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She smacked her thin lips. “Oh, Thernie, just woke up hale this morning, m’did. Full of guano and ginger. M’wanting a bit of air under me wing.” She brushed the fur forward on her face and dug in an ear and gobbled down whatever she found within. “This young dragon—yeeek!”
A translucent tongue shot up from where it rested next to the channel. It was segmented, with countless legs a blur, its body like living, mottled eyejelly. To the bat, thicker around than she and many times her length, it was a mortal danger, pincers at the front opening for her….
To the Copper it was breakfast.
He scrambled after it and extended his neck, bit down on the back half, and yanked it skyward. Legs tickling at his throat, he gulped it down.
He looked down to see Thernadad flapping his wings in the face of his mother, who blinked awake. She climbed onto his back and he scuttled back up, in that elbows-out fashion of bats, to the cavern roof.
“Twice grateful, sir,” Thernadad said, panting a little.
“Any blood flowing this fine night?” Mamedi said, creeping forward.
“Out of it!” Thernadad bawled. She was out of reach, so he battled the air in her direction with his wings.
“Just thinking of refreshing meself. Like a new-mated bat you were last sunrise. M’be hardly able to keep a grip.”
“Oh, son, m’be pershishing of that scare,” Thernadad’s mother croaked. “Just a wee drop; perhaps y’be persuading our kindly young prince now?”
The Copper saw other eyes shining in the darkness. How many bats had gathered in this cave?
“Sir—” Thernadad said.
“Leave me alone, would you?” the Copper said. He stalked into the cave, leaving the cluster of bats.
“Greedy sots!” Thernadad yelled, and soon the Copper heard the wing-flapping, tooth-snapping sound of a full-out bat brawl.
The Copper found a dark corner and rested. The seemingly still-twitching centipede wasn’t agreeing with him.
He wondered about this Lavadome and the dragons there. It must be a wonderful place, with plenty to eat, for dragons to be gathered there. He didn’t know much about dragon society, but he knew that Father had to fly far and wide so he wouldn’t over-hunt an area—or so that snatched livestock were only a nuisance, and not a regular threat. Would they look kindly on the arrival of a distant relative, hurt by weary dragonlengths of travel?
And they wouldn’t know his secrets.
He let off a burp, and the centipede finally ceased its attempts to escape his stomach.
The Lavadome sounded a long way off, and he couldn’t fly like a bat.
But he could follow one….
The Copper lunged forward without really knowing why. A heavy force struck the ground behind and all he could think was, Curse that Gray Rat!—having instinctively avoided another of his brother’s pounces. But he felt the weight of the thing in the air behind, in the tremor that ran through the solid rock when it hit.
He turned.
A huge, pale gray mass writhed over and around itself behind. A head that could probably suck him down as easily as he’d swallowed the centipede lifted itself from the mass, pointing its nose this way and that until it fixed on him.
“You picked the wrong cave, hatchling,” it whispered at him.
The Copper didn’t know of the old rivalry between snakes and dragons, the contempt in which the serpents held the winged and legged. Young dragons hunted the same game the great snakes did, so perhaps the old enmity was akin to that of lions and cheetahs in other parts of the world, competitors who struck each other’s young. He certainly never heard the tale of the deaths of AuZath and Nubiel, dragons of Ydar. They were murdered by a serpent who injected his poison into apples, which were eaten by grazing horses, which died and were naturally devoured in turn by the dragons.
The Copper just knew he was afraid.
“You must be King Gan,” he managed to say, though the words sounded a little croaky. Some instinct flared within; he hated the legless, writhing form. But fear froze him. They can hate as hard as they like, as long as they fear….
He’d never seen such black eyes. The way they fixed on him, so exactly aligned, it was as if the entire earth were a little off-kilter, as measured by the level of those eyes.
“I am. And all within sight, sound, hearing, and heat is mine. You are mine.”
The snake flowed toward him. The Copper couldn’t break off; all he could do was watch the eyes approach, twin balls rushing toward him, perfectly level….
