Now it was our turn to cheer. More lightning bolts licked over the surface of the sky, one finding soft belly scales and another taking off the wing of an unlucky Yaruban beast. Both shrieked in agony and plummeted toward the beach far below us.
I chanced a quick glance behind us before we reached the range of a fire zahhak’s breath, and my stomach churned. The Mahisagaris had made up more ground than I’d expected. They were in good formation, ready for the fight. Even if we somehow managed to survive the inferno that awaited us, we wouldn’t be able to dive away without showing the Mahisagaris our tail feathers. We were going to have to make a turning fight, which was the last thing I wanted when we were still outnumbered and our zahhaks were so tired.
But there was nothing for it now. Fire zahhaks began spewing their breath, and I knew the only way to survive was to dive, so I put Sultana’s nose down, urging her on with snaps of the reins and pressure in my seat, my body bending low, like that would somehow make her go that little bit faster.
My mouth went dry as flames roared over my head, the skin of my face burning from the searing heat, the stench of brimstone filling my nostrils. I hunched over Sultana’s neck, praying that we would make it through unscathed, half-certain that her tail would catch fire, or one of her wings, but suddenly there was clear air all around us, and the time had come to begin the fight in earnest.
We banked right, arcing across the sky, my head twisted around to track the acid zahhaks still coming at us, close enough now that we couldn’t charge at one another in formation like cavalrymen. Now it would be a series of duels, every zahhak and rider pairing herself against her opposite number. For me, that was Ahmed Shah. He’d been chasing me this whole time, and his zahhak was fresh, fast enough that I barely managed to get Sultana’s snout around to face her before we crossed paths.
He broke into me and I into him, our zahhaks crossing belly to belly before bending themselves through tight arcs in the sky. I was looking straight up at him across the circle as each of us tried to edge closer to the other’s tail feathers, but he was playing it smart. He had chosen to make our fight one of stamina rather than pure agility. He knew Sultana was tired, knew that maintaining a crushingly tight turn while keeping her wings flapping for speed was the hardest test of a zahhak’s strength and endurance. And he was confident that my thunder zahhak would falter before his animal did. But he didn’t know Sultana.
She dug into the turn, the force of her wingtips tearing open the sky itself, sending spirals of white vapor streaming off her primary feathers. I knew that we wouldn’t be able to win this fight the conventional way, by gradually gaining the angle we wanted, and Sultana must have sensed it too, because she deployed her hood, the sudden increase in surface area providing a new source of lift that tightened the turn that much more. Suddenly, rather than our being stuck at opposite ends of the same circle in the sky, Sultana’s nose started tracking toward Ahmed’s tail.
I gritted my teeth and clung to the reins for dear life, the tightness of the turn putting a pressure on my body that seemed to multiply the weight of my limbs and my head. It drove the blood from my brain and the light from my eyes. I had to scream and tense my stomach muscles and my leg muscles, clenching down as hard as I could just to stay awake. But we were so close, so tantalizingly close. Ahmed Shah was just a few degrees off Sultana’s nose. Another second, two on the outside, and we would have him.
Suddenly, the Mahisagari zahhak put on a burst of speed with her wings, and we stopped gaining on her tail. She tightened her own turn, racing around the circle, and my heart sank as I realized that I’d been duped. We’d never had the energy to catch her. He’d been playing us for fools, tricking us into giving it everything we had. And now he had us right where he wanted us. We were spent, and he was fresh, and the next thing I knew, I had the gaping maw of an acid zahhak lining up for a shot on Sultana’s tail feathers.
CHAPTER 31
No, I wasn’t going to let it end this way. I couldn’t. Not after everything we’d been through. I was not going to let Ahmed Shah steal my life from me.
There was nothing left to do but make him miss. I pulled hard on the reins, directing Sultana tighter into the turn, and lower. If we didn’t have the energy to tighten the turn ourselves, we’d use God’s energy to do it for us. The moment her nose dropped below the horizon, our turn tightened, our speed shot up. At the same instant, Ahmed Shah took his shot.
A bright blob of acid zipped between Sultana’s right wing and her tail feathers, somehow missing the both of us by inches, but my stomach clenched. That had been close. Even with the dive, we weren’t getting away from him the way we should have been. And now Sultana was scared; her mouth was hanging open. She was looking behind her as the acid zahhak stayed glued to us through the turn. I could have sworn that her emerald eye flickered to me in that moment, pleading with me to find us some way out
