“Not safe. Not until you are with me.” I heard his soot-tinged words grunt and gasp in pain. He was right of course, and I gingerly pushed myself up and opened my eyes, wondering where I actually was…
To discover that I was surrounded by stars.
Wow. My astonishment pushed me to my feet as I tottered forward. I was in a cavern. A very large cavern somewhere deep under the Shifting Sands, and I could see that there were the occasional sprays and fountains of sand from above, as the cavern must be riddled with holes.
But that wasn’t what captivated my attention. It wasn’t dark down here at all. In fact, it shone with light.
The cavern was filled with Earth Lights—and I mean filled. I had never seen so many of the glowing crystals before in one place. Even under the roots of the Masaka Mountain, we would be lucky to find one of the small nests of magical crystals a week, if that! The Earth Lights were crystals that appeared to react to any light that they encountered—so you might be tunneling and chipping away at the rocky walls, only to suddenly be blinded as your candle hit the exposed, diamond-hard edge of one.
But the Masaka Earth Lights were blue, I thought as I stumbled a few steps to see that, down here, the ‘crowns’ of crystals were also green and white and turquoise. Most of them were small, sitting along crevices in the walls or the floor—but I also saw that there were some truly giant Earth Lights as well—with spears that were as thick as my leg, and stood taller than I did!
We cannot let Inyene find this place, I thought instantly, before I heard a sound.
“Arghk.” It was a pained cough, and I spun around to see there, half lying in a nearby drift of sand was the torso of Naroba, struggling feebly as she must be waking up in the same condition that I had been in!
“Naroba! It’s Nari—I’ll help you!” I said, rushing over to wipe the sand from her brow and arms before grabbing her under the shoulders and pulling—
“Ach!” Naroba let out a hiss of agony. “My leg! I think it’s broken…”
I paused immediately and instead excavated the sand to get at her limb, and seeing that yes, it sat awkwardly underneath her. “Okay,” I said, stepping back. “Wait here. I’ll find a way out. If there’s a way in, there has to be a way out…” I said, cursing myself for not carrying water on me during the battle.
Naroba nodded that she understood, but she didn’t say anything as sweat gleamed on her face and she squinted her eyes in pain. Right, I thought. I needed to find a way to get an injured woman out of a cave that could be hundreds of feet below the surface of the Plains for all I knew… I looked up, once again seeing the Earth Lights everywhere, as well as a huge drift of sand that took up the entire lower part of the cavern. There seemed to be tunnels half-filled with sand branching off here and there, and I guessed that this was a part of some ancient watercourse: The very same one that probably fed the quick sand that we had navigated just earlier.
“One of those tunnels just has to lead back to the surface, right?” I muttered to myself, as Naroba appeared to be concentrating hard on not screaming.
Ymmen? I asked in my mind, wondering if there was a way that I could ask the dragon to sniff out any air or tunnel openings around him…
But, as soon as my mind brushed his, I found that there was a whole other set of problems that we had to consider.
“Little Sister! They are coming!” Ymmen said fiercely. I could sense him in my mind, as he turned his great bulk around and stood, wobbling slightly over the collapsed dune where I and Naroba had vanished. I could feel his desire to start digging at the sand above us—which was something that would surely get us clear before too long!—but it was dampened by a new danger.
“What is it?” I whispered into the spectral light of the cavern, to hear my voice returning back to me, again and again and again…
“Abominations. More of them,” Ymmen said, and then my mind was filled with a sudden image, like a vision. It was the dragon sharing his sight with my mind, of course. He had done it before, but every time he did I was still always amazed by it.
A dragon does not merely see as a human does. Their eyes are sharp enough to see a flicker of movement from a fish under the water, or to see the sparkle of sunlight on a shield of a warrior several leagues away…
What I saw now was an image of the sand-edged horizon that was so crystal-clear that it almost made my heart break. It was as if every part of the image was in perfect focus, and, should I have chosen, I knew that I could have concentrated on the golden dunes and seen the play of Plains meercats on their surface, or the eddies of the sand as the wind played with them.
But Ymmen’s vision was instead directed at a scattering of dark shapes like birds, who were growing larger with every moment. But there was something terribly wrong with their size given their distance—they were far larger than birds, their movement awkward and clumsy in the air.
And they trailed thin trails of graying smoke after them.
Mechanical Dragons! Inyene had sent more of them. “How many! How soon will they arrive?” I gasped in alarm.
“Soon. Within but a little time,” the dragon informed me, and I realized my mistake: Dragons don’t use timepieces like water or bronze-cogged clocks, do they?
“I see eight—nine—ten…” Ymmen growled.
“Ten!” I burst out. That was more than double what we had just fought—and Ymmen was now seriously injured, and the last time that I had seen Montfre he was barely conscious!
“I can beat them.” The dragon’s ire was indefatigable, and his fury at seeing them was such that I almost believed him. Almost.
“No, Ymmen—you are injured. You need to heal…” I said. We had to retreat, somehow, I was thinking. We had to find a way to get away from them, my thoughts raced… But Inyene’s dragons will be in the skies! I panicked. They could just fly after us. As good at surviving and hiding as the Daza were, we now had almost a hundred other people who would have to learn, very quickly, the sorts of skills that it took a lifetime to learn…
The cavern, I thought. Maybe if we could bring the people down here then they would be safe—at least for a bit…
“You don’t hide from a challenge,” Ymmen said seriously. I knew that he was talking dragon-logic, which wasn’t the same as human-logic, and relied on the fact that a dragon was a flying, fire-breathing mountain of scales, muscle and sinew…
But he also had a point as well, I realized to my horror. Even if we had time to bring all of the people down here into the tunnels, could we get the people down here before Inyene’s monsters saw us? I didn’t think so. And wouldn’t that mean that the metal dragons could just wait or dig us out whenever they wanted?
And these ones had smoke, I remembered from the dragon-sight. The fast-moving four that had come for us hadn’t been trailing smoke behind them, and they also hadn’t used their horrible approximation of dragon fire, had they? The two facts had to be linked. If these new abominations could use fire, then what was to stop them from just burning us alive as we hid down here.
“That will not happen while I draw breath!” Ymmen roared, and I even heard his distant, muffled cry from far above.