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“Suppose you weren’t armed.”
“A hundred loinclothed men against the Citadel Guard? It couldn’t be done.”
“Suppose I could provide you with arms and armor.”
“Our own? My men’s own bows and blades?”
“Yes.”
“We would have a chance. Just a chance. Could I count on your help at the citadel gate?”
“Of course.”
“It could be for nothing. Hieba is probably dead.”
“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.
