No one, not even Perennius, was watching Gaius. The dragon was on top of the leading pair of Guardians.
For something that weighed as much as a yoke of oxen, the beast had incredible agility. It could not avoid the abrupt descent, but even as inertia carried its leading right foot over the side, its tail was swinging around. That long, cartilage-stiffened member was the lever by which the allosaurus pivoted its mass. As the beast slid into the chasm, it was already twisting broadside, cat-quick, to scrape itself to a halt in the shortest possible time. The allosaurus was not intelligent, but its nervous system housed bundles of reflexes as finely honed as ever an assassin’s razor. The pair of gray, chitinous things on the ledge where its claws slashed for purchase were no more of an incident than the creosote bushes shredded in the same instant.
Perennius made his own reflexive judgment. He leaped over the side himself. The price of being wrong was death, but that was nothing new.
The dragon came to a skidding halt on the trail, facing the third Guardian at a distance of twenty feet. One of the beast’s three-clawed forelegs was extended up-hill. It clutched an outcrop at the end of a triple furrow in the thin sod. The jaws which had crushed their way through the bones and tough muscle of the donkey were open. The allosaurus had just begun its terrible, gulping cry when the Guardian’s shot tore its head off.
The crackling discharge blew apart the beast’s calvarium in an explosion of shrinking bone and expanding, gaseous nerve tissue. Its teeth shattered like glass as dentine responded to the induced heat. The dragon reacted like a beheaded chicken. Its hind legs thrust it forward in an uncoordinated lunge that spilled it off the trail and past the Guardian. The great beast began to roll sideways down the slope. It gathered speed as the angle steepened. The tail and neck flailed wildly, but the massive torso merely rotated faster and faster. The cream belly-scales alternated with the red-shot black of sides and back. Fifty feet above the floor of the chasm, an outcrop gave the huge carcass impetus enough to hurl it away from the wall. Limbs spasming with momentum and death reflexes, the dragon smashed down on the quake-strewn boulders which had preceded it into Typhon’s Cavern.
The Guardian rotated on what might be a ball joint above its tripodal legs. It was raising to meet Perennius the weapon which had just ripped the allosaurus. The agent was skidding on his armor-protected left hip and shoulder. He kicked the creature off the trail and grappled with it as they rolled together after the dragon.
Perennius gripped with both his hands the tentacle holding the weapon. He squeezed and pulled as if he were disjointing a lobster to get at the meat in the claws. The rock and brush through which they careened meant nothing to him, would have meant nothing even if the iron and leather encasing him did not absorb much of the punishment. Rock gouted in a spray of splinters and quicklime as the weapon fired into the ground. Then Perennius held the creature in his left hand. His right hand flung away
the weapon and the separated fragment of tentacle that still wrapped the glittering object.
Both combatants were brought up by a clump of holly. The bush had been flattened by the tons of dragon, but the stems had sprung up again in time to stop Perennius and his victim short of fifty sheer feet neither of them would have survived. The greave had been pulled from Perennius’ right shin. His bare forehead was bleeding from a gash he could not remember getting. The Guardian’s own flexible exoskeleton was dusty and abraded. Pores and the joint of head and segmented carapace were oozing a pink, waxy substance with an odor like that of bergamot. The creature had not made any sound, even when Perennius pulled it apart.
One of its remaining arms snatched a globular object that clung to its chitin like steel to a lodestone. Perennius watched the trebly-opposed fingers rotate the object toward his head while he tried to interpose his own arm. The agent’s flesh moved far slower than the images of disaster which flickered through his brain. He saw his carcass burned or sawn apart, perhaps simply vanishing….