CHAPTER 65
The vegetation surrounding the magical perimeter formed a hostile wall.
Nets of vine and brambles cloaked sword-shaped leaves whose tips would spike all the way to an unwary man’s shin-bone. Ants with mandibles like wire-cutters patrolled paths through the foliage. The bees which frequented the blossoms rose when the companions approached. They buzzed and hovered, flexing their abdomens under them to point their stings forward.
Dennis paused. “I thought it was all a nightmare,” he mused aloud. “What I remembered from the first night in the jungle. Along with the, with the ghost in my dream. But this is the way I remembered it.”
“Wizard’s work?” Aria asked.
“I don’t think it’s—” Dennis said.
“Wizard’s work imposed on the land, Princess,” Chester said flatly. “And the land responding, as all things respond to hostility. ‘He who loves his neighbor, finds a family around him.'”
The dragons on guard had heard them talking. One of the beasts snuffled close to the invisible barrier and began to scratch with its foreclaws. Its body was a wall of black scales which blocked the rare openings through the leaves.
The dragons’ breath, redolent of the fish they were fed and not wholly unpleasant to Dennis after so many years in a fishing community, oozed heavily through the foliage.
Dennis drew his sword. “All right,” he said, eyeing the bees with the caution they deserved. “Let’s go.”
He brought his star-metal blade up in a curve that sheared a mass of briars as though they were cobweb, then made the second cut which turned the slice into a pathway. Chester moved ahead of the youth, pushing aside the sliced vegetation whose thorns could do him no harm.
It was as though they’d planned the maneuver; and perhaps they had, during the battles they’d fought together since leaving Emath. Chester waited; Dennis slashed the rest of the way through the barrier—
And Aria’s white mantilla snapped once, twice, overhead, startling back the insects which were preparing to buzz down in attack.
Both dragons roared as the companions pushed toward them through the jungle wall. Dennis, in the lead again, was laughing in exultation.
They’d shrunk. These guard-beasts weren’t as large as the pair when Dennis fled Emath.
He flicked his sword at the nearer dragon. It snatched at the blade—and snatched back its injured foreleg with a yelp.
Dennis slapped the beast’s snout with the flat of his weapon. “Chester!” the youth cried. “These aren’t the same dragons. Has Parol replaced the old ones with these little fellows?”
Chester was raised to his full height on four limbs, spinning the others above him to weave a false silvery bulk that kept back the other guard-beast.
“They are not so great as Malbawn and Malduanan, Dennis,” the robot said, advancing through dust that was ankle-deep on the humans. The three companions were within the dragons’ perimeter by now. “Nor yet so great as Rakastava… but they are the beasts that have guarded Emath for all your life.”
The dragon which had cut itself on Dennis’ sword made another lunge at him. Dennis shifted his arm slightly. The beast blatted and scrambled back, pricked between the nostrils by the star-metal point.
In sudden determination, the injured guard-beast rushed its fellow from the side and knocked it down. The pair of dragons began to bellow and claw and one another, rolling across the perimeter in a huge cloud of the dust they had pulverized during their years of pacing.
Dennis and his companions began to step with care and reasonable quickness across the remainder of the trackway. It struck the youth that you could be very brave and very well-armed—and still be crushed to death by a couple of dragons battling in frustrated fury.
“Fortune goes as fate commands,” Chester called, over the dragons’ roars; but the beasts were flopping and snarling in the opposite direction, and the three of them could sprint the last yards into Emath Village if they had to…
Dennis looked toward Emath, taking his eyes off the dragons for the first time since he’d slashed his way into the perimeter they patrolled. The streets, roofs and windows were full of people who stared back at him.