Chương 71: “The Dragon”

He had an idea on the fourteenth floor. It was a bad idea. He knew it was a bad idea immediately, in the way you know things that are obviously bad and do them anyway because the alternative is worse and also because, and this was not a relevant consideration, he was simply noting it, June was going to find it very funny. In the corner of the fourteenth floor, in the deep shadow where two wrong angles met, was a skeleton. Very large. Six legs. A neck too long for the body.

Wings attached in a way that suggested whoever had built this had been working from a description of wings rather than any observation of how wings functioned. The jaw hinged in the wrong direction. The head, while impressive in ambition, could not anatomically be lifted by the musculature available to it. He had told her, eleven months ago, that her dragon was anatomically incorrect. He resurrected it all the same. The dragon woke up confused, which was understandable.

It had six legs and was not sure what to do with all of them. It looked at Vorrath. It looked at its legs. It looked at Vorrath again. He pointed at the stairs. The dragon went.

He heard it hit the Ledger somewhere around the thirteenth floor, heard it through the dungeon the way he heard everything through the dungeon, through walls and stone and resonance, and it was not the sound of a fight so much as the sound of something very large and very confused throwing itself at a problem it did not understand and not particularly caring that it didn't understand it. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The Ledger said, and this was the first time the Ledger had said anything since entering the dungeon that was not administrative: This creature has six legs. The dragon did not respond to this. The wingspan is insufficient for the body mass by a significant margin. The neck musculature cannot support the head at this angle. The jaw hinge is inverted. This is not a viable organism. The dragon continued. We have no category for— The dragon hit it again. Vorrath did not stay to listen to the rest.

He was already on the sixteenth floor, the seventeenth, moving down through the warmth of the twenty-eighth and the light of the twenty-ninth, and above him the Ledger was working through the genuinely novel problem of a six-legged organism with an inverted jaw hinge, which was slowing it down in the way that things without categories slowed systems that had seen everything else. They reached the thirty-first floor. He had shown her this, once, in description, on the water glass.

"That's it," June said. She stopped just inside the entrance and looked around and he felt her taking it in. The light was the same source-less warmth as before. The stone was dark and old and exactly as he had left it. The hearth was in the center of the floor, in the center of everything. And against the far wall, in the place where there had been no wall before, where there had been only the deep below the deep, was a door. An ordinary door. Dark wood. Iron handle. June walked to it without being told.

She put her hand on the iron handle.

"Vorrath," she said. He was with her, all of him, every floor, the hearth behind them and the Ledger descending through the floors above, each floor going quiet as it passed through. She opened the door.