I stared at Eskar, silhouetted in the feeble light: the shadow of her horns and spiky protuberances, her folded wings. She looked suddenly alien to me, full of secrets. She had not merely quit the Censors. She had not come here to see whether she could persuade the quigs to help. She’d already organized them; she’d been planning this for a long time.
There was more to her than I had guessed. For the first time it occurred to me that she was quite well suited to my uncle.
She conferred with Mitha, agreeing on what he should do and when. He replied, “All will be as you athk. We’ve cunningly rewired the lab, so we need only—”
“I trust your diligence!” she screamed, apparently not caring for the details. “You have two days. These hatchlings, Seraphina and Brisi, are to assist you in your sabotage.”
“Exthellent,” said Mitha, swiveling his conical chameleon’s eyes to look at us. “I shall keep them as thafe as my own eggth.”
Eskar signaled to Lalo, who began to climb back out of the tunnel. She made as if to follow him, hesitated, and turned back to me. “Three things, Seraphina,” she said, snorting acrid smoke in my face. “One: find Orma. Two: stop his excision, if possible. Three: secure yourself someplace safe during the fighting.”
She turned around so rapidly the tip of her tail hit me. Mitha kept me from falling backward into the sludge, but then he kept hold of my arm and took a sniff at my wrist.
“Well, call me a thalamander: you’re half human. How odd. Come on, then.” He started toward a tunnel on the right-hand wall, then paused and eyed Brisi, whose wings drooped forlornly. “Shrink down, hatchling,” said Mitha. “These tunnelth are too thmall for you.”
Brisi blinked at him dumbly, as if the smell had paralyzed her. I touched her scaly shoulder with my hand. “Into your saarantras,” I said in Porphyrian, supposing she found the quigutl accent difficult.
She shrank down, but she’d brought no clothing. Eskar hadn’t warned her, maybe because Eskar would have gone naked without a second thought. I pulled a linen shirt, doublet, and breeches out of my bag, led her into the less mucky corridor, and helped her change. She found the buckles and laces of Goreddi clothing quite alarming. Mitha waited, flicking his tongue flame on and off.
When Brisi was finally dressed, Mitha rose on his hind legs and walked at my side, one of his hands touching my elbow lightly for balance. We followed the corridor to a chamber, excavated into the living rock, where quigs processed the dragon leavings. Translucent orbs set into the ceiling provided an eerie, unflickering light. “Methane and solid fuelth,” said Mitha, gesturing toward pipes and tanks, gauges and kilns. “The labs run on dung. Helpth keep the facility hidden if there isn’t a cess-valley nearby.”
The passage narrowed again, multiple pipelines running along the wall. The flameless lanterns glowed upon the ceiling at intervals. At a nexus sat a curious conveyance, like a six-legged headless pony, wide as a bed, consisting mostly of gears and sputtering. It reminded me of Blanche’s mechanical spiders, without the creepiness.
At the thought of Blanche, I felt a pang. Except for my dream of Abdo, I’d barely thought of the other ityasaari in weeks. I had shied away from my shriveled garden. It was too distressing. Soon I would find Orma and we’d work out how to free my powers, and how to free the others from Jannoula.
Assuming Orma still knew me. I shoved that fear aside.
The mechanical pony had no seats as such; quigutl don’t sit like humans do. Mitha instructed us to lie on top of it on our bellies. I climbed aboard gingerly, grasping two leather loops to keep from sliding off. Brisi, beside me, gripped my arm with fingers like talons. Mitha clung to the contraption’s backside, behind the rattling engine, and reached around the side to pull a lever. The headless pony clanked along, snorting steam from its bum, faster than we could walk, through passages too tight for dragons. The dim, steady ceiling lights whizzed past. I tried not to think about falling off and being trampled.
After half an hour, we reached a vaulted bay where several of these conveyances were moored, hissing and humming. Mitha helped me down; my knees were trembling.
“Lab Four,” he said. “Under its own mountain. This is Quigutl Level Five, but any tunnel too thmall for a dragon is thafe. I will find you a nest. Are you hungry?”
I shook my head. Brisi gaped at him; seeing him in full light had shocked her anew. I put a hand on her shoulder, which seemed to snap her out of it. “I’m sorry,” she said in Porphyrian, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’ve heard of quigs from my mother, but we don’t have them in Porphyry. They’re so … ugly.”
I hoped Mitha couldn’t understand her. He gave no sign, and then we were interrupted by the arrival of several more quigutl. These were lab quigs, cleaner than their comrades in the pits. They came straight over, gabbling to each other, and began examining our clothes, tugging at the hem of my tunic and the cuffs of Brisi’s trousers.
“Porphyrian cotton,” said one knowledgeably. “That’s what we’re lacking, good fibrous plantth. I’m not keen on the ox hair or the bark. You see how fragile she ith?” She poked me in the face with a finger. “The bark would chafe.”
“How do they do thith?” said one, fingering the key pattern along the hemline.
“It’s called embroidery,” I said. His eye cones swiveled quizzically, and I realized the name didn’t explain anything. “You do it with a needle and floss.”
The quig reached into his mouth, down into his throat pouch, and pulled out an awl. “Needle. Like thith?”
“Finer. Sharper.”
“Hey,” cut in another quig, who’d been sniffing me rudely. “She’s a half-breed!”
The group oohed and aahed appreciatively, at which point Mitha decided the party was over and began to shoo them away. “Eskar is back,” he said as he shooed. “We have forty-eight hourth. There will be plenty of time to goggle over fabric later.”
“When we all go south!” cried a particularly small quig. Everyone hushed her.
“Thpread the word,” said Mitha. “Quietly.”
They scampered off. I exhaled; their close scrutiny had made me tense.
Mitha started up another corridor. He opened the door of an enormous room full of extremely noisy machinery; it was too loud to talk, but he made elaborate hand gestures at the quigs working inside, wordlessly communicating something. Eskar’s back, presumably. They all seemed to understand what that meant.
“The generator,” he said as he closed the door. The word meant nothing to me.
He brought Brisi and me to a quieter tunnel; the ceiling was even lower here, with hemispheric light fixtures, and we had to stoop. The walls were punctuated not with doors but with holes a foot off the ground; the air was damp and earthy. “Thith is the warren,” said Mitha, indicating the whole cheese-like network of holes. He walked on four legs now, his twiggy dorsal arms folded demurely against his back, sniffing around for the right hole. I was going to have to count.
“My nest,” he said, encouraging us to go inside. “You’ve been up all night, and I know you’re not nocturnal.”
Brisi and I crawled through the hole into a roughly circular room. The floor was lined with animal skins and dry leaves. There seemed to be no beds as such. Brisi slumped to the ground, exhausted. I handed her my bag to use as a pillow, and she took it gratefully. “I’ll be right back,” I whispered. “I need to ask Mitha something.”
She uttered no protest. She may already have been asleep.
I stuck my head out of the hole and hissed, “Mitha!” He was still in sight; he stopped and waited for me to waddle to him, like a duck. I bumped my head twice, not on the low rock ceiling but on the low-hanging hemispheric lights. “Eskar has ordered me to find someone, a particular prisoner.”
“We call them victimth,” he said. “But yeth, I can help you look.”
He led me out of the warren and up another service tunnel into a room full of … I guessed it was machinery. I saw a jungle of gleaming metallic vines and a peculiar slab of silvery ice nested into the facing wall. Mitha flopped onto his stomach on a quigutl stool, like a little ramp that led nowhere. From the tangle of silvery vines in front of him, Mitha pulled on a cluster of little cups and drew them toward him. Their wiry stems made them look like a bouquet of honeysuckle flowers. He stuck his claws in, one per flower, wiggled his fingers, and glowing writing appeared behind the ice.
It wasn’t ice but glass. I felt a little foolish.
I’d seen written Mootya in my mother’s memories—in fact, I’d seen my mother use a device called a note block. This seemed similar, but much larger.
“All right,” said Mitha, squinting at the panel. “Best do this now before we reroute all the power. Which victim are we looking up?”
“My uncle Orma,” I said. The word victim set my palms sweating. “Can you contact him with this, uh, machine?”
“No, no,” said the quig. “These are medical recordth. We can determine which cell he’th in, and whether they’ve made a mince of him yet.”
I clamped my lips tightly shut and let Mitha do whatever he was doing. His eye cones flitted back and forth as he read; impatient sparks crackled on the end of his tongue. At last he said, “He has an enormouth file, but no record of him being here.”
I’d braced for the worst, but this took me aback. “Could they have moved him to a different facility?”
One of Mitha’s eyes swiveled toward me. “I checked. He’th not at any Centhorial facility. Is that him?” He gestured toward the panel with one of his dorsal hands.
I gasped. Orma stared out as if from a window, his brows arched in mild curiosity. “What do you mean, he’s not here?” I cried. “He’s right there!”
“That’s a picture,” said Mitha. He tapped the glass; Orma didn’t blink.
If words could appear behind the glass, why not a portrait? I felt a little foolish, but it was so life-like.
Mitha was talking: “Sometimeth files are deleted for security reasonth. We’ll sniff around; there may yet be something to find.” Text slid up the screen; his mouth moved as he read. “Your mother was the dragon Linn, I deduce?” His fingers waggled manically in their scabbards. Two pictures of my mother, in her dragon and human forms, appeared. I pressed a hand to my mouth, not sure whether I was holding back laughter or tears.
I had never seen an image of her. She looked a lot like Orma. Prettier, maybe.
Mitha said, “She and Eskar were friendth. When Linn was compromised, Eskar wrote letterth begging her to come home and be fixed, but she would not.”
“Dragons write letters?” I asked, struck by the oddity of it.
Mitha swiveled an eye cone toward me. “Your mother was in human form; she couldn’t have read an aerial etching on the mountainthide. Eskar would have dictated it to one of uth. My point is, that was the beginning of the end of our Eskar’s employment here. She began to doubt.”
“Eskar told me she quit because Zeyd threatened my life,” I said.
Mitha’s head spines wobbled. “That too. Then she hired my cousin to thpy on her superiorth. He learned about the imprisoned half-human; that convinthed her to quit.”
I stared at him, a knot forming in my stomach. “The imprisoned half-human?” I repeated slowly. I knew all the half-humans; only one had been imprisoned.
“The one they raised from a baby and experimented on,” Mitha said simply, plucking the control cups from his fingers.
An icy certainty gripped my insides. “D-did she live in a cell with a tiny window and wear a dreadful suit of rabbit skins?”
“You know her!” said Mitha. “But don’t call it dreadful in front of the otherth. We don’t have good fibrous plants here in the mountainth.”