Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(117)

Mitha, for reasons known only to him, hit Dr. Fila again with the basin and knocked him out cold.





Within the hour the lab had surrendered to Comonot and his exiles.

Eskar explained it to me later: the stronger fighters, storming the gates, had drawn the best of the Censors’ guard to the main entrance. The weaker fighters, sneaking into the escape tunnel, had relied on stealth and deviousness, ambushing Censors and scientists one by one. They’d reached the heart of the mountain virtually unopposed, and the Censors had had no choice but to admit defeat.

Well, most decided they had no choice. The Censors were not untainted by the new ideology Comonot and Eskar had observed. Five Censors fought to the death and took three exiles with them, injuring four more. Others seemed to subscribe to the extreme anti-human ideology but couldn’t quite make up their minds to die for it. They were herded down into holding cells deep underground, where they would have ample time to reconsider their political affiliation.

I was still with Dr. Fila when two exiles came to collect him; I followed them through twisting, darkened hallways to an enormous atrium at the heart of the mountain. Here, at least, light trickled in through several small windows in the ceiling, so far away they looked like buttonholes. Hundreds of dragons milled around the atrium, patching each other up and inventorying supplies. Dr. Fila, who still seemed woozy from his encounter with Mitha, was sent across the room to line up with scientists, technicians, and a dozen deviants from the holding cells.

“You are called upon to aid your Ardmagar,” Saar Lalo was screeching at them. “The world is changing; you may yet change with it.”

The quigs restored power to the ceiling lights, to my immeasurable relief. It surely reduced my chances of being trampled in that room full of milling dragons.

I needed to find Comonot. Orma had been sent back to Goredd, so that was where I needed to go; I only hoped the Ardmagar could spare someone to carry me south. As I searched for him, I passed Brisi and the four Porphyrian hatchlings. They’d shrunk into their saarantrai again and were excitedly recounting their first dragon battle to each other. “I bit a scientist right in the rostral protuberance,” boasted one.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Brisi. “I torched an auditor’s cloacal vent.”

I asked after Comonot everywhere, but only Ikat, who was patiently instructing quigs in the application of cobwebby bandaging, had noted where they’d gone. “Eskar took him up the north passage to the Censors’ archives.”

She indicated a wide ascending corridor, so steep it was like climbing a mountain itself. I was sweating and breathless by the time I reached a cavernous archival chamber, and then was utterly appalled by the sight of the Ardmagar—wearing his humanity and nothing else—dancing around in the middle of the floor. Behind him, in her natural shape, Eskar operated a viewing machine similar to the one Mitha had used, but scaled to dragons. Two other full-sized dragons lurked in a corner of the room: an exceedingly antique specimen, his eyes filmed over by cataracts and with strange wart-like growths on his snout, and a smaller hatchling, his head spines sharp and gleaming. The oldster leaned heavily on the young one, like an aged grandfather being helped about by his grandson.

Ardmagar Comonot caught sight of me and bounded over. I tried not to stare, but he was blubbery around the middle. “Seraphina!” he cried, and for a horrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me. “We did it! The lab is ours, and soon every Censorial secret will be, too.”

“You’re in your saarantras,” I said, aiming my eyes at the distant stony ceiling.

He actually laughed, which drew my gaze, and I saw him ripple all over like a bowl of aspic. “I wanted to feel it,” he said. “Triumph, right? I like this one. It’s inspiring.”

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Soon,” he said, holding up a hand. “Eskar is looking something up. She has made an extraordinary claim, based on a snippet of information stashed in a mind-pearl, and I require correspondingly extraordinary proof.”

Across the room Eskar waved a wing in acknowledgment.

“What did she claim?” I asked, suspecting I knew. “Was it that the Censors secretly imprisoned a half-dragon here and experimented on her?”

“How would you have heard about it?” asked Comonot. Eskar arched her spined neck to look back at me.

I darted my gaze toward the two unfamiliar dragons in the corner. I didn’t like to talk about this in front of strangers. “The quigutl told me she was Eskar’s reason for leaving, although Eskar herself neglected to mention it.”

Eskar’s third eyelid fluttered in confusion. “I didn’t think it relevant.”

“She’s been planning this subterfuge for years,” said Comonot admiringly. “She quit the Censors because of a reasoned, moral objection.” I forgot I shouldn’t look at him; he winked appallingly. “Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that’s like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.”

Across the chamber, the ancient dragon harrumphed, coughed up an enormous gobbet of phlegm, and spit it into a corner, where it smoldered. He wheezed as he spoke. “You’ll find its records under Experiment 723a … but I could find it faster … if you’d let me use my own machine.…”