The Walls of Air Page 0,106

with a rolling breath of oily stench and fumes that stung his eyes. Rudy blinked, blinded, wiped at the burning tears...

And there it was.

He had never imagined anything so hideous or so gaudy. He had been expecting something green and vaguely crocodilian, like the dragons in picture books, not the product of an unnatural mating between a dinosaur and a calliope. It was enamelled Chinese red and flaming gold, flickering with bands of green and black and white that mottled the lean-ribbed sides like a beadwork on a pair of slippers. The head was

massive, horned, mailed, and bristling with flared scales of purple, black, and gold, which gave it a curiously beribboned effect; from the tufted whorls of streamers, spikes, and fins on that snake-like nape, a long ridge ran backward, up over the towering fulcrum of the mighty hind legs and down the counterpoised bulk of the spined, deadly tail. Green slime dripped from the armoured chin as it champed and swallowed. The huge head turned, not with the slow, saurian deliberation of a movie monster's, but as quick as a bird's. Rudy found himself looking into round, golden eyes.

The amber quicksilver of those twin mirrors drank his soul. He did not understand the vision that he saw in them, distant and clear, striking resonances of certainty within his heart. He saw the far-off image of his own chained hands silhouetted against the freezing arch of winter stars. An echo of bitter cold and blinding despair pierced him from what he knew, as surely as he knew his name, was his own future. Mesmerized, he could neither have moved nor looked away, had he willed it. He had to see, to understand...

He had never thought that anything that huge could move so fast. The dragon lunged like a lizard. Waking from his trance, Rudy could scarcely have moved if he had been ready. But instead of ripping, eight-inch fangs, all that struck him was a whiplash of kicked sand, for the dragon turned in mid-spring with a metallic hiss of rage and pain. Rudy threw himself aside to avoid the lashing hind foot, then raised his head from the ground in time to see Ingold leap away from the steaming deluge of blood that burst from the monster's slashed flank. From the end of that long neck, the armoured head struck like a snake. Ingold sprang clear of it, his sword striking sparks from the mailed nose.

The dragon reared itself back on the massive fulcrum of its long hind legs, its belly gleaming like stained ivory in the sick grey light. It strode forward and lunged down again, snapping, then half-turned to slash with twenty-five feet of spined tail whose force could easily have broken a man's back. Ingold moved out of range, but a moment later his sword whined in again, cleaving through air rotten with the choking fumes of the dragon's breath, to strike at the slashing teeth and iron mouth.

Don't go for the head, dammit, Rudy thought cloudily. There's nothing but armour there. Then, as the wizard ducked back from the lash of the tail again, he realized what Ingold was doing. He was opening the dragon up, distracting its attention, so that Rudy could go in for the kill.

The fanning mane of its protective bone shield guarded the dragon's neck from the front, making it impossible for its victim to get in any kind of killing blow. But every time the monster brought its head down to snap at Ingold, the whole of its neck brushed the ground. From where he lay belly-down in the sand, Rudy could see how delicate were the beaded scales covering the pumping arteries of the throat. A single blow would do it - provided, of course, a man was willing to run in under that heaving crimson wall of angry flesh.

His knees weak at the thought, Rudy scanned that mountain of scarlet iron for another target.

He could see none. His scanty knowledge of anatomy didn't cover dragons. He had no idea where they kept their hearts; and anyway, he doubted his sword would pierce

the polychrome mail of its side.

The spiked club of the tail cut the air like a whip, its barbs skimming Ingold's shoulder as he dodged it, with a force that spun him, bleeding, into the sand. The claws raked at him like swords; Ingold cut at them desperately from where he lay. Rudy knew that if the dragon pinned the old man, it would be all