In the Labyrinth of Drakes

by Marie Brennan

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

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

  Nature, however, was not inclined to oblige us.

  * * *

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

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

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  TWENTY

  In the Labyrinth of Drakes—Searching for eggs—The Watchers of Time—Hatchlings—Dragonsong—Smooth stone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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