For some reason the darkness of the Cellars bothered her. There was always a certain amount of mess and disarray, though it had improved a great deal since the new apprentices took over. She knew they’d been rolling out extra lamp oil for the party and breaking out spare torches and lanterns, and it showed. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but she lingered under the lamp before setting off toward the Lodger’s chamber.
When Ileth was about twelve, one of the old women of the Freesand, a bay widow who sold tobacco and nuts and oiled tie-pouches to put them in, told her that women especially needed to listen to their gut more than their head or their heart. The heart flew to all points of the compass, and the head was ready to rationalize away anything with Oh, it’s nothing to worry about, silly. But the gut you could trust. The gut never steered you wrong.
Ileth’s gut bothered her. Something was wrong up ahead. She had a horrible premonition of the Lodger, choked on a joint of meat, dying with no one there to run for help. She quickened her pace, afraid of what she would find at the end of the tunnel. It seemed a terrible distance to the light of the Lodger’s chamber and things were still. But not quite still enough.
With increasing unease, she’d covered about a third of the distance when she struck something. Her first thought was that she’d walked into something in the dark.
But the beam she’d thought she’d blundered into turned out to be a thick arm reaching from the darkness. It held her hard. Something huge and strong and reeking of beer yanked her off her feet and pulled her among the jumble of crating and shelving and barrels lined up in the passageway.
Gorgantern couldn’t resist a cackle of triumph. He slammed her against the wall and the world turned into fireworks and gongs.
“Got you, little piglet. You’ll oink now.”
He was wet, slippery. He’d greased his skin for a swim in the lake. She scrabbled for purchase with her feet and felt that he too was barefoot.
If his hands on her shoulders had closed around her throat, she would have died with a quiet crackle of cartilage and escaping breath. But he reached for her breasts. She’d been pawed there before. Her reflexes knew how to get away from that without much troubling her terrified brain. She slipped beneath his reach so fast it could have been mistaken for a magician’s trick. He grabbed her cobbled-together costume as she went, and she brought her heel, every bit of her dancer’s strength in leg and buttock behind it, down on his toes. She heard and—even better—felt an unmistakable crunch. The hand let go and she heard a howl through the blood roaring in her ears. Muscles strengthened and quickened by hours of exacting exploded and she was free of his reach.
She vaulted over a crate, caught her foot, rolled back to her feet in stride, and fled toward the Lodger’s chamber, yelling for all she was worth. She heard Gorgantern shove a crate aside as he limped after her. Later she reprimanded herself for forgetting her whistle; it would have echoed in the Rotunda; but the strength and terror in those hands reduced her to bare instinct.
Gorgantern staggered after her, swinging a bent iron crate-cracker he’d found somewhere. “Wrong way, piglet. No exit back there.”
“Murder!” she screamed as she ran. “I’m being murdered!”
She made it to the Lodger’s cavern, shrieking as she ran, only to trip on the gutter. She heard Gorgantern hard behind, flipped onto her back as she scrambled away—
Then a yellow shaft of light, heat, and noise filled the passageway. It pulled air away from her face. It was as though a tendril of the living sun came down and ran a fiery finger up the tunnel. And Gorgantern simply vanished.
One second he was there, bathed in the approaching light, and the next vaporized clean out of existence. There wasn’t even a body to fall or break into pieces. He was consumed.
She threw up her arm against the heat and the light. The next thing she knew, the Lodger had swept her up in his wing (she didn’t even know dragons could carry things in their wings until later it was explained to her that they were sort of a long-fingered arm) and, relatively safe from the fire in the leathery cocoon, survived the flames as the Lodger dashed through them in the odd rocking stride of a dragon’s leaping sprint.
Bounced around in the dark with an odd sensation of once again being a babe in arms, she felt dizzy and sick. When her head cleared, she was gasping, disoriented, out of a strange dream of the Captain knocking her down and standing wide-legged over her, roaring drunk. The dream dissolved and she was back in the Serpentine, drawing breath after gasping breath.
Sensible again, finding herself at the tunnel opening to the lift, she found herself looking into the alarmed eyes of the Lodger. His breath smelled like a hot lamp burning old grease.
“Ileth, can you talk?” the Lodger asked.
“That’s a . . . f-foolish question,” she coughed. Her lungs tingled. She broke into another series of racking coughs.
Figures dropped down from the ladders flanking the lift and she heard it clatter down to her level.
“There seems to be a fire in the—” The Lodger winced. “In the . . . passageway. I panicked. I must have some air.”
He lurched onto the platform, tucking his neck and tail. “Up. I must go up,” he growled tightly.
Ileth got to her feet, still coughing, and followed. She grabbed on to a trailing edge of wing and was pulled along as she used to be pulled when she’d grab sheep or dogs as a little girl. Yells of fire and a ringing alarm sounded from the junction. Others had discovered the fire. Finally she thought of her dragon whistle and blew it for all she was worth as she stumbled, clinging to the Lodger.
She smelled her own burned hair. There was some pain, especially on the arm she’d flung up to protect her face and on the exposed skin. The skin didn’t look like it was otherwise damaged. She’d heard bad burns didn’t hurt—at first.
The Lodger decided not to wait for the lift and climbed to the next level. Ileth hung on, listening to the dragon’s labored panting in increasing alarm. Oh no oh no oh no . . .
“Need. Fresh. Air,” the dragon said. He added something in Drakine she didn’t understand.
After an eternity they reached the Upper Ring. The Lodger, who clearly knew his way about, made for the exit. He held his front leg tight against his breast, resulting in an awkward, three-legged limp aided by a wing. The image of the dragging wing, particularly, alarmed Ileth. Something was dreadfully wrong.
She blew on the dragon whistle. “Make way! Make way!”
They must have made some pair moving across the Long Bridge, both sooty, Ileth with her hair singed and costume awry, the dragon staggering across the bridge. Someone called for people to fight the fire in the Cellars. The party dissolved.
At the other end of the Long Bridge the Lodger’s dragging wing knocked over the food tables. White-eyed and wheezing loudly, he didn’t notice, but he made it through the tunnel-like loom of Mushroom Rock and, skirting the little house where Joai served up soup and bandages, stumbled for the wall. Ileth thought she spotted the physiker’s white hair and ran to him, but it was just a portly man of Vyenn unknown to her. Ileth turned and watched in horror as the Lodger reared up, climbed over the battlements, and fell more than leaped over, his tail whipping up and over as loose as a cut line as he rolled down the precipitous slope to the bay.
Her injuries forgotten, Ileth ran after him. Heart pounding as though it sought exit from her chest, she found some stairs and made it to the wall. Disturbed rocks and dust were still heading down the precipitous slope to the bay where the Lodger was thrashing—no, swimming, snakelike, with limbs tight against his sides, for the shoreline.