[The Six Kingdoms 01] The Shadow of His Wings by Fergusson Bruce

Author:Fergusson, Bruce [Fergusson, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780877958529
Publisher: Grafton
Published: 1987-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Wings of Night

The Erseiyr saw me. The hooded, golden eyes, big as wagon wheels, stared at me, blinking twice, the veins wide as spokes. My legs were straw, and I fell to my knees, any resolve I’d had sucked away like egg from a shell.

His foreleg talons gripped the Skarrian stalker. It had appeared huge on the ridge, but in the grasp of The Erseiyr, the thing was pitifully small, a hideous, hairy doll that still lived. It moved its few remaining legs, struggling for the purchase of a wall or ground. Rizzix looked away from me, as a human might a crawling insect, and closed his jaws around the stalker’s head and snipped it off, as easily as one would take shears to string. He dropped the head, but before it could roll down into the eyrie, he kicked it back out the portal like some child’s errant skittleball.

The Erseiyr descended from the high entrance, his partially folded wings brushing along the hillocks of gold, their glossy black color a terrifying shadow over the gleaming hoard. He strode down to the belly of the eyrie on massive hind legs, the headless stalker still twitching in his grasp and oozing orange blood. As he moved, I felt the rock tremble. Or maybe it was my own trembling.

The swells of treasure shifted and clinked, and the shuddering of rock ended only when Rizzix dropped his dinner by the nests and completed the folding of his huge wings. The dark red carapace spread over and around them. His curved beak, a ridgelike extension of that carapace, could also be used as a ram, though the hook was sharp as a plow. Fishermen told tales of The Erseiyr hurtling down from the clouds, folding his wings before he plunged into the water to mortally stun a kreenkill.

He rubbed at his beak now as he walked over to the pond of steaming water. The pool was not large enough to take his entire body but he dipped various parts of it, especially his beak and forelegs. For warmth? More likely for cleansing. The beast, revered as a god in four of the Six Kingdoms, was a fastidious god.

Rizzix walked back to his nest and poked at timbers and branches with a foreleg, to arrange a more comfortable berth. One of the timbers was so large ten men couldn’t have lifted it. But Rizzix pawed it as easily as a cat would a piece of straw.

He began eating the stalker. The crunching of bone, the popping and ripping of cartilage filled the eyrie as the wind whined outside. Rizzix split open the stalker’s abdomen with a single jerk of his beak.

Rui’s gullet worked like a bobbing cork on a fishing line. “Now’s our chance, while he’s eating that thing,” Rui whispered. I nodded, and we began to back away, still on hands and knees.

Rizzix chewed on the halves of abdomen, pushing them into his jaws with dripping forelegs until they were all gone. As Rui and I scuttled backwards like crabs, The Erseiyr looked up and stared at us.

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