Dragon and Slave

CHAPTER 11

They waited until the camp was dark and quiet. Then, Jack slid his hand under the door, and Draycos slipped out into the night.

The trip to the thorn hedge had become a familiar one over the past few days.

Draycos moved silently along the uneven ground, habit and experience keeping him to shadows and cover wherever possible.

His mind, though, was a million restless leaps away. The injustice of what had just been done to Jack still throbbed in his brain like an angry percussion master with a full set of concert drums.

For that matter, this whole situation was beginning to get beneath his scales.

This was an important mission, and part of his job was to keep personal feelings from affecting his judgment.

But in this case, knowing that and doing it were two very different things.

This was a slave colony, and it was simply not possible for a poet-warrior of the K'da to completely suppress his anger and contempt.

And as to Jack's idea about coming back to make Fleck regret his actions, it was sadly short of the mark. What this place needed was not a few of Draycos's friends, but six assault squads of K'da and Shontine warriors. Three squads to free the slaves, the other three to burn the entire place to the ground.

He flicked his tail sternly. That was not a proper thought for a warrior, and he knew it. Justice was a vital part of the K'da warrior ethic. Vicious, bitter vengeance was not.

And any chance for justice was still a long way in the future. Jack could claim that everything beyond the hedge was his job if he wanted to, but Draycos knew better. There was a large expanse of ground they would have to deal with before they even reached the mansion. Worse, much of that ground was open, without any cover to speak of.

No. Before he could allow Jack through the hedge, he would have to do a thorough check of the area on his own. He would have to examine the grounds, search for hidden guard posts, and study the outside of the mansion itself. His task was far from over.

And perhaps it was because he was thinking too much about the task ahead that he made it to within sight of the thorn hedge before he noticed the faint taste of Brummga in the air.

He stopped abruptly, dropping flat into the shadow of a bush, silently cursing his lack of attention. A well-known route, a routine duty—that was where a warrior faced the greatest threat of trap or ambush or simple mistake.

It was a good and timely reminder. He could only hope it hadn't already been a

fatal one.

For a long minute he lay in the shadows, his nostrils and tongue sampling the air. There was definitely a Brummgan presence nearby; the scent was too strong to be simply left over from the day's activities. But the light breeze kept switching directions, hindering his efforts to pin down a location.

And then, as he strained every sense, he heard a soft cough.

Soft, but loud enough. His pointed ears twitched onto the direction, his eyes probing the darkness.

There he was, sitting beneath the same type of bush Draycos himself was hiding beside. A Brummgan soldier, complete with infrared-view detectors and a short but nasty-looking automatic weapon.

Sitting where he had a perfect view of the spot where Draycos had been digging his tunnel through the hedge.

Slowly, carefully, Draycos gave the rest of the area a complete check. He spotted two more Brummgas, similarly equipped, one in another shadow, the other beneath a sheet of camouflage webbing.

One of them Draycos could have handled, had he decided that such a move would aid their goal. But with three of them in widely spaced positions, an attack was out of the question. Slowly, carefully, he began to crawl back the way he'd come, his belly pressed tightly against the ground. Not until he was a hundred yards out of the watchers' sight did he finally stand fully upright again.

The taste of defeat on his tongue.

So all his work, all his cleverness, had been for nothing. The Brummgas had spotted his tunnel, and had set a trap for him. It was only the fact that they couldn't possibly have anticipated the arrival of a K'da warrior that had prevented them from nailing him on the spot.

What they were expecting, clearly, was one of their slaves. And if they were smart enough to watch one end of the darter's hole, they were probably smart enough to be watching the other end, too.

Earlier, he had left Jack and the hotbox without much more than a quick and casual check of the area. There hadn't been any alarm, which meant he must not have been spotted.

He didn't know yet how they'd managed to miss him. But however it had happened, he knew he couldn't count on being that lucky twice in a row. This time he approached the slave colony like the warrior he was supposed to be: slow, alert, and flat on his belly.

He hadn't noticed anything odd when he'd left, and now he discovered why. For one thing, the enemy observer was off to the side, where he could watch the doors into the two sleeping huts but didn't have a clear view of the three hotboxes. For another, the observer wasn't a Brummga. It was a human.

Not just any human, either. It was Gazen himself.

Draycos looked across the starlit patch of ground, watching Gazen idly fingering his rifle. Under normal circumstances, he could easily tell one human scent from another. But having just spent an hour in the hotbox with Jack, and a particularly strong-smelling Jack at that, he hadn't noticed the taste of Gazen in the air.

He twitched his tail in annoyance. First he had wasted time with thoughts of vengeance. Now he was wasting equally precious time making excuses.

For two months he had been trying to gently push Jack toward the path of a K'da warrior. He had tried to teach the boy to think and behave with a sense of justice and honor, instead of reacting like the selfish thief his Uncle Virgil had raised him to be.

Now, he wondered if perhaps some of the training had ended up going the other way.

He twitched his tail again. More rationalization. More excuses.

More wasted time.

All right, he ordered himself firmly. So Gazen himself was here. That meant he was taking this attack on the thorn hedge very seriously. And given that Jack was the newest arrival, he might have expected that Gazen's suspicions would immediately have turned his direction.

But apparently, that wasn't the case. If it had been, Gazen should have found a

place where he could watch the hotboxes as well as the sleeping huts.

Unless he didn't know Jack had been kicked out of his bed for the night.

Draycos let his jaws crack open in a wry smile. So all unknowingly, Fleck had in fact done him and Jack a huge favor. If he hadn't gotten Jack in trouble, Draycos might very well have strolled out of the sleeping hut tonight straight into Gazen's waiting hands.

Carefully, he began backing up again. They'd been saved by the thinnest of eyelid scales, the kind of luck every warrior hoped for. But that didn't mean there was any reason to throw a congratulatory party, either. Their main escape plan had just been discovered and neutralized. That meant they would have to fall back on Plan B.

Unfortunately, as far as he knew, they didn't have a Plan B.

Jack was asleep when he reached the hotbox, his hand jammed under the door to give Draycos a way in. The boy didn't wake up as Draycos slipped up his arm and settled into his usual position across his back. The two of them had a lot to talk about; but the hotbox still held some of the day's heat, and he might as well let Jack sleep while he could. There would be plenty of time to talk later when the growing cold drove him awake.

That point arrived two hours later, when Jack began shivering in his sleep.

Draycos managed to postpone it another half hour by returning to three-dimensional form and using his body to help keep the boy warm. But eventually, even that wasn't enough.

Jack listened in silence as Draycos related the night's activities. "That was a

close one, all right," he commented when the K'da had finished. "Thanks to Fleck and his low-rent friends. A shame we can't ever tell him—I'd love to see the expression on that ugly slap-catcher face of his."

"It would be interesting," Draycos agreed. "I presume, then, that you no longer wish to make him eat the spilled berries?"

Jack waved a hand. "The bugs have probably gotten to most of them by now, anyway."

He shivered violently. "I just wish I'd thought to bury that blanket Maerlynn gave me in the floor here. It would have come in handy."

"As a matter of fact, I did bury it," Draycos told him. "I thought it would might be bad for Maerlynn if you were found with it. Unfortunately, it is no longer here."

"Maerlynn must have dug it up afterward," Jack said with a sigh. "Too bad."

"The point is that we now have a serious problem," Draycos said. "I would have no difficulty myself jumping over the hedge. But I could not carry you over without risking injury to you."

"That just means we'll need another way over, that's all," Jack said. "Over, or through."

Draycos felt his ears twitch. "You have an idea?"

"I think so," Jack said. "It'll take some fancy timing, but if I can pull that part of it off it should work."

"May I ask what you have in mind?"

"Sure." In the dim light, he saw Jack smile tightly. "You remember Greb mentioning a couple of days ago that his and Grib's hatchday was coming up in three weeks? I thought we might throw them a little hatchday party."

"In three weeks?" Draycos asked, frowning.

Jack shook his head. "Life is uncertain," he said. "Let's do it now."