A Dragon at Worlds' End Read Online Free Page A

Relkin was, but distrusting that awful smell.
    Relkin cut off some hunks and threw them into a nearby pond where some small fish were circling. The fish attacked the chunks briefly. Two or three were almost instantly stricken with paralysis and floated to the surface, bellies up.
    With a sigh of frustration Relkin told his stomach to forget it. He wiped his sword carefully in the sand and washed his hands very thoroughly before they went on.
    The mires thinned out and they moved through tropical heathland, with a thin forest cover of dwarf pines. The going became considerably easier and they moved along at a steady pace, eyes peeled for some sign of prey. Ahead were white limestone cliffs.
    Relkin heard it first.
    "Uh-oh," he groaned.
    On a breeze from the south came a distant medley of wailing cries.
    "Those things again," grumbled the dragon. "They are too damn common in these parts."
    Hurriedly, they moved due east, trying to put a lot of space between themselves and the source of the noise. They had seen a pack of creatures that made those cries, and they had faced their ilk on the ramparts of the Legion camp. They had no desire whatsoever to come to grips with them—a horde of yellow-skinned killers, each with deadly sickle claws on its hind feet that were used to disembowel prey.
    They pushed on, working eastward along a ridge of drier ground, where the forest cover stayed thin and it was relatively easy to make good time. The wailing cries died away for a while, and the two travelers were starting to think they'd left them behind, when they were renewed, this time nearby.
    They were being tracked. They increased their speed, and now came to an area cut up by the karst canyons of a limestone landscape. Ledges and pinnacles were abundant.
    The cries were directly behind them now. Cursing, they shuffled along, pushing tired bodies into a redoubled effort. A fault had thrust limestone up in a sharp cliff that barred their way. There was no time to waste here; the killers would be on them very shortly.
    Panting with exhaustion and fear, Relkin noticed a crack in the cliff face they could ascend, legs on one wall, shoulders on the other. Bazil had learned to climb this way when he was a sprat back in Blue Stone County, although it had been a long time since he had tried it.
    They climbed. For Bazil it was an exhausting ordeal, and his energy reserves were already low. Still the chimney was almost ideal for this purpose, being big enough for a wyvern dragon to wedge his feet up on one wall and his shoulders on the other.
    Relkin was too small to get the benefit of the chimney effect, but he was able to scale the wall anyway. He, too, felt the weakness that came from lack of food and found himself drained by the time he hauled himself out on top of the cliff.
    The pack of sickle-claw killers had emerged from the forest and formed a stolid, goggle-eyed audience down below them. The killers made no sound, except an occasional keening cry of disappointment.
    When Relkin reached the top, he looked down at the stiff-legged pack. He counted more than ten of them, waiting patiently, with their long arms drooping to the ground, their tails held out straight behind them, and their big eyes fixed intently on himself and the dragon. Slowly Bazil inched his way up to the top of the chimney. He was sobbing for breath with each heave of his big body up the rock. At last he got a shoulder over the top. The maneuver at the end was the worst for him, since he was already drained of strength and this required the maximum effort from his upper body.
    Bazil took a deep breath, twisted, and let his feet leave the opposite wall. His arms and shoulders took the entire strain for a moment, while his claws gouged out dust from the rock face beneath him, and then he managed to boost one leg up and get a talon grip on the edge. For a moment he teetered there and might have fallen back, but for a final convulsive heave, plus Relkin's frantic hauling on