That did it. I should have known a hand-by-hand, bet-by-bet description of dragon poker would do the trick.
Without any warning at all, the dragon yawned . . . long and wide.
Aahz broke off his narration, a momentous event in itself, and blinked his surprise.
“Quick, Aahz! Jump for it!”
Bewildered as he was, there was nothing wrong with my partner’s reflexes. He was out of the dragon’s mouth in a flash, diving through the air to catch the rope below Guido.
As soon as his hands closed on our lifeline, several things happened at the same time.
With the extra weight on Massha’s levitation belt, our whole formation started to sink at an alarming rate . . . my apprentice lost her grip on me, giving me minor rope burns as I clutched madly for the rope, almost too late to follow the advice I had been so freely giving to everyone else . . . and the dragon closed his mouth.
I caught one last glimpse of the beast before we sank from sight, and I honestly don’t think he even knew we were gone. His eyelids were at half-mast, and the eyes themselves were out of focus from boredom. Aahz’s stories tended to have that effect on even vaguely-intelligent beings. I had simply found a practical application for the phenomenon.
“I’ve gotta change the controls, Hot Stuff!” Massha called, alerting me once more to our current situation.
The ground was rushing up to meet us with frightening speed.
I remembered the faulty controls that held all of us at their mercy.
“No! Wait, Massha! Let me try….”
Exerting my last ounce of reserve power, I worked at levitating our whole crew. Under normal circumstances, I could lift three people easily and four or five in a pinch. Here in Limbo, using everything I had with Massha’s belt assisting me, I barely managed to slow our descent to a moderate crawl.