Earth is flat, empty, weary, and bare. Her children, too, had left her, all but a few who lived peacefully off the land. And then came the Kar-Chee, to crack Earth open and suck out what remained of her richness, threatening the twilight of th old planet with an evil beyond anything that had gone before. With them they brought their servants, beasts so creul and horrible that men could recall their like only from ancestral nightmares, and named them “Dragons…”

Jon-Joras had come to Earth simply to oversee arrangements for a dragon hunt to amuse the king. These hunts were as much pageantry as sport — the dragons, brought to Earth centuries before as pets of an alien race, were powerful but slow-witted. But suddenly the dragons had become dangerous — quick, deceptive, a menace to the nobles who hunted them. And Jon-Joras found himself caught in the middle of an uprising that could shake the powers that ruled the star-worlds. AVRAM DAVIDSON has been a respected figure in both science-fiction and mystery circles for a decade or more. He has won both the Hugo award for the best science-fiction short story of the year, and the Edgar award for the best mystery story, and was editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction until turning to full-time writing. Ace Books has previously published a collection of his best short stories under the title of What Strange Stars and Skies (F-330)