There were three main breeds of Fell, dakti, kethel, and rulers. The rulers were the only ones with the brains to plan a trap; all the others did was follow orders. There had better not be a ruler here, Moon thought, still grimly angry. He stepped to the edge of the balcony and left the minor dakti twitching in its death throes. Or we’re already dead.
He leapt off the balcony and down to a bridge, then down again to a curtain of netting, swinging along it to another passage in the floor.
This tunnel was wider, and halfway through it the massive thumping grew louder, shaking the walls, knocking dirt loose from every crack and cranny. Somewhere below, someone growled, a voice he didn’t recognize.
Moon dropped out of the passage into a chamber mostly lost in shadow, only a few of the baskets still lit. The stink of charred flesh and wood was suffocating, but it didn’t disguise the Fell taint. Moon sensed bodies moving in the dark, frantic motion. He caught the netting with his feet and hung upside down, letting his eyes adjust, trying to pinpoint the movement by sound.
Midway down, a complex grid of log bridges and platforms was strung with rope ladders and trailing fabric. Far below it, in the bottom of the chamber, massive bodies struggled. After a moment he caught the reflected glints off scales, and recognized the pointed spade-shape on the end of Stone’s tail whipping up to smash into the wall. Stone was fighting a Fell nearly as big as he was, a major kethel, but Moon had expected that. He couldn’t see what the other Fell were doing.
At least half a dozen minor dakti, Moon’s size or a little bigger, clustered on two of the supporting logs. It looked like they were working at the join, gnawing and tearing with teeth and claws at the thick ropes that still held it together. The structure was already precarious, broken in enough places to hang drunkenly over... over the bottom well of the chamber, where Stone was occupied by the fight with the big kethel. Good idea, Moon thought.
He meant to just hang here and wait for the right moment, but one of the dakti must have seen him; its warning-shriek hurt his ears. Moon grimaced, annoyed. He didn’t want them to stop what they were doing to come up here after him. Fine. We’ll do it the hard way, he thought, and dropped for the platform.
He struck one dakti square on the head, knocking it flat, and used it as a springboard to leap on the one that swung to face him. Moon landed on it, bowling it over backwards. It tried to sink its claws into his shoulders and Moon flared his spines to keep it off. He grabbed its wrists, using his feet to rip from its chest down, disemboweling it. He threw the body at the next dakti waiting to leap on him, knocking it off the platform. He rolled to his feet, then staggered as the surface under him jerked. The other three dakti had kept to their job, tearing at the ropes holding the logs in place. The join was giving way. At the top of his lungs, Moon yelled, “Stone, get out of there!”
The dakti spun to face him, snarling, but the logs shifted, creaking and groaning as the whole structure started to lean. Moon braced to leap, then a sudden whish of air warned him. He flung himself forward, but something hit him from behind, the jolt knocking him flat on the platform.
Moon rolled over to see a major kethel loom over him, glaring down, its breath stinking of old blood and overripe corpses. It looked like the minor dakti but was as big as Stone, and an array of horns stood out around its head. A heavy collar around its neck was hung with groundling skulls. Deep ragged claw marks across its face dripped black ichor. Uh oh, Moon had time to think frantically, digging his claws in to scramble away from it. This wasn’t exactly working out the way he had planned.
Then Stone shot up behind the kethel and landed on its back, claws digging into the joints in its armor to yank it backward. Moon leapt up as the platform gave way under their weight, logs flipped upward, and the whole structure collapsed.
Moon jumped off, snapped out his wings, and beat hard to get high enough to reach another dangling rope net. Clinging to it, he looked back to see the kethel going down under the heavy logs. Stone perched on the wall, sweeping his tail around to knock more logs and debris down after it.
The kethel shrieked one last time, its body twisting in death throes. Moon breathed out in relief and started to climb.
Then from below, he heard a voice, raspy and thick, but still loud enough to carry. “Stone, absent elder of Indigo Cloud!”
His claws hooked in the net, Moon looked back. A dakti was trapped in the broken remnant of the platform, crushed between two logs. Its mouth was open, the voice echoing out from the distended throat. It said, “Is that your get? We thought you too feeble now to breed.”
It was the voice of a Fell ruler, speaking in the Raksuran language through the dying dakti. It knows we’re here. It knows Stone’s name, Moon thought, a chill running through his blood. It’s seen me.
Stone made a noise, a reverberating growl that was more weary annoyance than anger. He reached up and closed his fist around the dakti, crushing it.
Moon twitched to settle his spines, and started to climb again. The instant of panic was gone, and he told himself to be rational. The groundlings said that what one ruler knew, they all knew, but that couldn’t be entirely true. There were different flights of Fell, and they fought each other for territory; surely they wouldn’t share knowledge. And yes, a ruler might have seen him through a dakti, but it had been more interested in Stone. It would think Moon was just another Raksura.
On his way back up through the mound he found a wounded dakti taking the same route, caught it, and tore its throat out. At least it didn’t try to talk to him.
He climbed out of the top passage into fresh, cool air and twilight, the stars coming out in a sky turning from blue to deep purple. Moon flew back to the rocky perch on the next hill. He was covered with dust and Fell blood, scratched and sore.
The sudden whoosh startled him. Moon hissed and scrambled away, tumbling down the hill. He landed in a clumsy crouch, but when he looked back, Stone was standing on the rock in groundling form. Stone said, “Come here.”
Moon hesitated, all too aware that if he wanted to run, he should have done it before now. He couldn’t outfly Stone without a good head start, even when he wasn’t already exhausted from a long day’s flight. The worse part was that he didn’t want to run.
Tense and reluctant, he climbed back up to the rock. He shifted to groundling, facing Stone.
“Sorry,” Stone said, which wasn’t what Moon was expecting. “You all right?”
He reached out to brush the dirt off Moon’s forehead.
Moon shied away, startled and self-conscious. “Yes.”
Stone watched him for a moment, then let his breath out. “Will you still come with me to Indigo Cloud?”
Moon hesitated. He had always thought that he was flying into a fight; not talking about it had just let him ignore it until they got there. And he was going to have to deal with the Fell sometime. “You think the Fell are already there.”
“Yes, they could be there now. They know we’re weak, ready to be hit. I don’t know how much time we’ve got.” Stone winced, as if it hurt to admit it. “It’ll take three days at the speed we’ve been traveling. I can make it in one.”
Moon nodded. That would give him more time to think, at least. “Show me which way to go and I’ll follow—”
“Or I could take you with me. Now.”
Moon eyed him. After Stone’s rescue, he knew what being carried was like. He would have to be in his other form most of the time to stand the cold and the wind, and he had already spent more than a day that way. It was one thing to keep flying on the edge of exhaustion when you knew you could land and collapse when you couldn’t take it anymore; it was another to know he wouldn’t have any control. He said, warily, “I don’t understand why I can’t just follow you.”