I didn’t like being on a sky dragon, either, but I liked the thought of Sarad Nukpana getting his hands on the Saghred—and thereby his hands on me—even less. Unlike Phaelan, I felt better if I kept my eyes on the ground. That’s where I wanted to be, and if I kept looking at it, maybe my stomach would believe we were actually going to make it there. The sun had not yet come up as we banked over the harbor on our approach to the citadel, and our dragons announced their landing intentions with deafening shrieks.
One of them sounded suspiciously like Phaelan.
I grinned, then started to laugh. I couldn’t help it, and I—
Choked. Did a bug fly in my—
My throat constricted as if a giant hand were tightening around it, clutching, suffocating me. I panicked and tried to pull air in. Nothing. With the pressure came a presence I instantly recognized.
The Saghred.
I felt close enough to the rock to smell it. Corruption, vile and sickening, like sour bile at the back of my throat. Ancient, rotten, and malignant.
The Saghred was me. I was the rock.
And the thief had both of us.
I didn’t see him; I didn’t have to. The bastard’s hand was wrapped around the rock, around me. He’d gotten past the guards and the wards, and had stolen the Saghred.
The rock wasn’t doing a damned thing to stop him.
It wanted to be taken.
The edges of my vision were going dark. Holy hell, I was going to pass out flying over the city. I clutched the saddle horn in front of me with one hand and pounded desperately on Vegard’s back with the other, grabbing at his shoulder.
Vegard turned, saw my face, and his eyes went wide. He shouted something I couldn’t hear. The roar I heard wasn’t the wind; it was my breath rasping, absurdly loud like I was trapped inside a box with no air, no light. I knew I wasn’t locked inside a box, and not only did I have plenty of air, I was flying through it. My body didn’t believe it, panicking, fighting to escape. My legs jerked with a mind of their own and did something very bad.
I kicked off the leg restraints, also known as the only things strapping me to a giant airborne lizard.
I fell off.
I clawed at the saddle as I slid from Kalinpar’s back. My hands, still weak from the manacles, slipped off of the smooth leather edge, my other grasping for something, anything.
Vegard’s big hand closed like a vise around my wrist.
“Shit!”
Vegard didn’t mince words. I couldn’t make them.
Vegard fought to keep Kalinpar steady, struggled to haul me back into the saddle or at the very least not drop me, while trying to keep from falling off himself. The morbid pessimist in the back of my head wondered if I fell, would I die instantly on impact, or would I get to feel myself break and/or splat into a million pieces; and if so, what would it feel like?
That made me scream, or at least try to.
“Give me your other hand!” Vegard bellowed.
My hand, arm, and the rest of me was dangling at talon level with Kalinpar. The dragon’s talons were the length of my hand. Had Kalinpar been trained to pluck a falling person out of the air without a fatal puncture?
“Raine!” Vegard screamed.
His grip was slipping.
Vegard didn’t have the leverage to pull me up, and I didn’t have the strength. The thief was on the move, carrying the boxed Saghred in a pocket or pouch. His pace was smooth and unhurried. No, he wouldn’t want to attract attention. I had a link with a rock that did nothing but destroy, and I couldn’t so much as burn a hole in the bastard’s pocket.
I wasn’t the Saghred. I was me, and I was dangling above the city, and the only thing between me and a messy death was getting back on a flying lizard. Thick leather straps crisscrossed underneath Kalinpar’s gray-scaled belly, strong enough to hold two saddles and two men.
Strong enough to hold a desperate-not-to-die elf.
A gust of wind caught my legs; Vegard’s gloved fingers slipped again. I screamed, this time in rage, and sound actually made it out. I was not going to fall. I was not going to die. I was going to get on the ground, run down a thief, take that rock away from him, and club him over the head with it. Hard. Repeatedly. I hooked the edge of my fingers under Kalinpar’s belly strap, then up to the second knuckle, then wrapped my fist around it with a white-knuckled death grip. Which was exactly what it was going to take to get me to let that leather strap go. Death himself would have to come and pry my fingers off one at a time.
“Hang on!” Vegard shouted.
I shot him a look and got a grin in return.
The grin widened. “You’re about to get a lift.”
What?
I looked down. There weren’t any buildings or streets, just a big, broad, scaled back. Phaelan’s pilot expertly guided his dragon up beneath where my legs dangled, staying just out of the way of Kalinpar’s powerful wings. The sky dragon’s back was as good as solid ground. Phaelan’s hands steadied my legs just below the knees. Vegard got a firm grip on my arm, and between the two of them—and a pathetic amount of assistance from me—got me back in the saddle. I wasted no time strapping my legs back onto Kalinpar’s sides where they belonged.
“Let’s get you on the ground,” Vegard shouted back at me.
I gasped for breath, and the rushing wind tried to take it away. “Thief . . . has the rock . . . not in citadel.”
Vegard’s eyes narrowed in fury. “Where?”
“Moving.”
“Can you track him?”
I only felt like I was riding in his pocket. I nodded.
Vegard signaled to Phaelan’s pilot to go to the citadel and get reinforcements.
I stopped fighting the contact with the rock. I couldn’t see where the thief was, but I could feel him, like an invisible string bound me to him. As we circled back from the citadel, the string tightened. I had no clue how I could sense the rock, yet couldn’t tap one iota of magic. I’d just add it to the absurdly long list of crap I didn’t understand.
“Down!” I shouted. “Need to be closer . . . to the street.”
“Hold on.”
I’d heard that sky dragons were nimble enough to fly and land pretty much anywhere. I’d never seen it, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be in the saddle of one while it happened.
Vegard sent Kalinpar into a full dive.
Kalinpar shrieked in pure joy.
I just shrieked.
The sky dragon leveled out just below the rooftops in an entirely too small street. I got an up-close look at the goblin thief wearing what I guessed was his own skin, and he got the same view of the three of us. His eyes widened, right before he darted down a too-narrow-for-Kalinpar side street and out of our reach.
Vegard pulled back hard on the dragon’s reins and banked back up into the sky. My stomach tried to do the same. He leveled off just above the rooftops.
“Still sense him?”
The only sense I had was the need to be sick. I shoved it down, literally, and focused on the rock with everything I had. I might not have magic right now, but I had something even more powerful.
Stubbornness.
That thief wasn’t getting away. He couldn’t get away. If he did I’d wish I was dead or sharing the Saghred’s link with a bunch of pervert elf mages. They’d get to share the sensation of having people slaughtered and feel like they were being slaughtered on them, feel their souls being torn out of their dying bodies, those bodies disintegrated under the Saghred’s destructive magic.
Over and over again.
Dozens or hundreds or even thousands of times. Until the Saghred was full. Until it was at full power. And Sarad Nukpana and his king could turn that power against anyone they chose. Unrelenting. Unstoppable.