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They took a crack and descended some rough rock to a cavern filled with a confusing array of smaller chambers. Enjor flew off to be sure of the path. The Copper sniffed out a discarded iron-soled boot and carried it in his mouth until they took a rest break, where he thoughtfully chewed it down. Tearing and devouring the mixture of leather and metal was most satisfying, even if the dwarf-foot smell could poison a cave slug.
“Oh, m’be perishing, sir. Perishing!” Thernadad’s mother lamented.
“Just a little, then,” the Copper said, feeling generous with a belly full of heel and hobnail. “But be quiet about it.”
She opened him up just under his bad sii. He couldn’t feel much of anything in that limb anyway.
Enjor flapped back, gasping. He shoved his mother out of the way and took a hearty drink of dragonblood.
“What’s all this?” the Copper said.
“Better and better still,” Thernadad’s mother said. “I feel a maiden bat again,” she called, flapping off into the cavern. “Up and at ’em, y’slugs. Darkness a’wasting!”
“Careful, Mum!” Enjor called. “Not that way!”
He flapped heavily into the air, shouting, and in a few moments his mother returned, flying in irregular loops. She didn’t so much land as nose into the cave floor.
“What’s the matter? Drunk on dragonblood?”
“Bad air,” Enjor said.
“Eeeeee, that’s a funny color moonlight,” the old white-flecked bat said. She rolled her eyes this way and that, coughed, and was still.
“Mum! Mum!” Thernadad said, flying down from the ceiling.
“She went down the wrong tunnel,” Enjor said. “Bad air.”
Thenadad landed next to her and head-butted her hard in the stomach. The body didn’t so much as twitch. “Mum!” He rounded on his brother. “Why didn’t you watch her?”
“Me only just made it out myself!”
Thernadad snapped at his brother’s ear.>“Ooo, ooo, ooo, such a tragedy,” Mamedi blubbered; some cousin of hers had slipped and fallen into the water.
Some of the bats climbed on the Copper, as his scales offered better grips than the smoothed wood.
“Sir, m’be losing strength,” Thernadad’s mother said. “Just a quiet nip and none be wiser.”
“Oh, very well.”
The bat dug around in the soft tissue behind his ear and he felt the usual tingling numbness as she licked the area before biting. He couldn’t move his head without squashing her, but he rolled an eye down and saw the other bats feeding.
Irked that they didn’t ask permission, he was tempted to eat one in the hope that it would teach the others some manners. But Mamedi had finally left off her blubbing.
The river wasn’t always flowing and channeled. Three times the boat plunged into rushing, frothing water, thoroughly drenching them as it nosed into walls of water. Bats and one exsanguinated dragon hung on until the bat claws hurt him more than the teeth. At these moments the dwarves shouted to one another and beat a drum, and the Copper heard a clanging within as they worked their machinery.
Other times the boat stopped at steel doors in the water and waited until the dwarves finished turning wheels and clanging, then passed through to another chamber shut by another set of steel doors, sometimes raising the boat and sometimes lowering it. During this process the Copper and the bats hid under the nose of the ship. The dwarves emerged from the boat’s interior and stretched on the flat top of the craft, or fouled the water with their waste.
These water chambers were thick with rats, but the Copper didn’t dare leave to hunt. The bats were under no such compunction, and whipped through the chamber, clearing it of insects.
Thernadad returned, cleaning his teeth and gum line with a darting tongue-tip.
“Wherever dwarves go, rats go. Wherever rats go, bugs go. Wherever bugs go, bats hunt.”
“Maybe you should live here, then.”
“Oh, sir, w’be sticking to you. Be a heartbreak to leave you after all w’ve been through.”
Water bubbled all around the craft as the chamber filled, and the dwarves shouted to one another. The Copper, splashed and cramped from clinging to the underside of the boat, felt a nip at a sore spot behind his saa joint.
