The Avengers of Carrig by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page B

can command … It’s my guess he’s changed his mind, and he’ll never dare show his face in Carrig again.”
    Saikmar was on the point of saying that he disagreed, that he did not feel Belfeor was that kind of man, when a shrill cry came from the keen-eyed lookout on the edge of the plateau.
    They wave the yellow flag! The king’s been found!”
    At once there was a frenzy of activity. Up hobbled his uncle to embrace Saikmar and wish him well; the riggers stood to their weights and winches as he piled into thefragile shell of the glider and fastened safety-lines about him, setting his knife where he could reach it to cut himself loose if he had to. He took hold of the control-stick and set it for launching, pushing it well forward so that he could dive from the plateau’s edge before rising into the hot up-current of the nearest crater; then there was a wait which seemed long as eternity.
    “He comes!” the lookout called at last, and they let go the weights.
    Next moment the eyes of everyone else were on the king, but Saikmar dared not turn his gaze in that direction yet He was too busy gentling the glider through the treacherous volcanic draughts, seeking the up-current which would whip him a safe thousand feet higher than the king. When he at last located it, he could look. And caught his breath. No matter how often a man has flown over the Smoking Hills, he thought, there could never be another occasion like the first time you shared the air with the king-parradile.
    He had just taken his lazy leap into the sky; it was clear from which cave he had emerged, for his stiff tail pointed at it like a signpost. He was black, and blue, and gold, and he shone in the sunlight. Under his smooth hide the pumping wing-muscles rippled like waves in deep oil. Never in living memory had the king survived so long; never in memory or legend had one grown to such a—size!
    Seeing his true proportions, Saikmar was so startled he almost tilted his glider into a stall. Before today, he had never flown with the king—only watched and studied his habits from the ground. The parradile’s body was five times a man’s height from shoulders to root of tail, sharp-keeled below, broad and flat above. Tail and neck together added as much again to his length; atop the curving neck the wise old head, hammer-shaped, turned to survey the rising adversaries, for other gliders had taken the air now. And as though defiantly the king opened his vast jaws in a blood-red yawn, then leaned on his left pillion—sixty feet to the tip now it was full-spread!—and swooped into the updraught of a volcano.
    Before Saikmar knew what had happened, the king was at his own level and still rising.
    Some said that the parradile had copied this techniquefrom men; Saikmar held this to be nonsense, arguing that no flying creature could lair among the Smoking Hills and not discover the trick in the course of nature. Yet, watching the elegance with which the king rode the hot rising air, he understood how people could mistake it for a skill learned like human skills.
    As yet, however, it seemed the king was drowsy, for he did no more than glance toward Saikmar’s glider and then sheer off in a dive, pumping his wings to work the winter’s stiffness out of them. Relieved, for he felt it best to circle awhile before planning his first attack, Saikmar decided to gain more height still, and while doing so to see where the other contenders were.
    He recognized their various gliders easily enough; each clan had its distinctive livery colors, and painted their craft accordingly. His own was decked in the colors of the twywit, black-brown above and red-brown underneath. Others were green, slate-colored, blood-red, checkered or striped.
    No glider should have been white.
    He realized this the instant he saw it take the sky, even as his intelligence rebelled against the information of his eyes. No glider could climb like that—a mile from any updraught, at the lowest