“Holy shit!” I said. “That isn’t a dragon in there, is it?”
Andrei’s complexion was sheet white in the dim light. Fire was one thing all of the supernaturals were susceptible to. Fire and beheading were the two ways you could actually kill an immortal being.
The breath of a dragon could melt your bones off from a hundred metres away. I’d read in Demonology 101 that the dragons had died out because there wasn’t enough food for them in this dimension. They starved to death in their caves rather than leave their piles of treasure.
Doctor Thorne said that was a myth. He told me most had been slain by the Fae because they were too volatile. They were intelligent and couldn’t be subjugated. Dragon scales were also tougher than any metal known to man.
I had a very bad feeling about this.
“If that is a dragon,” Andrei whispered, “it sounds pissed.”
Normally, light in the dark was a beacon that lifted my mood. We turned a corner and the cavern opened up to reveal an enormous room. It became flooded with orange light. My bladder felt like it was suddenly too full. This wasn’t a cave anymore. It was an underground city.
Andrei and I instinctively dropped low. We belly-crawled until we reached the lip of the opening. It was fully three minutes before I could even start understanding what I was seeing. The room was bigger than the library at the Academy. Etched into the walls were threads of black mineral. Dragon glass. It grew from hairline fissures and bloomed into huge deposits. It gave the walls an artistic look that was completely at odds with what was happening below.
I blinked a dozen times and rubbed my eyes to make sure they weren’t deceiving me. Andrei pinched himself.
There was a dragon down here. It was chained by the throat and from each of its four legs. It stood in a crater with smooth walls made entirely of dragon glass. A metal harness like you would put on a dog kept its wings in place. The metal glowed a faint red. The dragon was a deep, midnight blue that turned to aqua when it breathed fire. The flames lit a forge above its head. There was a complicated industrial pulley mechanism that was being used to melt gold and other precious metals.
The cavern had been split into various levels with stone staircases and ramps making it possible for equipment and supplies to be delivered to each work area.
Para-humans of every shape and size were busy carting away rock, cutting into the rock with pickaxes, pouring the gold into moulds, and hammering the heck out of the weapons that came from the forge.
We’d stumbled upon a para-human black smithy. That would have been well and good except that by the far side of the room from where we lay, black steps led up to a raised platform. On the platform was what I could only describe as a throne made of dragon glass. The back of the throne arched up to form two outstretched dragon wings.
Sitting on that throne was a man in a red tunic. It fell down to his knees. He had long, coal-black hair that hung almost to his waist. The pointed ears screamed Fae. The staff leaning against the arm of the throne said mage. The staff itself was carved of hardened wood. It fanned up into the image of flames around a red crystal with a blue heart.
Just great. A Fae fire mage.
The platform was directly in front of a narrow rock walkway. It fell away to empty air on either side. The bridge itself led to another opening. From here I couldn’t see inside.
“How much do you want to bet that’s where the armoury is?” Andrei said. I wasn’t really listening. My focus was on the dragon inside the hole. It wasn’t all that big. Maybe the size of a small sedan. Every once in a while, when the dragon stopped breathing fire, some of the goblins and trolls stuck spears into the hole to poke it.
The dragon roared and let out a seething breath. I could feel my left eye twitching. Mature dragon scales would be impervious to normal weaponry. If the dragon still felt pain, it meant the dragon was young enough that its scales hadn’t hardened.
Andrei hissed. My eyes tracked to what had gotten his attention. Within the upper levels of the cave, there were openings around the top just like the one we were in. I spotted movement in several of them and saw the other contestants. “How are we going to do this?” Andrei said.
“Do what?” I asked, my attention back on the dragon. In between breathing fire, it was making a high-pitched whining sound that translated to crying in my ears. I couldn’t help thinking about Billy.
Andrei pinched my arm. “Pay attention!” He pointed to the suspected armoury. “We have to somehow get from here to there.”
I looked down. It was a pretty decent drop. I’d break every bone in my body before I died from drowning in my own blood. “There has to be another pathway leading down,” I said. If there was a city down here, it meant there had to also be sleeping quarters and somewhere that served food. There was probably a warren of paths through the mountain. The trick was trying to find it.
I could tell Andrei was contemplating the drop. Vampires were a lot sturdier than humans. Then again, he hadn’t drunk blood in years. He must be quite brittle at this point.
The dragon hadn’t breathed fire in a little while. Two dozen of the para-humans grabbed
