“Who lays eggs like that underground?” he asked Enjor.
“No idea, m’lord. No birds be a’living down here. At least, no birds y’be wanting to meet.”
The river drained off into a mire filled with giant mushrooms. The less said about this portion of the trip, the better—the Copper remembered only having muck and filth between every scale, every tooth, even working its way into his eyes.
The only ones happy about it were the bats, for insects flew so thickly here they made mistlike clouds. The bats ate their fill and then some—except for the young of Mamedi’s relative: They had hair now and an unslakable thirst for dragonblood.
Luckily they were so small they took only a few drops each.
He came out of the mire a bedraggled dragon, sick of filtering mouthfuls of filthy water through his teeth to eat the worms that wiggled through the mire bottom. He assuaged his appetite by tearing off mouthfuls of fungus.
At the other side of the mire they passed through another series of tunnels, these sided with a hard, shiny surface that offered cave moss no purchase. He had to be led through the blackest patches by the bats, who probably drained him each time he slept.
“Almost there now,” Enjor said, so often that Thernadad took up the refrain. “Almost there now.”
“What’s almost?”
“One more river to cross, the river of slaves. It flows in a circle around the Lavadome. Then the passage up.”
After one of his “scouts,” Enjor returned in excitement. “W’be there. You’ll get a good view if the sun is right.”
They reached the river, its current so slow that it was hard to distinguish from a lake. This river cavern made the dwarf-boat tunnels seem little more than chutes.
It had a high ceiling, sheer walls climbing to a dark roof cracked in places where true sunshine fell through. Shafts of light, one or two angled just right so the sunlight fell in neatly edged beams of gold, illuminated the gray-green river surface, tendrils of mist hovering above it in zephyrs of air. Titanic granite boulders rose from the waterline like teeth guarding the far edge.
“One more swim, m’lord,” Enjor said.
He saw a winged shape cross through one of the shafts of light.
“What are those?”
“Nothing y’be wanting to meet,” Enjor said. “That’s the griffaran—the dragon-guard.”
“Who are they?”
“Bat eaters,” Enjor and Thernadad said together.
“Hunt by?”
“Sight, m’lord.”
“Let’s cross once the sunlight goes, then.”
He rested on the riverbank and saw a long, thin boat with a line of hominids on board, crossing the water, beetle-sized in the distance. One of the flyers, a black shadow with vast wings, hovered overhead.
He waited until the beams lifted and vanished, disappearing into a faint glow from the sky. The shadowy wings still flew over the river, though. He nosed around the riverbank as the light faded, but found only a tasteless snail or two. He wedged himself into a crack—more to prevent the bats from feeding on him in his sleep than because he feared discovery—good eye on his vulnerable side.
But he couldn’t sleep, so excited was he to be this near to the Lavadome. He three-quarters shut his good eye. But why weren’t there dragons whirling above the river? Surely such a vast body of water had those long, bony, shovel-nosed fishes living within?
He felt a cautious nip at his leg. He reached out with a saa and heard a bat squeak.
“Thernadad! You!”
“Sir! Didn’t think you’d miss—”
He squeezed.
“You’re wrong there. Listen, Thernadad, or I’ll squeeze every bit of my blood back. I’m putting you in charge of my body. I wake up with any more slits, nips, or cuts, no matter how well concealed, I’ll assume you did it and squeeze you.”
“Yeek!”
“I can’t hear your voice at that pitch.”
“Y’be very generous, sir,” Thernadad grunted.
“Spread the word.”
“M’don’t suppose, as a gesture to our new understanding…”
“No. Once we’re across the river and I’m in the Lavadome. Not before.”
The cavern was eerie in the way the lighting changed into full dark. He understood light changing from cavern to cavern, but the idea of the amount of light over the lake altering over a single digestive cycle was new to him.
He set off into the water, the three thriving young bats riding upon his crest. The water was a good deal warmer than that of the underground tunnels, warmer than the rock or air, thus the low mist that hung over the water.
“Stay low,” he suggested to the bats on wing. “The, umm—”
“Griffaran,” Uthaned said, turning a tight circle over the Copper’s nostrils.
“—griffaran shouldn’t be able to pick you out through these mists.”
Something else was using the mists to hide. A boat, a version of the deman craft he’d encountered on the river, rowed across the water as fast as paddles and demen hands could move it. It held three demen, two rowing and a third in the center.
The deman in the middle of the boat lifted up a round, white object—an egg! and wrapped it in a cloth before placing it in a basket. He wore colorful feathers tucked through each ear piercing, set so they covered his shoulders.
The Copper’s stomach rumbled. An egg or two would be just what he’d need to get him the rest of the way to the Lavadome.
He swam alongside the boat, matching its direction and speed. The boat neared the far bank. The rowing demen jumped out, and the other climbed out, then extracted his basket. The rowers lifted the boat.
Appetite helped him make up his mind.
“You’d better be old enough to fly,” he told the young bats.
He dove and swam for the basket-carrying deman. It became more of a wet scuttle as he neared the shore.
“Jt tht aleet,” a deman shouted as the Copper pushed past a leg.
He spun, using his tail to take the deman’s legs out from under him. The hominid fell into the shallow water with a splash.
The Copper didn’t want to fight the demen so much as cause confusion and make off with an egg. He nosed into the basket and extracted an egg and—
Urk!
His head was jerked out of the water. The jerk originated from his neck, and his neck was attached to a line, and the line was in the hands in one of the demen rowers.
It took two of them to drag him, fighting madly and still clutching an egg to his breast in his good sii, and haul him out of the water.
Another deman got a line about his saa.
The Copper fought on pure instinct, determined to either die or be freed of the lines. He’d never be bound and tortured again, and if that meant his hearts’ blood pouring into this underground lake and his last breath rising up through those far-off cracks, he’d overcome even the fear of death.
He fought to bite through the line on his saa, but the line on his neck pulling in the other direction restrained his reach. Every time he tried to reach up to dig his claws into the line on his neck, they pulled again to straighten out his body so he couldn’t reach.
All he could do was hiss, gurgle, and fling his tail this way and that.
The demen, pulling him first one way and then another, dragged him out of the water and toward the cavern, shouting to each other in their rattling language. The third got his basket of eggs and ran into the rough-cut, low-hanging tunnels.
He returned with a short tube. He made a gasping sound, and his obscenely short throat expanded. He put the tube to his mouth.
A bat struck him between the eyes. The dart that flashed by the Copper’s ear missed. The other two young bats who’d been nursing on his blood were flitting back and forth between the demen with their lines.
If the Copper hadn’t been otherwise occupied by being choked and dragged, he would have gaped in astonishment. Bats, shy and fearful as any whisker-quivering rodent, attacking creatures a thousand times their own size! What had gotten into them?
The deman with the tube hissed and extracted a strange sort of a weapon, a long, wide-ended blade. He didn’t raise it like a dwarf, but reversed it so the blade was shielded under its elbow. It whistled through pointed teeth and came forward.
The Copper tried to right himself, but his bad sii slipped on slimy stone. He went down on his side. The deman at his saa ran forward and looped the line around his free limb and tied them at the joints, avoiding the Copper’s claws.
The blade flashed down and then up, and the Copper saw his own blood fly into the air, splattering the deman.
Anger, hurt, fear—his breastbone convulsed, and a wide gout of flame shot out of his chest.
The deman had only a moment to regret his inexperience in dragon fighting before the liquid fire consumed his face, chest, and shoulders. He lit up like a dwarf’s oiled torch. The deman with the line at his neck caught a little of the spray on his arm.
Pain struck—hard. Harder than the blade, or the tail-breaking iron bars of the dwarves.
The strain at his legs vanished as the deman groped for the fallen blade of his companion. The Copper wiggled toward the water. And here was the dropped egg!