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“Leave it,” the elf finally said, making a mark with a piece of chalk at the intersection.
The scouts found a hidden door in what looked like a piece of tunnel collapse. A pile of heavy and sharp-edged stones balanced precariously at the top made the cave-in look lethal to investigate.
“Something smells. I don’t mean the bats,” the Copper said.
Shadowcatch sniffed in the direction of the probing hominids, as though he could detect a betrayal by smell. “Right. Well then, if fighting starts, sir, keep an eye on them. Let me and Red Lightning and the Blind Ripper worry about the dwarfs. We’re used to handling the front. It’s my flanks I want watching.”
The Copper didn’t have a chance to respond. With a crash that must have been heard in the Lavadome, one of the boulders fell into the hole, revealing the entrance to a larger cave.
The scouts consulted with each other, and a human who was missing his right hand—the Copper remembered he was named Fyrebin; he’d stood out during the introductions because of the lost hand—defied the others and refused to enter first.
“I thought I heard a voice,” the old barbarian said.
Shadowcatch pushed up to the entrance to the cave and the Copper followed. He sensed a vast open space on the other side of the phony fall. “Me and the Blind Ripper will go forward. Tunnelbreakers. It’s tough duty, but someone has to do it.”
“I’ll come along,” the Copper said to Shadowcatch. “I’ll take your place. You manage things with the rest. You know them. They’ve never fought with me.”
Shadowcatch ground his teeth in thought. “I never questioned you before, but now I must, my Tyr. What do you have in mind?”
“I know the sounds and smells of dwarfs. I’m also a good deal smaller than you. If the Blind Ripper starts thrashing about, I can get out of his way. If things go disastrously for us, you can jam your body in this tunnel and delay until the rest find some defensive ground—I’d suggest the other side of the water-wash.”
“What do you think?” Shadowcatch asked, tapping the Blind Ripper.
The blinded dragon just shrugged. His dry sockets were disturbing. He tended to draw his lips back from his teeth and then cover them again in a nervous habit, or perhaps it was due to the injury that had robbed him of his eyes.
A grinding noise behind. This time it wasn’t Shadowcatch’s teeth.
It was a stone, as big as a roof and thick as winter ice on a shallow pond. It began to roll down a smoothed track. His gaze anticipated its track—it would strike the end of its track just beyond the opening to the tunnel, fitting into its position as neatly as a dragon’s griff behind the jawline.
It pressed down as if the mountain above added to its bulk. He could only slow it, not stop it.
He found the strength for a moment.
“Dwarfs all around,” the Blind Ripper said, backing up.
“Out, back to the tunnel,” he grunted, slapping at the gap with his tail so the Blind Ripper could find it.
“Out! Out! Out! ” he called to the Blind Ripper.
He saw the blind dragon’s tail vanish. Shadowcatch stuck his head in, saw the rolling stone with the Copper pressing the length of his body against it, scrabbling with his arms.
“Run for your lives. I’m done for,” the Copper called.
He’d taken one too many chances. Sooner or later, the luck ran out, or fate settled on you. Exhausted, he let the stone slip at last into the socket.
He turned around, his back to the gigantic wheel of a door.
A mass of dwarfs, fifty or more, stood with axes held before them. The closest was the height and width of a baby troll.
“What’ll we do, sir? Eat him raw or smoke him over his own flame?” one of them asked the frontmost dwarf.
Chapter 6
It was easy enough for AuRon to sneak into the great cave of Old Uldam. He’d lived there throughout much of his adolescence and early adulthood as sort of a tribal mascot for the blighters, who thrived thickly on the more hospitable south slopes of the mountains.
He knew each ruin in the old cave, once the principal city of the blighters during their glory days of dominance. Those ancient blighter kings had carved a city out of living rock, taking advantage of an arresting geographic feature, a sort of overhang in the mountain that created a great cave-mouth beneath. Through years of patient excavation, they’d enlarged the cave, keeping it supported by wide columns like teeth in a vast mouth, fangs bared to their enemies on the coasts of the Sunstruck Sea.
Wistala had lived here as well. Then his daughter became the Protector, saving it from a war of conquest from the Dragon Empire. His family’s fate seemed bound to the place.
