Within the Sanctuary of Wings

TEN

I was delirious for a long time after that, wracked with fever and the aftermath of what I later realized was a concussion.

I dreamt again and again of the avalanche, the rushing snow sweeping me away with titanic force, only this time it carried me over the eastern edge of the col. Sometimes I fell to my death, and sometimes I flew away on dragon wings.

I dug out the desiccated, boneless flesh of the Draconean god, and it woke up and spoke to me in a language I could not understand.

I was at home in Scirland, lecturing on what I had seen—but no one would believe me, even though my audience was made up of dragon-headed figures.

I was buried again, suffocating, certain I was about to die, even though the snow pressing me down was so warm and soft.

The whole time, I kept calling for those dearest to me… but they did not come.

Then one day I woke with something like a clear head.

I was not in camp. Whether I was in Shuwa’s house or someone else’s, I could not tell: my only illumination was one small yak-butter lamp, and someone had hung curtains of thick wool all around me, which had the odd effect of making me feel as if I were in the tent of an Akhian nomad. I lay on a heavy fleece, with another one over me. Smiling weakly, I recognized this as the “snow” that had buried me during my illness.

Was I well enough to cast it off? I lifted it experimentally, and was not surprised to find myself no longer in my mountaineering clothes. I wore only a shift, the sort of thing that can easily be removed when caring for a sick individual. This was not quite warm enough for the air, but I was determined to stand and reassert myself as a living person, rather than the near-corpse I must have resembled since my rescue.

My left leg ached when I put weight on it. Searching with my fingers along my calf, I found a tender spot, and surmised that I had fractured my fibula during the avalanche. No doubt I had done this very little good in my stumbling through the snow; but if my illness had one benefit, it was that I had given the bone some time to heal. Nonetheless, I made sure to bear the greater part of my weight on my right leg when I stood. The floor beneath me was not composed of the wooden panels I expected, but quilted hessian, stuffed with something small and hard.

Once I was sure of my balance, I parted the curtains and stepped out into colder air. Only a single step: after that, it was not the temperature that made me freeze.

Three figures stared at me from the other side of a fire. Not Suhail. Not Tom. Not Thu or Lieutenant Chendley, nor any of the Nying.

Three dragon-headed figures.

I clutched at the curtain for balance. It tore free from its moorings and we went to the ground together, the curtain and I. One of the figures stood, and I wanted to blame all of this on continued fever and delirium, but I knew better. I was awake, and alert, and the living cousin of the creature I had dug out of the snow was coming toward me with its claws outstretched.

I did not react with wonder, nor delight, nor scientific curiosity. Quite frankly, I shrieked. And then I tried to scrabble away like an upside-down crab—but the heavy curtain tangled me and my injured leg failed me, so I did not get very far.

The creature coming toward me went instantly still. On the other side of the fire, one of them jerked upright and popped its ruff as wide as it would go. The other lunged to the side of the second and clamped one clawed hand around its muzzle.

Body language varies from place to place around the world, and a good deal more between species. These draconic figures did not behave quite like humans, nor quite like dragons, but owed a bit to both. The expansion of the ruff was either hostility or a fear response, making the creature appear larger and more intimidating. These thoughts stabilized me, breaking me out of my own fear response… though the fear itself did not entirely dissipate.

I tried to behave like a rational being, rather than a bundle of instincts held together by a very tenuous thread. It was more easily intended than done, however, as was putting together a coherent sentence. I licked my lips, drew in a deep breath, and managed the following triumph of eloquence: “Where am I?”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were futile. Sure enough, the creatures looked at one another with no sign of comprehension. Of course: why should they understand Scirling? Though my command of Tser-zhag was very nearly nonexistent, I could manage that simple of a question; but it elicited no better response. Perhaps they could not speak at all?

A foolish thought. The creature that had approached drew breath and spoke, but I did not understand a word it said.

Fear threatened to choke me again. For all the strange and dangerous situations I have been in before, none came close to this. All of my previous captors had been human, and with most of them I had shared at least a modicum of language. Here I had nothing. I knew I must be in the mountain basin that lay beyond Gyaptse and Cheja; my speculation on the col, that the species might not be extinct after all, was proved correct. But that meant I was cut off from human habitation. I could not even ask whether the others were here, Chendley and Thu and Tom and, most of all, Suhail.

I tried regardless. Even though I knew they could not understand me, I asked; when my question got no response, I clung to names alone, repeating them in a louder and louder voice as if volume alone would accomplish what words could not. On the far side of the fire, the creature spread its ruff again, and the one at its side cast a glance toward—

A door.

I could not bolt for it, not with my legs so tremulous and one yet weak from the fracture. Still, I did my best, which was a rapid and unsteady hobble. I did not get more than three paces before the creature that had approached me interposed itself, half spreading its wings to block the way.

My voice shook nearly as badly as my legs, but I made it as strong as I could. “I have to look for the others. I do not care that you cannot understand me, I must—”

Before I could work myself up to a proper shout, the creature in front of me reached up and held its own muzzle shut, just as one of its compatriots had done to the ruff-spreading one. It is a thing I have seen people do to dogs who bark too much, and I realized it must be the equivalent of holding a finger to one’s lips. The creature was trying to hush me.

I almost screamed. Not out of fear, but out of defiance: if they wished me to be quiet, then perhaps the best thing I could do was to be as loud as possible. I had been a prisoner before, and had not liked it on any occasion.

But these creatures had taken care of me. I was not hungry, nor stained with my own filth; more to the point, I was alive. Whoever had rescued me from the snow, it had apparently not been my companions. Was it these three? Or others like them? Either way, it did not matter. They had looked out for my well-being, likely at a great deal of inconvenience to themselves. I owed my life to three winged, dragon-headed creatures out of Draconean myth.

No—not myth. I stared up at the tall figure in front of me, standing with its feet apart and its wings slightly spread, in a pose I had seen so many times before. The epiphany came upon me like a lightning strike, so astonishing it momentarily drove all fear and despair from my mind. All those statues and reliefs and painted murals, showing humanoid figures with wings and dragon heads, with humans making offerings to them… we had assumed those figures were gods. And perhaps, indeed, ancient humans had worshipped them as such.

But they were not gods.

They were, quite simply, the Draconeans.

That ancient civilization had not been a human edifice. It was the creation of beings like the one in front of me, who ruled over their human subjects until their downfall. The evidence had been before us for thousands of years… but when the Draconeans were overthrown, their existence faded into legend, easily disbelieved without the proof of it in front of us.

The one that had approached me gestured toward my bed, with words I still could not understand. It did not seem hostile. Numbly obedient, I limped back to my rest. Two of them worked together to hang again the curtain I had torn down, closing me into my little shelter, shutting away the sight of their hybrid, impossible bodies.

I lay under the yak fleece and shivered, but not from cold. The truth had crept into my mind while I was occupied with other things, but now, alone in my nest, I could avoid it no longer.

I was alone. Though the avalanche remained a terrifying maelstrom in my recollection, it was not so chaotic as to erase one simple fact: I had been torn away from my companions, from my husband. I went one way and they went another, and then in my disorientation I compounded that separation by staggering west. They were on the other side of the mountains, or—

Though I tried to tell myself not to think it, such discipline was beyond me. Or dead.

What the Draconeans made of my sobs, I do not know, but they left me in peace.

One of them brought me food some time later: porridge not much different from what the Nying ate. Accepting it, I tried to study the Draconean’s dentition, but it kept its mouth shut. Not wholly carnivorous, it seemed, although I had seen before, on the living and the frozen, that they had quite prominent cuspids. They could not give me porridge unless they farmed grain, and would not bother to farm grain unless they ate it. Which made sense, given the terrain; this region could not possibly support a large population of obligate carnivores. Perhaps their diet was like that of bears, omnivorous.

Such thoughts were the lifeline that kept me afloat while I ate my Draconean porridge.

They lived. They were real. How could I make space in my mind to accommodate that fact?

I found myself thinking of the egg from Rahuahane, and the cast I had made of the vacuoles in its petrified albumen. Lumpy and imprecise as it was, the cast had not given me a good picture of the lost embryo; but it had shown enough to be perplexing. The unexpected proportions, the odd configuration of the legs. All quite wrong for a quadripedal creature… but in hindsight, quite natural for a bipedal one.

How was it even possible?

I will not trouble my readers by recounting every occasion on which I lost the thread of my reasoning and sank once more into tears. I could not think of Rahuahane without thinking of Suhail, who had been there with me; I could not think of the egg without thinking of Tom, who had puzzled over its mysteries with me. Moreover I was still quite weak from my trials, and weeping exhausted what little reserves I had, so that I spent far more time asleep than I would have liked. I knew that I must try to get out of that place and back to human civilization; I told myself the others were waiting for me there, as a spur to my determination. But I also knew that if I tried to flee now, then regardless of what the Draconeans did, I would be a dead woman in short order. I was in no state to face the mountains.

How long had I been in that house? My hands and toes showed clear signs of healing frostbite. I did not think it had been dreadfully severe, as I still had full sensation in all the affected areas, and my skin was not sloughing off. But it had been bad enough to blister, so I had been more than merely nipped by the cold. Judging by my current condition, and the state of my leg… I feared I had been there at least a fortnight, if not longer.

Even if the others were alive, they would be certain I was dead. I lost a great deal of time to that realization, and could barely eat the food laid at my side.

What pulled me up again was the conundrum before me, the inarguable existence of living, breathing, dragon-headed creatures. If I could not escape them, I would study them. And perhaps my study would lead me to some useful understanding.

But first, I had to reach some equilibrium on the matter of my companions. I forced myself through the possibilities with ruthless logic.

If I assumed them to be dead, and they proved to be alive, then my mourning would be to no purpose. If I assumed them to be dead and was correct, I did not think my mourning would be lessened at all; I would only feel a new wave of grief upon confirmation of their loss. Contrariwise, if I assumed them to be alive and was wrong, my grief would be dreadful; but in the meanwhile I would enjoy a greater use of my faculties, which would undoubtedly be of use in returning me to the human world. And finally, if I hoped for the best and proved to be right… that would be the best of all possible outcomes. I therefore resolved to behave in all ways as if they were alive, until I had proof to the contrary.

Did it work? Of course not; no mere resolution could hold back all fear and uncertainty. But it did help. With that vow to support me, I could address myself properly to the question at hand: how could the Draconeans be possible?

Developmental lability had to be the answer; there was no other explanation. Very well, then: under what conditions could a draconic egg develop into something half human?

It must be exposed to some kind of human factor in its environment. Not a house or the sound of literature read aloud or anything of that sort; no, the factor must be biological. And then I thought of the murals in the Watchers’ Heart: the inscriptions, their glyphs painted red, descending on an egg below. The “precious rain” referenced in the Cataract Stone—and the clause that followed after, which might be read as an elaboration of the previous, telling of the “sacred utterances of our hearts.”

Blood. Bathe a draconic egg in human blood, and perhaps a Draconean would result.

How often could that possibly occur? The more extreme the mutation, the less likely the embryo is to be viable; the experimentation carried out at the House of Dragons in Qurrat, both mine and that of my successors, had established that quite clearly. Something like this would not succeed one time in a thousand, I suspected. Or perhaps it was somehow done in more gradual steps—I had no way of knowing. My only certainty was that it had been done, for the proof of it kept bringing me porridge to eat.

Lying in my nest, slowly regaining my strength, I imagined sharing my speculations with Tom and Suhail. This was comforting, and soon I imagined myself standing in a place like Caffrey Hall, lecturing to the public on the Draconeans I had met. Unexpectedly, I found myself giggling. (The sound may have been a little hysterical; I muffled it in my blankets.) It had come to me that one way or another, I had my victory. Either this discovery would at last force the Philosophers’ Colloquium to accept me as a member, and I would have the satisfaction of having broken through that door… or they would continue to refuse me, and I could wash my hands of them entirely. I had dreamt for years of achieving status as a Fellow, to the point where I could not surrender it easily—but if this did not suffice, then they would prove themselves a pack of hidebound reactionaries not worth a moment further of my time.

Of course, that would only be true if I had a chance to tell them.

Therefore, I must survive and return to the outside world. I would not give them the satisfaction of tut-tutting and shaking their heads over the sad demise of a woman whose aspirations exceeded her worth.

I will not pretend this washed me clean of all distress. Every minute I stayed in that place was another minute my husband believed me to be dead. I remembered all too well my grief when Jacob died; the thought of Suhail enduring such a loss was wrenching. However joyous our reunion would be, I could not envision it without first thinking of his suffering, which quite countered the effect. But rubbing the Colloquium’s collective noses in my achievement? That was quite a powerful motivator, and every time my will to carry on faltered, I thought of the satisfaction that awaited me.

My trio of Draconeans permitted me to rise from my bed and hobble about so long as I neither shouted nor broke for the door. I did wonder what would happen if I made too much noise: would I provoke an avalanche? Attract a predator? Disturb the local peace and bring wrath down upon my captors? No one came into the house but those three; I could not even be certain there were others out there. I suspected there were, though. Had I been able to stay longer at the top of the col and survey the land on the other side, what might I have seen?

I shook aside such thoughts in favour of more immediate matters. In order to hobble about, I had to fashion a splint for my leg, to avoid doing it any further mischief. The Draconeans, when they realized what I was after, attempted to bind the splint about my knee; my insistence on placing it around my shin provoked much conversation among them. Of course: they would have little experience with broken bones, when their own were so close to indestructible. Crutches, on the other hand, they understood quite well, for they could damage their tendons and ligaments just like any other creature.

With my health thus addressed, I turned myself to the task of observation. I began with the Draconeans themselves. They were somewhat over two meters tall: enough to loom over many humans, but I had seen men as large, especially in the Keongan Islands. In the chest and shoulder they were quite broad, presumably to support the musculature of their wings—could they fly? I suspected they would have difficulty, compared with their quadrupedal cousins; their bodies were not shaped for horizontal balance. They might be able to glide, though. They also appeared stockier than their ancient cousins, perhaps as an adaptation to the cold. Their scales were darker than those of the frozen Draconean we had found in the col; whether that was a seasonal difference, a sex-based one, or merely the equivalent of the colour variation seen in horses, I could not yet tell.

I had ample opportunity to study them, however, as they wore very little clothing while indoors. Although I found the air outside my blanketed shelter quite chill, they seemed perfectly comfortable in loose, plain trousers that did not fall below their knees. I knew that was not all they wore, though. They came and went, and although I kept my distance from the door, I could see through it to some kind of room beyond—an antechamber, I thought, where they donned and doffed heavier clothing, jackets and boots and the like. It would have been wildly insufficient to keep me warm, but it was clear their tolerance for the cold far exceeded my own.

(Why had the Draconean in the col not been clothed? I will never know for certain, but I do know they can suffer the effects of hypothermia. This sometimes causes people to succumb to a kind of madness wherein they strip off their clothing, feeling themselves to be far too warm. The lost one may have done just that.)

So much for the Draconeans, at least for the moment: next I turned my attention to their environment. The outside world was presently beyond my reach, but I could and did observe their house. It was not the kind of monumental structure I associated with the Draconeans; but of course I knew from Suhail that the ruins which awe us today are only the great edifices of their civilization, comparable to the Temple in Haggad or the Hall of the Synedrion in Falchester. Ordinary people had lived in more modest buildings.

(Were all of those ordinary people human? Or had Draconeans been numerous enough that there were Draconean peasants as well as rulers? My list of unanswered questions only grew longer with each passing day.)

The architecture differed in many ways from that of the Nying. Although the house in which I dwelt was round, it was clearly not built atop a livestock pen as is done in Tser-nga. Instead the floor was covered with that quilted hessian I had noted before, which was remarkably effective at insulating us from the cold—I did not learn why until later. The furnishings were sparse, just a few chests and shelves which held practical items such as pots and blankets. The fire sat in a broad, shallow bowl of bare stone; it was here that my caretakers slept, on thin mattresses they put away during the day. The smoke rose through a hole in the low ceiling (it barely cleared the heads of the inhabitants); the hole must have been shielded in some fashion, for I could not see the sky when I peered into it.

Our only light came from that fire and a handful of lamps whose odour I recognized: it was yak butter. Unless they traded with the Nying, and the entire region had conspired not to breathe a whisper of it to my party, they must herd their own yaks. They did indeed eat a mixed diet, grains and meat and dried fruit, along with the same staggering quantities of butter and fat I had seen among the Nying. And that, too, inclined me to believe these three were not alone, for it was unlikely in the extreme that they could supply themselves with such variety—especially when no more than two of them were ever gone from the house at one time.

I could not ask questions about any of it, though, until we could speak with one another. And that led me to my next task.

We began almost immediately. After my leg was splinted, I came to sit with them by the firepit, swaddled in a blanket, with my three hosts watching me warily. Looking at them, I said, “Anevrai?”

This was how Suhail had pronounced one of the words from the Cataract Stone. We had not known then whether it referred to the Draconeans or to their gods; now that I had conflated those two categories, I thought it would be a good guess. But they only cocked their heads and said nothing.

I was not half the linguist my husband was… but Suhail was not there, and so I must make do. I remembered him saying the words that changed the least were usually the most basic, and cast about for something that was both in the room and a word he had reconstructed. Pointing at the fire, I said, “Irr?”

This only seemed to deepen their confusion, but I kept trying. Leaning forward, I tapped one of the stones that ringed the fire and said, “Abun.” Then I pointed at the fire again. “Irr.”

The three Draconeans looked at one another and talked in low, rapid tones. One seemed to be asking a question, and the other two encouraging it—but perhaps that was only me laying meaning atop behaviour I could not understand. Finally the one turned back to me and pointed at the fire. “Rrt.” Then it tapped a stone. “Vun.”

My heart leapt. Fire. Stone. Two tiny footholds on the slope of an unimaginably large mountain; it was a long way from those two to conversation. But it sounded, to my linguistically amateur ear, as if Suhail was right. The Draconean language was ancestral to those of southern Anthiope—which meant it was not wholly alien to me. By looking for the points of commonality, I could leverage my way up to comprehension.

You must not imagine that this epiphany unlocked everything, any more than the Cataract Stone instantly unveiled the secrets of all Draconean inscriptions. It did nothing of the sort. Being raised in the Magisterial religion, I had never studied Lashon (and now cursed that lack), but my Akhian was passable, and gave me a much better starting point than the few fragments of vocabulary Suhail had tentatively reconstructed. But of course things had changed a great deal since those ancient days; the language my host spoke was not that of its ancestors from thousands of years before. Sounds evolved into completely different sounds, following rules my husband might know, but I did not. Words hived off to mean only a single concept related to the original, while something else came in to fill the void: the Akhian word for “to weave” seemed to be a distant cousin to the modern Draconean word for “cloth,” while their “weave” was unlike anything I had heard before. Progress was excruciatingly slow.

But what else did I have with which to fill my time? Until they allowed me to leave the house, the most useful thing I could do was learn to communicate. Perhaps (I thought with another stifled giggle) I might find a place among the Society of Linguists, if the Colloquium would not have me. And although I am not talented at languages, it is amazing what one can accomplish when one has nothing else to focus on.

It is not true, though, to say I had nothing else to occupy me. One day—I assumed it was day; in truth I had no way of telling time other than by the wakefulness of the Draconeans and my own hunger—my three caretakers held a quiet and tense-looking conference, huddled in a fashion that made it clear I was not welcome, even though I could not have understood them yet. Then, stiff with obvious tension, two departed, leaving one behind.

The remaining Draconean took down my curtains and urged me to the back of the rounded room, as far from the entrance as possible. There it made a nest of the curtains for me and enacted a pantomime. I was to sit in that nest and, if someone came through the door, pull one of the curtains over myself and hide.

This was my first evidence that I was not supposed to be there at all.

I watched this Draconean closely. I had begun to tell them apart: the one who spoke to me in our halting language lessons was the tallest, with pale streaks running down the sides of its neck, and so I called it Streak. Another, with narrower shoulders, most commonly took the task of cooking, and so I dubbed it Cook. This was the smallest and stockiest of the three, and I referred to it as Wary—for of the three, it was the most obviously afraid of me.

Afraid of me! I was half a meter shorter and half its weight, with no claws or teeth to speak of, and yet it feared me. Much of their conference, I thought, had been about persuading Wary to stay with me while the other two went away. How long would they be gone?

Watching the Draconean from my nest, I realized something else. All this time, I had been observing them with a naturalist’s eye, noting conformation, coloration, behaviour. We had begun to communicate… but not yet to treat one another as people.

I caught the Draconean’s attention and pointed at myself. “Isabella.”

It stared mutely. Confused? Or too wary to speak?

To clarify, I went through the words we had established so far, naming the fire, the stones, my blanket, and more. Then I pointed at myself again. “Isabella.” This I repeated, several more times, with slow and careful enunciation. Then it was time to point at the Draconean and make an inquisitive noise.

It understood me, I was sure. But it only turned away and bent itself to the task of cleaning the porridge-pot.

Either they did not use names, or this one was unwilling to share its own. I made a private wager on the latter.

The other two were gone for a long time, the remainder of which Wary and I spent in silence. Finally we heard sounds outside, and Wary gestured fiercely for me to hide myself; I complied without hesitation. But I peeked through a tiny gap in the blankets, and when the door was safely closed behind the familiar pair, I emerged once more.

I hoped their return meant I might be permitted to go outside. They had never before taken the precaution of hiding me, which meant today was unusual; it might have heralded that welcome change. Unfortunately, I had no such luck. But I repeated the process of naming myself, and this time, it bore fruit.

Streak understood my meaning immediately. After a glance at the others—I could see Wary silently willing its companion not to speak—the Draconean turned back to me, pointed one claw at its muzzle, and said, “Ruzt.”

The one I had dubbed Cook followed suit. “Kahhe.”

Then they glared at Wary until it muttered, “Zam.”

Now all of us had names. They were no longer creatures to me; they were people. And that marked the beginning of many changes among us.

ELEVEN

“Zabel.” This was how they tended to pronounce my name. They were not incapable of providing it with its initial and final vowels, but in their speech such things tended to fall away, and I answered readily enough to the truncated form. Ruzt had gone out for a time; now it was back, and it held in its claws my mountaineering clothes, carefully mended.

A thousand possibilities collided in my mind. I was to be escorted home; I was being tossed out on my ear; I was to meet other Draconeans at last; I was being taken to my execution. Would they bother to mend my clothes before killing me? I chided myself for foolishness and dressed with alacrity. Only one thing could I be sure of: I was going outside at last. After so long cooped up in that house, nothing sounded more wonderful.

Despite my still-splinted leg, my step was light as I followed Ruzt through the door it had blocked me from before. The antechamber was stuffed with all manner of sacks and crates; clearly it served as a storeroom for those things which would not suffer from the cold. The wall it shared with the inner room was covered in more of that quilted hessian. Ruzt took garments from a nearby rack, snow-caked enough that I understood why it did not bring them inside, where they would leave meltwater all over the floor. The sight should have warned me of what I would face outside, but I was so caught up in the thought of freedom that I did not follow my observation to its logical conclusion.

Ruzt led me to the exterior door, set a little distance to the side of the first (so the wind would not blow straight through to the interior), and opened it.

I stepped out into a world of diamonds. The sky overhead was a brilliant, unforgiving blue, and the sun reflected off a thousand surfaces around me. From the col I had seen greenery in the valley below; unless Ruzt and the others had taken me someplace entirely different, that green was all buried now. Icicles decorated the eaves of the buildings, hung in dense strings from the trees. Directly ahead of me, dominating the mountain basin, was the peak I had seen from the col, dressed entirely in white. My first step sank me almost knee-deep into the snow, and the air was the coldest I had ever felt.

While I lay ill and then healing inside that house, winter had begun.

Oh, by the calendar perhaps it was not yet there. But in the Mrtyahaima, winter does not wait upon the solstice to come calling; it arrives early and stays late. Though much of the precipitation falls during the monsoon, as rain in the valleys and snow in the heights, winter is not without its storms; and during that season, travel is all but impossible.

I stood as if turned to ice myself. All thoughts of departure withered on the vine. It did not matter how much I had recovered; it did not matter whether the Draconeans helped or hindered me in going. Any attempt to leave this place before spring would be a death sentence—and spring would not show her face before Fructis at the earliest. At a conservative estimate, I would be trapped here for at least four months.

Four months, during which everyone I loved would believe me dead.

Ruzt said something I could not understand. When I did not respond, it bent to peer at me. I shook myself to something like life and nodded, numbly. I could not encompass that thought yet; I would come to terms with it by degrees, for to take in the whole at once would break me. For now, I distracted myself with my surroundings, which I was at last free to explore.

The house stood on the edge of a village. It should, I thought, have looked more exotic; after all, this was a Draconean settlement. But the truth is that sensible architecture stays much the same regardless of species. The steeply pitched roofs were not far different from those of the Nying—or, indeed, those one might find in Siaure or northern Bulskevo. Where there is a large amount of snow, there is a need to shed it, lest it crush the roof with its weight.

I turned the other direction and saw that I had not come so terribly far. The familiar tower of Gyaptse stood proud in the sky, with Cheja alongside. From here, the path up to the col was comparatively easy. But I had no illusions that I could chance it: even if I made it across, I would die attempting to descend the other side alone; and even if I survived the descent, I would still be in the Mrtyahaiman wilderness, with a glacier between me and the nearest human settlement.

When I turned back, all three of my Draconean hosts were watching me. I suspect they guessed my thoughts, but I do not know for certain.

All three of my hosts. Where were the remainder?

Just as when we had come into Hlamtse Rong, I saw no one on the paths between the houses; unlike in Hlamtse Rong, there was no one peering out at me from cover. I could not even see many tracks in the snow. What few I saw, I suspected came from Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam.

This was why they had permitted me to leave the house. Because no one else was here to see me.

So where had the inhabitants gone? To winter quarters, perhaps? Leaving behind my three, who made no objection as I tentatively began to explore. They let me walk up to one of the other houses; when I knocked on the door, they only looked puzzled. Clearly it was not the Draconean custom to announce themselves in such fashion. Did they clap, as people do in other parts of the world? I had no idea. But the door opened when I tried it, and although Kahhe followed me closely, they permitted me to go inside. The layout of the house was much like the one I had left, but clearly packed up for the season, its inhabitants not expecting to return any time soon. Here, though, part of the quilted hessian had split, exposing the stuffing. Poking at this, I found it was filled with scales like the ones that adorned my companions, but paler.

“Insulation,” I murmured, stepping back to study it. The same material that helped protect their bodies could easily serve the same purpose on their houses. Did the Draconeans shed their scales each year? The quantity suggested they did, and the colour suggested the scales bleached over time, likely as a seasonal adaptation. (In wintertime a pale hide would camouflage them more effectively against the snow, while a darker hide would be much less conspicuous among the trees and bare stones of summer.) They must save their scales with care, stitching them into new fabric casings when the old ones failed.

Zam was hissing something to Ruzt when I came out of the house. It still did not trust me; that much was palpable. I wished I could ask why.

Since I could not, I continued exploring. There seemed no point in going into any of the other houses, but below me on the slope was a building unlike any of the others. It was low and square, but enormous in area, at least compared to everything else in the village. To give the roof a steep pitch would have required it to soar into the sky; instead its gentler slope was oddly lumpy, which I soon realized came from the pine boughs that carpeted it. These could be pried off as needed, taking the encrustation of snow and ice with them, and replaced with a clean covering from a storehouse built for the purpose.

Of course my first thought was “temple.” We humans have a long history of attaching that name to any monumental Draconean structure whose use we do not understand; this one might be constructed of wood and rough field stone rather than the carefully shaped blocks of the ancients, but what other purpose could motivate them to build so large a place?

I should have guessed the answer, for the parts of the village I had seen thus far had one exceedingly obvious lack. But it was not until I drew close and smelled the odour arising from it that I realized the truth.

Ruzt unbarred the door and ushered me inside the yak barn.

It contained what I presumed was every single yak belonging to the village, penned in a series of smaller enclosures. In each enclosure, the beasts shared a common style of nose-ring, which I understood to be owners’ marks. Wherever the rest of the Draconeans had gone, they had left behind their livestock—and, I soon realized, it was the duty of these three to care for them until spring.

I spent a good deal of time in that yak barn during my stay in the village. I knew from past experience in other parts of the world that assistance with daily tasks goes some way toward establishing friendly relations, and it was no different here (though my aid did little to thaw Zam’s heart). But my motives were not entirely altruistic: owing to the number of beasts inside the barn, it was also the warmest place in the village, unless I wished to spend the months huddled right next to the Draconeans’ fire. Furthermore, there was something of great interest to me inside that barn.

From above us I heard a familiar cry.

“Mews!” I said in startlement, looking at the Draconeans. Naturally this meant nothing to them, and none of the Tser-zhag words I tried had any better effect. But Ruzt led me up a ladder to an attic space—a mews, I thought, remembering Suhail’s laughter at the word—filled with familiar draconic shapes. These, too, were marked, though in their case it was with paint on their hides rather than rings through the nose.

In the days that followed I discovered that the mews were an integral part of how three Draconeans could care for such a large quantity of livestock all by themselves. In Hlamtse Rong we had wondered whether mews could be trained; in the Draconean village, which was called Imsali, I learned that they could. It works far better, however, when the trainer is not human, though the reasons for this are still a mystery. But I received my answer on the matter of the mews’ diving behaviour, for this is clearly a degenerate echo of the action they use to herd yaks.

Yes, my Draconean hosts used mews as their aerial sheepdogs. The little dragons helped them drive groups of livestock out to areas where grazing could still be found—for yaks can nibble up shreds and patches of grass from beneath the snow. If they have fed well enough in summer, they can survive all winter on such fare. We supplemented this with dried fodder in the barn, but to keep them there the entire season would be detrimental to their health. My hosts therefore took them out in a steady rotation, one Draconean and cluster of mews per herd, with at least one caretaker remaining behind in the village.

Even my fascination with dragon behaviour could not persuade me to volunteer myself for such excursions, not in a Mrtyahaiman winter. It was therefore in some ways fortunate that the Draconeans clearly did not want me to leave the village. Instead I engaged in chores there: mucking out the yak barn, caring for the mews not currently on duty, and working diligently to establish some command of the local language, with the help of Ruzt.

It is difficult to tell the story of that winter among the Draconeans. I kept no journal during my time there (lacking a notebook to keep it in, or a pen with which to write). Even if I had, I could not tell you when and how I learned everything; too much of it seeped into my head by some osmotic process, assembled from a hundred little clues until one day I knew a thing, without ever quite having been told it. Even when my education was more overt, it is difficult to recall the sequence and cause. Certain details are vital enough to this tale that I will keep them in their proper places; but for the rest, I shall let them fall where they may, without undue concern for chronology.

My progress often felt painfully slow—in part because it was, and in part because it came not in grand leaps, but by small degrees. There was no moment at which I began having conversations with Ruzt. We started with the vocabulary of my immediate environment, progressed to basic verbs, muddled through the fundamentals of grammar by a great deal of trial and even more error, and by the end could tackle some abstract concepts through extensive circumlocution—all of which was great progress over where I began, but it happened so slowly that at times I doubted it was happening at all.

That I achieved so much success I largely attribute to my husband’s brilliant deduction, connecting Draconean to the languages of southern Anthiope. Familiar though I was with the concept of evolution, I was not in the habit of applying it to languages; and on my own, I do not know if I would have looked for the patterns that would allow me to extrapolate from the tongue I knew to the tongue I did not. (There is, of course, a hazard in leaning too heavily upon such analogies: I spoke very Akhian-flavored Draconean, as I instinctively defaulted to the grammar of the more familiar language whenever my attention wandered.) But with that theory in hand, I could apply my naturalist’s mind to the problem, and after a while I was able to make educated guesses as to Draconean words I had not yet learned. These were rarely correct, but they often led me toward the proper word by a faster road.

The remainder of my success is due to Ruzt. If we, analogizing to biological evolution, think of Lashon and Akhian as the domestic housecat and the lion—differing in a variety of respects, but obviously near relations—then the modern Draconean tongue is like a dog: still derived from a common ancestor, from whom all three languages have inherited some important characteristics, but much more widely separated by millennia of change. Fortunately for me, Ruzt spoke what I eventually recognized as an older, religious form of the language, comparable to Scriptural Lashon; this lay much closer to the ancient roots than their modern tongue. The language she spoke with Kahhe and Zam contained a vast number of words that I suspect derived from another tongue entirely—perhaps a human language, though it did not, to my amateur ear, appear to be Nying or Tser-zhag.

Despite this, I learned a few things, beginning with the shift my alert readers may have noticed already: my hosts were in fact hostesses. Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam were three sisters, which is the typical household arrangement among the Draconeans. Males are fewer in number, but rather than following the polygamous structure a human society might assume, the Draconeans practice no real marriage at all. Their males live together, in several larger buildings where they are sorted according to their age group, while sister-groups maintain independent houses. They consider the sibling bond to be much more significant than the parental one, and the sororal more significant than the fraternal.

Imsali was not the only village in the region. On a clear day I could see smoke arising in other places around the Sanctuary—for that was how I came to think of the basin that encircled the great central peak, known to the Draconeans as Anshakkar. The ring of mountains surrounding it (of which Gyaptse and Cheja are but two) is nearly impassible; the col by which I entered is one of the lowest points in that ring, and as you have seen, it is not easy to traverse. Mountaineers may scale it, of course—but it is only in recent history that mountaineers have begun to frequent the region, people well equipped for the climbing of ridges and peaks, and motivated less by the search for new pastures or arable land or even trading routes than by the desire to conquer untrammeled terrain. For the inhabitants on all sides, the way is too forbidding to be worthwhile. What good would it do to enter such a place? Departure is too difficult; anyone who lived within would be isolated from the world without.

But the land inside is hospitable—at least by Mrtyahaiman standards of hospitality. The valleys are quite deep, and at most times of year the surrounding mountains block enough of the wind to make the interior relatively pleasant. Farming is possible, and the herding of yaks; and while humans would find it quite hard going, the Draconeans, with the advantage of their adaptable biology, made do quite well.

How had they come to be there? Speculation alone could not tell me, but my command of the language did not yet suffice to address such abstract, complex topics. I had a strong suspicion that, as I had theorized before, folk memory in Tser-nga preserved knowledge of the Draconeans—for surely these were the “ice demons” feared by the people of Hlamtse Rong. Had they dwelt here since ancient times? Nothing in their architecture reminded me of the ruins I had seen in other parts of the world… but of course it would be absurdly difficult to build such things in a place like this. For one mad moment, I wondered if the inhabitants of the Sanctuary even knew that the larger Draconean civilization had fallen thousands of years before, far outside their isolated home.

Had I been able to explore, I might have learned more, and more rapidly. Three things, however, militated against my departing from Imsali. First, of course, was my own weakness and injury, though in time I overcame that issue. The second was that although it does not snow as heavily in the winter as during the monsoon, it does still snow; and winter is the primary season for the wind to come howling through.

The third is that we were not alone in that place.

In our village, yes. (If I may be permitted to term it “our village,” when I was only a temporary guest there.) But as it transpired, each of the villages within the Sanctuary had its own set of yak caretakers. This I discovered one day when Kahhe swooped down and bundled me straight back into the barn, without so much as a by-your-leave.

I do mean swooped. On that day I discovered that, while Draconean wings cannot support full flight, they are sufficient for a degree of gliding. Kahhe landed before me in the snow, clapped one scaled hand over my mouth, and hauled me bodily through the doorway. It is a mark of how much I had come to trust the sisters that after my first, muffled yelp of surprise, I made no protest at all. If she felt I needed to be removed from sight, I assumed it was for my own protection—and so it was.

Voices came from outside. By then I had heard enough of the three sisters that I could recognize their tones, and knew the new speakers were neither Zam nor Ruzt. Kahhe pointed with one claw. I stared. She pointed again, wings fluttering. I knew what she meant; it was only reluctance that held me back. But I had no better option, and so, obedient to her instructions, I climbed over the railing into one of the yak enclosures and wormed my way between the beasts until I was far enough back to be thoroughly concealed. Then she went outside.

Common sense told me to stay where I was. But I am, as Suhail is fond of saying, deranged as well as practical. I could learn a great deal by watching my three Draconeans interact with others… and I did not relish the thought of staying among the yaks, made fragrant by their enclosed quarters.

I crept back between them and went to the barn door, where I peered out through the crack. In the street outside I saw two new Draconeans speaking to Kahhe. Before long her sisters joined them, and then the conversation devolved into an argument.

The wind was too fierce that day for me to hear much of what they said, and I doubt I would have understood more than one word in ten even if I could hear. Though by then I had some facility with the language, at least within the narrow scope of my daily affairs, I still required my interlocutors to speak slowly and clearly—which is not a thing people generally do in natural conversation.

Watching their body language, however, kept me fascinated enough to forget the intense chill coming through the crack of the door. Their gestures were not those of humans: Ruzt kept holding up one hand, fingers spread and palm out, which among us would have been a sign of placation or a request for quiet while she spoke. Here it seemed to be a way of indicating refusal, like a shake of the head. At one point a newcomer half spread her wings; Kahhe responded by spreading her own to their fullest extent. The other followed suit, and the two commenced what I could only think of as a staring contest, except with wings instead of eyes. When Zam had lifted her ruff my first day awake, I had interpreted it as a fear response; here I thought the increase in apparent size signaled some kind of dominance challenge instead.

Kahhe won the contest, but in the end Ruzt curled her fingers inward and turned her palm toward her body, which signaled assent. All five Draconeans turned and came toward me.

I scrambled for cover once more. Whether any of the Draconeans took particular note of the restless and protesting yaks in one of the enclosures, I cannot say; by then I was crouched as low as I could be in the far corner, praying that the nearest beast would not decide to saunter away and leave me exposed. I only know that no one commented on my presence, which meant none of the strangers had noticed it.

They climbed up the ladders and were gone for some time. I heard a creaking from the upper attic, where fodder was kept, above the mews. I considered trying to shift to better cover, but did not quite dare; the risk of being caught in the open was too high. Finally they came back down, bearing sacks of the richer feed we gave to yaks that seemed to be languishing in their winter quarters. So: the argument had been about feed, and whether our village would give any to the visitors. Were their yaks wasting away, or had something gone wrong with their feed, or were the newcomers simply bullies extorting surplus from their neighbours? I never did find out.

Kahhe retrieved me once they were gone. Leaving the barn, I saw something that stopped me—in my tracks, I should say, but it would be more accurate to say in front of them. The ground by the barn door was thoroughly trampled, but I had been roaming about earlier, and the snow away from the usual path showed my footprints clearly.

Human footprints. Would anyone here recognize them as such? They certainly did not look Draconean, by size or by stride length.

When Kahhe saw what had alarmed me, she immediately went to consult with her sisters. After that I was issued a broom with which to blur my tracks, and the trio frowned more on me going anywhere they had not already trampled a path. (After a day or two of carrying the broom, I instead improvised a kind of straw skirt, which would drag behind me as I walked without need for special effort. As this also had the effect of insulating me further against the cold, I did not mind the additional burden.)

“What would have happened if they saw me?” I asked, staring in the direction the strangers had gone. I spoke in Akhian, as had become my habit; I was more focused on learning Ruzt’s language than teaching her any of my own, but the odds of her understanding a stray word or two were higher if I spoke that tongue.

She made no reply, and I doubt my meaning came through. In a sense, I am glad I did not get an answer then, for I would not have been prepared for the consequences.

That night I approached Kahhe and asked, by means of mime, whether I could examine her wings.

Ever since I woke up and discovered that Draconeans were not only real but alive (or at least since I had collected my wits in the aftermath of that discovery), I had wondered about their wings. Their ancient kin might have inhabited places like Akhia and Keonga, but these three dwelt in an exceedingly cold climate. A thin structure like a wing loses heat rapidly, because the blood vessels are unavoidably close to the surface. How did they deal with this problem?

I had noted that my rescuers had a habit of crouching close to the fire with their wings partially spread, as if cupping the heat to themselves. They most often did this immediately after returning from the outside, in the manner of a human warming their hands at the flame, and that made sense to me; but they also did it before departing, and I wanted to know why.

So I pointed to Kahhe’s wings and said in her language, “What?” By now this was well established as my way of asking for vocabulary, and so she answered me, “Kappu.” I repeated this process with my eyes and received the word ika in return. Then, employing my new acquisitions and some accompanying mime, along with their word for “please,” I inquired whether I could examine her wings. Kahhe seemed puzzled by my interest, but let me approach, and did not flinch away when I touched her.

In the course of my career I have handled any number of dragon wings. Many of them, however, have been on carcasses, and most of the remaining number belonged to very small breeds of dragon, such as the honeyseeker. My only experience with a larger wing on a living creature was when I had to assist Tom in doctoring a drake in Akhia, and in that instance she was drugged to her ruff.

Kahhe’s wing was entirely different, not for any reason of anatomy, but simply because it belonged to a living, wakeful, self-aware creature. The muscles that controlled it shifted under my hands, Kahhe not quite willing to relax entirely into my grip. I felt the warmth of it—we had been inside for some time—and her pulse when I used my fingertips to locate the main alar artery.

A pulse which vanished a moment later. I think Kahhe believed I wanted to pinch off the blood flow, and was trying to assist me; and so she did, but not in the way she intended.

Her action told me what I would not otherwise have known: that Draconeans can voluntarily control the blood flow to their wings. When in strong sunlight or near a fire, they open those vessels and draw in as much heat as they can, but when they go into the cold, they reduce the flow to their wings, the better to preserve that heat.

They cannot do this forever, of course, as it greatly restricts the mobility of that limb; and the longer the wings remain dormant, the longer it takes them to return to full function. (It is for this reason that spreading the wings is a dominance challenge, at least in winter; to leave them exposed is a test of endurance.) Judging by the way she moved in the aftermath of the strangers’ visit, Kahhe had strained a muscle swooping in to hide me, likely on account of the cold and lack of blood flow. But it is a very clever adaptation—a kind of localized anatomical hibernation.

The notion of hibernation should have occured to me much sooner. (No doubt the more scientifically inclined of my readers have thought of it already, and wondered that I have not addressed it before now.) In my defense I can only say that I had spent my entire tenure in that village either unconscious, in hysterics, or reeling from the flood of new information; and as a consequence, I had the attention span of a gnat: no sooner did I begin pondering one aspect of the puzzle than some equally interesting angle distracted me.

But as soon as I thought of it, I was certain that the rest of the village’s inhabitants had not gone to winter quarters—or rather, that “winter quarters” for them consisted of hibernation. It is a common biological response to cold weather, for it allows the organism to survive on a much reduced diet when food is scarce; I had seen its more unusual summer cousin, aestivation, among the desert drakes of Akhia.

The Draconeans could not all go into hibernation, for they would wake to find their yak herds annihilated by the harsh winter. (Wild yaks may survive without undue trouble, but their domesticated kin have more difficulty.) My three fought their instincts, staying awake through the frozen months to ensure their kindred’s livestock would be waiting when spring came. They ate tremendous quantities of food—a fact I had noted but, having nothing to compare it against, had assumed was their ordinary diet—and chewed a certain leaf in much the same fashion as human men chew tobacco. Initially I abstained from trying the leaf myself, knowing that what was edible to them might not be so to me; but Ruzt pressed some upon me when I had an abscessed tooth, and although the taste was unpleasantly astringent, it helped to numb my mouth while she drained the abscess. After that I chewed it somewhat regularly, for I found it improved my health and mitigated the effects of the high altitude.

Not long after I examined Kahhe’s wing, I tried to ask about hibernation. Our communication was not anything like fluent enough yet to cover such a topic, and so once again I had to ask in mime, pointing at empty houses and then feigning sleep. At first I thought my meaning still too muddled, for Ruzt only cocked her head and then walked away. As this persisted, however, I became certain that she understood me perfectly well, and was using incomprehension as her shield against my questions. I did not press.

You must not think that I had suddenly mislaid my curiosity. My list of mysteries to solve was a kilometer long; but language was still a tremendous barrier, and moreover I was eternally cognizant of the fact that the line between “prisoner” and “guest” might be exceedingly thin. That my three hostesses were friendly to me, I was certain—well, certain in two cases; Zam still gave me a wide berth whenever she could, and watched me with a gimlet eye. But Kahhe’s swift action to hide me when the neighbours came calling made it obvious that I could not expect so hospitable a reaction from their kin.

And whether I was correct about hibernation or not, I knew beyond a doubt that eventually the other inhabitants of Imsali would return. When that day arrived, I needed to be out of the Sanctuary and back to my own people, which I could only do with the help of my three caretakers… or I needed that trio to be my shield against whatever might come next.

My communications with Ruzt and the others improved dramatically when I realized that I was thinking too much like my husband.

This was ironic because I had been trying not to think about him at all. I was frequently unsuccessful; over the past five years I had grown accustomed to having Suhail at my side, and his absence felt like a missing limb. As I have said, though, I often lost myself to despair in those days, for it was easy to imagine that I would never escape the Sanctuary (how ironic that name would then be!), and therefore would never see him again. I could banish my demons with unyielding determination to prevail… but this only worked for a time, and drained me tremendously. It was better to lose myself in the challenges I faced, addressing what lay immediately before me, rather than allowing my thoughts to stray too far ahead.

But one cannot live in a marriage like mine without each spouse shaping the other—not when one of your primary joys lies in sharing your interests and fields of knowledge. It was only because of Suhail that I had made as many linguistic strides as I had, and I followed his principles and theories in establishing a common vocabulary with my rescuers.

My change of course came about because of a brilliant dawn. A nightmare had woken me, as it often did; rather than disturb the sisters with my restlessness, I slipped quietly through the door to the antechamber. I had to bring my outer clothing with me, naturally, for the air there was cold enough to give me frostbite if I did not take care—and there is nothing like the unforgiving slap of freezing air to wake a person. Since sleep was now beyond me, and I had gone to such effort in dressing myself in all the necessary layers, I thought I might as well go outside.

Dawn had come to the summit of Anshakkar, that central peak. Though most of the Sanctuary yet lay in shadow, the mountain burned like a flame with the light of the rising sun. Looking on it, I was reminded of the dawn when I stood atop the col with Tom, gazing into the west; and I understood why humans have been known to worship mountains. Anshakkar’s beauty was of a divine sort, sharp and untouchable, as far distant from my own concerns as I was from the concerns of an ant. Pencil and paper, had I possessed either at that moment, could not possibly have captured the effect, and I have never had much skill with oils… but never in my life have I wished so strongly to render a moment on canvas, even if I knew my effort would fall short. It seemed to me in that frozen moment, caught between the remnants of sleep and the wakefulness of an icy dawn, that no one could hope to understand my time in the Sanctuary unless they saw that mountain, ablaze with morning’s light.

The feeling passed—but the idea it had planted in my mind did not.

Prior to the discovery of the Cataract Stone and subsequent breakthrough regarding their language, we had two sources for our fragmentary, erroneous knowledge of Draconean civilization. The first was folklore: memories preserved in Scripture and humble tales, mutated by time until they were scarcely recognizable. The second was the material remains of their age, the buildings and artefacts and, above all, the images—the painted murals and carved reliefs that had once adorned their world. We had misinterpreted so much of that, but it was still the one means by which the ancients could speak to the modern human, transcending the barrier of language.

Could I not communicate in the same way?

I had no proper supplies for the purpose, just a few scraps of paper that had been tucked into the pocket of my coat; my pencil had gone astray during the avalanche or my wanderings afterward, never to be seen again. But humans made art long before we had paper or pencils, and I would not let that lack hinder me.

The interior wall of the yak barn, plastered with white lime, was my primary canvas. By the time the sisters roused to feed the beasts and muck out their enclosures, I had laid out my tale in charcoal, doing my best to mimic the style of ancient Draconean art: Thu, finding the remnants of a Draconean in the valley; Thu again, meeting with myself and Tom and Suhail; then five of us climbing up to the col, where we found the second carcass; then the avalanche. As a coda, myself on one side of the mountains, my companions on the other, in postures of sorrow.

(I was fortunate that the barn, inhabited as it was by so many yaks, was warm enough that my tears did not freeze. My nose ran dreadfully, though, and I had only one handkerchief with which to address that issue, which I had already worn to a rag. Yak-wool scraps make abysmal tools for the purpose.)

The sisters were already upset when they came in, I think because they woke to find me gone from the house, and had to follow my brushed-over tracks to locate me. The simple existence of my picture was enough to deepen their consternation, long before I had a chance to show them its details. Zam in particular was angry: although the charcoal would wash off quite easily, or could at least be smudged into illegibility if the need should arise, I had left a blatant sign of my presence in a relatively public building.

But in time they calmed, and then Ruzt and Kahhe studied my pictures. I exercised my vocabulary, pointing to each bit like a teacher: Draconean, Zabel, mountain. Then, once Ruzt understood, I drew a final image. This one depicted myself and the others together again, in the posture from ancient art that we believed to indicate rejoicing.

Ruzt understood me, I am sure, when I turned to her with a pleading, hopeful expression. But she stared at the wall, neither meeting my gaze nor responding.

Kahhe asked her a question, in a tone I recognized as dubious, and jerked her head in the direction of the mountain Anshakkar.

This set Zam off like a firecracker. Whatever Kahhe had just suggested, Zam was adamantly against it. Ruzt silenced them both with a snap of her wings. I lifted a bucket of water, and she nodded; I began to wash my images from the wall.

What was at the mountain? I had my suspicions, but could not be certain. And I was not ready to pursue them just yet, not when it might lose me some valuable goodwill—or simply kill me outright.

But in the meanwhile, we had a new mode of communication, which aided me in expanding my vocabulary. I essayed some experiments with Draconean writing as well, hoping to establish for certain the pronunciation of the different glyphs, but made scant progress; Kahhe and Zam were clearly illiterate, and while Ruzt understood a little, she was very reluctant to help. Suspecting some kind of religious control of writing, I desisted. For my purposes, writing was of little use anyway, as it could only set down the words I heard. Images were better for eliciting new words entirely.

Ruzt and Kahhe seemed very respectful of my newly revealed skill. Their wooden tools and their pots were decorated, but only with abstract designs; as with people in many cold climates, they passed much of their leisure time in carving. Nowhere, though, had I seen any figurative art. The part of me that, despite evidence to the contrary, persisted in thinking of them as particularly clever dragons had taken this as only natural—but of course they were more than that; they were people, albeit only partially human, and their ancestors had been quite capable of both drawing and sculpture. Modern Draconeans did still have representative art, only not in casual use. And it is fortunate they did, for had they possessed no concept of artistic representation, they would not so easily have understood my pictures.

In time I came to understand that figurative artists form a special class in Draconean society, one that is much admired. Without realizing it, I had, by demonstrating my skill, made myself a good deal safer among them.

TWELVE

In the history of scientific discovery, it is my opinion that insufficient credit has been given to the behaviour of the humble yak.

Oh, I could say that what happened next was due to a fire in the yak barn. This would be true as far as it goes; without the fire, the beasts would not have panicked, and nothing of interest would have occurred. But had it been a fire only, with no ensuing complications from the yaks, I believe I would have remained in that village for the whole winter, and what ensued thereafter would have proceeded entirely according to the plans of my hostesses. Instead I departed from Imsali, learned things the sisters did not intend, and made a great deal of progress I had not anticipated in the least.

The carelessness which began the fire was not my own. The interior of the barn was exceedingly dim, even with the doors thrown wide; we often set butter lamps in strategic locations, the better to see what we were doing. Ordinarily we exercised some caution in where we placed the lamps, but errors happened—and on that transformative day, Kahhe made a mistake.

One of the yaks, wandering about its enclosure, jostled the beam on which the lamp lay.

Had either of us been right there, we would have seen the lamp fall, and could likely have extinguished the fire before it grew too large. But I was outside the barn when the trouble began, and Kahhe had gone to fetch a new basket in which to carry away the yak manure; the first one she found was torn, and by the time she replaced it with a usable one, the fire had well and truly taken hold.

Ruzt and Zam were out with portions of the village herd for grazing, which left the two of us to fight the blaze on our own. We first attempted to suffocate the fire with the best material we had to immediate hand—which is to say, yak manure. (Dried, their droppings are often used for fuel. But these were not yet dry.) Had the yaks remained calm, we might have succeeded. Alas for Kahhe and myself, they did not.

The group nearest the fire stampeded first, with their neighbours hard on their heels. The enclosures were not meant to withstand a concerted attempt to break out; the railings splintered and fell. Kahhe bent her knees and sprang upward, snapping her wings out in a desperate attempt to gain altitude; it lifted her high enough to seize one of the overhanging rafters. For my own part, I could only run—sideways to begin with, out of the stream of yak flesh, as if they were an avalanche like the one that had brought me to Imsali; but then onward and out of the barn entirely, for the spreading fire and the stampede soon had the entire place in an uproar.

Kahhe, it must be said, kept her wits rather well. By the time I had steadied my nerves and could re-enter the building without fear of being pulped, she was back at the fire, beating it out with anything that came to hand. This was not only courage at work: without the barn, the sisters could not hope to care for all the herds of Imsali by themselves. And without the herds, their village would starve in the coming year. I had no way of guessing how community-minded the Draconeans were; I did not know whether other villages would contribute bulls and cows to keep their neighbours going. Now was not the time to ask. I tied a rag over my face, seized a bucket, and began dousing one edge of the flames from the nearest water trough.

We got the fire out in time, although it destroyed one corner of the barn. This the sisters could patch after a fashion, with yak hides and bracing beams; the greater damage, in the immediate term, was the near-complete scattering of the herds.

In this I was both a liability and an asset. Although I lacked the physiological adaptations that made the Draconeans of that region better suited to withstanding the cold, I could endure if I had to, and my presence meant the sisters had a fourth pair of hands to help restore order. Four, however, was not enough: multiple people would be necessary to track down the missing beasts and bring them back to the village, but the village itself needed looking after, especially as the yaks returned. The sisters would have to call on the neighbouring villages for help… and that, in turn, risked the revelation of my presence. The only solution was to send me out with two of the sisters on yak-retrieval duty, while a few neighbours from the nearest villages helped keep order at home.

I was not so loath to wander the Sanctuary as you might expect. True, the conditions I would have to endure out there would be dreadful; I did not look forward to any part of that. But my situation, which confined me almost wholly to the sisters’ house, the yak barn, and points between, was beginning to send me mad with claustrophobia. I thought I would be happy to endure some freezing cold, if it meant I could see new surroundings.

(Of course it is easy to think such things from the comfort of a relatively warm building. I did regret that impulse more than a few times in the days to come.)

Three of us therefore set out: myself, Ruzt, and Zam, with Kahhe remaining behind to repair the barn. I spent a miserable night alone in a small snow shelter when reinforcements arrived, lest they see me about the village; then the other two joined me with a pack of mews, and we sallied forth, into the depths of the Sanctuary.

Much of what followed does not make for good telling, unless one is keenly interested in the finer points of herding yaks in mountainous terrain. The yaks, having fled, were safe enough for the moment; they are bred for that kind of environment, and need very little grazing provided they are in good enough health and fatness. But of course they might slip and fall, or fail to find any grass beneath the snow, or simply wander so far afield their owners would never see them again. We therefore spent more than three weeks tramping through the nearby folds of the Sanctuary, following signs of the beasts’ passage, and herding them back toward the village once found.

I was miserably cold, as you might imagine. By my best estimate, we were then in the depths of Messis, which in the southern hemisphere is the nadir of winter. The limited diet on offer in the Sanctuary was beginning to take its toll, with scurvy loosening my teeth and sapping all my energy. My warmest moments came when I was chasing yaks; my coldest came at night, when I had neither movement nor sun to counteract the bitter air. Ruzt and Zam had brought along a tent, into which we all packed—not only the three of us, but also the mews. The little dragons arrayed themselves around the tent’s interior perimeter, and I slept tucked between my Draconean hostesses—an exceedingly odd sensation, I must own, but the only way I had of preserving myself against the weather. They were not nearly as warm to the touch as a human would have been, but they were preferable to the icy wall of the tent.

One of the things that kept me from giving myself wholly over to misery and self-pity was my awareness of how my companions also struggled. Until the fire drove us forth, I had not realized how vital the warmth of their house was to counteracting their hibernation instinct. Deprived of that regular haven, they chewed enormous quantities of their stimulant leaf to remain alert. To complain of my own difficulty seemed like whinging in comparison—especially when I realized they did not have to suffer so much.

We could not wander the Sanctuary in this manner without travelling near other villages. They are widely spaced, as the region will not support a denser population, but we ranged far enough afield that we passed several other settlements. In each instance, Ruzt would lead me in a wide arc around, while Zam went in to speak with the inhabitants. My years in the field had given me some facility for moving with stealth, but I have never been in sharper practice than during that journey; for even when we were not near a village, we often had to be cautious of other caretakers leading their herds out to graze.

The significance of this all sank in after Zam came back from the second village bearing both food and a sullen expression. Her mutter to Ruzt, though too quiet for me to make out, sounded resentful.

In a fit of sudden clarity, I said, “You would be sleeping in the village, if I were not here.”

(What I actually said was “You sleep in the village, if I am not here.” Although by then I could converse passably well on our most common topics, I had not yet figured out either the conditional or subjunctive conjugations of their verbs.)

Zam glared at me. “Yes.”

For once I had no doubt as to why she disliked me. “I am sorry,” I said. Then, floundering for more words: “I will sleep alone in the tent. It will be all right.”

This was sheer bravado, courtesy of my wish to mend fences with Zam. Ruzt shot it down without hesitation. “No, Zabel. We must—” The words that followed were incomprehensible to me; I had never heard them before. But when I asked for clarification, she brushed off my question and returned to the task at hand.

If I could not free them to rest warm and snug in someone else’s house, then at least I could lend every last scrap of energy I had to hunting down the missing yaks. I suspect neither Ruzt nor Zam expected much on that front, though; they had brought me along only to ensure that none of the Draconeans helping Kahhe stumbled upon me by accident. Although by then I had been assisting in the yak barn for two months, I was still a novice herdswoman at best.

My lack went further than that, however. As I have said, the Draconeans use mews in their work, much as a Scirling shepherd uses a sheepdog. Suhail, Tom, and I had experimented with training the beasts in Hlamtse Rong during the monsoon, but our model had been that of falconry; the Draconean method is quite different. They employ neither jesses nor hoods, and direct the creatures with a complex series of whistled commands. Each pack of mews is paired with a specific herd of yaks, and is not much use in shepherding unfamiliar beasts.

How any of this was achieved quite perplexed me. Ruzt tried to explain, but we spent enough time attempting to circumlocute our way to simple agreement on what a word meant that digging deeper, into the actual concepts represented by those words, was beyond me. (At home, in a comfortably warm house, I might have managed it. Not with my brain frozen into a block of ice.) Even now it is a mystery. The customary explanation is that the rapport between Draconeans and mews is based on some kind of “shared draconic instinct”—but of course that is no explanation at all, any more than one can explain the survival of fish in water by recourse to some kind of “inherent piscine ability.” Fish survive by means of gills; what the Draconeans use to create understanding between themselves and mews, I do not know.

Whatever it may be, I lack it utterly, and so I could not make use of the mews. I was not quite so useless as Zam expected me to be, though. One cannot spend one’s lifetime tramping through every kind of wilderness the world has to offer in search of beasts without acquiring a modicum of tracking ability; and I had more than a modicum. I doubt I could follow a human or Draconean who sought to hide their passing, but yaks have no such subtlety. I suspect I could track one even now, when my vision is far from what it used to be.

I therefore spent much of my time ranging away from my companions, identifying whether a given set of prints belonged to an errant herd or one being overseen by a Draconean from another village. When we located our beasts, Ruzt and Zam used the relevant pack of mews to round them up, and then Zam escorted yaks and mews alike back to Imsali. These were my coldest nights, especially as the task wore on: without Zam, and with the number of mews inside the tent dwindling steadily, there were many fewer bodies to heat the air inside.

One night while Zam was gone it began to snow again, and Ruzt resorted to sheltering in a small cave on the flanks of Anshakkar itself, that central mountain. (I call it central: in truth it is somewhat off-center, being closer to the eastern edge of the Sanctuary than the western.) There she built a fire, and erected the tent so that it stood between the flames and the outside air, with a gap for the smoke to escape. Without such precautions, I suspect I would have died that night—and even Ruzt might have gone to sleep, not to wake again until spring.

After we had finished eating, I spent some time examining one of the mews. Those bred by the Draconeans are noticeably more docile than their Tser-zhag cousins: an unsurprising difference, but what was its cause? Had the Draconeans tamed and domesticated wild mews, or were those outside the Sanctuary the feral descendants of escapees?

It was one of many questions I lacked the linguistic facility to ask. I confined myself to physical examination instead, which I had not had much leisure for in the preceding days. My recollection of the mews Tom and I had dissected in Hlamtse Rong told me the main alar artery was located in a different position on them than it was on the Draconeans—in fact, it ran through a channel in the bone, where I could not feel it with my fingertips. Holding up the mew I had been studying, I asked Ruzt, “Do they close it? In the wing, as you do.”

She understood me, and circled her head in the motion they used to indicate that the answer was neither yes nor no. “Not as we do. They close… part of it? In the spring—” Her own wings were partly spread to capture heat from the fire; now she tapped one claw-tip against the membrane and made a dropping motion with her hand.

The membrane of the mew’s own wing had not felt especially warm to my touch, nor especially cool; upon reflection, it was about the same temperature as the surrounding air. The only warmth I felt was contained along the wing’s leading edge—as if that were the only place where blood yet flowed.

“They moult,” I said in fascination, staring at the mew. When I tried to tug at its wing, it yowled indignantly and squirmed away. Which is probably just as well; I later saw a fight between rival packs of mews, in which one tore the membrane of the other’s wing clean off. I might have done the same by accident. They do indeed moult when spring comes, growing in new membrane to replace the old. It is an inconvenient time for the Draconeans, as the mews are of no use whatsoever during that time; and indeed they are of decreasing use as the winter progresses, for they lose maneuverability on account of both this adaptation and the damage they may suffer without feeling it.

I made a halfhearted attempt to catch a second mew in my hands, but they were having none of it, and I lacked the energy to pursue them further. Ruzt watched this entire process in silence; then, when I was settled once more, she said, “Why do you ask these questions?”

Never in my life have I been so ill equipped to answer that query. It is hard enough when I must explain myself in my native tongue; in Draconean, I could barely string together an entire sentence that was not about yaks. Floundering, I said, “It is… what I do. I—” At every turn, I ran up against the limits of my vocabulary. “Begin to know? As I begin to know these words.”

“Azkant,” Ruzt said.

I hoped that was indeed the word for “to learn.” It was recognizable as a verb, at least; but I had on previous occasions thought I was asking for one word, only to discover later that Ruzt, misunderstanding, had supplied me with a different one. “I learn about… mews. And other animals.” I had not realized before now that I had no general word for “dragons.” There were none in the Sanctuary save the mews and the Draconeans themselves. The next time I had an opportunity to draw, I would sketch a variety of other breeds—rock-wyrms, desert drakes, queztalcoatls—and see whether Ruzt had a word that encompassed them all. She might well not. Her ancient ancestors might have created enough breeds to need such a term, but here in the Sanctuary, such a thing would fall into disuse and be forgotten.

Ruzt was clearly still confused. “As you herd yaks,” I said. “I learn about animals. It is what I do.”

My sentences were clear; my calling was not. There were no universities in the Sanctuary, no intellectual societies of scientists who pursued knowledge regardless of practical use, any more than there were in Hlamtse Rong or Keonga or Mouleen. I might as well have said it was my profession to load myself into a cannon and shoot myself to the moon: that would have been equally beyond her ken. And I had neither the will nor the words to try and explain. We bedded down without carrying the thought further, and did our best to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, the only thing that persuaded me to leave my blanket was the knowledge that I would be warmer if I moved around. Ruzt was sluggish as well, and we, by unspoken agreement, left our belongings where they lay. If the next night was anything like the previous, we would need the cave’s shelter again. If it were not… then we would be glad of a more comfortable night we did not have to walk very far to obtain.

Once outside, we separated and began to search. The terrain there was not so fierce as to pose a danger to either of us; if it were, the yaks would not have been as likely to venture into onto Anshakkar’s flanks. Unfortunately for us, it was a sighting the previous day that had led us here, not tracks, and so all we could do was quarter the area in the hope of stumbling upon some further hint of their presence.

Had the night not been so bitter, I suspect Ruzt would have sent me in the opposite direction from the one she chose—but her brain was not working as swiftly as usual.

I headed up a small ridge, thinking it would give me a good vantage point from which to survey the area. It is a mark of what effect the Mrtyahaima has on a person that I thought of the ridge as “small”; at home it would have been a good stiff hike. I shambled up it like an automaton, hunched in on myself against the cold, until I neared the ridge’s crest. There the morning sunlight found me, and I opened up like a timid flower, uncurling the tiniest bit to see if it was safe.

Earlier in this text I said that my awareness of how my Draconean companions suffered in the cold was one of the things that kept me from sinking entirely into my own misery and self-pity. The sight that greeted me atop that ridge was another.

Throughout the Mrtyahaima there are stories of a secluded mountain paradise. The nature of this paradise varies from place to place; in some regions it is the abode of the gods, in others it is the afterlife, and in some—though I did not know this until later—it is the bastion of some lost, idyllic civilization. I will not claim the Sanctuary was a paradise in the true sense of the word, and certainly it was neither divine nor idyllic… but its beauty I cannot deny. And from my vantage point I could take it in, from the encircling ring of mountains to the peak of Anshakkar towering above me, from the stony cliffs to the river that vanished into a steep-sided gorge, from the snow-coated trees to the flatter areas I suspected would be fields after the thaw. It was a wonderland of ice and snow, and so sublime was the vista that I forgot, for a few blessed moments, how cold I was.

What recalled me to myself was the realization that I was standing like some kind of brave explorer posing for her portrait—and that, in so doing, I had made myself quite visible atop that ridge. Even if there were no Draconeans nearby save Ruzt, this was not the wisest thing I could have done, and I hastily crouched to reduce my profile.

The shift in posture made me notice something else. The way up to the ridge had been a real scramble in places, but that was because I had chosen to take the most direct route to its top, rather than circling around to come at it from a lower point. Had I done so, the way would have been remarkably easy: the crest of the ridge was broad enough for at least five people to walk abreast, and quite flat.

Suspiciously so. It was too heavily shrouded in snow for me to examine its surface, but the manner in which it rose from the valley floor looked a great deal like a road.

And a road, of course, must lead somewhere.

As if I were a puppet and Curiosity herself pulling my strings, I turned to look in the other direction, up the slopes of Anshakkar.

There could be no doubt. It was a road, rising along a ramp either natural or Draconean-made; and although I could not properly see its end, something about the shape of the mountainside up ahead struck me as less than entirely natural.

I cast a quick glance about. Ruzt was not in sight, having gone in the other direction around that particular flank of Anshakkar; in the distance I could see smoke from one of the villages we had passed, but no one moving about. Inconveniently, no yaks had made their way up the road, which might have given me an excuse—

—but there were some yaks grazing not far off, on the other side of the road.

Wrestling one of the cows away from her herd and up the road was not so easily done, but I persevered. I knew, of course, that I should likely not be climbing Anshakkar to see what was there. If Ruzt wanted me to know, she would have brought me there herself. But the joy of discovery was my sustenance, when everything else in my life had been taken from me; and I did not have it in me to turn around and walk away. This way, at least, if anyone asked why I had gone there, I could say truthfully (if incompletely) that I was following a yak.

The beast finally received my messages and trudged up the road. The path was steep, but not arduously so, curving through a series of lacets that snaked their way up the mountain’s face. I could see my destination long before I reached it, but only in tantalizing glimpses of some monumental entrance, its lower parts blocked from view by the remainder of my route. Above that I thought I glimpsed something else, but it was even more difficult to see.

My wind had improved greatly since I first woke up in the sisters’ house, as had my injured leg. When at last I reached the road’s end, I was breathing hard, but not gasping. If my breath faltered, it was for the sight in front of me, and no physical weakness on my part.

The entrance carved into the mountainside looked like it belonged to the ancient world—and yet not quite. I could see the heritage of the Draconeans in the flaring, leaf-like capitals of the pillars which flanked the doors, but their bases were much wider than those I had seen elsewhere in the world, and no inscriptions marked their sides. The lintel above would have borne an intricate frieze if this place were in the Labyrinth of Drakes; here it showed only an abstract, geometric pattern, akin to those I had seen on pots and wooden implements in Imsali. And the doors—well, it is unfair to say how the doors compared, for the only surviving doors from ancient times I had ever seen were those in the Watchers’ Heart. But these were heavy and bound with corroded bronze, as if to hold out winter’s presence.

Had it been necessary to swing open one of those enormous portals, I would never have gone inside. The snow blanketing the flat, courtyard-like area in front of the doors was not terribly thick, on account of the continual wind, but it was still enough to hamper the swing of a door; and these were large enough that I would have had difficulty moving one even at the height of summer. But set into one of the doors was a smaller gate, such as one often sees in the main entrances of large Anthiopean tabernacles, through which an individual can pass without troubling to open the entire thing. And when I put my hand to this little door, it shifted.

Whatever this place was, I knew I should not be there. If anyone caught me, I might find myself in a great deal of well-deserved trouble.

But I had not forgotten the day I drew pictures on the wall of the yak barn. Kahhe, I thought, had suggested bringing me here, or at least telling me about this place; she had nodded her head in the direction of Anshakkar, and the mere suggestion had enraged Zam. I could only guess at what Kahhe thought to achieve—but knowledge was power, and right now I sadly lacked that resource. Sooner or later my life here would change, and if I went into that transition blind, I did not like my chances. However much I trusted Ruzt and her sisters, I did not want to leave myself wholly at their mercy.

I looked at the yak, who was ambling around nosing into the snow, as if wondering why I had brought her to a place with no grass. “No one will believe I chased you inside,” I said to her. She flicked one disinterested ear. “But I am not willing to relinquish you, either. Therefore, you will have to stay out here.”

There were five posts in the forecourt, whose purpose was no doubt ritual in some way or another. I tethered the yak to one of these. Then, before I could let myself think the better of it, I hauled the door open far enough to admit me and slipped inside.

THIRTEEN

The interior was quite dim, but not wholly dark. Several unglazed openings above the entrance admitted both light and a small quantity of snow to the chamber beyond. These gave enough illumination for me to identify freestanding braziers around the edges of the room, with small objects set on shelves built between the legs of the braziers. When I bent to examine one of these, I found it was a lamp—much like those I had been using these past two months, but more finely made. The yak butter within was solidified, but kindling sat in the brazier above, bone dry. It was the work of a mere moment to light the brazier, and then I held one of the lamps above it to warm while I looked at my surroundings.

We humans have long been prone to identifying every impressive Draconean site as a temple, but I had no doubt that I stood in the antechamber of a holy place. Historically speaking, there are two types of buildings to which people will devote great amounts of labour: the religious and the kingly. It was possible the Draconeans of the Sanctuary had a king or equivalent ruler, but the remote location of this place did not lend itself to political use. This was, of course, assuming that Draconean motivations were like those of humans—but my experiences with Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam gave me moderate confidence that their ways were not so alien as that.

The walls of this antechamber were richly decorated, in elaborate circular patterns reminiscent of the mandalas found in many Dajin countries, but different in style. Their meaning was opaque to me: I could recognize that it must be there, for nestled among the spirals and geometric figures were repeated symbols, but they could have signified anything. Each was painted in vivid colour, predominantly yellow, blue, and white, with rare touches of red. The artist in me wished to examine these more closely, because I was curious about the pigments they used; surely the Draconeans did not trade with the outside world to obtain the necessary materials. But the white and yellow might be derived from lead-based minerals, and the blue… copper? Cobalt? There might even be lapis deposits in the region; certainly they were known elsewhere in the Mrtyahaima.

I shook myself from my trance. The yak butter had warmed enough for me to light my lamp; with that in hand, I set forth to investigate.

Three different paths lay before me. Staircases ascended from the right and left corners of the entry hall; between them stood a pair of doors, almost as large as those through which I had come, but much more elaborately carved. I suspected they would be easier to move, for they were not a tenth so weathered as their exterior brethren, but for the time being I chose to leave them untouched. Instead I took the right-hand staircase upward.

Partway up this lengthy, spiral path, I realized why the climb was so fatiguing: the steps had not been cut for human legs. The Draconeans I knew were all a good thirty centimeters taller than me, and their legs were long to match; this meant that a comfortable step upward for them was a heave for someone my size. “I feel like a child again,” I grumbled to myself—and then snapped my mouth shut as if I could somehow swallow my words.

For as I spoke, I came around the final curve and found myself at the periphery of a large, open room… which was full of sleeping Draconeans.

Their tidy ranks stretched far beyond the reach of my puny lamp. But here, too, clerestory windows admitted dim light from without, disclosing lines of bodies that carpeted the floor from one wall to the other. Had I come up here without a lamp, I might have trod upon the nearest before I noticed they were there.

I stood as motionless as a mouse under the gaze of a hawk. Had my voice disturbed them? The unsteady light of my lamp (unsteady in part because of my trembling hand) made it seem as if those close to me were moving, but I steeled my nerves and did not bolt. Long moments passed. In time I realized that I was holding my breath, and made myself expel it quietly. No one had shifted or made any sound. I was, for the moment, safe.

And I had found the remainder of the Draconeans. Whether this was everyone who dwelt in the Sanctuary, I could not say; the room stretched back into the mountain, farther than either lamp or windows could show me, and I was not about to risk tiptoeing between them just to see. Certainly there were hundreds of them. For the first time, I found myself wondering about the size of the population here—were they in danger of inbreeding? But developmental lability might help to mitigate that issue; I had no idea one way or another, though it was an intriguing question to investigate later. It also helped to steady me. Very well, then: they hibernated, as I had surmised. Bars made a lattice of the clerestory openings, and below I could make out larger windows, shuttered and barred. Why both, the former open and the latter closed? Regulation of light, perhaps, while still admitting a quantity of cold air, which no doubt helped to keep them asleep.

I was very grateful for the cold air.

One careful movement at a time, I crept back downstairs. Brief investigation of the staircase on the other side of the entry showed me that, as I suspected, it led to the same place. For ritual reasons? Or practical ones? (Were I a Draconean, I would not have wanted to face the lengthy queues that would result from everyone there trying to ascend or descend by a single route.) Had Kahhe intended to bring me to that chamber? Wake someone inside? Or perhaps some other purpose altogether; I had not yet explored the entire place. I therefore turned my attention to the great carved doors.

I was glad to see that the hinges of these were well oiled—I was still thinking of the sleeping Draconeans, though it was doubtful that a squeaky hinge would be enough to rouse them from their seasonal slumber. The handles were two large brass rings, still bright gold, in contrast with the green patina on the fittings of the exterior doors. Telling myself that it was unlikely to budge, I gripped one and pulled.

Many thousands of years had passed since the construction of the Watchers’ Heart, but the Draconeans either had not forgotten the techniques of hanging an exceedingly heavy door, or had rediscovered them. It swung open far more easily than I expected.

“Well,” I murmured to myself in a near-soundless voice, “hanged for a fleece, hanged for a yak.”

Once again, my tiny lamp did not throw its light very far, and the small windows of the entry hall were no help at all beyond this threshold. But reflective flickers answered my lamp from all around the room; the nearest, to my right, was another brazier. Holding my breath—a foolish impulse, but difficult to quash—I lit the oil inside.

Colour sprang to life all around me. This room too was painted, with more of those mandala-like designs, interspersed with elements I suspected were purely decorative. But the image that dominated the room was familiar to me from Draconean sites: a circular disc, from which extended two stylized wings. Where it is found painted upon walls, that disc is invariably yellow, but here, as in the hidden chamber of the Watchers’ Heart, it was made of hammered gold.

Our best theories said the disc represented the sun, though why it should be winged, no one knew. Equipped with my knowledge that dragon-headed people were real, I found myself re-evaluating the basis of Draconean religion: was the sun itself perhaps what they worshipped? The winged disc often held a central place at any site, either hovering over Draconean figures, or on its own. Then again, real Draconeans did not rule out the possibility of mythical ones as well. After all, human religions have often depicted the gods as human in shape. Moreover, I had no certainty that the faith practiced here was the same as that which had prevailed when the Draconeans reigned over a worldwide civilization. Indeed, I should be surprised if it had not undergone changes.

With a wry smile, I added “religion” to the list of topics I must broach with the sisters when time and vocabulary permitted. The list was approximately a thousand items long, and grew with every passing day.

I turned my attention once more to my surroundings. The chamber was large, but not large enough to accommodate together all the Draconeans I had seen upstairs. Its furnishings were sparse. The reflections I had seen were from the winged disc and the gold tracery adorning the braziers, all of which had been polished to a mirror sheen. Finely carved benches occupied part of the floor, but not all. Beneath the sun disc stood what I presumed was an altar, with what appeared to be offerings. Approaching, I found branches of greenery and a bowl of seeds. The former were still springy to the touch; they could not have been cut more than a day or two before.

Which meant that someone visited this place during the winter. Did the temple, too, have a caretaker? Or did the wakeful herdswomen come to pay their respects?

Either way, it meant I should not linger. I had already been longer in the temple than I intended; I should collect my yak and go. But there were curtained openings off the central room, two flanking the altar, several along the side walls, and I could not depart without at least glancing inside. I pulled aside one of the curtains near the entrance and found a corridor behind, hewn, like the rest of the temple, from the living rock of the mountain.

(It did occur to me to wonder if this place, like the Watchers’ Heart, had any hidden doors. But I could hardly spare the time to hunt for such a thing, especially when I had no clues to guide me, such as we had enjoyed during our search in the Labyrinth.)

The corridor led me on a short way before debouching into a smaller room. A mandala adorned one wall, but this one was different; a Draconean figure dominated the center of the design. I could not help but evaluate it with an artist’s eye, noting the similarities to ancient art as well as the changes. A great deal of time had passed since the height of their civilization, but religious artwork is often highly conservative, harkening back to the styles and motifs of one’s forebears. Gone was the strange perspective which depicted figures in a combination of profile and facing stances, but the Draconean still adopted a familiar posture, striding forward with its hands at its sides.

I caught myself thinking of the figure as “it,” and shook my head. “Truly,” I murmured under my breath, “I must contrive a way to see some male Draconeans.” Thus far I had no data on sexual dimorphism among their kind. Certainly the sisters had no breasts, which was only to be expected among organisms that laid eggs. (Monotremes notwithstanding—that is to say, the platypus and certain kinds of echidna—mammals are not generally oviparous.) There might well be some males upstairs, but I did not quite dare to go back up and search for them.

Indeed, I should have departed already. With one last glance about the room, I hurried back down the corridor, my little lamp flickering with my speed.

When I flung the curtain aside, two Draconeans spun to face me.

Ruzt leapt forward, clapping one hand over my mouth. She needn’t have bothered: by then the instinct to remain quiet was deeply ingrained in me. I sagged in boneless relief, for it was only Ruzt and Zam, not strangers, who had come upon me.

My relief did not last long.

Zam wrenched me from Ruzt’s grasp, snarling. I had seen the sisters confront their neighbours who came begging; I had never seen one in a true fury before. Her ruff stood up high, her wings spread, and her lips peeled back to expose her formidable teeth. The words she spat at her sister and myself were too gutteral for me to have any hope of making them out, but I could guess at their meaning: she was enraged that I had trespassed upon their holy place.

My reasoning in entering the temple was sound. But reasoning is of very little use when faced with a sight like that; guilt and fear came down upon me in equal quantities. I could only babble apologies in my broken Draconean: “I think no bad” was the closest I could come to “I meant no harm.” But “I am sorry” came easily to my tongue, for it was a phrase I had used a thousand times before, albeit never with such heartfelt fervor.

Zam was not mollified. She divided her snarls between me and her sister. When Ruzt stepped forward, hands outstretched, Zam hurled me toward the altar. I had seen her lift heavy sacks of feed, but had never been on the receiving end of that strength before. I was briefly airborne; then I struck a bench and went sprawling. Instinct told me to stay down, to appear as contrite and unthreatening as possible. Zam disliked me; Zam had feared me from the start. Now she could kill me with one swipe of those claws.

When she seized me again, all the restraint in the world could not keep me from yelping. Zam dragged me to my feet and shoved me forward, in the manner of one marching a prisoner to execution. But a swift, terrified glance showed me that Ruzt was re-lighting my fallen lamp and following along behind. Surely I could trust her to protect me, if Zam had decided upon my death? I did not know. Perhaps she had concluded that this enterprise was a failure, that they never should have troubled themselves to rescue a human from the snow. Our legends and Scripture were filled with tales of murderous Draconean rituals, and a part of me expected to be the victim of one now.

Zam shoved me through the opening to the left of the altar. I did not expect stairs, and half fell down several of them, catching myself against the walls. When Ruzt passed through the curtain, providing a pittance of light, I saw the path led downward in a spiral much like the one I had followed upstairs. More hibernating Draconeans? The ruler of this place, who would decide my fate?

Neither. Reaching the bottom of the steps, I stumbled into another small room, this one painted with murals in a much older style.

Zam took me by the scruff of the neck and spat out the first intelligible word I’d heard from her that day. “Look.”

I would have looked even if she had not forced me to. The murals were crude imitations of those I had seen in the Watchers’ Heart, but I could follow their meaning clearly enough. On the right, which was the customary beginning for Draconean sequences, adoring humans knelt at the feet of a splendid dragon-headed figure, who dispensed livestock, baskets of grain, and other largess to its subjects. But this was soon followed by scenes of strife: layered bands in which humans turned their backs on pleading Draconeans and set fire to buildings or killed cattle in pointless slaughter. Warfare ensued.

“This is the past,” I whispered, heedless of which language I was speaking. It might have been Akhian; it might have been Scirling. I cannot recall. “The past as you remember it.” Their account differed from ours rather a lot: Segulist and Amaneen scriptures tell of tyrannical rulers who lived in decadence and oppressed their subjects until the Lord’s prophets led the people to overthrow them. Stories in other parts of the world have their own variations on that theme.

The central image dominating the back wall also have parallels in our tales, though I had never thought to connect my own evidence to them. Human figures, now grown monstrously large, poured black liquid over a field of eggs. Inside the shells, tiny Draconean figures in postures of agony turned to grey stone.

My knees gave out from beneath me, and Zam let me fall.

The eggs on Rahuahane. I had wondered at the process that petrified them, turning the albumen to the gem we call firestone. We found that gem in so many places worldwide, often associated with Draconean sites… I had not thought it through, because my attention was on the disintegrated embryos, not the matrix that once held them. Why so much firestone? Why so many petrified eggs?

Because ancient humans had poisoned them. They had found some compound that, when poured over the eggs, induced a fatal change of state. It was the slaughter of the children from Scripture, the punishment the Lord levied upon those ancient tyrants for their sins. It was the Keongan hero Lo’alama’oiri, travelling to the cursed isle of Rahuahane and turning the naka’i to stone.

We had done that—we humans. Our ancestors had massacred unborn Draconeans in untold numbers.

Zam left me there on the floor. It was by my own will that I turned to see the end of the tale: weeping Draconeans, murdered by humans, or fleeing in terror. Retreating into mountains, hiding. The Sanctuary in which they now resided.

No wonder Zam feared me. No wonder the sisters were so determined to keep me out of sight. I was the monster of their myths: a human being, a vicious, merciless beast. Never mind that they towered thirty centimeters over me and had teeth and claws I could not hope to match. We fear poisonous snakes a hundredth our size, for they can kill us in an instant.

Were the Draconeans’ eggs hidden somewhere in this temple? Did Zam think I had come here to turn them to stone?

I had to choose my words with exquisite care. I could not let my distress hamper my speech; Zam was clearly in no mood to wait while misunderstandings were sorted out. Three breaths were necessary to steady me: then, still kneeling upon the floor, I turned to face the two sisters.

“I am sorry for this,” I said, indicating the story upon the walls. Now was not the time to quibble over historical interpretation, to debate whether the ancient Draconeans had been loving rulers or hideous tyrants. We had slaughtered their children; I was indeed sorry for that. “We now—humans—” I had to use the Akhian word; I did not know what the Draconeans called us. Likely nothing flattering. “We do not know about this—about you. We have forgotten. I do not want to hurt you. No one wants to hurt you.”

That last was only true because no one knew about them, not as anything other than vague ice demons defending the borders of the Sanctuary. I could not blame them for hiding.

I looked at Ruzt. Zam could not be reasoned with right now; I could barely speak with her, given the archaic cast of the words I had learned. But Ruzt, I thought, was the mastermind of this entire scheme, the decision to hide me away and teach me to speak. “Why?” I asked. “If I am this—” I gestured at the walls again. “Why did you take me into your house?”

It was the question I had been wanting to ask them since I awoke. I had avoided it until now because I did not trust my command of the language to carry me through so complex a matter; but now I felt I had no choice.

Ruzt, I think, had delayed for the same reason. Now she paused, clearly choosing her own words carefully, so that I would understand. Finally she pointed at the leftmost panels and said, “For a long time we have run. Humans come, and we hide. Humans come again, and we hide again. Now we are here—where else can we go? Are there others? Like us?”

Isolated in the Sanctuary for who knew how many years, decades, centuries… if there were other enclaves, they would long since have lost contact with them. My answer came in a whisper. “I do not think so.”

Ruzt bowed her head. “As we thought. Then—we are the last. When humans try to come here, we defend ourselves. One here, two there. Not many. But we watch, because what if one day there are more?”

It would happen, inevitably. The Sanctuary was too inaccessible to be worth settlement by anyone who did not want to hide—but sooner or later a human would escape their border guardians and bring tales of dragon-headed beasts to the outside world. Most would laugh at the notion, but not all… and then more would come, and more, until someone showed up with an army. And then the Draconeans would have nowhere left to run.

The sisters had saved my life as an experiment. To see whether a human could be reasoned with.

I must, on peril of my life, be reasonable.

“Humans will find you,” I said, employing the word I had heard her use. It was not related to its Akhian counterpart, and I wondered what root it derived from. “Murderer,” perhaps. “You are right. I wish it were not so, but…” Explaning the Aerial War was beyond me. Ruzt did not need it, though; she nodded in resignation.

Slowly, keeping Zam in my peripheral vision, I stood. She still watched me with hostility, but made no move to strike. She had brought me here to confront me with my people’s crimes, not to kill me.

Addressing both her and Ruzt, I said, “You have my help. What can I do?”