“What spell can take us far from here?” Anthony cried.
Balkis tried to remember—yes! There was a verse that she'd heard the Lord Wizard recite.
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows—”
She broke off in fright as the net began to swing down. They had come to the top of the cliff, but there was only a hundred-foot shelf before it began to climb again, honeycombed with shelves on which the men had built a whole village complete with dragon-cotes, and they were sinking directly toward that village's square. She sang out louder and in a rush.
“Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows—”
Then the net struck rock with an impact that knocked the breath out of her. With wild hope she looked at Anthony, but saw that he was gasping for air, too, and despair and fear gripped her.
Thunder shook the ledge. Looking up, Balkis saw a huge reptilian shape that blocked out the sun, stooping upon the twelve-foot dragons with a twenty-foot tongue of flame. The smaller dragons sheered away in terror, their riders screaming, and as the leviathan passed, Anthony saw a rider with no saddle or reins, only the dragon's great triangular plates to hold him on its shoulders.
“What horror is this come upon us?” Anthony cried.
“It is not horror, but a friend!” Balkis told him, almost weeping with relief. “I know that dragon! He is Stegoman, and the man who rides him is the Lord Wizard of Merovence, my teacher!”
Stegoman completed his first pass and turned to rake the air again, but the dragoneers rallied, calling to one another and forming small groups to either side, surrounding the behemoth. One daring rider sailed overhead, dropping his net, but Mart's sword flashed, cutting half its ropes and batting the rest aside. It plummeted downward and tangled a rider below it.
But the dragoneers were singing again, chanting their war-song as they swooped and darted at the huge dragon who had come to wreak havoc upon them. Balkis had heard their accent long enough so that the words began to make sense, and she realized they weren't boasting or trying to buck up their own spirits—they were giving directions to their mounts and compelling them to obey! The tyrants had not made friends with the dragons—they coerced them by magic! She understood what they were ordering and cried a warning—but too late, for the separate knots of riders suddenly swooped all together and attacked in a pack.
Matt laid about him frantically, and Stegoman scythed his flame from back and forth, but a few dragoneers managed to duck in from his blind side and swords raked his ribs. Balkis bit her knuckles to keep from screaming as one dragoneer's sword caught Mart's blade and knocked it back against him, making him reel in his seat. She could see that Matt and Stegoman could hold the dragoneers off a goodly while, but in the end they would be borne down by sheer numbers.
Anthony saw that, too. He worked frantically with his own dagger, sawing through ropes. “If you know a spell to help your friend, sing it! We must be free of this net and away where we can aid in our own defense!”
Balkis tried to think of some verse that might disperse the horde of fliers that beset her friends, finally remembered something she had heard Idris sing, and began,
Another roar split the air.
Anthony froze, staring up. “What lyric brought you that?”
Another full-sized dragon came tearing down from the sky, a reddish dragon a little shorter and considerably more slender than Stegoman, but with a lance of flame just as long. The dragons scattered with scandalized screams of rage, and for the first time Balkis heard them utter words.
“It is Dimetrolas, bigger yet than when we cast her out!”
“It is Dimetrolas, turned against her own kind!”
“Even as we knew she one day would! Gather all! Slay the renegade!”
CHAPTER 26
“I am not a renegade but an outcast!” Dimetrolas roared. “If I turn against you now, it is because you cast me out of your tribe; I can fight without turning against my own, for you have made me no longer one of you!” Then her roaring turned inarticulate and her flame swept the air to guard Stego-man's back. Dragoneers howled as their mounts rolled aside from the flame.
But the dragons were shotting the alarm, and more of their kind came bolting from the round doorways of every cote. Some circled down to the shelf to gather their riders, but most came with bare backs, flaring their rage against the rogue who sided with a stranger against her own clan. Soon the whole village was aloft and attacking from every side, only oldsters, children, and hatchlings still on the ground to watch the battle. Gradually the cloud of fliers separated into two wedges, one on each side, like the jaws of a forceps.
“We must aid them!” Anthony cried.
“We must indeed.” Though why the Lord Wizard was not himself using magic to fight off the fliers Balkis couldn't understand. Perhaps he feared killing them, for if you knocked a dragon unconscious at that height, both mount and rider would die in the fall. She had watched closely enough to identify the leader of the dragoneers, though—the one who rode the largest dragon and wore an emerald jerkin, where all others wore brown or grayish-green, and if they had tamed the flying dragons not by friendship or skill but by incantations, they offered a very serious weakness for her to exploit. She began to chant, adapting a verse Matt had taught her, and so worried not at all about rhyme.
“Take it, Anthony!” She was chagrined not to remember the last line of the verse.
Anthony replied.
Balkis' voice rang with delight:
She floundered again, and Anthony came in on the instant:
A cry came echoing down, Mart's voice: “Wotton!”
“What in Heaven have we wrought, indeed?” Anthony exclaimed, looking up.
Every dragon who carried a rider roared with delight as he or she dove toward the village ledge, roars that resolved into, “Off my back, midge, ere I swat you!”
The riders shrieked frantic verses, but nothing would regain them control. The dragons swooped within five feet of the ledge; a few riders were smart enough to leap off. The others howled with fright as the dragons looped the loop to make a second pass—fright that their spells did no good, that the dragons were completely out of their control, that their conquered mounts did exactly as they pleased. On the second pass most of them jumped, and the dragons flew away to attack Dimetrolas. The few diehards nearly did—die, that is, because their dragons simply turned their heads and blasted flame. None actually struck the riders, they missed by a foot or more, but the men and women took the hint, untied their saddle-ropes, and as the dragons dove toward the ledge, leaped to save their lives.