking even after the dragon had snapped a large bite out of the snake's midsection, allowing its tail half to fall free.
Nestor drew some small encouragement from the fact that the dragon seemed to prefer snake to human flesh. He tried again, more methodically this time, to work himself free. But in this case method had no more success than frenzy.
He must have fainted again, for his next awareness was of being picked up once more by his captor. He was being held against the dragon's breast in the same way as before, and his arms were already firmly pinned. This time the takeoff was easier, though hardly any less terrifying — it consisted in the dragon's launching itself headlong from the brink of the small cliff, and gaining flying speed in a long, swamp-skimming dive that took Nestor within centimeters of the scummy water. Moss-hung trees flitted past him to right and left, with birds scattering from the trees in noisy alarm. A monkbird screamed, and then was left below.
Again Nestor faded in and out of consciousness. Again he was unsure of how much time was passing. If the damnable thing had not hauled him all this way to eat him, then what was its purpose? He was not being taken home to some gargantuan nest to feed its little ones — no, by all the gods and the Treasure of Benambra, it could not be that. For such an idea to occur to him meant that he was starting to go mad. Everyone knew that dragons built no nests and fed no young… and that no flying dragon was big enough to carry a grown man…
The clouds in the west were definitely reddening toward sunset before the flight was over. At last the
