Page 4 of River Dragon’s Song

He pulled himself up onto the ledge beside the spillway and crouched there, water streaming from his shoulders. He ran his hand along the carved lip of the stone. He found the channel cut into it, smooth and even, and followed it to the place where the silt always gathered. There was a small drift of it now, dark and gritty, enough to slow the flow if he left it. He carefully scooped it out with his claws and flicked it into the current, and the water moved more easily at once.

That was better. He didn’t know why it was better, only that it was, in the same way he knew to breathe and to swim and to listen. When he had first opened his eyes in this place, he had known almost nothing else. He hadn’t known his name, or where he was, or why his body ached as if he had been asleep for longer than memory. But he had known the water. He had known where the channels ran and which ones had choked with stone and dust. His hands had gone to work clearing them long before his mind understood what he was doing.

Since then the memories had come back slowly, in bits and pieces. His name had come first, on the second or third day, simply there in his mouth when he tried to speak. Other things had followed. The taste of the purple leaves that grew in the gardens downstream, and the knowledge that he could eat them. The way to find the warm currents that rose from deep below. The sound his people had called themselves, which had surfaced one night while he floated half-asleep in the shallows.

Nai’thara.

He had said it out loud, and it had echoed back to him from the stone walls, and no one had answered. He tried not to think about that too often. It hurt less to keep busy. It was easier to think about the water.

He finished clearing the spillway and moved on to the next one, and then to the one after that. He worked his way along the channel as he did every night. He didn’t know if it was truly night. There was no sun down here, no change in the light except for the slow brightening and dimming of the moss. But his body knew when it was time to rest and when it was time to work, and he had learned to trust it.

The channel ended in a broad, quiet pool beneath a ceiling he had never seen. There he stopped and did what he always did at the end of the night. He sang.

It wasn’t a song with words. He didn’t know if it had ever had words. It rose from somewhere deep in his chest, low and rolling, and it filled the cavern the way the water filled the channels, finding every corner and every crack. He could feel it in the stone under his feet. He could feel it in the water around his legs, a faint shimmer spreading across the surface of the pool in widening rings. Some part of him knew that the song mattered, that it was as much a part of caring for the river as clearing the silt. He couldn’t have said why.

And some part of him was always listening for an answer.

He let the last note fade and stood there in the silence that followed, his head tilted, his breath held. The water lapped softly against the stone. The drips rang in their pool. Far away, the falls roared on as they always did.

Nothing sang back, and he slowly let his breath out. It had been foolish to expect anything different. He had sung every night since he woke, and every night the silence had been the same. If there were others of his kind, they were far away, or they were sleeping still, or they were gone. He had begun to believe it was the last of those. He had begun to believe he was the only one left.

The thought settled in his chest like a stone at the bottom of a pool. He shook his head and turned back towards the channel.

The river shuddered.

At first it was just a sudden, violent wrongness in the water around his legs, a jolt that ran up through the stone and into his bones. The surface of the pool shivered and broke into a thousand tiny ripples, and every one of them was running in the wrong direction.

Then the sound reached him. It came from high above and far behind, from the direction of the falls, a sharp crack like stone splitting in the cold, followed by a long, grinding rumble. He knew that sound. He had heard it once or twice since he woke, when some weakened section of the upper tunnels finally gave way. But never so close, and never so loud.

He was in the water before the echoes had died. He swam swiftly, driving himself forward with long sweeps of his tail, his fingers spread wide so that the webbing between them caught the current. The channel was narrow here and fast, and he let it carry him while he listened. The rumble had stopped. In its place he could hear the patter of small stones falling into the pool below the falls, and the hiss of dust settling on the water. And beneath that, so faint he almost missed it, there was a splash.

It wasn’t a stone. Stones fell straight and sank. This was something larger, something that hit the water and thrashed.

He reached the bottom of the falls and stopped in the shadow of a fallen slab. The spray hung in the air and the moss glowed faintly on the wet rock. The pool beneath the falls was deep and wide, churning white where the water poured into it. Dust drifted down from somewhere high overhead, and it caught the light.

Because there was light, and not the soft blue glow of the moss or the pale green of the vines. It was hard and white and bright, brighter than anything he had seen since he woke. It came from something small that tumbled over and over in the water, flashing as it turned. Then the current dragged it under and the brightness faded away into the depths.

And then a second light appeared.

This one was moving. It rose up out of the white water near the far side of the pool, bobbing and swinging wildly. Beneath it he saw a head and a pair of arms beating frantically at the surface. Someone was struggling in the water, and the light was fixed to their head on some kind of hard, round shell.

He had no word for what he was seeing. His mind reached for one and found nothing, only the empty place where memories should have been. The creature was small, much smaller than he was. It had no scales that he could see, only some kind of loose grey covering, and there was a dark band over part of its face. A long dark braid streamed out behind it across the water, and its arms moved clumsily, without any grace at all.

The creature is drowning, he realized, and moved before he had decided to. He slid into the pool without a sound and dove deep, beneath the churning surface where the water ran dark and clear. He could see the creature’s legs kicking above him, silhouetted against the glow of the light. They were kicking in the wrong direction. The current was steadily dragging it towards the center of the pool, where the falls drove the water down in a long, strong spiral. It was fighting against the current instead of working with it.

He came up beneath it and set his hands against its back.

It was warm, and that surprised him. Everything in the river was cool, the stone and the water and the moss, and even he was cool to the touch until he lay in the warm shallows. But this creature was warm through the wet covering, soft and warm and alive, and the feel of it under his palms sent something strange racing through him.

He pushed gently. It was easy, even against the current. He guided the creature out of the spiral and across the pool, keeping low and out of sight, until he felt the bottom rise up beneath his feet and the water grow shallow. Then he gave the creature one last firm push towards the gravel bar at the edge of the pool and let himself sink back into the dark.

He surfaced cautiously, only his eyes and the top of his head above the water, in the shadow of the slab.

The creature was crawling out of the pool on its hands and knees. It dragged itself across the gravel and collapsed on the stones, coughing, its body heaving with every breath. The light on its head swung and came to rest pointing at the rock wall, where it lit up a patch of glowing moss and made it look pale and ordinary.

For a long moment the creature didn’t move except to breathe. He watched the rise and fall of its back and found that he was holding his breath, waiting.

Then it rolled over and sat up, and he saw its face. It was a female. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did, with the same certainty that he knew the water. She had a narrow face, pale beneath the streaks of mud, with dark brows drawn tightly together. She touched her face with shaking hands, adjusting the wide band that covered her nose and cheekbones and he realized it was a mask of some kind. Her breath rasped through it, harsh and fast, as she pressed it more firmly against her face.