The troll squatted astride DharSii, intent on his destruction. Its great arm-legs gripped DharSii’s crest at the horns, pulling him in ever-tightening circles.
She felt her hearts skip a beat in shock.
DharSii—oh, his neck is sure to be broken! The troll is too strong!
Her firebladder pulsed, eager to empty its contents.
Trolls were put together as though by some act of madness by the spirits, to Wistala’s mind. Their skin was purplish and veined, like the inner side of a fresh-cut rabbit-skin. Their great arms functioned as legs, while tiny legs hung from the triangular torso more to steady the body and to convey items to the orifice that served as both mouth and vent. Great plates covered lungs on the outside, working like bellows to force air across the back, and the joints bent in odd and disturbing directions. Worst of all, they had no face to speak of, just a soggy mass of sense organs on a gruesome orb alternately extended and retracted from the torso like a shy snake darting in and out of a hole.
This troll used its thick, powerful leg-arms grasping the horns of DharSii’s crest to wrench her mate’s head back and down. Wistala braced herself for the inevitable terrible snap that must come.
Wistala had killed a troll once before by breathing fire onto its delicate lung tissue. But dragon-flame, a special sulfurous fat collected and strained in the firebladder and then ignited when vomited by a saliva spat from the roof of the mouth, could hurt DharSii just as much as the troll. Dragon-scale offered some protection, but DharSii’s leathery wing tissue could be burned, or he could inhale the fire, or it might pool and run under his scale.
If she couldn’t use her fire, she could still fight with her weight.
She folded her wings and turned into a tight dive, not as neatly as a falcon but with infinitely more power.
This “Long-fingers” was perhaps as experienced against dragons as she was against trolls. It had DharSii by a dragon’s weakest point, its long neck.
She swooped around jagged prominences, risking skin of neck, tail, and wing. Heedless of the danger to her wing—a hard enough strike might leave her forever broken and unable to reach the sky again—she flew to DharSii’s rescue. This was no longer a simple hunt to exterminate vermin but a death-struggle between dragon and monster.
Pick it up—drop it from a height. Stomp and smash! Warring instincts raged.
Teeth would be next to useless on a creature of that size. Her neck just didn’t have the power to do much more than score its hide. Better to strike with her tail, or there might be two dragons with broken necks. She altered her dive as though trying to reverse directions, so that the force of her swinging tail might send the troll flying right out of the Sadda-Vale.
The troll, showing the uncanny sense of its kind, threw itself sideways just as she struck, rolling DharSii along with its bulk.
“I’m here, my love!” Wistala called.
Wistala missed the troll, lashed DharSii with her tail. It struck, a whip-crack against horseflesh but a thousand times louder. She saw scale fly and scatter like startled birds.
Wistala roared, half in rage, half in despair.
The troll, in avoiding Wistala’s blow, put itself in a position so DharSii could anchor his head by hooking horn on rock. The great black-striped dragon twisted his body and struck with his saa.
This time, instead of dust being kicked into the air, droplets of dark liquid flew. DharSii’s claws came away sticky.
Vaaaaaaa! DharSii roared as the wounded troll pulled him around in a circle as though trying to yank his head off by pure effort.
DharSii suddenly lunged into the troll’s pull, digging his horns into the fleshy torso. Now it was the dragon’s turn to plant his feet and pull.
The troll used its mighty limbs to push itself off the dragon’s crest, tearing skin and ripping open its own veins. DharSii’s horns and snout looked as though they’d been dipped in ink.
Wistala banked and by the time she swung around, the troll was covering ground in an uneven run, leaving a trail of blue-black blood.
She vomited fire and the troll pulled itself in a new direction with one of its arm-legs. As she passed overhead, claws out and wings high and out of reach, the troll lashed up. Tail and leg-arm struck with a sound like tree limbs breaking.
An orange flash, and this time DharSii was atop the troll. He severed the sense-organ stalk with a sweep of his sii and the troll tumbled, righted itself, and ran blindly into a limestone cut.
The troll bounced back and fell, a buzzing beetle-wing noise coming from its lung-plates as the bellows forced air across the vulnerable flesh.
Still, the troll fought, lashing out with leg-arms and arm-legs, but blinded and deafened against two dragons the contest was hopeless.
She and DharSii stood far enough apart that they just might touch wingtips, making a perfectly equal triangle with the wildly swinging troll. They raised their heads in unison, lowered their fanlike griff to protect delicate tissue of ear and neck-hearts, and spat, eyes as slits with water-membranes down and nostrils tightly clenched.
The thin streams of oily-smelling flame made a hot, low roar of their own as they met at the troll, painting it in bright hues of blue, red, orange, and yellow. Black smoke added a delicate spiderweb framing to the inferno of sizzling flesh and sputtering flame.
They had the troll engulfed in fire before it could pick itself up from the stony slope. It still writhed about horribly as the heat consumed muscle.