Page 269 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

Near the stair, Djaybee sat hunched over, a dark stain soaking his back. He’d never more gaze at the stars and draw maps with their aid.

Yellowteeth might have been a good assassin, but he hadn’t learned all he could of dragon anatomy.

She twitched and lowered her griff above the spear point in an eyeblink, knocking it aside as Yellowteeth threw himself off balance trying to ram it home. The point scraped across the floor instead of burrowing into her neck.

She helped him off his feet by lashing him between the shoulder blades with her tail as she came to her fours. She put a sii down on the back of his head, grinding his face into the geometry of the floor.

“In my experience, a good courier always asks if there is to be a return message,” Wistala said. “Will you be good enough to carry an answer back for me?”

“Mmpfh,” Yellowteeth snuffled.

“How thoughtful of you. Tell Gobold to come himself and try to break my fangs, if he wishes to deliver death. Now run, before I breakfast on roast blighter.”

She let Yellowteeth up, and he made better time for the stairs than he ever had running coal. If nothing else, he would muddy matters below, and he might even claim the job was done in order to effect an escape from the Wheel of Fire.

A fine cold morning of clean air and mists clinging to the Ba-drink had begun outside. She would not be taken like a rat in a mountaintop cage. The only passage out was down, but she did not want to fight her way through tunnels filled with dwarves, where she would run out of foua before they ran out of spears.

She needed the sky, and to learn if Ragwrist hovered at the edge of the siege or not.

On other days she’d examined her tower room, there were hours of leisure to do so, and the stone was most worn to the northwest, where the wind blew coldest in winter and ice accumulated. There were a multitude of tiny cracks in the masonry between the spaced windows.

She went to her water cistern and took a full mouthful of water, and imitating the unpleasant DharSii, spat it up and down around the masonry, did it once more with a fresh mouthful until the stone was well-wetted.

Then she employed her foua on the wind-chilled stone.

Loud cracks sounded through the flames. Wistala breathed through another window and smashed her tail against the wall, over and over again, as Auron had in the escape chimney, only this time a thousand times the strength was behind it.

A great piece of wall fell away between the two windows.

She could not quite squeeze through yet, but it was far easier to open it wider by pulling at the broken edges and exposed brickwork. A few more bruising tail strikes and she was out, even as footsteps sounded on the stair.

Wistala took wing above the city of the Wheel of Fire.

She roared and dived between the Tall Rock and Thul’s Hardhold, aiming for the Titan bridge. She extended her claws and tail as though to land, then stopped herself with swift beats of her wings just above the bridge.

A highpoon trailing chain, fired by a mighty war-machine, shot across the bridge. As it fell the chain caught and Wistala slipped sideways to grab the chain. A second highpoon lanced out from the other side, but she was watching for it, and reared out of the way.

Father, your pain was not wasted, even if your head now sits on a war-machine.

She flew into the air, as hard and as fast as she could, as other spears whizzed toward her. One pierced her wing, another glanced off her saa, but scale thickened by dwarf gold kept the worst of the damage out.

She swung the round iron weight at the end of the chain, back and forth, back and forth as she rose, with each swing building momentum. She let it strike the Titan bridge, breaking off a massive chunk which spun as it fell into the Ba-drink.

She flew off, flying oddly, fighting to the counterweight on the end of the chain, but her wing muscles were equal to the weight. She smashed a tower on the Hardhold where dwarves fired crossbow bolts. Two swings of the ball, and the shattered tower collapsed and slid down, smashing balcony, gallery, and garden on the way to the wharf.

Wistala noted that there were arrows sticking out of her scales and wing-leather, but in the heat of combat, she felt no pain.

She carried her burden to the far side of the Ba-drink and let the weight go at the flat part of ground by the landing. She flew over the lines of dwarves. Their war-machines were hurling missiles down the mountainside at a wave of barbarians coming up.

“Dhssol! Dhssol!” she wailed as she passed over the lines of dwarves at the wall. “All is lost! Dssol!”

And so she called over the lines of dwarves until she spotted Lord Lobok, standing with a few nobles and commanders on a prominence behind the wall at arrow-shot.

“Oh, Dhssol!” Wistala mourned as she landed. “I have seen it. There are too many! All is lost, see how they approach. You must fall back to the city, we are surely defeated on these slopes.”

“Terrible thought,” Lobok said, wringing his hands as a few ineffective arrows flew over the wall and landed near them in the rocks. “It goes badly for us, Battle Commander! These dwarves are the Wheel of Fire’s last hope.”

“Who needs a last hope when there’s a battle being won? Your imagination has you counting each one thrice,” the commander said. “Step back and let veterans command the fight. The closer they come, the more we kill, see? Our losses are but few.”

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