CHAPTER NINE

When I came to, my head still hurt, but not quite as much, and I had Lois' head jammed under my chin, humming. It wasn't a very good hum, it kept breaking up and then starting to rise as if it was going to turn into a shriek, and then she'd catch herself and yank it back down into a hum. But she was trying to hum. And she was only a baby. Time I started dragging myself back together. If I could still find all the pieces.

So I tried to sit up. The moment I moved, the avalanche in my skull started again and I put my hands to my head and squeezed. The avalanche stopped. It wasn't the squeezing though, it was another roar from Gulp: I moved, the avalanche started, Gulp roared, the avalanche stopped. Well, it didn't stop exactly. All the boulders got smaller and they did stop rolling around, as if they'd been flash-frozen by the noise. Or glued. But if the glue wasn't strong enough they'd fall over and start crashing around again. And I doubted the glue was that good. The ones that had stopped rolling were only the up-close ones anyway. There was still a lot of crashing going on at a little more of a distance. It was very, very weird. Almost weird enough not to be horrible. But not quite. And very, very painful. There was a softish, as rocks go, rather quivery, bristly glowing blob from Lois . . . and a great big sort of angular looming thing, like she was still standing over us except she wasn't, from Gulp.

And outside my skull there were a lot of big looming things. Big looming things. Big looming things.

Yes. You knew this already, reading it here, but I was having a lot. of trouble with reality. We were in a cavern full of dragons.

I'll let that sink in for a minute. It takes a lot of sinking in. Think yourself out of your comfy chair and your nice house with the roads and the streetlights outside — and the ceiling overhead low enough that a fifty-foot dragon can't stand on her hind legs and not bump her head — and think yourself into a cavern full of dragons. Go on. Try.

There was an actual fire in a big hearth-space (big — Wilsonville would probably fit into it) not too far away from where Lois and I skulked in a little half niche in the uneven stony wall, although I couldn't see what it was burning, and it didn't smell like wood, and the red light it cast seemed to me more purple than wood firelight. (It didn't smell like meat or blood or dead things either, which was just as well. Although I was weak and shaky probably from lack of food too I was not up to the concept of eating from any direction, eater or eatee, and I was particularly not up to thinking reassuring thoughts about how dragons don't eat humans.) There was a very strong smell of dragon over the strong smell of the smoke, which was almost as overwhelming as the sight of them was — and the echoes, when Gulp roared, must have been making old Earth totter on her axis.

It was like there was some kind of geometric progression-explosion for every sense I was forced to use: sight, hearing, smell . . . the smell was strong enough that I was tasting it too, which only left touch, and Lois and the nobbly rock at my back were not much comfort. If you wake up and find yourself chained to a wall in a dungeon and there are a lot of spiky-looking iron things hanging by the fire, you're relieved there isn't anyone looking at you thoughtfully while he's holding the spikiest in the fire, but that you're alone isn't much comfort.

I say the nobbly rock wasn't much comfort, and You have to remember I was aching in everything I had to ache in, but we were also in some kind of nest. I was so sore and tired and rattled that it took me a little while — what with the cavern-full-of-dragons thing kind of taking my attention — to realize this. I was lying on the ground, but I was really well padded with — I picked up a handful of the stuff and let it slip through my fingers and patter back into the heap. Dragon scales. They're a little prickly I admit, but in heaps they're surprisingly soft. And warm. Even a cavern which is full of dragons and a small-town-sized fireplace going a blast has drafts, particularly when you figure the ceiling is over sixty feet up.

Gulp sat or crouched near us, with the end of her tail flung out in front of us, so we were barricaded in, by the fire, by the wall, and by Gulp's tail. Here Gulp was a dark but streaky iridescent green; it was some weird light, because she looked darker by ordinary daylight, and it was like thick red twilight in the cavern. Remember I said that when we'd first come down here last night (if it had been last night) there'd been something almost familiar about the weird light? Yeah. It was just like in my dreams. I couldn't decide if I recognized the smell from my dreams too. And I was often frightened in my dreams. But the damn crushing terror was new and like complicated in this Toto-I-have-the-feeling-we're-not-in-Kansas-any-more way, like maybe I had a whole five horrible new senses to experience it with or something, thanks a lot.

The dragons around us were different sizes and different colors; there were a dozen of them, maybe fifteen — that I could see — that I thought I could see. No, I didn't recognize any of them — which was a relief: I know, I'm spending a lot of time here redefining "limit" and "edge" (and "crazy" and "impossible") but recognizing one of these dragons from my dreams of dragons would have been waaay over any definition of any edge you like — even if in my dreams they were, well, friendlier. Or at least they were okay with my being there, which these guys were not.

It was hard to tell dragons from rocks and shadows, and while I was never sure about this either it seemed to me that it wasn't always the same dozen or fifteen dragons — although I thought Gulp was nearly as big as most of them. The one I could see most clearly, however, was a lot bigger than Gulp, facing us from the other side of the hearth. He was black, with no iridescence at all, although on some of him — eye ridges and nose, spine, elbows — the scales were outlined in red. I had thought Gulp was scary — he was scary. He made Gulp, look like a cuddly toy dragon. A fifty-foot cuddly toy dragon. Looking at the size of his head and the one front claw that were reasonably illuminated by the firelight I figured he probably went on forever. His tail probably came out at the caves by the Institute, near where I'd seen Billy that time I'd gone to find him, to tell him Dad had okayed my overnight solo. What a long time ago that was. Sort of the time version of the length of this dragon. And I wondered, suddenly, if dragons were what Billy had been worrying about, down there in the cave. He hadn't really seen a dragon tail, had he? Sitting in a cavern full of dragons, anything was possible. I might as well just get rid of "impossible" as a concept and stop wasting time trying to redefine it.

Monster Dragon's eye slowly blinked. It was like watching an eclipse. I had the feeling I didn't want to look into that eye, as if it might blind me, like you're not supposed to look at the sun, even during an eclipse. The leader, maybe? Alpha male and all that? In that case he might be Lois' dad too, if Old Pete was right and it's only the alphas that breed. I wondered who had inherited Lois' mom's position.

Cautiously I checked the inside of my skull to see if I could tell which boulder Monster Dragon's was. I expected him to be the largest and the hurtingest, but he wasn't. He was large, all right, but he was almost not a boulder at all, more like a . . . a big lump of clay the potter hasn't decided what to do with yet. A bit, you know, malleable. Or poised. Balanced. Almost peaceful, which was pretty damned dramatic under the circumstances. How did I know it was him? I don't know. And to the extent that I could wonder about anything in the old, comparatively-normal-human Jake way, I wondered just what the last three weeks of hanging out with Gulp had done to me.