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He smelled a slightly sweet fluid and looked at the egg. It was cracked, either when the deman dropped it or in his clumsy retrieval—perhaps even when he’d tossed it into the boat.
He tasted the fluid. Delicious! He widened the crack and began to lap at the fluid within, and found it so tasty he greedily shoved his nose in and sucked the yolk down. He felt like a new dragon afterward.
The bats, always sensitive to a meal being served, joined him. They licked up bits of egg that had dripped or pooled in the cracked shell.
He smacked his jaws open and shut and ran his tongue around the edges of his mouth. It was the best meal he’d ever had. If he were ever king of his own land like the dragon-lords of old, he’d eat one just like it every day.
He crunched down the shell. Then he left the dwarf boat. No one would ever mistake it for a bit of flotsam. And if the dwarves needed it back…well, war was a series of misfortunes, wasn’t it?
“Who lays eggs like that underground?” he asked Enjor.
“No idea, m’lord. No birds be a’living down here. At least, no birds y’be wanting to meet.”
The river drained off into a mire filled with giant mushrooms. The less said about this portion of the trip, the better—the Copper remembered only having muck and filth between every scale, every tooth, even working its way into his eyes.
The only ones happy about it were the bats, for insects flew so thickly here they made mistlike clouds. The bats ate their fill and then some—except for the young of Mamedi’s relative: They had hair now and an unslakable thirst for dragonblood.
Luckily they were so small they took only a few drops each.
He came out of the mire a bedraggled dragon, sick of filtering mouthfuls of filthy water through his teeth to eat the worms that wiggled through the mire bottom. He assuaged his appetite by tearing off mouthfuls of fungus.
At the other side of the mire they passed through another series of tunnels, these sided with a hard, shiny surface that offered cave moss no purchase. He had to be led through the blackest patches by the bats, who probably drained him each time he slept.
“Almost there now,” Enjor said, so often that Thernadad took up the refrain. “Almost there now.”
“What’s almost?”
“One more river to cross, the river of slaves. It flows in a circle around the Lavadome. Then the passage up.”
After one of his “scouts,” Enjor returned in excitement. “W’be there. You’ll get a good view if the sun is right.”
They reached the river, its current so slow that it was hard to distinguish from a lake. This river cavern made the dwarf-boat tunnels seem little more than chutes.
It had a high ceiling, sheer walls climbing to a dark roof cracked in places where true sunshine fell through. Shafts of light, one or two angled just right so the sunlight fell in neatly edged beams of gold, illuminated the gray-green river surface, tendrils of mist hovering above it in zephyrs of air. Titanic granite boulders rose from the waterline like teeth guarding the far edge.
“One more swim, m’lord,” Enjor said.
He saw a winged shape cross through one of the shafts of light.
“What are those?”
“Nothing y’be wanting to meet,” Enjor said. “That’s the griffaran—the dragon-guard.”
“Who are they?”
“Bat eaters,” Enjor and Thernadad said together.
“Hunt by?”
“Sight, m’lord.”
“Let’s cross once the sunlight goes, then.”
He rested on the riverbank and saw a long, thin boat with a line of hominids on board, crossing the water, beetle-sized in the distance. One of the flyers, a black shadow with vast wings, hovered overhead.
He waited until the beams lifted and vanished, disappearing into a faint glow from the sky. The shadowy wings still flew over the river, though. He nosed around the riverbank as the light faded, but found only a tasteless snail or two. He wedged himself into a crack—more to prevent the bats from feeding on him in his sleep than because he feared discovery—good eye on his vulnerable side.
But he couldn’t sleep, so excited was he to be this near to the Lavadome. He three-quarters shut his good eye. But why weren’t there dragons whirling above the river? Surely such a vast body of water had those long, bony, shovel-nosed fishes living within?
