The Crucible of the Dragon God Read Online Free PDF Page B

already negotiated. Its teeth bit into the wood and cloth strip, ripping at it and tearing it away.
    Kali felt her whole body vibrate bone-jarringly and then, as the teeth of the blade spat the splint out, found herself being flipped dizzyingly through the air back towards the hammer. There was no time to reorientate herself and, in the second she tried, the swinging bludgeon slammed directly into her front, knocking her, stunned and winded, cleanly off the bridge.
    It could have been worse, she supposed, she could have lost the leg, but that was actually quite academic right now because she wasn't getting out of here. The place had become her tomb after all.
    She looked down at the stalagmites and boulders that were now rushing towards her, estimated she had only a few seconds before she hit, and closed her eyes.
    She slammed into the cavern floor. But it didn't hurt half as much as she'd imagined it might.
    What? she thought.
    Instead of the hard rock Kali thudded onto - and through - a layering of planks, that once upon a time must have been set there to prevent unwary miners stumbling into a dropshaft. They were so rotten she passed through without harm. Another layer was almost immediately beneath them, and then another, level after level of shoring. As Kali plummeted through, her momentum slowed slightly each time.
    Kathuck , kathuck , kathuck .
    It seemed to go on forever, and Kali was beginning to think she might die of suffocation as opposed to anything else when, at last, she slammed through the last of the layers and crashed, flat on her back, onto a small hillock of rotten wood on some deep, deep tunnel floor.
    She lay there for a second.
    "Ow," she said.
    And then she flipped herself upright, ready for whatever trap was going to be thrown at her next.
    But there was none. Kali knew instantly that this place was different to Be'Trak'Tak. It looked different, felt different and even smelled different. And that could mean only one thing. The whole area she'd travelled through to reach Munch's mine had been riddled with other such excavations, and this had to be one of them. She'd broken through into another mine. And what was more, there was light ahead.
    Wasting no time, Kali dusted herself down and began to move towards it, trying all the time to suppress the presumption that what was she looking at was an exit. After so long it was just too much to ask for, surely? And it was. Following the light to its source, Kali came upon against a solid rock wall.
    No, wait, not solid. There was something there.
    Kali's disappointment upon discovering that the light source was not an exit was mitigated slightly by the fact that it seemed to be no kind of natural light, and she found herself intrigued. Also she saw that it was not one light source but two, only seeming to be a whole because they were embedded in the rock close together. No, not embedded, she realised as she examined them further. The lights seemed to be attached to something else embedded in the rock, something bigger that a roof collapse had buried at some time in the past and that had remained undisturbed since. The question was, how long had it remained undisturbed? Kali studied the collapse with a professional eye, noting the visible fossilisation, the settlement of the larger pieces of debris, and the compactness of the scree around them, which was absolutely solid. A very long time, then, she concluded. The only problem now being that, if that were true, how in all the hells could the lights - whatever they were - still be glowing?
    She used her gutting knife to work away at the scree surrounding them, eventually revealing two small, orange orbs that seemed to throb beneath her touch, prompting a dull headache as they did. Suddenly, she realised what they had to be. Unless she'd missed her guess, they were some kind of power source for the thing to which they were attached.
    Kali slapped the area she had revealed around the orbs tentatively, and then a