Free The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells Page A

and rulers. The rulers were the only ones with the brains to plan a trap; all the others did was follow orders. There had better not be a ruler here, Moon thought, still grimly angry. He stepped to the edge of the balcony and left the minor dakti twitching in its death throes. Or we’re already dead.
    He leapt off the balcony and down to a bridge, then down again to a curtain of netting, swinging along it to another passage in the floor.
    This tunnel was wider, and halfway through it the massive thumping grew louder, shaking the walls, knocking dirt loose from every crack and cranny. Somewhere below, someone growled, a voice he didn’t recognize.
    Moon dropped out of the passage into a chamber mostly lost in shadow, only a few of the baskets still lit. The stink of charred flesh and wood was suffocating, but it didn’t disguise the Fell taint. Moon sensed bodies moving in the dark, frantic motion. He caught the netting with his feet and hung upside down, letting his eyes adjust, trying to pinpoint the movement by sound.
    Midway down, a complex grid of log bridges and platforms was strung with rope ladders and trailing fabric. Far below it, in the bottom of the chamber, massive bodies struggled. After a moment he caught the reflected glints off scales, and recognized the pointed spade-shape on the end of Stone’s tail whipping up to smash into the wall. Stone was fighting a Fell nearly as big as he was, a major kethel, but Moon had expected that. He couldn’t see what the other Fell were doing.
    At least half a dozen minor dakti, Moon’s size or a little bigger, clustered on two of the supporting logs. It looked like they were working at the join, gnawing and tearing with teeth and claws at the thick ropes that still held it together. The structure was already precarious, broken in enough places to hang drunkenly over... over the bottom well of the chamber, where Stone was occupied by the fight with the big kethel. Good idea, Moon thought.
    He meant to just hang here and wait for the right moment, but one of the dakti must have seen him; its warning-shriek hurt his ears. Moon grimaced, annoyed. He didn’t want them to stop what they were doing to come up here after him. Fine. We’ll do it the hard way, he thought, and dropped for the platform.
    He struck one dakti square on the head, knocking it flat, and used it as a springboard to leap on the one that swung to face him. Moon landed on it, bowling it over backwards. It tried to sink its claws into his shoulders and Moon flared his spines to keep it off. He grabbed its wrists, using his feet to rip from its chest down, disemboweling it. He threw the body at the next dakti waiting to leap on him, knocking it off the platform. He rolled to his feet, then staggered as the surface under him jerked. The other three dakti had kept to their job, tearing at the ropes holding the logs in place. The join was giving way. At the top of his lungs, Moon yelled, “Stone, get out of there!”
    The dakti spun to face him, snarling, but the logs shifted, creaking and groaning as the whole structure started to lean. Moon braced to leap, then a sudden whish of air warned him. He flung himself forward, but something hit him from behind, the jolt knocking him flat on the platform.
    Moon rolled over to see a major kethel loom over him, glaring down, its breath stinking of old blood and overripe corpses. It looked like the minor dakti but was as big as Stone, and an array of horns stood out around its head. A heavy collar around its neck was hung with groundling skulls. Deep ragged claw marks across its face dripped black ichor. Uh oh, Moon had time to think frantically, digging his claws in to scramble away from it. This wasn’t exactly working out the way he had planned.
    Then Stone shot up behind the kethel and landed on its back, claws digging into the joints in its armor to yank it backward. Moon leapt up as the platform gave way under their weight, logs flipped upward, and the whole