In the Labyrinth of Drakes (34 page)

So they were. Chips of stone had broken off the carvings, and not in the places one might expect from a fight. I looked around the room again, this time thinking less about the walls, more about what had taken place within them. “These men break in. Are the defenders here when they come, or do they surprise the invaders in their work?”

“They're here,” Andrew said immediately. “The way the fellow out there fell—he was facing someone farther down the corridor, not fighting against someone coming in.” He paced a circuit, shining his light on stains and scattered piles of decayed cloth. “There's more blood here than just those two could account for. Maybe some of the defenders died, too. If so, their bodies were taken away later.”

Tom took Suhail's lamp and examined a section of scarred mural. “After the invaders left, I'm guessing.
Somebody
hacked at the walls for a while. Not in any systematic way, I don't think—it looks more like frustration at work. If we pretend for a moment that there
is
a door here somewhere … they might have lost their tempers when they failed to find it.”

“Is it even
possible
?” I said.

“A secret door?” The grin spreading across Suhail's face would not have looked out of place on an eight-year-old boy. “Yes. It would have to be—” He whirled, gazing upward, orienting himself relative to the plateau above. “This direction.” He pointed at the wall that held the entrance to the corridor. “Unless it is underneath us entirely. There is no space for it in the other direction, and if it were to the left or right, it would have to be
very
small.”

We had tramped up and down from that plateau often enough to all have a very good sense of its dimensions. “Or else another corridor,” I said. “It would almost
have
to be a corridor, or else an exceedingly small room; otherwise it would overlap with the path we came in by. But how on earth would it open?”

Andrew actually bounced in place, so great was his excitement. “Some kind of hidden lever or knob! But we should be careful; we might trigger a trap instead. Then poison darts will come shooting out of the walls, or the ceiling will drop on us—”

Suhail laughed. “I think we can rest safe on that count. There has never been any proof that the Draconeans built traps into their sites.”

“There's never been anything like this, either,” Andrew said—which was true, albeit not a very compelling argument for improbable traps.

Given the room's intricately carved decoration, though, finding the trigger for a secret door (always supposing one existed in the first place) would be easier said than done. The invaders seemed to have tried without success; what were the odds that we would do any better? In our favour, we did have more time to search than they likely had, if there had been a rebellion under way at the time. But we could not press and pull on every square centimeter of the walls.

When the first hour of random prodding failed to produce any results, however, that was precisely what Suhail proposed. “We have to be systematic,” he said. “Otherwise we will waste our effort, revisiting points we have already tried, and perhaps miss the bit we need by a mere finger's breadth.”

Just then we heard a startled Akhian oath from the corridor. It was Haidar, come to make certain we had not all perished; instead he had found the first body. The hour was getting late, though it hardly made any difference in the depths of the temple. “We'll come back to this tomorrow,” Tom said. “It's waited for millennia; if there's anything else for us to find, it can wait a few hours more.”

Andrew and Suhail both made faces like their mothers were telling them to leave off playing and come have a bath. I believe I controlled my expression better, though not my heart. But with my concentration broken, I found myself ravenous, and Tom had a point.

“First thing tomorrow,” I agreed. “And I shall not sleep a wink tonight.”

*   *   *

Upon our return the next morning, I did not take part in the Great Secret Door Search. Instead I brought my sketchbook with me, along with every lamp we had, and set to work documenting the interior of the temple.

Nowadays this sort of thing is done with photography, and had we known we were going to stumble upon a priceless Draconean ruin, we would have brought a camera with us. (A camera, and someone to work it: none of us knew how to operate such a thing.) But the photographic methods of the time, being quite new, had one great flaw, which was that they required very long exposures—hardly ideal for capturing living subjects like dragons, who have no interest in sitting for their portraits. We might have gotten some value out of photographing them asleep, or recording their habitat; but I could do the same with pencils and paper, and those are much less finicky about temperature and the interference of grit. A camera was far more trouble than it truly would have been worth … or so we had assumed.

Standing once more in the temple chamber, Suhail shook his head at his own folly. “If I had the self-restraint the Merciful and Compassionate gave a rabbit, I would seal this up and ride back to Qurrat, then come back here with proper supplies and assistance. This site deserves better than we have given it.”

“We have not damaged anything,” I said, to reassure him. His expression appended the word
“yet.”
“At the very least, you should let me sketch things as they are now. I would be here for weeks copying everything in full—to begin with, I would need watercolours—but I can record the important points, at least. When that is done, if we have not found anything else, we can go back to Qurrat as you said.”

“
You
can go back to Qurrat,” Andrew muttered. “I'm not leaving until I find treasure.”

While the others began a systematic exploration of the wall, then, I set to work drawing. I began with the three bodies, and then the door to the chamber, but those were very quick sketches. My true interest was in the murals, of which there were five: one on each side of the entrance, two on the side walls, and an enormous one covering the back wall.

The large one was the procession of offerings. This was laid out in the customary manner of Draconean art, with the human figures a fraction the size of the dragon-headed ones, and all standing in the peculiar combination of profile and facing posture that looks so odd when one is used to modern techniques of perspective. The procession stretched out in horizontal rows, each one separated from the rest by a decorative band filled with writing. “Prayers?” I murmured to myself, laying down lines with a quick hand. The inscriptions I made no attempt to replicate; those would be better done as rubbings. “Or some kind of proclamation, perhaps?”

There was a good deal more writing on the left-hand wall, this time arranged in vertical columns, with each character painted in red. It was exceedingly strange, seeing the bright colours in this chamber, not only in the murals but on the statues. Close examination of other relics had shown that at least some Draconean statues used to be painted; but we are accustomed to seeing them as plain stone, and this has given their civilization an austere quality in our imaginations. Now, however, we had proof that they had loved colour as much as modern man.

I resorted to quick scribbles to represent the writing on that mural, putting my main effort into the egg that sat at the bottom, underneath the red columns and atop an elaborate altar-like shape. Again, rubbings would be more helpful in the short term than me drawing every character by hand. The murals to either side of the door I bypassed for the time being; Suhail, Andrew, and Tom were too much in the way.

That left me with the right-hand wall, which is the one I had the most interest in to begin with. This one showed actual dragons, which are much less common in Draconean art; most of their decorations depict humans or dragon-headed figures. But two winged reptiles dominated the upper part of the wall, flanking yet another inscription, and I was very keen to study them more closely.

My first thought, when I saw them the previous day, was that they might depict the kind of dragon this civilization had bred—a variety that seemed to have since gone extinct. If that were the case, however, then the breed in question had not been much different from our modern desert drakes. The creatures on the wall looked a good deal like the ones I had been chasing and feeding all year, allowing for a certain amount of artistic license: their scales were painted in gold leaf, making them far brighter and more splendid than any real beast, and the odd perspective of the Draconean style made them look rather like flowers squashed flat between the pages of a book.

But they had the broad, delicate ruffs I knew so well, and the fan-like vanes on their tails. I was forced to conclude they were indeed the familiar breed, or at least their very close cousins. If
those
had been hatched here, then it meant two things: first, that the Draconeans had raised more than one variety of dragon (for I was certain the kind we had found on Rahuahane were not desert drakes); and second, that an ancient civilization had succeeded where Tom and I had failed.

It was a disheartening thought, and no amount of telling myself that it was silly to feel disheartened in the middle of such a tremendous discovery changed my mood. I devoted myself to documenting this wall with assiduous care … and that is when I noticed something peculiar.

Even with all our lamps, the light was less than ideal. I picked one up and carried it to the wall, so I might get a closer look. “Oy!” Andrew said. “I need that, or I'm going to lose my place!”

“Put your finger on it for now,” I said, distracted. “This dragon's foot is wrong.”

The silence from behind me was disbelieving. Then Tom said, “Wrong how?”

“It's on backward. As if the seamstress wasn't paying attention, and sewed it on upside down.”

Andrew snorted. “It's Draconean art. It always looks strange.”

By then I had gone to the other dragon. “This one, too. Their feet ought to be facing toward the edges of the wall, even if the claws dangle. Instead they're cocked inward, as if—”

“As if pointing at something.” Suhail had gone outside again to pray. The month of fasting was supposed to be a time of piety; even if he was not observing the fast itself, he felt obliged to attend to his devotions—all the more so because he was spending the intervening time in a heathen temple. He had returned while I was distracted, and came now to stand just behind my left shoulder.

“And their scales are wrong, too,” I said. “That is—the entire depiction of their scales is very stylized, but we are used to that. I mean that even for the style, they are on upside down. But only on these hind legs.”

We had brought measuring tape with us. Tom fetched it and, with Suhail's assistance, stretched it out to form a line from the left-hand dragon's foot. He said, “I don't know exactly what angle we should follow, here. The top of the foot? The medial line of the metatarsals? It makes a difference.”

The two dragons were not perfectly symmetrical; their feet were not cocked to the same degree, meaning that any lines we drew from them would not intersect in the middle of the wall. The left was cocked higher than the right, skewing the intersection to the right as well. I said, “All we need is for it to direct us to the correct area. Once we have that—”

I had only just begun to run my hands over the wall. But the tip of my index finger brushed something—not anything noteworthy; only the irregular shape left between the carved marks of a character—and when it did so, the stone shifted slightly. On instinct, I pressed, and the bit of stone slid into the wall.

Something clicked.

I had crouched to search, and now shied back with such alacrity that I landed on my rump. Above me, with a clatter of chain and a ponderous, grinding sound, a portion of the wall swung inward.

Less than ten centimeters. It shuddered to a halt after that, its mechanism corroded and clogged with the slow accumulation of grit. But it was a secret door, and it had
opened
.

With slow care, Suhail knelt at my side. I think his intention was to help me to my feet; but having knelt, he stayed there, his hands on my shoulders, staring at the door. As if his knees, like mine, had gone too weak to bear weight.

Andrew whispered, “I
knew
it.”

His faith had been stronger than mine. We had searched for this thing; we had assembled arguments for the possibility of its existence. But theories are one thing, and proof quite another. And if the invaders had not found this door—as it seemed they had not—

Then whatever lay beyond it would be pristine. A Draconean site, wholly untouched since ancient times.

I got to my feet, then helped Suhail up. He was still staring at the wall, hardly blinking. I licked my lips, swallowed, then inhaled deeply and said, “I for one am
very
eager to know what is beyond that door.”

Tom looked to Suhail, but my husband seemed to have lost the power of speech. “Well?” Tom asked. “Will it damage anything if we force the door open?”

The question brought Suhail to rationality once more. “It might,” he said, in a shallow, cautious voice. “From the sound, I think the mechanism is stone and bronze, which is why it survived; wood or rope would have snapped at the first pressure. But it is not working smoothly any longer. We may not be able to close the door again.”

Then he blinked and drew what I think was his first real breath since he returned from his prayers. “Whatever we find in there,” he said, fixing each of us with his gaze, “we must
not
touch it. No matter what it may be. We may look only. Then we will close the door if we can, and go back to Qurrat, before this treasure lures us into stupidity or starvation.”

“Or both.” I reminded myself to keep breathing. It was remarkably easy to forget. “All of this, of course, presupposes we can get the door open.”