Hereward caught her foot, but he could not hold her. She was far heavier than any normal person her size, and gravity did the rest. The dragon slid down the hole and Hereward followed.
The escape passage was an oiled slide, a narrow tube. After the initial short drop, it ran at a forty-five degree angle for a hundred feet or so before it suddenly corkscrewed down in a series of giddying turns.
Hereward gripped the dragon’s ankle with one hand, and with the other touched the garter turned armband, gabbling out the necessary recitation, coupled with shrieks and cries as he was flung about by the sudden turns and the dragon managed to land a kick.
“In the name of the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the—ow—World, acting under the authority granted by the Three Empires, the Seven—curse you—Kingdoms, the Palatine Regency, the Jessar Republic, and the Forty Lesser Realms, I—arrgh—declare myself an agent of the Council. I identify the dragon manifested as Harquahar-Drim-Jashar—ow—a listed entity under the treaty and an enemy of the World, and the Council authorizes me to pursue any and all—damn it—actions necessary to banish, repel, or exterminate the said entity!”
The dragon screamed something back at him and kicked him again, but it had little effect. It hurt, of course, but she couldn’t get the leverage to deliver a decent blow while they were sliding so swiftly.
Hereward tried to look behind to see if Mister Fitz had jumped after him, but he was falling too fast, sliding up and down and around the well-oiled escape tube. He desperately hoped the puppet was very close indeed, for even with the activated brassard providing some minor physical protection, the dragon probably could rip his heart out when they arrived wherever this slide ended up.
The ending up happened rather more suddenly than Hereward expected. One second he was being flung around another corkscrew turn, and then in the next the slide slanted steeply upward to check the velocity of the sliders, went slightly down again, and spat the dragon and Hereward out onto the floor of a vast cavern. This was well lit by many small holes in the ceiling and upper third of the walls, allowing the afternoon sun to poke dozens of brilliant fingers in to light up what would otherwise be a dark and dismal cave.
Hereward rolled away as soon as he landed, and sprang up, not quite as easily as he’d intended due to the oil he was covered in. But he managed to stay upright and be as ready as he could be to fight the dragon.
But she did not instantly attack him, as he expected. Rather she stood staring at the center of the cavern, where the sun’s rays flickered over a scene of destruction. Dozens of empty chests were thrown together in a pile, surrounded by a nimbus of at least a hundred flat and flaccid leather moneybags, their drawstrings loose and every which way, looking like a mass beaching of sea-stingers cast upon an unforgiving shore.
“My . . . my treasure!” she wailed. “My gold! My lovely, lovely gold!”
She turned on Sir Hereward and hissed, revealing long, daggerlike teeth he hadn’t noticed before. They were even more disturbing than her talonlike fingernails.
“Where is my gold?”
“The Archon took it earlier today,” said Hereward, backing up. His eyes flickered from side to side, looking for a weapon, and also, rather hopefully, to the escape slide. But he couldn’t see anything useful, not even a stone, and there was no sign of Mister Fitz. There were probably trapdoors that closed behind the first escapee, or something of the sort. Any well-planned escape slide would block pursuers. He’d been lucky to hang on to the dragon.
“The Archon?” asked the dragon, as if she couldn’t believe it.
“Mister Fitz and I were never interested in the treasure,” said Hereward, hoping to keep her talking rather than ripping his heart out. “Only in you, Harquahar-Drim-Jashar.”
“What? Who?” asked the dragon. She had half turned to look back at the empty chests again. Her shoulders sagged, and she seemed older somehow. In fact, she looked just like a shipwreck survivor. Hereward had seen this kind of shock before. He’d been shipwrecked himself.
The knight touched the brassard on his arm. The arcane symbols glowed more brightly, the violet light harsh in comparison to all the rods of soft golden sunlight slanting down from outside.
“You are a proscribed entity, Harquahar-Drim-Jashar,” he said. “We are agents of the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World.”
The dragon turned back to him. She frowned in puzzlement.
“Who? I’m not Harquahar-Drim-Jashar.”
It was Hereward’s turn to droop slightly.
“W-w-hat?” he stammered.
“I’m not Harquahar-Drim-Jashar,” said the dragon. She stepped closer, but did not raise her taloned hands, and her teeth appeared to have retracted to more normal human dentition. “My name is Jallal-Qreu-Kwaxssim. I am nowhere near as old as a Jashar. They’re ancient.”
Hereward stepped back, glancing at the slide exit again.
“I see you have to answer to a puppet,” said the dragon, stepping closer again. “And belatedly I recall stories of scarred women who slay godlets and the like. But you are a man. And surely, this is all ancient history, and I am not who you are hunting, anyway.”
“I don’t answer to a puppet,” protested Hereward. “And not all the agents are women—Oh!”
Mister Fitz came flying out of the slide, a sorcerous needle cupped in his hand, its blinding light contained. He landed easily, skidded far less than Hereward had, though he was just as oily, and spun about. Fierce light bloomed as he opened his fingers to unveil the needle.
Hereward dived away from the dragon, but she had already launched herself toward him. He felt her snatch the earring from his right ear; there was a flash of sorcerous energy, immediately followed by the harsh rumble of falling rock. He crawled away on his belly and elbows, blinking away afterimages of violet light and coughing up stone dust. All the while desperately hoping the dragon wasn’t about to land on his spine and wrench his heart out through his back.
When the heart-ripping didn’t happen after three seconds, he rolled over and pushed himself up, to look frantically in all directions for the dragon, who was not immediately visible. Hereward could see only Mister Fitz, standing in the middle of the cavern, his head tilted back, no sun-bright needle in his hand.
“Did you get her?” he gasped. The object of Mister Fitz’s sorcerous blasts was to unstitch the dragon’s connection to this universe, which would banish her back to the dimension from which she had trespassed. If he had succeeded, there would be nothing left.
There was nothing left, Hereward was relieved to see.
Until Mister Fitz pointed up.
Sir Hereward narrowed his eyes, looking toward all those tiny, sunlit holes in the cavern’s upper walls and ceiling. A golden dragon in the classical reptilian guise, though only the size of his little finger, folded her shimmering wings back to shoot through one of the holes. She spread those wings on the other side to catch the sea breeze that came every afternoon to blow the foul smoke of the foundries on the Levels far from the city.
Hereward and Fitz caught one more slight glimpse through another hole as she spiraled upward and away.
“I didn’t know they could shape themselves so small,” said Hereward. He looked at the empty chests. “Why bother with all this, then?”