The Summer Dragon

  Ready.

  Ahead of me, Cairek’s lantern lit a narrow swath of melted stone, the sort of terrain that Dare and I passed through on our run from the Harodhi. Bellua kept his lantern mostly shuttered, but he couldn’t resist opening it briefly to illuminate this statue or that chasm. The clicking of dragons reverberated in my ears. They all sought an image of the terrain; they saw it with echoes, heard their own voices resounded back to them. They saw their world more perfectly this way than with sight alone, so who could blame them?

  I urged Keirr forward, past Bellua and Mabir, past Tauman, past Darid and Skot. Alongside Cairek I slowed her again and said as quietly as possible, “We have to silence our dragons, Cairek.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Their clicking and sounding will alert any other dragon who might be listening.”

  In the dim light of various half-shuttered lanterns I saw him turn my way, head cocked. His eyes lit as he heard what I heard: a dense weave of susurrate echoes vibrating off the unseen walls and ceilings around us, like the whispers of ghostly music in the darkness. He nodded, perhaps hearing and understanding it for the first time in his life.

  “Listen everyone,” he said with quiet urgency. “Dragons silent. No more clicking or sounding of any sort.”

  There were murmurs behind us as riders gave commands to their mounts. Cairek shuttered his lantern to nothing, and darkness enveloped us completely. Only when silence followed suit did he part the shutters on his lamp enough to see the way forward again.

  I remained just behind Cairek as we proceeded. I heard only the rustle of leather and cloth, the distant echoing drip of water on stone or into pools. I wondered if even those tiny sounds could create an image in a dragon’s mind.

  We descended a long staircase, flanked on the left by friezes similar to the ones behind us—people at work, at play, at war—and on the right by a deep chasm. After what seemed to be an hour spent in silence, we entered a tight passage with friezes on either side, and lanterns were opened again partway. Carvings of animals in a forest peered out between buttressing trees that arched up and over to texture the ceiling above with an intricate pattern of branches and leaves. A label in ancient runes accompanied each, as if this were a glossary of the outside world.

  Light grew from behind, along with scratching noises. I turned back to see that Jhem had opened her lantern a sliver so Tulo could make quick drawings as we passed. He’d clearly never been this far on his previous trips.

  We came out of the passage into another chamber, circular, with only one other doorway on the opposite side. Bellua whispered to Cairek, “Here lies my first question. Let us stop.” He opened his lantern shutters a little wider to reveal the scope of the room. It wasn’t as large as the Chamber of the Seasons, but a domed ceiling soared above and the far wall nearly disappeared into shadow. A relief of a city decorated the walls, the viewpoint of a person standing in the center of a public square, looking out at streets, avenues, mountains, and towering clouds. Tiny people scattered about and dragons dotting the sky gave it scale, but the focus of the work was the buildings.

  They were magnificent. Taller than anything I’d ever seen, though I’d never been to any of the big cities of the Empire. The impression was of a vast landscape of stone, streets at the bottom of canyons, gardens on terraces complete with giant trees. On our left, a dome commanded the center of attention. Atop it like a symbol stood a circle—a simple ring. The doors carved at its base gave the impression of huge scale. On the adjacent walls, it seemed that palisades might be glimpsed between the buildings, surrounding this city captured in stone.

  The image on the wall opposite astounded me. Mt. Zurvaan, its summit partially obscured by stylized clouds, loomed over the landscape. With shock I realized that I knew this city, but as it appeared at its height, alive and vital. “It’s Cinvat,” I said aloud.

  “That’s right,” said Fren, and Bellua stared at me with surprise and confusion on his face.

  Buildings marched up the slopes where I’d found only the barest remnants of roads. An amphitheater sat to the right where I’d seen a bowl in the forest. I looked for the giant head sculpture covered with moss, but perhaps something obscured it from this vantage. It didn’t matter. I felt as if the ghosts of Cinvat inhabited this hall and spoke to me excitedly of their time in the world. Tears of wonder clung to my lashes. I’d imagined many times what Cinvat might have looked like in its day, but here it was, depicted in stunning detail. Were these my ancestors? I felt them in my bones.

  On the left a plateau met the mountain’s lower slopes where I had entered a crack in the mountain in search of Keirr. But there was no cave in this representation. Instead I saw structures that could only be one thing. Ranks of brood platforms stacked one atop another lined the cliff’s edge, with suggestions of more buildings behind. “Look, where the caves should be—an aerie. A huge one.”

  “And look at the floor,” said Fren. “It’s a map of the city, street for street.”

  “Please let me get down and draw this,” said Tulo in a whisper that barely contained his excitement. “I need room to open my scrolls.”

  Cairek gave Bellua a questioning glance. “Do we dare spend the time?”

  Bellua considered only a moment. “Yes. A record would be wise, but keep your drawing spare, boy, and be quick.”

  Tulo scrambled down from Audax and moved to the center of the room as if pulled there. “Look,” he said. “From this spot”—he pointed to a star chiseled into the stone at his feet—“the perspective is perfect. It’s like you’re standing in the square. The illusion is exactly right.”

  “I wish we had more time,” said Mabir. “Promise me that if all turns out well with Addai we can return and record it properly.”

  Bellua hesitated, as if he could guarantee no such thing. But he said, “I promise.”

  “Be sure you draw that.” Fren pointed across to the image of the dome. “That is the temple of Asha, topped with the symbol of Truth.”

  “A circle?” said Bellua.

  Fren turned in the saddle to face him directly. “Of course a circle. The endless turning of the Evertide in simplest form.”

  Bellua’s face sagged. A few months ago he’d have said something about Korruzon representing the end of Cycles, or some such. But now he held his tongue.

  Mabir shuffled in the seat behind him. “I have a question for you, Bellua,” he said. “Why did you keep this secret?”

  He didn’t answer for a long span of time. “Pride, I suppose. I hoped to figure it out for myself. Now time makes understanding urgent.”

  “Has Rov seen this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he never mentioned it either,” Mabir pressed. “The secrets you kept from us, about our own mountain, our own home and history.”

  Bellua’s chin grew firm, and he nodded.

  “And now Rov and Addai act to take the aeries for themselves,” I said. “That explains the massive road Rov built between the aeries and the cliffs. He saw these pictures, and it gave him ideas.”

  Bellua nodded at me but said nothing.

  Jhem and Tauman looked all around with big-eyed wonder.

  “Why would they create such a monument?” said Cairek. “And deep in a cave, no less.”

  “Indeed,” said Bellua. “That is my exact question.”

  In answer, Mabir pointed at Tulo, who sat drawing frantically on a scroll of parchment. “Perhaps it’s a record of something they feared to lose. Or had already lost.”

  Bellua urged Tulo to complete his sketch quickly. The boy scribbled a few more lines, then took a sheet of blank parchment and used a stick of chalk to make a rubbing from a block of ancient text beside the depiction of the dome. He rolled his parchments and put his tools away only reluctantly, then with a hand up from Jhem clambered onto Audax’s back again. We crossed to the far door an
d left the record of Cinvat behind.

  Once more we descended into inky darkness, lit only with glimpses by lantern light, unaided by the questing clicks of our dragons. At one point we seemed to cross a bridge as a dark void fell away on either side. I heard only the faintest of echoes.

  “Bi-g,” said Keirr, in a whisper. Even without clicks, incidental sound painted a picture for her.

  Then we found ourselves in another close passageway, adorned with images of a library. Ranks and ranks of books on shelves but carved out of the root of the mountain. I could barely imagine why anyone would create a library you couldn’t read, full of books that were nothing more than spine and empty promise. “I wish I could take rubbings of all of it,” whispered Tulo, but we didn’t stop.

  The tunnel opened to a snaking trail through natural terrain of hanging stalactites and the spires that rose to meet them. From the dark beyond the reach of our lanterns came a rushing sound. Cairek closed his lantern entirely, and I realized that we could see by a pale blue glow through a crack in the distance. As my night vision adapted I saw glimmers from far-off walls.

  “We’re almost there,” he whispered.

  The first waterfall spouted from a fissure to our left and tumbled into a narrow ravine. Our trail descended by twists and stairs to meander alongside its swift torrent. It fell twice more before I realized that the luminescence had grown around us, outlining our surroundings in light. The air grew markedly colder as we descended. At last the way opened into misty radiance, blue and ethereal, so bright that it took several seconds for my eyes to adjust. We gathered together on a broad ledge overlooking a strange vista.

  “Holy Avar,” said Mabir. I heard gasps from several of the soldiers as well.

  The blue glistened on the watercourse as it leapt down a series of falls into a vast chamber, long and narrow, incredibly tall, ending in a lake so still it scarcely shimmered. In that distant end of the cavern, a beam of light came from somewhere out of sight far above, its source hidden by the intervening ceiling of stone.

  “What is it?” said Jhem, looking up.

  “Daylight,” said Bellua, “filtered through the glacier nestled between the Crag and the mountain’s pinnacle.”

  “Gods, is it morning already?” said Tauman.

  “Oh my,” Mabir whispered. “I see. Old legends tell that Zurvaan is an ancient, sleeping volcano, and spewed fire in ages past. This chamber is an empty lava shaft. See the boulders and rubble that cover the floor? The plug that once formed the ceiling crumbled away over the ages to reveal the glacier above, like a skylight.”

  “That’s only half correct,” said Bellua. “I flew to the top of this chamber to see for myself. It is indeed the glacier, but there’s a thick ceiling of glass supporting it, buttressed with steel arches. The glacier is man-made. The stone around it has decayed and the glass has fallen away in places, but the glacier has its own integrity. The people who lived here created the skylight as a light source, disguised by its very nature from the outside.”

  “Why would they do that?” said Jhem.

  “The people who lived here?” said Mabir.

  Bellua nodded. “Look closer. I believe this was a secret home, a sanctuary, hidden from the outside world.”

  Not all the irregular forms that littered the floor were boulders or rubble. Square shapes tottered with age, their upper margins broken, piles of debris at their feet. A subtle pattern of streets and avenues was clear once I looked for it. The ethereal blue limned a city—an actual city of buildings and courtyards and avenues—crumbling and covered with black moss, but clearly the product of human hands.

  “Astounding,” said Tauman.

  Tulo’s pencils scratched on paper somewhere to my right.

  “I’ve been through this city,” said Bellua. “Many of the structures are homes, still containing furniture and personal items of stone or metal. The mountain was the home of an entire race. It seems that the Harodhi shaman Maia killed occupied one of the buildings, along with several lieutenants or servants. What happened to them all we can only guess. But what I want you to see is beyond the city and across the lake.” He turned Zell in Cairek’s direction. “Sergeant?”

  Cairek launched Taben over the azure chasm, settling into a low spiral above the secret city by the lake. I followed, then Bellua with Mabir, then the rest in order. A tremor swept me as we passed over the dead buildings, as black and fractured as a long-forgotten graveyard. Huge chunks of melting ice littered the long-ago streets, suggesting that the integrity of the glacier so incredibly far above was compromised. We emerged into the shaft of light. Peering up, I saw a latticework of dark lines like the veins of a leaf against the pale blue ceiling. Here and there, thin trickles of water sparkled as they fell. Cairek sped over the city, across the lake toward the opposite wall, led us beneath an overhanging slab of ancient stone and into a cleared space. We alit beside him.

  An amphitheater surrounded us, broad and open, hidden from the view of the skylight above by the ledge stone. Here and there fallen boulders broke the sweeping arcs of stone seats and stairs, all iced with hardened liquid stone. Spires climbed up from the perimeter to meet pinnacles hanging from the lip above, a colonnade self-made over the course of an age.

  Bellua pointed toward the focus of all those seats, and upward. “Here is the image I could not decipher. This is the mystery that challenged me.”

  A wall stood behind the fractured stage, just as broad and several stories tall. Smooth and flat, subdivided into two dozen or more tall, narrow panels. As our eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, carved scenes emerged, each stranger than the one beside it. Some were easy to make out—animals and forests—but others were bizarre depictions of strange architecture, odd ships of the sky like bloated whales festooned with sails, or machinery crawling amongst ruins, or buildings in the air spewing men and constructs above landscapes impossible to fathom. They reminded me of the carvings in the Hall of the Seasons.

  Without asking permission, Tulo scrambled down from Audax and opened his quiver of drawing tools. We all followed suit as if that had been the signal. Even Cairek. Only his Dragonry remained mounted.

  Fren dropped to his knees, looking up with tearful reverence. Jhem and Tauman took note and turned to each other, then to me. Cairek and Bellua watched Mabir. The dhalla stood transfixed, studying the giant frieze intently, his posture straightening as if a few inches of additional height would help him to see it better. Cairek opened his lantern fully to accommodate him as Tulo’s pencil began to scratch. Mabir hobbled closer to the left-most image, signaling Cairek to follow with his light.

  Men in primitive skins and rags huddled around a cookfire. Cleverly sculpted knobs of stone suggested the eyes of wild animals, peering from the low forest. Above it all, in upright pose two stories tall, loomed a bear against a night sky, where an arc of moons progressed from sliver, to half, to full and back again.

  Without comment, Mabir moved to the next panel, and Cairek followed. A carved sky contained orbs like our moon, but in great numbers, one with a ring like a flattened hoop encircling it, others with lesser orbs arranged around them. Small raised spots shaped like stars were scattered in the spaces between, connected by grooved lines, perhaps denoting constellations, though none were familiar to me. On the ground below, surrounded by plants bearing unfamiliar fruits, sat a strange idol, a woman with pendulous breasts, her belly swollen as if with child. A serpent crawled over her knees.

  In the next panel a circle surrounded by flames rode in the sky above stylized clouds and a plain cut by a river. A strange building, triangular in shape, with two smaller triangles behind it, stood above a lush landscape that gave it impressive scale.

  Two-wheeled carts pulled by horses filled the next, the occupants armed with bows and spears. A mountain dominated the background, its peak circled with cloud and surrounded by rays of light.

  A man stoo
d upon a mountain in the next, but the panel was badly damaged by cracks and a hard casing of mineral deposits. The next few were also in bad shape, but I made out a bird’s wing with long pinfeathers, like those of a hawk or an eagle. The next revealed the snarling face of a lion. Then came a sky filled with arrows in flight, armies on the ground clashing with sword and shield in frozen terror.

  The following images were harder to comprehend, more like those in the chamber of the seasons behind us. Impossible towers, beneath swollen, whale-like craft adorned with sails. Horseless wagons arrayed with strange ballistae. Depictions of flames and ruin. Men holding books, balance-scales, sextants, and other tools of indescribable function. Men in anger shouting and holding up scrolls, atop a mountain built of people, those at the bottom crying and starved, cradling their dead. Bizarre constructs of odd geometry, shaped like blunt cylinders or disks or wings, again in a sky of stars and planets with no ground at all below them.

  Panel after panel of warfare and destruction, in which the machinery grew ever more strange. Only in the last few most severely damaged friezes did I see dragons at all.

  The final image sent a shiver down my spine—a gigantic dragon carved in such a way that it seemed to fall back into the stone, like a shadow, even though it stood in the foreground of everything. The artist had somehow made the creature seem like a negative space, an absence more than a presence, and I couldn’t help but think of the Edimmu. Other dragons filled the sky. Tilting on its foundation below was the temple of Asha that we had seen in the room recalling the long-dead city of Cinvat. I’d seen that monster somewhere else though, too, and when I realized where, my spine shivered into a frozen rail: the statue in our temple ruins, the black dragon battling with the white. The Dahak.

  After several minutes of silence, Mabir said, “It’s a history, whether real or mythical I cannot say.”