The Copper tried to learn who had commissioned the raid on the dwarfs, but was stymied. He even took it to Gettel, but she offered only that the dwarfs had made old enemies and that while they were hungry and short on everything but determination, they had a great deal of wealth at their disposal. They’d come to the surface to steal, but not to trade.
The Copper smelled a rat, and it wasn’t one of his nightly dinner companions. As Tyr, he’d raked up reasons for enough campaigns to recognize the throat-clearing that came before the battle cry.
They exercised together a good deal. The Copper even suggested a few training games he’d learned in the Lavadome’s Drakwatch.
Had they only been able to fly he would have put them up against even the best of the Aerial Host. There wasn’t any of the jealousy, the pride that caused difficulties between the dragons of the Host. These dragons, perhaps because they no longer flew, were beyond jostling for place. They relied on and supported each other, as when the Blind Ripper had difficulty finding his way in an unfamiliar patch of open ground and Thunderwing kept up a steady rustle of his good wing for the sightless dragon to align on.
He taught them a few tricks for tunnel-fighting, like using the walls or ceiling to bounce one’s fire around an angle, or how to wedge a dead dragon in a tunnel so he’s most difficult to remove from the far side.
The Copper never learned why they left that particular day. Perhaps some shepherd spotted the dwarfs as they used the entrance to their tunnel. Perhaps payment for eliminating the bandits arrived. Perhaps Gettel finally decided she could trust him in a fight.
They stalked out in a file on a fine summer day, each dragon’s nose a tongue-flick behind the tail tip of the dragon ahead. About half the expedition was made up of the flightless dragons, led by Shadowcatch.
Dragons are speedy on the march. The Copper had learned that fact to advantage when moving against an enemy who expected him to come from the air. Their long stride and muscles conditioned to the steady exertion of flying meant they could cover ground as quickly as human cavalry and could climb mountainsides that horses could never attempt.
So they shot toward the spine of the Red Mountains at a steady three horizons a day. The winged dragons flew in food and some barrels of water flavored with wine and sweet spirits, for Gettel knew dragons had a taste for wine and liked to keep their spirits up on the march.
It was the Copper’s first experience with real evergreen woods. He’d known a few pines in the mountains in the south, particularly when he served as Upholder in Anaea. There they clung to rock crevices, lonely and twisted in the wind.
These pines were thick as the bristling hairs on a wild boar’s back and straight as Hypatian pillars, with branches sticking out in circles like wagon-wheel spokes. And the aroma! It made him feel vital and alive again. Clean and innocent as when he’d first hatched from his egg. If he could ever free Nilrasha, he’d take her to pine-woods and let her clean her nostrils with the faint turpentine smell.
As they traveled into the Red Mountains, the Copper thought he might be descending rather than ascending the foothills, for as the mountains loomed larger, their track remained level on one shoulder. A team of hominid guides led them, including a pair of humans, an elf—and female at that—and a dwarf. They were a grizzled and haggard lot, just the type to float between barbarian lands and the Empire.
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.
“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
I
t 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.