Page 51 of Dragon Strike (Age of Fire 4)

Wistala wondered why he didn’t roar. Male dragons, in her limited experience, made a good deal of noise when they fought, especially when in pain. DharSii conserved his breath, struck, struck again. She’d never felt such power in a blow before. It reminded her of a mountain-troll, toughened by climbing. He struck, not biting, but stabbing forward with nose-tip and tail-point, and with each strike she heard her own scale breaking.

He battered her. He never closed, never came to grips in a manner that might allow her to claw or bite. She managed to latch on to his crest, but came away with a bloody sii and a torn-out claw when he recoiled.

“Yield!” he said, his voice oddly calm. “Cry settled! Cry, curse it all, cry!”

“Never!” she managed, wondering what in the six skies “cry settled” was supposed to mean.

His nose guard was cracked and sat askew, giving his snout the appearance of being bent a little. If she weren’t so battered and bruised, she might have laughed.

Her tail felt emptiness behind. She’d been driven right to the brink of the pit—

She batted one of the cauldrons filled with hot oil with her tail. It broke loose from its chains and sent a shower of oil toward him. The oil hissed as it struck on his flank and he scrambled to get out of the way.

Seeing a chance, she rushed forward, slipping as she passed over the spilled oil, hardly hot anymore after expending its burn in the first instant of striking the cool stone.

They reared up, grappling, biting and snapping. Wistala had always counted herself strong, and for a moment she bent him back—

But then her saa slid.

The oil might have cooled, but the footing was treacherous. DharSii lunged. She heard his hot panting in her ear, felt his breath beating at her neck as they strained, his griff locked in hers. Her tail sought purchase but found only empty air—

Then she was over.

She fell with a shriek. Just as she heard DharSii gasp something—it may have been “no”—her own frightened wail overwhelmed his word.

She tried to open her wings, a natural instinct, but while the chasm was wide it was not wide enough for that. She heard something snap, felt a shock, heard a flapping and realized one wing was broken, whipping wildly as she spun down—but the other was open, turning her fall into a crazy spin, like those spinning one-winged seeds those tall trees dropped in Hypatia’s northern forests.

She bounced off the wall, or a projection, and continued her fall, some instinct keeping that one wing open.

It was the most terrifying moment of her life.

Later she wondered how long she fell. It felt like an eternity, a day, but it couldn’t have been more than a few moments, for when she finally struck she could still see a circle of light above, not quite a star but far smaller than the moon.

Her eyes perceived a bump in the circle. Natural irregularity, one of the oil-pots, or DharSii?

She’d landed on something spongy. The soggy slap shocked her; she felt wet, clinging wet, all around.

Stunned for a moment, she could only lie there, looking up at that far-off circle of light, a wet, rotting smell like a barrel-full of last year’s swampwater, alternately revolting and comforting—the latter because a dying dragon would have more important things on her mind, one would think, than mouldering water.

Of all the dragons in the world to appear here—she couldn’t have been more distressed if she’d just fought AuRon. Of course, there weren’t many dragons left; she’d looked hard enough when she first uncased her wings. Would the hot oil scar him?

Then it struck her that her first thought upon landing, before judging her injuries to determine if they might be her last thoughts, was of the dragon she’d just fought.

She chuckled like Rainfall amused by one of old Stog’s mulish tantrums, a very undragonlike noise, but the laughter of elves infected all who heard it into imitation.

She cleared her mind with a determined effort and shifted her weight, testing limb and tail. Pain in her injured right wing stabbed, a fast, deep, twisting spear that bored right up through her shoulder muscle and shut her eyes. Her wing was more than half closed and hung at a strange angle. It also hurt when she breathed on her left side, though whether that was related to her wing or not she couldn’t say. Rainfall had done some sketches of her muscles once, just for his own satisfaction, and commented that a dragon’s entire body pivoted on the wing nubs.

Strangely, the most painful wound was that arrow in her tail. Of course the punctured flesh had a chance to grow tender. Luckily both sides of the arrow were still visible. She broke off the feathered end, then extracted the head by pulling it forward.

Fierce new pain made her eyes water. She spat out the arrowhead. Good workmanship, and the metal was well shaped and wholesome-smelling. She swallowed it.

Tangles and angles, she had more important matters at snout. She blinked and tried to clear her head.

The blighters had said something or other about this being an old well. She wondered. Down here there were ancient stairs, not masonry but steps cut into the rock itself, wide steps, even so that a full-grown dragon might use them, spiraling up. They must end somewhere above, for she was sure they did not go all the way up to the blighter defenses at the top.

Rainfall’s laboriously taught logic told her that the stairs must have been built, then, by someone who didn’t particularly desire access to the surface.

The cave she’d fallen down widened at the bottom like a bell, and it was filled with mushroom-like growths. Water soaked the muck here. She sensed that it moved, so it must be coming from somewhere and going to somewhere. She stood up, rather shakily, and surveyed her surroundings. It seemed there was some sort of lip or ledge above.

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