"Zach Hughes - Killbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

trees I could catch glimpses of white bones. To the south, beyond the point
from which the dragon had spat death upon the lion, there was another
rockslide. The dragon was effectively penned into a section of his path not
more than an arrow's flight long.
 "Well, Eban the hunter," I said, "it is only to kill him now."

How? That was the question. Once, according to legend, a dragon had
been killed by rolling burning logs down on him from above, but my father
had slain his dragon in a different way. I looked to the cliff which towered
above the dragon's path, highest in the center of the remaining range. I
made my plans. It was early afternoon, and I wondered if I would do well
to wait for darkness. Could dragons see in the night? We knew so little
about them.

Yes, I would await the coming of night. I withdrew, walking fearfully
along the abandoned portions of the dragon's path, and made my camp,
dined on dried meat and fruits, slept well in spite of what I faced. I awoke,
willing myself to do so, with the moon not yet above the hills, and in an
almost inky darkness, I made my way to the top of the cliff. The dragon
was a dark and foreboding blackness down below. I began to gather rocks,
hefting stones as large as I could handle, rolling some into place. Once I
dislodged a loose stone and sent it clanking and crashing downward, and
the area near me was lit, suddenly, by the fierceness of the dragon's eye, a
blinding blaze of light as if from the sun which, as I cowered back into the
forest, swept back and forth and then went away.

When the sun sent its warning of morning in the form of false dawn, I
had a pile of rocks higher than my head. My hope was that once I
dislodged them, pulling away the small log on which they all rested, they
would gather their brothers as they rolled down the slope in a growing
slide which would bury the dragon and make him immobile.

I waited until the light was good, and it was almost my undoing. For as
I readied myself, the dragon, who had been in perfect position, moved,
first making that eerie scream, then jerking into motion, his peculiar feet
making clanking sounds on the pathway which he had beaten down into
hardness with his eons of patrol. He went to the far south and paused. I
waited for an hour and was impatient. I steeled myself and stepped out to
the brink of the cliff and stood there, my body exposed. Nothing
happened. Had he expended his teeth? If so, he still had his eyes. I knew
that from the incident of the night. But he had to be moved back to the
center of the cliff to be a target for my manmade rock slide.

"Dragon," I said softly. "Come to me. Be a nice dragon and come to be
killed."
 He didn't hear.

"Dragon," I yelled.

Creak. Clank. I dived for the trees as teeth spattered around me. Well, I