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The bats nibbled and lapped at his wound, but as they seemed to be doing more good than harm, he left them to it. The pain faded to an ache. Awful, but tolerable. Scales, stuck together with blood, closed over the wound.
Suddenly they scattered. The fliers returned, bearing the woven basket.
One of the bird-creatures—griffaran, he reminded himself—climbed down the rock face from above, using its two limbs and beak.
Another placed the basket on the shelf beside him as it alighted.
“Egg thief!” one croaked.
“Egg thief! Death to all egg thieves!” others called, drifting on air currents.
Another landed and turned its head so it looked at him, first with one eye, then the other.
The Copper gulped. With so many gathered around would they each take some piece of him in those hooked beaks and yank him apart?
A vast griffaran, its beak battle-scarred, one eye socket dry and empty, and two digits missing from its right foot, landed. It wore a pair of golden rings, one in each arm, with fabric like bits of woven sunlight looped through and knotted.
“Gak! Any other prisoners?” it asked in Drakine.
“No, none. They’ve run again.”
“Curse the thieves,” one of the watching creatures called. Others squawked in agreement.
The one with the gold bands looked into the empty basket. “We will see justice done, drake. Prepare yourself.”
It reached out with a spread-taloned claw….
BOOK TWO
Drake
“FOOLS AND THRALLS TALK OF GOOD AND EVIL. THEIR MASTERS THINK IN TERMS OF TIME AND PLACE.”
—Tighlia
Chapter 11
The gold-shouldered griffaran, with two silver-winged companions soaring beside, flew to the far side of the water. The Copper rode, clenched in maimed talons, protecting his chest wound with his bad sii.
The Copper was more than a little surprised they didn’t tear him to shreds, or eat him, or drop him to break and die against the rocks below.
The griffaran sailed into line and entered a tunnel. He heard wing tips brush the chiseled sides. He looked ahead and saw the tunnel’s end, but the griffaran didn’t slow. They dropped, picking up speed, as though to dash themselves against the wall.
They beat their wings powerfully, and turned up, and rose through a hole in the cave ceiling, and suddenly there was open air and light all around.
The Copper looked around in wonder, wishing both his eyes worked so he could take it all in properly.
He couldn’t see much overhead, thanks to the commanding griffaran, just a vague sense of an oddly regular dome shape rising above, like a vast hollow mountain, and a glowing light source at the apex of the dome. Was that the sun? It was high in the sky and bright enough, but it hardly dazzled, and it seemed held in place with no blue about anywhere, so unlike the vague mind-pictures passed down from his parents that he decided it must be some imitation.
Below he saw a vast blue-green plain, with little rises of red rock, some needle-shaped, others leaning, a few formed like toadstools, and many more low hummocks scattered about. Mosses thrived in the wet crevices; ferns dripped from the edges of pools and streams.
At the center of the Lavadome stood a black carbuncle, like the pupil in the middle of an eye.
The fliers were making for the black rock.
As they flew closer and turned above it, he saw that the rock, unevenly shaped on all sides and resembling a kidney, had been sculpted, added to, cut and galleried and tunneled, enlarging what had been irregular holes scattered around the minimountain like the eyes of a potato he’d once seen a dwarf eating.
The fliers dropped toward a long garden filled with flower-covered vines set atop one of the rises in the rock. A sculpted river flowed through it, complete with waterfall. Statues of dragons—rampant, reclining, rearing, crossing necks, even dipping their noses into pools of water—surrounded the greenery. It smelled like earth and green growing things.
