Auby danced triumphantly at the top of the stairs. “Told you! Told you!” he crowed. I wanted to applaud when a cold shiver shot down my spine. In a split second, that brash celebration turned into terror. Auby screamed, the sound high-pitched and terrified. Next to me, Felicia also screamed, but her scream was all fury. She leaped forward, and I leaped with her.
Auby vanished in a cloud of sand, too fast for us to have seen what had happened. I knew, though—I knew. “Sandtrap!” I shouted, and I caught Felicia around the waist and hauled her back. A maw with a sharp, hooked point lifted from the darkness down the stairway, lunging after my mate. It would have gotten her foot, but I managed to snap out my tail and strike it square across the face.
It howled, and then it slunk back down the stairs and out of sight. The two of us were left in the dark, stunned, Felicia definitely a little in shock. “Auby… it got Auby!” she moaned. “What was that thing?” She was clutching at my arms, blunt nails digging into my scales. Not scared, or perhaps simply not flinching away, it was almost like she was still ready to run straight after the vanished predator.
“That was a sandtrap. Dushka make them, usually sentinels that guard the nest, but it can also be a hunting tactic,” I said. A pack of them had been bothering the Serqethos Clan for a few years now, but the hunters had been able to locate their nest and root them out. Now I knew why: they’d burrowed deep underground, inside the ruins. “It’s a good thing Auby is a bit tougher to chew on than most,” I tried to reassure her.
“You think?” she asked, but I heard the tremble in her voice; she wasn’t so sure. My human was worried about her little companion, our companion. The truth was, so was I. Auby was made of metal and other synthetic materials; he’d make a terrible meal, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do some serious damage to his small body. A Duskha’s biting power was legendary.
“Yes,” I said anyway. “We must be careful as we follow them down. There could be more traps.” My handheld scanner also wasn’t very good at picking up anything but the faint energy coming from machinery down below. It wasn’t meant to search for lifeforms, even though that would have been extremely convenient right now.
I led the way, testing the entrance to the stairs with my tail carefully before going down. Without Auby’s lights, we had to rely on the small lantern hanging from my belt. I didn’t have one to spare to give to Felicia, and as we reached the bottom, I knew that wouldn’t do. I wasn’t helpless in the dark, but she was. I unhooked the small device and pressed it into her hands. “You keep that, okay?” I said.
She caught it, clutching it tightly in her fist, and nodded. “We’ll find him, Levant. Don’t worry,” she said, and then she quicklyrose on her toes and pressed a kiss to my cheek. My sigils flared, brightening the hallway, and I clung to that sensation so I could continue to supply light. It wasn’t much, but it would help. Why was she reassuring me? I was not the one who had bonded with Auby… Her words did make me feel better; they gave me a bit of hope.
We were standing in another hallway that mirrored the one above us. Here, the statue of a fish was covered in grime, and sand had piled against the side, enough to definitely hide a Dushka. We began circling around it very carefully, Felicia behind me, her hand on my back. The thick doors beyond were our target; one was cracked open, and sand had piled here, too. A humming was coming from the open door, and my scanner beeped once to indicate we were getting closer.
The Duskha nest had to be close, and they would have to have a means of getting to the surface somehow to hunt. It was a very clever hiding place, because it was cool in here and would remain a steady temperature all day, year-round. I wondered how many there were, because surely breeding conditions were ideal. Under the right conditions, they bred very rapidly, and I really hoped we weren’t about to deal with a pack of more than a dozen of them.
“Auby?” I called out as we reached the door. It did not matter if we gave away our location to these predators with sound; they already knew exactly where we were anyway. A Dushka alone would never consider fighting a Naga male, but an entire pack, on their home turf? They would not hesitate to attack. Echoing my voice, Felicia also called out, and then we both held our breath and listened. Nothing.
“Going in, stay close,” I said, and I flicked the door open with my tail. The room beyond was massive, and for the first time, I knew we were in the right place. Not just near an energy signature that had attracted the Digmaster the same way Felicia’s ship had, but a fishery.
A metal walkway stretched from the door all the way across the room to the other side. It circled the place too, but what drew the eye was the water that glittered in the dark. A lake, or rather a fish nursery where the fish were supposed to mature before they were released into Serqethos Lake. I saw the water writhe and move, filled to the brim with fish. So many mature ones they almost could not move; they were that jammed together.
“Oh,” Felicia said, “I guess we just need to find a way to open the right gate and your people will have food again!” It looked that way, which was the best news I’d had all day. My body practically shook with relief. Yes, this was the answer. There was more than enough food in here to feed the Clan and the dragons for the coming months. The question was, would it replenish? Would it keep doing what it had done for a thousand years? Or had it broken down even worse than a rusted-shut hatch somewhere?
“So it seems, but where is the nest? Where is Auby?” I wondered. We needed to find the little Revenant first, because I did not trust that it would survive long on its own, in the midst of a pack of Dushka. “Auby! Flash your light! We can’t see you!” I shouted. The walkway across the fish pond was not as steady as I would have liked it to be. The metal did not appear to have corroded; my ancestors had strictly used alloys that could not degrade in their builds, but something had broken in the distance, as if a rock had fallen onto it.
“There!” Felicia hissed, pointing to a distant corner. A faint, flickering light could be seen, there, then gone again. I almost missed it, but perhaps her eyes, needing more light to see by, were better at picking it up. Instead of crossing down the middle on the possibly damaged walkway, I urged her to circle the edge of the massive chamber with me. “He’s alive, Levant. He heard you!”
The growling of a Duskha warned us as we got closer. They didn’t want to attack if they didn’t have to; they were warning us to stay away. My scales rattled along my spine, a primal warning, a display of my own tension. Neither of us was going to back down, and though I wanted to tell Felicia to stay back, I knew she wouldn’t. The truth was, I might need her to run in and snatch Auby; he was likely too damaged to walk on his own.
“Get ready,” I warned her in a hiss, my tail releasing her hand as the sigils dimmed along my body. We would both need to be able to move freely and quickly, but since our mating, we didn’t need that touch to communicate. The bond between our minds was strong enough now that an intuitive understanding of what each of us said and meant existed even without direct proximity.
“Ready,” she whispered. I saw her hand tighten around the knife I’d given her, and the other held on to the small light source. Shadows danced around us; sand slid and whispered across metal as the Dushka moved around us in the dark. They circled the room to close in on us from behind, cleverly cutting off our path in either direction. Too bad for them—we intended to go right through their nest, where they’d foolishly taken Auby.
A sandtrap blocking the narrow walkway was our first obstacle. I’d have to spring it to get through; the Dushka was burrowedin, hidden, but also blinded to anything but motion. I held Felica back with a hand, picked up a rock with the tip of my tail, and threw it. The beast was completely silent as it snapped, but sensing its failure, it howled and then charged. I clashed with it in a tangle of scales and fur, claws and teeth. For long seconds, there was only the fight, the surge of adrenaline, survival.
Chapter 17
Felicia
Seeing Levant fight one of those creatures was both terrifying and a little awe-inspiring. In the shadowed dark of the fishery, I couldn’t see enough to fully track their movements; I just caught flashes. The spotted fur hide of the massive Duskha reminded me of a hyena, but its growls were like those of a lion. The sharp hook on its snout was a bit like the beak of an eagle, perfect for tearing flesh and crunching through bone. It was a terrifying combination, deadly. Levant was just as lethal, and that somehow caught me by surprise, even if he was extremely buff for a fairly mild-mannered scientist.
There was nothing nerdy or scientist-like about him now. I saw only the lethal beast beneath the glossy black scales, the razor-sharp fangs he normally hid behind kind or eager smiles, and the claws he kept tucked away when he worked or when he touched me. He used his massive body in ways I didn’t expect, coiling, writhing, loops of muscle, or the tip of his tail striking like fists. The fight seemed to last only seconds, and yet it felt like a lifetime too.
The Dushka ended up lifeless beneath him, Levant rising over the creature victorious and definitely savage. There was a light on in his golden eyes that hinted at the warrior and the wild instincts he normally hid. Suddenly, I believed wholeheartedly that we’d be able to rescue Auby from that nest, and scare the Dushka away from this place so we could fix it.
I did not count on the one sneaking up from behind. I did not sense it, hear it, or smell it; there was no warning at all save for the prickle at the back of my neck. Levant had surged forward, and he was tangling with three more of the beasts, all of them as big as a pony, with massive, thickly furred paws. We were so close to the nest, I could see Auby’s light flicker frantically.
At that faint prickle of warning, I managed to turn and throw myself back. I fell into loose sand, my hands sinking and the light being buried. Plunged into darkness, only disturbed by Auby’s strobe light show, I saw the hooked maw full of sharp teeth only in flashes. It closed in on me, and I raised the hand with my knife on instinct. It cut through fur and flesh, but met so much resistance that I knew it was hopeless even as I did it.
“Noooo!” Levant roared, and the beast was flung off me, hurled through the air before it smashed into the wall on my left with a crunch and a thud. I scrambled to my feet, heart pumping furiously in my chest, with only one thing in mind: get to Auby, and then out of here. Levant might be strong; he might have fought that first one and made it seem easy, but now I knew better. The sheer power in the one that had knocked me down had taken my breath away. I could not let my mate fight a dozen of them. He might win, but I couldn’t let him take that kind of risk.
Perhaps it was a good thing the darkness hid much of the fight from my eyes. I could not see how many Levant was fighting, and still he’d known I was in danger and saved me. Dozens, definitely too many. I slid through the sand, forcing my legs to move faster, and then abruptly I was at the edge of the nest. Ithadto be the nest; I was certain of it. It was the only way todescribe the strange, burrow-like shape the beasts had created from sand and debris.
A narrow opening made me think the big ones couldn’t even enter it. Light flashing in ever-slower intervals from the opening assured me Auby was inside. I’d ducked and crawled through the hole before I could think twice, the light clutched in my left hand, the knife in my right. My arms trembled, my back ached from the awkward position, and branches scraped against my clothes. Sand also rained down, stinging and blinding me. Not good.
