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The demen were unhappy to have her alive, grudging her every mouthful of the wretched, rotten food they ate, but unwilling to kill her.
They bothered her in every way possible, kicking and prodding her as they passed, throwing their filthy, ropy waste at marks on her side and flank as though engaging in target practice, and not letting her sleep with their continual noise on the part of her guards, but they did not cause her any real agonies.
They smeared a piece of hollow wood, like bamboo only knob-bier, with her blood, yanked out a few scales, then clipped off the tip of her sii inclaw. She guessed them to be trophies or mementos of some kind. A grim sort of humor came over her at the thought. The last trace of her existence might decorate some deman’s hole.
They taunted and teased her over her injuries and situation, but hinted that she would soon be released to return to her kind.
The demen were clever enough in their brutal way. They inspected her bonds each time the guard changed, striking her on the joints with stout metal rods that they carried constantly. With little to do but observe, Wistala decided they used the rods to send signals. She saw them rap-tap-tapping the sides or floor of the tunnel, or listening to faint banging sounds and grumbling among themselves.
She suspected half of their ill temper was from short commons. There were constant squabbles over food as it was shared out, and a thicker slice of mushroom could be cause for much head-butting and spine-yanking.
One night—morning—who could say when it was?—shortly after her capture, a good deal of tapping woke her. Her agitated guards jumped up and shouted. Two of them picked up a stout spear with evil-looking, twisting fluting to the edges and put the tip against her side.
“No! Please,” she managed out the side of her mouth—awful last words for a dragon. Oh Father—
But they didn’t ram it home—instead they listened while her mind raced. She was chained such that she couldn’t strike the point away with tail or neck or limb, and even her wings were secured by a pair of chains running beneath her belly to the injured wing.
Her injured wing—it would hurt. . . .
A faint roaring—undoubtedly a male dragon—echoed in her prison.
Awful moments passed, trying to judge the roars—drawing closer or no? Then more tapping and the demen with the spear relaxed.
More tapping still and they hooked claws and snorted and honked into each other’s faces. She wouldn’t care to have another dragon clearing its nostrils right into her face, it was almost as bad as men picking and digging at their dirty corners.
She was gaining enough of their language to guess they were enormously pleased with something. Paskinix made an entrance with a few warriors, one much singed about face and fingers. Paskinix’s spines alternately drooped and waved like sea fronds as he spoke.
“Ye own comrade came down the shaft. Turned him back easy enough and would have taken his head, but he’s a cursedly good nose for traps.”
He? She wondered if it was DharSii.
“The orange one with black stripes?”
“I didn’t see much of yon roaring cockspur. He’s been pricked good, cowering in the muck bottom anow. Too many shafts in him to think about climbing out. We’ll let him bleed out and then hit him again.”
More warriors arrived, displaying gory weapons under her nose. She shut her nostrils to the smell of dragonblood.
“Now he’ll be of a mind to bend, that he will,” she thought she heard Paskinix tell his warriors as they hurled themselves about in celebration. They jumped around, overleaping each other like startled frogs.
Never dance out your victory over a living dragon, she thought. But hope was hard to come by.
Why would he come after her? To finish her off, or to rescue her? To tempt her to join his flying circus and kill not for food or for honor but at the orders of some greedy hominid queen?
She hated him anew at the thought. Then there was another thought, and a third, equally hateful.
Because they were all about him.
She turned her back to the revels and pretended to go to sleep, moving her good wing within its limits as though to block the light.
Working at her bonds as she never had before, Wistala pulled and twisted, not minding the ripped-out scales or the blood smearing the metal. Her blood might lubricate the shackles and let her get a saa free. If she could just—
Kzzzzt!
That lightning-smell again and her mind emptied. Her thoughts were concise and clear but oddly unmoored.
It seemed easier to just drift off to sleep . . .
Paskinix stood by her nose when she woke, waggling one of those rubbery digits at her. A moment later? An hour? A day? His spines made stabbing gestures toward her, threatening like scorpion tails. That odd machine huffed behind him.
