Page 52 of Dragon Strike (Age of Fire 4)

She could reach it by rearing up on her hindquarters. She shifted her saa and heard an alarming snap, but on inspection she discovered she’d just broken a moldy rib cage with muck and growth clinging to it. She dredged up a skull with tail-point and perched it upon tail-tip and brought it up to her eye.

Blighter, it seemed, and judging from the heavy brow, jutting jaw, and oversized incisors it had probably been a big male. Fallen from above or killed somewhere else, dumped here where the odors would only bother dark and feed the mushrooms.

She sniffed the big mushrooms, especially the smashed caps that had cushioned her fall. A second leafy undergrowth covered the well-floor, oblong pads, big and spongy enough for a blighter to sleep upon. Both smelled wholesome enough to eat, if she was in the mood for vegetation. She also smelled slug-trails, and for a moment stood again in the egg-cave with Auron and Jizara, with Mother watching from the shelf. The memory relaxed her. She could do with a nap.

Mustn’t!

The moldiness of the mushroom patch overwhelmed her nose, but another faint scent drifted down from above, one she couldn’t quite identify further than determining it was animal. First she raised her neck, testing limbs and tail, then reared up and explored the lip above.

The stairs broke at the ledge, and she sensed a tunnel of some kind—there was airflow. After their brief interruption, the stairs continued up again.

If she was to regain the surface she would need her strength.

She found the origins of the water, a mostly blocked-up crack in the wall. She lapped and lapped again, her head clearing with every swallow. The water was pure and clean and cold, thankfully, and even had a faint soda-mineral taste that pleased her exceedingly. Real dragon-water, this. No wonder the mushrooms thrived on it.

She cautiously ascended the stairs to the ledge, poked her head in the tunnel. Still that faint odd animal smell.

“Gaaaa!”

She recognized the bray of a goat. What in the worlds was a goat doing down here? She stuck her head farther into the tunnel. It seemed a natural one, curving up and rising a little, thinning as it did so like a dragon-neck. The goat looked lame, dragging a broken rear leg. Had it tumbled down the shaft and survived a miraculous landing on one of the spongy pads?

Poor thing. She could make a quick end to its suffering, and get a meal besides. Just what she would need to get herself back up that shaft.

The goat fled as best it could, and she took two quick steps after it, opening—

Kzzzzzt!

Odd. Stunning sensation. Her senses fled for a moment. She felt suspended, nowhere in time and space, cognizant only of what felt like a strong blow somewhere on her back.

The ground struck her under the chin, hard. She sensed motion all around. She smelled ozone, as though fresh from a thunderstorm, and suddenly she was with Auron, who was comforting her against the terrifying flashes and noise by tempting her with the taste of rain-drops on her tongue.

Cries and shrieking voices like birdspeech broke out all around. The sounds were kind of a pidgin Drakine mixed with clucks and hoots and croaks, a jamboree of mismatched winged creatures.

She recognized the dragon-name NooMoahk.

“Mizz! Anklamere’s grook cracker works bakka still, ptuck! Dragon-dropper, yak?”

“Yak! Cluck-glug! We braaak NooMoahk! Chukku-na.”

“Nip! Nip! Dulg mak NooMoahk, got us dragon-she!”

“Nie-hruss, ventwipe.”

The motion resolved into dancing forms seen through eyes incapable of focus, but she felt rather easy about it. Something fixed about her snout. She smelled a hot melted-metal scent. She recalled stories of killing dragons by pouring hot lead in their nostrils and other horrible hominid tricks, but she felt oddly complacent about the idea of it happening to her.

One eye focused and she saw a heavy leather band, studded and reinforced with hot rivets, stuck about her nose.

A bent-over shape, almost folded over on itself with an assortment of strange plates and spines and bits of creepily soft-looking flesh showing beneath and violet eyes brighter than any wildflower she’d ever seen stepped forward. It supported itself on a curved stick studded with what looked like hatchling teeth.

She heard a clattering above and rolled one eye up. Some cave above, with false cave-wall broken away . . .

A trap. She’d stuck her head right in.

Other hominids, vague in the dark, not quite so curled up but still bent, with legs that stuck out sideways and up more like spiders than men, rushed here and there with lines and chains.

“Ye speak to Paskinix, dragon,” the creature said. For a moment she couldn’t say which language it spoke.

“I’ve lived four generations, dragon, four!” it continued to her in competent but unaccented Drakine, tearing off a piece of raw and bloody goat-haunch with teeth like broken rocks, “waiting for another crack at NooMoahk. Didn’t expect that greased projection and the undermined crack when ye climbed down the shaft, did ye? Well, thy recklessness cost ye a wing. Thy Tyr thought he’d sneak in the back door after bashing in the front, eh?”

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