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Jizara’s death was a crime. A betrayal piled on a betrayal.
He could almost hear her singing beside the river.
He hurried away, back to the holes in the cavern ceiling where the bats liked to roost.
He listened for a particular pair of squeaky voices.
“Oh, shove off! Y’nose be dripping all over.”
“Faaaa!”
“Thernadad, you up there?”
The bats quieted. Thernadad climbed out of his hole and worked the back of his head with his gripping claw. “Sir be wanting something?”
“I need to speak to your brother.”
Thernadad clawed his way across the cavern roof, poking his head into holes, climbing over sleeping bats, throwing an occasional elbow and getting swatted in return.
“What be going on. Party?”
“Oooh! Watch it, cousin.”
“Enjor! Rouse yourself, y’fat tick. Sir wants to speak to you.”
The brothers’ mother popped out of her hole, moving with a younger bat’s energy despite her aging frame. “Is a feed on?”
“What do you want, m’lord?” Enjor said.
“How do I get back to my people? The dragons of this Lavadome?”
“Eh? Y’be knowing that best, m’lord.”
It took him several tries to get across that he couldn’t get back to his own kind without help—help from the bats. Their little mammalian brains took a while to get around the idea that they could travel together. While bats understood sharing living space, the idea of traveling together didn’t come easily.>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.
