CHAPTER 9
“Dodge!” I screamed as the large creature streaked through the air at us.
I ducked behind a convenient stone pillar rising in folds from the floor to my left while Ragar dodged to the right behind a haphazard pile of rocks that was probably once a stalactite that had come crashing down. I worried as I ran because Auraus was still nowhere to be seen. She had apparently put out her torch. I sent up a brief prayer to Caelestis that the Wind-rider remained hidden from the creature until she got into striking position. A brief mental pat reassured me that Auraus was fine for now. The creature whizzed past, tail lashing a few chips off the pillar I hid behind, and passed close enough to me to finally see it in the dim light of the cave’s fungus and the brighter light of my torch. My jaw dropped open. It may not have matched the descriptions in my fairytale books exactly, but I didn’t need to check one for a reference. I’d know that scaly, toothy reptilian head anywhere. Dragon!
Its scales were some sort of red; its long body was thick in the chest while tapering off towards the tail. Its two front legs had huge, wicked looking claws on them, and its black bat wings agilely dodged the rocks hanging from the ceiling as it twisted around for another run at us. It wasn’t as long as I had pictured in my mind, but who cared whether it was twenty feet or fifty feet. It was, terrifyingly, a dragon! The beast roared and dove towards me, thankfully with no fire, or any other kind of weaponized breath for that matter, coming out of its mouth. I scrambled again to get out of its flight path and threw myself flat so that its reaching claws would miss me. I felt the wind from it passing close over me and rolled to get out of the way of the snake-like tail that came down to crush me. I scrambled to my feet again and saw Auraus appear seemingly out of nowhere and land with a battle cry right between its wings. She drove her short sword into its spine, and its roar of attack turned into a scream of pain. The dragon rolled over midair and shook its unwanted rider off while looping around a stone column. Auraus, seemingly unfazed, spread her wings and flew off at a tangent.
“What do you think you are doing!” hissed an angry voice beside me.
A quick glance showed me Arghen materializing bedside me, dranth-less and holding his war spear at the ready. I didn’t answer him because the dragon was coming towards us fast, although jerkily. I guessed that Auraus must have severed something in its spine during her attack, because it was definitely a semi-controlled fall instead of a glide. Arghen and I jumped to either side of the flight path, and the dragon crashed into the pillar that we had just been beside. It looked dazed until an exultant yell heralded Ragar’s leap onto the dragon’s backside. Ragar stabbed the dragon with his longsword, making it scream in pain again and swish its tail violently. The unexpected pain looked like it cleared the stun out of the dragon, because it swung its head around to see what had hurt it. Ragar leapt off the beast towards me, but a well-aimed swipe of the tail caught the mountain-cat-elf midair and sent him flying upwards into a low-hanging stalactite. Amazingly, I saw Ragar catch it and swing himself around the stone spire before I had to tear my attention away from him to defend myself. Gymnasts back home would have killed to have that cat-like ability.
The dragon snapped at me, and I rolled out of its path again to come to my feet in the move I’d practiced with Jason in the past. A sharp red claw reached out to hook me, and I quick-drew my iron and swung at it, leaving a burn mark across its huge scaly knuckle. The dragon roared and struck at me with the other claw, but its attack was thrown off because Arghen assaulted it from the side opposite me. The back of the claw slammed into my chest and knocked me hard into a stalagmite, which was better than its wicked talon piercing me. My iron bar and my torch flew out of my nerveless hands. The breath left my body with a whoosh as I slid to the floor, and the dragon homed in for the kill. The monster opened its mouth to chomp on me, but then it wailed and snaked its neck around to look wildly around. Ragar, Auraus, Stalker, and Arghen had all struck it at the same time: Auraus and Ragar on its back, Arghen at its neck and directing Stalker to bite the tail. The dragon scales weren’t as tough as I expected because all the attacks struck home, and a red-black colored blood fountained out of each wound. The dragon gave a truly horrendous scream and flailed about, using its wings and tail in combination to try and bash its attackers off. While the tail succeeded in knocking away Stalker; Arghen, Auraus, and Ragar were able to avoid the wing strikes. Flying and ducking in and out with their attacks like bees defending their hive, it was only a matter of time before the trio was able to finally kill the dragon.
Auraus came over to inspect me for wounds immediately afterwards, but I was able to reassure her that I hadn’t been hurt. I was only a little stunned. Still wheezing, I accepted her help up; and when I felt steadier on my feet, I went after my iron and torch, which had landed near where Arghen cleaned the dragon blood off his war spear.
Ragar said to Arghen while taking care of his own stuff, “How was it that the beast saw you, Arghen?”
“Something alerted it, but what, I do not know. Perhaps it smelled my dranth before I rode into the cavern.”
Ragar frowned a little. “But they do not have that good of a sense of smell.”
Arghen shrugged.
“A dragon is the last thing that I would have expected to see underground,” I said to Arghen as I picked up the bar, still breathing hard.
“It was not a dragon, Lise,” replied Ragar to me. “It was a wyvern.”
“Dragon, wyvern, what’s the difference? They’re the same, aren’t they?”
“They have certain similarities, but to me the main differences are that wyverns have two legs instead of four, and that it can be killed easier than a dragon,” the mountain-cat-elf replied.
“If that was easy, I’d hate to see hard,” I said with a weak grin.
My mind flashed back to the day Arghen, Jason and I had had our first coordinated fight against the monstrous Trappist spider. I remembered how hard and tiring a fight that had been, and how mad I’d felt afterwards finding out that Arghen had used it as a training exercise and had deliberately drawn the battle out. The difference here is that I knew this fight hadn’t been drawn out on purpose.
Arghen abruptly straightened and gave me a furious look. “I thought I had told you to wait back beyond the cavern’s entrance!” he said with controlled anger.
I narrowed my eyes as I looked back at him, my anger rising to match his. How dare he lecture me now!
“I do believe that you ‘suggested’ we wait,” I said icily. “I said what I said only to get you going, because I felt that arguing was a waste of time. I never thought it was a good idea to be so far away with you going into possible danger. Once I’d been informed of its possibility, Ragar helped crystallize my thoughts into action. Turned out it was a good thing I changed my mind, isn’t it?”
“You lit the torches and drew its attention!” he accused.
“I needed to see.”
“What if it had been Under-elves instead?” he said, still angry.
“If we hadn’t come, you would have been dragon food. Sorry, I meant ‘wyvern food’. But even if they had been Under-elves, we would have fought with you. Not even the mighty Arghen can take on a squad of Under-elves alone! Or is there something else you’ve been hiding about yourself to us?” I spat at him.
Neither one of us broke eye contact until Auraus stepped between us. “This is definitely not the time for this,” she said, looking at Arghen. “Lise is leader. Either respect that, or fight for the leadership.”
I blinked as Arghen paused, indecision openly warring on his face. Fight for the leadership? I didn’t know that that was something they did on this side of the mist gate. I didn’t want to fight him—not because I knew I would get my butt kicked if we did, but because he was my friend.
“I won’t fight. If he wants it all that bad, he can have it!” I said, unable to suppress the anger and hurt I felt in my tone.
Arghen took a couple of deep breaths,
calming himself. “Lise. I am sorry. You are leader. But as leader, you have to understand that when a scout asks for something, there is a reason. And your agreement led me to assume certain things—like you would be where you said you would be. What if I had come back some different way, and you were not where I had left you? I would be worried that something had happened, and I would have assumed that you had been ambushed from behind by Under-elves. I would have gone off and possibly missed you in the cavern because I would not have been looking for your trail.”
I suddenly understood his point, even though there was no other way he could have come back to us. “All right, I understand what you mean. I’m sorry about that part, Arghen. I didn’t realize …”
“No, Lise. You did the right thing,” a hesitant voice broke in over mine.
Heather’s.
I swiveled my head at her in disbelief while Arghen and the others looked at her in surprise.
“No, really,” she said, her voice growing stronger as she looked at the Under-elf, one hand resting on Mountie’s neck as if pulling strength from the contact with her horse. “You say she’s the leader, and then you go off and do leader-y kinds of things both behind her back and without her. And then you yell at her when she does what she thinks a leader should be doing? You must have had some kind of belief in her at one time, or you wouldn’t have agreed to let her take the lead. So make up your mind one way or the other.” She looked back at me, her tan expression softening. “I have. Now.”
I blinked, flabbergasted. “What?” I said stupidly.
“Look, I know we haven’t gotten along, Lise, ever since you came to the Crosstown Academy on that scholarship and beat me at that first match. I was better than you then, but I was cocky and didn’t take the match as seriously as I should have. So you won, and I was mad at you. Not because you were better than me, but because I didn’t want to hate myself. Or have my parents hate me.”
“Your parents?” I hated sounding thick-brained, but I felt out of my depth.
“Yeah. I have what some ignorant people might politely call ‘traditional’ Asian parents. You know those Asian memes on the internet with an Asian man’s head that usually has something written on it like ‘A-? Why not an A+?’” She grimaced. “That could be my dad, though. He’s always set unrealistically high expectations for me, which I hate. Sometimes it feels like me not meeting his standards is just an excuse so he can berate me to relieve his own stress or something. My mom never contradicts him when he’s laying into me, either, but just silently stands by with a sorrowful look on her face. The one thing that he’d never found fault with me for was my fencing, because I’d never lost. After our match your first Academy day, I didn’t go home right away. I couldn’t face him and tell him I’d had my first defeat since moving up to Crosstown Academy. I went instead to the coffee shop near my family’s apartment building to get an espresso and happened to meet up with Amir, who sat down to drink his after-class latte with me.”
I nodded recognition at the name. Amir was a classmate of ours at the Academy. At the word ‘latte’, though, I had a sudden craving for one with cream and four sugars. I liked them sweet. I shoved it to the back of my mind so I could concentrate on Heather.
“Sometime later I saw my dad come in for coffee. I left Amir at the table and ducked outta there before my father could see me. But he must have talked to Amir after I’d gone, because when I went home to dinner that night I caught hell over the fact that I’d lost the match to you—a newcomer, and a scholarship student at that. Since that night, because of that, I’ve hated you for two reasons: because you’ve practiced really hard to be the best in the class, and because my father always asks Mr. Bronson how I did after each class. But I don’t hate you anymore, now. The last couple of days have shown me so much more of who you are, and who I am, too. I may not be the best person out here to help you, but I sure as hell am glad that it was me who fell through that damn portal to this weird world to you.”
I blinked again. This was the real Heather? Cool.
I smiled, and said lightly, “I’m glad, too. You’ve really pulled your weight since getting here, and I don’t know if we’d even be here right now if it hadn’t been for you at the tower. Friends?”
“Friends,” she replied firmly.
I tentatively put out my hand, and she just as tentatively took it and shook it. Then a powerful set of furry arms enveloped me and Heather both, pushing us into contact with each other.
“Hug instead. It is better that way,” purred a smiling Ragar.
Heather and I smiled shyly, and maneuvered our arms to hug for the first time ever.
CHAPTER 10
While Heather and I were coming to an understanding, Stalker decided that he just had to have a meal from the dead wyvern first. Not wanting to separate a carnivore from his meat, we waited. Heather was both repulsed and fascinated to watch the dranth eat so neatly. While she was occupied with Stalker, Arghen asked to take me aside. Warily, I agreed.
“Lise, I just want to say that I am proud of you,” he said quietly after we were away from the group.
I blinked. That was kind of out of left field for me.
He saw the look on my face and added, “Heather’s hugging you has shown me that you are becoming more an adept leader than perhaps I could see. She had hated you on sight when she crossed the mist gate even though you were the only person from her world here, as far as she knew. But over the last moon phase, you have managed to make her change her mind and to even defend you when she thought you were being treated unfairly. Well done.”
I glowed, but stopped myself from going all mushy. “Thanks, Arghen. That means a lot to me, coming from you,” I said as calmly as I could.
He offered me a warrior’s grip, which I gladly returned. We went back together to the others and saw that Stalker was done. I mounted everyone up, and we moved out. We rode for a while, and then stopped for a rest, during which I prayed to Caelestis telling her of our journey. Riding on afterwards, we went through two more Cavern of Convergences where Ragar helped Arghen determine which was the right way to go. Eventually the Under-elf told us he saw signs of the beginning of Chirasnivian territory.
“About time,” I said, as we turned into the latest travel tunnel he indicated. “Who’d’ve thought this would be so long a trip?”
“Remember, Lise, paranoia is the unwritten Under-elf watchword,” Arghen admonished me. “They would in no way have an easy trail from the keep to the city-state.”
“What do these signs you’ve been looking for look like?” asked Ragar, curious.
Arghen pulled up Stalker and pointed out some scratches that mirrored each other on the wall at dranth-mounted height. “You will see these signs in the travel tunnels at the beginning and end of every passageway, as well as at any applicable Cavern of Convergence tunnel mouth. The signs all direct any Under-elf in the general direction of each city-state, though the closer you get to a specific city-state, the more obtuse they get, as I mentioned earlier. This is how Surfacers who venture down here get lost and die.”
During the next time we stopped to eat, I said, “All right, Arghen, let’s hear what an Under-elf city-state is like and your disguise plan.”
I had some vague notion in my head that the Under-elf city-state would be a huge cavern with buildings set up in some sort of pattern. I was wrong. Arghen informed us that a combination of open spaces and living tunnels where what made up an Under-elf city-state, and because Under-elves were so paranoid, the city-state living tunnels were intricately connected by passageways. It seemed that the center of a city-state was something like a football stadium—plenty of seating surrounding a wide-open area. That was the heart of Under-elf life: where executions happened, market days from the traveling merchants occurred, announcements proclaimed by Council-leaders, and so on. The wide-open area, also called the Central Court, had permanent signs posted at each of the entrances that could be updated to let the citizens know what was go
ing to happen, and when.
The tunnels that led from Central Court went to the area surrounding the central cavern, called the Leadership Ring, where the higher-ups in Under-elf society lived: the Council members and other important people in the governing of the city-state had their combined offices and living spaces there, as well as the wealthier citizens. Though the four tunnels from the center led straight out to the Leadership Ring, at the junctures with the Ring the tunnels became many and twisty. From this first ring, other tunnels eventually led to the next set of open caverns.
That was where areas for social gatherings happened. These were somewhat smaller in scope, but were still pretty big open caves connected in a circle around the Leadership Ring and contained parks, watery grottos, and stuff like that. This was also where fighting areas were set up for Under-elves to practice skills like knife throwing, sword fighting, and archery.
“Wait,” said Heather, who’d been sitting beside me. “Do all Under-elves know how to fight over here?”
“Not all fight as well as the military, but all can spar to one degree or another,” replied Arghen. “It is an honor to hold a fighter’s title as a civilian here, so there are leagues and teams that pick a discipline and practice it constantly during non-working periods. Then the leagues have competitions against each other to determine an overall winner for a set time.”
Surprise was in her dark eyes at his words, but there was none in my blue ones. I remembered when I first figured out that most people on this side of the mist gate knew how to defend themselves, which was when I saw the freed captives of the keep pick up weapons to arm themselves without looking self-conscious about it. Arghen went on to tell us that the tunnels which led from these social areas went to the next ring, called the Civilian Ring, which were the living tunnels for the general population of the city-state: families, merchants, crafters, and the like. Past the Civilian Ring, there were tunnels that led to large open caverns where the farm lands and the breeding lands were.
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