The perimeter was a location, not a thing. Dennis and his companion stood at the back of a three-story apartment block. The walls were half-timbered; their whitewashed plaster triangles gleamed softly in the starlight. Just in front of Dennis was a line of coarse grass stretching to either side in a gentle curve parallel with the buildings.
The hundred meters between that grass and the jungle was clear. The earth there had been trampled into dust—churned to mud in the rain—by the claws of dragons.
As Chester had warned, one of the dragons was snuffling into sight. Dennis froze. He took his hand off the hilt of his new sword because he was afraid he might rattle the blade in its scabbard.
The dragon walked on two legs, but there was nothing about it even remotely like a man. The creature’s body and tail formed the cross-bar of a T supported by the legs. Its head was held close to the ground, so that its hips—eight feet in the air—were the highest point on the body when the dragon was walking normally. The legs folded upward like complex shears, then jabbed out claws-first for each strutting, birdlike step.
The head swung toward Dennis when the dragon was no more than twenty feet away. Its nostrils were set at the end of its flat muzzle. They wrinkled with the odor of the waiting youth. The eyes, gleams of black starlight, winked as they focused.
“Maybe we ought—” Dennis whispered to his companion as he edged toward the alley between this building and the next.
The dragon charged.
“Chester!” Dennis cried, flinging down his bag of provisions as he jumped between the dragon and his friend. The dragon’s lower jaw dropped. Its finger-long teeth dripped ropes of digestive slime as the beast bellowed—
And collided with the invisible barrier.
Dirt sprayed. Serdic’s barrier stopped nothing but the guard beasts themselves. When the dragon’s head banged to an angry halt against nothing, its feet skidded in a wave of the pulverized earth of the trackway. The youth coughed and began spitting out a mouthful of the dust.
The dragon ambled away, scratching the side of its head with one of the sharp-clawed grasping arms that were normally folded alongside its chest. The creature seemed completely to have forgotten Dennis and his companion. The dragon’s head and tail swung side to side, balancing the torso as the legs lifted in walking.
Chester picked up the bag of provisions. One of the sausages had spilled out. A tentacle raised it while the tip of another flicked dust precisely from the casing. “One does not learn the heart of a brave man,” the robot murmured, “until his friend is attacked.”
“I didn’t even think of my sword,” Dennis wheezed. He brushed his face with his hands but let tears and the lids clear the dust from his eyes. A sudden sneeze blew his nasal passages open and left him feeling much better, though his nose began to run.
Far on the other end of the perimeter, the second dragon bellowed in raucous triumph as it pounced on something—probably an unfortunate lizard which chose the wrong time to scuttle across the cleared strip.
The guard beasts were intended to keep the dangers of the jungle out of Emath—the tribes of scaly lizardfolk; rumored bands of human renegades, stalking the jungle trails in search of loot and always willing to pounce on an unprotected settlement; and bogeys still more frightful because no one in Emath had fully imagined them.
But the dragons were restrained rather than being controlled. They would attack anything they could get hold of, just as a pit trap would catch even the man who dug it. When the folk of Emath wanted to let traders from the jungle into their village, the wizard had to throw a separate barrier across the perimeter to prevent the guard beasts from rending the lizardfolk.
And no one from Emath could safely leave the village by land either; though that didn’t matter, because nobody wanted to do that—
Until tonight.
Dennis slipped his sword a few inches up and down in its sheath, making sure that he could draw it easily. If he remembered to draw it in the next crisis, anyway.