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“I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked you for hunting me down as a child and getting me away from the barbarians. I know you acted on behalf of my great-grandfather, not me, but it’s weighed on me that you might die without my making some gesture of gratitude. So here’s this: I’ll give you a pass to go into the Star Tunnel. According to the pass, you’re gathering a specimen I need. No one will dare question that. Were I to complain to NiVom that my work was impeded by some functionary—well, let’s just say NiVom has great hopes for my work.”
He fiddled about on a mass of shelving behind his desks.
“May I ask, Rayg, why two desks?”
“A man can work for pleasure, and a man can work for reward. Ideally, you’d like both. But anything for our glorious Sun King and Tyr goes on this desk”—he indicated the tidier of the two—“and my own pleasures and interests are piled on this one.”
“Thank you, Rayg. You’ve done well here. I hope NiVom releases you from service so you have a few quiet years with the second desk.”
“I’ve long since come to terms with that. Who knows? I may outlive NiVom. I may have to. There’s so much to do.”
AuRon, in one of his storytelling moods, had said that the Red Queen talked that way—too much to do to die.
Her pass took her all the way to the Star Tunnel without question. There was a heavy guard of those oversized demen at the old rising narrows to the Star Tunnel, and several different versions of spiny officer looked at her pass from Rayg before letting her through.
While passing along the chain of command, she marked one of the blood barrels resting on a piece of conveniently shelved stone. It had been tapped and had the wide copper bowls that fit a demen’s broad face scattered all about. The demen had been swilling dragon-blood like harvest wine.
When she descended again into the passage leading to the Star Tunnel, the demen clacked their mandibles at her as she passed, but Wistala didn’t see the humor in it.
Perhaps you had to smell the humor. She picked up a dreadful reek on the flowing air, almost as bad as trolls.
The Star Tunnel was different from the wondrous Lavadome in that it was a work of nature expanded by dwarfs and demen rather than a miraculous mystery. Much of it was shaped like a triangle, with a wide bottom and sides narrowing to the top. It was scored horizontally, like sedimentary rock. Daylight could be seen here and there at the apex of the triangle, and at night stars could sometimes be distinguished if the air was clear up short tunnels rising like chimneys from the vaster cavern.
The floor was smoothed in most places, save where they’d left a decorative stand of rock or stalagmite.
Wistala had first met Ayafeeia and the rest of the Firemaids here, when they fought off a last, desperate assault of starving demen. Her brother wanted space between the demen and the important underground rivers—when talking of his reign, he’d told her that from the first he’d had ideas about expanding the Dragon Empire belowground before returning to the surface—and by taking the Star Tunnel he deprived them of some of their best mushroom-soil and worm-beds.
She caught a distant glimpse of scale reflected from light shining down from above, near the huge crack where she’d first seen the Firemaids in action.
Tempted to hurry toward it, instead she slowed, suspicious. This air was foul with rotting bodies, certainly, but there was something else in the air. Had trolls ever come down and hunted the Lower World? The smell certainly seemed evocative of them, but muted by more comfortable dragon odors.
She saw a pile of rock with what looked like some human and demen bones, dirt, and what was hopefully just detritus that had fallen through the shafts from the Upper World shoved against the wall of the Star Tunnel. She heard faint banging sounds coming from a downward-leading passage next to it—there must still be mining going on. But the slagheap made a convenient perch, and she ascended it very carefully to avoid dislodging loose material.
She was never sure which she spotted first, the broken bodies, obviously dumped on top of each other from a height, or the trolls picking over, climbing, shifting, and rending the mass of scaly carrion, most of the color lost to a rusty coating of dried blood.
Gross and misshapen, elephant-sized, scale-covered, and dripping with secretions from orifices of unguessable purpose, they were easily the most loathsome creatures Wistala had ever seen.
Trolls. They had to be. She knew the shape too well, the dangerous power in those heavy-forward, light-rear limbs, and the odd sensory globes extending to examine the picked-over carcasses.
She knew that men fed a little dragon-blood now and then felt energized, in their prime. The Copper, when he was Tyr, kept bats and fed them from his own veins, so it was said, and they grew into great waddling winged things, like dogs. The Tyr’s Demen Legion had evidently taken the blood-drinking process a step further and were morphing into soldiers that could grow their own armor, see in the dark, and break down walls with their bare hands.
These trolls had been feasting on dragon flesh, and blood—with the demen skimming a little, it looked like, for who knew how many years?
These had developed not scale as such, but growths that reminded her of the corals of the Inland Ocean she’d seen shaped into art in Hypatia. They even had wings of various sizes, some just vestigial, others dragging behind from their joints like capes, and a few of the biggest ones looked capable of gliding or perhaps flight.
One troll was dangerous to an unwary dragon. Two might just be handleable, if they were caught in the open by an experienced dragon with a full firebladder.
She counted nineteen rummaging around the pile of bodies. Who knew how many more lurked in the recesses of the Star Tunnel, once the home-cave of the demen, who’d spent lifetimes adding to the living and gardening space?
Further writhing, pulsing horrors supped and extended inside the bodies. They had to be troll progeny. They resembled eggs only in their overall mass; the shape was more like some fantastic hairy starfish, extending bits of itself into the dead flesh and twitching as it absorbed rent flesh.
Her stomach pulsed and she didn’t know if she would erupt in flame or half-digested ration-meats and joints. She heaved, an involuntary act, and her legs extended as though to brace herself.
She sent a skittering of dried bones and dropped troll-scale down from her perch.
Dozens of troll sensory organs shot upright, turned, and centered on her.
She released her flame in a panicked scatter. The trolls leaped over and through it, making excited glubbing sounds out of their rubbery mouths.
