Page 4 of Guardian's Dilemma

I was too slow.

I fired a spell straight up, hoping to clip its wing and force it to land, but it twisted higher and higher. It was flying fast. Fleeing. Typical dragon. Coward.

My magic filled me, surging up with my adrenaline, and I ran towards the back alleyway the dragon had emerged from.

The spells I’d left strung across the alleyway were broken. No wonder I hadn’t felt any alerts. I looked around quickly, trying to assess the situation. There were two people standing there: the plump man who’d served me my uneaten lunch, and the large, scowling man. They were standing awfully close together.

“Where is it going?” I asked.

“What?”

The little man looked innocent but I wasn’t going to fall for that. I studied him carefully once again, trying to see anything I’d missed before. I was still sure he had no magic but if that dragon had taken off from right here – and the spray of litter across the ground indicated it had, and it had knocked the bins over as it had taken off – then these two must have seen something.

I sent a little spell out to make sure that what I was seeing was what was actually in front of me. It was designed to strip illusion away.

The large man shook his arm out as my spell struck him and, to my astonishment, it fizzled out and vanished.

“Pins and needles,” he said.

I couldn’t sense any magic coming from the large man but he had just undone my spell without any apparent effort.

I sent out another spell. This one would tell me what sort of magic he had.

It broke on contact.

And that was when I realised that I was looking at a troll.

I’d heard of them, but never met one.Ridireweren’t against killing a troll if it got out of the Unworld but only if it attacked us. Trolls weren’t really our problem. Our duty was to kill dragons until we had eliminated them from the earth, and it had been our sacred duty for thousands of years. Generations ofridire, trained from infancy to do the most noble thing a man can do: protect the human race by eradicating evil.

The fact that there was a troll right in front of me explained why I’d not been able to pinpoint where the dragon was. It had probably been hiding in the next room or something.

It was frustrating that I’d been so close and hadn’t sensed it. Damn that troll for distorting my magic so much.

“What happened out here?” I asked at last.

It was the little one who answered. “I don’t know. That’s what we came to find out. We heard a crash – someone knocked over the bins.”

“Maybe it was foxes,” said the large one.

“No, you know foxes can’t get into those bins. That’s why we have them. It must have been kids mucking around.”

I was getting frustrated by these two. I was almost sure they knew something but I just couldn’t prove it.

“You didn’t see anything?”

“Like what?”

“Anything strange?”

The big man shot me a look. “Other than you? No.”

Damn them both. I turned to leave and gave them a barely-civil, “Good afternoon.”

It would take us months to trace that dragon now. At least I had some small pieces of information that would help us narrow down where it would go.

Firstly, it was acuraidh, which meant it was strong and vicious but didn’t have any magic. Secondly, I was fairly sure I’d seen someone riding it, which meant it had an ally. Thirdly, it was heading north, though I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t circle round at some point. It was a decent enough place to start.

In the meantime, I’d take a look around. I wanted to see where the dragon had been living and try to work out who its ally might be. It would all be useful information further down the line.

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