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He dove and swam for the basket-carrying deman. It became more of a wet scuttle as he neared the shore.
“Jt tht aleet,” a deman shouted as the Copper pushed past a leg.
He spun, using his tail to take the deman’s legs out from under him. The hominid fell into the shallow water with a splash.
The Copper didn’t want to fight the demen so much as cause confusion and make off with an egg. He nosed into the basket and extracted an egg and—
Urk!
His head was jerked out of the water. The jerk originated from his neck, and his neck was attached to a line, and the line was in the hands in one of the demen rowers.
It took two of them to drag him, fighting madly and still clutching an egg to his breast in his good sii, and haul him out of the water.
Another deman got a line about his saa.
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!
He tucked it under his arm and saw a pair of stout, thick-skinned, horn-jointed legs next to him. He looked up to see the remaining deman ready to chop his head off.
A pair of black-taloned claws opened above the deman, took him up by the shoulders, and the Copper felt a wave of wind flow across him at the beat of feathered wings.
The Copper turned his head so he could watch the flier with his good eye. It was a strange sort of creature, a half dragon with twin tails, hardly any neck at all capped by a tall, arching head with a hooked snout, and feathered wings. It rose and turned, screeching, and another almost identical flier passed, flying in the opposite direction. The other reached out a claw and grabbed the kicking legs of the deman, and with only the briefest of jerks the deman parted messily.
Another flier came down and plucked him out of the water, its talons closing around his chest. Yet another approached, and the Copper wondered what it would feel like to be torn in twain and for how long he could watch his back half being carried off, but the second bird-creature flew under, eyeing him before alighting at the riverbank and poking around in the deman’s boat.
The feathered avian carried him up, across some of the tall towers of rock, and to a splinter of stone that made a convenient ledge. It dropped him and turned its leathery-skinned head almost completely around to watch him, a fierce cast in its eyes thanks to streaks of yellow and blue eyelid decorating the round black orbs.
It didn’t have a tooth-filled mouth, but a beak with a pink-white tongue inside. He saw it as it opened his mouth to cluck at him. What he took to be twin tails were in fact only feathers, like the heavy-ended blades he’d seen in the demen’s hands, only longer.
“Tlock—the fire was you?” it asked in good Drakine. The Copper noticed that it had a silver ring set into the fore-edge of a wing bone near the shoulder.
The Copper could only pant, the wound in his chest burning.
