Dragon Rigger Read Free Page B

currents felt hostile and unpredictable, lifting and buffeting him. He felt a brooding presence in the air. Beneath him were rock formations cracked and broken from some age-old convulsion of the land. He searched, riding the treacherous air currents, feeling the fires of impatience in the back of his throat. What had the iffling said? You must pass into the range. "Into," not "over." Was there some passage hidden in the spine of the mountains?
    He banked back toward the north side of the ridge and skimmed low over the slopes. Soon he felt a faint tingle in his undersense. Dropping close to the withered scrub, he spotted a thin line of shadow, a vertical crevice in the face of the slope. He flared to a landing and peered into the opening. It was too small for him to enter; but his undersense continued to tingle, and he thought he sensed a magic woven into the stone. Possibly the crevice was open to anyone, of any size, who wished to enter. Possibly it was also a trap.
    Sniffing, he looked around. The wind sighed, filling his nostrils with a tang of dust and barren stone. Nothing else moved. Muttering to himself, Windrush drew back and breathed a short tongue of flame along one side of the crevice. The flame didn't touch the stone, but passed straight into it, undeflected. With a rumble of satisfaction, he thrust his head in and stepped through the stone wall.
    Blinking his eyes as the entry spell quivered over him, he half expected to find himself standing in a cavern. Instead he stood in a long passageway that looked exactly like the same crevice, but vastly enlarged. It looked deep, but wide and high enough for him to fly in.
    Spreading his wings, he glided cautiously down the passageway, slow-flying between its twisting walls. There was a certain comfort in being surrounded by stone, even unfamiliar stone. As deeply as he loved the wind and sky, he also loved the feeling of solid mountain around him. It reminded him of his own cavern, with its weavings of protection. But here, he knew, he must keep his senses sharp for danger.
    The walls gradually closed inward and at last forced him to land. Ahead, the dark passage constricted sharply and crooked to the left. Windrush drew a slow breath, smelling for treachery. There was a dank mustiness here, and a cobwebbing of old magic, but nothing he could identify as a danger. The thought of squeezing through a tight passage did not much appeal to him, but if this was the passage the iffling had referred to, he saw little choice.
    Still, he was vulnerable here; he could no longer fly away. He sank his thoughts into the underweb of the world, probing to see if he could craft an escape spell if he had to. What he found was an astonishing murkiness in the underrealm; he could not probe far at all. But he felt a distinct tingle; he was approaching a change in the passage spell. It felt like an old-magic spell, not specifically familiar to him. But he suspected that it might lead him, through a twist of the underrealm, into a cavern deep within the mountain—and thus, perhaps, to the one he was looking for, a demon who possessed knowledge of the Dream Mountain.
    He crept forward into the constriction, his nails rasping on the stone. As he craned his neck around the bend, he felt the new spell wrinkling open. "Someone inviting me in?" he rumble aloud. There was no answer.
    He squeezed past the bend, and felt a shiver from head to tail as he pulled his massive body out of the constriction. He blinked in confusion, gazing suddenly into a dazzling, unnatural-seeming yellow light. With a hiss, he stepped forward.
    "WELL, DRAGON," boomed a voice that seemed to reverberate from an enormous space. "HAVE YOU COME BACK TO CHALLENGE AGAIN THE ONE YOU ABANDONED?"

Chapter 3: Demon in a Cave
    Blinking slowly, Windrush tried to focus through the hazy glow. Gradually he became able to discern the outlines of a large cavern. He still could not identify the source of the light, or of the voice. But the