It was a fatal combination. The Dragon Leader loosed a shaft as the enemy swept by. It was nearly a right-angle deflection shot and the mechanics worked against him as much as they did against the enemy. But he felt a tingle in his hands as the arrow leapt from the bow and he knew the arrow had seen its target.
The shaft sensed the enemy dragon and adjusted its trajectory accordingly. The tiny crystal eyes on either side of the broad barbed head both acquired the dragon and guided the arrow unerringly. The range was so close that the wing man’s magic detector barely had time to begin to sound and he had no time at all to maneuver out of the way.
The shaft struck deep into the dragon’s neck with force that drove it through scales and muscle until it struck bone. The beast arched its neck back and screamed in mortal agony while its rider clung desperately and despairingly to its back. Then the arrow’s spell took hold and the dragon went limp.
Below him the Dragon Leader saw the shape of the other dragon twisting dark against the gray-white clouds. As it disappeared into the cloud bank there was a faint pinkish glow marking the dragon’s last feeble gout of flame.
The Dragon Leader craned his neck, swiveling and searching for others in the night sky. There were none and no sign of battle anywhere. The moonlit cloud field was as quiet and serene as if nothing had happened here.
But it had happened, the Dragon Leader knew. His own scorched skin told him that. Soon there would be pain as the nerves started to complain of destroyed tissue. Now it was merely heat. The wheezy breathing and weary movements of his mount’s great wings told him she too had suffered from the other dragon’s fire. And worst, there would be at least three empty roosts back at the aerie tonight. That hurt more than the burns ever would.
“There will be other days,” the Dragon Leader promised through cracked and blistered lips as he looked to the south. “There will be other days.”
It was late and the fire in Wiz’s chamber had long since burned to cold, gray ash. He sat by the fireside, now lit only by the silver moonlight pouring in through the window, watching cloud shadows make patterns on the pier glass.
Damn fools, he thought for the tenth time. Can’t they see how valuable all this is. All right, so I made a mistake. But don’t they see its worth?
“We’ve had this conversation before,” the mirror told him.
“But they’re wrong,” Wiz said. “Damn it, they are wrong and I’m right. I know it.”
All evening he had alternated between anger, chagrin and self-pity. Each cycle was less satisfying than the one before and by now he was just going through the motions.
“That’s not really the issue, is it?” the mirror spoke quietly in Wiz’s mind. “If it was you wouldn’t be telling me all this again, would you?”
“Can’t they see . . . ?”
“Can you? What is really eating at you?”
“They were wrong!” Wiz protested tiredly. They were wrong and he was right and that was all there was to it.
“Is it?” the mirror asked. “Is that all there is to it?”
Wiz didn’t answer. Magic or no, the damn mirror was right. There was more than that.
He had been convinced he was right and he had done what he always did when he believed that: he went ahead without worrying about what others thought.
“And this time?” the mirror prompted him.
This time others had been involved,
he realized. There was no way they could not be.
Working magic wasn’t like sneaking some extra time on the computer to try a new hack. If this barfed, the results were a lot worse than crashing the system. It wasn’t just his life he was messing with, but theirs as well, and not surprisingly they resented it bitterly.
“Well, wouldn’t you?” the mirror asked. “Do you like having people mess with your life?”
“All right,” Wiz said tiredly. “You’re right. I was right too, but I was wrong in the way I went about it. I should have tried to work with them rather than ignoring them. Maybe I should have convinced them, won them over, before proceeding. But dammit! They didn’t have to make such a big deal of it.”