“Sorry, but—”
“You can’t leave them to their fate!”
Rincewind looked surprised. “I can’t?” he said.
“No. You can’t. Look, I’ll be frank. I’ve worked with better material than you, but it’s either that or-have you ever spent a million years in a coal measure?”
“Look,I—”
“So if you don’t stop arguing I’ll chop your head off.”
Rincewind saw his own arm snap up until the shimmering blade was humming a mere inch from his throat. He tried to force his fingers to let go. They wouldn’t.
“I don’t know how to be a hero!” he shouted.
“I propose to teach you.”
Bronze Psepha rumbled deep in his throat.
K!sdra the dragonrider leaned forward and squinted across the clearing. “I see him,” he said. He swung himself down easily from branch to branch and landed lightly on the tussocky grass, drawing his sword. He took a long look at the approaching man, who was obviously not keen on leaving the shelter of the trees. He was armed, but the dragonrider observed with some interest the strange way in which the man held the sword in front of him at arm’s length, as though embarrassed to be seen in its company.
K!sdra hefted his own sword and grinned expansively as the wizard shuffled towards him. Then he leapt.
Later, he remembered only two things about the fight. He recalled the uncanny way in which the wizard’s sword curved up and caught his own blade with a shock that jerked it out of his grip. The other thing—and it was this, he averred, that led to his downfall—was that the wizard was covering his eyes with one hand.
K!sdra jumped back to avoid another thrust and fell full length on the turf. With a snarl Psepha unfolded his great wings and launched himself from his tree.
A moment later the wizard was standing over him, shouting, “Tell it that if it singes me I’ll let the sword go. I will. I’ll let it go! So tell it!”
The tip of the black sword was hovering over K!sdra’s throat, What was odd was that the wizard was obviously struggling with it, and it appeared to be singing to itself.
“Psepha!” K!sdra shouted.
The dragon roared in defiance, but pulled out of the dive that would have removed Rincewind’s head, and flapped ponderously back to the tree.
“Talk!” screamed Rincewind.
K!sdra squinted at him up the length of the sword.
“What would you like me to say?” he asked.
“What?”
“I said what would you like me to say?”
“Where are my friends? The barbarian and the little man is what I mean.”
“I expect they have been taken back to the Wyrmberg.”
Rincewind tugged desperately against the surge of the sword, trying to shut his mind to Kring’s bloodthirsty humming.
“The Wyrmberg. There is only one. It is Dragonhome.”
“And I suppose you were waiting to take me there, eh?”
K!sdra gulped involuntarily as the tip of the sword pricked a bead of blood from his adam’s apple.
“Don’t want people to know you’ve got dragons here, eh?” snarled Rincewind.
The dragonrider forgot himself enough to nod, and came within a quarter-inch of cutting his own throat.
Rincewind looked around desperately, and realized that this was something he was really going to have to go through with.
“Right then,” he said as diffidently as he could manage. “You’d better take me to this Wyrmberg of yours, hadn’t you?”
“I was supposed to take you in dead,” muttered K!sdra sullenly.
Rincewind looked down at him and grinned slowly. It was a wide, manic and utterly humourless rictus that was the sort of grin that is normally accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out picking scraps out of the teeth.
“Alive will do,” said Rincewind. “If we’re talking about anyone being dead, remember whose sword is in which hand.”
“If you kill me, nothing will prevent Psepha killing you,” shouted the prone dragonrider.
“So what I’ll do is, I’ll chop bits off,” agreed the wizard. He tried the effect of the grin again.
“Oh, all right,” said K!sdra sulkily. “Do you think I’ve got an imagination?”
He wriggled out from under the sword and waved at the dragon, which took wing again and glided in towards them. Rincewind swallowed.
“You mean we’ve got to go on that?” he said. K!sdra looked at him scornfully, the point of Kring still aimed at his neck.
“How else would anyone get to the Wyrmberg?”
“I don’t know,” said Rincewind. “How else?”
“I mean, there is no other way. It’s flying or nothing.”
Rincewind looked again at the dragon before him. He could quite clearly see through it to the crushed grass on which it lay but, when he gingerly touched a scale that was a mere golden sheen on thin air, it felt solid enough. Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.
“I didn’t know dragons could be seen through,” he said.
K!sdra shrugged. “Didn’t you?” he said.
He swung himself astride the dragon awkwardly because Rincewind was hanging on to his belt. Once uncomfortably aboard the wizard moved his white-knuckle grip to a convenient piece of harness and prodded K! sdra lightly with the sword.
“Have you ever flown before?” said the dragonrider, without looking round.
“Not as such, no.”
“Would you like something to suck?”
Rincewind gazed at the back of the man’s head, then dropped to the bag of red and yellow sweets that was being proffered.
“Is it necessary?” he asked.
“It is traditional,” said K!sdra. “Please yourself.”
The dragon stood up, lumbered heavily across the meadow, and fluttered into the air.
Rincewind occasionally had nightmares about teetering on some intangible but enormously high place, and seeing a blue-distanced, cloud-punctuated landscape reeling away below him (this usually woke him up with his ankles sweating; he would have been even more worried had he known that the nightmare was not, as he thought, just the usual discworld vertigo. It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline).
This was not that event, but it was good practise for it. Psepha clawed its way into the air with a series of vertebrae-shattering bounds. At the top of its last leap the wide wings unfolded with a snap and spread out with a thump which shook the trees. Then the ground was gone, dropping away in a series of gentle jerks. Psepha was suddenly rising gracefully, the afternoon sunlight gleaming off wings that were still no more than a golden film. Rincewind made the mistake of glancing downwards, and found himself looking through the dragon to the treetops below. Far below. His stomach shrank at the sight.
Closing his eyes wasn’t much better, because it gave his imagination full rein. He compromised by gazing fixedly into the middle distance, where moorland and forest drifted by and could be contemplated almost casually.
Wind Snatched at him. K!sdra half turned and shouted into his ear.
