They rushed through air that a moment before had been flame and was still crackling sparks. In five strides, Bulmammon reached the tree and yanked the rope up around the dragon. In two more, the rope whipped tight against the tree. Karl hauled on the line like a longshoreman.
The stunned and panicked dragon scrabbled to flee, but the rope about its waist cinched it into the tree trunk. Bulmammon pulled harder, beginning a tight orbit around tree and dragon both. He dragged on the line, groaning with each pull.
A belch of dragonfire ignited the bare boughs of the oak tree. Bark snapped and fell in smoking streamers around the draconian and the private. A hiss escaped as some of those sparks sank into the golden scales of Bulmammon’s neck. He pulled all the harder on the rope and finished his circuit of the tree, wrapping the thrashing dragon in two tight strands. Then, suddenly, the captain stopped.
“Take it,” Bulmammon growled, and thrust the rope end into the private’s hand. “Keep circling the tree. Take it!”
Karl grasped hold of the cord, and once his hands were tight upon the hemp, he started to circle the tree. He’d completed one circuit by the time the Sivaks converged with their swords and began hacking at the flailing dragon.
Bulmammon stood back, pleased with what he saw. The dragon writhed in terror, struggling against the cords. When the notch-toothed blades of two Sivaks lanced through its sinewy side, the dragon sent a fireball down after the scrambling, scurrying foes. The Sivaks ran clear, but the private almost stumbled into the rolling flame. He fetched up short enough to save his clothes, if not his eyebrows. When the wall of flame recoiled, the private ran on. He finally reached the end of the rope, having wrapped the dragon beneath four cords. The first two Sivaks charged back in, and two more came with them.
With troops like these, the assassin might not even need to strike any but the killing blow.
Swords rang in the fire-charged air and gleamed in flashing glory as they bit into the dragon’s flesh. Roaring in agony, the infant dragon spat out a column of flame that set the branches overhead ablaze.
The kill was going just as Bulmammon had planned.
A flare sagged down from the orange-hot teeth of the dragon and swept down among the Sivaks, engulfing two of the four. Their black forms danced in crouched and jittering terror as they burned alive.
More Sivaks darted in, hewed and hacked, and danced away from the dwindling flares of dragonfire that splashed out toward them. Two of the Sivaks ran from opposite sides and struck as one, lopping off the infant wyrm’s foreclaws. One of them paid for this prank, though. He slipped in the blood that jetted forth from the stumps, and was then blasted away to ash by a ball of flame that cauterized those stumps.
The dragon swung its blind head, driving back the attackers and pouring the last of its fire into a ring around it. The grasses of the hilltop flared into a brilliant orange wall of flame, which marched slowly outward from the tree and the wounded beast. The blaze pushed back the messenger and the two able Sivaks, and even Bulmammon. The dragon spat twice more, then its breath was finally spent, its last defense gone.
Bulmammon drew his sword and charged through the wall of flame. He experienced a moment of agony, then only stinging, searing scales, and he was inside the blackened ring of grass between the wall of flame and the dragon. Charging for the creature’s throat, Bulmammon jabbed. He was flung back by a sudden thrust of the smoldering snout.
“Who slays me?” the infant dragon rasped, gray tendrils of smoke rising from his teeth. “Who slays me?”
Bulmammon was already on his feet, sword lifted before him. He crouched, ready to leap aside if there was more fire in that dragon gullet. “I have slain you. I-Captain Bulmammon, an Aurak, the greatest assassin of Highlord Ariakas, wearer of the red coxcomb-I slay you.” He raised his sword for the killing blow and then stopped.