by E. E. Knight
“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!
He tucked it under his arm and saw a pair of stout, thick-skinned, horn-jointed legs next to him. He looked up to see the remaining deman ready to chop his head off.
A pair of black-taloned claws opened above the deman, took him up by the shoulders, and the Copper felt a wave of wind flow across him at the beat of feathered wings.
The Copper turned his head so he could watch the flier with his good eye. It was a strange sort of creature, a half dragon with twin tails, hardly any neck at all capped by a tall, arching head with a hooked snout, and feathered wings. It rose and turned, screeching, and another almost identical flier passed, flying in the opposite direction. The other reached out a claw and grabbed the kicking legs of the deman, and with only the briefest of jerks the deman parted messily.
Another flier came down and plucked him out of the water, its talons closing around his chest. Yet another approached, and the Copper wondered what it would feel like to be torn in twain and for how long he could watch his back half being carried off, but the second bird-creature flew under, eyeing him before alighting at the riverbank and poking around in the deman’s boat.
The feathered avian carried him up, across some of the tall towers of rock, and to a splinter of stone that made a convenient ledge. It dropped him and turned its leathery-skinned head almost completely around to watch him, a fierce cast in its eyes thanks to streaks of yellow and blue eyelid decorating the round black orbs.
It didn’t have a tooth-filled mouth, but a beak with a pink-white tongue inside. He saw it as it opened his mouth to cluck at him. What he took to be twin tails were in fact only feathers, like the heavy-ended blades he’d seen in the demen’s hands, only longer.
“Tlock—the fire was you?” it asked in good Drakine. The Copper noticed that it had a silver ring set into the fore-edge of a wing bone near the shoulder.
The Copper could only pant, the wound in his chest burning.
He shut his eyes, and opened them again only when he heard high bat yeeks. The great bird-creature had left as silently as it had dropped on the demen. Thernadad, Mamedi, Enjor, and one or two of the other bats clung to a crack in the rock.
Real greenstuff grew on these pillars of stone. Enough light must come down through the cracks to support true plants rather than the mosses and lichens and slimes of the Lower World.
The bats nibbled and lapped at his wound, but as they seemed to be doing more good than harm, he left them to it. The pain faded to an ache. Awful, but tolerable. Scales, stuck together with blood, closed over the wound.
Suddenly they scattered. The fliers returned, bearing the woven basket.
One of the bird-creatures—griffaran, he reminded himself�
�climbed down the rock face from above, using its two limbs and beak.
Another placed the basket on the shelf beside him as it alighted.
“Egg thief!” one croaked.
“Egg thief! Death to all egg thieves!” others called, drifting on air currents.
Another landed and turned its head so it looked at him, first with one eye, then the other.
The Copper gulped. With so many gathered around would they each take some piece of him in those hooked beaks and yank him apart?
A vast griffaran, its beak battle-scarred, one eye socket dry and empty, and two digits missing from its right foot, landed. It wore a pair of golden rings, one in each arm, with fabric like bits of woven sunlight looped through and knotted.
“Gak! Any other prisoners?” it asked in Drakine.
“No, none. They’ve run again.”
“Curse the thieves,” one of the watching creatures called. Others squawked in agreement.
The one with the gold bands looked into the empty basket. “We will see justice done, drake. Prepare yourself.”
It reached out with a spread-taloned claw….
BOOK TWO
Drake
“FOOLS AND THRALLS TALK OF GOOD AND EVIL. THEIR MASTERS THINK IN TERMS OF TIME AND PLACE.”
—Tighlia
Chapter 11
The gold-shouldered griffaran, with two silver-winged companions soaring beside, flew to the far side of the water. The Copper rode, clenched in maimed talons, protecting his chest wound with his bad sii.
The Copper was more than a little surprised they didn’t tear him to shreds, or eat him, or drop him to break and die against the rocks below.
The griffaran sailed into line and entered a tunnel. He heard wing tips brush the chiseled sides. He looked ahead and saw the tunnel’s end, but the griffaran didn’t slow. They dropped, picking up speed, as though to dash themselves against the wall.
They beat their wings powerfully, and turned up, and rose through a hole in the cave ceiling, and suddenly there was open air and light all around.
The Copper looked around in wonder, wishing both his eyes worked so he could take it all in properly.
He couldn’t see much overhead, thanks to the commanding griffaran, just a vague sense of an oddly regular dome shape rising above, like a vast hollow mountain, and a glowing light source at the apex of the dome. Was that the sun? It was high in the sky and bright enough, but it hardly dazzled, and it seemed held in place with no blue about anywhere, so unlike the vague mind-pictures passed down from his parents that he decided it must be some imitation.
Below he saw a vast blue-green plain, with little rises of red rock, some needle-shaped, others leaning, a few formed like toadstools, and many more low hummocks scattered about. Mosses thrived in the wet crevices; ferns dripped from the edges of pools and streams.
At the center of the Lavadome stood a black carbuncle, like the pupil in the middle of an eye.
The fliers were making for the black rock.
As they flew closer and turned above it, he saw that the rock, unevenly shaped on all sides and resembling a kidney, had been sculpted, added to, cut and galleried and tunneled, enlarging what had been irregular holes scattered around the minimountain like the eyes of a potato he’d once seen a dwarf eating.
The fliers dropped toward a long garden filled with flower-covered vines set atop one of the rises in the rock. A sculpted river flowed through it, complete with waterfall. Statues of dragons—rampant, reclining, rearing, crossing necks, even dipping their noses into pools of water—surrounded the greenery. It smelled like earth and green growing things.
His captors swooped down and landed gently.
Hairy, broad-backed hominids dropped jugs and tools and scattered as the avians alighted. A rise of black rock overlooked the garden.
The griffaran fluffed their wings and let out loud calls.
A dragon—a real dragon, huge and silver with black tips at his griff and crest and tail-line—stirred from where he’d been resting atop a small rock.
“High Captain, what brings you to the Imperial Resort without invitation?”
“I have a wounded young drake. He was involved in an egg raid. I’ll speak to the Tyr.”
Dragon snouts emerged from the rock. A head or two rose from holes. The Copper saw golden, and red, and pink, and even purple eyes looking at him. He heard whispered dragon voices.
“The Tyr rests.”
“Yark! He has always trusted my judgment in waking him.”
The silver dragon inclined his head sideways—rather like Auron when puzzled—but there seemed to be lassitude to the gesture, and disappeared into the rise. The Copper noted that it was the tallest prominence on the black rock; even the garden was above much of the rest of the top.
The others looked and sniffed at him with interest, not contempt. The smell of dragons, the odd sense of the vast space around while still being underground, the faint throb of so many heartbeats and breathing bodies and shifting claws and scales—it overwhelmed him, and he felt his throat go thick and his good eye blur.
The Copper’s eyes roved in wonder around the dome. What he’d taken to be the sun was just a glowing patch of light at the top of the dome. He suspected it was in fact sunlight being filtered through translucent material. But that wasn’t the only glow. Jagged streaks of orange light, brightening and fading and pulsing, flowed down the sides, adding a red-orange cast to the brighter light above.
A smallish, wide-bodied dragon, with scales that seemed deep red or purple depending on how the light struck, carrying seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…twenty-one horn-tips atop his crest, emerged from the rock. The horns grew up, sideways, down, as though interested in what was happening all around the dragon’s head. But for all the creature’s evident pride in the number of horns, patches of bare skin showed around his eyes, mouth, and the edges of his crest where scale had fallen away.
A pair of wide-shouldered, stooped-over hominids wearing white loincloths trailed behind, with brushes, scoops, and a basket.
“It’s you, Yarrick. They just said a griff captain or I would have hurried. It is the hour of white?”
Yarrick stepped in front of the Copper, cutting off his view of the Tyr.
“But one. We thought it best to let you sleep, Tyr,” the silver dragon said.
“Oh, bash it. I like getting to work early. You should have roused me. But I’m forgetting our visitors. What news from the water ring, brave Yarrick?”
“Another egg raid, Tyr. Well organized. They distracted us, poisoned the nest guardians. Sixteen eggs this time—it would have been the worst loss we’ve ever suffered. And then there’s this.”
He sidestepped from the Copper. The Copper felt the gaze of two slightly cloudy eyes the color of aging gold coin. He stared back defiantly. If this dragon was going to watch his own kind torn to bits for nest raiding without singeing so much as a feather—
“Really? That’s terrible,” the Tyr said.
Yarrick fluffed his wings. “This drake—still with egg-wet behind the griff, if I’m still fit to judge dragons—almost lost his gizzard to the demen while rescuing our eggs. But there were guts to spare in that one.”
Rescue?
It took the Copper a moment to get over the shock. He felt doubly fortunate that the fight with the demen turned out the way it did, even at the price of a stab in the firebladder. What if the griffaran had found him eating from a broken egg?
“What is he, some young relative of yours eager to prove himself, my Tyr? He shows the old FeHazathant spirit.”
“NoSohoth,” Tyr said, “is this some relative of mine? Why hasn’t he been presented to me? Such old scars on a young drake, too. He’s taken honors from three bitter fights, and I’m just looking at the front end of him.”
The silver dragon with the black griff tips lowered his head and looked at the Copper closely. “He’s no hatchling from the Imperial Resort, Tyr.”
Tyr glowered. �
��Hmmmm. Yes. Why does that not surprise me?”
“Let us sing of glories proudly won,” a golden drake said from one of the flower beds. The Copper saw a couple of bats flit under an overhanging rock behind him.
“Let’s keep our fool’s mouth shut for a change,” NoSohoth muttered.
“Let the drake sing, old fellow,” Tyr said. “At least he’s got an appreciation for the old virtues and deeds.”
“Sir, I’ve no time for songs,” Yarrick said. “I’m here to see that justice gets done to this brave little fellow. He saved six eggs.”
“Did he? Did I doze off and miss part of the story? Well, if you say so. What’s your name, lad?”
The Copper opened his mouth, but couldn’t find words.
“Perhaps he’s in awe to be in the Imperial presence,” NoSohoth said. “You’ve nothing to fear, drake. Glorious Tyr is grandsire to all of us, a part of our lifesong whatever our parentage. Just answer honestly and no harm will befall you.”
“Nice to see daring young drakes plunging in among enemies instead of crying for help. Not enough about. Not enough,” the Tyr said. He settled down over his sii and saa, perhaps to be less threatening.
“I…I’ve no name, sir. I’m…my sire and dam…dead.”
“What? Who?” Tyr said. “NoSohoth, what’s this? Are you keeping ill news from me again?”
“No, Tyr,” NoSohoth said. He turned to the Copper. “There’ve been no attacks in the Lavadome in two generations. Are you from one of the Upper Provinces?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps. I came down the river. I’ve been traveling for ages…ages, it seems.” The Copper wished his voice hadn’t sounded so squeaky. He wondered if he could even be heard over the surr-whooosh of the Tyr’s breathing.
“Yarrick, where did you find him?”
The avian straightened up. “The lake circle.”
“The lake circle, Tyr,” NoSohoth corrected.
“Oh, never mind that,” Tyr said. “We’re old friends, and this is a friendly visit.”
“Of course, Tyr,” Yarrick said. “On the far bank, to the north. Downstream from the thrall crossing.”