My heart felt as if it might leap right out of my mouth. Suhail looked back at us. I do not know what Tom and Andrew did, but I nodded emphatically. He removed his headscarf, wrapping his hand in the fabric—he later explained this was to keep the oil and sweat of his hand from touching the wood, made delicate by the ages—and eased the door open far enough for us to slip through.
The room beyond was as you have seen it in pictures: a rectangular space, its corners dominated by four statues standing with wings and arms outspread. The spaces in between were carved and painted, their colours undimmed by time, for they had not seen light since the downfall of Draconean civilization. Those murals alone would have made the site a worldwide treasure, for they are better preserved than any we have found elsewhere, and from them we have gleaned a hundred details of the ancient Draconean religion.
The remaining contents were few, with signs that the place had been looted long before we set foot inside. A bronze tripod had once stood in the center of the room. Now it lay on its side a little distance away, the bowl fallen from its top, dented and forlorn. By the left-hand wall there was a splintered pile of wood, with shards of clay beneath; these proved to be tablets, each carved with Draconean text, which we have since pieced back together. Chains hanging from the ceiling still held primitive lamps: shallow bronze dishes that would have been filled with oil, judging by the soot that marked the ceiling above.
One of those lamps had been torn from its moorings. Below its empty chains lay two more bodies, as well preserved as their companion out in the corridor. It took no careful observation to see how one had died: his head was crushed from the side. The other we could not judge, for he lay under the first, and no one wanted to move him.
Andrew muttered a profane oath, looking at the two of them. “So the myths are true. The Draconeans didn’t just fall—they were overthrown.”
Common sense argued that a few dead men did not a rebellion make. My instinct, however, agreed with Andrew. Those men had not died of natural causes; they were killed in a fight. Given the state of preservation here, that must have happened in ancient times, with sand sealing the place for millennia afterward. Their weapons, from what we could see of them without touching the bodies, were crude bronze: assuredly not the best Draconean civilization could produce, and not what defenders of this temple would have been armed with. They must be invaders, rebels, the ones who had kicked in the door and come down here to despoil this place. No other site in all the world preserved a moment like this one did, and the moment thus presented to us, out of the distant past, was one of war.
Suhail’s eyes were wide in the lamplight, drinking in every detail. The wonder I felt upon seeing a dragon in flight was written in the soft parting of his lips, the stillness of his body, as if the slightest movement would cause this all to collapse into dust and dreams. He and I had found a Draconean site before, on Rahuahane, but that one had been wrecked like all the others. This one was almost pristine, and I could only begin to imagine the effect it had on him.
I was not the only one thinking of Rahuahane. His voice almost as dry as the air, Tom said, “This beats that other ruin you found all hollow.”
And then Suhail said, “This is wrong.”
It brought us all around to stare at him. “What?” Andrew said.
Suhail’s free hand curled in the empty air, as if to grasp a mirage. “Rahuahane. Can you not see?”
I cannot fault the other two for failing to grasp his point. They had not been on that cursed island; they did not know the conversation we had there. But I looked once more at the statues in the corner, and I understood. “These are the figures you told me about—the fertility gods, or guardians of the young. Whichever they are. The ones we found at that hatching ground.”
Now Andrew was staring at me instead of at Suhail. “Hatching ground? Rahooa-what? When did you find a ruin?”
I had shared many things with my brother, but not that. He was too likely to tell someone, or go haring off to the Broken Sea to find it for himself—and that was without me telling him about the firestone. But I could not spare the attention to explain it to him right then. “This has all the marks of a hatching ground, for the dragons the Draconeans bred. But where is the hatching ground itself?”
With that question in mind, the site’s purpose became obvious. Even if one were not a specialist like Suhail, familiar with theories about the particular variety of statue looming over us from the four corners, the murals told the tale. The processions of people were not merely bearing offerings; they bore them to gods who stood over radiant spheres—eggs. I could not understand all the symbolism, but I did not need to. There ought to be eggs here, and there were not.
The room was not so terribly large that a pit for eggs could have somehow escaped our notice. Tom even went to the bodies fallen in the corner and peered under them, on the small chance that they concealed anything of interest. The bowl that had stood atop the tripod was not nearly sufficient to hold such a burden. “Unless there was only one egg at a time?” Suhail suggested doubtfully.
But the inside of the bowl was charred, indicating they had lit fires inside it. “Even desert drake eggs do not incubate in flame,” I said. “Likely they burnt offerings or incense here.”
A muscle jumped in Suhail’s jaw. “I should not be frustrated,” he said, with a disbelieving laugh. “On Rahuahane we made the discovery of a lifetime; here we have made the discovery of the century. To be so lucky twice is a gift from God himself. But—it feels incomplete. I am certain there should be more.”
Andrew spun in a circle, arms flung outward. He was grinning like a fool. “Al-Sindi! In the stories, there’s always a secret door.”
“You,” I said severely, “have been reading too many fairy tales.”
Then we all fell silent, looking at one another. Tom offered, with a cautious air, “The walls—they’re scarred in places.”
So they were. Chips of stone had broken off the carvings, and not in the places one might expect from a fight. I looked around the room again, this time thinking less about the walls, more about what had taken place within them. “These men break in. Are the defenders here when they come, or do they surprise the invaders in their work?”
“They’re here,” Andrew said immediately. “The way the fellow out there fell—he was facing someone farther down the corridor, not fighting against someone coming in.” He paced a circuit, shining his light on stains and scattered piles of decayed cloth. “There’s more blood here than just those two could account for. Maybe some of the defenders died, too. If so, their bodies were taken away later.”
Tom took Suhail’s lamp and examined a section of scarred mural. “After the invaders left, I’m guessing. Somebody hacked at the walls for a while. Not in any systematic way, I don’t think—it looks more like frustration at work. If we pretend for a moment that there is a door here somewhere… they might have lost their tempers when they failed to find it.”
“Is it even possible?” I said.
“A secret door?” The grin spreading across Suhail’s face would not have looked out of place on an eight-year-old boy. “Yes. It would have to be—” He whirled, gazing upward, orienting himself relative to the plateau above. “This direction.” He pointed at the wall that held the entrance to the corridor. “Unless it is underneath us entirely. There is no space for it in the other direction, and if it were to the left or right, it would have to be very small.”