In the Labyrinth of Drakes (33 page)

It was absurd, of course. Six people, subsisting on camel's milk and the water that could be hauled from a spring a full day's journey away, digging out a staircase with tiny hand shovels. The shaft was narrow enough that only one person could dig as the hole grew deeper; we took it in shifts. Had it been much longer, we would have been forced to abandon the effort. Our rations were growing perilously thin, even with Haidar hunting to supplement them, and while we would not have starved there in the Labyrinth we might have starved on the way out. But the farther we got, the less any of us could bring ourselves to walk away, even when common sense said we should.

Fifteen steps, from the top of the plateau to the base of the staircase. We had uncovered six when Andrew called out, bringing us all hurrying to the shaft: the vertical wall of the far side had ended in a lintel. At that point there was no possibility of leaving, for we all wanted to know—
had
to know—what lay at the bottom.

Suhail took over digging for a time, relinquishing his position only when it was time to pray. Mere words cannot do justice to my husband's patience: the desire to tear through the ground must have burned like an inferno in his heart, but rather than hastening his work, he slowed down. And his care was rewarded, for he soon uncovered a mass embedded in one wall below the lintel, which turned out to be the twisted, broken remnants of a bronze hinge.

Where there had been a hinge, there had once been a door. The lack of a door told us something had happened—something that almost certainly crushed our unspoken hopes of an untouched site. But we dug on.

And the sand came to an end. Suhail, digging out the doorway, broke through into air. I was sitting at the top of the stairs when he did, awaiting the next bag of sand to carry away, and had to restrain the urge to climb over him and put my eye to the hole. “Can you see anything?” I asked.

“I need a light,” he said, and I scrambled to call down to the camp.

A match was brought. Suhail put the flame through with a cautious hand. It continued to burn, telling us the air inside was good. I was not the only one holding my breath.

Suhail peered through the gap for a long moment, then pulled back. “A corridor,” he said. “The walls are carved, but I cannot make out details. We'll have to clear the doorway.”

He would not let us hurry, no matter how any of us chafed—Andrew in particular. We worked downward to the last of the stairs, continuing to dig long after there was enough space to climb through. Our efforts revealed the other hinges, and then, at the bottom, the reason Suhail had insisted on caution: the broken remnants of the door.

It was not in very good condition. Lighter rainstorms would only penetrate the top few feet of sand, but there must have been the occasional deluge, which sent water all the way to the bottom of the staircase. Only portions remained, and those sadly decayed. I had a few brushes with me, on the chance that we would have enough water for me to try a bit of painting; these were put to use instead in brushing sand off the fragile wood. Laid bare, the door told a story.

“Looks like it was bashed in,” Andrew said.

The four of us were crouched on the steps above, leaning over one another to study the scene. Suhail traced one hand through the air, not touching the wood. “Struck here, I think—and it broke the panel near the top, tearing away a portion still attached to the hinge. That must have rotted away entirely.”

Tom broke the silence that followed. “What was in here, that it merited breaking down the door?”

Was.
Whatever had been here was undoubtedly long gone. But I knew Suhail's views on archaeology: even if the great treasures had been looted, we might still learn any number of things from the shreds that remained.

Suhail eased the cover of a notebook beneath one of the pieces of wood and tried to lift it. The fragment crumbled as he did so. “Damn,” he said. “We can't possibly carry this back. It won't even survive going up the staircase.” He turned, putting one hand on my knee. “My artistic, keen-eyed love, my angel of the pencil. Can you record it?”

Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting at the entrance to a previously unidentified Draconean ruin. Any number of wonders may lie down the dark stone corridor that stretches before you … but you are not exploring them, because you have undertaken to draw a picture of a broken, half-rotted door. Not just the door, either: also its hinges, and the green, corroded mass that was once the latch, and the shape of the frame and staircase that accompany it.

It is a mark of how much I love Suhail and esteem his archaeological acumen that I did as he asked, rather than trampling across the decaying wood of the door to see what lay beyond.

When that was complete, we removed what we could of the door, which in the long run was only its metal fittings. These we wrapped in scraps of cloth, and then—at last—we proceeded.

Four of us went: Haidar and al-Jelidah remained outside with the camels. Suhail took the lead, but I followed with my hand in his, one step behind only because we could not comfortably walk side by side. He and Andrew carried lamps, and their light showed us that the tunnel, hewn out of solid stone, was carved all along its length: the striding figures of Draconean gods, winged and dragon-headed, with humans bearing offerings to them. “If you ask me to stop and draw all of these before we explore to the corridor's end, I shall
kick
you,” I whispered to Suhail. He laughed.

(Why did I whisper? It was not as if there were anything down there I might disturb by speaking too loudly. But I could not have raised my voice for all the iron in Eriga.)

Then Suhail stopped, so abruptly that I ran into his back.

He was not looking at the walls any longer. I followed the line of his gaze, and saw something on the floor up ahead.

Andrew, peering around me, said, “Is that … are those
bones
?”

It will not surprise you, I expect, that I thought immediately of dragonbone. There is no evidence the Draconeans had the art of preserving them, and good reason to believe they did not, apart from what nature may have occasionally provided; the chemical knowledge necessary for that is rather more advanced than they likely had. But the last time I discovered a pile of bones in an underground space, they had come from dragons.

These, however, were human. We advanced slowly, as if the skeleton might rise up and attack us; Suhail held his lamp out like a shield. The four of us clustered together instinctively, courtesy of too many lurid tales of haunted Draconean temples.

Up close, however, the bones were merely sad. They lay as their owner had fallen, slumped against the wall—and to my great surprise, they were not entirely bare. Water had not penetrated this far, and so the body had naturally mummified in the cool, dry air. The preservation was imperfect, and his clothes hung in nearly absent tatters … but one could look at his cadaverous face and see an ancient person there.

“He's got a knife,” Andrew murmured.

We arrayed ourselves around the body, touching nothing. Andrew was right: there was a dusty bronze blade under the corpse's hand, as if he had dropped it when he died. Tom lowered his face nearly to the floor, peering at the body, and said, “There's something caught between his ribs. It might be the point of a spear.”

“A broken door, and now a dead man,” I said. “What
happened
here?”

His voice trembling faintly, Suhail said, “Isabella, I
will
ask you to draw him. And, yes, the carvings on the walls. But not yet.” Even his scholarly discipline knew limits.

We went onward. Now that we knew to look for them, we spotted dark marks on the floor, on the carvings along the walls, that might have been bloodstains. Then the corridor came to an end at another door, and this one was not broken down; it stood a little ajar.

My heart felt as if it might leap right out of my mouth. Suhail looked back at us. I do not know what Tom and Andrew did, but I nodded emphatically. He removed his headscarf, wrapping his hand in the fabric—he later explained this was to keep the oil and sweat of his hand from touching the wood, made delicate by the ages—and eased the door open far enough for us to slip through.

The room beyond was as you have seen it in pictures: a rectangular space, its corners dominated by four statues standing with wings and arms outspread. The spaces in between were carved and painted, their colours undimmed by time, for they had not seen light since the downfall of Draconean civilization. Those murals alone would have made the site a worldwide treasure, for they are better preserved than any we have found elsewhere, and from them we have gleaned a hundred details of the ancient Draconean religion.

The remaining contents were few, with signs that the place had been looted long before we set foot inside. A bronze tripod had once stood in the center of the room. Now it lay on its side a little distance away, the bowl fallen from its top, dented and forlorn. By the left-hand wall there was a splintered pile of wood, with shards of clay beneath; these proved to be tablets, each carved with Draconean text, which we have since pieced back together. Chains hanging from the ceiling still held primitive lamps: shallow bronze dishes that would have been filled with oil, judging by the soot that marked the ceiling above.

One of those lamps had been torn from its moorings. Below its empty chains lay two more bodies, as well preserved as their companion out in the corridor. It took no careful observation to see how one had died: his head was crushed from the side. The other we could not judge, for he lay under the first, and no one wanted to move him.

Andrew muttered a profane oath, looking at the two of them. “So the myths are true. The Draconeans didn't just fall—they were overthrown.”

Common sense argued that a few dead men did not a rebellion make. My instinct, however, agreed with Andrew. Those men had not died of natural causes; they were killed in a fight. Given the state of preservation here, that must have happened in ancient times, with sand sealing the place for millennia afterward. Their weapons, from what we could see of them without touching the bodies, were crude bronze: assuredly not the best Draconean civilization could produce, and not what defenders of this temple would have been armed with. They must be invaders, rebels, the ones who had kicked in the door and come down here to despoil this place. No other site in all the world preserved a moment like this one did, and the moment thus presented to us, out of the distant past, was one of war.

Suhail's eyes were wide in the lamplight, drinking in every detail. The wonder I felt upon seeing a dragon in flight was written in the soft parting of his lips, the stillness of his body, as if the slightest movement would cause this all to collapse into dust and dreams. He and I had found a Draconean site before, on Rahuahane, but that one had been wrecked like all the others. This one was almost pristine, and I could only begin to imagine the effect it had on him.

I was not the only one thinking of Rahuahane. His voice almost as dry as the air, Tom said, “This beats that other ruin you found all hollow.”

And then Suhail said, “This is wrong.”

It brought us all around to stare at him. “What?” Andrew said.

Suhail's free hand curled in the empty air, as if to grasp a mirage. “Rahuahane. Can you not
see
?”

I cannot fault the other two for failing to grasp his point. They had not been on that cursed island; they did not know the conversation we had there. But I looked once more at the statues in the corner, and I understood. “These are the figures you told me about—the fertility gods, or guardians of the young. Whichever they are. The ones we found at that hatching ground.”

Now Andrew was staring at me instead of at Suhail. “Hatching ground? Rahooa-what? When did you find a ruin?”

I had shared many things with my brother, but not that. He was too likely to tell someone, or go haring off to the Broken Sea to find it for himself—and that was
without
me telling him about the firestone. But I could not spare the attention to explain it to him right then. “This has all the marks of a hatching ground, for the dragons the Draconeans bred. But where is the hatching ground itself?”

With that question in mind, the site's purpose became obvious. Even if one were not a specialist like Suhail, familiar with theories about the particular variety of statue looming over us from the four corners, the murals told the tale. The processions of people were not merely bearing offerings; they bore them to gods who stood over radiant spheres—eggs. I could not understand all the symbolism, but I did not need to. There ought to be eggs here, and there were not.

The room was not so terribly large that a pit for eggs could have somehow escaped our notice. Tom even went to the bodies fallen in the corner and peered under them, on the small chance that they concealed anything of interest. The bowl that had stood atop the tripod was not nearly sufficient to hold such a burden. “Unless there was only one egg at a time?” Suhail suggested doubtfully.

But the inside of the bowl was charred, indicating they had lit fires inside it. “Even desert drake eggs do not incubate in flame,” I said. “Likely they burnt offerings or incense here.”

A muscle jumped in Suhail's jaw. “I should not be frustrated,” he said, with a disbelieving laugh. “On Rahuahane we made the discovery of a lifetime; here we have made the discovery of the century. To be so lucky twice is a gift from God himself. But—it feels incomplete. I am
certain
there should be more.”

Andrew spun in a circle, arms flung outward. He was grinning like a fool. “Al-Sindi! In the stories, there's always a secret door.”

“You,” I said severely, “have been reading too many fairy tales.”

Then we all fell silent, looking at one another. Tom offered, with a cautious air, “The walls—they're scarred in places.”