David Farland - Worldbinder

But at the last instant, Siyaddah peeled away and rushed to join him, followed by a pair from the warrior clan, a young man that Alun did not know, and the girl Talon, that he had helped rescue from the Knights Eternal.

“Let’s go,” Alun told the dogs. Wanderlust gave a strong jerk on her leash and went racing up the tunnel into the warrens, barking.

“Quiet!” Madoc shouted at the dogs. “Quiet now.”

Both dogs went silent, for they were well trained. Still, they strained at their leashes, leading the way.

These won’t be common troops up here, Alun realized as he tried to hold the dogs back. No common troops could have climbed the sheer walls of the mountain.

With a pounding heart, he realized that there would be Knights Eternal ahead.

In the darkness, Rhianna reached the corpse of the dead knight and grabbed at his wings. The creature’s skin had gone gray with age and his flesh felt dry and mummified. As she pulled at his wings, his whole body followed. It could not have weighed fifty pounds. Even his bones must have rotted and dried up.

Rhianna’s blow had taken the creature square in the skull, bursting it like an overripe melon. All that was left of its head was a single mandible hanging by a scrap of skin.

Rhianna was afraid to move, afraid to draw attention. She could not see much in the darkness, but wyrmlings were filling the courtyard in front of the warrens, and the snarl and bang of thunder drums filled the night. Stone slabs were sliding down from the mountainside, revealing its secret passageways, and for the moment, that seemed to hold the wyrmlings’ attention. But at any instant, the wyrmlings could come for her.

Grasping the wings with both hands, Rhianna gave the knight’s remains a swift kick, and the wings came free with surprising ease.

She studied the fearful prongs in the powdery starlight, wondering how to insert them, afraid that the obvious answer was the only one.

There was a rush of wings behind her, and Rhianna whirled, afraid that a Knight Eternal had found her.

High King Urstone landed with a grunt.

“Gesht,” the high king whispered, casting a worried look into the sky. The word might have meant hurry, or follow me. Rhianna could not be certain, so she tried to do both.

She grasped the wings, held them over her head.

The high king leapt forward, shoved the metal prongs into her back, hard.

The pain that lanced through her drove a gasp from Rhianna’s lungs.

But the king spared her no sympathy. He raced to Fallion, took one look at him, and picked him up.

“Gesht! Gesht!” he hissed, and King Urstone leapt into the air, his wings flapping madly, trying to lug Fallion up along with his own bulk.

Wait for me, Rhianna thought forlornly. Her wings felt like dead weight on her shoulders, and she had to wipe away tears of pain.

She heard a shout off to her left, saw a trio of wyrmlings charging out of the darkness. Her own staff was at her feet, so she grabbed it and went sprinting along the wall, fleeing the wyrmlings. In a hundred yards, the wall ended.

Rhianna ran, swiped the tears of pain from her face, and tried furiously to flap the wings.

She had only gone fifty yards when she felt a tingling sensation as the wings came alive.

The heavy footfalls of wyrmling warriors closed in behind her, accompanied by the sounds of bone mail clanking.

Rhianna raced, fearing that at any moment a poison war dart would strike her square in the back, the way that one had with Jaz.

She peered upward, saw King Urstone flying high up the mountain toward a parapet.

A wyrmling roared at her back, came racing up with a burst of speed. Rhianna knew that she couldn’t outrun the monster, so she whirled to her right and leapt over the wall.

A wyrmling leapt after her and grabbed her right wing. She pulled free. The wyrmling plummeted with a scream.

Her wings were barely awake. She could feel blood surging through them, and she flapped frantically as she went into an uncontrolled spin.

She hit the ground with a thud some eighty feet below, her fall softened both by the flapping of her wings and a pile of dead bodies.

There were shouts off to the east. She heard a clang as an iron war dart bounced off the ground beside her.

Rhianna took off, running and flapping her wings feverishly, and then it seemed that some power outside herself took control of the wings, began forcing them to stretch forward and grasp the air in ways that she had not imagined, then pull downward and back, propelling her into the air. The wings had awakened.

Rhianna pumped furiously, aware that it was her own blood that sang through the veins of the wings, that it was her own energy that drove them.

It took great effort to get off of the ground. It was as hard as any race that she had ever run. Her heart hammered in her chest and blood throbbed through her veins as she took flight, but with a final leap she was in the air, her feet miraculously rising up from the ground.

She was boxed-in ahead. A two-story market rose up on one side, a sheer cliff face on the right. She flew to the market wall, batting her wings, and raised herself high enough so that she could grab onto the roof. With a burst of renewed fear, she clambered over the wall and rose into the air, flapping about clumsily like a new fledgling, grateful only to be alive and flying.

She wheeled about, heading upward, her heart pounding so hard that she grew light-headed. She had only one desire: to reach Fallion’s side.

Thunder drums roared and a deafening concussion blasted through the tunnels. Daylan Hammer, with his endowments of hearing, drew back from the door.

“King Urstone is flying up, bearing the wizard Fallion to safety,” the lookout called. “The wyrmlings have got battering rams.”

The thunder drums snarled, and from pedestals inside the iron door, archers shot arrows out through small kill holes.

There was a tremendous boom. Rocks cracked overhead; a split ran along the tunnel wall creating a seam, and pebbles and dust dribbled down. There were strange rumblings, the protests of stones stressed beyond the breaking point.

“Run!” Daylan warned. “The roof is going to collapse!” He whirled away from the great iron door, heard rocks sliding and tumbling outside, banging against the iron, sealing them in.

The warriors of the clan just stood, peering up at the widening rent. Time seemed to freeze.

Daylan could outpace them all, and right now he realized that he needed to do so. There would be no saving them if the roof came down.

“Flee,” he warned, hoping to save at least a few men, and then he darted between them, shoving men aside as lightly as possible, hoping not to throw them off balance.

A cave-in, he thought. This passage will be sealed, leaving only two entrances to defend.

By the time that most of the men had begun to react, he was thirty yards from the door and gaining speed. His ears warned when the rocks began to come down behind him.

He yearned to go back and dig out what men he could, but his duty was clear. Fallion Orden was of greater import than all the men in this cavern.

Vulgnash dropped from the wispy clouds, bits of ice stinging his face, and for a moment he just soared, floating almost in place as he studied the battle below. He was hidden up here, a shadow against the clouds.

Starlight shone upon Mount Luciare, turning the stone to dim shades of gray, almost luminous.

Distantly, he could hear the triumphant battle-cries of wyrmling troops, the rumble of thunder drums.

The city was in ruins. Mounds of dead men littered the streets between the lower gates and upper gates, and now the wyrmling troops had brought up battering rams and were attacking the great iron doors that sealed off the warrens.