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The Copper fought on pure instinct, determined to either die or be freed of the lines. He’d never be bound and tortured again, and if that meant his hearts’ blood pouring into this underground lake and his last breath rising up through those far-off cracks, he’d overcome even the fear of death.
He fought to bite through the line on his saa, but the line on his neck pulling in the other direction restrained his reach. Every time he tried to reach up to dig his claws into the line on his neck, they pulled again to straighten out his body so he couldn’t reach.
All he could do was hiss, gurgle, and fling his tail this way and that.
The demen, pulling him first one way and then another, dragged him out of the water and toward the cavern, shouting to each other in their rattling language. The third got his basket of eggs and ran into the rough-cut, low-hanging tunnels.
He returned with a short tube. He made a gasping sound, and his obscenely short throat expanded. He put the tube to his mouth.
A bat struck him between the eyes. The dart that flashed by the Copper’s ear missed. The other two young bats who’d been nursing on his blood were flitting back and forth between the demen with their lines.
If the Copper hadn’t been otherwise occupied by being choked and dragged, he would have gaped in astonishment. Bats, shy and fearful as any whisker-quivering rodent, attacking creatures a thousand times their own size! What had gotten into them?
The deman with the tube hissed and extracted a strange sort of a weapon, a long, wide-ended blade. He didn’t raise it like a dwarf, but reversed it so the blade was shielded under its elbow. It whistled through pointed teeth and came forward.
The Copper tried to right himself, but his bad sii slipped on slimy stone. He went down on his side. The deman at his saa ran forward and looped the line around his free limb and tied them at the joints, avoiding the Copper’s claws.
The blade flashed down and then up, and the Copper saw his own blood fly into the air, splattering the deman.
Anger, hurt, fear—his breastbone convulsed, and a wide gout of flame shot out of his chest.
The deman had only a moment to regret his inexperience in dragon fighting before the liquid fire consumed his face, chest, and shoulders. He lit up like a dwarf’s oiled torch. The deman with the line at his neck caught a little of the spray on his arm.
Pain struck—hard. Harder than the blade, or the tail-breaking iron bars of the dwarves.
The strain at his legs vanished as the deman groped for the fallen blade of his companion. The Copper wiggled toward the water. And here was the dropped egg!>“Who lays eggs like that underground?” he asked Enjor.
“No idea, m’lord. No birds be a’living down here. At least, no birds y’be wanting to meet.”
The river drained off into a mire filled with giant mushrooms. The less said about this portion of the trip, the better—the Copper remembered only having muck and filth between every scale, every tooth, even working its way into his eyes.
The only ones happy about it were the bats, for insects flew so thickly here they made mistlike clouds. The bats ate their fill and then some—except for the young of Mamedi’s relative: They had hair now and an unslakable thirst for dragonblood.
Luckily they were so small they took only a few drops each.
He came out of the mire a bedraggled dragon, sick of filtering mouthfuls of filthy water through his teeth to eat the worms that wiggled through the mire bottom. He assuaged his appetite by tearing off mouthfuls of fungus.
At the other side of the mire they passed through another series of tunnels, these sided with a hard, shiny surface that offered cave moss no purchase. He had to be led through the blackest patches by the bats, who probably drained him each time he slept.
“Almost there now,” Enjor said, so often that Thernadad took up the refrain. “Almost there now.”
“What’s almost?”
“One more river to cross, the river of slaves. It flows in a circle around the Lavadome. Then the passage up.”
After one of his “scouts,” Enjor returned in excitement. “W’be there. You’ll get a good view if the sun is right.”
They reached the river, its current so slow that it was hard to distinguish from a lake. This river cavern made the dwarf-boat tunnels seem little more than chutes.
It had a high ceiling, sheer walls climbing to a dark roof cracked in places where true sunshine fell through. Shafts of light, one or two angled just right so the sunlight fell in neatly edged beams of gold, illuminated the gray-green river surface, tendrils of mist hovering above it in zephyrs of air. Titanic granite boulders rose from the waterline like teeth guarding the far edge.
“One more swim, m’lord,” Enjor said.
He saw a winged shape cross through one of the shafts of light.
“What are those?”
“Nothing y’be wanting to meet,” Enjor said. “That’s the griffaran—the dragon-guard.”
