Dragon Rigger by Jeffrey A. Carver Page A

the new figure became clearer. He could see its form now: neither dragon nor beast, it was human. Rigger . His breath rushed out in a silent exclamation. Where the rigger touched it, the ice was melting. The glow of the Dream Mountain began to shine through more strongly.
    The human turned her head. It was Jael.
    But in that moment of recognition, she became transparent and disappeared. The Dream Mountain faded, and the icicle prison walled him in on all sides. It stretched out forever, through the fractured sky to the skies beyond.
    Windrush could do nothing except circle angrily. Finally he roared and flew straight toward the wall of ice, his hot breath boiling the air before him. Better to die than to let this terrible work go unchallenged! But when his fiery breath touched the wall, it vanished. The shattered sky vanished, and the web; everything vanished except the night air whispering over his wings. He cried in protest, but his voice faded on the wind.
    He looked down at the other dragons, a swarm of fiery insects in the valley below. He heard his name floating up on the air. Without answering, he searched the night sky one more time, looking for the source of that vision. Finally he gave up and spiraled downward.
    As he rejoined the windmilling flight, he saw that the flush of the lumenis seemed to be wearing off most of the other dragons. "Did you see what I saw?" he rumbled.
    "We saw you trying to fly to the summit of the world," answered Farsight. "What else was there to see?"
    "A vision," Windrush murmured. "I'd hoped you might have seen it, too."
    "A vision ," crowed SearSky, flying up from behind. "Another work of your trickster friend?"
    Windrush waited until the other dragon came alongside. "Whose work it was, I cannot say," he answered. "It could have been a taunt from the Enemy—but I think not. I believe it may have come from the Dream Mountain. It had a smell of prophecy about it."
    As his words carried on the wind, a murmur passed through the flight of dragons. But SearSky was unimpressed. His eyes blazed like coals of fire beneath his knobby brow. "How can you judge it a work of the Dream Mountain, if you cannot tell a false vision from a true one?"
    Windrush snorted sparks, not dignifying the insult with an answer. He peered around at all of the dragons. "What I saw was a great web encircling the world! A web of ice—ice as hard as stone, a trap of the Enemy. It stank of despair. I saw the Dream Mountain beyond it, out of reach. And then . . ."
    He described what he had seen: the small human figure climbing and melting the web. And the Words. His voice became husky, rasping his own words into the air. "It was Jael!" he said, breathing a soft, billowing flame. "Jael, friend of Highwing, friend of the realm. She was undoing the work of the Enemy, which the rest of us were powerless to fight."
    His words hung on the night air for a dozen heartbeats, before he admitted that Jael had vanished before winning against the ice and darkness.
    "We heard your outcry," Farsight whispered, his diamond eyes flashing.
    "My rage broke the vision. But it could not break what was in the vision. It was a power greater than our own." He let loose an angry flame and veered off into silence.
    The others began to debate what he had told them, but Windrush stayed outside the circle. The air was soon filled with questions, not just about the vision, but about the past, about the truth of the Words, about Jael. "Do you doubt," Farsight said caustically to one questioner, "that Jael broke the Enemy's sorcery against Highwing? And against us?"
    "So we have heard," came a rumbling reply. "We know that the enchantment was broken. But by whom? Who can say?"
    Farsight snorted in disgust.
    And on it went. Windrush had come to expect it. He had observed that few dragons seemed to remember sacrifices made on their behalf, unless they were direct witnesses to the acts. There were many here whose spirits had been freed from the Enemy's