“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.

Chapter 9

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.