A Natural History of Dragons (19 page)

The Drustanev ruins are not extensive. Inside the gateway lay a large, open courtyard, now thoroughly choked with underbrush and trees. Lord Hilford scuffed at the ground in one exposed spot and uncovered the chipped corner of a paving stone, tilted up at a sharp angle by a root thrusting beneath. But we did not linger long, for Astimir was urging us onward, to the main temple ahead.

I call it a “temple,” though of course the function of those places has been debated ever since the days of the Nichaeans. All Draconean structures are built on such an imposing scale as to inspire awe; we therefore naturally associate them with religion. Lesser edifices did not survive the thousands of years that elapsed since the dissolution of that ancient civilization; all we have now are the great works. And to what purpose would such buildings be raised, if not for the glory of their dragon-headed deities?

A little further inward lay the pylons of the temple’s front wall, too massive even for time to collapse them. Like the right-hand half of the gateway, the lintel between them had fallen, and an accumulation of debris and dirt raised the passage to nearly a third the height of the wall. Astimir assisted Lord Hilford up this slope, then bent to aid me. My skirts caught on the undergrowth, and one wicked thorn tore a long rent in the fabric, but I did not mind. From the top of that passage I could see into the hypostyle hall, now open to the elements, the thin stones of its roof long since having relocated to the ground, where they lay nearly as buried as the paving in the courtyard.

Some of the columns themselves had toppled, leaning against one another like drunken gentlemen exhausted after a night’s carouse, or rolling in hefty cylinders on the ground. The sun was now high enough to make the space within a warm shelter, secret and still. The proud figures of Draconean gods spanned the walls, flat and odd to an eye accustomed to modern conventions of perspective, but hinting at mysteries forgotten ages ago. I wished I were a painter, to capture the quality of the light as it poured across those weathered shapes; being only a poor woman with a pencil, I marshaled my sketchbook and did what I could.

That particular sketch included Lord Hilford bending to peer underneath one of the tilting pillars, pulling at the tall grasses that choked the space below. Before long, he called out to me. “Mrs. Camherst! You must come look at this. Have you brought anything that might do a rubbing?”

I obligingly fetched out a charcoal stick and a large sheet of loose paper, then picked my way across the space to join him. “What is it?”

“Run your hand across this,” he instructed me, as I had done with the dragon wing.

What greeted my fingers, however, was not the microscopic roughness of the rock-wyrm’s hide. Instead it was deep grooves, somewhat softened by the passage of time, but still clearly perceptible.

I crouched, trying to see, but after the brilliance of the sun, the shadow defeated me. With the assistance of Lord Hilford and Astimir, one man on each side of the pillar, holding my paper in place, I rubbed the charcoal stick everywhere I could reach.

When we pulled it free, a white gap ran down much of the center, but to either side the charcoal’s smear was broken by an arrangement of lines I had seen before, in books. “It’s an inscription!” I exclaimed.

Even more than the art—whose strange, stylized nature had never really caught my interest—Draconean script excited a feeling of mystery and wonder. The markings were indubitably language, though men had once dismissed them as the scratchings of dragon claws. (This is largely owing to the poor preservation of ruins in Anthiope. Once our scholars became aware of less-weathered inscriptions elsewhere in the world, opinions changed—after a certain amount of hidebound resistance, of course.) What message they conveyed, however, was completely inscrutable. Draconean writing had frustrated all efforts to decipher it.

With that clear example to hand, I gazed about with new eyes, and saw the weathering on the other columns for what it was: the faint, nearly obliterated remnants of more writing. There had once been inscriptions all over the columns of the hypostyle, but the exposed surfaces had been badly degraded.

Lord Hilford ran his hand across the leaning column and brushed grit off his fingers. “Limestone. It hasn’t survived well. The walls are marble; that does better. I wonder where they brought it in from, and how?”

My finger traced along one of the gaps in the charcoal, following its raking line. “Why is it that no one can read what this says? Do we not have enough samples yet?” If so, this one might be of some value.

But the earl shook his head. “That used to be the notion, but a fellow named ibn Khattusi made a concerted effort, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, to gather together all the known inscriptions, and encouraged people to document more. He published his findings in a great fat book, and a few years later the Akhian government offered a prize for the man who deciphered the language; but no one has claimed it yet.”

“We don’t even know what language it
was,
do we?” I asked. “That is—obviously it’s Draconean, or rather, that is the name we’ve given it. But we don’t know what languages Draconean might be ancestral to.”

With a grunt for his stiff knees, Lord Hilford knelt at my side to study the paper. “Precisely. So we have no idea what sounds these symbols might represent, or indeed whether they
do
represent sounds; they may be ideographic, like the archaic script of the Ikwunde. Codes can be deciphered, but codes represent a known language, which means one side of the equation is already in hand. Draconean is a complete mystery.” He smiled sideways at me. “Fancy taking a shot at it yourself, Mrs. Camherst? The Akhian declaration did say their prize was for the
man
who sorted it out, but I daresay you could argue them into paying out for a woman.”

The notion had honestly not even crossed my mind. I laughed. “Oh, no, my lord. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. You’ve heard me butcher Vystrani.” I nodded in the general direction of Astimir, who, having brought us as far as the hypostyle hall, seemed to think his work was done—that, or he’d given up on the tedious Scirling scholars who kept pausing to examine things rather than continuing onward to new sights. “I am no linguist, much less an expert.”

I folded the rubbing carefully, though, on the possibility that ibn Khattusi might want it for his collection, and we spent some time poking about the ruined stones to find other bits with inscriptions not too badly weathered to record. I tore several fingernails digging up a fragment mostly buried in the earth, but was rewarded with the clearest bit yet, once I’d brushed the dirt away.

The central chamber of the temple, unfortunately, had collapsed too thoroughly for us to enter. We instead toured the remainder of the small site, including the bit of wall I had glimpsed on our hunt; I clambered rather higher atop it than was likely wise, and spent some time attempting to guess which open bit of stone in the distance might be stained with that dragon’s blood.

When I climbed back down, peering past my skirts to see where I should set my feet, a twinkle of vivid color caught my eye.

My foot, already descending, almost landed atop it; I swung wide and stumbled, but managed to avoid falling. As soon as my balance was secure, I bent double, searching for that glint of color.

The grass half buried it, such that I almost missed it. But my fingers, sweeping through the blades, touched something hard; and I lifted it to my eyes.

And promptly dropped it again.

This time the finding went faster; I knew what I was looking for. A firestone, the size of my thumbnail, and brilliant in the light. I cradled it carefully in my palm, marveling. There was no mistaking this for a piece of jewelry lost by some previous visitor: quite apart from the unlikelihood of anyone so wealthy coming here in their formal gems, it was raw, not shaped by any lapidary’s tools.

What on
earth
was it doing in an obscure Vystrani ruin?

I dropped to my knees and cast around in the grass, stabbing my hands on every twig and turning over every pebble. I covered an area at least five feet in radius before I conceded that my find was a solitary one. But tremendously valuable; I had seen only a handful of firestones during my days in the marriage market, and those adorning the fingers or necks or ears of people
far
beyond my own class. This one, set into a pendant or ring, would be the finest jewel the Camherst lineage owned.

Do understand, I am not a covetous woman. Not for physical things, at least; where knowledge is concerned, I am as greedy as the mythical dragons in the stories, sitting atop their glittering hoards. (Though I, unlike those dragons, am not only willing but
eager
to share.) But the firestone entranced me, for it was the first I’d ever held in my own hands. I knelt there in the dirt, tilting it in my fingers so the fire within danced back and forth, until I became aware that I’d lost all feeling in my feet. Then I staggered upright, and realized my companions had gone missing somewhere during my ascent of the wall.

I wasn’t unduly concerned. Astimir was likely relaxing in a comfortable spot, waiting for us to be done. As for Lord Hilford, I thought it most probable that he’d returned to the hypostyle hall, or the great double gateway. With my sketches of the site, I knew the most direct route back would be to go left, across a broken, ruin-less bit of ground.

Halfway across that ground, something snapped beneath my foot, and I plummeted into darkness.

Not far, but it does not take much of a fall to twist one’s ankle—not when the fall is so entirely unexpected. I landed awkwardly and tumbled without grace to one side, fetching up at last on my rear, with one palm skinned and my cry of surprise still ringing from the walls.

I clamped my mouth shut before a second cry could escape my lips, because two thoughts occured to me in quick succession. The first was
cave,
and the second was
dragon.

My surroundings were undoubtedly natural. The light spilling in from above showed me rough walls and a sloping floor, unshaped by human hands. The hole I’d come in by wasn’t nearly large enough for a dragon, but such a passage might exist elsewhere; the cave extended into the darkness, well beyond my ability to see. I sniffed, thinking I might catch a scent that would at least confirm my mortal peril, but all I smelled was pine.

Pine—because those were the boughs that had been laid across the opening, and then covered in needles until they matched the surrounding forest floor. A convincing disguise, but not one that could support my weight, and so I had fallen.

A disguise
implied a disguiser. Someone had gone to effort to hide the opening, and not out of concern for public safety.

I went very still. Only my ears moved, drawing back along my skull as if that would make any significant improvement to my hearing.

Eventually those muscles tired, and I rubbed them with my fingers, thinking. I’d heard nothing in the darkness, and only the wind and the cry of an eagle above. The
sensible
thing to do would be to shout for help; there did not seem to be any person here at present, and if this was a dragon’s lair farther along, I would do well to vacate the premises before the owner returned.

But I am not always sensible.

My eyes had adjusted as far as they could. Peering into the gloom, I saw that I had fallen quite near one end of the cave; to my right, the floor sloped away into impenetrable blackness. But I thought I could make out some shapes at the edge of the void. Brushing my skinned palm clear of debris, I rose to my knees and made my way carefully toward those shapes.

(Crawling in a dress, for those gentlemen who have never had occasion to try it, is an exercise in frustration, all but guaranteed to produce feelings of homicidal annoyance in the crawler. But there was not enough room to stand without crouching, and I did not want to test my ankle just yet.)

The shapes, when I arrived at them, proved to be a pair of crates. I brushed my hand over the top of one, and realized with a mingled feeling of horror and disbelieving hilarity what I had found.

Stauleren smugglers, as I have noted before, make extensive use of caves in their work.

The two crates were empty, so I could not be sure of my conclusion. It seemed likely, though; they were shoved against the wall as if left there temporarily, not quite far enough out of sight. The cache, if there was one, undoubtedly lay deeper in the darkness.

I was not about to go looking for it. Already it was unlikely that I could hide the evidence of my fall; it might have been the work of a bear or deer, but then where was the animal? And to leave the cave without yelling for help, I would have to drag one of the crates over and stand on it, which a bear surely would not do. To hide my trespass, I would have to shout for Lord Hilford, and then there would be more questions. He might even feel honor bound to send word to the boyar, and it would all be a tremendous mess I did not want in the slightest.

The entire incident had me giddy with surprise. That giddiness made certain courses of action seem much more reasonable than they ought to be. With the firm convinction that I was thinking good sense, I dragged one of the empty crates into position beneath the hole, then retrieved my sketchbook, which I had dropped on landing. A quick thought led to a frantic search of my pocket, soon reassured: my firestone was still there.

Then I took my pencil and wrote a quick note in Eiversch.

My apologies for the intrusion. It was an accident, and I will speak of it to no one.

I didn’t sign the note, figuring that my feminine handwriting would be identifier enough—and if it was not, then no sense helping Chatzkel and his men draw the right conclusion. I tucked the paper beneath the lid of the crate, leaving most of it visible, then took my sketch pad in my teeth and climbed grimly to my feet.

My ankle was not pleased with this decision. But although it complained, it would hold me. The only bad part was when I had to climb atop the crate, putting all my weight on that foot for longer than I would have liked. That done, however, my head and shoulders emerged once more into the open air, and from there I was able to drag myself onto the ground above.