Page 156 of Dragon Fate (Age of Fire 6)

“Blather and rot,” Rayg said. “Sing another pleasant little ditty, AuRon, while I carve up your mate’s breast.” Rayg stepped across the room with a long, razor-edged knife.

AuRon could feel the tension in the air, like the energy stored in the Lavadome’s crystals.

“Imfamnia, ware!” AuRon shouted.

Rayg had done nothing, of course, but Imfamnia didn’t know that. She crouched and spat fire in Rayg’s direction.

He cartwheeled out of the way, showing the agility of an elvish dancer. He reached into his voluminous overcoat and hurled a handful of glittering, starlike spiked shapes at Imfamnia. They passed through her scale like arrows shot through a gauze curtain, leaving black rings at the holes.

Imfamnia howled in rage and pain. Smoke from her flame filled the room. The trolls hauled on the chains and dragged AuRon and Natasatch to the ground.

But he could still see the action. And, more important, breathe. Maddened, Imfamnia threw herself at Rayg, who jumped out of the way again, perhaps not quite so quickly as the last time. Instead of an elvish dancer, he was a supremely agile human warrior.

Imfamnia crashed into the hard stone of his tower, cracking it and opening a wide fissure in a window. Scale and bits of masonry flew. AuRon wondered who’d built the tower. Certainly not dwarfs if the base cracked from just the force of a dragon striking it.

“I think, Rayg, you overbuilt. I’m no dwarf, but it looks like you built your tower on a poor foundation,” Natasatch said.

The tower swayed but did not give way.

AuRon heard the trolls’ lung-flaps working harder in the smoke.

“Get them out!” he shouted at the trolls. They just stood there. He took out his horn and started blasting.

Imfamnia charged out of the smoke, blood smearing down her forehead, and AuRon saw her hindquarters lash around as the trolls dragged them outside.

He saw Imfamnia with the crystal staff in her hand. She hurled it like a spear at Rayg, an unnatural motion for a dragon but a perfectly sound one for a hominid. The staff broke and the Lavadome lurched in the air, tilted.

Suddenly everything was groaning and cracking in the tower. AuRon scrambled to push Natasatch out, dragging a troll.

“Rayg, when you built that tower, I imagine you thought it would always sit on a level surface.”

The Lavadome shifted back level again. The tower didn’t cease groaning, however, and pieces of masonry and jets of dust shot from the bottom two levels.

He heard a pained cry from Imfamnia.

The air above was full of whirling bats, disturbed by the change in the light in the Lavadome, AuRon guessed. Flocks like clouds circled about the gardens. The vermin had multiplied in the years of the Lavadome’s neglect.

Rayg staggered out and into the bats.

“Revenges! Revenges for our Tyr and our dark!” they squeaked, covering him in flapping wing and fur. Just like his brother, AuRon thought, to inspire such loyalty in vermin.

A cloud of bats whirled overhead like a living tornado. The funnel reached down . . .

AuRon lashed out sideways with a saa. Now that he knew where to hit a troll, it was easy to detach the sense-orb.

The remaining troll, waving those oversized, overmuscled, dragon-killing arms, staggered through the cloud of bats, its sense organ covered in a bag of brown balls of hair and leathery wings. The bats in the air around it dodged its blows as easily as they circumnavigated stalactites. It plunged off the edge of Imperial Rock with a last surprised hoot.

The tower gave a final shudder and fell in on itself blam blam blam blam! as each floor collapsed into the other. Metallic shrieks and the sound of glass breaking added to the noise.

The tower’s collapse shocked Rayg and Imfamnia out of their duel. “Hurry, before the Firemaids find us!” Rayg said.

Infamnia came to her senses, picked up Rayg, and threw herself into the air, out over the edge of the Imperial Rock. But there are disadvantages to not being born a dragon but living within one. She forgot to check her wings before trying to fly. A cut tendon left a third of one wing flapping. They both followed the troll off the edge.

“How did the bats know?” Natasatch asked.

“I imagine Nilrasha or my brother told them.”

The Lavadome belonged to the dragons again. And the bats, of course.

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