Page 207 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

“Always. But we’re not dead yet,” she said, looking down into the grand staircase, where smoldering barbarians were setting wood alight.

Widow Lessup ran through the door and shut it behind her. Below, they heard doors breaking, crockery smashing, and assorted calls in tongues perhaps only Rainfall understood.

“May For have the sense to keep them in the tunnel until this is all over,” Widow Lessup said.

“I wish you’d gone along,” Rainfall said.

“Me? Crawl through all those cobwebs? I’d rather be stripped and carried off by the Hordes of Hesstur out there than breathe spider sacs.”

Wistala looked at the desk, nosed open a drawer.

“Whatever are you doing there, Tala?” Rainfall said.

“Your cord-and-seal cutter, there, the short sharp blade. Let’s have it.”

Widow Lessup ran for it. “Are we to slit each other’s throats? This is just like that play . . . ummm, the one with the old tyrant king and the three children . . .”

“No. I need my wings. It’s a bit early, but I can move them a little, even though they’re still encased. I may be able to fly.”

“How does a knife—?” Rainfall said. “Oh.”

“Widow Lessup,” Wistala said, pointing to the twin lines of raised scales on her back. “You’ll have to do it. Hard and fast, parallel to my fringe, like you’re dressing a goat.”

Rainfall grasped her by the hand and pointed.

“Oh, I don’t know—”

“Fast!” Wistala said. “But not too deep. Cut the skin along the stretch marks—that’s probably the way it would open naturally.”

Widow Lessup took a deep breath. . . .

The first one hurt. The second one hurt even more, because she still had the pain of the first lining her back. Wistala tried to ignore the pain, and concentrated on the crashing sounds on the floor below. She also smelled smoke.

She extended her bloody wings as far as she could in the library, marveling at their form. They seemed a bit undersize compared with her mother’s, but then they weren’t fully grown yet, as she was in the middle of her final drakka growth spurt.

“I take it you’re going to go up and out?” Rainfall said, looking at the crystal cupola.

Wistala plunged her head through the hole in the library floor, as though she were going for a fish through an ice hole. She locked her jaws over the head of a barbarian running with an armful of stolen linens through the corridor below, pulled him up, and flung him skyward and through the glass, which mostly shattered outward from the force with which he was thrown.

Widow Lessup sighed. “It was such a pretty thing. Why must pretty things always be smashed?”

Wistala reared up on her saa and, using the scales on her sii, smashed away the remaining bits of glass. She took a deep breath and roared out her pain and anger into the night: “Let all who would burn these books know that there is an Agent of Librarians here. Enter to curses and peril!”

“You’ll have to leave that wondrous chair behind,” Wistala said. “I’m not sure I can carry you and it, as well.”>“Night-of-blades—tsk,” Rainfall said. “Barbaric phrases, from a Thane of the Hypatian Empire.”

The Dragonblade raised his spear; its tip glowed faintly red, like cooling metal from the furnace, but the steel couldn’t have been more than torch-hot.

Forstrel knelt beside Rainfall’s wheeled chair and tied the sash about his waist, as calmly as though ten-score armed barbarians didn’t surround the house. Rainfall raised his arms a little so Forstrel could work the knot after wrapping the silk twice about his waist.

“I appreciate the call, though not the companions. You keep strange and lowly company these days, Hammar.”

“Ha!” Hammar shouted. “This from an elf with a pet dragon!”

“You come bearing arms to this estate, do violence to my animals, and attempt to murder my wife,” Rainfall said. “I suppose you know your thaneship is now utterly forfeit.”

“Glad I am to be free of the title,” Hammar said. “You will wish, before the moon reaches its zenith, that you’d shown more loyalty to me. The barbarians have admirable methods for dealing with those who show disloyalty to their lords.”

“I’ve never claimed loyalty to Hammar, only to the office of thane,” Rainfall said. “If you had a jot of your father’s wisdom, you’d know that way is better.”

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