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The trickles of the cavern dried up into practically nothing, and the slugs ceased roaming. He became hungrier than ever—his appetite grew and thrived and seemed to tap insistently at the backs of his eyes, and he worried the edges of his claws with sharp little teeth, pulling up dead skin until he bled.
He drank and bathed at a little pool in a far corner of the cavern. Once it had been fed by a fall that made the trickle on the egg shelf seem like a rainy bit of nothing, but now even the cascade had dried to a thick dampness on the cave wall.
While licking at it one day he noticed air moving around a projection. Even better, the air carried with it the smell of slugs.
He squeezed around the rock and found a crack, a jagged projection that narrowed at the bottom like a claw. Some water trickled from the bottom, carrying a more definite slug smell. He wormed through the crack and heard a few loose scales—it seemed all his scales were loose these days—fall into the water.
The air in here was wetter, and the cave moss still grew thickly in a ring around the pool, offering some light and playing on the bubbles that popped up now and then through the pool, which had spongy pads growing on the surface. He saw slugs squeezing themselves between rocks and under the pads and fell on them, and upset one of the pads in his thrashing.
The other side of the pad held little white spheres, clustered together so it was hard to tell where one began and the next ended. He sniffed them and they smelled delicious.
He tried swallowing one and almost immediately felt better. Eggs! They were probably slug eggs; they certainly smelled like the slugs. He devoured six more before he remembered how he had overhunted the rats in the offal pile. Eat up too many eggs and there’ll be no slugs….
He tongued down two more anyway, and let out a soft burp. His blood flowed with new life.
He watched the water flow into the pool from a crack at a slightly higher level, less of a waterfall than a water step, and a little flowed out into “his” pool on the other side of the crack. The volume coming in and the volume going out seemed out of balance; a torrent came in but a trickle flowed out.
Of course—the bubbles. Water was going down, as it always did, and air wandered up, each always looking for company of its own kind.
He dove, followed the bubbles, hoping for another chamber with more slug eggs to raid. Though so little light filtered down that it was the next thing to black, he couldn’t get lost; the bubbles would guide him back up. He found another shelf, with the bubbles gathering momentarily before sliding up and out.
But a distinct glow came, not from the source of the bubbles, but from deeper within the shelf. He swam toward it, his whole body moving in an easy, back-and-forth manner, though the cold made his hearts beat hard.
Then the light burned above him and he rose.
The pool top had more of the spongy pad growths, but only partially covering the pool, like a half-closed eye. He grabbed onto one of the pad stalks to arrest his rise and stuck his nose out among the pads.
Instinct made him take a small, cautious nostrilful. The air smelled good. He half emptied his lungs and drew in fresh air, then examined the scents of the room. He smelled mosses and some slug trail and rats and a strange rich, dry smell and dirt and a dirtier, sweaty smell, like horse hoof and…metal!
He took three more breaths and found some more slug eggs under the pads. Then he risked popping the ridge of his head up.
Cave moss, brighter than any growths he’d ever seen, lit the room from a big mound next to the pool. The chamber was shaped rather like a dragon’s head and neck, with the pool resting at neck level, a high rise above that had air moving up it, and then it seemed to narrow off in one direction, like his snout. The pool next to the chamber had been cleared of the spongy pads, and a metal tube like his own neck rose out of the pool and turned at the top.
The metal came from what looked like flats and pits carved into the stone. The artificially straight lines on the metal and the worked stone set off some inner alarm.
Go back. This is not for you.
But the maddening, metallic smell made his mouth go thick and slimy. He had to find it.
He swam across the pool and heard rat claws scritch as he rose dripping from the water, sniffing and listening. The passage led off downward, narrowing even further. The sounds of anything coming up it would be forced in a single direction toward him, and he’d have plenty of warning, so he relaxed a little.
The metallic column rising from the water smelled delicious, but was too big to swallow. It made a loop above and turned back down over a big stonework hollow. It had a vaguely greasy smell to it, like food.
Strange, fashioned objects of a rough, dry, wholesome-smelling substance—wood, some old memory echo told him—held growth of some kind. The wood had bits of metal embedded into it.
Ah, here’s the metal. And here. And here.
The flats and pits of the chamber had bits of metal, some with wooden handles, many of them redolent of meats and scorching, and even better, a few were small enough to be swallowed. He found a hollow tube sealed at one end, the same color as his scales, and found that if he stood on it he could crush it. He folded it in half and smashed it down again—he enjoyed compacting the metal more than he’d enjoyed anything since listening to Zara sing—and soon he had it in a shape that could fit down his throat.
Most satisfying.
Now food.
Where the moss grew thickly there was a garbage pile so rich in tidbits it felt like a gift. He broke up a few bones and extracted the marrow, found several chunks of rat-gnawed gristle and delicious, charred skins with the hair conveniently burned down to a stubble.
Now, this is a feast worthy of a dragon!
With nothing but some gassy burps to keep him company, he explored a pit where some kind of fire had burned recently and found more wooden holders, some with metal bands. He decided the vaguely greasy, dirty smell was some manner of hominid. Didn’t dwarves spend a lot of time tunneling and mining?
