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“Oleer!” I screamed. I couldn’t see him. Had he managed to get to the other side of the cave-in? Was there even another side?

“Agh!” Tamin threw his arm across me, clutching me to his side as another billowing cloud of dust tore at our hair and clothes. Sharp fragments of rock bit into my cheeks and arms, even though I was sure that Tamin must have taken the brunt of the blast. The tunnel around us shook and roared, and I thought that this was it. There would be no escape for us. There would be no feeling the Soussa winds ever again, I would never be free, and neither would my people.

Chapter 6

The Shrine

“Nari? Narissea – are you hurt?” Tamin’s choked voice came from beside me. I opened my eyes and realized that I was not dead. Neither of us were.

The roar of the rocks had stopped, leaving instead just the rain-like tapping as bits of gravel and splinters of stone dislodged around us. But that didn’t mean that we were safe. “The tunnel might still collapse on us,” I whispered. “We have to be very careful.” I blinked and rubbed my face – my hands came away gritty and dry from the dust.

And I could see, I realized. Which I shouldn’t be able to, as both myself and Tamin had dropped our candles, and which had gone out in the rock blasts.

“What is that?” Tamin whispered warily.

There was a soft, hazy bluish glow coming from behind us. It wasn’t bright. All I could see was the shadowed form of my surrogate uncle and the tumbled rocks around us. But it would be enough.

“That’s an Earth Light,” I said. I had never been so glad to find one in all my life. Not for Inyene, but for us. “Come on.” I patted him on the shoulder and started to carefully crawl back down Western Tunnel Two to the source of the blue glow.

The tunnel where we had previously been was now completely different. Rocks almost as large as I was were jammed and jumbled across our path, so that we had to squirm and shimmy past them to get to our destination.

“The rock fall must have opened up an underground fissure,” I said.

“A what?” Tamin asked.

“A crack,” I explained. Masaka mountain was full of them, and none of the slaves or overseers seemed to know why. Lots and lots of cracks just like the Drop, but some only a few meters tall and a finger’s breadth wide, while others might be much larger.

There had been two rock falls, I now saw, and recalled the blast of cold air that hit my back first, before the one in front of us had cut off our escape. The first rock fall had blocked off the rest of Western Tunnel Two, but it had dislodged a huge plate of rock, revealing…

“That’s not a fissure,” I corrected.

“Oh.” Tamin sounded bemused.

It was a tunnel. An almost perfectly rounded tunnel, fairly short, and leading to a larger cave, which was where the eerie blue glow was coming from. “This has been worked,” I explained, pointing to where the tunnel walls did not have the smoothed, organic flows of natural rock – and neither did it have the sharp edges and jags of fractured rock. Instead, the walls were pocked and bubbled, as if they had been carved out of the stone by chisels.

The blue glow was growing slightly, not becoming dazzling, but bright enough to see that the cave on the far side was small, and that it had—

“Columns?” I said in wonder. I pushed on through the tunnel as my curiosity was piqued.

The cavern wasn’t large; it was roughly circular with rough-hewn columns seeming to grow out of the rock walls, from floor to ceiling. And there, in the center, was a carved stone pedestal with some sort of design on it, like birds, that I couldn’t quite make out. It was from four little alcoves in this pedestal that the glow was emanating, where four roses of blue Earth lights sat.

But I was far more intrigued by what was sitting on top of the pedestaclass="underline" a large chest, made of dark metal.

“It’s not rusted one bit,” Tamin said in hushed tones as he joined me beside the chest.

“It wouldn’t be. It’s so dry down here,” I whispered, creeping towards the chest, and hesitantly reaching up a hand.

“Nari,” Tamin whispered cautiously. But, without any sign of danger, I pressed my fingertips to the chest. The metal felt cold. When I tapped it with my nails, it rang like a bell.

“We have to look,” I said. The chest didn’t appear to have any locks on it at all, just the lid that met the opposing edge. A little nervously, I prodded my steel bar, which I’d still managed to have with me, under one edge and lifted it open. It gave out one long, singing creak of metal, before the lid overbalanced and banged down to the far side, making both me and Tamin jump.

And there, looking up at me from the inside was the face of a woman.

“Uh?” I made a questioning sound in my throat as I looked. It appeared to be a roll of canvas, flexible and soft, and smelled strongly of resins and oils. The uppermost side had the pale face of a Middle Kingdom woman with large stylized curls of yellow-gold hair, swept away from her face, against a red backdrop. She was staring off to one side, although I couldn’t see at what.

I looked at Tamin, who made a ‘I have no idea’ gesture with his open palms, and so I reached in, carefully grabbing the topmost edge of the canvas and pulling it upwards.

It rolled out underneath its weight, dislodging just the slightest clouds of dust. There were heavy crease lines like tide marks across the length of the picture, but they did nothing to hide the image that was revealed.

A woman, wearing armor and holding a short spear in a defensive posture – and behind her, with its head curling low in front and wings outstretched, was a large red dragon.

“She must have been a Dragon Rider,” Tamin whispered in awe as he looked at the unrolled picture. He meant one of the many such warriors and heroes who had roamed the world in centuries past. Their natural home had been the Training Academy at Torvald – capital of the Middle Kingdom – but I had once heard that every kingdom had their bands of Dragon Riders.

Back when there were more dragons in the sky, I thought. Before they vanished. And when the dragons had been a lot friendlier to humans than they were now. Or at least, that is what everyone had always told me, I thought. The dragon I had met had been wounded – and even though it had a right to be upset and angry – it hadn’t been unfriendly at all!

The image on the roll of canvas was striking. The woman’s expression was captured as one of fierce defiance and dignity as she stared off at some distant horizon or enemy. Her red dragon, too, was well-captured (I could say that because now I knew what a dragon looked like up close). A female, I assumed – as it had no pronounced horns. It was snarling in the same direction as the woman was.

I wish I was as brave as she was, I thought.

“Look, there’s more!” Tamin pointed to what had lain under the canvas: another fold of canvas – much lighter this time – as well as a bundle of dark cloth. I hesitantly laid the painting off to one side and reached for the cloth bundle while Tamin reached for the fold of canvas.

“It’s heavy,” I announced, unwrapping the cloth to find it tearing easily in my hands. This wasn’t the sort of oiled and waxed cloth that the others were. It appeared to be just someone’s old cloak.

And inside was a leather-bound book, and something else.

“A dagger!” I said in surprise, almost dropping both book and dagger at once.