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“Shut it, you,” Thernadad made a swipe at her ears, but she ducked over it.
“M’answering the nice young dragon’s question! So now e’be starving and yeee-eyee-yeee…” Her story trailed off into high-pitched wailing.
“Oh, you should just bring her to this cavern. I’m going exploring. Maybe I’ll pick up another set of cave nits.”
Mamedi left off crying. “Oh, sir—”
Thernadad snapped his teeth at his mate. “Mind the snakes,” he called.
He left them yeeking and boxing again, though Thernadad flapped his wings halfheartedly, as a veteran campaigner who knew a battle lost when he saw one.
This cavern was very different from the home cave. The dwarves had carved it almost wholly from rock, smoothed the floors, and laid the saa-width water channels where the mosses still thrived and offered some amount of light.
Deep pocks like spear wounds—no, like rat holes—could be found in profusion around rougher areas where they’d extracted their minerals. He sniffed one and smelled rat. There were damps and trickles, and these supported more colonies of cave moss and mushrooms, which in turn supported rats and mice. When backtracking to the bat cave and river outlet, he found a few soil beds where the mushrooms grew more thickly—the dwarves must have cultivated something in the soil other than mushrooms, for there were stakes and wire lines, but nothing but a few dead, tough vines remained of their crop.
He smelled more rat here and began to hunt by nose. He caught a flash of white skin and bit quickly and instinctively, cutting it in unequal halves. Legless—a snake! The back end had a big bulge—it had obviously just eaten a rat and couldn’t creep away as he approached. It took a moment for the front end to twitch out.
He carried both halves back to the bats. Mamedi was away getting her sister, so he climbed up and hung the front end up where Thernadad could easily reach it, and swallowed the back half in one long inhale—with a little gulp at the thickening where the half-digested rat lay.
Thernadad nibbled and sucked. “Not to be a’criticizing, sir, but if y’leaves ’em whole, there’s more to lap. Just give ’em a good shake and a crack against a rock, is how an experienced snake killer goes about it. They stay juicier that way.”
“I wasn’t hunting with you in mind.”
“Oh, no, no, no. Of course not.” He nipped out one of the snake’s eyeballs and gulped it down. “M’sees your wounds are healing up nicely. Glad we got to you in time, sir, so’s y’didn’t bleed to death crawling out of the river.”
The Copper looked over his many scabs and felt a little ashamed. He should have brought Thernadad and his wife back a whole snake, at that.
“Hope y’didn’t chomp one of King Gan’s favorites. E’be a mean one. E’doesn’t like anyone a’meddlin’ w’his snakes. Except hisself, of course. E’eats his own kind.”
“King Gan eats his own snakes? Why would they keep such a king?”
“The others not be having much choice in the matter. E’says: ‘They can hate as hard as they like, as long as they fear.’ It’s a necessity, like. There’s precious little to fill an appetite such as his.
“A cave snake, sir, twice your length and more besides. The White Lightning. By the time y’knows he struck y’be dead. He’s strong enough to swim upstream in the river if he likes. Lost my own poor father to him, and an uncle besides.”
“Any area I should stay away from?”
“There’s a swampy bit over there.” Thernadad pointed with a vein-stitched wing. “Beyond that, a real honeycomb it is, where the dwarves struck gold. There’s an air shaft to the surface e’using in summer. Y’be keeping away and not getting ideas, m’hoping.”
“Of course,” the Copper said. He squeezed into a crevice welled in shadow. “I’m for a nap. Wake me if King Gan goes for a swim.”
Thernadad licked his grasping digits and cleaned all around his eyes. “Nowt a’gets past me, sir. Why, m’be having eyes that can spot a rat-tail twitch on the far side of the cavern, and ears that echo off a pinched mouse turd before it hits. M’begging the sir’s pardon for the coarse language; m’be forgetting myself. Right! Ears down and all, on duty, quick’s the wing and sharp’s the tooth…”
Thernadad’s chatter went on, but the Copper slept through the rest.
The Copper woke briefly at a slight smelly sploit of bat guano dropping. He rolled an eye upward and saw Thernadad hanging there, wings well over his face, making rasping noises in his sleep.
“There, e’be waking,” Mamedi said.
Another, even wider than her and with two little bats clinging trembling to its back, also looked down at him.
Mamedi rubbed her grasping digits together. “Sir, not to be bothering sir, but it’s been a long trip and me sister, e’be perishing hungry, and her brood a’be so hungry they barely a’clinging to her back. Just the tiniest of nips out of your tail; won’t feel but a pinch, an’ a little blood loss heals a big wound, good for the circulation an’ all….”
“Just this once,” he said, shifting so he could extend his tail.
Mamedi crept down first, found a scale nit, and crunched it down. “Oh, they a’be the very buggers. There’s another. Sir, what y’been doing that y’picked up so many so quick?”
He craned his neck a little so he could look behind and saw Mamedi’s sister and her children lapping at a slight, pleasantly tingling wound. Another bat crept out of the shadows and joined in the flowing feast.
