“Stop it,” the Copper said. “She’s dead.”
The other bats crept across the ceiling, yeeking at one another in the shadows.
“That’s three lost. How many more?” Mamedi’s sister said. “This dragon’s not such a lucky strike after all.”
“No one asked you all to come,” Thernadad said. He made to fly up, but the Copper put a sii claw on his wing.
“Let’s keep moving.”
“Once a bat drops…” Enjor said, flapping back up to the ceiling. “M’lordship’s right.”
“And just be leaving her here?” Thernadad asked. “Bats should be living above the bones of their elders.”
“I’ll carry her, if you like,” the Copper said. He picked up the cooling little body and swallowed it whole.
“Awwwww, sir,” Thernadad said. “That was unkind.”
“She had enough meals from me. One in return seems just. You’d rather the rats and slugs got her?”
“Y’see another gone,” Mamedi’s sister whispered. “Who’s next?”
“The Lavadome’s worth a few odds ’n sods droppin’. Like outside, underground.”
“Long way yet,” Enjor said, whipping back. “Little to eat until w’be reaching the river.”
Enjor hurried the party past another shaft plunging down—the source of the bad air—and they entered some naturally formed caves. The moss here was the natural variety, faint blue and green threads that vanished whenever the eye moved. White things with waving antennae slipped into cracks as they approached, and insects with bodies like glass froze against the striped cave walls.
The older bats grew tired and clung to the Copper as he walked, and only Enjor, tireless for all his bulk, and some of the first-year bats had energy to flit around.
A bat squeaked.
“What’s that?” the Copper asked.
“Boktemi found something,” Mamedi said.
A brighter patch lay ahead. The Copper smelled rot and metal on the air.
The source of the odor was two figures sitting back-to-back, dead for a day or two at most.
“Ahhh, that be more like it. There’s some juice there still, down in the lower quarters,” Mamedi said. She crawled off the Copper and began to scratch around at an outthrust leg. Tendrils of blue cave moss had found the bodies as well, and climbed toward wounds on the bodies.
The Copper examined the faces. These were no dwarves or men; they were thicker-skinned than either, pebbled like a dragon’s stomach and with thick ridges of horn making fearsome flanges at the skull and jawline. A row of spines, thin as straw, grew from their backbones.
They wore helms, though not in the dwarvish fashion. These helms were open, a series of reinforcing rods that capped the natural ridges on their skulls, and had a fearsome spike on the top. One’s spike still bore a bit of dried gristle.
“Are these—”
“Demen,” Enjor said. “Ech. The blood’s gone bad.”
“M’be calling the eyeballs,” Thernadad said.
“A’taking more than your fair share!” Mamedi protested.
“Says who?”
“Faaaaaa!”
She jumped up on one of the creature’s shoulders, bristling for a fight.
“Easy, now,” the Copper said. “I’m trying to read this.”
“Who be a’caring how they got here?” Enjor said, shoving a younger bat away from some slow-seeping fluid.
“Blast these thick skins,” another bat commented from the darkness. “Wish these were dwarves.”
The Copper tried to ignore the bats. The two demen bore grievous injuries, yet no dead lay around them. So they must have fought elsewhere before sitting down to succumb to their wounds. But why back-to-back? And why hadn’t their fellows carried them to safety?
He suspected that the answer to both questions was a lost battle. They were either on guard against the victorious dwarves—or whomever—or something deadlier lurked in the darkness.
Threats in these caverns or no, he needed his strength. He chewed down a mouthful or two of the rotting flesh and the metal tip of a scabbard, then crept off to sleep scales-out in a protective nook.
He woke and found two new brown-stained wounds on his tail.
The greedy bats had taken advantage of his sleep.
“Thernadad!” he roared.
The bat flapped over, and the Copper waved his tail in front of his upturned nose.
Thernadad combed his ears. “Sir, m’be telling them to take only a lap or two each. There be so much energy in dragonblood, and w’be all bone-weary from the journey. Only a few drops out of your great body, nothing to you, but a lifesaver—”
“I was tired enough as it is. Now I’m drained. Who am I going to ride on when I get tired?”
“They be a rotten bunch of sots, yes; m’won’t let it happen again.”
“You’ve got only three songs, Thernadad, but you sing them well.”
He stalked back toward the bodies of the demen. “Tell them to keep clear. I’m having my breakfast and I’m tempted to juice a bat to wash it down.”
“Told you his lordship—” Enjor said.
“Faaaaa!” Mamedi screamed, backhanding her mate’s brother with a wing tip. “Y’be the one saying he wouldn’t miss—”
He ignored the fighting and nosed around in the corpses. Their vital organs were a putrefying mass—he settled for a bit of thick shoulder. The blood had drained down from the upper half of the bodies, and the shank had tenderized a little as it aged.
A clattering—a pile of dry bones falling was how it struck the Copper’s ear—made him look up, still attached by an un-severed hunk of tendon to the corpse of the deman.
He couldn’t say what appeared out of the dim light, for the cave moss lit only the lower underside of its body, only that it was frightfully spindly, standing on many legs, with two long, pincer-tipped claws on its front limbs, a cluster of eyes, and a long rise up from the tail, curling around.
He’d seen a scorpion or two in the home cave. They liked the dark and the cool, and if you flipped them and gave them a good smash at the leg joints with your tail they had tastier meat than a slug, though a good deal less. But those were compact little creatures.
The bat brawl stopped.
Odd how the bats looked up to him. It was only a lucky splatter that allowed him to escape King Gan. And this armored monstrosity…it would stick him with that barb and lift his slight body up in those great claws and drag him off to some dark hole.
He backed up, wanting the bodies of the demen between him and the scorpion. The tendon running from his mouth to the corpse tightened, and the body lurched.
A blur, and then a thwak sound—the spindly scorpion struck the deman’s corpse. The force of the blow knocked it over and its wiry helmet fell off. The Copper hugged the cave floor and the helmet rolled, its arc limited by the spikes, up against his nose.
The scorpion rushed forward and took up the corpse in its claws, and the deman’s companion, now with nothing to lean against, slowly sagged a claw’s breadth at a time. The scorpion rounded on the motion, wary, and struck again with its tail. It pulled its prize in a little closer and guarded it with the other pincer, as though the second body meant to challenge it for the meal.
The Copper ever so slowly tongued the snared tendon out from his teeth and took the deman’s helmet in his jaws, trying to think his way through a fog of terror that kept his sii and saa from obeying. Maybe he could ward off a blow, the way dwarves did with a shield….
The vast creature, for all its size, was a slave to its senses. No doubt it would take the corpse it had acquired back to whatever hole would accommodate those long, thin, segmented limbs, and eat in peace. But how long would it be until it grew hungry again? Would the short, regular steps of a dragon hatchling draw it after them?
Summoning his courage, he pressed his tail against the leaning corpse and gave it a shove so it spilled over toward the scorpion.
The insect let out a shocked, whistling breath and struck with its tail again.
The Copper dragon-dashed forward through two of the impossibly thin legs, got under the thing, and struck upward with the spiked helmet, right at the joining of its eight limbs.
He pulled back down just in time to feel himself stepped on as the beast sprang sideways, crashing heedlessly into the cavern wall. It tipped, fought to right itself, claw arms and tail waving this way and that.
The Copper didn’t wait to see whether it would die or not.
“Enjor—which way?”
“Oook.”
He threw the helmet at the bats. “Lead the way, curse you!”
The bat flapped off and the others followed. The Copper kept up, and as the fright seeped out of their bodies they collected themselves in a cramped corner, where he could press up against the ceiling with the bats, catching his breath.
He listened for that bone-rattle sound of the thing’s feet, but heard only his own hearts pounding.
“You killed a cave scorpion,” some young nephew of Mamedi’s—Uthaned, he thought the creature’s name was—said.