One hundred paces in took her into a pocket of hot, still air. She no longer needed the clovermint to keep her awake, but it freshened the air she was breathing. Cayce almost swooned in the heat but kept her balance by leaning harder into the damp cave walls.
At one hundred fifty paces, Cayce felt a gust of cool, ozone-scented air. The entire tunnel rumbled around her, and her hand came off the wall as she lurched forward. Her empty pack became tangled on a cone of rock, and as she pulled it free she fell flat on her face with her arms stretched out over her head. The gem-light in her headdress cracked and flickered out, leaving Cayce in almost total darkness.
A low, dry chuckle rolled down the tunnel. It started somewhere ahead of Cayce and echoed past her, bouncing off the walls all the way back to the cave entrance. Cayce listened to that sound escape and envied it.
“Another unexpected guest gains entry to my home.” The voice was smooth, cultured, and confident. It seemed a pleasant, conversational tone, though it was so loud in Cayce’s ears she was sure she felt blood dribbling from them.
Cayce got her arms beneath her and lifted herself up onto her elbows. She was almost entirely unhurt, but she could not get to her feet. Her legs felt paralyzed, cold and beyond her ability to control.
The voice continued. “Am I so wretched a host? So unfriendly that no one thinks to solicit an invitation before dropping by, for fear of rejection? Are my manners so coarse, so vulgar that visitors feel they have to impose upon my hospitality in secret, rather than risk a formal introduction?”
Where Master Rus used elevated language and affected manners to mislead and disarm his clients, this voice came with an undeniably authentic pedigree. The speaker sounded as if he’d been living among scholars and poets all his life. As if a bit of easy, self-deprecating banter such as this was as natural for him as exhaling.
“Perhaps you did send word of your impending arrival,” the voice said, suddenly bright. “Perhaps you weren’t being presumptuous. Perhaps you are instead a victim of some courier’s indolence. Is that it, my new young friend? Did you send word that you’d be coming, only to precede the herald who would have announced you?”
Cayce willed her legs back to life. They twitched and smarted, but eventually they obeyed. She brought her knees up under her chest and rocked back onto the soles of her feet, still crouched with her palms on the ground. She kept her face turned toward the sound—toward the interior of the mountain—as she prepared to turn and bolt back up the tunnel.
“What is your name, child?” The voice lost its conversational timbre, smoothly becoming the voice of a lord who is not accustomed to waiting for a reply.
“Don’t answer.” An unfamiliar voice came from directly behind her, but Cayce knew there was no one there. She stretched out her hand and waved it through the empty air, wondering if the dragon was toying with her. Kula said he could influence his victims’ minds. Maybe he was trying to confuse her, to spook her into running.
“Little girl.” The cultured voice sounded much closer now. “I asked you a question.”
Two flashes of blue light temporarily lit up the entire tunnel. Cayce’s eyes did not adjust quickly enough for her to, see anything in detail, and then she was blind in the dark once more, alone with disembodied voices and the smell of electric sparks.
“I am Tania Cayce,” she called loudly. Maybe if she were as polite as her host he would refrain from devouring her.
“No, no!” The second voice’s anguish helped Cayce recognize it. Vaan the glum pixie had shaken off Master Rus’s sleeping potion and followed her into the mountain. He seemed on the verge of panic now that his plan wasn’t being followed.
“Vaan,” the elegant voice said. “Is that you among my guests? Have you been plotting against me again?”
This will not go well for the pixie, Cayce thought. But she didn’t need him and had already worked out a plan to save herself.
“I am apprenticed to Potionmaster Donner Rus,” Cayce called. It wasn’t much to work with, but maybe if the dragon focused his rage on Vaan he would be more lenient with her. “He sent me here to request a simple boon. It is a small thing, something you would never miss. May I speak with you?”
“No.” The cultured voice lost its lilt and became as sharp as broken glass. “I think you have already told me enough.”
Blue light flashed again, and Cayce felt something hard and warm slam into her left shoulder. Childlike arms wrapped tightly around her waist and bore her off her feet. She dimly realized Vaan had tackled her.
The pixie’s momentum slammed her against the opposite wall. Cayce twisted as she hit to shunt some of the impact onto Vaan’s head, and they both grunted before dropping heavily onto the cave floor.
The mountain shook again, and Cayce heard a gurgling cough. The apprentice’s ears popped as a wave of pressure surged up the tunnel. Fast behind the pressure wave came a crackling ball of blue-white energy that charred and scarred the stone walls as it came.
Vaan threw his entire weight onto Cayce’s shoulders, forcing her head down behind a stalagmite. She struggled but stopped when she felt the burning heat from the energy ball wash over her. As the parts of her not covered by Vaan’s body tingled and burned, she quickly lost interest in casting him off.
She stayed motionless for a few seconds after the ball passed by, then started to gather her strength to wriggle free of the pixie. Vaan tightened his grip, however, and his small arms were like iron bars wrapped around her shoulders.
“Go limp,” Vaan said in her ear. “If you don’t I can’t save you.”
Cayce stopped struggling except to raise her clenched fist to display Rus’s red gem. “This ring,” she said.
“Won’t work,” Vaan said. “Whatever it’s supposed to do, it won’t work.” Cayce heard a strange buzzing sound as the pixies wings lifted them both off the floor.
For a delirious second she was nauseated and exhilarated by the sensation of weightlessness. Then Vaan pivoted in midair and shot up the tunnel. His grip was firm and confident, but he was only a small thing, and Cayce’s long legs flapped crazily behind them. With nothing to hang onto and no control over their momentum, all she could do was clench her teeth and try to stay calm.
It was no mean feat. All around them the tunnel shook and rained pieces of rock in their path. The dragon’s laughter had become a feral roar that somehow seemed to be right behind them but also gaining on them all the time. On several of the sharpest turns, Cayce saw glimpses of the dragon’s face, his teeth snapping and his long horns striking sparks from the rock. Though they were going out ten times faster than Cayce had gone in, to her the aerial trip took one hundred times as long.
Impulsively, Cayce drew Rus’s crystal skull and dropped it in their wake. If the fall wasn’t enough to crack it and release the caustic cloud, the dragon’s heavy body would certainly do the trick. As the beast slithered up the tunnel in pursuit, flashing jags of energy licked across the scales on his neck like bright, savage tongues.
Cayce stared hard as Vaan bore her on. She focused below the flashing teeth and sparking horns as they passed over the spot where she had dropped the skull. The head and neck came unerringly forward, and the sparking body followed behind, heedless and unaffected by Russ purple crystal.
Unaffected? Cayce peered back intently, shoving the distractions of their headlong flight to the back of her mind. The arcane glow around the dragon seemed to flicker, flaring from searing whiteness to a cool, muted blue. With each change in the light’s intensity, the monsters face rippled and rolled as if under water.