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Thernadad combed his ears. “Sir, m’be telling them to take only a lap or two each. There be so much energy in dragonblood, and w’be all bone-weary from the journey. Only a few drops out of your great body, nothing to you, but a lifesaver—”
“I was tired enough as it is. Now I’m drained. Who am I going to ride on when I get tired?”
“They be a rotten bunch of sots, yes; m’won’t let it happen again.”
“You’ve got only three songs, Thernadad, but you sing them well.”
He stalked back toward the bodies of the demen. “Tell them to keep clear. I’m having my breakfast and I’m tempted to juice a bat to wash it down.”
“Told you his lordship—” Enjor said.
“Faaaaa!” Mamedi screamed, backhanding her mate’s brother with a wing tip. “Y’be the one saying he wouldn’t miss—”
He ignored the fighting and nosed around in the corpses. Their vital organs were a putrefying mass—he settled for a bit of thick shoulder. The blood had drained down from the upper half of the bodies, and the shank had tenderized a little as it aged.
A clattering—a pile of dry bones falling was how it struck the Copper’s ear—made him look up, still attached by an un-severed hunk of tendon to the corpse of the deman.
He couldn’t say what appeared out of the dim light, for the cave moss lit only the lower underside of its body, only that it was frightfully spindly, standing on many legs, with two long, pincer-tipped claws on its front limbs, a cluster of eyes, and a long rise up from the tail, curling around.
He’d seen a scorpion or two in the home cave. They liked the dark and the cool, and if you flipped them and gave them a good smash at the leg joints with your tail they had tastier meat than a slug, though a good deal less. But those were compact little creatures.
The bat brawl stopped.
Odd how the bats looked up to him. It was only a lucky splatter that allowed him to escape King Gan. And this armored monstrosity…it would stick him with that barb and lift his slight body up in those great claws and drag him off to some dark hole.
He backed up, wanting the bodies of the demen between him and the scorpion. The tendon running from his mouth to the corpse tightened, and the body lurched.
A blur, and then a thwak sound—the spindly scorpion struck the deman’s corpse. The force of the blow knocked it over and its wiry helmet fell off. The Copper hugged the cave floor and the helmet rolled, its arc limited by the spikes, up against his nose.
The scorpion rushed forward and took up the corpse in its claws, and the deman’s companion, now with nothing to lean against, slowly sagged a claw’s breadth at a time. The scorpion rounded on the motion, wary, and struck again with its tail. It pulled its prize in a little closer and guarded it with the other pincer, as though the second body meant to challenge it for the meal.
The Copper ever so slowly tongued the snared tendon out from his teeth and took the deman’s helmet in his jaws, trying to think his way through a fog of terror that kept his sii and saa from obeying. Maybe he could ward off a blow, the way dwarves did with a shield….
The vast creature, for all its size, was a slave to its senses. No doubt it would take the corpse it had acquired back to whatever hole would accommodate those long, thin, segmented limbs, and eat in peace. But how long would it be until it grew hungry again? Would the short, regular steps of a dragon hatchling draw it after them?
Summoning his courage, he pressed his tail against the leaning corpse and gave it a shove so it spilled over toward the scorpion.
The insect let out a shocked, whistling breath and struck with its tail again.
The Copper dragon-dashed forward through two of the impossibly thin legs, got under the thing, and struck upward with the spiked helmet, right at the joining of its eight limbs.
He pulled back down just in time to feel himself stepped on as the beast sprang sideways, crashing heedlessly into the cavern wall. It tipped, fought to right itself, claw arms and tail waving this way and that.
The Copper didn’t wait to see whether it would die or not.
“Enjor—which way?”
“Oook.”
He threw the helmet at the bats. “Lead the way, curse you!”
The bat flapped off and the others followed. The Copper kept up, and as the fright seeped out of their bodies they collected themselves in a cramped corner, where he could press up against the ceiling with the bats, catching his breath.
He listened for that bone-rattle sound of the thing’s feet, but heard only his own hearts pounding.
“You killed a cave scorpion,” some young nephew of Mamedi’s—Uthaned, he thought the creature’s name was—said.>“Stop it,” the Copper said. “She’s dead.”
The other bats crept across the ceiling, yeeking at one another in the shadows.
