Linsha focused on the black lance. She leaped and shoved it down deeper into his body. Thunder’s screech almost shattered Linsha’s eardrums. Sweat and tears of pain ran down her face, and she felt her hands burning around the haft of the lance. She shifted her stance and pushed on the shaft again, forcing the barbs to move faster through Thunder’s lung toward his heart. Thunder’s last mortal cry shook his dying body. Disbelief and terror drowned the furious glow of his eyes. His legs swayed under his weight.
Linsha stared up into the gaping holes of his nostrils and his slack mouth so close to her. She smelled the stink of his breath and thought her time had come to die.
Frantic, Crucible snapped at the blue’s neck. His weakened bite caused little damage to the blue’s tough scales, but he succeeded in drawing Thunder’s fading attention back to himself. The blue dragon’s head slammed around and pushed aside Crucible’s weakening defenses. His heavy jaws closed around the bronze’s neck just under the jaw, and he began to crush Crucible’s throat.
Linsha pushed on the lance once more, and this time dark blood bubbled up around the wound. The barbs had torn Thunder’s heart. She felt him shudder. As the life drained from the dragon’s body, his wings sagged, his muscles lost their strength, and his great body slowly collapsed to the earth.
Linsha stood for a moment, hauling air into her lungs and reveling with intense relief. Then, in the sudden silence of the cavern, she heard a strange gasping, rattling noise, and her fear returned tenfold. Crucible was still underneath the massive corpse. She scrambled down Thunder’s back, dropped to the ground, and hurried around the mound to the dragons’ heads. Sick with fear, she found Crucible nearly buried in the sand of the nest and trapped under the dead blue. Worst of all Thunder’s jaws were still locked around his throat. The bronze struggled, unable to breathe beneath the sinking dead weight of the enormous blue crushing into his chest and throat. Blood oozed from wounds on his neck and trickled down into the sand. His amber eyes darkened and bulged in his efforts to breath.
Linsha took one look and knew she could not help him alone. She had no sword to pry open Thunder’s jaws, nor did she have enough strength to lift the weight of the dragon’s head from Crucible’s throat. He would have to do something to help himself.
“Crucible!” she cried. She grabbed Thunder’s jaw and tried to wrench the head loose from the bronze’s throat. It barely budged. “Listen to me! Look at me! I am here. But I need your help. I can’t lift this. Crucible!”
The bronze’s pain-filled eye rolled toward her. She yanked again at the blue’s jaw. If she couldn’t move it, maybe she could just loosen it enough for Crucible to breathe.
“Can you shapeshift? Change to a man! To a cat! Change to a shrimp for all I care! Just get out from under this!”
Would he have enough strength left? Would he have enough conscious thought left to control the magic? He could shapeshift to a cat under Thunder’s body and be crushed before he knew what happened.
“Crucible!” she tried again. “Can you shapeshift to a cat? Right here? Where I can get you?”
She tugged at Thunder’s huge head. The blue’s dull, lifeless eye stared back her, but she thought she felt the head move slightly. She tried again and again until her vision swam and her arms trembled with fatigue. Crucible’s throat rattled. She dropped down by his head and felt for some sign of life.
“No, you don’t!” she yelled at the bronze. “You stay with me!”
Grasping his nose, she tugged at his head just enough to tilt it back. His nostrils twitched ever so slightly, and he took a gasp of air. It rattled down his throat into his starved lungs. All at once he began to glow with soft golden light. Linsha moved back but kept her hands ready to snatch him the moment he transformed. The spell took longer than usual, and his shape seemed to waver in the glimmering light—once long and human-like, then large, then small and four-legged. It finally settled on small and furry.
Thunder’s body settled deeper into the sand as Crucible’s large form disappeared and reappeared as a battered, bloody orange-striped cat pinned under Thunder’s head.
That was a shape Linsha could manage. She dug the sand out from under the cat and pulled him away from the dragon. Cradling him in her arms, she began the long walk back to daylight.
26
Nightfall
She returned to the passage that led to Iyesta’s treasure chamber not only because it was shorter, but she also wanted to satisfy her curiosity. Crucible had brought an egg with him into the labyrinth to enrage Thunder, and the only place she knew he had gone was the palace. For the sake of her oath to Iyesta, she tread a slow and wary path back through the darkness to the light of the stairway leading up to the treasure chamber.
She moved up the stairs until she could lift her head beyond the lintel and see into the room. The sight before her surprised her. The room was deserted, but something had left a terrible mess. Dragon skulls lay scattered across the floor—some smashed to bits, some cracked and broken. The piles and chests of treasure Iyesta had so carefully amassed over the years were ransacked, and most of it was gone. The thieves had taken the most valuable pieces—the weapons, the magic artifacts, and the chests of steel coins. They had left jewelry, gems, and piles of cheap coins scattered among the pieces of broken eyesockets, shattered jaws, and smashed brainpans. What she didn’t see were the eggs. There was no sign of them—no shards, no dead embryos. Nothing.
The eat squirmed in her arms and opened his eyes. Where are we?
“In the treasure room,” she whispered. She lifted him up so he could see.
He growled deep in his throat. They were here. The eggs were here. He had them stacked in his totem. Who took them?
Linsha felt her heart sink. Gods, she had tried so hard to save those eggs. Now they were gone again. She heard movement upstairs in the throne room and ducked back down into the tunnels. If the guards were returning or the thieves were still out there, she didn’t want to face them. She was not sure she could fight a four year old for his toy horse. The cat sagged back into her arms and fell asleep.
Still holding the warm shape of the cat, she made her way back to the hidden entrance in the palace ruins. Late afternoon sun peeked through the vines shielding the doorway when she and Crucible came to the exit. Linsha staggered out and collapsed on the grassy patch near the door. She hoped no one was nearby, for she did not think she could walk another step. She curled her body around the cat and let her awareness sink.
Her rest lasted long enough for her eyelids to fall shut and her muscles to relax. She was drifting on the tide, gently slipping into the darkness of sleep when hoofbeats trotted through the undergrowth. She woke to dappled sunlight and the distant rumble of thunder.
Varia’s voice called, “There she is!”
She looked up through bleary eyes to see the stubbled, dirty face of Sir Hugh and the young, whiskery face of Leonidas looking down at her in obvious relief.
“Lady Linsha, thank Paladine!” said Sir Hugh from his horse. “I hate to be waking you, but there are guests coming you don’t want to meet.”
She rolled to a sitting position and tried to focus, tried to swim back against the tide.
Varia flew down and landed on her bent knee. “Please hurry, Linsha. The Brutes ransacked the palace during the battle, and the mercenaries are furious. They’re searching the entire grounds.”
“Where is Azurale?” Leonidas said. “I thought he was with you.”
Linsha looked at his face and noticed how much he had aged in just a short week. The boyish immaturity of his features was gone, replaced by harder, more tempered lines wrought by stress, fear, and loss. Her eyes glimmered with tears, knowing she was about to add to his grief.