back claws were worse. Even so, he couldn't bring himself to simply roll over and die. There was always a chance. He could always get lucky…
They hunt in packs, remember.
The mud would slow it down, though. From moving like lightning to merely very, very fast…
Shit. I'm going to die.
The snapper opened its jaws and charged, and time seemed to slow. Even through the mud, Sollos felt the ground shake with its each step. He dropped the bow and pulled out his knives. It was coming for him. For a split second he seemed completely unable to move.
At the last possible moment, his arms and legs finally remembered what they were for. He didn't bother trying to step out of the way, but let himself fall sideways, out of the monster's path. As he moved, he twisted. One knife jabbed straight at the snapper's face, trying to distract it. The other arced in a vicious backhand towards where he hoped the creature's throat would be.
All completely wasted. Maybe if it hadn't been for the mud…
The first knife missed. The second hit something and was wrenched out of Sollos's hand, and then the snapper smashed into him, the sheer force ripping him out of the mud and tossing him into the air. Teeth tore at his shoulder. There was a sharp pain from one of his ankles, and then he landed on his back, hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs. The snapper was flying towards him, all teeth and claws. And yet there was something not quite right about it…
He thrust the knife up towards the monster with both hands and closed his eyes. The snapper fell onto him, jaws gaping. He felt a searing flash of pain, and then everything went mercifully black.
He was in a pool, deep in a cave, far beneath the Worldspine. In one of the secret places that only the Outsiders knew. The water was icy cold. The darkness was absolute and the silence immense. He was alone. He was alone because this was what his clan did when a boy became a man. Except his clan was gone, and he was more alone than anyone had ever been. Only him and Kemir…
Something snatched his leg. He didn't feel it coming, and it dragged him down so fast that he didn 't even have time to breathe. He vanished with barely a ripple and sank like a stone. The water became colder and colder until it began to burn, and then the darkness blossomed into light, and the water wasn't water, but white hot fire, stripping his flesh and searing his bones to ash, and there was a face, the face of a dragon.
Something slammed into him. He opened his eyes and the world and the pain came flooding in. He was lying on a damp dirt floor. Everything hurt. His cheek was pressed into the toe of someone's boot.
'Morning,' said a voice that was both too loud and too far away. His head hurt. He started to retch, but that sent such spasms of pain through his ribs that he stopped. He'd seen someone once, in Queen Shezira's eyrie, caught by the idle swish of a dragon's tail. They'd flown about a hundred feet through the air and they hadn't got up again. If they had, Sollos thought, this is how they'd have felt.
Unless…
What happened when you died? He remembered the snapper well enough, so that had to be what had happened. The dragon-priests said that everyone went to the great dragon in the sky to be forged into new souls in the great cosmic fire. But the dragon-priests were mad.
'Are you going to lie there all day?'
'Kemir?' He tried to move. Bad idea. 'The snapper…'
'Got an arrow through its head. And so did its friend.'
'This really hurts.' For a moment Sollos had the almost overwhelming urge to get up and look himself over, just to make sure there were no bits missing. One bite was all it took to lose an arm or a leg, after all.
Even the thought of moving triggered fresh spasms of pain. 'My ribs…'
'Best I could tell there's nothing broken. Nasty wound on your shoulder. That'll need seeing to. The rest of you looks all right. You took a mighty thump when that thing crashed into you, though. You're probably bruised all over. Lucky it didn't land on top of you.'
'It did. Didn't it?'
'Half and half. It sort of bounced off you and ended up lying to one side. Otherwise only the ancestors know how I'd have pulled you out of that mud. Bloody stuff.'
Very slowly, Sollos rolled onto his back. He started to take a deep breath and then quickly thought better of it. 'My head hurts. Got any water?' He frowned. Instinctively, his hands reached for his knives, if only to make sure they were still there. They weren't. 'Where are we?'
'We're in the Outsider settlement, my friend. Home sweet home.'
'Where are my knives?'
'All right. We're prisoners in the Outsider settlement. That would be more accurate.'
Sollos blinked. Carefully, he looked around. Walls made of ill-fitted planks of wood surrounded him. Soft sunlight filtered in through the cracks. 'Prisoners? Why?'
Kemir shuffled his feet. 'There were… words.'
'What did you say?'
'Oh, nothing to get so upset about. I blundered into the place in the small hours of the morning, which probably didn't help, and since I had you slung over my back, I wasn't in much of a position to argue. And they asked if we had anything to do with the dragon they'd seen earlier, and I said yes, and they asked if the dragon- men were going to come back and burn the place, and so I said yes, probably, since that's what they usually do, either that or the rider was just scouting for a good place to buy dried fish, which, let's face it, was about the only thing this lot have to trade. They didn't take that too well.'
Sollos rolled his eyes. He could do that, he discovered, without anything hurting.
'Don't get all crotchety! Like I said, it was the middle of the night and I woke them all up, so they were pretty grumpy. All right, I might have shouted at them at bit as well, but I'd been carrying you through that lucking mud for hours. I'd lost count of how many times I fell over and I'd had enough. Bloody stuff was bad enough when it was just me.'
'All right, all right.' Sollos forced himself to ignore the pain. He took a deep breath, sat up and then stood. And nearly fell down again.
Kemir caught him.
'Shit! You didn't tell me I'd broken my ankle.'
'Really?' Kemir bent down. 'I didn't spot that. Let me have a look.'
'No! Don't…' He hopped back and forth, trying to keep his balance. 'Ow!'
'That's not broken. That's just a sprain.'
'How do you know? Ow! Stop that!'
'See. No grating bones. Strap that up and you'll be fine. Well, maybe in a couple of days.'
Standing on one leg wasn't working out. Sollos tried sitting down, but then his ribs shrieked at him. He ended up flat out across the floor, back where he'd started. 'So we found the settlement, and now we're stuck here.'
'That's it.' Kemir shrugged. He gave the walls a good shake. The hut seemed ready to fall apart. 'Not exactly stuck. We can leave whenever we want, and I doubt they'd stop us either. Of course, with no bows, no knives, no armour and you being in the state you're in, we wouldn't get very far. Not that we'd know which way to go in the first place.'
'That's fantastic, Kemir. Thank you.'
Kemir snorted. 'Better than being eaten by snappers, I thought.'
'One way to look at it, I suppose.'
'Not as dull as picking our arses back in the valley with those stuck-up knights, either.'
'Since you put it like that.'
Kemir lay on the floor next to Sollos. Together, they stared up at the ceiling. 'I did pick up one thing while we were all busy shouting at each other.'
'What's that?'
'Rider Semian wasn't the first dragon they've seen in these parts lately.'
'Really?'
'Could be they've seen another. Could be it was white.'
'Could be they want to give us our stuff back and then show us where it is?'
