In the Labyrinth of Drakes (35 page)

Tom and Andrew put their shoulders to it, both of them being stronger than Suhail. The panel made very unpleasant noises as it moved, but move it did. The wall proved to be approximately twenty centimeters thick, and beyond it was darkness. When the gap was large enough for my hand, I put a match through, as Suhail had done at the staircase, to test the air.

His voice trembling, he asked, “Can you see anything?”

“No,” I said. “Not from only a match's flame. But the air is good.”

The men redoubled their efforts. Soon, however, the door ground to a halt … and the gap it left was not very large.

Andrew made an anguished noise. “We
can't
just leave it like this! To hell with the mural—do we have a hammer? We could smash the edges off—”

“No!” Suhail yelped.

I stepped up to the crack and measured myself against it. “I think I can fit through. It will be tight, but possible.”

I should not have looked at my husband when I said that. His expression was that of a man who has glimpsed Paradise, and been told he may not enter. Contrition gripped my heart: as tremendous as this moment was for me, of the two of us, I was not the archaeologist. How would I feel if he went on to see some new kind of dragon, while I stayed behind? “Never mind,” I said. “It has waited this long; it can wait a while longer.”

“No,” Suhail said again, this time in a softer voice. “We cannot leave without knowing, and I will not destroy this door just to see. If you can fit through, then go.”

Tom sighed when I turned to him. “I would say,
Do you think that's safe?
—but I know what your answer would be. If this turns out to lead into the back end of a drake's lair, though, please do think twice before settling down to sketch it.”

Andrew said only, “You are both my most favourite and least favourite sister in the world right now.”

I was, of course, his only sister. Squaring my shoulders, I addressed the task of sliding through that narrow gap.

I had to exhale completely to fit through, and lost a button even so. It was a tight enough squeeze that I suffered a moment of worry as to what would happen if I got stuck. But then I was through, and Suhail passed along my notebook and pencil and one of the lamps. Before handing me the latter, he took my hand and kissed it, his body blocking this from the sight of the others. In a voice meant only for me, he murmured, “Come back and tell me of wonders.”

“I will,” I said, and turned to face the next step.

I was in a narrow corridor, running parallel to the wall. Suhail had been right; the hidden chamber lay back in the direction of the entrance. Not far ahead, the passage descended in another staircase, to a level below that of the previous room. By my calculation, the lower level must be at least halfway down the plateau.

For the sake of my companions, I called these details out to them. “There are murals here, too,” I said. “Painted, like the ones in the room, not the plain ones in the first corridor. All of gods—there are no human or dragon figures here that I can see.” A mischievous impulse seized me, and I added, “Shall I stay and draw them, before continuing on?”

The chorus of
“No!”
from behind me bid fair to shake dust from the ceiling, but it also made me smile and fortified me for the mystery ahead. When I raised my lamp, my hand no longer shook.

At the base of the steps, the corridor turned right again. Here, however, there was no door. The moment I rounded the corner, my lamp threw its light forward, and the chamber returned it in glory.

Even in its heyday, the hatching pit on Rahuahane must have been a rough, provincial thing. What I saw here was the exemplar: a square chamber carved and painted in the finest detail, with steps in the center leading up to a low, round platform. Unlike the room above, this one was still furnished. There were tables, stands, vases and bowls; gold and alabaster, coloured enamel and precious wood … an immeasurable treasure of unbroken Draconean artifacts.

Almost
unbroken. One of the low tables had been upset, its dishes knocked to the floor. When I advanced into the room, I understood why.

Empty fragments of eggshell lay in the sand-lined center of the pit. There were no skeletons: of course there would not be. Those would have fallen to dust after the hatchlings died. Stains and a few bones from what looked like birds remained in or around some of the dishes; undoubtedly the ravenous newborns had devoured every scrap they could while they waited for their caretakers to return. Left alone, hunting for more sustenance, one of them must have knocked over the table. But the bottle atop it had held some kind of oil, not food, and its contents had spilled out to soak the bare earthen floor.

My lamplight fell upon marks pressed into the earth.

They were tracks. Footprints, left behind by the newly hatched dragons, as they wandered back and forth in search of food that would never come.

T
HE
H
ATCHING
C
HAMBER

Later on, I was objective. I drew the tracks, measured them, took casts and tried to work out how many different individuals had trodden in that patch of oil-soaked ground. They were a priceless scientific discovery, and I valued them as such.

In that moment, however, I was not objective in the least. I envisioned the history that had transpired here—little hatchlings abandoned on the day of rebellion, starving to death in this beautiful and lifeless chamber—and I wept, tears rolling silently down my face. The Draconeans had never truly been people to me, only an ancient civilization who worshipped and bred dragons and therefore posed some intriguing puzzles. But the bodies up above had been people, individual men who lived and died; and the tracks here told the story of lives that had vanished without any other trace. Whatever had happened in the Labyrinth of Drakes, so many ages ago, it had carried a dreadful cost.

I do not know how long I stood there, my tears drying on my face. After a while the thought came to me that I was wasting precious water, crying like that; and so I came back to my senses. I hurried to the foot of the stairs and called up, “Are you still there?”

Suhail's answer was impatient, disbelieving, and full of love. “Where do you
think
we would have gone?”

“There is a hatching chamber,” I said as I came up the stairs, my voice catching a little. My knees trembled, but I refrained from putting my hand on the wall, lest I mar something. “It is untouched. Very much so. It looks as if there were eggs abandoned here, which eventually hatched, but the dragons themselves never made it out. I will want to search for teeth and talons—anything that may have survived.”

“Those should tell us whether it was in fact desert drakes they were breeding,” Tom said, full of excitement. He had undoubtedly been looking at the murals and drawing the same conclusions I had.

“Indeed,” I said, reaching the top corridor. Suhail held his hand out through the gap, and I went to grasp it—but then I stopped short. “Hullo there,” I said, diverted. “What's this?”

I had not taken a very good look at the back of the door when I first came through. Now that I did, I saw a piece of rock wedged under the bottom edge. Its faces were fresh enough that I thought we had broken it free in pushing open the door; it had then fallen into a spot where it prevented the door from opening any farther.

“What do you see?” Suhail demanded, in the tone of one who is about to perish of curiosity.

I pulled the stone free and said, “Try the door again.”

Andrew threw himself against the panel almost before I was done speaking, and the door grated open a little more. It still did not go far … but it went far enough. Through the newly widened gap, I could see Andrew standing with his hands on his hips, glaring at me. “You couldn't have looked behind the door
before
you wandered off to make discoveries without us?”

I would never have told him this at the time (and have debated admitting it now)—but a part of me was glad he had not been there when I found the chamber, for then he would have seen me weep for ancient hatchlings. I was not even certain I wanted to share so private a moment with Tom. But Suhail brushed the marks of tears from my cheeks with a gentle hand, and I smiled up at him. “Come. Let me show you wonders.”

 

TWENTY-TWO

Return to the Watchers' Heart—My reputation changes—Lieutenant Marton's report—Quite a lot of spit—My theory—Changes at home—Four times as much

Much of what happened after that is
extremely
public knowledge. We sealed the site—even going so far as to carry that pile of sand back up to the top and pour it into the staircase—and returned to Qurrat. Through a heroic effort of will, neither Tom, nor Andrew, nor I breathed a word about what we had found in the Labyrinth. This was to give Suhail time to secure the place properly—a task which ultimately took him to the court of the caliph in Sarmizi. I went there myself much later, but was glad not to face the ruler of Akhia during this delicate phase; as my faithful readers know well, I do not like dealing with politicians.

The Labyrinth is not incapable of supporting human habitation, even in summer. Rather, maintaining a presence there requires a tremendous outlay of resources. This the caliph was happy to provide, once he understood the value of what we had discovered. Before the winter rains came, an expedition returned to the Watchers' Heart (as the site has become known) to record it properly and begin clearing the hatching room of its treasures.

Suhail led this expedition, of course, and I went with him, to collect any remnants of the ancient hatchlings. (Tom remained in Qurrat to oversee the House of Dragons and its transition to a less military purpose.) Jake accompanied us as well, having arrived in Akhia shortly before the excavation team departed. I did not tell him our destination until we were safely away from civilization, and found my caution abundantly justified: he whooped and danced about so much, he fell off his camel and broke his left arm. This put only the most negligible damper on his spirits, for he had Suhail as his new stepfather, he was out of school, and we were taking him to see a treasure out of legend. It lacked only the sea to make his happiness complete.

Of the archaeological treasures taken from the Watchers' Heart you can read elsewhere, in abundance. Where my own work is concerned, I found less than I expected, and more. Less in the sense that there were no teeth, no claws, and only a scattering of delicate scales. But that very lack told me that what had hatched there were almost certainly
not
desert drakes.

The general response when I published this information was an assumption that I had simply overlooked the missing remains. This, however, is a slander against both my own professionalism and Suhail's. He oversaw all efforts at the site, and took precautions that were extraordinary for the time (though quite standard now). Nothing could be removed until its original position had first been recorded with a photograph; then it was photographed again, from all angles, once clear of the site. Only when this was done would he allow another item to be removed.

Nor did his caution end there. We sifted every bit of sand that had been removed from the staircase, making certain there was nothing more than ordinary pebbles mixed in, and took equal care with the interior of the site. Every bit of sand and dust from the hatching chamber was screened to a minute degree: that is the only reason I found the scales. Had there been teeth or other materials there, we
would
have found them.

When I was not peering at a tiny speck of rock to see whether it might be relevant, I made rubbings of every inscription in the place, then put myself to work recording the murals properly. I was not able to finish this task before the winter rains came, but I made good progress. As for the inscriptions … Abdul Aleem ibn Nahwas had finished refining Suhail's Ngaru translation, and gave a copy to him before we left Qurrat. Whenever he could snatch a spare moment, Suhail was chipping away at the Draconean text of the Cataract Stone, seeking the correspondences that would enable him to puzzle out the phonetic content, and from there begin to identify vocabulary, grammar, and so forth. We had new inscriptions to read, and could not wait to discover what they said.

We did not speak of that aspect where anyone could hear, not until the text was ready for publication. There was already more than enough publicity surrounding the Watchers' Heart: journalists from half of Anthiope had flocked to the site, some of them ill-prepared enough for the hazards of the desert that Suhail had to negotiate with the Ghalb to find and rescue those who might otherwise have perished. But this did not deter them from wandering by our camp in the hopes of seeing the hidden chambers, interviewing Suhail or myself, or both.

This is the point at which my public reputation underwent a revision of truly awe-inspiring proportions and speed. Scant months before, I had been the notorious woman who wed the man reputed to be her long-time lover on shockingly brief notice. With our discovery, however, we became the romantic tale of the century: two brilliant eccentrics, destined to be together, marrying in a whirlwind of passion for soft-hearted men and women to sigh over in envy. While I cannot dispute the “eccentric” part, and have a healthy respect for both my own intelligence and Suhail's, I could not help but laugh at the image of us that journalists and gossips presented to the world.