In the Labyrinth of Drakes (36 page)

I am glad I was in the desert for the worst of it, safely insulated from the stories spreading through Qurrat and beyond. Natalie compiled a scrap-book of articles published in Falchester, which she presented to me upon my return to Scirland; I can scarcely read some of them without expiring of laughter or embarrassment. But on the whole, my sudden transition from notoriety to genuine fame was a boon to my career, and so I cannot complain overmuch.

One other thing amuses me, looking back on that time. So much attention was focused on the discovery in the Labyrinth of Drakes—and rightly so, for the Watchers' Heart has never been truly equaled by any archaeological site since (though the city of Jinkai, buried in volcanic mud, comes close). Virtually no one apart from myself and Tom, however, paid the slightest bit of attention to my work with the honeyseekers.

The turning point there came when the winter rains drove us out of the desert at last. Lieutenant Marton had faithfully carried out my orders regarding the egg incubation programme, and came to report to me almost as soon as I returned to Dar al-Tannaneen.

I knew something was amiss as soon as I saw him, for he was wringing his hands fit to dislocate a finger. “What is wrong, Lieutenant?”

“The data,” he said. “That is—one bit of it. A honeyseeker, I mean. One of the honeyseekers. It's wrong. Not like the others.”

“Has it fallen ill? Which one?” I reached for the files in which I kept all my notes on the hatchlings.

The reference number he gave me, however, was not yet in my files, as it belonged to one of the eggs that had been incubating during my absence. I closed the ledger in front of me and said, “Lieutenant Marton. Take a deep breath, and tell me precisely what is amiss.”

He obeyed, straightening his shoulders. “I did as you asked, Dame Isabella, increasing the temperature. Well past the point where I expected all of them to die. But one of the eggs hatched anyway. And the thing that came out of it is—different.”

My chair nearly toppled over as I stood. “Show me.”

*   *   *

I saw immediately what Lieutenant Marton meant. Had I encountered this hatchling in the wild, I would have thought it very similar to a honeyseeker, but not quite the same. A related species, perhaps. Female honeyseekers are a dull green, and their mates black-and-yellow, with a bright blue crest; this one was female and had a similar shape to her body, but her scales were solid orange. Her body was even more attenuated than usual for her kind, and sported a much finer crest. All in all, she was not nearly so mutated as Lumpy—in fact, she seemed quite healthy—but she was, as Lieutenant Marton had said,
wrong
. This was not what a honeyseeker should look like.

Earlier in this volume I said I was eliding a certain incident whose significance was not apparent to me at the time. My mind returned to it now, in light of this new data.

Some months before, one of the hatchlings had become vexed at me for manipulating his body to obtain measurements of his growth. To express his annoyance, he had spat on me—the defense mechanism of honeyseekers, which acquires its toxicity from the eucalyptus nectar they consume.

Their saliva is not
very
toxic. It is neither as choking as a swamp-wyrm's breath, nor as corrosive as the spray of a savannah snake. But it can irritate the skin, causing an unpleasant rash, and so I had hurried to wash the affected skin (leaving the honeyseeker to enjoy a brief freedom, before I returned and finished my measurements). Afterward, though, I noted that my skin was not even a little red.

“Lieutenant Marton,” I said. “How many times have the honeyseekers spat on you?”

He looked puzzled. “I don't know, Dame Isabella. A dozen times, at least. Probably more.”

“How much has it irritated your skin?”

“It doesn't bother me, Dame Isabella,” he said stoutly. “So long as I wash it off within a few minutes, I don't have any problems.”

A few minutes was long enough for the full rash to set in, and even prompt washing leaves one with redness and tender skin. But I needed more evidence than that.

Marton categorically refused to let me use myself as a test subject—even going so far as to roll up his sleeves and take one of the juvenile honeyseekers directly out of my hands. My attempt to reclaim it produced the first test, as it provoked the creature into spitting on Marton's bare arm. “Might as well do the rest,” he said with a hint of triumph, and reached for the next one.

I gave in. Soon a full dozen honeyseekers had spat on him, and I had written on him with my pen, marking each place where the saliva struck with the appropriate reference number. Half an hour later, there was no effect from any of them.

“Maybe it's because we're keeping them in cages?” he speculated.

“That should not matter,” I said. “We are still feeding them eucalyptus nectar. It should show up in their saliva.” (Had I been in less of a rush to test my theory, I might have been wiser and asked Tom to chemically analyze samples, rather than using Marton as my canvas.) “And that does not explain your orange honeyseeker, either.” The creature had hatched despite being subjected to temperatures that ought to have been lethal.

Nor were those the only anomalies. I went back through my records, examined each juvenile closely; I thought about the swamp-wyrm eggs that had been transplanted to the rivers of Bayembe. Some had failed to hatch, and others had hatched unhealthy specimens, just as we experienced here at Dar al-Tannaneen. But the ones that had been healthy, the ones that had grown …

They had been different, too.

I showed the orange honeyseeker to Tom and Suhail, laid out all the data I had. It was not nearly enough for a strong theory, and I had learned my lesson about publishing ideas before I thought them through sufficiently—but I trusted those two men above anyone in the world. They would not mock me for getting something wrong. I took a deep breath and said, “I think dragon eggs are not merely sensitive to handling. I think the environment in which they incubate actively changes the organism that results.”

Tom was examining the orange honeyseeker from every angle, ignoring her furious spitting. “You think they aren't toxic because they didn't incubate in nests of eucalyptus leaves.”

“I didn't want to strip the sheikh's trees bare. We've been using tamarisk leaves—I didn't think it would make a difference.”

I was not the only person in this enterprise who lacked caution. Tom wiped some of the spittle from his arm and tasted it. He made a face. “Salty.”

Suhail's eyes went very wide. “Tamarisk trees can take up salt from groundwater.”

“Swamp-wyrm eggs in clear, running water,” I said. “Rather than the silty morass of Mouleen. We already know the Moulish change the egg's environment to influence the sex of the creature that results; Mr. Shelby says that works with some reptile eggs, as well. He says it is based on temperature. What if, with dragons, it can affect more than sex?”

“That,” Tom said, “would be a
hell
of a thing to study.”

It would require an absurd number of eggs. If the honeyseekers were anything to go by, not all mutations worked out well; many were lethal. One would lose a great quantity before one had anything like a stable breed of orange, salty honeyseekers.

But on a long enough timeline, it might be possible. And who knew how many centuries the Draconeans had spent on dragon-breeding, gradually shepherding wild stock toward something of their own making?

“When you think about it,” Suhail said after I expressed this thought, “it isn't
that
much different from what we have done in breeding livestock. A great deal of the selection happens earlier in the life cycle, is all. And the rate of change is, shall we say, more
dramatic
.”

I could not help smiling at him. “I see our discussions in Coyahuac about animal domestication left a mark on you. Let me officially recant what I said then: I am now firmly of the opinion that they
did
domesticate dragons. A breed they created through altering the environment of the eggs; a breed that has since gone extinct, or else mutated beyond easy recognition—for it is likely that whatever they made was unfit to survive on its own. Oh, if
only
we had a proper skeleton to study!”

“We have found a hidden temple, footprints, petrified eggs, and a stone we can translate,” Suhail said, ticking the items off on his fingers. “Who is to say that a skeleton is not out there somewhere?”

The odds were small … but I would not give up hope. “If there is, then we will find it.”

*   *   *

Suhail and I parted for a time that winter: the obligations of dealing with the Watchers' Heart kept him in Akhia, while Tom and I had to report to Lord Rossmere concerning our own commission. (Also Jake had to return to school, though he protested mightily.)

“I would call this a successful failure,” Lord Rossmere said once we were settled in his office. “You did not manage to breed dragons, but we kept Yelangese attention diverted for a good long while. And that discovery of your husband's, Dame Isabella, has turned into a diplomatic coup for us with the Akhian government.”

I smiled sweetly at him. “I am glad that
our
discovery has brought so many benefits.”

His frown said he had not missed the stress I laid on that word. “Yes, well. Under the circumstances, the Crown has decided it would be best to let the research in Qurrat continue in a more generalized way. Who knows? Maybe you'll even find a way to harness dragons for a more active combat role, the way the Keongans do.”

Tom cleared his throat. “My lord, neither Dame Isabella nor I are interested in carrying out more military research. We would be happy to go on studying drakes, to further our store of knowledge—but not to use them in war.”

Lord Rossmere brushed this off with the air of a man who thinks he can talk his opponent around, but Tom and I were utterly firm on that point, both then and in the weeks to come. We did not like the clear implication that the breeding programme had been a smokescreen for the synthesis efforts from the start; we did not like being treated as the Royal Army's lackeys. Suhail had enough influence now in Akhia that Dar al-Tannaneen would survive, with or without Scirling involvement: if Lord Rossmere tried to force the point, the emir of Qurrat would reclaim the property and re-establish it as a research site under his own authority. Which would hardly free us from the noose of politics, of course—that cannot be escaped, wherever one goes—but it made a useful stick to bludgeon people with in an argument.

And I soon had quite a strong arm with which to bludgeon. Not long after our return, Tom and I received the news that we were both to be rewarded for our recent deeds: he with an elevation to knighthood, becoming Sir Thomas Wilker, and I with a peerage.

I burst into laughter when I heard the news. “Me, a lady? You can't be serious.”

But they were quite serious. I was to be granted the barony of Trent, in the county of Linshire. There were various complications on account of my foreign marriage, but the peerage solved one problem in the course of creating others: Suhail and I took the opportunity to adopt Trent as a shared surname, dodging the linguistic and social contradictions we had ignored up to that point. Miss Isabella Hendemore had become Mrs. Isabella Camherst, then Dame Isabella Camherst; now, at the age of thirty-four, I acquired the name by which the world knows me: Isabella, Lady Trent.

Only a few of my readers, I think, will understand why my elevation felt almost like an insult.

Tom understood. “It's a slap to the face,” he said, pacing an angry circuit across the carpet of my study. “Not that you don't deserve it—you do.”

“And you deserve more than a knighthood,” I said.

“They'll never make me a lord, and we both know it. But why haven't they made you a Colloquium Fellow?”

I could feel my mouth settling into an ironic line. “Because I have not yet published anything of sufficient scientific import.”

“Bollocks,” he said bluntly. “You've published as much as I have. More than a great many of my
fellows
.” He scarred the word with heavy sarcasm.

We both knew the real answer to his question, of course. I was not a member of the Philosophers' Colloquium because I was a woman. “If I am right about the effect of the environment on incubation, and I publish
that
—”

Tom's leg jerked as if he almost kicked one of my chairs. Instead he sat in it, scowling like a thunderhead. “We have to achieve twice as much, in order to get half as much reward.”

There was no answer I could make to that. It was true … but neither of us could do a thing about it. Except, of course, to achieve four times as much. To be so exceptional, they could no longer shut us out; and having done that, to hope that those who came after might be judged on equal terms with those who should be their peers.

It is not a dream easily attained. We have not truly attained it in my lifetime. But I was more determined than ever to do my part.

I therefore went to the wall and pulled down the map hanging on a roll there. It was decorated with little tags, marking the homes of different draconic breeds around the world. Once Suhail came to Falchester, he and I would update it with major Draconean sites. Somewhere in the world, our two passions must intersect and form the picture I sought.

Turning to face Tom, I smiled and said, “The answers are out there somewhere. And together, we will find them.”

 

BY
MARIE BRENNAN

A Natural History of Dragons

The Tropic of Serpents

Voyage of the Basilisk

In the Labyrinth of Drakes

Midnight Never Come