Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar Read Free Page B

did so out of the best of motives.
    Such as now.
    It was Amayon, bright-clothed in garnet velvet and sparkling with jewels and malice, who handed Ector the torch which he drove into the kindling.
    At this distance John couldn't see clearly, and the crowd beyond that flame-like crimson form was only a blur. But he heard their voices, wild over the cracking of the fire. Furious voices, relishing as Ector did the vindication of themselves. They'd been told that the plague was his doing, or the doing of the demons he'd worked for, and they were doubly angry, for there had been a time when he'd been popular in Bel. Dragons-bane— the only man living who had slain a dragon. He had fought the demon-possessed dragons that flew down at the command of the demon mage Caradoc; he had defeated them.
    “… pawn of the Hellspawn,” Ector was shouting above the rushing crackle of oil-soaked tinder. “Author of the plague that has swept this land …”
    The smoke billowed thick and greasy. The heat was suffocating, and in the smoke she took shape. Beautiful and hideous, wrought of fume and fire, she held out her hands to him, waiting for him to call her name.
    I won't. He closed his eyes—not that that did a lot of good; he knew she was still there—and turned his face aside. Airless, all-encompassing heat and pain. I won't. I will die, and Jen and the boys and all the Realm die with me.…
    Someone screamed.
    He thought, Do they see her? and someone else took up the shriek. More howls—terror, panic. Wind bent the flame around him, whirled the smoke, and he opened his eyes and saw a dragon, huge, fifty feet or more and with a wingspan twice that, silver-streaked and tabbied with black and opalgreen blazing eyes. It was almost on top of him already, and he could do no more than stare up at it in shock as the silver claws lashed down, caught him up, stake, ropes, and all, scattering burning hunks of wood and hay over the heads of the trampling crowd. The beating shadow of wings, the flash of the winter sunlight as they rose above the city's walls and the bitter, freezing cold after the fire's heat. With his hands still tied, John felt a stab of pure dread that the dragon would drop him—Fat lot of difference that would make, given the day I've had so far—and turning his head he saw the city fall away, mossy ice-slicked roofs and bare trees; city fields and the silver loop of the River Clae, shining in the Magloshaldon woods. Brown fields, then brown steppe, then gray sheets of cloud that enveloped them like damp muslin and cold that shredded his bones.
    The dragon carried him tucked up under its breast, and without the heat of its flesh John thought he probably would have slipped away into death from the cold, Which I wouldn't have bet two coppers on last night …
    Weightless exhaustion. Consciousness that came and went, slipping away to drop him suddenly back to an awareness of hanging suspended in damp gray clouds, over a barely glimpsed landscape of formlessness below. He was only marginally conscious when the dragon descended to a gray-yellow desolation of sand and scattered boulders, of flint hills without vegetation and of twisting scoops of pebble-filled stone that had been watercourses long ago. These he saw only dimly, for the gray light was fading, and his eyesight wasn't good enough to discern details. On a wide plateau in the desolation stumps of pillars marked where a city had stood. Crumbled foundations and lines of broken walls surrounded a stone platform two hundred feet by nearly five, a square rock island in the sand—even he couldn't miss it.
    The dragon balanced in the air like a kite and, reaching down, laid John on the ground before the remains of the plat-form's wide stair. Evening turned the vast sky yellow, lilacstained and fading. John felt the stone under him chill as snow through the torn rags of his shift, and knew the night would be brutal. He couldn't imagine where he was, or how far they had