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“Thank you, sir.”
NoSohoth turned and stalked out, sniffing the air around a crevice concealing the bats. The blighter looked at Harf and made a chopping motion at his neck. Harf showed a mouthful of brown teeth and patted his belly.
“My prince want food?” Harf asked, holding up his neck marker so the Copper could see it.
“Yes. And be quick.”
Harf disappeared in the lurching, two-legged run of his kind. The Copper wondered how he didn’t fall over. Humans struck him as half-finished—and the completed half wasn’t much to look at. Badly balanced, thin-skinned, just the odd patch of hair on their heads that seemed to do nothing but get in the way of their eyes, nostrils, ears, and mouths, and they smelled like wet bats. The Air Spirit must have had his mind on other things as he created them.
After a refreshing sleep he explored his new home caves. The wound over his firebladder wept a little clear fluid, and felt tender but not painful. A projection of rock, like a long limb, reached out from the wall and almost to the pool. It smelled strongly of male dragon.
A bat flitted past his eye. “The others be frightened, m’lord,” said Uthaned, the active young bat. “They want to know where to go.”
Harf made a move to swing at the bat with his scrubbing stick, but the Copper gave him a sharp, “No!” He sniffed at Uthaned; the bat smelled exhausted. “That cave with the big horned skull will do for now.”
“Mamedi is ready to drop, and the three young aren’t used to so much flying. Might we have a taste of generosity?”
The bats had gotten him here, and food was on the way. “Oh, why not. But let’s go somewhere private. Back to my cave.”
The bats opened him up front and rear. He did a quick count: only eight left. He couldn’t even remember how many had been with him when he jumped in the Nor’flow, but it was a lot more than eight. Of course, rodents were made for dying.
“Did y’be seeing those herds of cattle below?” Thernadad said as he sat on Mamedi, keeping her from a trickle of blood leaking from the Copper’s armpit.
“M’smelling fresh air wafting up from below. We’ve got an entrance near,” Enjor agreed. “Water, too.”
“Faaaa!” Mamedi said, pushing her bulky mate off and getting a few quick tonguefuls of blood. “Dragon reek so bad in here, m’eyes be watering.”
“W’be in the happy flapping land,” another bat said.
“Sharply now,” a deep voice from the outer passage echoed. “Krthonius, what can you say for yourself?”
Whoever Krthonius was, he didn’t have anything to say right away, so the deep voice bellowed, “Aubalagrave?”
“Strange smell in the cave, your honor.”
“That’s more like it,” the deep voice said. “Just because you’re home doesn’t mean you’re safe. Remember that. Many’s the wing-sore dragon who’s lost because he returns to his cave already half-asleep.”
“There haven’t been assassins in the Lavadome in—” a rather lisping voice said.
“Thrall revolts. Leadership battles. Cave claim jumping. I’ve seen dragons die in all of them. Any of you lot able to identify the strange smell?”
“Ummm. Bat?”
“Yes.”
“Here’s a hamcart,” the lisping voice said.
“Get up to the ceiling and hide yourselves,” the Copper told the bats. With a mixture of burps and flaps, they took off for the deep shadows above.
The Copper climbed off his shelf and walked out into the light of the passage. He saw a vast, ruby-red twelve-horned dragon. The Red had been maimed, with nothing but a stumplike projection from each side of his spine where his wings should be. Three young drakes, one a dazzling white, the other two blacks, narrowed golden eyes at him.
“Excuse me, are you NeStirr—”
“Rough-and-tumble, lads. Here’s our intruder. Give him what-for, but don’t bleed him.”
The drakes dragon-dashed forward. The attack came so suddenly the Copper’s brain froze, and he could do nothing but hug the floor of the passage before they were on him, each bigger than he.
The white reached him first. The white had an ugly wound on one side of his face, exposing teeth and gum line. He head-butted the Copper in the snout, then threw himself across the Copper’s neck, pinning his head. The others wedged their noses under his side and flipped him, exposing his belly. They scrabbled at his skin with sheathed sii claws.
