by E. E. Knight
They passed into another cavern. The floor was littered with broken bits of masonry, and cave moss in several colors—red, blue, and green—still thrived where water was dripping. The Copper looked at characters scrawled on a wall in a reflective color, like liquid dragonscale, though someone had clawed through it.
“What is this place?” he asked Enjor on one of his swoops.
“Old dwarf settlement, m’lord. Abandoned in the wars with the demen.”
“Demen?”
“Deep Men. Filthy bunch. Not above throwing a net over a bat and a’sticking a skewer through him for roasting.”
“Demen?” Thernadad’s mother cried. “They snip off bat wings and roll up their awful moss paste in it.”
“Faaaa!” Mamedi said. “They bite our heads off before singing a battle song. M’be going no farther.”
The Copper hopped up a set of stairs and peered through a broken portal. He smelled rats and damp wood rot.
Enjor hung upside down and picked at his tailvent. “Only other road to the south river is right through the heart of the Wheel of Fire city. A black bat in full cave-dark couldn’t make it. I’m resting where I can hear them coming.”
“Wake me if you do,” the Copper said, too tired and cold to fear dwarves or demen. He found a pile of smashed wood and rotten fabric and went to sleep.
He heard rats scrabbling around in the dark and shifted position. The noises faded as the rats fled, but they returned. They always did, drawn by the smell of dragon-waste.
He followed the sounds and smells, then spit out the thin contents of his fire bladder. While it wasn’t ready yet to burst into flame, it could blind or wound. He jumped after the pained squeaks and trapped two rats under his good sii, then swallowed them before his prey knew what had happened.
Feeling a little better with rat in him, he went back to sleep.
Enjor led them up a winding, rough tunnel, claiming that it went all the way to the surface, with a fair prospect off a mountainside if you followed it long enough.
Thernadad’s mother rode his back the whole way. The tunnel smelled decidedly dwarvish. It made the Copper nervous.
“Sir, I can fly a bit if y’be just generous enough to give me a small lap.”
“The last time your family left me light-headed. I need my wits.”
They took a crack and descended some rough rock to a cavern filled with a confusing array of smaller chambers. Enjor flew off to be sure of the path. The Copper sniffed out a discarded iron-soled boot and carried it in his mouth until they took a rest break, where he thoughtfully chewed it down. Tearing and devouring the mixture of leather and metal was most satisfying, even if the dwarf-foot smell could poison a cave slug.
“Oh, m’be perishing, sir. Perishing!” Thernadad’s mother lamented.
“Just a little, then,” the Copper said, feeling generous with a belly full of heel and hobnail. “But be quiet about it.”
She opened him up just under his bad sii. He couldn’t feel much of anything in that limb anyway.
Enjor flapped back, gasping. He shoved his mother out of the way and took a hearty drink of dragonblood.
“What’s all this?” the Copper said.
“Better and better still,” Thernadad’s mother said. “I feel a maiden bat again,” she called, flapping off into the cavern. “Up and at ’em, y’slugs. Darkness a’wasting!”
“Careful, Mum!” Enjor called. “Not that way!”
He flapped heavily into the air, shouting, and in a few moments his mother returned, flying in irregular loops. She didn’t so much land as nose into the cave floor.
“What’s the matter? Drunk on dragonblood?”
“Bad air,” Enjor said.
“Eeeeee, that’s a funny color moonlight,” the old white-flecked bat said. She rolled her eyes this way and that, coughed, and was still.
“Mum! Mum!” Thernadad said, flying down from the ceiling.
“She went down the wrong tunnel,” Enjor said. “Bad air.”
Thenadad landed next to her and head-butted her hard in the stomach. The body didn’t so much as twitch. “Mum!” He rounded on his brother. “Why didn’t you watch her?”
“Me only just made it out myself!”
Thernadad snapped at his brother’s ear.
“Stop it,” the Copper said. “She’s dead.”
The other bats crept across the ceiling, yeeking at one another in the shadows.
“That’s three lost. How many more?” Mamedi’s sister said. “This dragon’s not such a lucky strike after all.”
“No one asked you all to come,” Thernadad said. He made to fly up, but the Copper put a sii claw on his wing.
“Let’s keep moving.”
“Once a bat drops…” Enjor said, flapping back up to the ceiling. “M’lordship’s right.”
“And just be leaving her here?” Thernadad asked. “Bats should be living above the bones of their elders.”
“I’ll carry her, if you like,” the Copper said. He picked up the cooling little body and swallowed it whole.
“Awwwww, sir,” Thernadad said. “That was unkind.”
“She had enough meals from me. One in return seems just. You’d rather the rats and slugs got her?”
“Y’see another gone,” Mamedi’s sister whispered. “Who’s next?”
“The Lavadome’s worth a few odds ’n sods droppin’. Like outside, underground.”
“Long way yet,” Enjor said, whipping back. “Little to eat until w’be reaching the river.”
Enjor hurried the party past another shaft plunging down—the source of the bad air—and they entered some naturally formed caves. The moss here was the natural variety, faint blue and green threads that vanished whenever the eye moved. White things with waving antennae slipped into cracks as they approached, and insects with bodies like glass froze against the striped cave walls.
The older bats grew tired and clung to the Copper as he walked, and only Enjor, tireless for all his bulk, and some of the first-year bats had energy to flit around.
A bat squeaked.
“What’s that?” the Copper asked.
“Boktemi found something,” Mamedi said.
A brighter patch lay ahead. The Copper smelled rot and metal on the air.
The source of the odor was two figures sitting back-to-back, dead for a day or two at most.
“Ahhh, that be more like it. There’s some juice there still, down in the lower quarters,” Mamedi said. She crawled off the Copper and began to scratch around at an outthrust leg. Tendrils of blue cave moss had found the bodies as well, and climbed toward wounds on the bodies.
The Copper examined the faces. These were no dwarves or men; they were thicker-skinned than either, pebbled like a dragon’s stomach and with thick ridges of horn making fearsome flanges at the skull and jawline. A row of spines, thin as straw, grew from their backbones.
They wore helms, though not in the dwarvish fashion. These helms were open, a series of reinforcing rods that capped the natural ridges on their skulls, and had a fearsome spike on the top. One’s spike still bore a bit of dried gristle.
“Are these—”
“Demen,” Enjor said. “Ech. The blood’s gone bad.”
“M’be calling the eyeballs,” Thernadad said.
“A’taking more than your fair share!” Mamedi protested.
“Says who?”
“Faaaaaa!”
She jumped up on one of the creature’s shoulders, bristling for a fight.
“Easy, now,” the Copper said. “I’m trying to read this.”
“Who be a’caring how they got here?” Enjor said, shoving a younger bat away from some slow-seeping fluid.
“Blast these thick skins,” another bat commented from the darkness. “Wish these were dwarves.”
The Copper tried to ignore the bats. The two demen bore grievous injuries, yet no dead lay around them. So they must have fought elsewhere before sitting down to succumb to their wou
nds. But why back-to-back? And why hadn’t their fellows carried them to safety?
He suspected that the answer to both questions was a lost battle. They were either on guard against the victorious dwarves—or whomever—or something deadlier lurked in the darkness.
Threats in these caverns or no, he needed his strength. He chewed down a mouthful or two of the rotting flesh and the metal tip of a scabbard, then crept off to sleep scales-out in a protective nook.
He woke and found two new brown-stained wounds on his tail.
The greedy bats had taken advantage of his sleep.
“Thernadad!” he roared.
The bat flapped over, and the Copper waved his tail in front of his upturned nose.
Thernadad combed his ears. “Sir, m’be telling them to take only a lap or two each. There be so much energy in dragonblood, and w’be all bone-weary from the journey. Only a few drops out of your great body, nothing to you, but a lifesaver—”
“I was tired enough as it is. Now I’m drained. Who am I going to ride on when I get tired?”
“They be a rotten bunch of sots, yes; m’won’t let it happen again.”
“You’ve got only three songs, Thernadad, but you sing them well.”
He stalked back toward the bodies of the demen. “Tell them to keep clear. I’m having my breakfast and I’m tempted to juice a bat to wash it down.”
“Told you his lordship—” Enjor said.
“Faaaaa!” Mamedi screamed, backhanding her mate’s brother with a wing tip. “Y’be the one saying he wouldn’t miss—”
He ignored the fighting and nosed around in the corpses. Their vital organs were a putrefying mass—he settled for a bit of thick shoulder. The blood had drained down from the upper half of the bodies, and the shank had tenderized a little as it aged.
A clattering—a pile of dry bones falling was how it struck the Copper’s ear—made him look up, still attached by an un-severed hunk of tendon to the corpse of the deman.
He couldn’t say what appeared out of the dim light, for the cave moss lit only the lower underside of its body, only that it was frightfully spindly, standing on many legs, with two long, pincer-tipped claws on its front limbs, a cluster of eyes, and a long rise up from the tail, curling around.
He’d seen a scorpion or two in the home cave. They liked the dark and the cool, and if you flipped them and gave them a good smash at the leg joints with your tail they had tastier meat than a slug, though a good deal less. But those were compact little creatures.
The bat brawl stopped.
Odd how the bats looked up to him. It was only a lucky splatter that allowed him to escape King Gan. And this armored monstrosity…it would stick him with that barb and lift his slight body up in those great claws and drag him off to some dark hole.
He backed up, wanting the bodies of the demen between him and the scorpion. The tendon running from his mouth to the corpse tightened, and the body lurched.
A blur, and then a thwak sound—the spindly scorpion struck the deman’s corpse. The force of the blow knocked it over and its wiry helmet fell off. The Copper hugged the cave floor and the helmet rolled, its arc limited by the spikes, up against his nose.
The scorpion rushed forward and took up the corpse in its claws, and the deman’s companion, now with nothing to lean against, slowly sagged a claw’s breadth at a time. The scorpion rounded on the motion, wary, and struck again with its tail. It pulled its prize in a little closer and guarded it with the other pincer, as though the second body meant to challenge it for the meal.
The Copper ever so slowly tongued the snared tendon out from his teeth and took the deman’s helmet in his jaws, trying to think his way through a fog of terror that kept his sii and saa from obeying. Maybe he could ward off a blow, the way dwarves did with a shield….
The vast creature, for all its size, was a slave to its senses. No doubt it would take the corpse it had acquired back to whatever hole would accommodate those long, thin, segmented limbs, and eat in peace. But how long would it be until it grew hungry again? Would the short, regular steps of a dragon hatchling draw it after them?
Summoning his courage, he pressed his tail against the leaning corpse and gave it a shove so it spilled over toward the scorpion.
The insect let out a shocked, whistling breath and struck with its tail again.
The Copper dragon-dashed forward through two of the impossibly thin legs, got under the thing, and struck upward with the spiked helmet, right at the joining of its eight limbs.
He pulled back down just in time to feel himself stepped on as the beast sprang sideways, crashing heedlessly into the cavern wall. It tipped, fought to right itself, claw arms and tail waving this way and that.
The Copper didn’t wait to see whether it would die or not.
“Enjor—which way?”
“Oook.”
He threw the helmet at the bats. “Lead the way, curse you!”
The bat flapped off and the others followed. The Copper kept up, and as the fright seeped out of their bodies they collected themselves in a cramped corner, where he could press up against the ceiling with the bats, catching his breath.
He listened for that bone-rattle sound of the thing’s feet, but heard only his own hearts pounding.
“You killed a cave scorpion,” some young nephew of Mamedi’s—Uthaned, he thought the creature’s name was—said.
“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.
