In the Labyrinth of Drakes

by Marie Brennan

But rumour is a creature with many heads and no body, and I had no way to hunt it, any more than I could smooth over matters with my new relations. All I could do was march into Colonel Pensyth’s office that afternoon and announce, “I will of course be continuing my work as before; have no fear of that. But I will have no further need of my room here, for I have wed Suhail ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati.”

  His considered, restrained reply was, “You what?”

  “Have wed Suhail ibn Ramiz. This morning: that is why Tom, Andrew, and I left. I do apologize for the disruption. There is nothing untoward about it, I assure you—only that he is a scholar and a gentleman, one I have respected for many years. And now he is my husband.”

  Pensyth had grown very red about the neck. “You sat in that very chair and swore to me you didn’t want a husband.”

  “At the time, it was true. There may not be even two men living in the world whom I would have agreed to marry, certainly not on such short notice. But I do not need two; I only need one.”

  My words were more than a little giddy, which I imagine did not help my case at all. Pensyth said, “Is this your idea of avoiding a scandal?”

  My giddiness did not take me so far as to speculate out loud regarding the alternatives. (And thank goodness for that.) I merely said, “Given that I have done nothing improper, I care not a fig for what people may say. Now that I am married, I desire precisely the same thing I did before I was married: to carry on with my research. Only now I will have Suhail’s assistance in full.”

  Brash confidence can carry one past some obstacles—but not all. Before the night was out, I had to once again eat my words to Pensyth, this time regarding my lodgings.

  Suhail arrived at the House of Dragons shortly after nightfall, looking grim and resigned. “I hoped that would go better,” he admitted quietly to me.

  My heart beat faster. “What happened?”

  “I have not been disavowed—not yet, anyway. We’ll see what Husam thinks when he wakes up tomorrow morning. But neither am I welcome in the house.”

  I thought of my own estrangement from my family, brought about when I pursued my dreams against their wishes. The familiar ache rose up within me. In no way could I bring myself to regret what Suhail and I had done … but I could, and did, regret what consequences it might carry for him. “I am sorry,” I said, knowing it was thoroughly inadequate.

  Suhail shook his head. “Do not be. I knew this was a risk, and I accepted it gladly. But in the meanwhile—I don’t suppose this place can house us both?”

  “Of course,” I said instantly. “I may not be able to get a larger bed until tomorrow, but for tonight—”

  He stopped me with one hand on my arm. So small a contact should not have meant so much—and yet it did. “For tonight,” he said, “we will find a place to stay in the city. I look forward to sharing your work with you, my love … but there are some parts of you I will not share with your work. And tonight is one of them.”

  PART FOUR

  In which we discover a good deal more than anyone expected

  NINETEEN

  Together in the House of Dragons—Ancient words—Testing to destruction—The desert in summer—Al-Sindi—Sandstorm—Broken shells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He laughed. Then, composing himself, he recited:

  We are the patient, the faithful, those who continue when all others have abandoned the path. Obedient to the true masters, we make this stone in their name, in their hand as we remember it. Here the gods will be born anew: the jewels of the precious rain, the sacred utterances of our hearts, the transcendent ones, the messengers between earth and heaven. On their wings we will
ascend once more to the heights. May the blood of the traitors be spilt on barren stones of their sin. Hear us, gods of our foremothers. We keep the faith, until the sun rises in the east and the Anevrai return.

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

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

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

  CATARACT STONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

  I was entirely wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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