Thirteen : Recruiting Drive
If you eat a live toad first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen all day long.
—California saying
To you or the toad.
—Niven’s restatement of California saying
—well, most of the time anyway . . .
—programmer’s caveat to Niven’s
restatement of California saying
Wiz spent a cold, miserable night in the freezing pit. With the dawn his prospects didn’t look any brighter. If he didn’t get out of here he was going to die of hunger and thirst. Actually, he’d probably die of the cold before he could die of hunger or thirst.
Face it, he told himself as he looked around for the hundredth time, the only way this could get worse would be for the sorcerers to find you.
Up above there was a scraping, as if something was clawing at the cover of the pit. With a groaning of hinges the cover moved aside and a shaft of sunlight streamed down into the depths.
Wiz looked up and saw a huge scaled head peering down at him. The dragon cocked its head to one side and ran its forked pink tongue over its ivory fangs.
Okay, Wiz thought, so I was wrong.
The dragon was a late adolescent, not yet grown to the point of acquiring true intelligence, but not far short of it. It was obviously one of the mounts for the Dark League’s dragon cavalry, gone feral.
That meant the animal had all the ferocity native to dragonkind and not the least fear of man.
Again the forked tongue licked out, tasting the air in the pit. Then its lips curled back revealing even more of ripping fangs and the animal growled.
Wiz shrank back against the wall as the dragon inhaled deeply. Instinctively he crouched and turned his back even through he knew it wouldn’t help him.
With a whoosh the dragon blasted a gout of flame down into the hole.
It was the shape of the trap that saved him. The dragon aimed his fire at Wiz, but Wiz was back out of sight under the overhang. That meant the full force of the dragon fire struck the rock walls of the neck.
The rock was wet, soaked from the eternal damp and the dragon’s fire converted a good portion of the moisture into steam. The overhang protected Wiz, but the dragon got a burst of live steam square in the face.
Dragons are not immune to dragon fire, and still less to steam. The beast snapped its head back and roared a high whistling scream like a tea kettle gone berserk. It jerked back from the pit, whipped around and galloped off, roaring and screaming at the top of its lungs.
Son of a bitch! Wiz thought as the dragon’s screams faded into the distance. He drew a deep lungful of moist warm air that stank of sulfur and dragon and looked around the pit in wonder.
I’m alive. Son of a bitch! He was still trapped in the pit and he was still hunted, but he was alive.
Wiz threw back his head and laughed at the wonder of it all.
“Rise and shine,” Jerry said as he came out of the bedroom. “We need to get an early start today.”
It was mid-morning, which didn’t strike Moira as particularly early, but she didn’t comment. She watched fascinated as Jerry pulled a couple of packages out of the refrigerator’s freezer compartment and popped them into the microwave oven.
“Breakfast will be ready in a couple of minutes. The bathroom’s over there if you need to freshen up.” Moira nodded and went through the door. Most of the fixtures were strange to her, but fortunately Wiz had told her enough about his world that she was able to figure things out.
“Hope you like country breakfast,” Jerry said. “I wasn’t expecting company and it’s all I’ve got.”
The microwave oven beeped and Jerry removed the boxes. Moira opened hers and poked the contents dubiously with her fork. The eggs were tough, the sausage patty tougher and had an odd metallic taste besides. The biscuit and gravy were steaming hot on the surface and icy in the interior. If this was the “fast food” Wiz had raved about there was something seriously wrong with the man’s taste buds.