Free The Crucible of the Dragon God by Mike Wild Page B

hinge by tying the metal struts to the flexible frame of Suresight itself, swung a strap beneath the two, and then stood back to admire his handiwork.
    Looking like a pair of artificial wings, what he had created would not emulate a bird but he could hang beneath it and it would glide . He hoped that was all he would need. There was no time to test its airworthiness, however, as the explosions around him had now become so frequent that they were one solid, roiling mass of ever expanding combustion. The only thing that he could do now was fly.
    Slowhand slung the device on his back, tightened the strap, and ran, the precipice that loomed before him doing nothing to discourage him - because if he stayed he was dead anyway. Suddenly, he was in the air and plummeting, and with desperate shifts of his weight from his left and to his right, he managed to manoeuvre the contraption between the numerous metal struts and beams that filled the cavern, dropping past and through them until the floor of the cavern was in sight.
    Here, Slowhand arced his body upward, feeling the strain not only on his muscles but on the contraption itself. However, as it groaned in unison with him, his flight path gradually changed from the near vertical to the horizontal. He banked to the left, into the harbour's exit tunnel, its striplights blinking by him, and he could feel the wind from the outside on his face. But with a quite literal sinking feeling, he realised that the air currents within the tunnel were not enough to keep him aloft. Thankfully, the explosions in the harbour above obliged him at that very moment, blasting a wave of heated air and flame down into the tunnel buffeting him forward as effectively as if he had been swatted away by some giant, invisible hand. Slowhand yelled with surprise and with exhilaration and, as the sky darkened around him, realised he had exited the tunnel and was above the Drakengrats once more.
    He was just beginning to think he was safe when the entire underside of Thunderlungs' Cry began to blow apart in a series of thunderous and buffeting explosions. There was an ominous cracking from above, too, and as the air about him began, suddenly, to fill with falling stones, rocks and even boulders, he realised that Thunderlungs' Cry itself was coming down. Slowhand cursed and frantically began to manoeuvre the glider through the deadly rain, avoiding pieces of the collapsing bridge by inches and aware that even a single impact could slap him from the sky. Whether through some innate piloting skill or sheer luck, he emerged unscathed, and was about to whoop in triumph when a growing shadow on the distant ground made him instinctively look up.
    Ohhh, fark ! he thought.
    Because Thunderlungs Cry had saved the best for last, it seemed, and - seemingly in slow motion - an entire middle section of the bridge was plummeting towards him.
    Slowhand never thought he'd be grateful for more explosions, but for the final, momentous detonation from the rockface, he most assuredly was.
    He suddenly found himself being punched across the sky. The shockwave from the final detonation had caught the glider and punched it into a spin away from the rock face and, to Slowhand's misfortune, higher rather than lower into the mountains. As he sailed dizzyingly above the immense chasm he realised that while he had been punched higher, this did not necessarily mean that he was going to remain high as the shockwave had severely damaged what little integrity his invention had possessed in the first place. Swallowing uneasily, the archer craned his neck to inspect how bad things were, and his worst fears were confirmed. His jerry-rigged frame was bent and warped, and where he had lashed catgut to hold it together, it was now either snapping away from the metal or uncoiling from it with a sound like multiple cracking whips. He estimated he had perhaps a minute before the whole thing came apart.
    There was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to