Saba is an important character in Senta and the Steel Dragon and in The Drache Girl, he has perhaps his bigget part.

Suddenly he heard gunfire erupting from directly in front of him.  One, two shots.  Then a pause.  Then one, two, three, four, five, six, pause.  He looked up above the trees and saw a flash of steel shoot across the sky.

“Oh, bloody hell!” he shouted and ran at top speed in the direction of the gunfire.  That he carried no other weapon than a heavy truncheon, worried him not a bit.  Two men with military issue service rifles, but wearing expensive hunting clothes stood in the middle of the gravel road.

“Guns down!” yelled Saba, as he skidded to a stop in front of them.  “Drop your guns now!”

“See here chap,” said the first man, his accent labeling him as plainly as if he had worn a placard that he was from Old Town Brech.  He must have been very new to the colony, because Saba made it a custom to get to know everyone, and neither of these men he recognized.

“We’re doing nothing illegal,” said the second man.  “Just shooting some pests.”

“What exactly were you shooting?”

“We heard from some of the neighbors that these velocipedes….”

“Velociraptors,” Saba corrected.

“Yes, them.  They’ve been a menace lately, to the point of endangering the local children.”

“Quite,” said the first man.  “We went out to put a few down and found a small group digging right into those garbage bins.  We shot a few and killed two, I think, but one took off and flew into the trees.”

“If you listen to me very, and I do mean very, carefully,” said Saba.  “I just might be able to save your lives.  Lay your rifles down on the ground.”

“But I don’t under…..”

“Do it!”

The men leaned over and carefully placed their weapons on the white gravel road.

“Nobody told you velociraptors don’t fly?”

A loud whomp made all three men jump, and they found themselves standing next to a pony-sized reptile with twenty foot wings, and more importantly a mouth open large enough to swallow a human head.  Steel scales reflected the light from the winter morning sky like shields and swords on a forgotten battlefield.  The steel dragon let out a huge roar, rending the air with a noise that must have been heard all over Port Dechantagne.  Little puffs of smoke flew out of his mouth at the two men as well as bits of saliva which burst into little sparks in the air.

“They bloody shot me!”  The dragon’s four word sentence disintegrated into another roar of rage.

One of the hunters started to bend over for his rifle.  Saba stepped on the gun and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Let me see your injury, Bessemer,” he said.  The dragon folded its left wing, and held out the right wing showing an ugly lead mark on a shiny steel scale about midway between the first joint and the shoulder.

“It doesn’t look that bad,” said Saba.  “And you know this was an accident.  They were trying to knock off some velociraptors.”

“So was I,” said Bessemer.  “I didn’t expect it would get me shot!”

“It was an accident, honest and truly,” said the first hunter, shaking a little.  “Maybe we can make it up to you.”

“There was a time,” said Bessemer.  “When the only acceptable payment for this type of transgression was a virgin given at midnight on the full moon.”  Then he burst out laughing.  “Of course I didn’t mean you, Saba.”

The two hunters laughed, a bit nervously, along with the dragon, happy that the anger he had arrived with seemed to be going away.

“Well, no harm then,” said one.

“You daft fools,” said Saba, looking down the road.  “He’s the least one of your problems.”