Page 51 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

The cat spoke from deep in her throat: long garble garble hrrr hunt and fair garble garble hrr blood.

Why, felines used words of Drakine!

“Beware blighters bearing gifts,” Wistala said back to her in Drakine, quoting an old dragon-proverb.

“Watch out for—ummm, dirty presents?” Yari-Tab said, as she trotted up a leaning column that reminded Wistala of a windblown tree on a mountainside.

“Close. That was dragonspeech.”

“Well, I never! I feel like I’ve got a new tchatlassat.”

Wistala thought she knew the word. “A . . . clutchmate?”

“More like a—umm . . . cousin. A distant blood relation who is also a friend.”

What was the word for that in drakine? Ah yes, kazhin. “My mother never told me about felines.”

“Mine taught me to hunt, and that’s about all. But that’s felines for you. Great at telling their own tales and looking out for same, indifferent to anyone else’s. We’ve got to find that basement now. Ahhh.”

Yari-Tab jumped down from the column to a protruding branch, then to a broken windowsill, and then to the ground in a sort of controlled fall. She landed a good deal lighter than a dragon.

“Can you fit down this, Talassat?”

Wistala looked down what appeared to be an overgrown hole. Brambles trailed over an overhanging pile of rubble.

Yari-Tab ventured in and turned so her eyes glittered from the darkness. Above it three ancient arches, all broken open at the top, hosted a tangle of spider-legged plants.

“It widens out a little way down. Can you smell the rats?”

Wistala stuck her head in, smelled the rat urine mixed with old leaves and wormcast. The gap yawned bigger than it looked; it was mostly closed off by roots and their attendant mosses and trapped leaves. She pushed her head down and through, catching bits of lichen and dry air-root in her scales.

She found they were on stairs, Yari-Tab already down and through another hole, a half-filled passageway.

She tracked by smell and sound—the cat’s footfalls were as silent as morning mist, but Wistala could hear her breath and sniffing.

“I wish I had my fire,” Wistala said.

“Fire?”

“Yes, dragons can spit fire. I don’t like not being able to see. A torf here and there makes all the difference.”

“That’s part of the fun, hunting by ear and nose. Though all this talking has sent the rats running.”

“Sorry. I like being underground—I just want to explore thoroughly so I can feel safe, and unless dragons live long out of the sun, their eyes can’t work on nothing.”

“It’s light you want? Want to see a bit of magic?”

“Cats and rats! You can do magic?”

Yari-Tab purred. “Oh no, but I’m fond of pretties. See this, my all-nose-and-no-smellsense-tchatlassat.”

Wistala heard the cat scamper up a wall and more prruming.

A faint glow, like an angry dragoneye, threw a faint amber light across the chamber. With a modicum of light to work with, Wistala could now see the passageway they traversed.

She reared up and sniffed at the light source. It was some humble gem, perhaps enchanted in a fashion, for it held a glowing liquid within. As her nostrils breathed on it, the light grew brighter.

Yari-Tab extracted a clump of dirt from her paw and a cobweb from her whiskers. “There you are, Talassat. Some bit of forgotten magic—they’re here and there in odd corners in the underground. The men have stripped them from the chambers they can get at. No one’s found this one.”

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