They stumbled back, wary.
"What it is?" Tagg asked.
Gandy peered again. "Dunno. Maybe half a snake?"
"Might be." Tagg approached it carefully, thrust out his arm and prodded the thing with his finger, then jerked away. When he touched it, it writhed with a motion that was more than a twitch. Like the tail of a huge rat, it swayed this way and that. But it seemed otherwise harmless. Whatever might be at the other end of it, this end had no teeth or claws.
"This food?" Tagg asked the Grand Notioner.
"Might be," Gandy decided. "Snake okay for stew sometimes, if not bitter. Check it out."
"What?"
"Taste it. See if it bitter."
Reluctantly, Tagg approached the thing again, grasping it with both hands. It writhed and struggled in his grip. Whatever it was, it was very strong. But he held on, and when it seemed a bit subdued, he lowered his head, opened his mouth and bit it as hard as he could.
Abruptly, the thing flicked and surged, flipping Tagg across the jagged tunnel into the far wall. And all around them, seeming to come from the stone itself, a huge roar of outrage rang through the air.
Tagg got his feet under him just as the Grand Notioner surged toward him, running for his life, with Minna right behind. Both of them collided with Tagg, and all three went down, rolling along the cracked floor, a tumble of arms, legs and muffled curses.
They had barely come to a halt when others — a lot of others — piled into them, over them, and onto them. The main party, led by the Highbulp Glitch I himself, had been emerging from a connecting way when they heard the roar and panicked. In an instant, there were gully dwarves tumbling all along the tunnel, and a great pile of gully dwarves at the convergence where Glitch I — and everyone behind him — had stumbled over the flailing trio.
It took several minutes to get everyone untangled from everyone else, and Tagg — at the bottom of the heap — was thoroughly enjoying being tangled up with Minna again until he looked up and gazed into the thunderous face of his lord and leader, Glitch I, Highbulp by Persuasion and Lord Protector of This Place and Anyplace Else He Could Think Of.
Glitch glared at the three just getting to their feet. "Gandy! What goin' on here?"
"Dunno," Gandy grumbled. "Ever'body pile up on me. How I know what goin' on? Couldn' see a thing."
"Heard big noise," the Highbulp pressed. "You do that?"
"Not me," Gandy shook his head. He pointed an accusing mop handle at Tagg. "His fault. He do it."
"Do what?"
"Snakebite."
Feeling that he should explain, Tagg pointed up the corridor. "Somethin' stickin' out over there. Like half a snake. Tasted it to see if it bitter."
The Highbulp squinted at the twitching thing. "Is it?"
The earlier roar had faded into echoes, leaving an angry, hissing sound that seemed to come from nowhere in particular.
"Is now, sounds like." Tagg nodded.
Cautiously, the clans of Bulp gathered around the green thing protruding from the rubble. Glitch scrutinized it carefully, first from one side, then from the other, then beckoned. "Clout, come here. Bring bashin' tool."
A squat, broad-shouldered gully dwarf stepped forward uncertainly. On his shoulder he carried a heavy stick about three feet long.
Glitch pointed at the twitching thing. "Clout, bash snake."
Clout looked doubtful, but he did as he was told. Raising his stick over his head, he brought it down against the twitching thing with all his might. This time the roar that erupted, somewhere beyond the rockfall, was a shriek of sheer indignation. Stones trembled and grated, dust spewed from crevices, and the entire wall of fallen rock began to shift. The twitching green thing disappeared, withdrawn into the rubble, and massive movements beyond sent fragments flying from the rocks there. All around, the debris shifted and settled, closing crevices and escape tunnels.
As gully dwarves scampered back, falling and sprawling over one another, the entire wall of rubble parted, and in the settling dust a huge, scaled face glared out. Slitted green eyes as bright as emeralds shone with anger, and a mouth the size of a salt mine opened to reveal rows of dripping, glistening fangs. The scale crest atop the head flared forward, and the head was raised to strike. Then the emerald eyes widened slightly and the mouth closed to a grimace.
"Gully dwarves," Verden Leafglow hissed, her voice laced with pain and contempt. "Nothing but gully dwarves."
For a time, she simply ignored them. Their pleas for mercy, the smell of their fear, the cowering huddles of them here and there in the shadows, were dimly pleasant to her, an undertone like music, soothing in its way.
A gaggle of gully dwarves. They could do her — a powerful green dragon — no harm. They could not get away — all the exits they might reach were sealed by rockfall — and at the moment, she decided, they were not worth the effort it would take to crush them. So she ignored them, concentrating instead on her wounds. The indignities of a bitten and thumped tail rankled her, but she could deal with the perpetrators later, when she was stronger. They were trapped here in the rubble with her. They had nowhere to go.
The saw-edged disk had ripped into her body, bringing her down in the rubble. In the darkness of the fallen castle, almost buried by debris, she had lain bleeding as the armies of the Dragon Queen passed by — passing, she thought bitterly, and leaving her behind. For that, she would not forgive Flame Searclaw. The huge, arrogant red dragon with his preoccupied human rider, had known she was there. In her mind, clearly, had been his dragon-voice, chiding and taunting her.
Her left wing hung useless beside her, her left foreclaw was terribly maimed and it had been all she could do — through spells and sheer concentration — to close the gaping slash at the base of her neck. That wound alone could have killed her, had her powers been less.
Still, the healing was slow, painful, and incomplete. In ripping through the armored scales at her breast, the disk had cut her potion flask — hidden beneath the scales — and carried away the precious self-stone concealed there. It was gone, somewhere among the rubble, and without it the powerful green dragon lacked the magic to reshape her maimed parts. The ultimate healing power was beyond her, without her self-stone.
Focusing all of her concentration upon the damaged parts of her, she drew what strength she had and applied it to healing. And when the effort tired her, she slept.
When their initial blind panic began to fade, replaced by simple dread and awe, the subjects of Glitch I — Highbulp by Persuasion and Lord Protector of This Place, Etc. — turned to their leader for advice. They had to find him first, though. At first sight of the apparition that had appeared in the shifting rubble, Glitch had darted through the first several ranks of his subjects, crawled over, around and under several more layers of panicked personnel, and finally wedged himself into a crack behind all of them. Getting him out was a task made more difficult by the fact that he did not want to come out.
Finally, though, he stood among them, gawking at the huge, green, sleeping head of the thing in the hole only a few feet away. "Wha.. " He choked, coughed and tried again. "Wha… what that thing?"
Most of them looked at him blankly. Some shrugged and some shook their heads.
"That not snake," Tagg informed his leader. "Not stew stuff, either."
Emboldened by the Highbulp's restored presence, old Gandy, the Grand Notioner, crept a step or two closer to the sleeping thing and raised his mop handle as though to prod it. He changed his mind, lowered his stick and leaned on it, squinting. "Dragon?" he wondered. "Might be. Anybody here ever see dragons?"
No one recalled ever seeing a dragon, and most were sure that they would remember, if they had.