Dealing with Dragons

Cimorene stopped walking immediately. "Kazul?"
"It's quite all right, Princess," Kazul's disembodied voice said from out of the darkness. "This happens all the time here. Don't bother trying to relight the lamp. Just put your hand on my elbow and follow along that way."
"All right," Cimorene said doubtfully. She groped with her free hand in the direction of Kazul's voice and scraped her knuckles on the dragon's scales. "Ow!"
"Take your time," Kazul advised.
"I'm ready," Cimorene said. Her right hand was pressed flat against the cool, rough-edged scales at the back of Kazul's left forearm.
'Just don't move too fast, or I'll lose you or get stepped on or something."
Kazul did her best to oblige, but Cimorene still had difficulty in keeping up. She had to take at least three steps for every one of Kazul's, and it seemed that every time she moved her foot, she hit a rock or an uneven place in the runnel floor. Then she would stumble, and her hand would scrape and slide against Kazul's scales, so that she was afraid she would lose contact with the dragon.
"Are you sure I shouldn't try and relight the lamp?" Cimorene asked after her fifth painful stumble-and-slide.
"Quite sure," Kazul said. "You see, it isn't-ah, there it goes."
While Kazul was speaking, there was a flicker of light, and then the darkness rolled aside like a curtain being pulled. Cimorene found herself standing in a large cave whose walls glittered as if they were studded with thousands of tiny mirrors. The lamp in her left hand was burning cheerfully once more.
"Was it the lamp?" Cimorene asked after studying it for a moment. "Or was it me?"
"It was the caves," Kazul said. "That was one of the reasons they're 'of night' as well as 'of fire."
"Only one of the reasons?" Cimorene said thoughtfully. "I don't like the sound of that."
"You'll be quite all right as long as you're with me," Kazul assured her.
"Very few things are willing to mess with a dragon, even in the dark.
And the periods of darkness don't last long. It's because the magic of these caves doesn't affect us as much as other people, or so I'm told."
"You mean that blackness is likely to come back?"
Kazul nodded.
"Then let's get as far as we can before it does," Cimorene said, and started across the cave.
There were four tunnels leading out of the opposite side of the glittering cavern. Kazul took the second from the left without hesitating an instant.
"Where do all these tunnels go?" Cimorene asked, glancing at the other three openings as she followed Kazul.
"The one on the right end leads to a chain of caverns," Kazul said over her shoulder. "The first few are quite ordinary, but then you come to one full of hot sulfur pools. Some of the older dragons bathe there.
They claim the water is good for rheumatism. Beyond that is a cave with molten silver dripping down the walls, and the chain ends at a deep chasm with a river of red-hot melted rock at the bottom."
"Doesn't sound very attractive," Cimorene commented.
"The dwarfsmiths find it very useful for forging magic swords," Kazul assured her. "The second tunnel on the right takes you into a maze.
The tunnels and caverns constantly shift around, so that no matter how carefully you mark your way, you always get lost."
"Even dragons?"
Kazul nodded. "Though I believe there was one prince who managed to find his way out with a magic ball of string."
"Oh, bother!" said Cimorene. The lights had gone out again, just as they emerged into a small cave.
"It's quite all right. This part's easy," Kazul said.
"Next time I'm going to bring a cane," Cimorene muttered. "Where do the other tunnels lead?"
"The one on the far left goes through a couple of caverns that are pretty, but not very interesting. We're always chasing knights and princes out of it, though. They come for flasks of water from the bottomless pool at the far end."
"What does it do?" Cimorene asked. "Ow!" She had just banged her right elbow against the wall of the cave in the dark.
"It casts a cloud of darkness for twenty miles around when it's poured on the ground," Kazul replied.
"How useful," Cimorene muttered balefully, rubbing her elbow.
"And this tunnel leads to the Enchanted Forest, by way of the King's Cave," Kazul finished.
"Oh, good. I was hoping to see that," Cimorene said. The King's Cave was the chamber where the first King of the Dragons had found Colin's Stone, and the Historia Dracorum had not described it anywhere near well enough to suit Cimorene. "And here's the light coming back, thank goodness.
Let's hurry before it goes again."
They went through three small caves and two more periods of blackness before they reached the King's Cave. Kazul pointed out various locations of interest, such as the wall of crystal with a chip in one corner where the Prince of the Ruby Throne had stolen a piece to make a magic ring and the jewel-studded cavern where the King of the Dragons met with people who needed impressing. There was one very eerie cave full of slabs of black rock. Most were standing on end, though a few had fallen over. Kazul said they were all enchanted princes.
"All of them?" Cimorene asked, appalled. There were at least forty of the stone slabs, and the cave was quite crowded.
Kazul shook her head. "No, the one on the end there is just an ordinary boulder."
"How did it happen?"
"The princes came to steal some of the Water of Healing from the well at the end of the cave," Kazul said. "There are two dippers by the well: one is tin, the other is solid gold and covered with jewels. The princes all tried to use the gold one, even though they'd been told that only the tin dipper would work. It's no more than they deserve."
Cimorene frowned, thinking of some of the princes she had known.
"Well, I won't deny that they probably behaved foolishly, but-" "Foolishly!" Kazul snorted. "Any reasonably well-educated prince ought to have sense enough to follow directions when he's on a quest, but all of these fellows were sure they knew better. If they'd simply done what they were told, they wouldn't be here."
"Still, turning them into slabs of stone forever seems a little extreme."
"Oh, they won't be stone forever," Kazul said. "Sooner or later someone will come along who has the sense not to improvise, and he'll succeed in getting the water. Then he'll use some of it to disenchant this lot, and the cave will be empty for a while until the next batch of young idiots starts arriving."
Cimorene felt better knowing that the princes would someday be freed, though she had sense enough not to try doing it herself. Since she had not been sent on a quest for the Water of Healing, it was highly unlikely that she would be able to disenchant the princes even if she succeeded in taking the water. And she knew enough about quests and enchantments and the obtaining of things with magical properties to know that she would probably get into a lot of trouble if she tried.
So she tucked the matter into the back of her mind and followed Kazul through the stone-filled cavern. She was careful not to step on any of the fallen slabs.
Just outside the entrance to the next cave, Kazul stopped. "This," she said, "is the King's Cave. We have to cross it as quickly as we can.
Don't stop in the middle, and don't say anything while we're inside.
Understand?
Good. Come on, then."
As soon as she stepped inside the cave, Cimorene understood the reason for Kazul's request for silence. The walls, the ceiling, and the floor were made of dark, shiny stone that multiplied and threw back echoes of even the smallest sound. The soft scraping of Kazul's scales against the floor sounded like thirty men sawing wood, and the tiny gasp Cimorene gave at the sight and sound of the cave was as loud as if she had shouted. Cimorene went on as quietly and carefully as she could.