I only knew I’d slept because I dreamed about Abdo. He was riding in the back of a wagon with several other people, jostling and bumping over a rutted country road. The road wound into the Queenswood, which was just turning golden and autumnal. At a bend in the road, where the undergrowth was particularly dense, Abdo suddenly leaped to his feet and flipped himself out of the wagon. His companions shouted in protest, some reaching out dark hands to stop him, but he was beyond their reach, somersaulting down the hill through ferns and shrubbery until he disappeared from view.
I heard his voice: Don’t look for me.
In the wagon, Paulos Pende stood shakily. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell down dead.
“Seraphina!” screamed a steam kettle, which, once I opened my eyes, turned out to be full-sized Eskar. “Ready yourself. It’s time to go.”
I was disoriented, and the first thing I wanted to do was look for Abdo in my head. The dream had been so vivid that I had the impression he’d really spoken to me, that it wasn’t a dream at all.
Of course, his message had been that I shouldn’t look for him. I felt my resolve tangle in knots.
In any case, there was no time. Eskar was snorting impatiently. I hastily wrapped the blanket around my ribs, and Eskar grasped me in her talons again. There wasn’t much further to go; the three dragons skimmed one more valley and landed at the edge of a glacier, silver beneath the narrow moon. Ghostly wisps of steam rose from a deep crack in the ice. Eskar set me down, stuck her head into the crevasse, and flamed the ice; our companion dragons paled to blend with the glacier and spread their wings to block her light. When Eskar had widened the crack sufficiently, the others squeezed through. I would have followed on my own, but Eskar took me up protectively and carried me in. I was glad once I realized we were in a downward-sloping icy tunnel, longer than it looked; even Eskar’s claws had trouble finding purchase.
We reached a flat floor at the bottom. My eyes were almost useless under the glacier; the ice was too deep for the moon to shine through, and the cavern was very dimly lit. I was more worried about the smell. A moist, clingy, sulfuric funk had hit us about halfway down the tunnel—and I mean hit, like we’d run into a brick wall of stench. My eyes watered. My nose finally gave up the game, but my throat still felt a thickness in the air and gagged in self-defense. The floor was covered in cold mush up to my ankles.
A scuttling echoed above us and a squishing below. Sparks rained in the darkness. I thought it was my eyes playing tricks, until the sparks became steady open flames at the ends of fifty long tongues, belonging to as many quigutl, the smaller, lizard-like cousins of dragons. My eyes adjusted; the cavern opened far larger than I’d realized, a cathedral of ice and stone enclosing a hulking mountain of festering muck. Quigs swarmed all over it, some with shovel blades strapped to their ventral hands.
“You’re trethpassing,” said a quigutl in lisping semi-Mootya, raising its spiky, lizardy head in front of us. On its hind legs, it was nearly as tall as me. Its eye cones swiveled, taking us in.
“We need to see Mitha!” screamed Eskar.
“If you know Mitha,” said the quig, flaring its head spines suspiciously, “then you know Mitha doethn’t work in the cesspitth.”
Cesspits. That would be the mountainous muck. I wrapped an arm around my face, gagging again, and tried not to think about my boots.
A commotion arose, a stout quigutl crawling toward us over others on the dung heap. He stood up in front of us, facing his fellows, and raised his hands for silence; he had only three hands. “I am Thmatha, Mitha’s cousin,” he said. “I know this dragon. She saved me from Dr. Gomlann’s experiment. He took my arm, but I’m alive in the pits, not pretherved in a jar.” Thmatha saluted Eskar. “I will bring Mitha.”
He plunged into the darkness, and we were left to wait. “Are you hungry? We’ve got dung,” quipped one of the others.
Eskar cried, “Seraphina, get out your flute!”
She couldn’t see the look I shot her in the dark; she might not have understood it if she had. “You want me to play flute. In the cesspit.”
“I do!” she screamed. “The quigs will like it.”
It meant taking deeper breaths than I cared to, but I tried to be a good sport and humor her. The acoustics of the dung-filled ice cave were extremely odd; my experimental warm-up notes echoed unpleasantly. There was a scuttling in the darkness; the quigs’ bobbing tongue lights closed in around me. I worried that the sound had upset them, until I realized they were jabbering at me. “What’th that? Do it again. Aim it at the western wall. That should give interesting reverberationth.”
I turned in the indicated direction and began to play a nursery tune, “Dance a Biddy Weasel.” The quigs chattered animatedly about the wavelengths of the notes, whether one could make such an instrument from a musk ox femur, and what sort of modifications would be required if one had no lips.
I glanced at Eskar; she nodded minutely. Somehow this was part of the plan.
Thmatha returned about an hour later, evidenced by the quigs shifting their attention. He and another quigutl were ushered up to the front, and the new arrival—who I presumed was Mitha—saluted Eskar the way a saarantras would have, gesturing toward the sky. Eskar saluted back. A murmur went up; as a rule, dragons did not salute quigutl. Mitha said to Eskar, “You brought us a novelty. You were alwayth generous that way.”
“It took me a long time to return!” cried Eskar. “This is meager recompense.”
Mitha gave a strange double shrug with his two sets of shoulders and said, “No matter. We’re ready. We’ve been ready for yearth. I hope this isn’t all the firepower you brought with you.”