The Perilous Sea (ARC) by Thomas Sherry

Author:Thomas,Sherry
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER ♦19

The Sahara Desert

THE ROAR CAME AGAIN.

Fairfax dove for the satchel. Titus grabbed his tunic and pulled his wand from his boot.

She made a pushing motion with her hand. A noise almost as terrifying as a dragon’s roar rumbled through the tent—she was causing an avalanche, meant to startle and distract the sand wyvern outside.

“Stay here,” Titus ordered.

He vaulted out—and was immediately buried under a landslide of sand. He vaulted again, toward the top of the high dune, just as a sand wyvern, almost exactly the same color as the Sahara, took to the sky screeching, its wings beating hard.

He knew that sand wyverns were bigger than normal wyverns, but this one was at least three times the size he had anticipated, its wingspan the dimensions of a small manor, and carried two riders, instead of the usual one.

The riders, in Atlantean uniforms, tried to rein in the sand wyvern and point its nose in Fairfax’s general direction again. Titus launched a succession of shield-punching spells at the riders, followed by a stunning spell.

One rider slumped over. The sand wyvern turned and blasted a stream of fire toward Titus. He tossed up a shield and aimed an attack at the beast’s belly. Wyverns—ordinary wyverns at least—had a soft underbelly, the reason they could be caught and tamed by skilled mages.

But the sand wyvern did not even react as Titus’s destabilizing spell hit it squarely in the abdomen, except to lunge at him, one enormous claw extended.

Hoping to draw the sand wyvern from Fairfax, he vaulted toward the top of the next dune—he had set up camp in the narrow valley between two waves of towering dunes that ran close and parallel to each other, hoping for better protection from the heat of the sun during the day. Blind vaulting being what it was, he ended up halfway up the sand slope he had aimed for, instead of at the top, with the sand wyvern already on his heels. Looking down the valley toward the point in the distance where the dunes appeared, he vaulted again.

This time, he rematerialized at least a quarter mile away. The sand wyvern wheeled about and shot toward him. Then in midair it jerked—convulsed, almost—and with a huge roar, turned back toward Fairfax, even though Titus prodded it with several thorn spells.

He swore and vaulted back to the tent—only to find himself completely entombed in sand. Not only was Fairfax gone, the tent, too, was gone. Swearing again, he took himself to a high spot.

Fairfax stood in the valley between the dunes, completely dwarfed by the sand wyvern, no more than twenty feet from her. Her arms were raised, as if she were signaling the beast to stop. And the beast seemed to be cooperating in a most civilized manner, hovering, the tip of its tail almost touching the ground.

Two seconds passed before Titus understood exactly what he was seeing. The sand wyvern was trying to advance, inch by inch, against the headwind Fairfax had created, which sent sand billowing in its path.

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