In the Labyrinth of Drakes

NINETEEN

It is a common trope of romantic tales that the heroine declares she would gladly live in a garret if it meant being with her love. I was not prone to such dramatic utterances; but looking back on my actions, I suppose it would not have been far off the mark.

We resided at Dar al-Tannaneen for the remainder of my time in Qurrat, for Suhail remained unwelcome in his brother’s house. I shifted my belongings to a larger chamber (one which, coincidentally, was farther removed from the barracks in which the others slept), and we made plans for furnishing the room in a comfortable style—but it will surprise few of my readers, I think, if I say that we never followed through on those plans. Our arrangements there were haphazard, and remained so until I departed.

What need had I of furnishings? I had Suhail; I had Tom; I had dragons. Under no circumstances was I going to drag Jake with us into the desert—no matter how much he might have pleaded to go—but I wrote to him saying that he could miss the fall term at Suntley and come join us in Akhia instead. Even if my commission ended before then, I thought Jake deserved to reunite with his new stepfather and see where Suhail came from.

Much of the clutter in our new quarters belonged to Suhail, who relocated his entire library from his brother’s house to Dar al-Tannaneen. “I’ve had to keep half of this hidden under my bed,” he admitted, prying the lid off the first crate. “It will be nice to feel like an adult again.”

I borrowed his crow-bar and opened another crate. It is inevitable, I suppose, that one cannot unpack a box of books efficiently, at least not when the books belong to someone else; I was immediately diverted by looking through them. Of course I could not read three-quarters of their titles, as they were in Akhian or some other language I did not know—but that did not stop me from looking. And when I lifted a heavy green volume from the bottom, I found something I did recognize.

“Is this Ngaru?” I asked, pointing at the symbol on the front cover.

You may think it strange, but I had quite forgotten about the rubbing of the Cataract Stone I gave to Suhail. He and I had rarely been in the same place since then—and when we were, our minds were fully occupied with other troubles (such as Maazir and the Yelangese poisoner), or else we were busily pretending to be near-strangers to one another. It was not that the Cataract Stone had never crossed my thoughts again; rather that it never did so at a point when I could ask Suhail how he was getting on with it.

As it turned out, he had not gotten very far at all. He said, “That was one of the books I had to hide under my bed. Which is a very great pity, since I had to sell my soul to Abdul Aleem ibn Nahwan to get my hands on it—that’s a glossary and grammar of Ngaru.” A mischievous grin spread over his face, and he took the volume from me. “But I suppose, now that I am the idle husband of a prominent naturalist, I must occupy myself with something. And I have no idea how to do needlework.”

Even with his aptitude for languages, it was slow going. Suhail had never studied Ngaru before obtaining that book from his fellow scholar, and had devoted the months between then and now to the necessary first step of familiarizing himself with it. Translating the inscription was a painstaking process, and he warned me at every turn that he would need an expert to verify his text before he would be at all confident in the result. Indeed, he would not even share what he had with me until he worked his way through the entire piece. It is a very good thing that the House of Dragons kept me busy, or I would have hovered over his shoulder until he went out of his mind with distraction. Even though ancient civilizations and dead languages have never been my greatest love, I was champing at the bit to know what the stone said.

He unveiled the fruits of his labour one night over a private dinner. “The beginning of it is not the kind of thing to make anyone’s heart beat faster, except perhaps a scholar of early Erigan history. It is a list of names—a lineage, I think, for some early king. Then it goes on for some time about how that individual caused the stone to be set up in the ninth year of his reign—”

“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently. “Get to the interesting part.”

“Are you sure?” This time his grin was more diabolical than mischievous. “I could read that part to you, if you like, complete with footnotes about my uncertainty regarding case endings—”

“We are alone, Suhail. There is no one to see if I throw food at you.”

He laughed. Then, composing himself, he recited:

Rapt though I was, that did not preclude my mind from seizing upon his words and picking them apart for meaning. “The sun rises in the east every morning. Either that is an error in your translation—which I doubt—or an error in their carving, or else some kind of ancient idiom. In which case we will likely never understand what they meant. ‘Gods of our foremothers’… I suppose they were matrilineal, as many Erigan peoples are today. But what does ‘Anevrai’ mean?” My breath caught. “Ngaru post-dates the fall of Draconean civilization, does it not? Is—is that what the Draconeans were called?”

“It might be.” Suhail was grinning from ear to ear. “Or it is the name of their gods. I cannot tell, from one text alone.”

And a brief text at that, if one discounted all the folderol about lineages and such. But there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands of texts out there. “Now that you can read the language, though—”

He held up a cautioning hand, stopping my excitement before it flew away with me. “I cannot read Draconean. Not yet.”

I stared at him, confused. “But you know what it says.”

“Yes. My next challenge is to figure out how it says that. Which symbols say ‘gods’ in the Draconean tongue? Which ones say ‘faithful’? Are those single words in their tongue, or several? How do their verbs conjugate? What order do they phrase their sentences in? I gave it to you in Scirling, but in the Ngaru order you would say ‘stones barren’ instead of ‘barren stones.’ I cannot even be positive that the Draconean text reads the same—though ‘in their hand as we remember it’ suggests that it does.”

His explanation deflated me. I had believed this single key would unlock everything at once. In reality, it was not nearly that simple. “Even so… is it helpful?”

Suhail’s eyes went wide. “Is it helpful? It is a gift from God himself, the Preserver who kept this stone safe through the years, the Bountiful who gave us this treasure that may not have any equal in the world. Without your discovery, we might have laboured another ten generations without ever knowing as much as we know today.”

His praise warmed me right down to my toes. “Are you confident enough in your translation to have that friend of yours look it over?”

My husband bit his lip, looking at the paper. “I—yes. Perhaps. I’d like to refine it a bit more, first—Ngaru verb tenses are quite different from Akhian or Scirling—”

I laid a gentle hand over his. “Then here is what I suggest. Give it to him when we depart for the desert; that way you will not fuss about like a mother hen while he works on it. When we come back, you can make preparations to publish the result.”

“We can make preparations.” He turned his palm upward and gripped my hand firmly. “Both of our names will be on this. You have my word.”

He did not spend every waking minute between then and our departure on perfecting his mastery of Ngaru. As Suhail admitted, sometimes the best thing for one’s work was to step away for a time, to freshen the brain with other exercise.

Tom and I gladly ceded the preparations for our second expedition to him, as he knew far better than we what might be necessary. My own attentions were much occupied by the honeyseekers, for I had several more months of data now, and had to decide what should be done with the experiment while I was in the desert.

My purpose, you must remember, was not to find how best to encourage the healthy propagation of the breed. It was to test the limits of their hardiness—or rather, the hardiness of their eggs—and determine which factors were the most influential. There is a phrase engineers use: “testing to destruction.” It is not enough to know that a beam is strong; they must find out how much weight it can bear before snapping. The only way to do this, of course, is to pile on weight until it does snap.

This was the point I had reached with the honeyseeker programme. The plan I drew up involved extremes of both temperature and humidity, with multiple eggs in each scenario to ensure that any one failure was a pattern, not a coincidence. I could not subject them to any great influx of cold, as our budget did not stretch to cover large quantities of ice, but heat was easy to arrange. Lieutenant Marton had instructions to increase this one step at a time until he was certain no eggs could survive.

You may think it is cruel to subject unborn beasts to such stresses, in the knowledge that some will be harmed by it, and some even killed. You are correct. It is also, however, the only way to learn certain vital facts. I would not do such a thing lightly, and having learned what I can from it, I would not do it again. But I cannot regret my decision to test the honeyseeker eggs so rigorously, for it wound up bearing unforeseen fruit upon my return from the desert.

We departed for the Jefi once more in the second week of Messis: myself, Suhail, Tom, Andrew, Haidar, and al-Jelidah, with the best camels Suhail could provide. In hindsight it was an absurdly small group, and sorely under-equipped for our eventual needs. But of course we did not know that at the time, and Suhail’s preparations were entirely reasonable for the circumstances. For my own part, based on my previous excursion, I believed that I was prepared for this journey.

I was entirely wrong.

In past volumes I have claimed that I am a heat-loving creature, and it is true. But there is heat, and then there is the Jefi in summer. Perhaps the simplest way I can convey the difference is to say this: had Tom and I been kidnapped by the Banu Safr in that season, we both might have died.

The air was dry even in winter; in summer it became positively desiccating. I thought at first that I perspired surprisingly little. Then I realized the moisture was evaporating nearly as quickly as it formed, and in fact I was losing water at a shocking rate. There was no point between our departure from Qurrat and our eventual return when I was not thirsty, not even after I drank—for we could never indulge ourselves as fully as we wished. We had to conserve not only the water we carried but also what we found, for some of the springs we relied upon took hours to refill even a few liters, and the well-being of our camels necessarily took precedence over our own comfort. What water we obtained was bitter and unpleasant to drink, and it reeked of the hide skins in which we kept it.

Grit worked its way into every crevice. It was under my fingernails, in the folds of my ears. I half expected a grinding noise every time I blinked. The sun was more than punishing, it was torturous; its light beat down from above, then reflected off the sand and struck a second time from below. On Suhail’s advice, we added eye veils to our headscarves, restricting our vision but also protecting our eyes against the constant glare. We painted our lips with grease to reduce chapping, but our exposed hands did not fare so well. The paste that supposedly protected against the sun helped a little, but even with its aid, we were still miserably charred.

I cannot fault Andrew for snarling at one point, “Why the hell did I let you talk me into this?” I even forbore to remind him that he had wanted to come along, which under the circumstances I think was quite noble of me.

And it was only Messis: not yet the height of summer. We departed so early—well before hatching might begin—because Tom and I wished to see estivating dragons, drowsing in their rock shelters. But it meant we would be out here a dreadfully long time. Two of the camels we rode were in milk, and what they provided was a welcome alternative to and supplement for water; camels can extract moisture from plants that are inedible for humans, so by allowing them to graze and then drinking their milk, we could extend our supplies somewhat. When our food supplies were sufficiently reduced, we would slaughter and eat one of the pack camels; if necessary we would do this more than once. Such measures are necessary, when undertaking a journey of this sort.

Luck smiled upon us at first. We crossed tracks in the desert that al-Jelidah identified as belonging to fellow Ghalb, because they were from donkeys instead of camels. We followed these for a day and found the Ghalb camped at a Banu Zalit well. They were a small group, a family of eight, which is common for their tribe. Our Akhian companions exchanged news with them, as is obligatory among the nomads (enemies excepted), and learned that there was a drake not far away. I believe they thought us mad when they realized we wanted to go toward the beast, rather than away from it, but we parted from them in amity, and wasted no time in hurrying toward our mark.

I have been close to dragons on many an occasion, including riding upon the back of one. There is something especially hair-raising, however, about sneaking into the lair of one while it sleeps.

“Like al-Sindi the thief,” Suhail said with a wide grin. This turned to mock outrage when he learned that none of the Scirlings in the party knew that tale; he told it that night after we ate our meager supper.

This was not as comforting as it might have been, for al-Sindi, as my more literary readers may know, is the thief who crept into the lair of an estivating drake in search of its golden treasure. But there was no gold, and the drake woke while he was there; al-Sindi was forced to flee deeper into its lair. This being a fairy tale, the lair was an improbable complex of twisting passages and bottomless pits. There are many variant episodes in the tale of al-Sindi, recounting what strange wonders he found in the byways of the drake’s lair, but many of them end badly for the thief.

“Moral of the story,” Andrew said when this was done. “If the dragon wakes up, run out instead of in.”

“Or else trust the clever slave-girl you meet along the way,” Tom said. “The bits where al-Sindi listens to her are the ones where he ends up alive and rich at the end.”

We did not find golden treasure in the drake’s cave, nor did we have to flee in any direction. So long as one moves quietly and does not tread upon the dragon’s tail, it is possible to get quite close to an estivating drake without disturbing it—even close enough to measure its rate of breathing. This, like all of the creature’s bodily functions, slows down tremendously during estivation, which is part of how they survive the summer months when food becomes more scarce.

My own breathing slowed down while I was inside, even though I knew that mere air was unlikely to wake the beast. Every sound seemed excessively loud: the scratch of my pencil, the shift of my feet on the stone, the quick beating of my heart. That latter even made me contemplate whether an ear trumpet would improve one’s hearing enough to measure heart rate as well: I was not quite foolhardy enough to try taking a sleeping dragon’s pulse directly.

Our party did not linger long, however, because we had another goal: a particular egg cache we had marked during the winter, which had been left untouched by the Aritat for this very purpose. It lay just outside the canyons and gullies of the Labyrinth of Drakes, and if the eggs hatched early enough, we might hope to find a second clutch in the area—I was personally hoping for one within the Labyrinth itself—and record that one, too.

Nature, however, was not inclined to oblige us.

It was a gusty day, which I found quite agreeable. The wind kicked up a good deal of grit, but it cooled me a little as well. So long as I kept my face turned away from the wind, the weather seemed a pleasant change of pace.

Our Akhian companions knew better. Al-Jelidah saw the warning signs first: a haze on the horizon, which grew with alarming speed. He spoke sharply to Suhail in the nomad dialect, and my husband’s face lost all its good humour on the spot. He began twisting in his saddle, looking in all directions—for what, I did not know.

“Is there a problem?” I asked.

“Sandstorm,” he said. “We have to find shelter.”

I knew of sandstorms, of course—but I knew of them in much the same way that I had known the Jefi was hot in summer. Intellectual understanding fell far short of the reality. I was bemused at the rapidity with which our party moved: following a hasty consultation, which revolved around whether we had time to reach a good place to make our stand, or must settle for a closer but less adequate option, we chivvied our camels into a gallop.

As fast as our beasts ran, the storm moved faster. By the time we reached a small hillock that dropped off in a rock face on the other side, the distant haze had become a distinct cloud. When I say “small,” I mean it very strictly: the bluff was scarcely a meter and a half high, and not long enough for all six of us. Suhail directed me to crouch at the base of the rock, with Tom and Andrew on either side of me and our camels so close that, were they prone to rolling, they might have crushed us. He and the other two Akhians reversed this ordering, crouching on the leeward side of their camels, for lack of any other shelter.

“Dab this inside your noses,” Suhail said, handing us the little jar of the grease we had been using to protect our lips. Mystified, we obeyed. “Now stuff your ears with these rags. Tie your scarves over your faces, as tightly as you can. Use extra scarves on your foreheads, low over your eyes—leave only the smallest slit. Tie them over your eyes, if you can endure a blindfold.”

When each of us finished this task, he tilted our heads backward enough for him to pour a few drops of water over our noses and mouths, wetting the fabric. Through the slit between my two scarves, I could see al-Jelidah and Haidar doing the same to themselves. “Keep your hands tucked inside your clothing,” Suhail added. “The wind may scour you bloody, otherwise.”

No more did he have time for. By then I could hear the strange, hissing roar of the wind—like other storms I have encountered, but with the alien touch of sand particles sliding over and past one another at tremendous speed. The light was beginning to turn red as the leading edges of the cloud eclipsed the sun. Suhail covered his own face with quick, practiced hands, and took shelter in the lee of his own camel.

Over the growing clamour, I shouted, “How long will we stay here?”

“Until the storm is gone!” Suhail shouted back.

I wanted to tell him that this was a singularly unhelpful answer. Of course we would remain there until the storm was gone; what I wanted to know was how long that would be. In my naivete, I did not realize that was the only answer he could give me… for a sandstorm may last anywhere from minutes to hours.

I cannot tell you how long we endured that one. What hour it had been when al-Jelidah saw the cloud, I do not recall; all I know is that much of the day was gone by the time we emerged. In between, there was misery.

A sandstorm assaults you, as even the most driving downpour does not. Rain sliding down the inside of your clothes is unpleasant, but it does not threaten to trap you, weighting your body while more piles up around you, pinning your legs. I saw at one point that my camel was periodically shifting, rising slightly from her couch to step free of the sand building around her; on the assumption that she knew better how to survive this weather than I did, I mimicked her.

Would that I had a camel’s ability to pinch my nostrils shut against the dust. Grit caked my scarf, and slipped through where I had not tucked the edges well enough; despite that protection, I found myself coughing out bitter masses, constantly feeling as if I could not get enough air. I learned soon enough why Suhail had directed us to grease our nostrils; without that, my skin would have cracked and bled.

I wished desperately that my husband were at my side. I knew why he was not: he was more accustomed to enduring such challenges than my Scirling companions, and so had given us what shelter the little bluff could provide. Much of the time I had my eyes closed anyway, to protect them against the scouring wind; when I opened them, I could scarcely make out Tom and Andrew through the red cloud. Suhail, on the far side of Tom, might as well have been in Vidwatha. But I would have derived comfort from seeing even his silhouette, as a reminder that such things could be endured.

The sound was ultimately the part I hated the most. It reminded me of the time in Bayembe when an insect had gotten inside my tent, and its buzzing threatened to drive me mad. This was worse, because it was deafening, and it went on for what seemed like an eternity. One of the scraps of rag stuffed into my ear fell out; attempting to replace it, I opened an unwise gap in the defense of my scarf, and nearly choked on dust. For the sake of my breathing, I left that ear unblocked, and the hissing roar of the wind was loud enough that I felt partially deaf on one side for some time after. Half deaf, half mad, I crouched between my camel and the stone, and prayed with unwonted fervor for this trial to end.

By the time it did, I had so lost all sense of reality that I did not trust it. Not until Suhail came and chivvied my camel to her feet did I believe we were safe, that the blue sky clearing above was not some hallucination.

When I stood, sand cascaded from every fold of my clothes, inside and out. The skin of my face stung as I unwrapped the two scarves; peeling them away, I saw that their edges were daubed with blood. The gap between them, narrow as it was, had allowed the wind to score my skin, flaying the top layers. Suhail bore similar marks. He wet a rag and offered it to me; my breath hissed between my teeth as I cleaned the area of grit.

I lifted my head from this task to find him offering me a tired, dusty grin. “We have made it through water and sand,” he said: this, and the gale that had blown us to Keonga. “Give us snow next, and we will have collected the full set of storms.”

“Do not tempt fate,” I said, but I could not help smiling in return.

We never would have found the cache of eggs without al-Jelidah’s aid. I consider myself an observant woman, particularly where visual matters are concerned, but the desert I returned to was not the one I had left four months before. Expanses of greenery were gone, consumed by animals or simply dried up and blown away. In areas of sand dunes, the very dunes themselves had migrated. And even a short time away from the terrain had eroded my memory, so that every gully or outcropping of rock looked like every other.

But when al-Jelidah brought us to the spot, there was no question of finding the egg cache itself. Bits of it were strewn across the ground for meters in every direction.

In a voice made thin with dryness, Tom said, “God damn it.”

I stared at the wreckage, feeling as hollow as the remnants of the shells. We had missed it. All our haste, and we were still too late.

The Akhians dismounted and began to quarter the ground. Suhail picked up fragments of shell and conferred with al-Jelidah in the nomad dialect. Then he raised his voice and called out to us in Scirling. “It was animals. Hyenas, perhaps. There are still signs of their digging, and tooth-marks where they broke into the shells.”

I sagged atop my camel. Too late, yes—but not because we had failed to estimate the hatching season correctly. Predators had beaten us here.

When I persuaded my camel to kneel and went to examine the wreckage, I saw what Suhail meant. The eggs had not been cracked from within, as if by a hatchling struggling to get out. An outside force had broken them, in some cases all but crushing the egg completely. “Does this happen often?” Tom asked, gesturing with a shard of shell.

Al-Jelidah shrugged and said something, which Suhail had to translate for us. “It depends. He says that sometimes the drakes fail to dig their nests deep enough, or the wind uncovers the eggs.”

I went to one of the pack camels and pulled out the notebook where I had written my original observations. “This one was no shallower than the rest. Do you think the recent sandstorm exposed them?”

Suhail shook his head immediately. “No, the storm didn’t reach this far. And this happened longer ago than that.”

So even had we hurried more, we would still not have found the cache in time. It was cold comfort.

We camped a little distance away that night, and had the type of scant meal that was all too common during that journey: tough, tasteless flatbread baked in the ashes of our fire, with a tiny bit of coffee to wash it down. It was the month of fasting in the Amaneen calendar, but travellers are exempt from that requirement; Suhail had promised Mahira that he would make up for it when he returned to Qurrat.

Tom and I pored over our maps, but to little avail. All the other caches we had marked had been harvested by the Aritat and sent to Qurrat. If we wanted to observe a hatching in the wild, we would have to find another clutch… and quickly.

Al-Jelidah shrugged when we said this to the group. He was Ghalbi: he knew the desert like no other. He had not needed Scirling naturalists to find eggs before, and he did not need them now.

But searching would not be easy. “The Labyrinth of Drakes,” I said, touching that spot on the map. “We did not mark clutches there, so they will not have been harvested. And drakes are known to lair in that area.”

We had been planning to go there regardless—but it had been a later stage in our plans, not our sole hope for seeing a hatching. “Finding buried eggs, without being eaten by predators along the way…” Suhail mused. “Not an easy task. And travellers often get lost.”

Andrew roused enough to say, “You’ve been there.”

Suhail grinned. “In my foolish youth. And a few times in my equally foolish maturity. I’m not saying it can’t be done—only warning you. The depths of the Labyrinth are not for the faint of heart.”

“The faint of heart would not be out here in the first place,” I said. “Let us enter this Labyrinth, and see what we may find.”

TWENTY

I have tried many times in my life to sketch the Labyrinth of Drakes, and failed every time.

Mere pencil or ink cannot capture the place. Even photographs cannot do it, for such an image can only show you a limited slice of the whole, and the true experience of the Labyrinth is to be surrounded by it. The terrain there is spiderwebbed with canyons, until one cannot truly say whether the high ground is broken by these depressions, or the low ground is interrupted by hills and plateaus. In many places the canyons become so narrow, one might be in a corridor rather than out in the wild. Over the ages, wind and rushing water have carved the stone into fantastical shapes, fluid and twisting, exposing the striations of the rock.

This is where the Draconeans of southern Anthiope chose to settle, the location that many have long believed to be the heart of that ancient civilization. It was a more habitable place back then: they built dams to protect the canyons against the sudden floods that make it so lethal in winter, and dug wells to supply themselves from artesian sources, which have since become clogged and unusable. For shelter they reached into the stone, carving out chambers that are among the wonders of the archaeological world. Elsewhere they built their temples and walls out of enormous blocks, but here they had no need; they merely hollowed out what nature had provided.

We passed the first of these ruins not long after entering the Labyrinth. “The Gates of Flame,” Suhail called these sculptures, and I could see why. The draconic shapes melded beautifully with the rich red and gold of the stone, wings reaching skyward. (These are sadly marred by bullet holes: too many passing travellers, both nomads and foreigners, have found them enticing targets.) I scrutinized them as we approached, trying to guess whether they were meant to depict desert drakes, or some ancient kind now lost. Perhaps the dragons they had bred? Presuming they had bred only one variety; I had no reason to assume the Draconeans of Rahuahane had cultivated the same type of beast on a tropical island as their cousins in a maze of canyons on the far side of the world.

I soon realized, though, that if I looked only for monumental works like the Gates of Flame, I would miss half of what there was to see. There were doorways set into the rock all over the place, and jagged piles where the hollowed cliff faces had given way at last. “One of these days,” Suhail murmured, eyeing a particular spot as we rode past. When I raised my eyebrows at him, he grinned and said, “Cranes and sufficient labour to haul the rubble clear. What might we find inside?”

Though I was no archaeologist, I could see the appeal. Draconean sites had been thoroughly looted during the millennia since that civilization’s fall. Even the cavern he and I had found on Rahuahane had been in a ruinous state. In all likelihood many of those collapsed chambers were empty—looters had tunneled into some of them centuries ago, hunting remnants they could sell—but the possibility was tantalizing.

We were not going to answer such questions on this trip, though. Indeed, the only reason I had as much time to explore the ruins as I did was that I could not be of much use in looking for eggs. The drakes did not lay them on the canyon floors; their clutches would have been washed away by the winter floods. They had to seek out higher elevations, the plateaus above and the terraces partway down, where the canyon walls were not so steep. We knew well the sort of location they favoured, sandy enough to allow for digging, and exposed to the sun. But what a dragon can reach by flight and what a human can reach by climbing are not always the same thing.

Al-Jelidah was accustomed to this work, and scrambled about with phenomenal ease, clinging to minute protrusions of rock with fingers like steel bars. He went farther and faster than anyone else in the party. Suhail was not far behind him, though, using ropes where he could to assist his climb. “There are statues and inscriptions in some rather unlikely places,” he explained with a laugh, when I expressed my surprise. Tom, Andrew, and Haidar tramped about on the easier paths, searching every nook and cranny of the Labyrinth for possible clutches.

Which left me with the camels. Oh, I searched when I could—but my clothing hampered me, and even when I donned trousers, I lacked the strength and physical conditioning of my male companions, and could not get nearly so far. (Remembering this, I took the precaution of training before my next expedition, which came very much in handy.) I consoled myself by working on a map of the area, which Suhail said might be the first accurate attempt anyone had made since Mithonashri a hundred and fifty years before.

Our search took us deeper and deeper into the Labyrinth. One clutch we found had been raided by predators, like our original target; another had already hatched, which made me fret with impatience. Tom and I conferred and agreed that we should move onward, rather than studying the signs left behind at that one. What little we might learn was not worth the risk of missing the event itself elsewhere. If all else failed, we could always come back.

Suhail steered us a little, at the end. Not so far as to potentially miss a good spot—he would never have put our work at risk for a mere side trip—but when the choice came of going either left or right, he chose left, because he knew where it would lead. And so, on a morning in early Caloris, when the light was at its most dramatic angle, we emerged from a canyon barely wide enough for our camels to find ourselves facing the Watchers of Time.

If you have seen any images from the Labyrinth of Drakes, you have seen this site. The Watchers are five seated figures, fully twenty meters in height, carved into the sloping face of a canyon wall. They have the draconic heads and wings so typical of Draconean statuary, and seem to be gazing to the ends of eternity itself. Between them are four doorways, and above is an intricate frieze, depicting small flying dragons and human figures in chains.

The space that lies beyond those doorways has long been a mystery. All four open onto the same shallow antechamber, from which only a single archway gives access to the larger space within. This must have once contained furniture, paneling, or something else similarly flammable, for the walls of that chamber are covered with soot, which has almost completely obscured the murals that once decorated every square inch. Only bits and pieces can be made out, and efforts to clean away the soot have in many cases removed the murals as well. There is hope nowadays that our methods have improved, and the ancient artwork of that place might be seen at last… but so far, it has come to naught.

It was not what I had come to the Labyrinth to see, but even a woman as obsessed with living dragons as myself could not help marveling at the place. Had I grown up with such relics nearby, who is to say that I, too, would not have formed a fascination like Suhail’s? The Draconean ruins in Scirland are few and disappointing. The Watchers of Time took my breath away.

We camped nearby that night. Suhail admitted he had once laid his pallet within the antechamber itself—“But never again,” he said with feeling. “I hardly slept a wink that night. I was convinced the Watchers knew I was there, and did not approve.” I knew what he meant. Though I am not a superstitious woman, I did not want to sleep with their stony eyes on me; we went around a corner to a spot out of their sight.

We stood watches during the night while we were in the Labyrinth, for the groundwater allows vegetation to persist through the summer—which attracts various herbivores—which, in turn, attracts carnivores. Our tiny fires, built from camel dung, were not enough to keep them away. I alone was not expected to stand sentry, less on account of my sex, and more on account of having refused Andrew’s offer to teach me to shoot… but that night I slept very little regardless, thinking of the Draconeans and the world they had known.

The next morning my companions searched the area, while I stayed below and sketched the Watchers. (It was hardly necessary, as they have been a popular subject for every traveller who passes through the area and even some who have never even seen them—but I could not look upon those ancient guardians and not wish to render them with my own pencil.) We would not be able to stay long, and knew it. There had once been a well nearby, whose site Suhail pointed out, but it was so thoroughly collapsed that it would be less effort to dig a new one entirely. For water we would have to go some distance. One of our milk camels had foundered after the sandstorm, and the other was not giving as much as we had hoped.

From high above, I heard a triumphant shout.

I twisted on my seat to find Tom standing at the edge of the plateau across from the Watchers. He was a dusty blot against a sun-bleached sky, but he waved his hat to attract my gaze, and put his other hand to his mouth to direct his voice. “Up here!”

He had scraped his hands bloody getting up there—a fact I discovered after Suhail led me by an easier route. (I say “easier”; it is not the same thing as “easy.”) But his suffering paid off, for he had located a clutch of eggs, nestled in the cup of sand above.

From a dragon’s perspective, the site was ideal. The plateau was high enough that it received almost no shade, except in the very late morning and afternoon. It had a little dip in its center, though, which caught sand that would otherwise have blown away; and in this sand, the dragon had laid her eggs.

(I had the utterly fanciful thought that she had laid them: the first drake whose mating flight we observed, the one I lost track of when al-Jelidah prevented me from riding onward into the Labyrinth. The odds of it were small… but my mind does not always weigh odds rationally.)

From a naturalist’s perspective, the site left something to be desired. It was not close to water; furthermore, if Tom and I wished to observe the hatching, we would either have to sit in that cup with the newborn drakes—not a very wise idea—or else climb an even steeper hill a little way off and watch through field glasses.

This last, as you may imagine, is what we chose to do, while Andrew and al-Jelidah took our camels and went to acquire water.

There is nothing like an intellectual victory to distract one from miserable heat and thirst. We had found the clutch just in time: the very next day, when Tom and I were still trying to tent our cloaks over ourselves as shelter from the sun, the eggs began to hatch. I lay full-length on the burning stone for hours, field glasses glued to my face, putting them down only when necessary to sketch what I had seen. Suhail stepped around and over us with fabric and sticks, trying to make sure we would not die of heat exhaustion while we were too busy to notice. By the end of the day I had an excruciating headache, but I hardly cared—for I had, at last, seen desert drakes hatch.

Tom and I had both read Lord Tavenor’s accounts of the hatchings at Dar al-Tannaneen, of course. Many of those eggs produced unhealthy results, though, and we could not be certain how the change in their circumstances had altered the process. Watching that day, we treated the entire affair as a new observation, discarding all of our assumptions and noting every detail, no matter how small.

The eggs were nearly spherical, which is common among birds that lay their eggs in holes (where there is no risk of them rolling away). Their colour was pale and sandy, but speckled here and there with darker spots, like the eggs of sand grouse—in both cases, we surmised, as camouflage against predators that sought to find and raid the nests. The shell had become hard since the laying, which is not universal among dragons: some lay leathery eggs, like those of reptiles, but others are more like those of birds. The hatching drakes used an “egg tooth” to break through the shell; this is actually a specialized scale, and is shed soon after birth.

Where our observations diverged most from those of Lord Tavenor was in the matter of the shell membrane. This was a good deal thicker than he had reported, and it became apparent that before the drakes broke free of their shells, they had to shred that membrane. “Why so thick, do you think?” Tom asked me without ungluing himself from his field glasses.

“Perhaps it is a holdover from the more leathery type of egg,” I said, propping myself up on one elbow so I could sketch with the other hand. “The harder shell could have developed in response to environmental factors, but the more flexible interior remained.”

It was a nice theory, and I held to it for many years. Tom eventually conducted experiments, however, that gave us a more accurate explanation: the inner membrane of a desert drake egg is a highly specialized material that responds to heat. This connects to the yolk by means of the chalaza, the thready component one sees upon pouring an egg into a glass, and actually supplies the drake with energy supplementing that of the yolk itself. At the time we did not know this, though. All we knew was that the drakes showed a surprising amount of vigor upon emerging from their shells, and were soon stumbling about without having been fed a single thing.

There are few things more hideous and adorable than the newly born of any species. The drakes had the benefit of scales, which kept them from looking like raw flesh the way so many avian hatchlings do; but they were gawky and pale, and much prone to plowing their faces into the sand when their weight got ahead of their feet. Far from cannibalizing one another, they showed a startling degree of sociability: as night fell, they gathered together among the remnants of their shells, forming a pile to keep themselves warm.

Tom and I had to retreat from the plateau before the light was entirely gone. We were not much more graceful than the drakes as we made our way down to our camp on the canyon floor, and without my observations to distract me, I felt in full the consequences of a day spent under the sun’s merciless eye. Though I did not say it to anyone at the time, I was more physically wretched than I had been when the Banu Safr kidnapped us—albeit less sunburnt. I drank every drop of water Suhail gave me and passed out on my bedroll, too tired even for the whirl of my thoughts to keep me awake.

Even so, I found myself rousing again about two hours later. A sound had disturbed my sleep, quiet and low, but persistent. When I rolled over, I found Suhail was sitting up, arms loosely linked across his knees. “What is that?” I whispered.

“I think it is the drakes,” he said.

It was a steady, soothing hum, in shifting chords as voices dropped out and came back in. The result was not precisely musical—even I, not blessed with much sense of pitch, could tell the various notes conflicted at times—but it was beautifully eerie in its way, like the howling of wolves, but gentler. “They are… singing to one another?”

Even in the darkness, I could make out his smile. “Purring, perhaps. Like cats. There are stories of this, but I’ve never heard it myself.”

After a moment he lay down again, and I pillowed my head on his shoulder. I cannot tell you how long I listened to their aimless song; it followed me into sleep and shaped my dreams. But those moments, however many there may have been, have remained in my memory as among the most priceless of my life: enduring a rough camp in the Labyrinth of Drakes, with a man I loved warm at my side, listening to the dragons sing.

Three days passed before we could investigate the nest directly, which is the length of time it took for the drakes to abandon it for good. I will not trouble my readers with too many details of this period, as it is all but prelude to what came next; I will say only that the time was physically unpleasant, for we were down to our last mouthfuls of water, barely enough to keep body and soul together, and I no longer had the joy of new discovery to distract me.

Fortunately Andrew and al-Jelidah returned on the third afternoon, bearing as much water as they could harvest from the spring without draining it or keeping us waiting for too long. Even then I could not drink my fill—but that water, bitter and goat-flavoured though it was, tasted more glorious than the finest wine.

“Do we want to look for another nest?” I asked Tom.

He thought about it, biting his lip, then finally shook his head. “By the time we find one, it may well have hatched. And we’ve pressed our luck rather far already.” Jackals had gone after the camels on the trip to the spring, and my brother had been forced to hide in a crevice to avoid a drake that had woken briefly from its slumber. Suhail had found another lair not far from our current location; we all had our fingers crossed that the dragon there would remain in estivation until we departed. No doubt Tom was thinking of all of these things when he said, “I’d rather finish this one properly, then head back.”

We had missed the hatchings at Dar al-Tannaneen (in favour of seeing the natural version out here), but we could do some good with the new drakes. “As much as I hate to say it, I agree. Let us see if the drakes are gone yet: if they are, we might leave as early as today.”

The last of the drakes had indeed departed. They were sufficiently harmless at this stage that Tom had followed two of them when they wandered off the previous day, watching their first, inept efforts at hunting, but in that terrain we could not afford to pursue them far. A corner of my mind was already considering what sort of preparation would be necessary to observe juveniles out here—but whatever the answer might be, it certainly amounted to more preparation than we had made. I therefore turned my attention to the remnants of their nest, which at least had the courtesy to stay in one place.

Bits of shell were scattered all over. Initially we left these where they lay, scrutinizing the cup of sand from all edges before stepping into it and disturbing the tracks of the drakes. Then we began to gather up the shards. Among them we found a few shreds of membrane, which had escaped the notice of the hatchlings; most of that material had been eaten. We had brought a small quantity of formaldehyde with us, sufficient to preserve the soft tissues of one hatchling (if occasion arose); we used it instead for the membrane, so we could study it at leisure back in Qurrat.

Because this was the sole hatching we had been able to observe, we wanted to be thorough. We gathered up every last scrap of shell we could find—uncovering evidence that the site had been used more than once—and when that was done, I sat for a time in the cup, running my hands through the sand to make certain we had not missed any.

My fingers brushed stone.

This should not have been unusual. I sat atop a great pile of stone, after all; it stood to reason there would be some at the bottom of this cup. But that should have been rough, and what I touched was flat and smooth.

Curious, I dug away some of the sand to see. This was easier said than done, as sand of course tends to slide right back to the bottom of any hole; but I was able to find what I had touched. It was indeed quite flat—not a figment of my tactile imagination, brought on by too much sun. And as I ran my hand across it, my fingertips found an edge.

I can only imagine what I would have looked like, had anybody been watching me. I knelt on the sand, flinging handfuls of it to the side like a drake preparing to lay, trying to clear enough ground to see. The stone was perhaps twenty centimeters wide, and featureless—but so regular in its shape that it could not be a natural accident. It was a separate piece, on one side set into the rock, and on the other…

Some part of me, I think, knew what I had found before the rest of me put it together. For when I raised my voice, it was not my fellow naturalist to whom I called out.

“Suhail!”

Whatever note he heard in my voice, it brought him from the floor of the canyon to my side in an astonishingly short time. He knelt in the hole I had made, laying one hand on the shaped stone. “Here,” I said, and guided his fingers downward.

He felt what I had: a second stone, set below and in front of the first.

In a voice no louder than a few grains of sand slipping past their kin, he whispered, “Stairs.”

My heart was pounding in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. I said, “It is only two blocks. It might be nothing more.” Or it might be a great deal more.

Suhail said, “We have to see.”

Andrew and Tom had followed him, but more slowly. By the time they reached us, he and I had revealed a bit of the second step, and thrust our hands deeply enough to find a third one below. “We have found something,” I said breathlessly, “only I do not know what—”

“Water,” Suhail said. “We need water. This will collapse in on us if we do not wet it down at least a little. No, it will only evaporate—” He stopped, hands clenching in frustration. There was no timber we could use to brace the sides of our pit. Then he looked all around the cup, five meters or so across. “Baskets,” he said. “Whatever we can load sand into, and then throw it over the edge.”

Despite our excitement, we were not so reckless as that makes it sound. I credit this to Suhail, who clung to the rock of his professionalism even as a storm threatened to sweep him away. We did indeed pour out the sand—but carefully, in a single spot, where we could examine it for any bits and pieces that might be mixed in. It fell to the other four, poor souls, to carry these down from the cup and bring the empty saddlebags back up, while Suhail and I dug out the stairs.

Because of this caution, our progress was slower than it might otherwise have been. We dug our pit wide, clearing an area around the top of the staircase down to the bare rock; this revealed a shaft cutting downward through the stone, which alleviated our fears of collapse. Then we dug out the staircase itself, from one wall to the other. We only made it through the first step that day, and a bit of the second, and when nightfall came we were exhausted.

Sitting around our camel-dung fire after it became too dark to dig, we looked at one another in silence. At last I broke it. “I do not know what may be at the bottom of those stairs,” I said. “But I do know that I cannot walk away without at least trying to find out.”

“They must be Draconean.” This came from Suhail, who was staring fixedly into the distance. “There is nothing about their appearance to say, not yet—but the location. Directly across from where the Watchers sit. As if that is what they are watching. It cannot be accident.”

“Are there any legends or historical records of other civilizations here?” I asked. He shook his head. “Then it is very likely theirs, for that reason if no other.”

An unrecorded Draconean ruin. It might be nothing: a passage to an unremarkable chamber, used in past ages to store supplies. It might have been—likely had been—looted centuries before, by someone who never noted its location for posterity. But it was not on the lists of remnants in the Labyrinth. No modern person, apart from the six of us, knew it was there.

Andrew laughed, spreading his hands. “Is there a question here? I’m staying. Good God, what kind of man could walk away?”

By the expression on his face, al-Jelidah could. He was no scholar; his interest was in what he got paid to do, nothing more. But so long as we paid him to carry bags of sand down from the plateau, he was perfectly willing to do that. And Haidar, of course, was Aritat. He would not abandon his fellow tribesman.

When I looked at Tom, a tired grin crept upon him. “I’m game,” he said. “As they say: when you find the dragon’s lair, you must look inside.”

TWENTY-ONE

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.”

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.”