“The dead men did the fighting for me,” the Copper replied.
“What be that to us? Bug juice is poor in vitality,” Mamedi said. “Besides, w’be leaving the body behind.”
“Ooo, m’be famished, how about—” one of Mamedi’s relations began.
“None of that, now,” Thernadad said. “Our host has done enough. Suck air and saliva for a bit.”
The Copper hardly heard them. He wished he hadn’t thrown away that helmet in a fit of temper. If nothing else, he could poke the more annoying bats with it.
“Good news, m’lord,” Enjor said.
“Almost any change could be good news.” Food, freshwater, an end to all these twists and turns. Even a change in light level. He was tired of groping through the dark, led on by bat yeeks from patch of dim moss to patch of dim moss.
“W’be at the river.”
The Copper had been walking for the last thousand paces or so with just one eye open, trying to sleep as he slid his three good legs forward and hopped over his bad.
“How far?”
“Y’be smelling it just over this next incline.”
The bats flew wearily ahead. He climbed up a rocky tunnel. Someone had cleared a path of loose boulders.
“All I smell is dwarf.”
“Must be a’fighting with the demen again,” Thernadad said.
They passed over a makeshift wall in the tunnel, the source of all the loose boulders, and descended. The Copper smelled wood: Splintered shields lay all about, some with arrows growing out of them. He extracted a few arrowheads and swallowed them. What had made this dark pocket of emptiness worth fighting over?
“M’perishing,” Thernadad gasped.
“We’ll rest.”
The Copper hoped he could find fish in the river. His appetite had progressed from tickle to gnaw to worry two marches ago. He curled up. Past the “wall” the tunnel turned into another series of chambers leading off in various directions, mostly down.
“Lights. Lights!”
It took the Copper a moment to realize that he’d been asleep. He shook his head, clearing cobwebs some industrious spider had woven on his ear. He scanned the downslope with his good eye, marked the beams of light waving around, probing corners.
Behind the beams of light he saw the outlines of glowing beards and thick curves of light-frosted helmets. Dwarves.
“A’searching the cavern,” Thernadad said. “Better run, sir.”
“I don’t think I’m up to it,” the Copper said. “Here, all of you gather ’round; let’s go down this incline. Oh, never mind the damp…I’ve got an idea.”
The Copper clung to the cavern roof in the downslope, hidden by a series of serrations not very different from the ones on the roof of his mouth. The dwarves had broken up into smaller groups to better search all the chambers and shafts of the system behind the wall.
A dragonlength below and up the slope from him, the bats lay on the floor, as relaxed as he could make them, save for Mamedi’s sister, who cowered in a crack for fear of being stepped on by a dwarf.
The dwarves probed the darkness with their lights and began to descend into the chamber. This had better work, or he had nowhere to run….
A dwarvish lantern flicked across a length of stiff bat wing, and the Copper got a momentary glimpse of the delicate finger bones and veining in their remarkable construction.
“They’re going to step on us,” Enjor yeeked.
“Faaaa!” Mamedi said. “Keep your ears down.”
The dwarves froze in their tracks and grumbled to one another. One made a loud sniffing sound.
The young bat, Uthaned, gave a twitch.
The dwarves hurried back up toward their fellows, shouting warnings.
“Good work, you all,” the Copper said. “Everyone gets a lick of blood for that. Except you,” he said to Mamedi’s sister. “No risk, no reward.”
The dwarves passed over to the other side of the wall, leaving only a group of sentries standing at the gap. As soon as the others moved on, the sentries stacked their arms and started a low fire. Soon the smell of sizzling meat cooking had the Copper’s mouth gushing.
If there had been just two dwarves he might have become reckless and attacked them for their food. Luckily they left four behind, so the hatchling wasn’t even tempted to rashness. The only alternative to listening to his empty stomach groan as the dwarves ate was a quick escape, so he roused the bats—most of them reenergized by a quick nip from his tail—and crept away. The only sentry the dwarves left watched the long incline on the other side of the way, not the warren of caves the dwarves had already searched.
And so they came to the southbound river—the Sou’flow, as Enjor styled it.
And were checked again. One of the dwarvish hollow-log riverboats rested in the current, in what seemed the dazzling brightness of cave moss and numerous lanterns at front and back. The craft waited, hooked to chains hanging down from the ceiling and occupied by a dwarvish crew.
The Copper evaluated his chances from the shadows. With the amount of light in the cave, he felt as though one of the dwarves focused lanterns right on him, but told himself it was only the long trip in the dark that had oversensitized him.
He heard a strong breeze moving with the current. Between the wind and the sound of water in the tunnel breaking against the swinging chains and the back of the dwarf boat, they wouldn’t hear him slip into the water or swim past.
The dwarves seemed glad of a chance to escape their vessel, and lounged ashore, sleeping or tending to their beards or gathering around a flat bit of cavern floor where they spun coins at one another, stamping and barking their satisfaction or disgust with the course of the game.
Enjor flapped off to hunt for insects on the water, and the Copper saw a dwarf comment and point at the bat’s darting black form.
“I need a diversion,” he told the bats. “Thernadad, Mamedi…could you fly up to those chains hanging from the ceiling? Start a fight, as noisy as you can.”
“Us? Fight?” Thernadad said. “A more unnatural act m’can’t imagine! W’be as close as ever two bats—”
“M’willing,” Mamedi’s sister said. “M’making enough noise, if sir will let me have a nip first.”
“After.”
“I’ll go too, Mum,” Uthaned said. His speech inflections had grown almost dragonish, but then, he was a young bat with more brains than the common run of them.
The bats flitted off and alighted on the chains. There they commenced yeeking and swatting. The dwarves noticed the commotion and turned to watch.
The Copper had considered creeping across the cave wall or ceiling—the dwarves would be less likely to look there—but he opted for speed instead of concealment. He shot from his hiding spot at the dragon dash—though his was a little strange in that he used his front limbs only to land; his saa did all the work because of his withered sii.
One of the dwarves bent to pick up a loose rock. The Copper couldn’t say what made him shift course—later he decided it was both dislike of dwarves and a worry about the bats losing heart to go on if they lost still another—but it wasn’t a conscious decision at the time.
He caught the dwarf in the back of his stubby knees as he threw, and felt a weight come crashing down across his back.
Dwarvish yells of alarm—none louder than from the dwarf unexpectedly finding himself atop the hatchling’s back, riding it like a child attempting to make a pony out of too small a dog—followed him right into the water, where he kept running along the river bottom, weighed down by the dwarf.
He lost the dwarf to buoyancy and surfaced in the current and hazarded a look back, expecting to see the dwarves running to their weapons or the ship to give chase.
Instead he saw one bedraggled dwarf scooting out of the water as quickly as limbs and backside could carry him, and the other sailors bent over, laughing so hard their glowing beards dripped light.
Chapter 10
The journey south took a good deal more time, both because of the greater distance they traveled and the infrequency of tunnel boats. Most of the craft on this part of the river were warships thick with well-armed dwarves and throw-lamps. He didn’t dare ride any of those, for dwarves rode in the front, with a good view of the prow of the ship, sometimes tossing lines to probe the water depth.
He even encountered one being laboriously drawn back up against the current by dwarves using poles and hooks, sweating and grunting and chanting as they worked.
They clung and splashed to another vast lake, and Enjor advised them to make for the other side. It was easy enough for the bats to fly, but the Copper had to fight his way through a waterfield of spongy pads anchored to the bottom by long roots. A black slime thick with biting water mites infested the underside of each pad. The slime caught in his scales, and he began to itch immediately.
All the Copper could do was curse the bats for their ability to fly, and his curses were all the more venomous thanks to the foreknowledge that he would never fly, even if he lived to see his wings uncase.
They lingered at the edge of the lake for a day or two in a warren of half-submerged rocks and sand and muck. He had no way of telling time other than his body’s natural rhythm, as he tried to scrub out the nits with sand and freshwater, scratching himself until he was raw and bleeding. In this case the bats were a positive blessing; their saliva took away the itch as they worked over every sore spot.