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For all their speed, dragons don’t take to marching, as the Copper had learned in his first year in the Drakwatch. Flying, yes. Short sprints—the surprisingly explosive dragon-dash—certainly. But plodding on hour after hour is oxen work, not dragon. They became irritable and quarrelsome.
The Copper, to divert their minds, had each one describe his favorite food. Most described the tender fats on certain quarters of beef. But not Thunderwing. Thunderwing had a strange scale color pattern, a watery blue covered in tiny white flecks like windblown snow. He claimed his favorite food was corn.
“For its indestructibility?” Shadowcatch said. “It passes out the other end much as it entered.” The others expressed similar flavors of disbelief: perhaps ground and used for breading, it makes fine stuffing, as it absorbs juices like good cotton paper.
“Ha!” Thunderwing said. “It’s my favorite because so much other game grows fat on it. Deer, pheasants, elk, oh, and the pigs. There is nothing like a corn-fed pig.” He smacked his lips.
“Well done, Thunderwing,” the Copper said. “Thunderwing, philosopher-king.”
The others found so much humor in that, it occupied them until the next meal-break on the march. They looked for excuses to point something out to their “philosopher-king.”
They idled for a day while their scouts selected an approach to the dwarf-exit.
“We have a lot riding on this,” Shadowcatch said. “These dwarfs have been an irritant to the barbarians in the north with their thefts of livestock. They must have made powerful enemies in Hypatia, or even among the Empire’s dragons, for they’re paying for this job.”
“How do you know that?” the Copper asked. Gettel had continued to be cagey about revealing their employers in this job until the last, though according to the other dragons, that had never been the case before.
“Strict orders! No eating of any kind of valuables. It’s stolen property. It all goes to the scouts, to be returned to the commissioners.”
To the Copper, it smacked of assassination. All the orders about returning stolen property might be a vomited-up smokescreen.
The dwarf-exit was well concealed inside a rotted-out cottonwood tree. Here the campaign met its first difficulty, as the hole was sized for a hominid, not a dragon. The guide-dwarf, the loser in a feud with these others, apparently, went down the hole and returned to say that it widened out just a short drop down, and appeared to widen farther into a cave that smelled of bats.
So the dragons set to work moving earth and pulling boulders up by using the bole of the dead and now uprooted cottonwood.
“With all this racket we’re making, they’ll have a good head start on us if they choose to flee,” the Copper said.
“They’re deep, if I know dwarfs,” Red Lightning said. “I just hope our trackers don’t fail us.”
“We want the dwarfs as much as you do,” Ghastmath, the human scout-leader replied, testing the edge of his oiled blade. He was gray-haired and coughed a great deal in the morning when he woke, but still hearty-looking. He had the wild and weathered look of a barbarian.
“Do you trust these two-legs, my Tyr?” Shadowcatch asked under his breath.
“I don’t trust any humans,” the Copper said.
“How about elves?” Halfmoon, the female elf, asked. She had the caramel skin of the south, such as he’d seen in Bant. Her hair had acorns in it, though whether they were wound into it or growing out of it he couldn’t say. A raven sat on her shoulder with eyes shut, as though napping.
“I’ve known only one, as a hatchling. She was kindly, but not so kindly that she saved me from a crippling,” the Copper said.
The dwarf approached. “I think we can fit a dragon in now,” he said, as he shook dirt and bits of root from his beard.
The cave smelled a bit like skunk, but that might be a dwarf-trick to keep bears out. In any case, they were soon past the skunk smell and into a cave whose floor was slick with guano. They waded through a bowed water-catch, then climbed down a short chute and reached the tunnel proper. This was dug, not natural formation. There were fewer crevices for bats to occupy, so the droppings thinned out.
The Copper was excited to be in action again. The tension that comes from a mix of fear and anticipation of a fight made him feel alive in a way that he hadn’t experienced since well before his exile.
“Let’s get past the bats,” Red Lightning said. “Once we’re out of the stink, we can send our scouts ahead again.”
Their scouts examined some obscure marks at a corner. The elf picked up a piece of nail, which she identified as belonging to a boot.
“We’re in a bit of the old Dwarf-Kingdoms, unless I’m mistaken,” the dwarf said.
The Copper smelled dwarf more than guano now. They were close.
“Why do we still need the scouts?” he asked.
“I don’t mind their help, sir. They’re the ones who are paying, seems like they’re eager to come to grips with the dwarfs. Since spoils are to be shared, they’re probably along to make sure no coin gets eaten before it can be counted.”
The grizzled ex-barbarian and the elf consulted the dwarf at the next turn of the tunnel. A smaller branch tunnel led down. It had a half-finished look and was small enough that even a dwarf would have to stoop.
