Dragon Breeder 3 by Dante King (e novels to read online .TXT) 📕

the spoil tip from this tunnel, at one side of the entrance. I poked me conk through, and it looks like there’s a small town or something in there. Place is lit up by these luminescent globes strung all about the place, filled with glowing worms of some sort.”

“The ratfolk?” Ashrin asked.

Diggens nodded as he poked his tobacco into position and rolled his toothpick-thin cigarette.

“Yeah, I’d say so,” he replied. “The whole place has the same aesthetic look as their armor did, you know? Well-made, but constructed with the odds and ends of stuff they’ve scavenged. Anyway, the town, all the huts and buildings and what have you, are situated around one big, main structure.”

“How many ratfolk are there?” Renji asked. “Are there enough of us to be able to fight our way through?”

“We’ll take them,” Tamsin said. “It’ll give me a chance to use my new Slot.”

I looked around. Jazmyn and Ashrin’s squad members stared intently down the tunnel, their hands on their weapons.

Diggens held his smoke up to the candle on his hat brim and then wedged it into the corner of his mouth. The blue haze curled up from the tip of the dog-end, tracing the lumpy green face before spreading out under the brim of his worn leather hat.

“Weren’t no one around from what I could see,” the gnoll said. “The whole place looks like it’s been abandoned. Appears the ratfolk way of doing things is that everyone fights to protect or expand the colony.”

“Curious,” Rupert remarked.

“Nah, not really, fella,” Diggens said. “Not down here in the Subterranean Realms. Down here, there’s no room for passengers. Everyone fights to protect what they have. What good would it have been for a hundred of the beggars to stay down here if the ratfolk had met another clan of ratfolk, or kobolds, instead of us in the cavern? The victors, if they destroyed the ratty force from the township down yonder, would have come down and wiped out the rest of them. No questions asked and no quarter given. Nah, it’s a tough existence down here, fella. The sort of neighborhood where every single soul pitches in or perishes.”

“All right then,” I said. “That’s some damn nice scouting work there, Diggens, but I reckon we should get a move on. May as well make hay while the sun shines, and if there’s no opposition to us getting through this tunnel, I can’t think of better weather than that.”

Diggens sucked hard on his dog-end so that the potent tobacco sizzled and spat. Just before the thin snake of sash touched his rubbery lips, the gnoll spat the finished cigarette aside. Through a thick mouthful of smoke, he said, “Fuckin’ oath, fella.”

* * *

We emerged cautiously out of the mouth of the tunnel and moved quickly behind a cluster of boulders that lay on the outskirts of the eerily silent town.

Jazmyn, Ashrin, and I moved stealthily into a position not too far away. We were able to peer down into the ratfolk’s township, through a gap between two strange, blue fern-like shrubs flourishing in the bed of an old mineral creek.

“Any sign of life?” I whispered to the other two.

“Not a squeak,” Jazmyn muttered. Her eyes narrowed as she methodically scanned the motley assortment of buildings spread out below us on the floor of the cavern.

The buildings of the underground town were just as Diggens had described them; quite well engineered and constructed, but crudely made out of salvaged materials. The walls of the huts and buildings were mostly constructed of stone, but the roofs of the bigger buildings were made from metal that looked like it had been salvaged from mine carts and the tracks on which they ran. I saw more than a couple of examples of old shields filling holes in roofs.

There was not a soul around. Not a sign nor a single solitary sound of any of the ratfolk still in this town. The only sign that anything had once been living was in a largish square off to our right. There, hanging from a set of huge meat hooks, was a giant humanoid carcass, with pale gray skin and blunt features.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“Rock troll,” Ashrin hissed in my ear, “or a golem, I always struggle to tell the difference.” Her breath and her proximity sent a little tingle down my spine, making a little pocket of tantalizing heat spread out in the pit of my stomach.

“Looks like our ratty pals managed to take down that big fucker just before they managed to breach the wall to our cavern,” Jazmyn said.

The rock troll or golem certainly had been a big brute. All of ten feet tall and about as wide as a hatchback was long. The body of the thing was missing its two legs, which had been taken off with a butcher’s precision and hung on hooks next to it. Black blood pooled beneath the grim corpse.

“Let’s get the others,” I said, “and start taking a look through this place. These rats might have been as mad as shit, but it doesn’t look like they were the sort of creatures to waste anything. If there are crystals down here, I bet they’re kept in a treasury or a place of prominence.”

I paused for a moment, wondering whether Jazmyn or Ashrin would disagree with me, since they were the far more experienced dragonmancers. Except, they simply exchanged a look, nodded at each other, then nodded at me.

We returned to the others. After going through a cursory weapon check, we headed into the town.

We moved without haste, checking the buildings that sprouted with no real order around the place. The ratfolk clearly had no form of transport down here, so the structures were built haphazardly, with no central road running through the middle. The path between