Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(116)

But I couldn’t move. Behind me Brisi was pushing the other direction, wriggling, squirming past me; she shoved me hard into the rock wall in her haste to get by. She stopped in the doorway and stripped off her clothes. Her silhouette stood out starkly against the firefight behind her. She was all skinny arms and legs, and then she was more. She elongated and uncoiled into a terrible spiky shadow and leaped without hesitation into the fray.

I cried out, afraid for her, but Mitha was pulling the lever, closing the door. Tongues of flame licked around its edges, then were extinguished as it tightly closed. “Well, good,” said Mitha, a slight tremor in his voice. “She belongs there. It is right. Come—I’ve thought of a better route.”

He led me through some extremely tight tunnels; I crawled on elbows and belly and tried not to imagine getting stuck. At last we popped out of a trapdoor into an operating room, empty but for the hulking metal tables and surgical arms; they cast malevolent shadows in the light of my wrist lamp. A pool of silver blood glinted on the floor.

A dragon screamed in the surgery next door. Mitha scampered ahead, but I was loath to approach. I crept up to the enormous doorway and peeked into a room eerily illuminated from all angles by quigutl wrist lanterns. In the center was a full-sized dragon, its eyes wild. It snatched up a quig in its jaws and shook it like a terrier, snapping the smaller lizard’s neck. Two dead quigutl lay sprawled across a large metal table nearby, silver blood dripping off their dangling legs and congealing on the stone floor.

Around the dragon, on the walls and ceiling, under the cabinets and the sinister-looking surgical machinery, dozens of quigutl swarmed. The dragon tossed the dead one into the air and snapped at another; it dodged out of reach under the metal table.

“Dr. Fila!” cried Mitha. He’d reached the middle of the room, brandishing a dragon-sized scalpel in each of his four hands. They were like swords to a quig.

The dragon doctor turned, quigutl gore hanging from his teeth.

“Remember when you neutered my brother?” said Mitha, waving his surgical tools. “Remember when you removed my mother’th voice box?”

The doctor spat fire. Mitha dodged; the flame hit an operating table and sent it flying. I ducked back, terrified.

“Remember the acclaim you received for the machine my uncle built?” called another quigutl from behind the dragon. “Remember how you don’t remember we exist until something breakth or you decide to break one of uth?”

From all around the room, the quigs began to croon Mitha’s song: But we are not so helpless now.…

Mitha did a waggling dance around the room, avoiding Dr. Fila’s jaws. The dragon doctor kept his wings folded; there wasn’t room to spread them without getting entangled in wires and dangling instruments. Mitha capered upon a metal table; the doctor struck, missed, and bit the table. The clang reverberated sympathetically up my spine, setting my teeth on edge. For a moment the doctor seemed disoriented.

The quigs all pounced at once.

They moved so fast I saw nothing but streaks of light, the wrist lamps writing danger in the air. Within seconds they’d bound Dr. Fila with thin, strong flesh-flensing wire, shutting his jaw so he couldn’t flame and immobilizing his limbs.

Once they had him tied up, they did not taunt or harm him; they scurried about the room, mopping up blood, righting toppled equipment, and—absurdly, to my mind—making repairs. They removed the bodies of their fallen kin.

I approached cautiously. The constant movement of their lights made it difficult to navigate the maze of broken metal and glass; the room reeked of quig breath and sulfur. The dragon fixed his shiny black eyes on me. Smoke leaked from his nostrils.

Mitha looked up from scooping broken beakers into his mouth and waved at me. He gestured toward a metal basin full of water. I handed it to him and he spat melted glass into the water, which cooled and hardened into a long, transparent noodle. Mitha ran his tongue over his lips, scouring them with its ignited end, and then said, “Shall we question thith fellow?”

“Will he be in any mood to answer?” I said, sounding more flippant than I felt. I was still shaken. “They’ve wired his jaw shut.”


The dragon’s head was on the floor. Mitha clocked him on the nose with the basin, then climbed up and sat among the spikes with a scalpel aimed at the doctor’s eye. “We’re going to unfasten your jaw,” the quigutl explained. “You will answer Seraphina’s questionth nicely. If you make any threatening move, I will pull out your eyeball, climb into the hole, and eat your brainth. My mate will lay eggth in your sinuseth.”

“Enough, Mitha,” I said. Mitha chirped, and one of his fellows began working on the wires around Dr. Fila’s jaw, loosening them until the dragon could form understandable words through clenched teeth.

“Seraphina,” he said thickly. “I know your name. I have a message for you.”

Fear bloomed over my heart like frost. “From whom?”

“Your sister half-human. General Laedi,” he snarled. “She has your uncle. We sent him south to her. You are to return to Goredd at once. She is done humoring you.”

“Did you excise his memories before you sent him south?” I asked, my voice low and fearful.

Dr. Fila snorted. “Would he be a lure to you if we had? It’s you she wants, Seraphina. If she had known the mad lengths you’d go to in order to find him, she never would have had us bring him here. She’d have kept him at her side from the start.”