“I was supposed to take you in dead,” muttered K!sdra sullenly.
Rincewind looked down at him and grinned slowly. It was a wide, manic and utterly humorless rictus. It was the sort of grin that is normally accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out, picking scraps out of the teeth.
“Alive will do,” said Rincewind. “If we’re talking about anyone being dead, remember whose sword is in which hand.”
“If you kill me nothing will prevent Psepha killing you!” shouted the prone dragonrider.
“So what I’ll do is, I’ll chop bits off,” agreed the wizard. He tried the effect of the grin again.
“Oh, all right,” said K!sdra sulkily. “Do you think I’ve got no imagination?”
He wriggled out from under the sword and waved at the dragon, which took wing again and glided in toward them. Rincewind swallowed.
“You mean we’ve got to go on that?” he said. K!sdra looked at him scornfully, the point of Kring still aimed at his neck.
“How else would anyone get to the Wyrmberg?”
“I don’t know,” said Rincewind. “How else?”
“I mean, there is no other way. It’s flying or nothing.”
Rincewind looked again at the dragon before him. He could quite clearly see through it to the crushed grass on which it lay but, when he gingerly touched a scale that was a mere golden sheen on thin air, it felt solid enough. Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.
“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 around.
“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 backward 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 practice 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 downward, 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 moss. 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 toward 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.