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“Then we will avenge ourselves upon the Queen.”
“And kill one of her doubles as you die.”
“I’ve thought much about that,” AuRon said. “I cannot help but think there is some deep mystery to the Queen. The being I’ve spoken to is no double, no matter how well trained. I spoke to the Queen herself. I’m sure of it. So she is either speaking through her doubles, as she did with me in the Lavadome, or . . .”
“Or what?” one of Naf’s captains asked.
“Or there is a deeper enigma still to the Red Queen.”
Paskinix sent a messenger-bat back, with a report that there’d been “a fight and a capture” in one of the upper chambers while the dragons dined and waited for the drakes and demen to clear a blockage.
The Copper went to see the results himself.
Three dead demen lay together, facedown with their arms linked according to the custom of the hominids.
The chamber the bat led him to must have been near the surface. Old bones, flat bits of dried hide, thin as leaf and held together by a coat of hair and mud, droppings, and mushrooms and lichens feeding on the rest dirtied the floor of what looked like a dwarven sleep-hall, judging from the many notches in the wall. He’d seen old dwarven cells. When away from their homes they liked to sleep in little chambers reminiscent of the partitions in honeycombs.
The Copper found himself face-to-face with his old friend NiVom.
The demen had multiple lines around his neck, his limbs, climbing hooks through his wings and buried painfully into his spine and tail.
“Tell me one thing. How does she know of our movements?”
“She didn’t know dragons were coming, just demen, otherwise I suspect you’d have met more than just myself and my mate.”
“Your—mate?”
“Imfamnia. Your mate-sister.”
“You would mate with such a traitor to her kind?” the Copper asked.
“Says a dragon who had a tooth in the destruction of his family.”
The Copper did not want to have that conversation again. “Where’s your mate now?”
“She ran as soon as the demen attacked. Valor in combat is not one of her charms.”
“May we bleed him, my lord?” one of the demen asked, sharpening his knife against the cavern floor.
The Copper sniffed at his old Drakwatch leader’s wounds. “And you were always so bright, NiVom.”
He heard rumblings of the Jade Queen from the Aerial Host. Imfamnia would pass into history through some very creatively-worded songs centered around her alleged deeds with various temporary mates.
“I’d forgotten how quietly demen could move rock,” NiVom said. “If you’re going to kill me, do it. I have no heart for talking.”>The Copper doubted it. It would have been in the battle stories he’d learned in the Drakwatch.
They’d wrecked flatbed dwarf carts and filled nets with the surprisingly buoyant mushrooms that were normally ground into cattle-feed. There were driftwood logs dried, bound together, and formed into rafts.
They’d made traces out of leather, chain, and rope. The dragons of the Aerial Host would drag the rafts and boats behind in the manner of horses pulling carts. But this time the horses would ride. Cattle and goats rode in the improvised armada, ready provision for eating along the journey. The riders of the Aerial Host sat along with the livestock in the boats, their armor and weapons tied down rather than worn in case the boat upset in rough water. From everything he heard of the Nor’flow, the ride would be treacherous.
Even unhappier than the most miserable, lowing cow was the griffaran guard. All but a bare minimum of griffaran stood perched on logs and gripping canoes in talons so tight-set that the sawdust dribbled from beneath their talons.
Aiy-Yip and his feathered warriors, usually as placid as statues until they exploded into fury, were white-eyed and losing feathers as they bobbed toward the river tunnel.
“Hate-hate-hate water!” Aiy-Yip said as his boat bounced in the current. “Bathing one thing, but this is yaaak! like drowning!”
Nilrasha watched them depart.
Her mate would have his own way. A Tyr shouldn’t leave the Lavadome to go into battle—it just wasn’t done. A tour of the Upholds, yes, but to lead dragons into battle . . .
