He thought about it, biting his lip, then finally shook his head. “By the time we find one, it may well have hatched. And we’ve pressed our luck rather far already.” Jackals had gone after the camels on the trip to the spring, and my brother had been forced to hide in a crevice to avoid a drake that had woken briefly from its slumber. Suhail had found another lair not far from our current location; we all had our fingers crossed that the dragon there would remain in estivation until we departed. No doubt Tom was thinking of all of these things when he said, “I’d rather finish this one properly, then head back.”
We had missed the hatchings at Dar al-Tannaneen (in favour of seeing the natural version out here), but we could do some good with the new drakes. “As much as I hate to say it, I agree. Let us see if the drakes are gone yet: if they are, we might leave as early as today.”
The last of the drakes had indeed departed. They were sufficiently harmless at this stage that Tom had followed two of them when they wandered off the previous day, watching their first, inept efforts at hunting, but in that terrain we could not afford to pursue them far. A corner of my mind was already considering what sort of preparation would be necessary to observe juveniles out here—but whatever the answer might be, it certainly amounted to more preparation than we had made. I therefore turned my attention to the remnants of their nest, which at least had the courtesy to stay in one place.
Bits of shell were scattered all over. Initially we left these where they lay, scrutinizing the cup of sand from all edges before stepping into it and disturbing the tracks of the drakes. Then we began to gather up the shards. Among them we found a few shreds of membrane, which had escaped the notice of the hatchlings; most of that material had been eaten. We had brought a small quantity of formaldehyde with us, sufficient to preserve the soft tissues of one hatchling (if occasion arose); we used it instead for the membrane, so we could study it at leisure back in Qurrat.
Because this was the sole hatching we had been able to observe, we wanted to be thorough. We gathered up every last scrap of shell we could find—uncovering evidence that the site had been used more than once—and when that was done, I sat for a time in the cup, running my hands through the sand to make certain we had not missed any.
My fingers brushed stone.
This should not have been unusual. I sat atop a great pile of stone, after all; it stood to reason there would be some at the bottom of this cup. But that should have been rough, and what I touched was flat and smooth.
Curious, I dug away some of the sand to see. This was easier said than done, as sand of course tends to slide right back to the bottom of any hole; but I was able to find what I had touched. It was indeed quite flat—not a figment of my tactile imagination, brought on by too much sun. And as I ran my hand across it, my fingertips found an edge.
I can only imagine what I would have looked like, had anybody been watching me. I knelt on the sand, flinging handfuls of it to the side like a drake preparing to lay, trying to clear enough ground to see. The stone was perhaps twenty centimeters wide, and featureless—but so regular in its shape that it could not be a natural accident. It was a separate piece, on one side set into the rock, and on the other…
Some part of me, I think, knew what I had found before the rest of me put it together. For when I raised my voice, it was not my fellow naturalist to whom I called out.
“Suhail!”
Whatever note he heard in my voice, it brought him from the floor of the canyon to my side in an astonishingly short time. He knelt in the hole I had made, laying one hand on the shaped stone. “Here,” I said, and guided his fingers downward.
He felt what I had: a second stone, set below and in front of the first.
In a voice no louder than a few grains of sand slipping past their kin, he whispered, “Stairs.”
My heart was pounding in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. I said, “It is only two blocks. It might be nothing more.” Or it might be a great deal more.
Suhail said, “We have to see.”
Andrew and Tom had followed him, but more slowly. By the time they reached us, he and I had revealed a bit of the second step, and thrust our hands deeply enough to find a third one below. “We have found something,” I said breathlessly, “only I do not know what—”
“Water,” Suhail said. “We need water. This will collapse in on us if we do not wet it down at least a little. No, it will only evaporate—” He stopped, hands clenching in frustration. There was no timber we could use to brace the sides of our pit. Then he looked all around the cup, five meters or so across. “Baskets,” he said. “Whatever we can load sand into, and then throw it over the edge.”
Despite our excitement, we were not so reckless as that makes it sound. I credit this to Suhail, who clung to the rock of his professionalism even as a storm threatened to sweep him away. We did indeed pour out the sand—but carefully, in a single spot, where we could examine it for any bits and pieces that might be mixed in. It fell to the other four, poor souls, to carry these down from the cup and bring the empty saddlebags back up, while Suhail and I dug out the stairs.
Because of this caution, our progress was slower than it might otherwise have been. We dug our pit wide, clearing an area around the top of the staircase down to the bare rock; this revealed a shaft cutting downward through the stone, which alleviated our fears of collapse. Then we dug out the staircase itself, from one wall to the other. We only made it through the first step that day, and a bit of the second, and when nightfall came we were exhausted.
Sitting around our camel-dung fire after it became too dark to dig, we looked at one another in silence. At last I broke it. “I do not know what may be at the bottom of those stairs,” I said. “But I do know that I cannot walk away without at least trying to find out.”
“They must be Draconean.” This came from Suhail, who was staring fixedly into the distance. “There is nothing about their appearance to say, not yet—but the location. Directly across from where the Watchers sit. As if that is what they are watching. It cannot be accident.”
“Are there any legends or historical records of other civilizations here?” I asked. He shook his head. “Then it is very likely theirs, for that reason if no other.”
An unrecorded Draconean ruin. It might be nothing: a passage to an unremarkable chamber, used in past ages to store supplies. It might have been—likely had been—looted centuries before, by someone who never noted its location for posterity. But it was not on the lists of remnants in the Labyrinth. No modern person, apart from the six of us, knew it was there.
Andrew laughed, spreading his hands. “Is there a question here? I’m staying. Good God, what kind of man could walk away?”
By the expression on his face, al-Jelidah could. He was no scholar; his interest was in what he got paid to do, nothing more. But so long as we paid him to carry bags of sand down from the plateau, he was perfectly willing to do that. And Haidar, of course, was Aritat. He would not abandon his fellow tribesman.
When I looked at Tom, a tired grin crept upon him. “I’m game,” he said. “As they say: when you find the dragon’s lair, you must look inside.”
TWENTY-ONE
It was absurd, of course. Six people, subsisting on camel’s milk and the water that could be hauled from a spring a full day’s journey away, digging out a staircase with tiny hand shovels. The shaft was narrow enough that only one person could dig as the hole grew deeper; we took it in shifts. Had it been much longer, we would have been forced to abandon the effort. Our rations were growing perilously thin, even with Haidar hunting to supplement them, and while we would not have starved there in the Labyrinth we might have starved on the way out. But the farther we got, the less any of us could bring ourselves to walk away, even when common sense said we should.