Read Online The Book of Silence by Lawrence Watt-Evans - Free Book Online

mound and the meadow below, and Garth realized that it was unaware of his presence on its back.
    It could feel nothing through its armor and thought that he, too, like Koros, had fallen.
    He smiled, brushed aside a lock of black hair that had fallen into one eye, and drew his dagger. He had lost his sword in his leap, releasing it without conscious thought when he had to find a fingerhold, but his axe was slung across his back, and the dagger’s sheath was secure on his belt. He set about prying at the scales on the back of the dragon’s neck, wedging the point of the knife beneath their overlapped edges and working upward.
    The scales tore loose and fell, tinkling down past the dragon’s wings into space. To Garth’s surprise, the monster did not react. He leaned forward to look at the spot of hide thus uncovered, as the wind of a high-speed turn lashed at him.
    Beneath the scaly armor was a fine wire mesh, and beneath that, Garth could faintly make out a myriad of gears, chains, springs, and sprockets, ticking quietly.
    He sat motionless for a moment, absorbing this discovery of the dragon’s true nature. Quickly, he reached a decision; he could not kill this thing, obviously, and now he decided that he did not want to destroy it. He sat back and waited.
    It was almost pleasant, crouching atop the broad metal back of the dragon as it swooped through the air. Garth had never flown before and found what little he could see from where he sat to be intriguing indeed. The wind was fresh and exhilarating when the monster was not in one of its sudden turns or dives, and the view was amazing.
    He did not have to wait long; after a few more passes across the hillock and meadow the dragon looped back up across the riverbank, then soared gracefully down into the gaping mouth of a cave on the eastern shore, at the base of the hillock. It braked by cupping its wings forward.
    Inside the opening, it folded its wings and settled neatly to the ground, landing with a heavy thud and a mild bump. Then, in a scant second, it froze into total immobility, losing completely its incredible semblance of life and becoming a mere metal construct.
    Garth glanced up and about and saw that the entire inside of the mound was hollow. Nor was it a natural cave; stone arches braced the ceiling, and niches were occupied by flaring oil lamps. Three young men stood off to one side, well away from the dragon; they had not yet noticed its unwanted passenger.
    The smoke that still streamed from the creature’s nostrils suddenly thickened, and a loud hissing came from somewhere beneath the overman; then the smoke stopped entirely, leaving a thinning cloud to obscure the chamber’s sooty upper reaches.
    Garth leaned over the dragon’s shoulder and watched as a door in its belly swung open, just barely visible to him beyond the curve of chest and foreleg. Three men crawled out, then two more, and finally two more still.
    Garth lifted the axe off his back with his right hand, keeping his drawn dagger in his left, and vaulted down to the cave floor. He landed in front of the party of seven that had emerged from the dragon, with the other three humans to his right. The jump was longer than he had realized in the poor light, but he managed to catch himself and keep from sprawling, though it was not the dignified and dramatic entrance that he had hoped for.
    The men froze, staring at him in astonishment. He stared back.
    After a moment of stunned silence, Garth demanded, “So it was all a fraud?”
    The faces of the men were blackened with some sort of gritty dust, but Garth thought he recognized one of them as a person he had seen in the village where he had eaten that morning. It was this man who answered. “No, no ... I mean, not originally. There was a real dragon once, really there was.”
    â€œBut he died,” another man said.
    â€œWe fed him poisoned sheep,” a third added. “It was really very simple. My