“I didn’t know dragons could be seen through,” he said.
K!sdra shrugged. “Didn’t you?” he said.
He swung himself astride the dragon awkwardly because Rincewind was hanging on to his belt. Once uncomfortably aboard the wizard moved his white-knuckle grip to a convenient piece of harness and prodded K!sdra lightly with the sword.
“Have you ever flown before?” said the dragonrider, without looking round.
“Not as such, no.”
“Would you like something to suck?”
Rincewind gazed at the back of the man’s head, then dropped to the bag of red and yellow sweets that was being proffered.
“Is it necessary?” he asked.
“It is traditional,” said K!sdra. “Please yourself.”
The dragon stood up, lumbered heavily across the meadow, and fluttered into the air.
Rincewind occasionally had nightmares about teetering on some intangible but enormously high place, and seeing a blue-distanced, cloud-punctuated landscape reeling away below him (this usually woke him up with his ankles sweating; he would have been even more worried had he known that the nightmare was not, as he thought, just the usual discworld vertigo. It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline).
This was not that event, but it was good practise for it. Psepha clawed its way into the air with a series of vertebrae-shattering bounds. At the top of its last leap the wide wings unfolded with a snap and spread out with a thump which shook the trees. Then the ground was gone, dropping away in a series of gentle jerks. Psepha was suddenly rising gracefully, the afternoon sunlight gleaming off wings that were still no more than a golden film. Rincewind made the mistake of glancing downwards, and found himself looking through the dragon to the treetops below. Far below. His stomach shrank at the sight.
Closing his eyes wasn’t much better, because it gave his imagination full rein. He compromised by gazing fixedly into the middle distance, where moorland and forest drifted by and could be contemplated almost casually.
Wind Snatched at him. K!sdra half turned and shouted into his ear.
“Behold the Wyrmberg!”
Rincewind turned his head slowly, taking care to keep Kring resting lightly on the dragon’s back. His streaming eyes saw the impossibly inverted mountain rearing out of the deep forested valley like a trumpet in a tub of nose. Even at this distance he could make out the faint octarine glow in the air that must be indicating a stable magic aura of at least - he gasped - several milliPrime? At least!
“Oh no,” he said.
Even looking at the ground was better than that. He averted his eyes quickly, and realized that he could now no longer see the ground through the dragon. As they glided around in a wide circle towards the Wyrmberg it was definitely taking on a more solid form, as if the creature’s body was filling with a gold mist. By the time the Wyrmberg was in front of them, swinging wildly across the sky, the dragon was as real as a rock.
Rincewind thought he could see a faint streak in the air, as if something from the mountain had reached out and touched the beast. He got the strange feeling that the dragon was being made more genuine.
Ahead of it the Wyrmberg turned from a distant toy to several billion tons of rock poised between heaven and earth. He could see small fields, woods and a lake up there, and from the lake a river spilled out and over the edge…
He made the mistake of following the thread of foaming water with his eyes, and jerked himself back just in time.
The flared plateau of the upturned mountain drifted towards them. The dragon didn’t even slow. As the mountain loomed over Rincewind like the biggest fly-swatter in the universe he saw a cave mouth. Psepha skimmed towards it, shoulder muscles pumping.
The wizard screamed as the dark spread and enfolded him. There was a brief vision of rock flashing past, blurred by speed. Then the dragon was in the open again.
It was inside a cave, but bigger than any cave had a right to be. The dragon, gliding across its vast emptiness, was a mere gilded fly in a banqueting hall.
There were other dragons -gold, silver, black, white -flapping across the sun-shafted air on errands of their own or perched on outcrops of rock. High in the domed roof of the cavern scores of others hung from huge rings, their wings wrapped bat-like around their bodies. There were men up there, too. Rincewind swallowed hard when he saw them, because they were walking on that broad expanse of ceiling like flies.
Then he made out the thousands of tiny rings that studded the ceiling. A number of inverted men were watching Psepha’s flight with interest. Rincewind swallowed again. For the life of him he couldn’t think of what to do next.
“Well?” he asked, in a whisper. “Any suggestions?
“Obviously you attack,” said Kring scornfully.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” said Rincewind
“Could it be because they all have crossbows?”