Read Falconfar 03-Falconfar for Free Online

they'd likely come for him again.
    So where, with the roofs of Harlhoh yonder—a small village with plenty of folk cowering, pointing and running in it; fellow targets to lure greatfangs talons, all of them—and tilled fields stretching everywhere else to the dark and distant line of the surrounding Raurklor, could he go? Or hide?
    Deep in the forest would be best, but there was no way he could outrun five of the beasts, across all that farmland.
    The alternative was to find rubble, hunker down in it, and hope by the Falcon that he didn't end up crushed or buried alive, if the huge flying beasts kept at it after leveling the tower, reducing Malragard from rubble to gravel.
    The largest of the remaining greatfangs whirled, in a sinuous rwisting of its scaly bulk that Rod wouldn't have believed possible if he hadn't seen it, to hook its talons under the roof of the lower levels of the tower, and tug as it flew overhead.
    Stone and slate shingles tried to bend, with an almost human shriek, and then shattered into scores of pieces and fell apart, creating a brief rain of tumbling shards and leaving the ponderous beast holding nothing at all.
    Its latest attack had wrought something else. Well down the stair from Rod, below a landing now choked with tumbled ceiling-beams, a long sliver of ceiling had been torn away, so that someone running down the stair could leap sideways through the tapering gap, into the darkness below. Where there was a room, presumably—quite possibly a ready-made tomb, if the greatfangs' assault kept up—but better shelter than the open air he was standing up in now, alone and prominent on the stair, with two smaller greatfangs headed his way.
    Rod dashed down the stairs, leaping heaps of rubble or skidding through them on his boot heels, like an out-of-control skier about to crash, where they formed drifts too large and deep to jump over or dodge. One of the greatfangs was definitely heading for him, veering from what it had been doing to open a fanged mouth that wasn't the huge cavern of its two bigger brethren, but still the size of a grand pair of double doors.
    And definitely large enough to bite him in two in one swift lunge.
    Rod had time enough to get a very good look at that mouth, and its fringe of sharp fangs—the largest were as long as his arms— before he had to duck and wriggle and bruisingly slam his way through a tangle of fallen beams. Whereupon, as he struggled free of them, gasping, the greatfangs looming up like a huge dark curtain overhead, the narrow gap was right in front of him.
    He launched himself into it head-first, quickly raising his hands to shield his face and throat.
    One wrist banged numbingly on the edge of the gap as he went through it, but he had time, in the long plunge that followed, to get both hands up.
    He fell a long way in the darkness. His landing—
    —Was a crash through an unseen awning or canopy, which held him for the merest of moments before tearing with an angry sound and choking and blinding him with swirling dust. Then he slammed into what felt like a mattress—cloth and straw and ropes that groaned and held for agonizing moments ere they snapped with strange singing sighs—and slammed with it into something beyond, something hard, flat and unyielding.
    The floor, Rod concluded brilliantly, in the last moment before the worst of the choking took him, and he writhed and spasmed helplessly in the dust, lungs and throat afire and precious air nowhere to be found. He rolled desperately, blind and in agony and just wanting to get away from the dust.
    Once, long ago, on a school trip, Rod had spent a few memorable minutes wallowing in a great box of foam mattress stuffing, giggling but helpless, and the dust roiling around him now felt about like that. He rolled and rolled, clawing at the floor to try to move faster, shuddering at the agony in his lungs, panting but unable to sob...
    Until it all ended, and he could breathe.
    And cough. And cough some