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Mamedi set to yeeking with a group of bats. “Cruelty, cruelty, a poor starving bat…”
The Copper felt rather better for the snack. “Did you see who it was?”
“Me cousin twice removed by mating. Too dumb to dodge a cave wall. W’be better off without him. If sir’s in the mood for afters, Mamedi’s sister wouldn’t much be a’missed. By me, anyway.” He threw a companionable wing around the Copper’s shoulder. “Let that be a lesson to the rest of you,” he yeeked.
“They’re getting set to open the doors again,” the Copper said. He heard the dwarves tramping back into the center of the vessel and going to their positions.
He looked back at the huddled bats, eyes wide and glinting at him in terror, and felt better than he had since he spit in King Gan’s eye.
Chapter 9
The Copper longed to sleep, but Enjor insisted that the tunnel they needed to get to was “just a bit ahead.”
They’d had to leave their first boat at another lake and swim to a different river mouth before coming upon a new vessel, smaller and more beat-up than the first, worked by a trio of dwarves.
Twice their own boat idled, hugging the side while larger vessels going the other way passed. One was wide and had heaps of black rock piled within, and crawled along only a slug’s pace faster than the current.
The other almost flew down the tunnel, a long, narrow craft with dwarves sitting in the front and rear at some kind of apparatus that reminded the Copper of the foul machines they’d used to attack Mother in the cave. Instead of a bell, this one sounded a horn at intervals. Its lights, throwing tight beams from curved copper lanterns, almost blinded him as they searched the water’s surface.
At last they came to another landing, where the dwarves reached up and snagged hanging chains and yelled back and forth as a pair of dwarves laden with bags hanging from wooden poles joined the boat.
“M’lord,” Enjor whispered in his ear. “This passage be getting us to the other river.”
The Copper nodded, and Enjor roused Thernadad. The Copper waited until the vessel got under way again and slipped off the nose with hardly a splash. He floated for a moment until the dinging bell receded, then dragged himself up into the chamber.
They passed into another cavern. The floor was littered with broken bits of masonry, and cave moss in several colors—red, blue, and green—still thrived where water was dripping. The Copper looked at characters scrawled on a wall in a reflective color, like liquid dragonscale, though someone had clawed through it.
“What is this place?” he asked Enjor on one of his swoops.
“Old dwarf settlement, m’lord. Abandoned in the wars with the demen.”
“Demen?”
“Deep Men. Filthy bunch. Not above throwing a net over a bat and a’sticking a skewer through him for roasting.”
“Demen?” Thernadad’s mother cried. “They snip off bat wings and roll up their awful moss paste in it.”
“Faaaa!” Mamedi said. “They bite our heads off before singing a battle song. M’be going no farther.”
The Copper hopped up a set of stairs and peered through a broken portal. He smelled rats and damp wood rot.
Enjor hung upside down and picked at his tailvent. “Only other road to the south river is right through the heart of the Wheel of Fire city. A black bat in full cave-dark couldn’t make it. I’m resting where I can hear them coming.”
“Wake me if you do,” the Copper said, too tired and cold to fear dwarves or demen. He found a pile of smashed wood and rotten fabric and went to sleep.
He heard rats scrabbling around in the dark and shifted position. The noises faded as the rats fled, but they returned. They always did, drawn by the smell of dragon-waste.
He followed the sounds and smells, then spit out the thin contents of his fire bladder. While it wasn’t ready yet to burst into flame, it could blind or wound. He jumped after the pained squeaks and trapped two rats under his good sii, then swallowed them before his prey knew what had happened.
Feeling a little better with rat in him, he went back to sleep.
Enjor led them up a winding, rough tunnel, claiming that it went all the way to the surface, with a fair prospect off a mountainside if you followed it long enough.
Thernadad’s mother rode his back the whole way. The tunnel smelled decidedly dwarvish. It made the Copper nervous.
“Sir, I can fly a bit if y’be just generous enough to give me a small lap.”
“The last time your family left me light-headed. I need my wits.”
