01 Wing Warrior by Kevin Outlaw Page B

were home to foul and evil creatures. Most people didn’t believe such rumours, but Hawk did, and that was why he always watched the mountains so closely, especially when night was beginning to fall.
    He yawned and let his gaze travel south to the calm, massive expanse of the Everlasting Ocean. There were no travellers on the main road linking Crystal Shine with the port city of High Tide. There were no boats out on the ocean. The world was as still and quiet as an undiscovered tomb.
    Hawk’s stomach was not so quiet. It was grumbling and complaining, and he was all too aware how long it had been since he last ate.
    He turned his attention back to the empty borderlands. The last fingers of sunlight had turned everything a deep red. It was as though the ground itself had been caught on fire.
    Spoon and Carp, the two chefs, would be in the kitchen right now. They would be boiling potatoes and carrots, and roasting chickens. They would be cooking parsnips and making huge vats of gravy, nice and thick the way Hawk liked it.
    There would be fresh bread baking in the oven, filling the whole fort with a delicious smell; there would be churned butter on the table; there would be hot tea boiling on the stove.
    He licked his lips and his eyelids drooped sleepily.
    Suddenly a terrifying screech echoed across the landscape, and a black shape ripped through the clouds above the mountaintops. So deafening was the sound, Hawk lost his balance and fell flat on his back. By the time he was on his feet again the shape, whatever it might have been, was no longer in sight.
    He leaned his spear against the turret and tied his quiver of arrows around his waist. He was no longer thinking about food.
    Moments later the tower trapdoor opened and Clay climbed out. Clay was a huge man, and getting through the trapdoor took him a lot more scrabbling and squeezing, puffing and panting, then it did for other people.
    ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.
    ‘Hear it? I saw it,’ Hawk said.
    ‘What was it?’
    Before Hawk could answer, the shape reappeared on the horizon, looping and weaving above the clouds before heading directly for the fort.
    Startled shouts were already rising from other turrets, and an alarm bell started ringing in the courtyard. Soldiers were running backwards and forwards, putting on helmets and strapping on swords. From Hawk’s viewpoint they looked like scurrying silver ants swarming over a termite hill.
    Although Hawk had never seen a dragon before, he knew that was exactly what the thing swooping down over the jagged peaks of the Sanguine Mountains was. There really weren’t that many things a huge flying lizard could be mistaken for.
    The dragon’s wings made a flat, slapping sound, and as it raced above the open wilderness any living thing its shadow touched, every blade of grass, withered and died.
    Hawk watched, almost hypnotised, as the sunlight flickered on the dragon’s sleek, black scales.
    ‘Hawk,’ Clay said, drawing his sword. ‘Hawk, shoot it.’
    Hawk continued to stare, mouth open.
    The dragon bellowed furiously and soared above them, hanging momentarily like an ugly stain on the red sky.
    ‘Hawk,’ Clay repeated.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Shoot it. Use your bow.’
    ‘Right.’
    Hawk picked up his bow with shaking hands. The dragon came plummeting down from the sky, as fast as a shooting star, into a hail of arrows fired from soldiers all around the fort. Each arrow pinged and snapped uselessly on the dragon’s armoured skin.
    Hawk fired an arrow of his own, aiming for one of the dragon’s wings, but at the last moment the dragon banked away and the arrow twanged on its scaly back instead.
    ‘Try again,’ Clay said.
    The dragon roared over the fort. Soldiers ducked or ran screaming for cover. A black vapour was coming out of the dragon’s mouth and nose: an acrid, thick smoke that billowed around the dragon protectively.
    Hawk fired another arrow, watching in dismay as it bounced off.
    ‘It’s no use,’