Free Extraordinary Zoology by Howard Tayler Page B

her belt and chambered it. She snapped the breach closed and aimed again at the fog drake, stepping to where she could see its remaining eye.
    Of course , she thought, a half-second too late, that also means its remaining eye can see me .
    The drake lashed out with its tail, slamming hard into Edrea and sending her sprawling. She lost hold of her rifle but retained the spinning band of runes about her wrist, her arcane vision still sharp. The rifle did not, she noted with relief, land muzzle-first in the mud. It would be a shame to survive this only to get dressed down like Lynus had.
    “To me!” Pendrake shouted. Kinik, Horgash, and Lynus were up and running after him.
    But Pendrake was charging Greta, whose snorting was louder than the drake’s.
    “Bear left!” Edrea yelled. “And watch out for that tail!”
    Pendrake stopped to reorient himself. Kinik and Horgash were now closer to the drake than he was, with Kinik in the lead. The ogrun seemed perfectly on target this time. Edrea guessed that the mist thinned farther from the lake.
    Kinik delivered a powerful, crouching sweep with her cleaver and took the fog drake’s right hind leg out from under it. The blade stuck deep in the shank.
    Horgash ran straight up the drake’s back, reversed both sword-grips as he ran, and plunged them down toward its spine.
    Both swords hit scale and bone, skipping out to the sides.
    The drake twisted and bucked, turning to face the others, and Horgash flew off its neck into the mud. Kinik wrenched her blade free but dropped to one knee with the effort.
    Pendrake ran up behind Kinik as she crouched. “Kinik! Brace!” She froze, then grunted in surprise as the professor planted a running step squarely in the center of her back and leaped onto the drake’s neck.
    He too reversed his grip, one hand on the hilt of his ancient, unnatural sword and one hand on the pommel. He thrust the blade deep into the base of the fog drake’s long neck, piercing scale like it was paper. The drake screamed in agony, arching its back. Pendrake clung tightly to the sword, twisting viciously. The drake continued to thrash.
    Kinik stood and swept again with her polearm, roaring with exertion. Her bellow almost drowned out the meaty crunch her war cleaver made when she buried it in the bone of the drake’s left foreleg.
    The drake toppled, and Pendrake rode it over, continuing to savage the beast with the embedded blade.
    Horgash came stumbling out of the mud, swords at the ready, but by the time he reached the drake’s head the beast was still, its amber outline gone from Edrea’s sight.
    “Is everybody okay?” Lynus called into the mist.
    “I feel ten years younger,” Horgash said with a broad smile.
    “I feel two feet shorter,” said Kinik with a grin.
    “I feel like a moment of silence,” Pendrake said, staring down at the remains of Codex. He shook his head sadly. “Morrow, but he was a fine animal.” He pointed up the rise. “But unless we all feel like walking, we ought to give quick chase.”

    Aeshnyrr and Oathammer hadn’t run far—just up and out of the fog—and Horgash’s bison, Greta, hadn’t gone anywhere. Their bolting had resulted in a few scrapes, but nothing serious.
    Unfortunately, the trail Edrea had been following was destroyed. As the mist began to fade—much of it had been the fog drake’s work—no further tracks were visible.
    “The Tharn have gotten away from us,” Edrea announced, examining yet another horse-trampled bramble. “That clear, clumsy trail is gone now.”
    “No,” said Horgash. “It ended here.”
    Pendrake nodded. “He’s right.”
    “I’d have been right if I said something. As soon as we crossed that ridge into the mist, I thought to myself, ‘This would be a great spot for an ambush,’ but somebody,” he pounded his fist against his breastplate for emphasis, “ somebody has spent too many years trading instead of leading the marching warriors.”
    “I knew it!” said Lynus.