Dragon Avenger

by E. E. Knight

  What was the word for that in drakine? Ah yes, kazhin. “My mother never told me about felines.”

  “Mine taught me to hunt, and that’s about all. But that’s felines for you. Great at telling their own tales and looking out for same, indifferent to anyone else’s. We’ve got to find that basement now. Ahhh.”

  Yari-Tab jumped down from the column to a protruding branch, then to a broken windowsill, and then to the ground in a sort of controlled fall. She landed a good deal lighter than a dragon.

  “Can you fit down this, Talassat?”

  Wistala looked down what appeared to be an overgrown hole. Brambles trailed over an overhanging pile of rubble.

  Yari-Tab ventured in and turned so her eyes glittered from the darkness. Above it three ancient arches, all broken open at the top, hosted a tangle of spider-legged plants.

  “It widens out a little way down. Can you smell the rats?”

  Wistala stuck her head in, smelled the rat urine mixed with old leaves and wormcast. The gap yawned bigger than it looked; it was mostly closed off by roots and their attendant mosses and trapped leaves. She pushed her head down and through, catching bits of lichen and dry air-root in her scales.

  She found they were on stairs, Yari-Tab already down and through another hole, a half-filled passageway.

  She tracked by smell and sound—the cat’s footfalls were as silent as morning mist, but Wistala could hear her breath and sniffing.

  “I wish I had my fire,” Wistala said.

  “Fire?”

  “Yes, dragons can spit fire. I don’t like not being able to see. A torf here and there makes all the difference.”

  “That’s part of the fun, hunting by ear and nose. Though all this talking has sent the rats running.”

  “Sorry. I like being underground—I just want to explore thoroughly so I can feel safe, and unless dragons live long out of the sun, their eyes can’t work on nothing.”

  “It’s light you want? Want to see a bit of magic?”

  “Cats and rats! You can do magic?”

  Yari-Tab purred. “Oh no, but I’m fond of pretties. See this, my all-nose-and-no-smellsense-tchatlassat.”

  Wistala heard the cat scamper up a wall and more prruming.

  A faint glow, like an angry dragoneye, threw a faint amber light across the chamber. With a modicum of light to work with, Wistala could now see the passageway they traversed.

  She reared up and sniffed at the light source. It was some humble gem, perhaps enchanted in a fashion, for it held a glowing liquid within. As her nostrils breathed on it, the light grew brighter.

  Yari-Tab extracted a clump of dirt from her paw and a cobweb from her whiskers. “There you are, Talassat. Some bit of forgotten magic—they’re here and there in odd corners in the underground. The men have stripped them from the chambers they can get at. No one’s found this one.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “My mother showed me this chamber and the trick, and I imagine she got it from hers. Rats aren’t very clever—if you put a little light in a room, they’re far braver about traveling the shadows than they are when it’s holefill black.”

  “Did your father ever teach you at all?”

  “Never knew him.” She made another light descent and trotted to the far corner of the passageway. “One of a dozen possibles and not much for hanging about goes the feline proverb.”

  Wistala tried to imagine what the home cave would have been like with other hatchlings and mother-dragons about. Other male hatchlings pouncing her—she got a pang as she thought of Auron.

  So much less to eat!

  Wistala found herself liking Yari-Tab, though once she began talking, she was like a mountainside stream on a warm spring day, running always.

  They entered an arched chamber, dead-ending in a collapsed cascade of dirt and masonry. The cut-off passage was about the size of Father if you didn’t count his neck and trunk, cobwebbed above and rat-fouled below.

  “You’re sending the rats running,” Yari-Tab said, hearing scrabbling sounds from a series of holes at the edge of the room. They were choked with dirt, broken stone, and everything from bits of bark to twigs.

  She paused at one that stood under a crack in the wall where a good deal of masonry had fallen away, showing dirt behind mixed in with chunks of man-cut stone, both enlarging and blocking the passage. “There are bits of tunnel beneath this. Lots in other places are filled with swamp water, but this one has so much rat-scent coming up out of it, I think it’s got to lead to the Deep Run.”

  “How do you know the Deep Run exists?”

  “The rats squeak it to each other when they’re being chased.”

  With every word, it became easier to understand the cat. Wistala wasn’t sure if they were speaking Feline or Drakine or some simplified version blending the two. Their slit-pupiled eyes regarded each other in the darkness.

  Wistala sniffed at the blockade. Only the tiniest glimmer of light came from the stone in the other room, but it was enough for her eyes to work on. “The rats have dug a hole. Why don’t you just enlarge it?”

  “A feline? Dig?” Yari-Tab flipped onto her back and rolled around in delight, batting at a bit of old cottonwood seed that had drifted down somehow, fighting it like an enemy. “Digging’s for the rodents,” she said as she sat and reset her fur.

  Wistala thrust her snout into the hole, widened it enough for her sii, and went to work. Soon she sent showers of dirt in either direction, extracting or shoving the bigger pieces out of the way.

  Yari-Tab found a perch out of the way of the digging and settled down to watch.

  Her claws struck metal, badly rusted. Some kind of bars had been set into the tunnel, which trapped sticks, which collected leaves, which stopped dirt and blockaded the inlet.

  The bars vexed her even after she dug her way through. Though rusted, they were too hard to bite, and all her claws could achieve against them were a series of scorings. Just beyond, a mound of dirt blocked the inlet, but a rat path ran up toward the top of the sluice. She backed out of the tunnel.

  “Finished already?” Yari-Tab yawned.

  Wistala blew dirt out of her nostrils. “See if you can get through the rat hole now.”

  The cat disappeared down the hole and returned, mud tipping her whiskers. “You’re almost there. Beyond the bars is a hole, and beyond that I smell fresher air and hear lots of water drips.”

  “Except I can’t get beyond those bars.”

  “Surely your neck can get through,” Yari-Tab said, cleaning herself.

  “I can’t dig with my head.”

  “Well, don’t look at me.”

  Wistala’s tail swished of its own mind, and she crawled back down the sluice. She put her head through the bars and felt around with her nostrils. At the bottom joins, the water had worn away masonry, and it was quite crumbly on the other side. She extracted her head and went to work with one of her claws.

  When she cleared off chunks all around the bricks holding the bar, she pushed again, but still it wouldn’t yield.

  “Stone and bone, what a bother!” Muscles convulsed in her chest, and she spat at the bar. A rope of spit clung to it, as ineffectual as her claws. But it gave off a sharp, hot odor.

  Am I getting my foua this early?

  She heard a rat make a yeeking noise and scuttle.

  If she could only part the bars a little so they’d offer more room, like—

  Wistala remembered sleeping between Auron and Jizara. Jizara always took the warm spot against Mother, and Auron would sleep to the outside, leaving her cramped in the middle. Sometimes they pressed so close, she could hardly breathe. When they did that, she turned on her back and used her short, strong saa legs to part them.

  She wedged her hindquarters sideways, pressing her tail through the gap, and backed as far as she could between the bars. She pressed with her legs at the center of the bar, just as she used to do at the center of Auron’s back.

  It
bent!

  With that achieved, she repositioned herself between the bars facing the other way. She bent that one, as well. Now she had enough space to really put her legs and back into it—

  Craaak!

  The sudden release of pressure shocked her into thinking she’d broken her back instead of the bar for a moment, but sure enough, the bottom join had broken free of the rest of the clawed-away masonry. With half its strength gone, she could get down on all fours under it.

  Ten heartbeats later, it was done—she could get through.

  “Done it done it done it!” she called up to Yari-Tab.

  “I knew you would,” the feline called back, sounding half-awake.

  With the bars out of the way, clawing earth seemed like pushing through nothing more than a pile of fallen leaves. She spun as she dug, all four limbs working once and tail helping shove out the loosened earth, and then she got through. Her nostrils filled with fresher-moving air.

  And the smell of rats.

  A smooth-sided tunnel yawned beneath, water and muck filling the bottom. Other arched-off tunnels branched off it, some dry, others trickling a bit of water and algae. A green lichen grew at the rim of the water, some weak cousin of the growth from the home cave. Or rather the stuff living in the lichen—Mother had told her that the lichen itself didn’t glow; rather, the light came from tiny creatures that thrived on its fuzzy surface.

  “Come and have a look, sister,” Wistala said.

  Her water-lids fluttered up and back down when she realized what she’d said.

  Yari-Tab crept easily between dirt pile and a tangle of roots holding the earth that hadn’t fallen.

  “Such scents! Such hunting! I’ll never suffer an empty belly again.” Her tail stood straight up as she looked out over the water-bottomed tunnel. Walkways big enough for a man stretched to either side of the main channel; other passages branched off everywhere.

  “Watch yourself. They can be savage when cornered. If they’re anything like cave rats, that is.”

  “Oh, to be sure.”

  “The coin?”

  “But, of course.”

  Yari-Tab tore herself away from what Wistala suspected were dreams of bloody rat livers and climbed back up the sluice. This time she went to the glow-room, reignited it by rubbing herself round the stone again, and took off down another passage. She passed under a low arch and came to a badly cracked wall.

  “Someone took a lot of trouble to seal the metal behind this wall and make it look like just another stretch of passageway. It’s just inside that hole at the bottom.”

  Wistala could smell metal through the hole. She thrust her nose in, following an instinct that wasn’t quite hunger and wasn’t quite lust.

  But nothing but dusty darkness met her exploring tongue—though the dust did taste of refined metal.

  “Where is it?” she asked, withdrawing her head.

  Yari-Tab bunched up in the darkness, eyes widening.

  “Where’s what? The hole’s full of it!”

  “No, it isn’t. What kind of trick is this?” She felt her griff drop and begin to rattle, and the cat backed away.

  “I wouldn’t play a trick on a tchatlassat! Never!”

  “Take a look,” Wistala said.

  “I . . . I can’t seem to move.”

  “Fears and tears, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Wistala lay down in hungry despair, feeling frustrated. After a long moment, the cat padded to the hole and entered.

  Yari-Tab reemerged. “The rats. Wouldn’t you know it.”

  “What would they use coin for?”

  “I’ve never made it past wondering why they eat tail-stinkies that are better off buried, myself.”

  “Well, might as well ask them.”

  “Ask who?”

  “The rats, of course. They took it.”

  Her ears went flat. “The rats? Are you frothing? They can only just vocalize. Hardly more sense than mouse-jibber.”

  Wistala picked herself up and started back for the sluice. “Are you coming?”

  “Do you even understand Rodent?”

  “Err—”

  Yari-Tab bounded after her. “Then I’m coming. Someone sensible ought to come on this expedition. This story will be worth yowling till it echos, if you pull it off.”

  They returned to the opening to Deep Run. They heard rats flee ahead of them as they climbed the dirt pile.

  “Inspecting your claw-work.”

  “Where to next?” Wistala asked once they climbed down to the pathway beside the muddy water. She saw glittering red rat eyes on a high ledge that ran near the top of the tunnel.

  “I don’t know. You instigated this dogbrained hunt. Follow the strongest smells until we corner some.”

  This underground felt wrong to her; everything was even and proportioned and unnatural. She felt vaguely tense and unsettled as she explored.

  They came to an outpouring of water from some aboveground entry. The fall was about as wide as she was long and fed a swampy mass of tangled water plants, here and there sending out buds on long stems like dragon necks.

  “Can you jump that?” she asked, looking at the waterfall. The rats slipped through it under a low, wet overhang of fallen-away masonry.

  “No. Too long,” Yari-Tab answered.

  “Then hang on to my back. You’re going to get wet.”

  “Oh, bother,” Yari-Tab said. Wistala winced as she felt claws dig into the base of her scales.

  Wistala plunged through the spray and came out the other side into a join of passages.

  Yari-Tab hopped off her back and made a great show of flicking her tail this way and that and kicking up her rear legs as she shook off the wet, a good deal of her grace and all of her dignity gone. She was even bonier than Wistala had imagined, obviously—

  A ripple broke the pool, and the water exploded as a blur of a long-nosed shape lunged for Yari-Tab. Wistala saw snaggly yellow teeth and open mouth—

  Once when Wistala was just out of the egg, a stalactite had cracked in the home cave, and Mother came to the edge of the egg shelf in a flash, putting her scaly bulk between the hatchlings and the gloom of the cave before the echo faded. Mother explained it later as “the fighting instinct,” and something very similar must have happened in some same depth of Wistala’s brain that kept her hearts beating.

  Wistala jumped forward, threw herself into the jaws, felt them close on her scales and belly. An irresistible force dragged her into the water and under into darkness.

  Whatever had a hold of her was perhaps surprised at her size, for it tried to shake her, but managed to only wave her back and forth in the black water filled with tiny strings of water roots. Wistala clawed with both sii and saa, lashed with her tail, brought her head round, and bit whatever held her at the join of its jaw. She got one saa into the teeth and tried to pry the jaws apart.

  The pressure vanished, and the beast rolled, pulling her around it like a constricting snake as she left its jaws. It was perhaps the weight of a pony, though all jaws and tail, limbs smaller even than hers—

  Since it had released her, she returned the favor, and it swam off into darkness. As she broke the surface of the water, she saw a thick tail with a serrated fringe like leathery teeth swirl the water and capsize the podlike blossoms of the water plants.

  Wistala hugged ground and pulled herself up beside Yari-Tab, spat out a loosened hatchling tooth.

  “That was a channelback!” Yari-Tab said from a perch at the top of the wall. For a half-starved cat, she was quite a jumper. She hopped down and landed softly next to Wistala.

  “It fled. I was too big a mouthful anyway.”

  “If you miss on your first pounce—,” Yari-Tab said.

  “Try, try again elsewhere,” Wistala replied, paraphrasing an old dragonelle proverb. A creature that lived by hunting could ill-afford fights with prey; a lost eye or a broken limb could mean death by starvation.

  “Thank you, tchatlassat,
” Yari-Tab said. They turned and climbed away from the tunnel lake to a drier path, only to be attacked again.

  Wistala felt a pull at her saa as she saw a trio of rats leap down from the ledge above—she lashed out instinctively with her saa and swished with her tail.

  Two rats landed on her back, one on her head. It went for the eyes, and she panicked, whipping her head and rolling. Yari-Tab squealed as her body weight rolled over the cat.

  She felt a bite in the naked flesh under her sii-pit. She whipped her head down, pulled the rat up by her teeth as she might a tick, crushed it, and flung it back into the channel water. Something bit at her hindquarters again, and she kicked—

  Then they were gone as quickly as they’d come. She smelled blood and rats thick all around.

  Yari-Tab had one pinned, both claws digging into its shoulders as it kicked out. The feline opened her teeth—

  “Wait!” Wistala said.

  “Whyever? The foul beasts bit my—”

  “I want him to show us to the coin.”

  The rat squeaked in fright.

  “Ask it,” Wistala urged. “Ask it where the shiny metal is.”

  Yari-Tab squeaked out something, and the rat chattered back.

  “He says he knows just what you mean and that there’s lots. Don’t believe a word, though. Rats will say anything once you’ve got your claws in them.”

  “I’ll take the chance. Tell him to show us.”

  “He’ll bolt down the first hole or dive—”

  Wistala bent down and took the rat in her mouth. She held her jaws just open enough for the rat to see the tunnel through her rows of teeth.

  Yari-Tab purred. “That’ll keep him in line.” She squeaked up at the rat.

  “He begs you not to swallow.”

  Wistala tried to form words but couldn’t. She tilted her head and rapped a claw on the stepstones.

  “Oh. Of course.” She squeaked out again. “He says straight ahead for a while.”

  To any rats, or perhaps cave toads or bats lurking in the tunnels, they must have made a strange procession. Wistala walking with her head aloft, jaw set in its grimace, a rat nose protruding from between prominent fore-fangs. An orange-striped cat walking beneath, hopping over mud and rat droppings, occasionally rising up on its hind legs to squeak into the hatchling’s mouth, in and out of mottled moss-light.