Page 41 of Lady Dragon
But neither human nor dragon suddenly slithered out from behind a massive rock and toward them on far too many legs, its movements almost snakelike as it wove its way down the mountain at incredible speed.
And yet it wasn’t covered in scales like a snake or even a dragon, but armored, chitinous segments all linked together, striped in black and orange as if to hide among the lava flows, and preceded by a massive pair of pincers that clacked together viciously at its head.
Kirek had seen centipedes before, but only those, even the biggest of which, she could squash underclaw. Never one with the bulk of a lion and the length of a dragon.
The red dragon reared up as those pincers snapped where her face had been—her eyes, rather.
The hideous creature probably tried to blind dragons first before it went for the rest of them. Not only lava cleaned these bones around here, apparently.
Kirek shouldn’t have loosened her grip for even a moment, because she was thrown from the red dragon’s back when she recoiled. Kirek twisted as she fell to avoid breaking her neck, and ended up bouncing and tumbling down the hillside, scraping over shards of sharp rock that cut her skin like glass.
Through her spinning field of vision, she glimpsed something ahead that made facing the centipede behind the more appealing option: The hillside abruptly ended in haze-filled darkness.
Kirek didn’t want to find out how far down it dropped.
Scrabbling with one hand while trying to protect her head with the other, she yanked out one of her daggers, hoping she wouldn’t end up stabbing herself, and flailed at the mountainside.
The dagger bounced off with the spark of steel on rock, and Kirek kept rolling.
A few more turns would take her over the edge. With a strangled cry, she lashed out once more.
Her dagger caught, yanking her arm and the rest of her body to a halt.
She still slid a few more paces, her boots jutting out over the edge and into space.
Trying not to panic, Kirek twisted, flattening herself on her belly to spread out her weight, and dug into the mountainside with her other hand, heedless of her pitiful nails that weren’t claws, and carefully dragged herself up until she could get her knees under her.
She looked over her shoulder and wished she hadn’t.
A sheer cliff fell away at her back, plummeting to what would have been her certain death on jagged rocks below.
She yanked her dagger out of the ground and scrambled away from the edge as quickly as she could.
Only then did she return her focus up the hill.
The centipede was coiled, getting ready for another strike of what must already have been several. The red dragon, wings spread wide, sent a stream of fire flooding over it. The creature curled in on itself, flames licking and raging over its body.
When the fire died, it was sizzling and steaming. But then it raised its pincered head and struck at the red dragon again. It made sense that it was resistant to fire, living near molten lava.
“I’m coming, Samansa!” Kirek cried.
Her hand immediately went for her sword as she started running and slipping up the mountain scree—not that she imagined it could do much against those thick armor plates. But despite the creature’s size, Kirek had seen what a hawk could do to even the fiercest-looking centipede .
Here, the red dragon was the hawk.
Samansa flared her wings once more, but Kirek froze in her tracks when the red dragon only looked back at her with a bright, malignant eye.
I’m not Samansa , she said.
And then she pushed off, her wings shooting her high into the air. Not toward Kirek, but away. The smoke and darkness quickly swallowed her.
She’d left Kirek. Alone.
Well, not entirely alone. Its intended prey gone, the centipede’s antennae quivered, and its head swiveled in her direction. Its pincers clacked once. Then its segmented body uncoiled from its defensive crouch, flowing like a stream of far faster-moving lava, and it charged her.
Kirek barely had time to think. But she didn’t panic. And she didn’t move. Instead, she crouched.
A few paces before those pincers would have closed around her body and cut her in half, Kirek leaped.
The centipede carried on under her, and she came down on its back, trying and half failing to run along it, her boots slipping on its smooth shell before she careened off the tail end and landed hard on her shoulder and very nearly her sword.
But the hillside was under her, and even luckier, she didn’t roll or slide far, despite how fast the centipede was moving.
It sped right off the cliff in its haste, launching itself into darkness.
Its body writhed as it fell, twisting, as if to run back along its segments, like Kirek had, to regain the ground, before it dropped out of sight.
Within the pattering of scree raining down on the rocks below, Kirek heard a much louder, nastier crunch .
And yet, she didn’t move beyond drawing herself up into a low squat, barely breathing, even though she was entirely out of breath. She waited, one hand gripping the mountain, the other her sword, listening.
And then she heard a clacking— angry clacking, if that was possible—and then the scratching and scrabbling of too many legs against the cliff face.
She cast around for something, anything to throw or even leverage with her legs, but all the bigger rocks or boulders had already gone over the edge, this close to it.
Even then she didn’t run. In fact, she sidled up to the deadly drop, planted her feet at an angle, making sure to center herself above the worst of the noise, and readied her sword in both hands.
The twitching antennae popped up first, of course, the most repellent stalks to ever spring from the earth, followed by the wicked, serrated scythes of those pincers.
But Kirek waited, utterly still, for the head of the blossom to rise, monstrous as it was—the clicking, grinding maw, ringed in sharp edges.
And then Kirek became the true bloom, unfurling the violence in every bit of muscle from her feet to thighs, hips to shoulders, and thrust her sword.
The steel tip went through its mouth and into its brain—skies above, she hoped it had a brain—and hit chitin on the other side, where it jarred Kirek’s arms as if she’d stabbed a stone wall with full force, and went no farther.
The centipede froze, but didn’t fall. Kirek would have happily let it take her sword down with it, in this instance, but its many legs remained attached to the cliff face, supporting its weight.
So, once more pivoting from the hips, Kirek drew her leg up, still clutching her hilt, and kicked it in the face as hard as she could.
The rebounding force of her blow smashed her back against the hillside, her sword coming with her.
Freed from the blade, and preferably its life, the centipede tipped backward, one segment at a time, leaning like a tree…
and fell. This time, after she heard the resounding crunch of it hitting the rocks far below, Kirek didn’t hear anything else.
She still sat there for a moment, gasping for breath, before she realized one of her boots, the one that had connected with the centipede, was once again hanging off the edge.
She yanked it back to safety, thrust her sword into the ground, and used it to haul herself away from the cliff with as much haste as she could muster.
As a dragon, she might have trumpeted her victory, or strutted a circle around the corpse of her fallen foe.
But her foe had fallen quite far, she had no interest in descending to find its corpse, and, furthermore, she was a jittery pile of human-shaped flesh wrapped in fragile skin, not a dragon.
When she climbed her way back up the mountain to where the centipede had first attacked, she was alone.
Samansa was still gone. Had never circled back for her.
It was then that Kirek’s nerves caught up with her, and her body started shaking.
She took huge, shuddering gulps of scorching, metallic air and tried to calm herself.
Samansa had left her. To be devoured by a giant centipede, trapped between rivers of lava and a deathly drop, on the side of a volcano that had just erupted.
No , Kirek told herself. The red dragon had left her. But that understanding didn’t stop the hot tears that spilled out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Which was only one more sign of how human she was becoming.
She scrubbed her tears away on her leather sleeve, hissing as the movement made her ragged hands suddenly roar to ferocious, stinging life. Now she could feel all the cuts and bruises she couldn’t before. But she didn’t have time to indulge the pain, or her self-pity.
Because, as bad as she felt, Samansa would feel worse—and she might pay for it with her human skin.
If Samansa’s guilt broke through the hard-scaled disdain of the red dragon, as it had done before, after she’d abandoned Kirek at High Nest, then she might transform.
And, as unforgiving as this place was to Kirek’s human body, hers was far stronger than Samansa’s.
Kirek didn’t even know if Samansa could breathe out here, let alone not immediately burn, if she didn’t fall to her death from the air.
The surface of Kirek’s leathers, her hair, were fiercely hot to the touch.
She didn’t even try to test the steel of her sword, lest it blister her finger.