“Let’s find out,” Wistala said. “We followed the troll-tracks in one direction, I think we may go in the other equally easily.”
“Happily. The sooner we leave this smell behind, the sooner my neck will recover.”
“Poor little drake. Good thing you’re so taut. Being stiff-necked about everything was good training.”
“Ha-hem,” DharSii grunted.
The trail gave out halfway up the mountain.>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.
Big-footed rabbits fled in panic from the heat, which set puddles of water asizzle and cracked rock. Birds shot out of the patches of yellow-and-white-flowered meadow about the mountainside.
The dragons ignored them, leaning against each other and crossing necks as they caught their breath. The spreading dark smoke seemed to stain the iron-colored clouds above like blood dark against a sword’s edge.
The stench of burning troll was as bad as Wistala remembered. Unpleasant business, but it had to be done if the Sadda-Vale’s hatchlings, and dragons, were to eat the herds they and their blighter servants tended.
“You arrived just in time, my gem,” DharSii said. “Long-fingers had one more trick behind his ears for me.”
“Next time, let me follow the troll-tracks while you watch from the skies.”
“Trolls interest me,” DharSii said. “Look at them, my jewel. In form and function they’re like nothing else in the world.”
“Couldn’t the same be said of dragons?” Wistala asked.
“Well, there are great birds, as you know—the Rocs, for instance. I’ve seen art in bestiaries of two-limbed dragons—wyverns, though they appear to be incapable of breathing fire, but the record is vague on that matter and there’s no way to settle it, as they appear to be extinguished from our world.”
“I wish the same could be said for trolls.”