The troll placed his hand on the Copper’s chest, felt around, then turned away, kicking sand upon the corpse with those ridiculous back limbs.
“It appears you win again, AuRon,” Rayg said. “Though by default. Your amazing string of luck in single combat—”
With a screech Nilrasha ran forward.
“Wait, you won’t be harmed!” Rayg called. “That was just—”
She threw herself upon the huge troll, back legs tight against her side after the leap. She pedaled frantically with them, removing the troll’s scaly skin in bloody strips. The troll let out a gibbering hoot and then the blood quit spraying as it collapsed.
“You may depart, Natasatch,” Imfamnia said. “I think you’ll find it an easy glide to the surface.”
“No. Whatever fate my beloved and the father of my hatchlings faces, I share it with him.”
“As for the loser’s mate, you may go, too.” Rayg let out a corkscrew call and the trolls pawed back from Nilrasha. “We’ll see that the former Tyr’s body is properly—”
“No,” she snarled at the trolls, covering her mate’s body with her own.
Nilrasha, bleeding, wormed beneath her mate and with a heave of her back legs, lifted him across her back.
“Kill her!” Imfamnia shouted. “Rayg, you fool, have the trolls take her head.”
“They’re not going anywhere,” Rayg said.
Leaving a bright trail of commingled blood, Nilrasha pulled the limp body of her mate toward the exit, clutching it across the back with her stumps of wings.
“Are you mad?” Imfamnia asked.
Rayg shrugged. “He was good to me. What I am now is because of him, more than anything. I’d hoped he’d triumph over his brother.”
“I’ll deal with them myself, then,” she said, gathering herself for a leap.
Nilrasha raised her bloodied head. “You do that, Jade Queen. Oh, for that chance. If my last grapple is with you, I die exalted.” She spat out the stump of a broken tooth, leaving a trail of bloody slime hanging from her maw. She set her sii atop her mate’s body, ready to leave a ring of blood around it. “Well?”
Imfamnia paused. “Perhaps . . . not. Oh, crawl into a hole and die together. The world spins on and we shall ride it.”
She continued her crawl, made it past AuRon.
Was he imagining things, or did his brother’s good eye give a tiny wink?
Wistala thought it would be a battle for the history books, just because NoSohoth fought in it.
The ungainly old dragon panted through the air but must have been in some kind of training, because he managed to fly down the spine of the Red Mountains without collapsing or lagging behind.
It appeared he was capable of fury after all. “Betray me, will you? You pup!” This and much more issued forth from him, even in his exhausted slumbers between flights.
On the journey, DharSii did what he could to get them ready for battle. He divided his younger and more fit fliers from the older, lumbering dragons. Then each of those groups was divided into pairs. The front dragon would fly toward the destination, the one behind his wing keeping up and keeping watch on the lead. It was an old system dating back to DharSii’s days in the Lavadome as a very young dragon. How it would fare against the fancier evolutions of the Aerial Host—if much was left of it—these days remained to be seen.
They avoided Ghioz on the way, and stopped at Nilrasha’s needle to free her, but she’d been removed, along with her griffaran guard. Some local eagles said that before the last quarter moon—three weeks or so by a dwarfish calendar—a party of dragons and big, broad-shouldered beasts the eagles didn’t recognize came and took her away, the whole team of them carrying her off through the air in a net the way loads were swung up into a big ship.
Wistala quizzed them closely. It sounded as though the flying trolls had left the Star Tunnel and were ready to do NiVom and Imfamnia’s bidding.
Their enemy rose out of mountain to meet them. NiVom must have had word of their coming.
“A fight in the open air will be better,” DharSii said. “Room to maneuver against those trolls. They don’t look fast.”
“That’s a swarm of griffaran,” Wistala said. “Black as the pit. I prefer the old sort.”
“Don’t judge yet,” DharSii said. Wistala waited for him to elaborate, but he gave orders for the fast dragons to gain altitude and the slower ones to make for the Lavadome.
All at once the fight was upon them. The trolls and griffaran grew from distant dots to sets of claws and wings swooping through the air in an instant, it seemed. A griffaran raked a dragon—one of the Hypat contingent—across the flank and a red mist appeared and fell, spreading into nothingness. The crippled dragon plunged.
Another went down, one of the dragon tower contingent who’d flown south for the glory of battle. His flame gouted up in frustration. A troll smashed another dragon across the back with a massive fist and it folded horribly backward under the blow. Wistala plunged toward the troll, determined to destroy it. She loosed her fire but too soon, as the troll closed a wing and fell off fast to its left, avoiding the flame’s path. She managed to catch part of its wing with her tail nevertheless.
There were other black smears of dying dragon-flame in the sky. They’d done no damage to the enemy that she could see. Even the Aerial Host dragons hadn’t caused blood to rain down. Was this the death-flight of dragonkind?
Finally a troll fell, but it took a dragon with it. They went down together, both trailing wing skin and bone in a fluttering mass as they fell.
“We’re done for,” a dragon called.
“Hunting them is one thing, but this!”
Wistala watched one of the griffaran turn in pursuit of a dragon. The graceful female dragon turned tight, her wings, body, neck, and tail working together, and even her spinal fringe doing its duty to stabilize her in the air. The griffaran tried to match it, and like a runner losing his balance, the air went out from under it and it fluttered and fell in a confused manner for a moment before righting itself.
They’re body-heavy and underwinged, Wistala thought.
NiVom and Imfamnia had made a mistake, tinkering with the griffaran. Nature is capable of perfection and adding dragon-blood means a subtraction somewhere else. They took a supremely deadly flier and made it tough and frightful, resistant to arrow and fire, but it had lost the lethal speed and maneuverability that made it such a threat to dragons. Flying against the griffaran was a contest between an osprey and a buzzard.
“Sloppy fliers. Like bumblebees! Don’t engage, hit light and dodge the counterstrike.”
“Pair off,” DharSii bellowed. “Pass word: Pair off! Just nip them at the wingtips!”
For the more experienced former warriors of the Aerial Host, the tactical advice wasn’t necessary. They’d already sniffed out these mutated griffaran’s weakness and were improvising methods for taking advantage of it.
One of the Lights—AuRon’s daughter Varatheela, by the look of it—flapped hard, her wingmate trying to keep up. She went straight at one of the glistening, reptilian griffaran. It raised its claws to meet her snout, but at the last moment she turned on her belly—a very dangerous move—and grabbed a sii-ful of feathers out of the edge of its wing as she passed.
Ungainly before, the dreadful griffaran plummeted like a duck with an arrow through its wing.
“Those edges are everything with a bird-wing,” DharSii said. He executed a dive and two griffaran swooped to follow. Extending legs, wings, tail, and even griff to their maximum, he slowed his pace in the air and they passed overhead, claws out and grasping at air. Both were marking DharSii’s course rather than each other and collided. A loose feather flew up and the two griffaran, senseless or dead, fell limp from the sky.
“I watched your brother making that move once,” DharSii said, watching with satisfaction as the griffaran struck the mountainside. “He slows himself more easily than I.”
NiVom must not have had much time to evaluate his new griffaran against live dragons. Of course, keeping secrets meant no one could tell you when you’ve gone wrong.
The trolls were another matter.
Don’t think of it as a battle. Think of it as a big hunt.
“Same thing as our hunts, only in the air,” Wistala said. “One of us draws its attention, the other one strikes!”
“I’m first,” DharSii said.
He plunged into the path of a troll and spat whatever remnants of his firebladder he could—more to get the troll’s attention than in expectation of setting it alight. He made a convincing show attack, lashing out with quick flips of his wingtips and tail in a series of blows aimed at its stalked sense-organ cluster.
The troll rolled—an unexpected move—and its arms windmilled, striking DharSii hard in the side. DharSii sagged under the blow and a wing went folded, the sign of a bad injury to the back muscles or ribs.
Wistala, silently asking the sun and spirits to have it be a clever ruse, folded her wings and dove. She didn’t open them again, even when she struck the troll a hard body blow. She ripped with sii and saa, tearing the roots of the troll’s butterfly-like wings to shreds, felt it pounding her back, but she kept her wings closed tight as they fell like bloodily mating dragons.