Zarkingu, a new skull-ornamented standard-pole over her shoulder, sniffed the air with an ecstatic expression on her tusked face.
“Dragon-magic dies,” she announced.
The biggest orc rumbled something to Imhullu and Shazgurim, who hefted their jagged war-axes in the narrow cavern and flanked the group. Will held up a small hand.
“Better let us go first, Captain Ashnak. There’ll be booby-traps, or I don’t know dragons. Even dead dragons. Ned, bring out the detection equipment.”
The older halfling, avoiding Will’s eye, dug into the brass-bound chest and brought out a wire-spring-and-glass contraption. It might even be a trap-detector, Will thought, for all I know. He took it with nerve-twitching care between his two hands and studied it with deliberation.
Ned rattled his fingers absently on the chest.
—I’ll do the checking for real traps, brother. You just convince them that we’re indispensable because we can work that thing. Whatever it is.
Will took a deep breath and turned back to the carved tunnel-entrance. Ned pushed the doors open. A breeze blew out, heavy with the spice-scents of decaying magic. In the light of Ned’s torch, and with the uncannily silent footsteps of four crouching Agaku behind him, he walked down the short tunnel and out into the great cave.
“Dark Lord’s prick!” Ashnak swore, straightening up.
Blue light blazed into Will’s eyes, brighter now as the great dragon died. He heard the other orcs exclaim behind him.
Dagurashibanipal’s spiky body lay, a glass mountain, in the centre of the cathedral-sized cavern. He stared at the crystal length of her, camouflage-coloured to the vast heap of silver and adamant upon which she sprawled. Even dead, she towered high as fortress walls. The unnatural yellow light died in the slits of her horn-lidded eyes.
One wing twitched.
Horn and bone slid together under torchlight. Metal sinews stretched, gears and cogs whirred, and Dagurashibanipal’s one prosthetic wing unfurled in a last mechanical reflex. It reared up into the cavern’s heights; curled, split, ribboned, shredded; then fell like a collapsing ship’s sail.
“Golem…” Will, eyes wide, stared at flesh and blood, at wire and canvas, and neither moved again. The poisoned dragon’s diamantine corpse stilled. He began a slow circling of the cavern wall beside Ned, paying a deliberate attention to the wire-and-spring device in his hands.
Ned muttered under his breath, “It’s only another dragon. Dammit. It’s only another dragon…”
Ashnak of the Agaku marched across to the hoard, kicking silver crowns and diamonds contemptuously aside. “This isn’t what we came to find! Are you sure this is the right dragon?”
Will, soberly, said, “There is—was—only one Dagurashibanipal, and that is she. Look out!”
Ashnak threw himself flat on the stone floor.
“Elfshit!” A claw ripped Imhullu’s face and the squat orc swore, ignored the blood streaming from his eye-socket, and swung the great jagged poleaxe in both hands. Something clashed, impacting against the stone wall. “Agaku! Agaku!”
Wings hissed through the blue air. Chittering, their metallic claws outstretched, a flock of tiny dragonet-golem fell from where they roosted in the cavern’s ceiling.
“Agaku!” Shazgurim yelled cheerfully, bassinet’s hound-visor down, swinging her axe in a figure-eight blur. Gear-cogs and glass eyes sprayed away from her.
“Last magic! Last magic!” The smaller female orc waved her hands in the air, attempting to snatch one of the dragonet-golem in flight. Ashnak straight-armed her into the wall, face-forwards, spat on his horny hands, and battered the last of the flying machinelets into crumpled horn and hawser.
“Well warned!” he chuckled throatily. “Good exercise for the Agaku, master halfling. Is there more?”
Will shook his head dumbly.
“Here!” Zarkingu hopped from foot to horny foot, wiping the blood from her battered features. “Ashnak! Here!”
Will carried the glass-and-wire device carefully over to the entrance of a side-cavern, hands still shaking. “Madam Zarkingu, best be wary. Let the experts check it out first. Ned, what do you think?”
“Mmm…could be fine…”
“But what is it?”
A vast tunnel stretched out before them, lit by the blue light of dying magic. The sides had been squared off, giving a flat floor and ceiling, and the walls and floor were, for as far as Will could see, lined with metal shelving.
He stared down the ranks of metal shelves. There were stacks of clothing of an odd colour and cut, metal-and-wire devices, chunks of solid but obviously forged metal—and all this piled high out of sight.
Beyond this first one, similar chambers stretched off into the underground distance.
“Different magic…” Zarkingu whimpered. “But not here—not these.”
“What’s this?” The big orc, Ashnak, pushed past her into the first chamber, seizing a big chunk of metal with what looked like a crossbow grip and trigger at one end. He pulled the trigger.
Foom!
“Arrrgggh!” Imhullu roared. Fire and shrapnel ricocheted off the tunnel wall behind him, pitted now with a line of two-inch-deep cavities. The squat orc grabbed at the severed tops of his long, hairless ears.
“Yaayy-ahh!” Ashnak lifted the weapon and pulled the trigger again.
Dakka-dakka-dakka!
Will ducked. A furnace briefly opened beside the left side of his face. The stone floor hit him between the shoulder-blades. The wire-and-glass device went flying. An earsplitting sound cracked his skull. Stunned, he hitched himself up onto his elbows, yelling, deafened, “No! Stop!”
Flame seared across Will’s vision, bright as the sun at midday, jabbing from the weapon’s muzzle. An explosion shook the air. Splinters of diamond flew from the adamantine corpse of the dragon, ricocheting back from the vast cave-walls, whizzing past him with dull whup! sounds.
“Weapons!”
“Ashnak! Ashnak!”
“The nameless was right!”
“Fighting Agaku! Fighting Agaku!”
On knees and elbows, Will Brandiman worked his way rapidly back across the dry stone floor to where his brother lay under the bottom-most metal shelf nearest the entrance. The halfling’s doublet and trunk-hose were thick with dust. He lifted his head slightly as Will pushed in next to him. Orc feet ran past, forward and back, bringing out piles of the metal objects into the main cavern.
“Are those all weapons, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, Will. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
Horny feet pounded past and then plodded back. Shazgurim swore, dumping what sounded like half a ton of scrap metal in the main cavern.
“But what kind—sorcerous weapons?”
“Their magic-sniffer said not.”
The permanent temperature of the caves, chill but not freezing, began to sink into Will’s bones. He rested his head on his short arms, blocking out the blue-white light. “They’re probably going to kill us as soon as they remember we’re here.”
Ned whispered, “Can I bring three things to your attention, brother? One: as far as we could make out, Dagurashibanipal sealed up every entrance to this place, apart from that one rat-hole. Two: outside in the chests there is a small amount of the dwarven-rock-blasting powder.”
Will lifted his head from his arms. “Enough to bring a reasonable chunk of the roof down in that tunnel…What’s the third thing?”
“And three,” the elder halfling said quietly, “the mad one just said different magic. I don’t believe a dragon as old as Dagurashibanipal would leave this place without a curse on it. And my guess is that it’s probably one that operates better the longer one is actually kept near the hoard.”