Chapter 16

The couple were having breakfast on the third morning.

Ricky said, “Micky, we need to go find the dragons. I don’t normally go wandering around in their domain, but I feel that we can’t wait any longer. I doubt that Silver is coming, as she should have tripped one of my alarm spells by now.”

“If I were Kerr, I’d have set up some scheme to get the dragon to go to the plateau. But I didn’t know what he plans to do, as I’ve thwarted that plan by bringing you and me here.”

“Kerr’s only real option is to follow us. Fortunately, that storm has kept them under the shield. However, I noticed them sorting out lankys to ride when you went to do the dishes.”

“The dragons don’t normally venture far in winter. They like to stock some extra food for the younger ones if they wake and need it. Most of the older dragons hibernate for the three months.”

“They just leave a rotating guard. The younger ones often get this duty because they are easier to wake when it’s time to change over. They also tend to not go out, as they hate the cold weather.”

“I suspect that Silver is hibernating this rotation. This would normally be my off year, so that makes sense that she wasn’t expecting me. It worries me that the portal in the cavern being activated hasn’t elicited a response from the guards. Unless they can’t come to me for some reason.”

“Micky, I can’t mind-talk with them as spells in the caverns stop me from hearing them. Even so, the guards know that the dais has been activated, and they are supposed to come and find out why.”

It wasn’t hard to see Ricky was agitated.

Micky was more than keen to follow Ricky to find the dragons.

She figured that if they were asleep, then it was a safe time for her to see them. They were soon dressed in their cold-weather clothes and had donned the knapsacks filled with extra supplies before they left.

Ricky donned his thin, white, canvas-looking shoes he called deck-shoes. Micky put back on her more sturdy boots. She wasn’t so keen on stubbing her toes in the dark, in a rock-strewn cavern.

Micky also added some more food to her knapsack and two extra bottles of water. It wasn’t as if the weight was going to worry her with the knapsack being magical. Once she said she was ready, they set off.

Micky followed Ricky as they weaved through both small and large caverns and lots of tunnels. Some of the tunnels were man-made, but most were simply wide channels in the rock.

About half an hour in, Ricky has stopped at one intersection and contemplated which way to go. He went east. An hour or so later, they stopped in a set of caverns that could be entered from the outside from the east.

The position of the cave was why the dragons used it as the main entrance. Many hundreds of years before, a huge slice of the mountain had cracked off and slipped down. It left a roughly 80m wide and twice as long forward-slanting forward wall of rock.

The top of the cave entrance was about 30m down the cliff and off the centre by 6m or so. It would take an experienced mountaineer to gain the cavern entrance from above the cave mouth. The opening was ovalish in shape with the widest measurements being 6m long and 4m at the highest. Hence it was very difficult for people to get to the dragons.

Ricky knew of a smaller side entrance on the northern side that he had found when he was not much more than a boy. He also knew that he and his father hadn’t been the only people who had used that entrance in the past.

He had believed that he had blocked it off after Silver had been stolen and the dragons told him how to use the portals. However, he couldn’t guarantee it was the only entrance, and he hadn’t checked the old tunnels in at least twenty years.

He now wished he had set up more cameras on and in the mountain. The portable viewer that had brought with him showed that the cameras in the dragon’s communal caverns indicated no movement.

The guard could well be asleep as some of the younger dragons didn’t take their safety seriously. Two cameras that were on the tunnel that Silver normally used to come and visit him had stopped working. This worried Ricky too.

He had thought of going that way but decided to come in via the front door, so to speak. They had had a few quakes last summer, but none had felt that big. When he popped in to see Queen Fleur in mid-summer after the biggest of the quakes, she had told him that they were all safe.

Thinking along this line, an incident about two years before popped into his head and his concern suddenly deepened. He’d come back from a short winter trip to the coast and knew two or three people must have been stuck at his crossroads.

What had bothered him was that they only seemed to have stayed for half of the winter going by the resources that were used. That in itself was odd as pretty much only magical gifted travellers could get in or out once the first storms blocked the passes.

What worried Ricky now was that he believed they had spent the other half of the winter here in the mountain and he now believed for certain that his suspicions that they had been trying to access the dragon caves were in fact true.

Silver had said that the guards hadn’t seen anyone and none of the eggs was missing, so they had dismissed his worries at the time. Grimly, Ricky knew that the dragons were not the only treasure in this mountain that would draw people here.

He knew of a second small crystal cavern that had once been accessible from the old northern entrance. You had to access that cavern to then follow the rather arduous path of natural tunnels, to get to one of the ancient dragon caverns that these dragons weren’t using any more.

The shield he maintained to protect the main living caverns blocked the other entrance that the dragons still used and only he and they could go through it.

For many centuries, fables had said that the Queens didn’t own the only crystal caverns. One of the two mountains in the centre of the island had one too. Ricky knew the Quaz crystals were in very short supply in the lowlands as he used them as currency himself.

He should have expected more people to come looking for them sooner rather than later. If someone had come looking for the crystals and had then managed to break through the shield, they could get into the dragons’ new caverns, it could explain why Kerr was here now. He did have a thing about the dragons.

Ricky then became really concerned about his bond daughter. Sometimes, Silver came the long way just to check on the old caverns when she wanted to come and visit him. Even so, she nearly always turned up in his crystal cavern by the end of the second day. The only time she had been late was because of a rockslide she had to clear.

Because he used the portals, Ricky had gotten lazy. He hadn’t checked if anyone had tried to use the walking trails from the Spirit Road (eastern road), or the Fern road (south-eastern road) for near on twenty years.

Hence, if people had come back at a better time of the year for a second look, they didn’t need to access his plateau at all to get to the caverns that he was thinking about. He wouldn’t have been alerted and neither would the Dragon’s if they were out hunting.

He thought of the old camla and woollies trails that led down from the small plateau high on the northern side. The wild woollies and camla would stay on the mountain all year round. They often established set trails to get from one feeding ground on the mountain to another.

The trail he thought about, swung back towards the east to skirt Dragon’s Ravine. It would be hard going, but men with knapsacks, some ropes and hooks could navigate the ravine and the ridges to the old cave just like he had.