Dumery thought he could manage it-get in there, grab the dragons, and get out again, and then hide somewhere in the forest, work his way south and west, back out of the mountains and back toward civilization. Teneria wouldn’t dare follow him if he went south, near the Warlock Stone.
He hadn’t worked out all the details, of course, but the hard part, he was sure, would be getting the dragons. Once he had his breeding pair he would worry about details, such as where he was going to keep them, and how he was going to get them there.
First things first, he told himself.
He reached the outer fence, and discovered that the very first step-getting back into the farm-was going to be harder than he had thought at first. This was not an easy fence to climb. It was nine or ten feet high, with black iron uprights set a few inches apart-that much he had known already.
He had not, however, paid much attention to the fact that there were only two crosspieces holding the uprights together, one nearly at ground level and the other near the top. The uprights were far enough apart that he couldn’t brace his foot between two of them, but close enough together that he couldn’t squeeze through.
And climbing the uprights themselves, while possible, wasn’t going to be easy, because they weren’t round, easy-to-grasp rods, they were triangular, with concave faces, so that the edges were sharp.
He sighed, grabbed hold of two uprights, and started climbing.
The metal cut into his palms and his fingers; if he clung tightly enough to pull himself up, the edges cut more deeply.
And then he felt himself starting to slide back down; the smooth metal didn’t give him enough friction to hold. The edges were cutting more than ever as his hands slid down them.
He let go and fell back to the ground, frustrated. He looked at his hands.
The palm of his left hand was bleeding sluggishly; the fingers and his right hand were marked with red pressure lines, but the skin hadn’t been broken.
He swore, using every foul word he’d ever heard the sailors on his father’s ships use, and wiped the blood off on the grass.
That, he told himself, was a truly vicious fence! Why had they made it that way?
He supposed that it was really intended to prevent dragons from getting out, rather than to keep him from getting in, but it seemed to work quite well either way.
On the other hand, he thought, he was smarter than any dragon, and the dearth of crosspieces gave him an idea. If he could find something and wedge it between two of the bars, he should be able to bend them further apart and squeeze through. After all, he was thin enough, particularly after his recent adventures in reaching this point. The bars were iron, not steel-iron was cheaper and lasted better in the open weather, since steel would rust away.
Iron, however, was easier to bend, and the bars weren’t that thick, no more than an inch or two through.
He looked around, but he was standing on bare rock. His only real tool was his belt knife, and that wouldn’t do.
The greater moon’s light was already starting to fade, and he decided that speed was more important than any other consideration; he picked up a handy rock, roughly the size of his head, and jammed it into the fence.
It went right through.
He swore again, and picked up another, larger rock.
This one took an effort to hoist up, but at least it didn’t go right through the bars. One end of it did. He braced it up with one hand and hammered at it with the other.
The fence jangled loudly at the impact, and he hurt his hand, but the bars didn’t yield.
A dragon roared at him from one of the pens, but in the darkness he couldn’t make out exactly which one it was.
He snarled in reply, then with one hand holding his wedge-rock in place, he picked up another, and used it as a hammer, pounding at the wedge-rock with it.
The fence rang and buzzed at the impact, and the dragons bellowed in reply-which pleased Dumery, as he judged that the draconic racket would drown out the noise the fence was making.
Then one bar started to give, and Dumery pounded harder, holding his improvised hammer in both hands.
With a loud snap, the rock suddenly fell through the fence, and Dumery blinked, startled. The bar hadn’t bent that far yet!
He looked again, and realized that the bar had snapped off at the bottom. He pushed at it, and it swung freely.
Delighted, he shoved it to one side and squeezed sideways through the resulting opening.
Now all he had to do was to get to the hatchling cage, get inside, grab two dragons-a male and a female-drag them out, close the cage behind him, drag the dragons over here and out through the fence, and run and hide.
Oh, sure, that was all. He grimaced slightly, and wondered if maybe he was being a little over-confident.
It also occurred to him that he did not want to close the cage behind him. If all twelve hatchlings got loose the resulting confusion would keep the farmers much busier, which would be so much the better for him.
He trotted along the fence, around the largest pen, ignoring the dragons that were staring at him. His toe caught on a rock and he stumbled, which elicited a weird hooting from one of the dragons, but he caught himself and hurried on.
The dim orange moonlight was fading, and he didn’t want to stumble over a cliff in the dark; he had to hurry!
Chapter Thirty
The latch was a black lump in the dimness, and he poked at it in growing frustration.
How in the World did the damn thing work?
It was like no latch he had ever seen before. There was no simple bar to lift, no lever to pull, no knob to turn; instead two thumb-sized stubs protruded from the top of a tangle of ironmongery that Dumery could make no sense of. He tried pushing first one stub, and then the other; both resisted, but either one could be moved. Neither one seemed to do much of anything.
Annoyed beyond reason, he bashed at the thing with his fist, and that didn’t help either. It made the cage door rattle against the frame, but the latch stayed closed.
A dragon snorted somewhere nearby; Dumery didn’t look up. Instead he grabbed each stub in one hand and tried working both at once, to see what would happen.
Sliding both to the right didn’t work, nor did both to the left, but when he pushed them together in the middle he heard a clank, and the door swung open.
Dumery smiled.
A dozen little dragons stared up at him from inside the cage, their gleaming eyes unreadable. He stared back. The colors were harder to distinguish in the gloom than he had expected-the orange light of the greater moon turned both green and blue-green to a murky, dim, nameless color. He was about to step into the cage for a closer look when he heard the growl of a larger dragon. He turned away from all those staring little eyes to see if anyone in the house had noticed the noise, or had just happened to be looking.
He found himself looking directly into another, much larger, pair of draconic eyes.
He blinked, and caught his breath.
One of the big dragons was loose, and standing not ten feet away, its long neck extended so that its head was mere inches from his own.
It growled again.
One of the hatchlings hissed, and snapped at Dumery’s leg; he snatched the threatened limb away and started to kick at the little beast, then reconsidered as he felt the big dragon’s hot breath on his shoulder.
Snatching up two of the hatchlings while this monster watched did not seem like a viable plan. In a hopeless attempt to look innocent, Dumery managed a sickly smile and started to close the door of the cage. He stopped abruptly when one of the hatchlings shrieked; he had caught its neck and one wing in the door.