Paul Collins - Wizard Trouble

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 35.98KB 13 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

WIZARD TROUBLE

by Paul Collins

Cover art by Jenny Dixon

ISBN 1-58608-219-1

Gemstar Edition ISBN 1-58608-347-3

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, Georgia 31636

http://www.newconceptspublishing.com

Other NCP books available by Paul Collins:

Wizard Trouble

Gilbon the dragon was the last of his kind. His black and grey mottled hide testified to a great age; his

once sharp teeth were now blunted instruments with which he ground his greens; his silvery wings were

now somewhat tarnished since he hadn't used them much for eons; his once taut body had run to fat. He

had two broken and blackened horns that vaguely resembled the spinal mounds that ran the length of his

back. Tall as a stone hut and twice as long, he might at first glance seem a formidable foe.

He stretched languorously beneath a towering singsong tree. Its funnel fronds whistled myriad tunes as a

gentle breeze combed their hair-thin antennae.

The dragon heaved a sigh of contentment. Retirement wasn't all that bad, he mused. Water gurgled from

an underground stream to his left, and the heat from the rising sun warmed his thick hide that, in old age,

sometimes seized on him in bouts of cold weather.

Brightly colored birds cavorted in the branches above his head and at that moment he truly believed

himself to be in dragon heaven.

Gilbon allowed his heavy lidded eyes to close. While he snoozed he fantasised of better times - when, in

his youth, he had traipsed about the world challenging knights, kidnapping maidens in distress, and

acquiring himself the title of King Dragon.

Of course, he admitted as his sleepy head began to droop, he was too old for all that gallivanting hero

stuff now. He'd been forced to assault the Dark Lord Perdurabo's Tower a short while ago, to rescue a

kidnapped youth who had slept for two hundred years. Never, but never, again did he expect to put

himself under such duress.

Then something nudged him.

With a start, the aged dragon opened his rheumy eyes. In a flurry of movement, he sat up onto his hind

legs.

"I say," he grumbled, "watch what you're doing with that toothpick!" He ducked another jab from a

lance.

Beneath Gilbon stood a young knight. Whoever she was, her assortment of armor was rusty and

ill-fitting. "What on earth do you think you're playing at!" demanded Gilbon. A faint waft of vapour spat

from his nostrils.

"I'm a knight and I've been sent forth to slay you!" the knight cried through a face grill.

"A girl knight?" Gilbon scoffed. "Sorriest excuse for a knight I've ever seen! The couters on your arms

are over large, and your pauldron's too small for your shoulders. In fact, your entire assemblage seems to

be made up from bits and pieces," he said. "Even your steed's accoutered the same: his chamfrain's too

wide for his head, and the crinet's too long for his neck; the petrel's hanging slackly around his chest, the

flanchard's too tight around his - NOW STOP THAT!" he roared as the knight lunged forward. Gilbon

swayed to one side to avoid the battered tip.

Having missed her target, the young knight staggered to remain upright. Then, with a crash of metal, she

fell in a heap. Her armored visor rolled across the ground like a kicked bucket.

Gilbon lifted one ponderous foot and smashed the knight's lance to kindling. "You're making a thorough

nuisance of yourself, girl, and dragons must have their peace, you know." Defenseless, the knight

scrambled for the nearest boulder and hid behind it.

Gilbon sighed heavily. "Come out from there," he called irritably.

"I'd die first!" the knight said defiantly.

"That can be arranged!" Gilbon threatened. He took several deep breaths and heaved out from the pit of

his stomach. A black, scorching flame leapt forth and charred the boulder black.

"Your position is untenable!" Gilbon challenged her. "Your horse has fled, you're unarmed and you face a

superior foe. Prepare to die!" he bluffed.

"I surrender!" the knight wailed.

Looking despondent, the young girl came out from behind the boulder. She held her hands high in the air.

"What's your name?" Gilbon demanded.

"Jackie," she said.

"Gilbon," said Gilbon. "Now what's all this about? I can't have my snooze being interrupted every time a

foolish knight needs to prove her womanhood!"

"You wouldn't understand," Jackie said.

"Try me," Gilbon goaded cunningly.

Jackie swallowed hard. "You won't like it."

"I've still got both barrels loaded," Gilbon threatened. To emphasize his threat, he pushed two tendrils of

flame from his seared nostrils.

"Voices have told me that only the brain of a dragon can save my father from his ailment."

Gilbon opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "Leave my brain out of it!" he ordered.

Jackie felt as good as cooked already. She raised her hands higher.

"I've never heard such poppycock in all my born natural!" Gilbon said. "A dragon's brain you say?"

"That's what the Voice told me," Jackie admitted despondently.

"Well I never," Gilbon said, stunned. "Let me tell you something, Jackie my girl. Your Voice is out of

touch with reality. It - "

Suddenly silence swept the glade. Gilbon craned his bullneck and looked about. The birds had taken

flight; the cascading water that usually gurgled its way south did so quietly; the singsong tree only

whispered maudlin tunes. It was as though a death sentence had been placed upon them.

It made Gilbon feel chilled somehow. And whenever dragons feel chilled, they move on. Which is just

what Gilbon suggested they do.

"I'll take you to see a wizard friend of mine. Perhaps he'll be of friendly disposition to assist you."

Gilbon shook his head with mirth. "A dragon brain!" he chuckled. "Whatever next?"

***

Deep within a limestone mountain the wizard Shantele clenched his teeth with anger. The obese magician

took a deep breath to calm his taut nerves, but it helped not. "Can't you do anything right?" he growled at

his apprentice. He watched dust motes crawl lazily through the air. "I gave you the simplest of jobs and

you even botched that!"

Winston croaked in bewilderment. "I did wash the floor, Master. Look, the floor's still wet!"

"Then what's all this dust?" Shantele flapped his hand in frustration.

"It's clean dust!" Winston countered.

Shantele sneezed heavily. "I give in!"

"You mustn't work yourself up," Winston said earnestly.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Paul Collins - Wizard Trouble.pdf

共13页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Paul Collins - Wizard Trouble

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: