 "A BAD START IS STILL A START." —Tyr FeHazathant

No pleasant dream, this. Discomfort and darkness, cold and cramp, clinging tendrils binding. The restrictions vexed him.

The hatchling struggled against his torment, twisting his neck to a more comfortable position, for his head kept jerking uncontrollably.

Suddenly his nose tore free of its bonds with a startling crack that ran down his body to the tail-tip. A membrane gave way, air tickled at his nose, and his lungs greedily pulled in its enticing freshness and a comforting, musky odor that filled him with longing.

A weight dragged at his belly, and he knew he had to be free of it. He reached up a rear claw and tore it away, the small pain worth the greater freedom.

The pain brought an additional benefit: His mind cleared of dreams and confusion and doubt. Instinct took over his little body, from deepest fiber to smallest hatchling scale. He pushed in every direction at once, head twisting and battering at the gap as his nose worked out.

Then it all gave way and he sprawled, whipping his tail around and fighting to right himself in a mass of clinging membrane and white shards. He opened his eyes, but the light pained and confused him, so he shut them again.

A wet web hung on him. It stuck everywhere in his scales, in the folds of hide and bone behind his jaw, his crest, his claws.

Strange, strange, strange. No clouds or currents or friendly sun, yet he was not frightened at the newness. The musky smell told him that all was well. He was safe.

He brought up a forelimb and wiped the web away from his eyes and off his crest. Now he could go to work with his long, flexible neck and sharp teeth, getting it off his limbs.

"We've done it; oh, thank Susirion and the four shapers, he lives." The voice, the mind, more than half his own, had spoken to him in the egg. Through it he had seen brilliant sunlight and hot, flowing gold, blended and poured into his consciousness. This was the voice of his dreams, the spinner of images bright but vague around the edges, sunlight, crashing ocean waves, herds of blotch-backed beasts thundering below, leathery wings flapping and a proud, booming voice shaking the mountainside with song.

"Open your eyes, my jewel. See your mother and your world!"

Mother!

He opened his eyes, and it took a moment for his vision to clear. Too much to take in: a wall of green scale, curled-down head with its sniffing nostrils and shining, wide-open eyes, darkness filled with strange columns bathed in a glow from pools of light gathered on the floor, even a gentle, probing tail-tip as thick as his midwaist flicking bits of…of…shell, his brain supplied…flicking bits of shell off his haunches.

Wave after wave of love, delight, contentment rolled out of her and over him. This was better than any of the dreams before. The hatchling basked in it, a tiny thrumming deep in his throat answering her powerful one. They prrumed to each other. The ground almost vibrated with the low, resonant thrumming.

Two other eggs stirred. One rolled into the other with a soft tap.

The shifted egg opened like a jagged-toothed mouth, and a powerful red form spilled out. Its back legs outdrove its front, and it collapsed forward for a moment, jaw flat against the hard ground.

It squawked. He listened to the echoes and determined that they were in a confined space, but a very large one, and that a vast distance—to his few moments of experience—yawned behind, like his body, far longer than it was high.

The hatchling hardly noticed its smaller forelegs, its powerful neck, the clinging goo trailing from its rear limbs and bits of egg flying off its whipping tail. He had eyes only for its crest, a short rise of flattened horn sweeping back from its eyes.

Every instinct screeched: Threat, threat, threat!

The Red snorted liquid out of his nose. He opened his eyes and blinked. The tiny sharp spur crowning his nose turned toward the hatchling. The Red gathered himself, short flaps of armored skin behind his jawline rattling angrily against the base of his crest.

The hatchling found his own flaps answering the sound.

Tchkka-tchak tchkka-tchak tchkka-tchak!

The Red lowered his head and exploded toward him in a flash of glittering scales, mouth agape, fans wide and menacing.

He shifted to dodge him, but the clumsy new body didn't react the way it did in dreams. They reared up on hindquarters, claws scrabbling and mouths biting—

—suddenly they were suspended in space.

Falling, but not for long.

They hit hard, the hatchling atop the Red, the Red's crest striking first and absorbing much of the blow.

The hatchling brought up a rear limb and raked the Red's flank. When the Red shifted he bit, but his jaws closed on air as the Red lurched away.

The Red swung around, rushed him, used his weight to roll the Copper, got atop him. Bit down—

He put up his left forelimb to protect his neck, and the Red's jaws closed on it rather than his neck and they rolled again. They clawed and scratched at each other's scales. He tried to push the Red away and right himself. A tearing pain in his forelimb, and the Red tightened his grip, braced those massive rear haunches, and began to pull, jerking his head back and forth, rending muscle and joints as the hatchling squawked and tried to bite at the Red's neck.

Craack!

The hatchling didn't know what caused the Red to drop his limb. Then the Red jumped off him and climbed up, up, toward the eggs and another crested head.

The hatchling jumped after him—no foe is getting away that easy!—but he sprawled as he took his first step, hurt forelimb not where it should be. It seemed to be folding itself against his breast, claw turned inward.

He wobbled on three limbs and tried to climb, but fell on the first attempt. He heard high-pitched, angry cries from the vicinity of the eggs.

His second attempt at a climb went a little better, as he braced himself with his tail. But he fell again when he shifted his rear limbs and his tail slipped on the hot, wet liquid dripping from his limb.

The third time he used his jaws, gripping a projection with his teeth when his tail could no longer support his weight. Panting, he heaved himself over the edge, up among the eggs again.

His vision blurred a moment and he felt dizzy from the climb. When it cleared again…

The Red fought another hatchling, a slight gray thing compared to the Red's bulk. It had leathery skin rather than scales. The Red used his weight to upset the Gray and managed to get his jaws around the Gray's neck.

The hatchling saw his chance. He coiled and jumped, throwing himself on the Red's back with his powerful back limbs. He got his jaws around the Red's neck, where it was thinnest just under the jaw….

The Red thrashed, used his weight to knock him over, and scrabbled. The hatchling bore down, feeling the Red's panting breath and pounding neck hearts through his teeth….

The Red stiffened, every muscle in his body aquiver, and went limp. The hatchling closed his teeth on his throat, feeling the neck hearts rattle and die.

The hatchling went as limp as the Red.

Movement. The Gray was on his feet, facing him crest-to-crest.

Kill it! Kill and eat!

The Gray sidestepped to get around the corpse of the Red and rushed him, aiming straight for the bloody wound on his injured limb. The hatchling shifted to protect it, and the Gray drove his crest into his side, pushing, pushing….

He squawked as he went over a second time, grabbed for the Gray, but the hatchling danced out of the way of his rear claw and he fell….

Right on his bad forelimb.

The pain blinded him; it took him a moment to recover, and when he opened his eyes again he was alone at the base of the egg shelf, listening to more cracking sounds.

More?

He couldn't even beat the lighter Gray. Suppose another such as the Red…?

But though he did not know it, he was the son of a powerful line, and his young hearts knew no despair. And he had his mother's wit still intact. He rested, gathering strength. He'd let the others weary themselves tearing one another to bits and then come up fresh….

Except he felt so weak. He licked at his wounded limb, and the blood-tang left him both hungry and revolted.

No cries of battle greeted his ears. Maybe they were all bled out. He examined the wall to the egg shelf first, looked for an ascent with plenty of good grips.

This time, when he began to slip, he just tightened his grip and searched for a rest for his tail until he found the strength to climb on. He passed over the lip….

Nothing. Just two sprawled green hatchlings, uncrested and therefore innocuous, digging into the corpse of the Red. The blood smell inflamed his appetite.

My victory! My feast!

Others enjoyed his kill. He jumped on the Red's corpse, claiming it, baring his teeth at the hapless Greens.

One, shorter of length and powerfully built like the Red, backed away. The other, longer and thinner even than the Gray, tripped, thrashed weakly.

Drive her away, his appetite roared.

He jumped on her, pushing, nipping her at the shoulder and hip points. She squeaked in alarm, pulled away.

He tore free a piece of fleshy tail she'd been gnawing at.

The other Green intervened with a growl, opening her jaws, glaring at him like the combative Red.

He caught a flash of motion off his weak side. It was the Gray again, bounding up from a trickle of water at the other end of the egg shelf.

The Green advanced, covering her sister with her own bulk.

He couldn't fight them both at once. He mouthed the chunk of tail and fled, finding he could use the elbow of his injured forelimb when running, though it pained him. He jumped back off the egg shelf. If they tried to jump down after him, he'd get them at a disadvantage when they alighted.

The Gray yapped down at him, but showed no sign of plunging to the cave floor. The Copper gnawed at the meaty tail, feeling the energy entering his bloodstream from the swallowed hunks of tissue.

The Gray's head disappeared, and the battle fury left the Copper. He felt cold, alone, and wandered over to the trickle and lapped a little water. He cooled his injured limb in the pool. Above, Mother started to sing. He crept closer so he could catch the end of the song:

…and the long years of dragonhood are sure to be thine.

He tried to climb up to the egg shelf, but failed, the pain in his throbbing limb overcoming him. He lay in the cold, hearing Mother's soft throat music, half song and half prrum.

He made one more attempt at the climb. Not to fight this time, but to be by Mother, safe and warm, wrapped in music and belly heat. Mother's great tail dropped over the edge and pushed him down. She looked down at him from the heights of her neck.

"No, little one, Auron has won the egg shelf. If you come up again he will kill you."

He tried to reply, but the only noises he seemed to be able to make were squeaks, not words. He tried, came close, tried again:

"Fwhy?"

"I'm sorry, hatchling. You are an outcast. You must learn to overcome on your own."

He huddled against the base of the egg shelf, cold and alone.

No pleasant dream, this.

Loneliness was a constant companion to the outcast. Often hunger tagged along throughout the day, gnawing at him from belly to tail-tip, but hunger wandered off at night as he dreamed of warm, rich feasts. Loneliness would not be so easily seen off.

 Only loneliness is mine to hold,

 Scalel-edge sharp and dreadful cold.

The outcast rhymed to himself, in imitation of the songs he heard from the egg shelf.

He made his first kill almost by accident. While sleeping, tucked into a crack lest the Gray attack him again with a pounce and a triumphant squawk, he felt an odd tickle at his tail. A wide, flat thing, rather like his tongue save for a questing projection that stuck up from its front—he knew the front judging by the direction it slurped—had touched his tail and recoiled.

He fell on it without really knowing what he was doing and tore it open as he landed. It still writhed, so he batted it about some more before biting off the head. It mindlessly crept down his throat, seeking tight, wet safety, and he instinctively swallowed.

It tasted vile and slimy, but filled his belly. He ate the other half and suffered no ill effects save for a hunger that came back all the fiercer for having once been assuaged.

Hunger drove him out into the cave when his belly sagged, empty, and loneliness forced him back to the crevices under the egg shelf.

He explored the cave from the egg shelf to the entrance hole, knew its drains and its hollows and its patches of shining green moss that brought light to the blackness, thriving on dragon waste and bat droppings.

Often he clung to the side of the egg shelf, straining to pick up mind-pictures from Mother as she taught the rest of her clutch. Stories, lessons, songs, rhymes, she bubbled like the trickle at the other end of the egg shelf whenever she didn't sleep.

The Gray was named Auron, he knew. His noisy sisters were Wistala and Jizara.

And then he met his father.

Father was a massive bronze mass, frightening in the quiet with which he moved. One moment the outcast was following a slug trail in the hope of another ephemeral meal of slug meat, and the next it seemed as though the cave wall had shifted next to him, a startling mass of sliding scales approaching the egg shelf.

He keened up at Father, tried to form words, sat up on his hindquarters and yapped until his head swam.

Father stared at his stiff, maimed limb, snorted, and continued his journey toward the egg shelf. He had to dodge Father's swinging tail by retreating into a crevice.

Of course, he and Mother began to discuss Auron, the Gray Rat. To the Copper his brother was rather like an oversized rat: quick, quiet, and vicious.

Thus the pattern of his days was set.

He managed a grubby sort of survival, living off slugs, rats, and the bit of hoof or tail that he could sometimes filch by sneaking up onto the egg shelf when the others were sleeping.

How he longed to join them, basking in Mother's heat!

Once he tried to settle up against them, under Mother's protective wing, but she began to shift and rumble and woke Auron. He had to scramble off the egg shelf, pursued by his brother's angry yaps.

He sat at the base of the egg shelf, picking up a stray mind-picture or two from Mother as she taught the others in dreams. He hugged the memory of Mother's attention at his hatching. Would it be too much for her to stretch her neck and give him a lick, breathe a few bars of one of the long songs she sang to him in the egg…?

Tell him his name?

Little crying coughs escaped his body.

He learned to differentiate his sisters. Wistala was quick of tongue, Jizara long, elegant, and with a melodious voice.

He avoided Auron. The Gray seemed vulnerable, with a thick, pebbly skin instead of scales, but was fast and alert and hard to hear coming. And he was growing strong on what he and the sisters hunted and the choicest bits of whatever Father brought back.

But soon the Copper realized he only thought he knew unhappiness and longing.

It happened during one of Father's longer visits to the cavern. Every now and then he spent a period between hunting trips inspecting every nook and cranny with eyes, ears, and nose. Coming to a crack that the outcast knew contained nothing but dark, Father nevertheless stuck his nose deep inside and drew a long breath. He snorted out dirt and mucus.

"What do, Fazer?" the Copper said, greatly daring. The dragon-smell made his hearts pound against his skin.

The huge, six-horned head lifted and turned. "Ah. It's you."

Which wasn't much of an answer.

"What name I? I name how?"

"You're not of the nest, cripple. You don't need to be named. I'm not even sure you can be called a dragon in the lifesong."

That just made him miserable, and he lowered his head.

"That's no way to look, hatchling. You're unique, as far as my family memory goes. None of my line of sires ever saw a second male survive. You're not of the clutch, yet you're of our kind, and the cave's so big Auron can drive you away, but not out, so to speak. Neither scale nor claw, son nor stranger."

The Copper formed his next words carefully, and they came out better. "You my father. That prove me your son!"

"You may be lame in body, but your wit's quick enough. That's your mother speaking with your tongue. If you've got her brains, I expect you'll survive at least until you leave the cave."

"To light?" The Copper knew that tidbit from egg-dreams.

"Yes. The Upper World is a dangerous place, and your wings are still a full clawset of winters off. Look at your scales! Poor little blighter. You need a bellyful of coin. Follow me."

The Copper almost danced in Father's wake, the dragon's dangerous smell no longer terrifying but thrilling. Father approached a small ledge, descended, and approached a heavy stone resting in a small sink. A dead trickle of water was thick with dried dark moss.

Father grasped the stone with his front sii and wrestled it out of the rock.

"I've been meaning to give the girls some play-pretties. But you need something more substantial. Can't do more; there's little enough as it is."

He stuck his head down the hole, and the Copper smelled something he'd never experienced before: an aroma hard and rich and metallic. He felt his scales bristle and his griff descend and flutter against his jaw and neck, giving a faint rattle.

Father's head came back up. His eyes burned.

"Indeed, little enough! Why should I part with any to a wretched nothing? Cripple! Outcast!"

The Copper backed up, half-terrified and half-furious. The gold smell made him want to leap and claw.

Father tilted his head back and forth as though gauging distance; then he suddenly relaxed. "Serves me right for depriving myself." He swallowed something that clinked. Then his bristling scale relaxed and he gave a brief, satisfied prrum. He reached down again and spit out a few gold and silver coins, thick with slime.

"That's to get you started. All there'll be, I'm afraid, unless I get lucky."

The Copper sniffed a silver disk. He needed its light, its brightness. His mouth went thick and wet all over. He gobbled it down, and then the others, quickly, as though they were a nest of rats about to escape.

Father's feet stamped restlessly.

"I suppose no harm's done. Auron won't need it, after all." Father exhaled in a whoosh that flattened the Copper's scale. "Maybe we'll have better luck with males in another clutch."

The Copper smelled more gold down the hole. He hurried toward it, following the smell, which seemed to have seized hold of his brain.

The boulder came down, and he ran nose-first into it.

"A dragon must win his own hoard, outcast," Father said, moving off toward the egg shelf.

The Gray Rat and he made a sort of peace. The Gray kept to his hunting perches, keeping an eye out for slugs, and as long as the Copper avoided the usual spots they'd go long stretches without seeing each other. Wistala, the chatterer, seemed always to be talking to her mother or brother or sister, and was the most successful hunter.

Of course, they were usually hunting the best spots, so the Copper had to make do with trying to catch the white, long-whiskered cave rats in the offal pile while the others slept. They were smart, quick, and vicious, and to get on he had to be smarter, quicker, and even more vicious. He tried piling bones and loose rocks in such a way that they loomed over a juicy bit of dragon-waste, then toppling them when he heard noises in the pile, but he found that the rats would worm through the bones and hooves easier than if he tried to catch them on the hop.

He found that if he smeared himself first with slime from the receding pools and then with dragon-waste, they couldn't smell him, thanks to the wet, and would often get within a jump's distance. But he learned an enervating lesson when he overhunted the garbage pile, for the rats quit coming. He took to visiting it only after the other hatchlings ate something Father brought back, for sometimes they missed a tail or an ear or a bit of marrow. Then he hunted the pile with an appetite that would have taken many, many rats to fill, but took away only one or two for all the filth and bother.

Of course, this necessitated a good deal of washing afterward.

While scrubbing off after one meal he heard a high, pleasant trilling coming from the egg shelf above. The words and tune warmed him like the sunlight he dreamed of. The running, splashing water devoured the words, so he climbed up the egg shelf and peeked over.

Farther down the egg shelf, almost out of the mosslight, his mother slumbered, and he saw the tail of the Gray Rat wrapped around her tail-tip. Wistala's nose peeped from under Mother's tail.

The longer and thinner of his two sisters lay across the trickle, arching her back in the water cascading down the side of the cave, warbling to herself:

 Paint my wings, as a stranger in paradise,

 Take me not from the city's light,

 through white towers I long to soar…

"Oh," she squeaked, seeing him. She shrank against the cave wall.

"Why did you stop?" he asked.

"Do you want to use the trickle?"

"Use it?"

"The cascade. It's marvelous for cleaning under the scales, especially that bit that falls all the way from the ceiling."

"Your name is Jizara," he said, marveling at how easily the word formed in his mouth.

"That's just for songs and such. Zara rolls off the tongue so much easier. You don't speak very well. I suppose you don't get much chance for talking."

"Will you sing more?" He felt the clumsiness of his words.

She uncoiled a little. "You like my singing?"

"It's beautiful." He edged up on the other side of the trickle.

She turned a little deeper green as her scales rose and fell. "You won't…you won't jump on me?"

"Why should I?"

"Auron does it all the time."

It felt so good to talk, he was wondering if he wanted a song to interrupt. "I'll stay on this side of the trickle."

"What do you want to hear?" she finally asked.

"What was that you were singing before?"

"A song of Silverhigh, the ancient. They made such beautiful songs. I can only sing them when I'm alone."

"Why?"

"You sound just like Auron! Mother said it was a wicked place full of foolish dragons."

"But they made beautiful songs. Sing."

She went on, and he found himself relaxing, joint by joint, claw by claw, lulled by the music. Then he was asleep.

He woke in glorious warmth. Jizara lay wrapped right around him, nose-tip to tail-point. But then she had an extraordinarily long neck.

A golden eye opened. She yawned. "You're rather small. Almost like a new hatchling of my own," she said. "You fell asleep, so I came over to your side." She looked away. "Oh, Mother is stirring. I'd better get back. She gets angry when we wander while she sleeps."

"When will you sing to me again?" he asked.

She retreated from the intensity of his words, jumping across the trickle. "I don't know. A day? Another day after that?"

Why couldn't she be more precise? Day had no real meaning in the Lower World. "I'll wait for you."

"And I'll sing for you, brother. A-la, now."

Her voice calling him brother settled in his head like a mother dragon on an egg perch.

He lurked about the base of the egg shelf too much, waiting for her to return, growing even hungrier. They met twice more, but one hardly counted, for Auron woke and the Copper had to run as soon as he saw him stretching his neck. After each meeting he hugged the moments to himself, played them in his mind so it seemed they'd never parted. They had played a game as they talked, trying to mirror their tail-tips, and he would go to his pool and play against himself, pretending the vague reflection was his sister.

Sister. Brother. Such lovely words to a lonely little dragon.

But the fourth time he saw her, she looked down into the water between them and wouldn't meet his eyes.

"I'm not to sing to you anymore," she said.

He was shocked into speechlessness. Everything appeared as usual at the other end of the egg shelf, Mother apparently asleep—

"You're nameless. Outcast."

He found his voice. "Zara, you are all I have."

"She says that if I truly care for you, I'll do this and you'll go up out of the cave on your own and find more food and grow strong. Don't you see how weak you are? You look positively hag-ridden. You've no chance at metals. Your scales are thin as an eyelid!"

A glubbing sound came out when he tried to reply.

"Mother says Auron is growing. He may kill you in an attempt to drive you out of the cave."

"I hate being alone! I'd rather die."

"Mother has a message for you."

"She does?"

"She told me that you can overcome this. You've got a gift, in a way, a chance to establish your own line. A whole new family of dragons, all tracing their songs back to you! Not even Auron has that. Go, and maybe one day we'll meet again in the Upper World."

He lingered in the cave, however, keeping to the edges, avoiding the others. Once or twice he ventured up the passage Father used on his hunting trips, but they smelled of old dragonblood, and he found broken pieces of scale.

He was tempted to try eating it for the metals it contained, but the smell disgusted him and he wondered what the sharp edges would do to his insides.

The trickles of the cavern dried up into practically nothing, and the slugs ceased roaming. He became hungrier than ever—his appetite grew and thrived and seemed to tap insistently at the backs of his eyes, and he worried the edges of his claws with sharp little teeth, pulling up dead skin until he bled.

He drank and bathed at a little pool in a far corner of the cavern. Once it had been fed by a fall that made the trickle on the egg shelf seem like a rainy bit of nothing, but now even the cascade had dried to a thick dampness on the cave wall.

While licking at it one day he noticed air moving around a projection. Even better, the air carried with it the smell of slugs.

He squeezed around the rock and found a crack, a jagged projection that narrowed at the bottom like a claw. Some water trickled from the bottom, carrying a more definite slug smell. He wormed through the crack and heard a few loose scales—it seemed all his scales were loose these days—fall into the water.

The air in here was wetter, and the cave moss still grew thickly in a ring around the pool, offering some light and playing on the bubbles that popped up now and then through the pool, which had spongy pads growing on the surface. He saw slugs squeezing themselves between rocks and under the pads and fell on them, and upset one of the pads in his thrashing.

The other side of the pad held little white spheres, clustered together so it was hard to tell where one began and the next ended. He sniffed them and they smelled delicious.

He tried swallowing one and almost immediately felt better. Eggs! They were probably slug eggs; they certainly smelled like the slugs. He devoured six more before he remembered how he had overhunted the rats in the offal pile. Eat up too many eggs and there'll be no slugs….

He tongued down two more anyway, and let out a soft burp. His blood flowed with new life.

He watched the water flow into the pool from a crack at a slightly higher level, less of a waterfall than a water step, and a little flowed out into "his" pool on the other side of the crack. The volume coming in and the volume going out seemed out of balance; a torrent came in but a trickle flowed out.

Of course—the bubbles. Water was going down, as it always did, and air wandered up, each always looking for company of its own kind.

He dove, followed the bubbles, hoping for another chamber with more slug eggs to raid. Though so little light filtered down that it was the next thing to black, he couldn't get lost; the bubbles would guide him back up. He found another shelf, with the bubbles gathering momentarily before sliding up and out.

But a distinct glow came, not from the source of the bubbles, but from deeper within the shelf. He swam toward it, his whole body moving in an easy, back-and-forth manner, though the cold made his hearts beat hard.

Then the light burned above him and he rose.

The pool top had more of the spongy pad growths, but only partially covering the pool, like a half-closed eye. He grabbed onto one of the pad stalks to arrest his rise and stuck his nose out among the pads.

Instinct made him take a small, cautious nostrilful. The air smelled good. He half emptied his lungs and drew in fresh air, then examined the scents of the room. He smelled mosses and some slug trail and rats and a strange rich, dry smell and dirt and a dirtier, sweaty smell, like horse hoof and…metal!

He took three more breaths and found some more slug eggs under the pads. Then he risked popping the ridge of his head up.

Cave moss, brighter than any growths he'd ever seen, lit the room from a big mound next to the pool. The chamber was shaped rather like a dragon's head and neck, with the pool resting at neck level, a high rise above that had air moving up it, and then it seemed to narrow off in one direction, like his snout. The pool next to the chamber had been cleared of the spongy pads, and a metal tube like his own neck rose out of the pool and turned at the top.

The metal came from what looked like flats and pits carved into the stone. The artificially straight lines on the metal and the worked stone set off some inner alarm.

Go back. This is not for you.

But the maddening, metallic smell made his mouth go thick and slimy. He had to find it.

He swam across the pool and heard rat claws scritch as he rose dripping from the water, sniffing and listening. The passage led off downward, narrowing even further. The sounds of anything coming up it would be forced in a single direction toward him, and he'd have plenty of warning, so he relaxed a little.

The metallic column rising from the water smelled delicious, but was too big to swallow. It made a loop above and turned back down over a big stonework hollow. It had a vaguely greasy smell to it, like food.

Strange, fashioned objects of a rough, dry, wholesome-smelling substance—wood, some old memory echo told him—held growth of some kind. The wood had bits of metal embedded into it.

Ah, here's the metal. And here. And here.

The flats and pits of the chamber had bits of metal, some with wooden handles, many of them redolent of meats and scorching, and even better, a few were small enough to be swallowed. He found a hollow tube sealed at one end, the same color as his scales, and found that if he stood on it he could crush it. He folded it in half and smashed it down again—he enjoyed compacting the metal more than he'd enjoyed anything since listening to Zara sing—and soon he had it in a shape that could fit down his throat.

Most satisfying.

Now food.

Where the moss grew thickly there was a garbage pile so rich in tidbits it felt like a gift. He broke up a few bones and extracted the marrow, found several chunks of rat-gnawed gristle and delicious, charred skins with the hair conveniently burned down to a stubble.

Now, this is a feast worthy of a dragon!

With nothing but some gassy burps to keep him company, he explored a pit where some kind of fire had burned recently and found more wooden holders, some with metal bands. He decided the vaguely greasy, dirty smell was some manner of hominid. Didn't dwarves spend a lot of time tunneling and mining?

He heard a clattering echo from deep down the passage and decided to leave the chamber, filching one more tube of metal on his way out. He'd have fun flattening and devouring it later.

While hunger gnawed at him back in the home cave, he argued with himself about going back. Certainly the metals he'd eaten would be missed, and the dwarves, if they were dwarves, would be put on their guard.

He visited the cave a second time, and lurked long in the pool before emerging. He spent most of the time rooting in the garbage heap and hunting rats. He very much doubted the dwarves would miss a few rats. He did find a single coin, fallen and rolled into a shadow behind one of the wooden boxes, and gobbled it eagerly. Coins were a perfect size to slide comfortably down a hatchling's gullet.

But the metallic tang nagged at him, wanting company. He worked one of the metal talons driven into the wood loose with his teeth—there were so many others he didn't see how one would be missed.

Since the second trip went so well he planned a third, though he waited what felt like ages, just in case. He kept himself in practice hunting up slugs. The trickles into the egg chamber increased day by day—evidently the dry period above was ending. The other hatchlings had all grown substantially, ranging over almost the whole cave now, and he couldn't avoid them with his usual paths. Luckily he could hear Wistala, for she was always talking to Jizara.

Quick, quiet Auron was something else entirely. The Gray Rat almost killed him with a pounce and chased him all the way across the egg cavern, and the Copper had to dive into the rising pool to escape him by wiggling through the crack, now underwater again.

Auron wasn't satisfied with having Mother and Zara and the chatterer and food and Father's horded gold. Rich in everything, he wanted even the lightless edges and holes and cold corners of the egg cave.

But Auron had a weakness, and in his arrogance didn't see his own faults. The Gray Rat had no scales. If the Copper could build up his strength a little, thicken his scales, he could close with Auron and take back the clutch.

The thought made his fire bladder boil.

With the waters rising again it meant a little longer swim to the treasure chamber. He took extra time smelling the air and certainly smelled no dwarves, though there was a dirtier scent, of the kind he associated with bits brought down from the Upper World.

The garbage pile had some meaty tidbits, and he lingered at the edge of the pool, ready for a fast dive, slowly nosing drier garbage aside while he extracted the meaty joints.

Then he smelled the silver.

It wasn't a strong smell, and leather masked the aroma. He investigated next to the benches and cubbyholes—they smelled of the recently cooked meat—listening, always listening, and probing with eye and ear before he placed a foot.

The silver-and-leather smell came from pegs driven into a wooden wall hung with bits of woven fabric, most of which smelled like either grease or charcoal. Farther down the tunnel were stacks of fragrant wood, and many roots and herbs hung up and drying—perhaps the dwarves were replenishing supplies as the season changed above.

He found the source of the enticing smell. A leather bag containing a few coins—copper, silver, and even a faint aroma of gold—hung there. The top had some kind of binding on it, evidently to close it, and had been left loose, allowing the smell of coin to escape.

The Copper salivated. The dwarf would pay for his forgetfulness….

He nosed the bag off the peg.

Ka-thunk!

The peg, relieved of the coin's weight, sprang up in its wooden slot.

Hairy masses of rope engulfed him. Festoons dropped from the cave roof, weighted with chains, and his eyesight went white as one of them struck him across the snout. The boxes to either side exploded open, throwing more lines that sprang from them. He felt weights and hooks and slick little circles of metal skittering across the floor.

When his eyesight returned he saw shadows all around, their beards glowing faintly. He felt tugs at his limbs as they attached lines.

He'd never been so terrified. His hearts felt as though they'd burst out of his chest or from behind his griff. Auron's leaps and sudden pins were nothing to this.

One was trying to extract the purse from his mouth, grunting as he pulled. The Copper sawed at the purse strings and the dwarf fell back. Defiantly, he swallowed the silver. The dwarves might win a three-limbed hatchling, but they'd lose their silver.

The dwarves made noises that all seemed to be some variety of yak or grumt or phmumph.

They drove metal claws into the rocks and tied him, snout and tail, and set bands of leather about his limbs. A massive dwarf with an ax watched the whole thing, gurgling to his companions, ready to sever his head if he wiggled free.

But the dwarvish hands seemed made of rock and iron, and he was soon covered with their greasy smell.

Then the beatings began.

They took iron bars and smashed them against his vulnerable pinioned tail. The pain ran up his body, fired in each digit, sparked yellow in his eye sockets, whirled about his organs so that each breath brought agony.

He whimpered; he cried; he sent mind-pictures begging them to stop.

That pain was nothing to what came when they stopped, gave him time to sleep and heal, and then started in on his tail again. During the second beating his teeth came together and tore at mouth edge and tongue until he spit blood.

Even through the pain a clarity took over and he wondered at the dwarves. What sort of creatures cause pain just for the sake of pain? There was no contest for control of a cavern, and they weren't killing him to eat him. The torture was its own end.

By the third beating the pain wasn't so bad, just dull warmth with the occasional jolt, like a fading cramp.

He heard a heavy step and shifted his body, felt scales give way. His skin had stuck to the floor with his own dried blood.

He did his best to tuck his tail. It moved clumsily, stiff and heavy, unable to curl. He rolled an eye upward, saw a vague sort of shadow, a hominid huge and dark looming above. The hominid smelled of dogs.

The tall one grunted and turned away, almost as an afterthought giving him a swiping kick to the nose with the side of his heel. Pain shot across both eyes.

A warbling broke out, and another hominid fell to its—no, her—knees in front of him. Her flat face was scarred on one side, and she wore an eye patch. A light brown eye, with just a touch of Mother's gold and a hint of green, looked into his.

"Oh, how they've hurt you, young one," she said in intelligible Drakine. "Poor thing."

His hearts woke to the words, the sympathy of her tone, even if the Drakine was nasal and harsh. She reached out and rubbed him between the eyes. If his snout hadn't been tied shut, he would have brushed her with the tip of his tongue, so grateful was he for the sympathy.

"Worthless little scut," the tall, broad, dog-scented man said in far worse Drakine. He lifted his boot again, and the Copper shut his eyes.

The one-eyed one interposed her body, and he noticed that she had leaves in her hair. That should mean something, he felt, but the aches in his body kept whatever vestigial memories he'd received in the egg deep and dark.

"The dwarves blame you for the crimes of your parents," she whispered. "They've been hunting a very wicked pair, a bronze and his mate, who've betrayed and stolen from the dwarves. Dwarves will move mountains to reclaim their own, if you don't know."

She looked at her companion, off on the other side of the tunnel talking to the dwarves. One leaned on one of the iron rods they'd used to beat him. Another, more potbellied than the rest, pulled at his dim-glowing beard as the man spoke, making noncommittal hmpf sounds at the pauses. The tall man unrolled some kind of map, and the potbellied dwarf sneezed.

"I don't hold with blaming offspring for the crimes of their parents, do you?"

He hesitated a moment before answering. Was it wise to talk to a…a…leaf-hair? Elf! So satisfied was he that he had finally summoned the name that he croaked, "No."

The elf showed her teeth when he answered, even though the word was muffled by the binding about his snout.

The tall man came over and talked to the other in their unknown barking tongue. Casually, while he spoke, he brought his heel down on the Copper's tail. The agony made him whimper and writhe, and the elf finally pushed him away.

She yelled at the others until they shrank away from her fury. If only Mother had been this protective of her own hatchling.

Then she knelt beside him again. "Little one, I'm here hunting hatchlings. The dwarves have a buyer willing to pay a princely sum for healthy males or females. That was your sire's bargain with the dwarves, a set of eggs in exchange for much gold and silver. But they reneged and fled.

"I know dragons. I suspect you were driven out of the nest by the stronger male. Let me capture your brother and sisters, if any, and I'll see to it you get enough copper—silver even—to stuff yourself for a year."

She reached into a bag on her belt and extracted some coins and let him sniff. Even in his shattered and weakened state, the smell turned his mouth slick.

She put the coins back, looked at the others. The man approached, drawing a long sword, an evil carved blade extending from the wide-open jaws of a dragon.

"Some king and queen of dragons, this hatchling's sires," the man said. "If my babe disappeared from his home, I'd drag the sky down into the deepest corners of the earth to find him."

The elf snarled something to him in their tongue.

He ignored her. "Just what you'd expect from dragons, leaving their hatchling in the hands of some vengeful dwarves. I'll take his griff as a trophy and the dwarves can finish him."

Another dwarf picked up an iron rod.

"No!" the elf protested in Drakine. The Copper would wonder, much later, how and where she learned the tongue. Even hate himself for not being suspicious at their use of Drakine in their arguments. "I can make a bargain with him. Even the dwarves will accept a bargain."

She turned to him, caressed him under the chin. "Little one, you must let me help you. Show me to the egg shelf. We'll take your brother and siblings. They'll be well treated and prized by their eventual owner, and the feud between your parents and the dwarves will be over. You'll have the egg shelf."

The Copper didn't care what they did with his brother. Or the chatterer—they could drag them both off, for all he cared. But Jizara…

"I have two sisters," he said. "One goes. One stays. Her name is Jizara; she's got the longer neck and tail. She stays."

The elf's eye widened and he saw her teeth again. She barked at the others. The potbellied dwarf lowered his face and stamped, then grunted something in return.

"Bargain!" she said, and untied his jaws.

The Copper felt better than he had since the first iron-rod blow to his tail. In all likelihood Mother and Father would kill these wretched, torturing dwarves. Even if they didn't, the Gray Rat would be dragged off and have his snout tied. As for the chatterer, she could do with a bit of enforced quiet. He almost smiled at the thought.

Mother told me to overcome. She left out any details of how to do it.

After he told her how to find the home cave, she gave him a purse full of silver pieces to seal the bargain.

Their plan had the virtue of simplicity. The dwarves would storm the egg shelf, restrain Mother with holding poles, and bind up his siblings.

They showed him the straps and poles and snout cage that would be used on Mother, yet worms of regret were wiggling at the back of his mind. But they gave him no chance to escape, keeping chains on him from the point where he swam through the underwater tunnel with a guideline for the dwarves to the moment tunnelers arrived to widen the cracks.

The dwarves lit their way with hissing firework torches that burned bright blue even underwater and created a minichamber from a polished shell as big as a dragon's head. They cleverly fed the air bubble within the shell with a pair of leather hoses worked by bellows back at the scullery, constantly substituting good air for bad.

The trick, as the Copper saw it, was to have the dwarves make off with Auron and Wistala the chatterbox. If a few of the rod-carrying poghti got burned in the process, so much the better.

He thought he knew how.

All three of the other hatchlings explored and hunted within the egg cavern. Auron always scurried around over a wide range, Wistala had a few predictable perches where slugs were likely to pass, and Jizara kept closer to Mother and the garbage pile.

He could take care of Auron. Thanks to the dwarves' meals and generous amounts of metal, his new scales were coming in thick and fast. He could tell the dwarves where to find Wistala, then immobilize Auron somewhere far from the egg shelf—but not too far to be heard—and scare him into trumpeting a warning. The dwarves would not be so foolish as to attack an alerted dragon, and at the first sign of alarm Wistala would certainly hide by Mother.

So pleased was he with the plan, he found himself giving off a slight prrum.

The day finally came. They timed it with Father leaving on a hunt.

He met the dwarves and the missing-eyed elf in the now dry chamber behind the waterfall. The dwarves had cleverly diverted the water into a metal tube that carried it off down the cavern of the scullery, save for a little leaking that dropped into a bubbling pool.

Tunnel dwarves were marking the wall behind the waterfall with chalk, muttering quietly to others who carried spikes and hammers.

Behind them warrior dwarves gathered with their holding poles and lines and straps, the potbellied dwarf at the front. Eye Patch, looking tired and smelling of wood smoke from the Upper World, stood off to one side, armed only with a small knife at her belt.

The Copper was rather relieved that the big, cruel man who liked to step on his broken tail was absent. There'd been some talk, he was told, about having a guard outside the cavern in the event Father returned unexpectedly. Perhaps he was in the Upper World. The farther off, the better. Once the bargain was struck, the dwarves had become elaborately polite to him, always bowing and tossing him greasy half-eaten joints of lamb or broken old bits of metal. But that man…Every time he stared down into the Copper's eyes with those cold, unfeeling round eyes, his griff fluttered nervously.

The man meant to kill him. What was holding him back? He doubted even Eye Patch or the dwarves could stop him—even if they wanted to.

And he smelled like dogs. Dog smell awoke an ancient fear in the Copper. In any case, it was time for a few last words. He'd have the egg shelf and his sister at last, or be dead.

"I keep my bargain. Two hatchlings," he said, using a rehearsed speech in the Dwarvish that Eye Patch—for he never learned her name—had taught him.

The potbellied dwarf started at that. Eye Patch chuckled to herself and said some lilting words to the dwarf, who grumbled into his beard.

"He says no good's ever come from teaching others Dwarvish," Eye Patch said in her bad Drakine.

"Tell him I'm going into the cavern now. I'll come back in a moment."

Eye Patch translated: "He says you'd better, or he'll skin you personally."

He squeezed out through the cracks—just—and swam across the pool. The egg cavern seemed vast now, a great expanse filled with comforting smells but doubtful shadows and the echoes of the waterfall. He returned to the dwarves and gave them that strange up-and-down waggle of the head that hominids used.

The dwarves began to tap at their chalk marks, timing their strikes to the splashes outside. The work went fast, as it always did when the dwarves had a plan to follow. They spent a good deal of time before and after each job arguing amongst themselves in their glottal tongue, but when in action together they were swift and efficient.

He slipped back out through the crack and felt his hearts hammering. He found a patch of dark well away from the now thriving cave moss and waited, every nerve alert.

Auron passed soon enough, sniffing as he hunted. The Copper fell in behind his rival, stopping when he stopped, moving when he moved. Auron paused for a taste of water at the waterfall pool and cocked his head in that odd way of his, listening. He slipped into the water. He'd heard the dwarves tapping!

Clever, my brother.

But not as clever as I.

Auron would head for the egg shelf; he was sure of it. He positioned himself on a low ridge of stalagmites at an alley the Gray Rat would use….

The cave wall fell away, almost silently, toppling inward into netting the dwarves had ready to receive it. Auron hurried from the pool, swimming like an arrow toward Mother.

He mustn't reach the egg shelf or things would go ill. The Copper would terrify Auron into screaming his unprotected lungs out!

The Copper jumped, landing full-weight on his brother's scaleless back. Mother's green gleam could just be seen in the distance.

"Got you! Death has come for you, softling," he hissed in Auron's ear.

The Gray Rat protested, clawed uselessly at the Copper's scales as he whined about intruders. The Copper bit him in the soft tissue behind the griff to shut him up. He gave the rehearsed speech, but couldn't help pouring a little extra resentment into it:

"I've lived in hunger and hiding since the day I came out of the shell, thanks to you. So you'll die now, as you should have died out of the egg. Two brothers, both stronger, and you ended up with the nest. It's time to right a great wrong. Nearly time, that is. First you get to watch Mother and the chatterer skinned. Stop writhing, you lizard—you're worse than a snake! Too bad you won't see me gorge myself on Father's gold."

He let the Gray Rat have a good look at Mother. He'd call out a warning and—

Blinding pain flashed up from his snout, and his vision burned white. He lurched away from the pain and Auron wriggled free. He bit at where he sensed his brother stood and got only air, and when he could see again, he and Auron were snapping at each other.

Why wasn't the fool screaming out a warning to Mother? The dwarves would be on him any moment! What did he have to say to get the Gray Rat to shriek out a warning? He heard a splashing and a clatter behind—the dwarves were gathering.

Auron wasted more time in speech making: "You live this day if you trouble me no further. Though when I tell Father of this, he may feel differently. He'll pull the mountains down to find such as you, who'd lead assassins to the egg shelf."

The words hurt almost as much as the tail-crack. Auron spun and hurried off toward the egg shelf at a dash, finally sounding a warning. A thrown net just missing as his brother ran.

Well, the dwarves would have to deal with that. He'd smelled his sister around somewhere; if he could find her he could hold her down until the dwarves could get a loop around her snout.

He turned and saw the dwarves advancing, widely spaced across the egg cavern.

Behind them he saw a gleaming helmet, two upraised wings, and polished black scale—dragonscale!—about the shoulders. The huge man was down here after all, carrying a spear that glowed and sparked like a log in the concentrated heat of a dwarf hearth.

What was this? The dwarves weren't carrying restraining poles and ropes. Instead they bore great bowed machines balanced across their broad backs, two carrying the bulk with another lifting the fletched end. Others had climbing ladders and spears, spears, and more spears, each with a thick crossbar to keep a pinioned dragon from pulling itself down the shaft toward the wielder.

He marked Wistala climbing toward a hole in the cavern roof above the egg shelf. Mother flung Auron up after her, then nosed at Jizara.

But Jizara stared out across the cavern, met his eyes.

Brother! Look out for the dwarves! We must escape!

The dwarves ignored him as they charged—later he thought it would have been kinder if one had split his skull with one of the broadaxes they carried across their backs—and he searched for Eye Patch. Where was she? He saw the potbellied dwarf, hanging on to the top of a stalagmite, giving orders and pointing with a gnarled bit of polished wood.

The Copper ran up to him, flung himself down.

"Spare the one on the shelf. My sister! My sister!"

The dwarf stepped on his neck. "Hmpf. You don't want to see this."

Ka-thun! Ka-thun!—the metal-and-wood contraptions of the dwarves launched their missiles, exploding into motion and dying a moment later, purpose served.

The dwarves yelled as they stormed toward the egg shelf in a rattle of metal—chain shirts rustling, shields banging, helm flanges rattling on shoulder plates, metal-spiked boots striking the cavern floor, and above all the kuu-kuuu-kuuuu! of the dwavrish war cries.

It sounded like the end of the world.

The big man went forward in a series of leaps, springing from prominence to prominence and jumping over formations the Copper had to climb. A flood of dogs led him, and more warriors of his kind followed behind, aiming thick arrows notched in curved bows like half-folded dragon wings.

The Copper smelled the brassy, hot-oil smell of dragonfire, heard the roar of flame devouring air. The shadows of the cave began to dance.

"In there under it, my lads. That's the style!" the dwarf-lord grunted. At least, that was what it seemed to the Copper he was saying, though how he caught the meaning without knowing the words he could not say.

The Copper heard his mother roar, and the sound made him tremble.

"Spare my sister!" the Copper squeaked.

The dwarf looked down. "Poor wretch. We'll not bleed her a drop. She's worth a lot to us. Now what passes? Dogluk, hold him."

The potbellied dwarf hurried toward the egg shelf, and the Copper scrambled up a stalagmite.

Mother lay on her side, chest heaving, neck and chest pierced by great shafts that showed feathers at one bleeding hole and gory barbed heads at the other. Her head still moved weakly, one golden eye rolling this way and that, bathed in fire leaking from her breastbone.

"You have won this battle, Gobold," she said to the dwarf. "But I keep a last trick. The war is not over. My young live. And they are free. Free!"

The potbellied dwarf walked over to her, laughing. "Your young? One of them led us to you. Don't look to your young. Greedy and selfish, like all dragons." The one she'd called Gobold struck her across the mouth with first one fist, then the other.

Mother spit out a broken tooth.

"They will avenge this day!"

The potbellied dwarf laughed and, still laughing, swung his ax and struck her in the neck. By the third blow his boots were awash in blood, his stout helm, beard, and arms splotched red.

The Copper's hearts ceased beating for a moment and he swooned.

A mass of dwarves, men, and dogs crowded on the egg shelf, embracing one another and letting blood from Mother's wounds run into their helmets, which they then passed around and drank. Dogs, wild with excitement, chased from wound to wound, sniffing, biting her where she still twitched.

Men stood, holding nets over Jizara with heavy boot heels. His sister lay frozen in terror, eye whites bright in the cave's gloom. The Copper wanted to fling himself down atop her, protect her, but the smell of dragonblood in the air had him clinging tight-bellied to the cave floor.

The big man came forward, his dragon-jaw blade out and ready. He stepped up to Jizara, glanced over his shoulder at the dwarves dancing and stamping about Mother's corpse.

"Mercy," Jizara gasped.

The big man laughed. "Nits make lice," he said in his rough Drakine.

He pushed his blade slowly into her throat, twisting it this way and that, and, whimpering, Jizara died.

Fiends!

A dwarf dragged him back by his battered tail, but the pain was nothing to the insensate anger flooding his hearts. A howl broke from his throat, every agony he'd suffered since the moment of his hatching gathered into a single scream.

Fiends!

A dwarf stood on his neck. The dwarf called another over, and they bound him in the leather strapping they used to bear their war machines.

The dwarves took up a chant. The Copper heard thwacks and chunks as they employed their axes, and then he heard a strange, high-pitched sound as some blew air through tubes.

Then the singing dwarves marched back out of the cavern, bearing their wounded and trophies wrapped in salty-smelling fabric on litters made of their spears. He smelled dragonblood everywhere.

One of the men pointed and there was some talk, but Gobold broke away from the others and grabbed the Copper by the crest and lifted his head. The Copper shut his eyes at what was coming….

But instead Gobold spoke, and again, strangely, he understood: "No. This feud started over bargains not being kept. Let none say Gobold—"

The dwarves called out at that; others clapped and stamped their feet or rattled their knives in their sheaths. The Copper struggled against his bonds, wanting to sink his claws into the dwarf's fleshy gut.

"Well, Fangbreaker, then. Let none say Fangbreaker is not true to his word. Or his threats."

Gobold the Fangbreaker let go of his crest. "Besides, he's worthless in trade. That foreleg's useless, and his tail's shattered. The cavern and its treasures are yours, O prince of dragons!" He laughed and slapped his belly. "The honor and glory of this day is yours." He bowed. "Enjoy."

The dwarf hurried off to join the others in their march.

Next the men left, leading their dogs—dried dragonblood made the curs' hair pointy—with the big man in his black armor carrying his spear across his shoulder, a bloody dragon ear dangling from each end.

The big man paused the march by the bound hatchling. He stared down at him, the gruesome flat face working obscenely as he thought.

The Copper felt his fire bladder pulse. He managed to spew a little yellow stream of sulfurous saliva across the dragonscale-covered boot.

The man chuckled. "That's more like it," he said in his rough, uninflected Drakine. "I'm your enemy. You may as well know my name. I'm called the Dragonblade. Know that I did all this—with your help."

Why didn't the man end the misery? Strike off his head, obliterate each bloody memory, the horror of what he had done…

"If you're my enemy, why don't you kill me as well?"

Perhaps the man sensed his torment, decided to leave him with the pain, alone in a cavern with the stripped bodies of his family. He just adjusted the burden across his broad back and called something out to his companions.

"Will you not kill me?" Some little flicker within him still wanted to live, then, for he waited for an answer.

The man expelled a long breath. "You should be wiped out. Bestial. Craven. Look at you. You sold your birthright for a mouthful of silver. The sooner the last remnants of the tyrant-wings are gone, the better for the world.

"Besides, I slay only dragons." He set down his spear and drew his long sword. The Copper shut his eyes again, and he felt a sharp tap along his back. Then a throbbing agony flared, worse with each beat of his synchronized hearts.

"Farewell, worm."

The Copper opened his eyes and saw a jagged rent next to his spine. Exposed meat and bone gleamed among torn scale. It hurt worse than the battering his tail had taken. He took a cautious breath—his lungs were still intact, though it hurt to breathe. The man had crippled his dormant left wing!

He panted in his binding, pain plaguing both body and spirit. He lay there for a long time, thinking slow, dark, wounded thoughts as his blood thickened across his back.

Mother had told him once to overcome difficulties. How did one overcome oneself? Self-destruction?

Hunger saved him, hunger and the sound of squeaking rats. He heard them moving toward the egg shelf.

He wiggled his head around and began to chew at his bindings. He bent as he reached for the straps on his saa and incautiously brushed his back wound against the cave floor, white-hot agony leaving him quivering for a moment, and when he came out of the hurt his brain took a moment to remember where he was. He forced his head between his sii and tore through the back bindings.

That done, he lay for a moment, too weak to do anything but breathe.

He crawled toward the egg shelf and saw a ghastly heap atop it, the end of a severed neck dangling off the egg shelf, cave moss in a tiny splash of light where the blood had pooled. Rats, fat on dragonflesh, crept along the cave wall, stupid and weakened by gorging.

He tore into them, biting and flinging them hard against the cave wall, and they dove for their cracks. One was too fat to fit back into his shelter, and the Copper solved his problem for him by biting him in half.

He didn't dare climb the egg shelf. If he got up there and saw what remained of his mother and sister, he'd go mad.

He found a riven helm and nibbled off some chain links. The metal tasted better even than rat. With that he remembered Father's hoard cave.

Father! What would happen when he returned to this?

Time passed, sliding by unmarked as he staggered around the cave. He couldn't drink from the pool, evil memories of the dwarves keeping him far from the familiar waterfall. He couldn't drink from the trickle; he'd spotted more gore and slaughter atop the moss-thick heap of dragon waste; the shadows of the cave held lurking recriminations; the stalactites and stalagmites were spears….

What sort of world was it where dragons were slaughtered in their own homes? He knew almost nothing of the history of his kind, but had a vague sense of the majesty and grandeur that once was theirs, passed down from egg to egg. He'd committed a crime against every drop of blood in his body, every glittering scale passed down from some ancestor.

A hard world, that was certain. Cast out by his own family. Betrayed by dwarves. Of course, he forgot his own intent to betray in his wretchedness, explaining to himself that the dwarves didn't know his plan. Any betrayal on their part carried the full weight of its own sin, not tainted by his own intent.

Then he went a little mad.

He may have even frothed at the mouth. He vaguely remembered thirst-thick saliva crusting on his snout when he came out of it, a good deal thinner and with claws worn down to dull nubs.

When he woke as though from a sleep-terror he found himself bleeding from a cracked scale at the base of his crest and between his eyes—he'd been bashing his head against a sharp projection shaped like a dragonhorn.

What had brought him out of it?

A familiar sound, a dragon roar.

"Irelia! Auron! Wistala! Jizara!" Father called. "Spirits, it cannot be! Not all! Curse the Wheel of Fire to flame and ash!"

Why did Father not list him with the others? Was he not part of all?

He tried to answer, but his dry throat was capable of only emitting a small squeak: "Fazer!"

Father didn't call for him because he had no name. He needed a name if he were to be called for.

He hurried toward the bellows but found himself stumbling on his crippled forelimb. He caught one quick glimpse of bronze tail-scale disappearing through the shaft that led up and out. Only Father's harsh, angry smell remained.

He found some deer that Father had dropped and nibbled a little, but had no appetite. He should save them for Father when he got back. Father would also need metals; he would return from his great battle with the dwarves needing them. He'd show Father that he hadn't eaten a single coin of the hoard, and in gratitude Father would share some with him again.

Thinking of the hoard…

He went to the shaft covered by the great rock. It had been moved aside and smelled of dwarf. He shut his nostrils so as not to be overwhelmed by the smell and descended into the cavern….

The cavern lay almost empty. A few pieces of copper had been left, and a bit of silver glinted toward the back where it had rolled under a projection, but all that remained was the lingering smell of dwarf. There wasn't a full mouthful left for him, never mind Father's vast jaws.

Father would give him some fine names. Thief.

Traitor.

Outcast.

He flung himself down and keened.

Later, he climbed out of the hoard cave and went to the much-reduced pool. The dwarves had rerouted the water so it emptied into some deeper cavern to facilitate their works and crossing into the cavern. It bubbled and belched up from a whirlpool. As he drank he could feel the current.

He heard a wailing Drakine scream from the direction of the egg shelf.

Did one of his family still live? Perhaps Zara had played dead so the dwarves would leave her alone. The smaller body he'd glimpsed was a cruel trick of the Dragonblade's. He hobbled as quickly as he could to the egg shelf.

It was Zara, green and alive and rubbing her fringe against a sharp spur of rock next to a great growth of thriving moss at the base of the trickle where the dragon-waste lay. He could just see the fringe on her back and the side of her head, but it was certainly her, gloriously alive and moving….

"Sizter!" he said, happy beyond words. She must need comforting, with Wistala lying dead next to her; the pair had been closer than stalactite and stalagmite run together.

"They killed her, Jiz…" he tried to get out, but the words came only with difficulty.

The green hatchling rounded on him, burning anger in her golden eyes. "I'm Wistala."

Confusion…certainty. He missed the rest of her words, or perhaps shut his ears to the accusations he knew to be true. It was Wistala; she'd returned, and she knew exactly what had happened and who was responsible.

Auron wasn't with her. He hadn't made it. Perhaps the Copper could reason with her, confess and beg for a chance at redemption.

"They lied," he said. He needed her to know the whys and wherefores. "A bloody cave, no hoard—"

She leaped at him, tripping in her fury. He fell on her, tried to keep her from biting him. If she'd only listen for a moment, he'd make it up to her somehow. "We need to overcome this, put it behind. Unite. The past can't be changed, but we can make sure—"

She wasn't listening; she was struggling. She threw him off; healthy, well-fed muscle with a good deal of strength in her stout frame forced him backward, over—

"It can be avenged," she said, biting and clawing for his underbelly, fighting as though in a duel to the death, not a hatchling wrestling match. Blinding pain struck as her claws found soft flesh at his eye. He fought madly, broke her grip, turned his good set of backscale toward her, and hit her with his broken and stiff tail. He scrambled away.

Alone again.

Wistala knew what he'd done, the enormity of it, bigger than the cavern, bigger than the mountains he'd never seen save in vague dreams. Somehow that was worse than the pangs of his own conscience. Wistala would carry this knowledge with her for the rest of her life and hate him forever.

How could he overcome her hatred? Or was it not her hatred, but his own, shared in some lesser portion by her?

Yes, he would overcome her hatred, his guilt, the horror that had engulfed their home. He staggered toward the pool, flung himself in, and let the whirlpool carry him away from his lonely and broken life.

Later he tried to remember how long he was in the water. The darkness made it a fearful journey. He slipped down through the whirlpool, went limp, and waited to become wedged in a crack or hole and asphyxiate.

Instead he had the sensation of bouncing off a rock, and then feeling air all around his body before he struck moving water again with a slap. Something about the smell and temperature in the water told him he'd joined an entirely different watercourse.

Oddly, the interest in that fact sustained him for a moment, long enough for him to right himself and realize he was in a fast-moving current in a tunnel.

The rushing current and the cold were enemies to be fought, and his body responded automatically. He turned to keep his nostrils above water, angled his frame so he rode the current with little effort.

At intervals he passed glowing dots, little clusters of eyes and wagging tongues. They flashed up and by so rapidly he never could make sense of them. In his experience anything regular indicated dwarves, though he couldn't imagine why they should wish to mark a tunnel of freezing water in the dark of the Lower World.

So when he fetched up against a stout chain hanging into the water, fully as thick as his neck, it was the easiest thing in the world to hang on and look around.

He recognized more marks, similar to the ones in the tunnel behind, differing only in profusion in their verticals and horizontals. Three caves were scarred with signs of mining. Cave moss, a good deal brighter than the kind he knew from the home cave, extended from the water from the common landing.

He reached out with his neck and found a grip, then let the rest of his body follow in easy stages, finally releasing the helpful, wide-looped chain with his saa.

He lay a long time and slept next to the rushing water.

Voices came to him in a dream full of dark rocks rushing by.

"Don't m'tell that m'knowing not the smell of blood. Fresh blood."

"Faaaa!" another voice bawled back.

He opened an eye.

"Here e'is. Traveler. A bit of washup from the river."

A horridly upturned face, all ears, black eyes, and nostrils, regarded him from the cavern wall. The thing had leathery wings, with a gripping digit not unlike a dragon's wing-spur. It was a bat, fully three times the size of the ones he'd seen in the home cave. And he'd never understood a word of their high-pitched chatter.

"E'breathing!" a second, smaller but wider one behind said.

"Cave lizard, m'think," the larger said, hanging from his tiny rear legs for a better look. "Strange sort. Hurt."

The larger extended his arms and flapped his leathery wings vigorously. They were thinner than dragonwings, almost translucent. The Copper could see blue veins in the skin.

Under the fanning and the light touches of the wing tips the Copper twitched. They tickled! He twitched.

He tried to give a greeting, but it came out as an unintelligible cough. He shook his head and righted himself.

"E'having a set of scale. A'wait!…E'be a dragon!"

"Faaaa!" the other said again, staying away from the Copper and just peeking out into the cave.

The hanging one rubbed his face up and down with his wings, licking his grip-digit and rearranging the face-fur, though there was only so much that could be done with such ugliness. "M'name's Thernadad, an e'be m'mated, Mamedi. A'begging your pardon, sir. Y'be hurt. W'can attend that for you."

The brightness in the creature's black eyes disturbed him a little.

"You're right, I am a dragon," the Copper said. "I do seem to be bleeding." His back wound had opened up again, and it hurt abominably.

"M'told you!" the hanging one said to his companion.

"Once!" the other said to no one in particular. "Once in a three-season turn e'be right, and now m'hearing it until m'let loose for the drop." But she licked her lips, and the Copper saw sharp white teeth.

"If y'will just shift closer to the wall, sir, we work best right-side down. Unless y'want us clinging to your scale, but m'knowing not the extent of your injuries…."

The Copper rolled and the bat shifted. It started licking at the wound on his back, and he felt a slight tingle that transformed into a pleasant numbness. He looked back, and the bat had worked his odd, jutting jaw into the wound and was tearing away ragged bits of flesh and lapping up blood with a blurring tongue that flicked in and out faster than he'd ever seen anything move in his life.

The bat lifted a blood-smeared snout. "See to sir's face, dear, with that soft touch of yours."

The other came forward a good deal more cautiously, eyeing the Copper warily. Finally she hung over him, but kept all her four limbs attached to the cavern ceiling, ready for a quick getaway. She dropped down and went to work in the region around his right eye. He noticed some blurring there, as though the eye regarded the world through a half-closed lid.

"Bit of a mess, here, sir. Just a'going to numb it down a bit." She began to lick about the eye, and he felt that same tingling followed by numbness.

"Y'carrying a set of tunnel nits, tight up against that scale. A'lurking in the moss a'waiting on a tasty bit of juicy skin, like always. May I?"

"Of course."

The Copper felt a tug and heard a crunch. Followed by another and another.

"Finished here," the female said. She touched him with a wing. "Excuses, sir. Y'permit some body work?"

"Certainly," the Copper said, enjoying the warmth beneath the numbness.

He felt the female climb onto his back, gripping at his scale, lifting and digging out insects with more tugs and crunches, moving slowly front to back. "That's kindness! That's generosity. So rare these days. E'be a gentle sort, e'be."

"Y'hearing m'disagree? M'found him, you thick cow!"

"Faaaa! Luck's the only thing y'got in this life, you great squirt."

The Copper fell into a pleasant half sleep, and heard little gassy emissions from the pair. "That's what m'call a feed. Indeed," the male—Thernadad, the Copper corrected himself—said.

"Y'wanting to get away from the river, sir," Mamedi added. "A trunk full of dwarves could pass at any time. Might a'spot your skin and throw out a hook."

The Copper dragged himself around the corner of the cave, ready for sleep.

"Watch out for snakes. Cave snakes in here," Thernadad said.

"E'be too big for all but King Gan himself," Mamedi said.

"Don't y'worry, sir. We'll be right above." Thernadad said more, but the Copper didn't hear it.

He had vague dreams of the bats clinging to him, swelling like great ticks, but woke to find his wounds crusted over with healthy-smelling scab, though they itched a little. His right eye bothered him more than anything; he could see through it as if through a mist, but everything went a little fuzzy and indistinct when he closed his left eye and looked only through the right.

He judged himself to be in a cave, vaster but lower than the home cave, branching off in every direction but up. Always there were the little channels of cave moss—in some places stopped up, glowing bright where the water still flowed. There were a good many small holes driven into the ground, as though something had been fixed there with spikes, like the dwarves had used for their water-diversion apparatus, but the work had long since been abandoned and the metal taken up. While nosing around he found a broken bit of spike and swallowed it.

He heard a flutter off in a corner and saw the big blood-drinking bats yeeking in voices pitched so high he could hardly hear them, and flapping their wings in each other's faces as they hung from the cavern roof. It seemed more of a squabble than a fight, so he ignored the commotion.

The odd thing was that he felt relieved when he saw them. It was nice to have someone speak pleasantly to you, praise you, even if it was only for the number of nits clinging to your scale-roots. And their chatter distracted him from the griefs circling in his mind.

He walked over to the pair, trying to strut like a proud young dragon, but feeling a little off balance, thanks to his stiff tail.

"You, there. Excuse me."

The bats left off spitting at each other. Both licked their gripping digits and straightened up the fur on their ears and chins.

"Sir a'needing something?" Thernadad said, rubbing his gripping digits together under his chin.

"What is this place?"

"Dwarf mine, long and longer abandoned," Thernadad said. "In my oldfather's time, there was a'feasting on draft horses and goats, but now there's nothing but mushroom-fed rats and moss-crawlies. And the snakes, of course, who a'eating our poor young."

"What were you fighting about?"

"Nothing of import to sir."

"Faaaa! E'be a heartless brute, to a'be telling the truth," Mamedi said. "E'leaving my sister to starve! Ooo, ooo, ooo!"

"Sir doesn't want to be a'hearing our troubles."

"Why will she starve?"

"The dwarves just closed off the old air shaft to a stock paddock and she's—"

"Shut it, you," Thernadad made a swipe at her ears, but she ducked over it.

"M'answering the nice young dragon's question! So now e'be starving and yeee-eyee-yeee…" Her story trailed off into high-pitched wailing.

"Oh, you should just bring her to this cavern. I'm going exploring. Maybe I'll pick up another set of cave nits."

Mamedi left off crying. "Oh, sir—"

Thernadad snapped his teeth at his mate. "Mind the snakes," he called.

He left them yeeking and boxing again, though Thernadad flapped his wings halfheartedly, as a veteran campaigner who knew a battle lost when he saw one.

This cavern was very different from the home cave. The dwarves had carved it almost wholly from rock, smoothed the floors, and laid the saa-width water channels where the mosses still thrived and offered some amount of light.

Deep pocks like spear wounds—no, like rat holes—could be found in profusion around rougher areas where they'd extracted their minerals. He sniffed one and smelled rat. There were damps and trickles, and these supported more colonies of cave moss and mushrooms, which in turn supported rats and mice. When backtracking to the bat cave and river outlet, he found a few soil beds where the mushrooms grew more thickly—the dwarves must have cultivated something in the soil other than mushrooms, for there were stakes and wire lines, but nothing but a few dead, tough vines remained of their crop.

He smelled more rat here and began to hunt by nose. He caught a flash of white skin and bit quickly and instinctively, cutting it in unequal halves. Legless—a snake! The back end had a big bulge—it had obviously just eaten a rat and couldn't creep away as he approached. It took a moment for the front end to twitch out.

He carried both halves back to the bats. Mamedi was away getting her sister, so he climbed up and hung the front end up where Thernadad could easily reach it, and swallowed the back half in one long inhale—with a little gulp at the thickening where the half-digested rat lay.

Thernadad nibbled and sucked. "Not to be a'criticizing, sir, but if y'leaves 'em whole, there's more to lap. Just give 'em a good shake and a crack against a rock, is how an experienced snake killer goes about it. They stay juicier that way."

"I wasn't hunting with you in mind."

"Oh, no, no, no. Of course not." He nipped out one of the snake's eyeballs and gulped it down. "M'sees your wounds are healing up nicely. Glad we got to you in time, sir, so's y'didn't bleed to death crawling out of the river."

The Copper looked over his many scabs and felt a little ashamed. He should have brought Thernadad and his wife back a whole snake, at that.

"Hope y'didn't chomp one of King Gan's favorites. E'be a mean one. E'doesn't like anyone a'meddlin' w'his snakes. Except hisself, of course. E'eats his own kind."

"King Gan eats his own snakes? Why would they keep such a king?"

"The others not be having much choice in the matter. E'says: 'They can hate as hard as they like, as long as they fear.' It's a necessity, like. There's precious little to fill an appetite such as his.

"A cave snake, sir, twice your length and more besides. The White Lightning. By the time y'knows he struck y'be dead. He's strong enough to swim upstream in the river if he likes. Lost my own poor father to him, and an uncle besides."

"Any area I should stay away from?"

"There's a swampy bit over there." Thernadad pointed with a vein-stitched wing. "Beyond that, a real honeycomb it is, where the dwarves struck gold. There's an air shaft to the surface e'using in summer. Y'be keeping away and not getting ideas, m'hoping."

"Of course," the Copper said. He squeezed into a crevice welled in shadow. "I'm for a nap. Wake me if King Gan goes for a swim."

Thernadad licked his grasping digits and cleaned all around his eyes. "Nowt a'gets past me, sir. Why, m'be having eyes that can spot a rat-tail twitch on the far side of the cavern, and ears that echo off a pinched mouse turd before it hits. M'begging the sir's pardon for the coarse language; m'be forgetting myself. Right! Ears down and all, on duty, quick's the wing and sharp's the tooth…"

Thernadad's chatter went on, but the Copper slept through the rest.

The Copper woke briefly at a slight smelly sploit of bat guano dropping. He rolled an eye upward and saw Thernadad hanging there, wings well over his face, making rasping noises in his sleep.

"There, e'be waking," Mamedi said.

Another, even wider than her and with two little bats clinging trembling to its back, also looked down at him.

Mamedi rubbed her grasping digits together. "Sir, not to be bothering sir, but it's been a long trip and me sister, e'be perishing hungry, and her brood a'be so hungry they barely a'clinging to her back. Just the tiniest of nips out of your tail; won't feel but a pinch, an' a little blood loss heals a big wound, good for the circulation an' all…."

"Just this once," he said, shifting so he could extend his tail.

Mamedi crept down first, found a scale nit, and crunched it down. "Oh, they a'be the very buggers. There's another. Sir, what y'been doing that y'picked up so many so quick?"

He craned his neck a little so he could look behind and saw Mamedi's sister and her children lapping at a slight, pleasantly tingling wound. Another bat crept out of the shadows and joined in the flowing feast.

"Wait, who's that?"

Mamedi lifted her snout from his scale-roots. "Her mate, of course. E's supposed to leave the father of her children behind when she moves into a new cave?"

"I imagine not."

"There's a lesson in generosity for you, nephews!" Mamedi said. "Remember it. Y'don't often see the like these days. E'be a very special gentle sort. It's a rare one that doesn't forge a favor and returns kindness with kindness, Thernie and me saving his life and all."

Her sister and family cooed and yeeked agreeable noises as they lapped.

The Copper dozed. He'd hunted again, keeping well away from the set of pools Therenadad had called "the swampy bit."

He wondered if the events in the home cave had been some terrible dream, brought on by exploring the pool, diving, and being injured when he fell into the river. He'd fallen in and out of consciousness often enough, or been half drowned when pulled by undertow. Could all the detail—the dwarves with their faint-glowing beards and the big man with the glowing spear—be the product of frightful, dying-hatchling dreams?

He told himself his family was alive and well. Not missing him a bit, of course, but such was his lot as an odd male—what had Father called him? Outcast. They were probably gathered around Mother on the egg shelf now, feasting on some thick-muscled oxen brought back by Father, and Jizara was singing after the feast.

"M'excuse, sir. Sir?" Thernadad said, climbing down the cave wall next to him.

"Yes?"

"The mate an m'talked, and since her sister's come to stay, we thought one more or less wouldn't make a difference." He went into a paroxysm of fur smoothing.

"Why are you telling me?"

"It's me old mum, sir. E'can't make it to the surface anymore, or survive the dangers out there besides. Pitiful shape she's in. If e'could just have a lick or two, e'doesn't have any appetite at all no more, hardly."

The Copper saw a half-white bat, small and frail, above.

"Oh, very well. I suppose her sister's somewhere behind, also starving."

"Oh, no, no. My brother. A great, well-traveled bat e'is; been down every hole in these mountains. Thousand and one stories. Now e'takes care of old Mum. E'pulled her up, again and again, to the cave roof on the trip so she could drop for another glide. E'perishing with exhaustion, e'is."

"So he needs some blood down his throat, too." The Copper felt his griff flutter.

"Sir, don't be a'taking me wrong," he said as the tiny old bat crawled down his back. "What you've done for us poor hangers more than makes up for your life being saved by quick thinking an' skill and charity. Wonderful thing, charity. Never know how it a'gets paid back in this life or the next. Here, y'be excusing me, her old teeth, you know."

Thernadad licked him a couple times, and the Copper felt the nook in his saa go numb. With a quick bite Thernadad opened a cut and the old bat began to lap.

Thernadad wiped the corner of his eyes again and again as he licked a smear of blood from his limbs. "Oh, sir. Me poor old mum. You've made me so happy. M'won't forget this kindness till the day I drop. No, sir."

"Rich good blood, this dragon," Thernadad's mother said.

"Oh, dragon," a great heavy bat said. He'd shifted to directly above the Copper with surprising stealth. "Haven't tasted that since I flew the whole way 'round the Lavadome. What a place. Thick with dragons. Not as kind as this one, no, nearly got my wings bit off. Y'be falling into the Nor'flow by accident and get carried all this way, m'lord?"

Thick with dragons? "Tell me more," the Copper said.

"Glad to, m'lord. It's only my throat, a'be drying up from the exertions."

"I suppose I can spare a little more."

The big bat dropped down to his flank.

"Ooooo, is there a party?" Mamedi said, crawling across the cave roof with her sister and brood behind. A couple more bats seemed to have joined the family.

"E's flowing nicely," Thernadad's mother said. "Great strong young dragon."

Thernadad's wide-bodied brother shoved his mother out of the way and pushed his nose in and drank. When he came up for air, he wiped his snout with his wing and dragged himself up the Copper's neck, where he threw a companionable wing around and gave him a bloody leer. "Dragons a'loving treasure stories. Ever heard of CuTar? How about the great glowing stone of NooMoahk? In old Uldam, it is, like a bit of the sun itself dropped into the earth—"

"I'd rather hear about this Lavadome. Where is it, exactly?"

"Oh, an awful journey y'had, to get so lost and confused. To get back y'be having to make it to the Antiope for the southward flow, and there's no good road, in the sun or in the dark, not hereabouts. M'taking another pull and think on it. Hey! Y'be getting out of it, you greedy beggars!"

Mamedi and her relations fought for a place in a wing-jostling heap at the cut in his tail. One of the bigger ones, more enterprising than the rest, had opened another wound in his tail.

"This is a bit much," the Copper said. He dragged his tail away from the greedy mouths.

"Y'be molesting our good host," Thernadad yelled from above.

"Faaaa!" Mamedi answered back.

"Off me mum, you!" Thernadad dropped down on one of his mate's relations who'd shoved his frail mother aside—less vigorously than her own son, it seemed to the Copper, but he was learning that the insult wasn't as important as who offered it. A full-out bat brawl started.

He curled his slit tail around himself—it bent in a funny and uneven manner, with bends more like a dwarf tunnel, thanks to the rod injuries to it, and alternately licked and blew on the cuts until the bleeding stopped, as the bats lashed one another with leather wings and tried to bite off oversize hairy ears.

He woke feeling tired and hungry. He checked his cuts and discovered a new wound in the soft spot just behind his shoulder. Though bat bites did heal clean and fast, and he could hardly feel the injuries. His head hurt, and he walked down to the river for a drink.

He sucked cold water, and his head began to feel better almost immediately.

Thernadad swooped by. "Sir, y'be wanting to get away from the river!"

Bing-bing. Bing-bing…Bing-bing! The metallic clatter was regular, and therefore alarming. He saw a light up the tunnel from upstream, reflected on the flowing water.

"Hurry!" Thernadad urged.

BING-BING!

He scrambled backward and set himself against the cave wall.

A long wooden trunk, a clattering bell anchored at the front and swaying lanterns hung in reflective hollows in its sides, rushed down the river, pushed along by the fast-flowing water. Through long, narrow slits he saw dwarves within, sweating backs rising and falling as they worked at some mystery on their craft. He caught one glimpse of a dwarf at the tail, hanging off a flange and working some kind of apparatus that descended into the water from the safety of a metal cage, and it was gone, moving as fast as a quick-walking dragon.

BING-bing…Bing-bing…Bing…Bing.

Thernadad alighted and smoothed his face fur. "Careful at the river now, sir."

"What was that?"

"The dwarves. They get about on those things here in the Lower World."

"It came from the same direction I did, with the current."

"Of course e'did, sir. Always a'coming from that direction."

"Then how do they get back?"

"Mother! Mother!" Thernadad called back, but not in answer to his question. The Copper heard air move above, and saw the old white-flecked bat turning tight circles low over the underground river.

"M'knew it," she screeched as she flapped back into the cave and rested. "Flies be riding with the dwarves. Snapped up two while y'be working your jaw."

The Copper's appetite had woken with a vengeance, and he began to sniff around the bank of the river. Perhaps fish lived within the fast-flowing current.

"Y'flying days be over, m'thinking!" Thernadad said. "Enjor, e'be saying you could hardly glide nomores."

She alighted next to the channel bearing a trickle into the cave interior and took in water with her quick, darting tongue.

She smacked her thin lips. "Oh, Thernie, just woke up hale this morning, m'did. Full of guano and ginger. M'wanting a bit of air under me wing." She brushed the fur forward on her face and dug in an ear and gobbled down whatever she found within. "This young dragon—yeeek!"

A translucent tongue shot up from where it rested next to the channel. It was segmented, with countless legs a blur, its body like living, mottled eyejelly. To the bat, thicker around than she and many times her length, it was a mortal danger, pincers at the front opening for her….

To the Copper it was breakfast.

He scrambled after it and extended his neck, bit down on the back half, and yanked it skyward. Legs tickling at his throat, he gulped it down.

He looked down to see Thernadad flapping his wings in the face of his mother, who blinked awake. She climbed onto his back and he scuttled back up, in that elbows-out fashion of bats, to the cavern roof.

"Twice grateful, sir," Thernadad said, panting a little.

"Any blood flowing this fine night?" Mamedi said, creeping forward.

"Out of it!" Thernadad bawled. She was out of reach, so he battled the air in her direction with his wings.

"Just thinking of refreshing meself. Like a new-mated bat you were last sunrise. M'be hardly able to keep a grip."

"Oh, son, m'be pershishing of that scare," Thernadad's mother croaked. "Just a wee drop; perhaps y'be persuading our kindly young prince now?"

The Copper saw other eyes shining in the darkness. How many bats had gathered in this cave?

"Sir—" Thernadad said.

"Leave me alone, would you?" the Copper said. He stalked into the cave, leaving the cluster of bats.

"Greedy sots!" Thernadad yelled, and soon the Copper heard the wing-flapping, tooth-snapping sound of a full-out bat brawl.

The Copper found a dark corner and rested. The seemingly still-twitching centipede wasn't agreeing with him.

He wondered about this Lavadome and the dragons there. It must be a wonderful place, with plenty to eat, for dragons to be gathered there. He didn't know much about dragon society, but he knew that Father had to fly far and wide so he wouldn't over-hunt an area—or so that snatched livestock were only a nuisance, and not a regular threat. Would they look kindly on the arrival of a distant relative, hurt by weary dragonlengths of travel?

And they wouldn't know his secrets.

He let off a burp, and the centipede finally ceased its attempts to escape his stomach.

The Lavadome sounded a long way off, and he couldn't fly like a bat.

But he could follow one….

The Copper lunged forward without really knowing why. A heavy force struck the ground behind and all he could think was, Curse that Gray Rat!—having instinctively avoided another of his brother's pounces. But he felt the weight of the thing in the air behind, in the tremor that ran through the solid rock when it hit.

He turned.

A huge, pale gray mass writhed over and around itself behind. A head that could probably suck him down as easily as he'd swallowed the centipede lifted itself from the mass, pointing its nose this way and that until it fixed on him.

"You picked the wrong cave, hatchling," it whispered at him.

The Copper didn't know of the old rivalry between snakes and dragons, the contempt in which the serpents held the winged and legged. Young dragons hunted the same game the great snakes did, so perhaps the old enmity was akin to that of lions and cheetahs in other parts of the world, competitors who struck each other's young. He certainly never heard the tale of the deaths of AuZath and Nubiel, dragons of Ydar. They were murdered by a serpent who injected his poison into apples, which were eaten by grazing horses, which died and were naturally devoured in turn by the dragons.

The Copper just knew he was afraid.

"You must be King Gan," he managed to say, though the words sounded a little croaky. Some instinct flared within; he hated the legless, writhing form. But fear froze him. They can hate as hard as they like, as long as they fear….

He'd never seen such black eyes. The way they fixed on him, so exactly aligned, it was as if the entire earth were a little off-kilter, as measured by the level of those eyes.

"I am. And all within sight, sound, hearing, and heat is mine. You are mine."

The snake flowed toward him. The Copper couldn't break off; all he could do was watch the eyes approach, twin balls rushing toward him, perfectly level….

Something boxed him about the eyes and crest. "Don't be looking him in the eyes!" Thernadad screeched, darting up and out of the way of the snake.

The snake lunged at him, suddenly transformed into pure energy. Its body seemed to vaporize into a white blur rushing toward him.

He ducked, hugging his belly to safe rock.

King Gan, forced by the bat's intervention to strike a switchback before he was ready, struck the Copper at the head instead of the base of the neck. His fangs, out and forward, folded against the Copper's young crest above his eyes.

The Copper felt hot liquid run down either side of his head as the snake became a snake again, and coiled back.

Fear flowed up from his belly, tightened against his breastbone. He seized up, stuck out his own neck, and vomited, fire bladder emptying toward the snake.

A spray of yellowish liquid, vaguely sulfurous, struck King Gan across the nose.

The great snake went mad. He whipped his head back and forth, writhed, coiled, uncoiled, knotted, until the Copper couldn't tell head from tail but could only run lest he be crushed as the snake rolled and whipped.

A dragonlength away he paused to glance over his shoulder. King Gan flowed toward his swamp as fast as coils would carry him, where he plunged headfirst into the shallow water of the moss-thick mire.

"Right in the pits y'be hitting him. Never saw the like—a'taking the venom out of ol' King Gan that way."

"The pits?"

"Everything here in the dark has a way of a'hunting that don't rely on light," Thernadad said. "Bats be having our ears, that lousy legpincher feels vibrations, and the snakes feel the heat of us poor warm-blood rodents. M'hearing dragons sniff for that what doesn't smell as bad as they do, but y'be free to correct me, cousin."

"Cousin?"

"Your life. Saved three times now. That be making us family, the way bats see it. Speaking of which, m'be working up a powerful thirst saving your life. How about a nip out of the old tail, real quiet, before a whole skytrail of the hungry beggars show up?"

Later, feeling a bit drained, and not just because of the blood Thernadad lapped out of his tail, the Copper rested. He perched high—hopefully out of King Gan's reach—and watched the mire. He heard an occasional bubbling hiss and a splash, as King Gan soaked the heat pits on his nose.

Some piece of him was the tiniest bit grateful to Auron for all the sudden pounces out of the darkness. Without the torments of his brother, he'd never have avoided the snake's first strike.

He began to cry.

The Copper slept but couldn't rest. He ate but didn't enjoy. He eliminated but felt no relief. More often than not he perched near the river tunnel, losing himself in its steady echo.

Auron and Wistala would come hunting for him. Wistala had already probed the home cave, looking for him, and both knew he used the pool. They'd never felt the pain of iron rods, or soft, promising whispers and kind touches that left one's head in a muddle.

King Gan still lurked in the moss-ringed cavern pools, according to the bats, and his snakes were more aggressive than ever—at least as far as the bats were concerned. One got some cousin of Thernadad's.

Which was just as well. The Copper had lost count of the number of bats gathered in the cave, each with a sad story, each begging for just a lap or two from a nipped-open vein. He'd be about to say no, and then Thernadad or Mamedi would dig at an earhole or push stray chin whiskers back into place and remind him of his escapes from death.

He dipped his stiff, dwarf-broken tail in the river, watched the cut it made in the current, the arrowhead pointing in the direction of the flow…

"Water Spirit, you brought me here for a reason. Give me your wisdom."

If he still lived, it meant the spirits weren't willing to take him back just yet. Scarred, lamed, and probably never able to fly thanks to the wound from the big man, he would be denied a normal dragon's existence. What female would take a mating flight that could last no longer than a leap from a rock top?

According to Thernadad's brother, Enjor, there were dragons somewhere upriver of him. That arrowhead in the current pointed toward them.

Did he even want to find more dragons?

He remembered Auron's stalking and pouncing, Father's indifference, Mother's shunning. Anger bubbled in his fire bladder.

Sometimes their deaths didn't seem such a crime.

He saw a six-legged scuttling thing crawling along just under the surface of the water, making the smallest of waves in the current. He plunged his snout in, grabbed it, flipped it out, and cracked its shell with a quick stomp of his saa before it could right itself. He tongued out the whitish, rather tasteless meat within and crunched down the legs and limbs. A little grit helped the digestion and was a pleasant change from the dirty, hairy taste of rat. If only he had Jizara to join him in the hunt. One could swim and toss the crabs out of the river; then the other could smash them before they could retreat back to the water.

Jizara's death was a crime. A betrayal piled on a betrayal.

He could almost hear her singing beside the river.

He hurried away, back to the holes in the cavern ceiling where the bats liked to roost.

He listened for a particular pair of squeaky voices.

"Oh, shove off! Y'nose be dripping all over."

"Faaaa!"

"Thernadad, you up there?"

The bats quieted. Thernadad climbed out of his hole and worked the back of his head with his gripping claw. "Sir be wanting something?"

"I need to speak to your brother."

Thernadad clawed his way across the cavern roof, poking his head into holes, climbing over sleeping bats, throwing an occasional elbow and getting swatted in return.

"What be going on. Party?"

"Oooh! Watch it, cousin."

"Enjor! Rouse yourself, y'fat tick. Sir wants to speak to you."

The brothers' mother popped out of her hole, moving with a younger bat's energy despite her aging frame. "Is a feed on?"

"What do you want, m'lord?" Enjor said.

"How do I get back to my people? The dragons of this Lavadome?"

"Eh? Y'be knowing that best, m'lord."

It took him several tries to get across that he couldn't get back to his own kind without help—help from the bats. Their little mammalian brains took a while to get around the idea that they could travel together. While bats understood sharing living space, the idea of traveling together didn't come easily.

"All roads in the lower world lead to the Lavadome, if y'follow them long enough," Enjor offered, after much thought. "Don't dragons have homing sense an' all that?"

"Mine doesn't seem to be working," the Copper said.

Enjor scratched his tailvent and sniffed at the residue before continuing: "The best route would be the rivers. Only problem is the Sou'flow be a weary and uncertain trip from here. You might have to go the wrong direction a'ways, then cut across, though that would take you near more dwarves and their works a'following the river."

"And then what?" The Copper felt a weight on his tail, found the white-flecked bat at her usual spot, lapping up blood.

"Old caves full of nothing but dark and bad air."

"So good y'be to us, sir," Thernadad said as the Copper's teeth ground against one another.

"Perhaps I could engage you as a guide," the Copper said to Enjor.

"Oh, m'be too old for such a fearful journey. Besides, there's old Mum."

Bats fluttered down from the roof.

"Oooo! A party!"

"There, open him up just under the knee; e'flows so nicely there—"

"I'll feed you along the way," the Copper said. "You and your mother both."

Enjor's eyes brightened. "That's a generous offer, m'lord."

"Faaaa! E's our host!" Mamedi said, leaping on Enjor's back.

"Off me, y'daft sot!"

But just as Thernadad shouldered his way into what was working up into a fifty-bat brawl, a bat let out a terrified death screech. A snake had reared up, biting a low-flying bat heading for the Copper's tail and dragging it to the ground.

"Sons o' Gan!" Thernadad shouted.

The Copper hugged rock, protecting his belly, and heard a pained squeak.

The cavern came alive with white shapes, pink tongues flicking as they rushed forward, coiled, struck, and rushed forward again. The greedier bats, stuck on the floor by the Copper's open wounds, fell first.

The Copper found himself eyeball-to-eyeball with a great white snake, almost a rival to King Gan himself. He felt his griff lower and rattle, and the snake pulled back, gathering itself for a strike.

It would flash like lightning when it hit, so the Copper preempted the fangs with an openmouthed rush of his own. The snake, for all its size, wasn't used to a dragon dash and seemed to slide in all directions in panic. The Copper bit for the neck—anywhere else on the snake would mean a counterstrike of venomous fangs.

The snake whipped its head sideways and the Copper went with it, clinging with claws and teeth. He struck the cavern wall, saw stars at the impact.

Blindly, he bit down hard, pulling with teeth and pushing with sii. The snake rolled and rolled again. The Copper found himself ensnared in coils. But they didn't crush; they just twitched.

He dropped the dead snake's neck and pushed away from the still-writhing body.

"Kill that one! The burning lizard!" the Copper heard. He turned his good eye to the sound and saw the great snake with a black-flecked face. King Gan's smooth nose was peeled and cracked.

Snakes dropped dead bats and crawled for him.

The Copper doubted he had the strength left to fight another such snake, let alone several, or King Gan himself. He ran for the river. A snake slipped sideways to intercept. He jumped over it before it could do more than snap at his legs.

He looked up. The surviving bats were fighting to get into holes too small for snake heads.

"I'm leaving! Enjor?"

"Good idea, m'lord."

"Leave the cave?" a bat squeaked.

"Who be a'needing it?" Thernadad barked. "Snakes and misery and too many bats lately." He glared at his mate.

"E'be our host! W'be coming along," Mamedi said, fluttering toward the river.

"Mum! Mum!" Thernadad shouted. He alighted on the chain hanging by the river mouth, then turned to search the tunnel and cavern beyond. "W'mustn't leave without m'mum!"

"Past her time, anyway," Enjor said, turning circles over the river.

"Mum!"

"'Ere me be!" a tiny voice squeaked. "M'been clinging for life to this fool dragon."

A trio of snakes followed as quickly as coils could carry them.

"Unless you want to swim, madam…" the Copper said.

Thernadad flapped down and alighted on the Copper's back. "Here, Mum, climb on."

She launched herself into the air. "M'be all right for a bit."

The Copper slid into the river, hugged his limbs to his side, and let his tail rather stiffly propel him through the water. He found that if he took a full breath of air, he could sink and let just his head ride above the waterline.

He gave a glance back and saw a snake plunge into the water, but its fellows clustered at the bank.

With a bend, a dropped shoulder, and a wave of his tail, the Copper rounded on his pursuer, and the snake fled upstream.

The bats fluttered overhead. For all the elbow throwing and head butting they did when clinging to the rock ceiling, they maneuvered in the air expertly, avoiding outcroppings of rock, the river surface—and a hatchling's tiny crest.

They left the brighter mosses of the tunnel for a dim line of growth that existed at the edge of the river, clinging to the rough-hewn tunnel. Every now and then the tunnel widened and the lines fell away before coming together again where tool-work scarred the rock.

At one "lake," Enjor swooped down and guided him toward an outflow. Colored lights glimmered across the lake, reds and blues and oranges, but he had no desire to investigate and risk another encounter with dwarves or whatever else lived down there.

Swimming was tiring—his bad leg dragged on the current, and he had to turn and push to compensate—so he preferred to float, keeping his lungs inflated and just waving his tail enough to stay afloat.

He became used to the cold of the water so quickly he feared he might be going numb and freezing to death. He struck out for the side of the cavern and tried a short climb and found all his limbs still able to function, though his hearts were pounding from the slight effort.

"M'be needing a rest, anyway," Thernadad said, landing. His mother clung to his back, a tiny white-flecked thing atop his bulk. Her spurt of energy must have given out.

The others soon landed.

"M'be perishing," Mamedi said. "Just a tiny drop of blood, sir."

"I need my strength," the Copper countered.

"Faaaaa!" she said. "You're just floating there. Us on wing be doing all the work."

"M'mind be muddled with exertion and shock of seeing cousins slain right and left, m'lord." Enjor coughed. "A fork be coming up in the river. Unless I have my wits w'be going wrong."

The Copper was tempted to tell him to return to the cave and deal with King Gan.

"Oops, you'd better be climbing higher, sir," some young relation of Mamedi said. "Another dwarf boat a'coming!"

The Copper saw its light before he heard the faint ring of the approaching bell.

From what he could remember of the craft, the only dwarf who could see out the front was in a cage at the back of the boat.

"I'm tired of swimming," the Copper said—though he'd been floating, there was no reason for the bats not to think him as tired as they were; otherwise they'd each clamor for blood. "Let's ride with the dwarves."

"Muh?" the bats chorused.

"You cling to rock well enough. Hang on to the front of the boat."

"With all that racket?" Thernadad said. "A'deafened by that bell? Can't echo with all that noise."

"Leave the steering to the dwarves. Anyway, I'm going to ride for a while. Try to keep up."

"The lordship's right!" Enjor said. "M'be for it. The dwarves know their business."

The Copper slipped back into the water.

Bing-bing. Bing-bing…Bing-bing.

It filled the tunnel like an angry dragon, light and clanging and churning as it cut through the water.

The Copper reached for it, but the front had been smoothed where it met the water. He slipped beneath its prow and felt the pull of current toward the bubbling stern, clawed frantically, and finally got a grip on a sort of rail running the underside of the vessel. He locked sii and saa on the projection and used it to climb back to the nose end.

He rode for a moment between front point and bow wave, catching his breath. Using the power in his saa and his good sii to grip, he managed to round the nose and found the bats huddled unhappily, their gripping digits white with terror. Worked metal in regular spiral shapes had been driven into the bow. Whether it was decor or functional he couldn't say, but it did offer a grip.

He wrapped himself around the bow as comfortably as he could.

"M'feel like a bit o' flushed dwarf-waste," Thernadad said. His face was wet from being splashed.

"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.

He lashed out and down, heard a brief squeak as he crushed a bat in his jaws. He swallowed it.

The other bats yeeked in terror.

"Stupid sot," Thernadad said. "That'll teach 'em some manners."

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.

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."

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.

"Stop it," the Copper said. "She's dead."

The other bats crept across the ceiling, yeeking at one another in the shadows.

"That's three lost. How many more?" Mamedi's sister said. "This dragon's not such a lucky strike after all."

"No one asked you all to come," Thernadad said. He made to fly up, but the Copper put a sii claw on his wing.

"Let's keep moving."

"Once a bat drops…" Enjor said, flapping back up to the ceiling. "M'lordship's right."

"And just be leaving her here?" Thernadad asked. "Bats should be living above the bones of their elders."

"I'll carry her, if you like," the Copper said. He picked up the cooling little body and swallowed it whole.

"Awwwww, sir," Thernadad said. "That was unkind."

"She had enough meals from me. One in return seems just. You'd rather the rats and slugs got her?"

"Y'see another gone," Mamedi's sister whispered. "Who's next?"

"The Lavadome's worth a few odds 'n sods droppin'. Like outside, underground."

"Long way yet," Enjor said, whipping back. "Little to eat until w'be reaching the river."

Enjor hurried the party past another shaft plunging down—the source of the bad air—and they entered some naturally formed caves. The moss here was the natural variety, faint blue and green threads that vanished whenever the eye moved. White things with waving antennae slipped into cracks as they approached, and insects with bodies like glass froze against the striped cave walls.

The older bats grew tired and clung to the Copper as he walked, and only Enjor, tireless for all his bulk, and some of the first-year bats had energy to flit around.

A bat squeaked.

"What's that?" the Copper asked.

"Boktemi found something," Mamedi said.

A brighter patch lay ahead. The Copper smelled rot and metal on the air.

The source of the odor was two figures sitting back-to-back, dead for a day or two at most.

"Ahhh, that be more like it. There's some juice there still, down in the lower quarters," Mamedi said. She crawled off the Copper and began to scratch around at an outthrust leg. Tendrils of blue cave moss had found the bodies as well, and climbed toward wounds on the bodies.

The Copper examined the faces. These were no dwarves or men; they were thicker-skinned than either, pebbled like a dragon's stomach and with thick ridges of horn making fearsome flanges at the skull and jawline. A row of spines, thin as straw, grew from their backbones.

They wore helms, though not in the dwarvish fashion. These helms were open, a series of reinforcing rods that capped the natural ridges on their skulls, and had a fearsome spike on the top. One's spike still bore a bit of dried gristle.

"Are these—"

"Demen," Enjor said. "Ech. The blood's gone bad."

"M'be calling the eyeballs," Thernadad said.

"A'taking more than your fair share!" Mamedi protested.

"Says who?"

"Faaaaaa!"

She jumped up on one of the creature's shoulders, bristling for a fight.

"Easy, now," the Copper said. "I'm trying to read this."

"Who be a'caring how they got here?" Enjor said, shoving a younger bat away from some slow-seeping fluid.

"Blast these thick skins," another bat commented from the darkness. "Wish these were dwarves."

The Copper tried to ignore the bats. The two demen bore grievous injuries, yet no dead lay around them. So they must have fought elsewhere before sitting down to succumb to their wounds. But why back-to-back? And why hadn't their fellows carried them to safety?

He suspected that the answer to both questions was a lost battle. They were either on guard against the victorious dwarves—or whomever—or something deadlier lurked in the darkness.

Threats in these caverns or no, he needed his strength. He chewed down a mouthful or two of the rotting flesh and the metal tip of a scabbard, then crept off to sleep scales-out in a protective nook.

He woke and found two new brown-stained wounds on his tail.

The greedy bats had taken advantage of his sleep.

"Thernadad!" he roared.

The bat flapped over, and the Copper waved his tail in front of his upturned nose.

Thernadad combed his ears. "Sir, m'be telling them to take only a lap or two each. There be so much energy in dragonblood, and w'be all bone-weary from the journey. Only a few drops out of your great body, nothing to you, but a lifesaver—"

"I was tired enough as it is. Now I'm drained. Who am I going to ride on when I get tired?"

"They be a rotten bunch of sots, yes; m'won't let it happen again."

"You've got only three songs, Thernadad, but you sing them well."

He stalked back toward the bodies of the demen. "Tell them to keep clear. I'm having my breakfast and I'm tempted to juice a bat to wash it down."

"Told you his lordship—" Enjor said.

"Faaaaa!" Mamedi screamed, backhanding her mate's brother with a wing tip. "Y'be the one saying he wouldn't miss—"

He ignored the fighting and nosed around in the corpses. Their vital organs were a putrefying mass—he settled for a bit of thick shoulder. The blood had drained down from the upper half of the bodies, and the shank had tenderized a little as it aged.

A clattering—a pile of dry bones falling was how it struck the Copper's ear—made him look up, still attached by an un-severed hunk of tendon to the corpse of the deman.

He couldn't say what appeared out of the dim light, for the cave moss lit only the lower underside of its body, only that it was frightfully spindly, standing on many legs, with two long, pincer-tipped claws on its front limbs, a cluster of eyes, and a long rise up from the tail, curling around.

He'd seen a scorpion or two in the home cave. They liked the dark and the cool, and if you flipped them and gave them a good smash at the leg joints with your tail they had tastier meat than a slug, though a good deal less. But those were compact little creatures.

The bat brawl stopped.

Odd how the bats looked up to him. It was only a lucky splatter that allowed him to escape King Gan. And this armored monstrosity…it would stick him with that barb and lift his slight body up in those great claws and drag him off to some dark hole.

He backed up, wanting the bodies of the demen between him and the scorpion. The tendon running from his mouth to the corpse tightened, and the body lurched.

A blur, and then a thwak sound—the spindly scorpion struck the deman's corpse. The force of the blow knocked it over and its wiry helmet fell off. The Copper hugged the cave floor and the helmet rolled, its arc limited by the spikes, up against his nose.

The scorpion rushed forward and took up the corpse in its claws, and the deman's companion, now with nothing to lean against, slowly sagged a claw's breadth at a time. The scorpion rounded on the motion, wary, and struck again with its tail. It pulled its prize in a little closer and guarded it with the other pincer, as though the second body meant to challenge it for the meal.

The Copper ever so slowly tongued the snared tendon out from his teeth and took the deman's helmet in his jaws, trying to think his way through a fog of terror that kept his sii and saa from obeying. Maybe he could ward off a blow, the way dwarves did with a shield….

The vast creature, for all its size, was a slave to its senses. No doubt it would take the corpse it had acquired back to whatever hole would accommodate those long, thin, segmented limbs, and eat in peace. But how long would it be until it grew hungry again? Would the short, regular steps of a dragon hatchling draw it after them?

Summoning his courage, he pressed his tail against the leaning corpse and gave it a shove so it spilled over toward the scorpion.

The insect let out a shocked, whistling breath and struck with its tail again.

The Copper dragon-dashed forward through two of the impossibly thin legs, got under the thing, and struck upward with the spiked helmet, right at the joining of its eight limbs.

He pulled back down just in time to feel himself stepped on as the beast sprang sideways, crashing heedlessly into the cavern wall. It tipped, fought to right itself, claw arms and tail waving this way and that.

The Copper didn't wait to see whether it would die or not.

"Enjor—which way?"

"Oook."

He threw the helmet at the bats. "Lead the way, curse you!"

The bat flapped off and the others followed. The Copper kept up, and as the fright seeped out of their bodies they collected themselves in a cramped corner, where he could press up against the ceiling with the bats, catching his breath.

He listened for that bone-rattle sound of the thing's feet, but heard only his own hearts pounding.

"You killed a cave scorpion," some young nephew of Mamedi's—Uthaned, he thought the creature's name was—said.

"The dead men did the fighting for me," the Copper replied.

"What be that to us? Bug juice is poor in vitality," Mamedi said. "Besides, w'be leaving the body behind."

"Ooo, m'be famished, how about—" one of Mamedi's relations began.

"None of that, now," Thernadad said. "Our host has done enough. Suck air and saliva for a bit."

The Copper hardly heard them. He wished he hadn't thrown away that helmet in a fit of temper. If nothing else, he could poke the more annoying bats with it.

"Good news, m'lord," Enjor said.

"Almost any change could be good news." Food, freshwater, an end to all these twists and turns. Even a change in light level. He was tired of groping through the dark, led on by bat yeeks from patch of dim moss to patch of dim moss.

"W'be at the river."

The Copper had been walking for the last thousand paces or so with just one eye open, trying to sleep as he slid his three good legs forward and hopped over his bad.

"How far?"

"Y'be smelling it just over this next incline."

The bats flew wearily ahead. He climbed up a rocky tunnel. Someone had cleared a path of loose boulders.

"All I smell is dwarf."

"Must be a'fighting with the demen again," Thernadad said.

They passed over a makeshift wall in the tunnel, the source of all the loose boulders, and descended. The Copper smelled wood: Splintered shields lay all about, some with arrows growing out of them. He extracted a few arrowheads and swallowed them. What had made this dark pocket of emptiness worth fighting over?

"M'perishing," Thernadad gasped.

"We'll rest."

The Copper hoped he could find fish in the river. His appetite had progressed from tickle to gnaw to worry two marches ago. He curled up. Past the "wall" the tunnel turned into another series of chambers leading off in various directions, mostly down.

"Lights. Lights!"

It took the Copper a moment to realize that he'd been asleep. He shook his head, clearing cobwebs some industrious spider had woven on his ear. He scanned the downslope with his good eye, marked the beams of light waving around, probing corners.

Behind the beams of light he saw the outlines of glowing beards and thick curves of light-frosted helmets. Dwarves.

"A'searching the cavern," Thernadad said. "Better run, sir."

"I don't think I'm up to it," the Copper said. "Here, all of you gather 'round; let's go down this incline. Oh, never mind the damp…I've got an idea."

The Copper clung to the cavern roof in the downslope, hidden by a series of serrations not very different from the ones on the roof of his mouth. The dwarves had broken up into smaller groups to better search all the chambers and shafts of the system behind the wall.

A dragonlength below and up the slope from him, the bats lay on the floor, as relaxed as he could make them, save for Mamedi's sister, who cowered in a crack for fear of being stepped on by a dwarf.

The dwarves probed the darkness with their lights and began to descend into the chamber. This had better work, or he had nowhere to run….

A dwarvish lantern flicked across a length of stiff bat wing, and the Copper got a momentary glimpse of the delicate finger bones and veining in their remarkable construction.

"They're going to step on us," Enjor yeeked.

"Faaaa!" Mamedi said. "Keep your ears down."

The dwarves froze in their tracks and grumbled to one another. One made a loud sniffing sound.

The young bat, Uthaned, gave a twitch.

The dwarves hurried back up toward their fellows, shouting warnings.

"Good work, you all," the Copper said. "Everyone gets a lick of blood for that. Except you," he said to Mamedi's sister. "No risk, no reward."

The dwarves passed over to the other side of the wall, leaving only a group of sentries standing at the gap. As soon as the others moved on, the sentries stacked their arms and started a low fire. Soon the smell of sizzling meat cooking had the Copper's mouth gushing.

If there had been just two dwarves he might have become reckless and attacked them for their food. Luckily they left four behind, so the hatchling wasn't even tempted to rashness. The only alternative to listening to his empty stomach groan as the dwarves ate was a quick escape, so he roused the bats—most of them reenergized by a quick nip from his tail—and crept away. The only sentry the dwarves left watched the long incline on the other side of the way, not the warren of caves the dwarves had already searched.

And so they came to the southbound river—the Sou'flow, as Enjor styled it.

And were checked again. One of the dwarvish hollow-log riverboats rested in the current, in what seemed the dazzling brightness of cave moss and numerous lanterns at front and back. The craft waited, hooked to chains hanging down from the ceiling and occupied by a dwarvish crew.

The Copper evaluated his chances from the shadows. With the amount of light in the cave, he felt as though one of the dwarves focused lanterns right on him, but told himself it was only the long trip in the dark that had oversensitized him.

He heard a strong breeze moving with the current. Between the wind and the sound of water in the tunnel breaking against the swinging chains and the back of the dwarf boat, they wouldn't hear him slip into the water or swim past.

The dwarves seemed glad of a chance to escape their vessel, and lounged ashore, sleeping or tending to their beards or gathering around a flat bit of cavern floor where they spun coins at one another, stamping and barking their satisfaction or disgust with the course of the game.

Enjor flapped off to hunt for insects on the water, and the Copper saw a dwarf comment and point at the bat's darting black form.

"I need a diversion," he told the bats. "Thernadad, Mamedi…could you fly up to those chains hanging from the ceiling? Start a fight, as noisy as you can."

"Us? Fight?" Thernadad said. "A more unnatural act m'can't imagine! W'be as close as ever two bats—"

"M'willing," Mamedi's sister said. "M'making enough noise, if sir will let me have a nip first."

"After."

"I'll go too, Mum," Uthaned said. His speech inflections had grown almost dragonish, but then, he was a young bat with more brains than the common run of them.

The bats flitted off and alighted on the chains. There they commenced yeeking and swatting. The dwarves noticed the commotion and turned to watch.

The Copper had considered creeping across the cave wall or ceiling—the dwarves would be less likely to look there—but he opted for speed instead of concealment. He shot from his hiding spot at the dragon dash—though his was a little strange in that he used his front limbs only to land; his saa did all the work because of his withered sii.

One of the dwarves bent to pick up a loose rock. The Copper couldn't say what made him shift course—later he decided it was both dislike of dwarves and a worry about the bats losing heart to go on if they lost still another—but it wasn't a conscious decision at the time.

He caught the dwarf in the back of his stubby knees as he threw, and felt a weight come crashing down across his back.

Dwarvish yells of alarm—none louder than from the dwarf unexpectedly finding himself atop the hatchling's back, riding it like a child attempting to make a pony out of too small a dog—followed him right into the water, where he kept running along the river bottom, weighed down by the dwarf.

He lost the dwarf to buoyancy and surfaced in the current and hazarded a look back, expecting to see the dwarves running to their weapons or the ship to give chase.

Instead he saw one bedraggled dwarf scooting out of the water as quickly as limbs and backside could carry him, and the other sailors bent over, laughing so hard their glowing beards dripped light.

The journey south took a good deal more time, both because of the greater distance they traveled and the infrequency of tunnel boats. Most of the craft on this part of the river were warships thick with well-armed dwarves and throw-lamps. He didn't dare ride any of those, for dwarves rode in the front, with a good view of the prow of the ship, sometimes tossing lines to probe the water depth.

He even encountered one being laboriously drawn back up against the current by dwarves using poles and hooks, sweating and grunting and chanting as they worked.

They clung and splashed to another vast lake, and Enjor advised them to make for the other side. It was easy enough for the bats to fly, but the Copper had to fight his way through a waterfield of spongy pads anchored to the bottom by long roots. A black slime thick with biting water mites infested the underside of each pad. The slime caught in his scales, and he began to itch immediately.

All the Copper could do was curse the bats for their ability to fly, and his curses were all the more venomous thanks to the foreknowledge that he would never fly, even if he lived to see his wings uncase.

They lingered at the edge of the lake for a day or two in a warren of half-submerged rocks and sand and muck. He had no way of telling time other than his body's natural rhythm, as he tried to scrub out the nits with sand and freshwater, scratching himself until he was raw and bleeding. In this case the bats were a positive blessing; their saliva took away the itch as they worked over every sore spot.

But the nits always rallied and returned. Each time he woke, fresh masses had gathered.

He'd never forget the fish of that deep, vast lake. They were bony, and had thick hides with horny dimples running the back and side, with long shovel noses. But the softest, tastiest flesh he'd ever sampled ran from just behind the jawline and along the underside down the long tail. If he dipped his tail in the lake and poked at the bottom, overturning rocks, the fish would often come, drawn to whatever creatures were stirred up by his probe. And more often than not he could get his jaws on one before it could flee, though he once was taken on a wild underwater ride by a specimen three times his own length.

He came back bloody-mouthed, having lost a pair of hatchling teeth.

He feasted on fish and the bats feasted on him and the nits feasted on both—though the bats were better at digging the creatures out of their fur. Scale had its disadvantages.

But after a period of rest and feasting on fish he felt the urge to move on. The bats took some convincing, for there was good insect hunting, especially over those awful pads in the middle of the lake, but after one of their number was eaten by some swooping thing that was all mouth and wing, they saw the wisdom in moving on.

Just when he thought it was time to strike off downriver again, they were delayed by one of the younger bats giving birth to a trio of young. The bats had a strange system of feeding their young in which the newborns lapped fluid from their mother. It struck the Copper as being wasteful; to his mind the sooner young learned to feed themselves the more likely they were to survive. But considering the utter helplessness of a pink newborn bat, their system had been literally born of necessity.

Thernadad cadged twice-daily feedings of dragonblood for the nursing mother. The Copper agreed, mostly because Thernadad said a well-fed mother would mean well-fed young, and well-fed young would soon be able to cling to their mother as she clung to the dragon, and thus they'd be able to get going downriver all the sooner.

It meant more fishing, and as fish were growing scarce at that end of the lake, the Copper explored its edges. He found a few old dwarvish camps and exploratory tunnels filled with little but mold and slime.

During one of these trips, swimming back with half of one of the bony fish floating along in his mouth, he came across the wreck.

He'd missed it during his climb across the rocky edge of the lake because it was more than half-submerged. It was a strange sort of vessel, hardly large enough for more than three dwarves, only a quarter the width of the other vessels, and entirely lacking in machinery. Parts of it were charred, and the wood that was in contact with the water had rotted.

The Copper found a few tasty metal pegs made out of a greenish heavy metal. They smelled hearty, and he extracted one with his teeth. Finding it palatable, he pulled out a second one, and the vessel parted from its lower half and rolled over, breaking into two pieces, one of which was dry and still floated.

What dwarves could do, he could. He hopped into it and, after a moment of precarious rocking, found that it supported him. It was curved, and about half of it went under the water. He found that if he lay between the two raised arms he could be mostly out of the water.

He pushed off and paddled with his saa, alternating with tail swipes when his legs grew tired. With this, he didn't need a dwarf boat. It wasn't quite swimming, nor could it be called riding, but it would do.

He paddled it back to the rocks where the bats waited, clinging to the cavern ceiling, and showed off his prize. The bats were more interested in the fish than the find.

The Copper had gotten better at pounding ideas into minuscule bat skulls. Or perhaps the bats had grown used to following his orders. "This way you don't need to fly all the time. You can rest on the wood edges, there."

"Ooo, m'be not liking that," Mamedi said. "Bit of dwarf craft. It'll go wrong and end up on top of me in the water!"

"Then cling to my back. I won't roll over. Here, try."

She stayed where she was on the rock until Thernadad gave her a shove. Then she fluttered down and settled on his head.

"You're blocking my good eye with your wing."

"M'regrets, sir," Mamedi said.

He pushed out and swam in a slow circle. He wondered how the piece of wreckage would handle in the stronger current of the river tunnel. But even if he bumped his whole way to the Lavadome, it would be easier, and warmer, than swimming. The dwarves, for all their faults, knew how to get from one bit of cavern to another with as little discomfort as possible.

Another advantage of the Copper's discovery was that it allowed the young mother bat to travel with her young.

Looking back on matters later, he counted the final leg of the journey as one of the key turning points in his life. A thousand tiny circumstances might have caused him to miss the camping demen and their egg. Had he ridden lazily in the piece of wreckage instead of paddling, had he not passed up likely landing places because of dwarf-smell and pushed the bats, had it been another season when the river flowed more slowly, or more quickly…

The strange chain of events started when he saw a distant shape in the dim light of the tunnel. A brighter patch of light that marked a tunnel mouth revealed it as three hominid shapes rowing in a little shell of a boat not much larger than his own bit of wood.

He reached out a saa and arrested his drift.

Three demen struck the tunnel mouth. Two dragged their boat out of the current while a third scouted, spiny projections on his back bristling. The two began to take baggage out of their craft.

"Kuu! Kuu! Kuuuuu!" a chorus of voices shouted.

The demen shoved their boat back into the river.

The Copper heard a scream, and he saw one of the demen fall toward the boat, sprouting new quills in the chest and leg where none had been before. He dropped some light-colored orb into the water as he fell. His companion shoved their craft into the water and fell on board.

The Copper saw sparks fly as missiles struck the tunnel wall.

A group of dwarves charged into view, striking at the deman who'd gone ahead to scout. He fought like a mad thing, lashing out with blades in each hand, head-butting dwarves with his spiked helmet, but fell when an ax caught him across the horned spine. The dwarves didn't stop to celebrate, but threw wide, flat-bottomed craft of their own into the water and pursued the wounded deman and his companion.

The Copper waited with the bats, who filled the time by complaining of exhaustion and hatred of the river and travel. He ignored the chatter. The only bat he couldn't afford to lose was Enjor.

"Keep out of sight," he told the bats. "If I jump off the craft, just drift with it for a while."

He approached the tunnel mouth. He caught the smell of burning flesh—heard the dwarves chattering as they burned the body of the slain deman.

A pale white object just beneath the river's surface caught his eye. He arrested his silent drift and retrieved it by pinching it between his good sii and the crippled limb. The dwarf watching the river stiffened and took a step toward the bank.

It was an egg. Smaller than a dragon egg and wider at one end than the other, it had a faint, clean smell that reminded him of wet sand.

He released his grip and let his raft continue downstream. The dwarf looked out onto the river, unsure of his own eyes, but by the time he called his fellows over the Copper was rounding a riverbend.

He heard a distant hammering sound. Not long later they came upon the dwarf boat, anchored just beneath a series of cracks in the cavern wall that led to another hole in the cavern roof. He smelled demen here, and a little dwarf.

The dwarves had anchored their craft with an arrowlike piece of metal driven into one of the cracks. The Copper bumped up against the dwarf boat.

He dug his teeth into the line holding the boat. A quick grind of his teeth and the boat commenced drifting. He tossed the egg into some canvas at the bottom of the boat, hopped in after it, and sniffed around the bottom. He found some bread and dried meat wrapped up in waxy cloth, ignored the bread, and swallowed the meat.

As he ate he sniffed the boat. It was a clever thing, with canvas sides held up by wooden slats. It leaked a little through the hinge at the bottom. He guessed the dwarves folded the boat up to carry it through the tunnels.

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?

He felt a cautious nip at his leg. He reached out with a saa and heard a bat squeak.

"Thernadad! You!"

"Sir! Didn't think you'd miss—"

He squeezed.

"You're wrong there. Listen, Thernadad, or I'll squeeze every bit of my blood back. I'm putting you in charge of my body. I wake up with any more slits, nips, or cuts, no matter how well concealed, I'll assume you did it and squeeze you."

"Yeek!"

"I can't hear your voice at that pitch."

"Y'be very generous, sir," Thernadad grunted.

"Spread the word."

"M'don't suppose, as a gesture to our new understanding…"

"No. Once we're across the river and I'm in the Lavadome. Not before."

The cavern was eerie in the way the lighting changed into full dark. He understood light changing from cavern to cavern, but the idea of the amount of light over the lake altering over a single digestive cycle was new to him.

He set off into the water, the three thriving young bats riding upon his crest. The water was a good deal warmer than that of the underground tunnels, warmer than the rock or air, thus the low mist that hung over the water.

"Stay low," he suggested to the bats on wing. "The, umm—"

"Griffaran," Uthaned said, turning a tight circle over the Copper's nostrils.

"—griffaran shouldn't be able to pick you out through these mists."

Something else was using the mists to hide. A boat, a version of the deman craft he'd encountered on the river, rowed across the water as fast as paddles and demen hands could move it. It held three demen, two rowing and a third in the center.

The deman in the middle of the boat lifted up a round, white object—an egg! and wrapped it in a cloth before placing it in a basket. He wore colorful feathers tucked through each ear piercing, set so they covered his shoulders.

The Copper's stomach rumbled. An egg or two would be just what he'd need to get him the rest of the way to the Lavadome.

He swam alongside the boat, matching its direction and speed. The boat neared the far bank. The rowing demen jumped out, and the other climbed out, then extracted his basket. The rowers lifted the boat.

Appetite helped him make up his mind.

"You'd better be old enough to fly," he told the young bats.

He dove and swam for the basket-carrying deman. It became more of a wet scuttle as he neared the shore.

"Jt tht aleet," a deman shouted as the Copper pushed past a leg.

He spun, using his tail to take the deman's legs out from under him. The hominid fell into the shallow water with a splash.

The Copper didn't want to fight the demen so much as cause confusion and make off with an egg. He nosed into the basket and extracted an egg and—

Urk!

His head was jerked out of the water. The jerk originated from his neck, and his neck was attached to a line, and the line was in the hands in one of the demen rowers.

It took two of them to drag him, fighting madly and still clutching an egg to his breast in his good sii, and haul him out of the water.

Another deman got a line about his saa.

The Copper fought on pure instinct, determined to either die or be freed of the lines. He'd never be bound and tortured again, and if that meant his hearts' blood pouring into this underground lake and his last breath rising up through those far-off cracks, he'd overcome even the fear of death.

He fought to bite through the line on his saa, but the line on his neck pulling in the other direction restrained his reach. Every time he tried to reach up to dig his claws into the line on his neck, they pulled again to straighten out his body so he couldn't reach.

All he could do was hiss, gurgle, and fling his tail this way and that.

The demen, pulling him first one way and then another, dragged him out of the water and toward the cavern, shouting to each other in their rattling language. The third got his basket of eggs and ran into the rough-cut, low-hanging tunnels.

He returned with a short tube. He made a gasping sound, and his obscenely short throat expanded. He put the tube to his mouth.

A bat struck him between the eyes. The dart that flashed by the Copper's ear missed. The other two young bats who'd been nursing on his blood were flitting back and forth between the demen with their lines.

If the Copper hadn't been otherwise occupied by being choked and dragged, he would have gaped in astonishment. Bats, shy and fearful as any whisker-quivering rodent, attacking creatures a thousand times their own size! What had gotten into them?

The deman with the tube hissed and extracted a strange sort of a weapon, a long, wide-ended blade. He didn't raise it like a dwarf, but reversed it so the blade was shielded under its elbow. It whistled through pointed teeth and came forward.

The Copper tried to right himself, but his bad sii slipped on slimy stone. He went down on his side. The deman at his saa ran forward and looped the line around his free limb and tied them at the joints, avoiding the Copper's claws.

The blade flashed down and then up, and the Copper saw his own blood fly into the air, splattering the deman.

Anger, hurt, fear—his breastbone convulsed, and a wide gout of flame shot out of his chest.

The deman had only a moment to regret his inexperience in dragon fighting before the liquid fire consumed his face, chest, and shoulders. He lit up like a dwarf's oiled torch. The deman with the line at his neck caught a little of the spray on his arm.

Pain struck—hard. Harder than the blade, or the tail-breaking iron bars of the dwarves.

The strain at his legs vanished as the deman groped for the fallen blade of his companion. The Copper wiggled toward the water. And here was the dropped egg!

He tucked it under his arm and saw a pair of stout, thick-skinned, horn-jointed legs next to him. He looked up to see the remaining deman ready to chop his head off.

A pair of black-taloned claws opened above the deman, took him up by the shoulders, and the Copper felt a wave of wind flow across him at the beat of feathered wings.

The Copper turned his head so he could watch the flier with his good eye. It was a strange sort of creature, a half dragon with twin tails, hardly any neck at all capped by a tall, arching head with a hooked snout, and feathered wings. It rose and turned, screeching, and another almost identical flier passed, flying in the opposite direction. The other reached out a claw and grabbed the kicking legs of the deman, and with only the briefest of jerks the deman parted messily.

Another flier came down and plucked him out of the water, its talons closing around his chest. Yet another approached, and the Copper wondered what it would feel like to be torn in twain and for how long he could watch his back half being carried off, but the second bird-creature flew under, eyeing him before alighting at the riverbank and poking around in the deman's boat.

The feathered avian carried him up, across some of the tall towers of rock, and to a splinter of stone that made a convenient ledge. It dropped him and turned its leathery-skinned head almost completely around to watch him, a fierce cast in its eyes thanks to streaks of yellow and blue eyelid decorating the round black orbs.

It didn't have a tooth-filled mouth, but a beak with a pink-white tongue inside. He saw it as it opened his mouth to cluck at him. What he took to be twin tails were in fact only feathers, like the heavy-ended blades he'd seen in the demen's hands, only longer.

"Tlock—the fire was you?" it asked in good Drakine. The Copper noticed that it had a silver ring set into the fore-edge of a wing bone near the shoulder.

The Copper could only pant, the wound in his chest burning.

He shut his eyes, and opened them again only when he heard high bat yeeks. The great bird-creature had left as silently as it had dropped on the demen. Thernadad, Mamedi, Enjor, and one or two of the other bats clung to a crack in the rock.

Real greenstuff grew on these pillars of stone. Enough light must come down through the cracks to support true plants rather than the mosses and lichens and slimes of the Lower World.

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….