Fifteen steps, from the top of the plateau to the base of the staircase. We had uncovered six when Andrew called out, bringing us all hurrying to the shaft: the vertical wall of the far side had ended in a lintel. At that point there was no possibility of leaving, for we all wanted to know—had to know—what lay at the bottom.
Suhail took over digging for a time, relinquishing his position only when it was time to pray. Mere words cannot do justice to my husband’s patience: the desire to tear through the ground must have burned like an inferno in his heart, but rather than hastening his work, he slowed down. And his care was rewarded, for he soon uncovered a mass embedded in one wall below the lintel, which turned out to be the twisted, broken remnants of a bronze hinge.
Where there had been a hinge, there had once been a door. The lack of a door told us something had happened—something that almost certainly crushed our unspoken hopes of an untouched site. But we dug on.
And the sand came to an end. Suhail, digging out the doorway, broke through into air. I was sitting at the top of the stairs when he did, awaiting the next bag of sand to carry away, and had to restrain the urge to climb over him and put my eye to the hole. “Can you see anything?” I asked.
“I need a light,” he said, and I scrambled to call down to the camp.
A match was brought. Suhail put the flame through with a cautious hand. It continued to burn, telling us the air inside was good. I was not the only one holding my breath.
Suhail peered through the gap for a long moment, then pulled back. “A corridor,” he said. “The walls are carved, but I cannot make out details. We’ll have to clear the doorway.”
He would not let us hurry, no matter how any of us chafed—Andrew in particular. We worked downward to the last of the stairs, continuing to dig long after there was enough space to climb through. Our efforts revealed the other hinges, and then, at the bottom, the reason Suhail had insisted on caution: the broken remnants of the door.
It was not in very good condition. Lighter rainstorms would only penetrate the top few feet of sand, but there must have been the occasional deluge, which sent water all the way to the bottom of the staircase. Only portions remained, and those sadly decayed. I had a few brushes with me, on the chance that we would have enough water for me to try a bit of painting; these were put to use instead in brushing sand off the fragile wood. Laid bare, the door told a story.
“Looks like it was bashed in,” Andrew said.
The four of us were crouched on the steps above, leaning over one another to study the scene. Suhail traced one hand through the air, not touching the wood. “Struck here, I think—and it broke the panel near the top, tearing away a portion still attached to the hinge. That must have rotted away entirely.”
Tom broke the silence that followed. “What was in here, that it merited breaking down the door?”
Was. Whatever had been here was undoubtedly long gone. But I knew Suhail’s views on archaeology: even if the great treasures had been looted, we might still learn any number of things from the shreds that remained.
Suhail eased the cover of a notebook beneath one of the pieces of wood and tried to lift it. The fragment crumbled as he did so. “Damn,” he said. “We can’t possibly carry this back. It won’t even survive going up the staircase.” He turned, putting one hand on my knee. “My artistic, keen-eyed love, my angel of the pencil. Can you record it?”
Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting at the entrance to a previously unidentified Draconean ruin. Any number of wonders may lie down the dark stone corridor that stretches before you… but you are not exploring them, because you have undertaken to draw a picture of a broken, half-rotted door. Not just the door, either: also its hinges, and the green, corroded mass that was once the latch, and the shape of the frame and staircase that accompany it.
It is a mark of how much I love Suhail and esteem his archaeological acumen that I did as he asked, rather than trampling across the decaying wood of the door to see what lay beyond.
When that was complete, we removed what we could of the door, which in the long run was only its metal fittings. These we wrapped in scraps of cloth, and then—at last—we proceeded.
Four of us went: Haidar and al-Jelidah remained outside with the camels. Suhail took the lead, but I followed with my hand in his, one step behind only because we could not comfortably walk side by side. He and Andrew carried lamps, and their light showed us that the tunnel, hewn out of solid stone, was carved all along its length: the striding figures of Draconean gods, winged and dragon-headed, with humans bearing offerings to them. “If you ask me to stop and draw all of these before we explore to the corridor’s end, I shall kick you,” I whispered to Suhail. He laughed.
(Why did I whisper? It was not as if there were anything down there I might disturb by speaking too loudly. But I could not have raised my voice for all the iron in Eriga.)
Then Suhail stopped, so abruptly that I ran into his back.
He was not looking at the walls any longer. I followed the line of his gaze, and saw something on the floor up ahead.
Andrew, peering around me, said, “Is that… are those bones?”
It will not surprise you, I expect, that I thought immediately of dragonbone. There is no evidence the Draconeans had the art of preserving them, and good reason to believe they did not, apart from what nature may have occasionally provided; the chemical knowledge necessary for that is rather more advanced than they likely had. But the last time I discovered a pile of bones in an underground space, they had come from dragons.
These, however, were human. We advanced slowly, as if the skeleton might rise up and attack us; Suhail held his lamp out like a shield. The four of us clustered together instinctively, courtesy of too many lurid tales of haunted Draconean temples.
Up close, however, the bones were merely sad. They lay as their owner had fallen, slumped against the wall—and to my great surprise, they were not entirely bare. Water had not penetrated this far, and so the body had naturally mummified in the cool, dry air. The preservation was imperfect, and his clothes hung in nearly absent tatters… but one could look at his cadaverous face and see an ancient person there.
“He’s got a knife,” Andrew murmured.
We arrayed ourselves around the body, touching nothing. Andrew was right: there was a dusty bronze blade under the corpse’s hand, as if he had dropped it when he died. Tom lowered his face nearly to the floor, peering at the body, and said, “There’s something caught between his ribs. It might be the point of a spear.”
“A broken door, and now a dead man,” I said. “What happened here?”
His voice trembling faintly, Suhail said, “Isabella, I will ask you to draw him. And, yes, the carvings on the walls. But not yet.” Even his scholarly discipline knew limits.
We went onward. Now that we knew to look for them, we spotted dark marks on the floor, on the carvings along the walls, that might have been bloodstains. Then the corridor came to an end at another door, and this one was not broken down; it stood a little ajar.