We had tramped up and down from that plateau often enough to all have a very good sense of its dimensions. “Or else another corridor,” I said. “It would almost have to be a corridor, or else an exceedingly small room; otherwise it would overlap with the path we came in by. But how on earth would it open?”
Andrew actually bounced in place, so great was his excitement. “Some kind of hidden lever or knob! But we should be careful; we might trigger a trap instead. Then poison darts will come shooting out of the walls, or the ceiling will drop on us—”
Suhail laughed. “I think we can rest safe on that count. There has never been any proof that the Draconeans built traps into their sites.”
“There’s never been anything like this, either,” Andrew said—which was true, albeit not a very compelling argument for improbable traps.
Given the room’s intricately carved decoration, though, finding the trigger for a secret door (always supposing one existed in the first place) would be easier said than done. The invaders seemed to have tried without success; what were the odds that we would do any better? In our favour, we did have more time to search than they likely had, if there had been a rebellion under way at the time. But we could not press and pull on every square centimeter of the walls.
When the first hour of random prodding failed to produce any results, however, that was precisely what Suhail proposed. “We have to be systematic,” he said. “Otherwise we will waste our effort, revisiting points we have already tried, and perhaps miss the bit we need by a mere finger’s breadth.”
Just then we heard a startled Akhian oath from the corridor. It was Haidar, come to make certain we had not all perished; instead he had found the first body. The hour was getting late, though it hardly made any difference in the depths of the temple. “We’ll come back to this tomorrow,” Tom said. “It’s waited for millennia; if there’s anything else for us to find, it can wait a few hours more.”
Andrew and Suhail both made faces like their mothers were telling them to leave off playing and come have a bath. I believe I controlled my expression better, though not my heart. But with my concentration broken, I found myself ravenous, and Tom had a point.
“First thing tomorrow,” I agreed. “And I shall not sleep a wink tonight.”
Upon our return the next morning, I did not take part in the Great Secret Door Search. Instead I brought my sketchbook with me, along with every lamp we had, and set to work documenting the interior of the temple.
Nowadays this sort of thing is done with photography, and had we known we were going to stumble upon a priceless Draconean ruin, we would have brought a camera with us. (A camera, and someone to work it: none of us knew how to operate such a thing.) But the photographic methods of the time, being quite new, had one great flaw, which was that they required very long exposures—hardly ideal for capturing living subjects like dragons, who have no interest in sitting for their portraits. We might have gotten some value out of photographing them asleep, or recording their habitat; but I could do the same with pencils and paper, and those are much less finicky about temperature and the interference of grit. A camera was far more trouble than it truly would have been worth… or so we had assumed.
Standing once more in the temple chamber, Suhail shook his head at his own folly. “If I had the self-restraint the Merciful and Compassionate gave a rabbit, I would seal this up and ride back to Qurrat, then come back here with proper supplies and assistance. This site deserves better than we have given it.”
“We have not damaged anything,” I said, to reassure him. His expression appended the word “yet.” “At the very least, you should let me sketch things as they are now. I would be here for weeks copying everything in full—to begin with, I would need watercolours—but I can record the important points, at least. When that is done, if we have not found anything else, we can go back to Qurrat as you said.”
“You can go back to Qurrat,” Andrew muttered. “I’m not leaving until I find treasure.”
While the others began a systematic exploration of the wall, then, I set to work drawing. I began with the three bodies, and then the door to the chamber, but those were very quick sketches. My true interest was in the murals, of which there were five: one on each side of the entrance, two on the side walls, and an enormous one covering the back wall.
The large one was the procession of offerings. This was laid out in the customary manner of Draconean art, with the human figures a fraction the size of the dragon-headed ones, and all standing in the peculiar combination of profile and facing posture that looks so odd when one is used to modern techniques of perspective. The procession stretched out in horizontal rows, each one separated from the rest by a decorative band filled with writing. “Prayers?” I murmured to myself, laying down lines with a quick hand. The inscriptions I made no attempt to replicate; those would be better done as rubbings. “Or some kind of proclamation, perhaps?”
There was a good deal more writing on the left-hand wall, this time arranged in vertical columns, with each character painted in red. It was exceedingly strange, seeing the bright colours in this chamber, not only in the murals but on the statues. Close examination of other relics had shown that at least some Draconean statues used to be painted; but we are accustomed to seeing them as plain stone, and this has given their civilization an austere quality in our imaginations. Now, however, we had proof that they had loved colour as much as modern man.
I resorted to quick scribbles to represent the writing on that mural, putting my main effort into the egg that sat at the bottom, underneath the red columns and atop an elaborate altar-like shape. Again, rubbings would be more helpful in the short term than me drawing every character by hand. The murals to either side of the door I bypassed for the time being; Suhail, Andrew, and Tom were too much in the way.
That left me with the right-hand wall, which is the one I had the most interest in to begin with. This one showed actual dragons, which are much less common in Draconean art; most of their decorations depict humans or dragon-headed figures. But two winged reptiles dominated the upper part of the wall, flanking yet another inscription, and I was very keen to study them more closely.
My first thought, when I saw them the previous day, was that they might depict the kind of dragon this civilization had bred—a variety that seemed to have since gone extinct. If that were the case, however, then the breed in question had not been much different from our modern desert drakes. The creatures on the wall looked a good deal like the ones I had been chasing and feeding all year, allowing for a certain amount of artistic license: their scales were painted in gold leaf, making them far brighter and more splendid than any real beast, and the odd perspective of the Draconean style made them look rather like flowers squashed flat between the pages of a book.
But they had the broad, delicate ruffs I knew so well, and the fan-like vanes on their tails. I was forced to conclude they were indeed the familiar breed, or at least their very close cousins. If those had been hatched here, then it meant two things: first, that the Draconeans had raised more than one variety of dragon (for I was certain the kind we had found on Rahuahane were not desert drakes); and second, that an ancient civilization had succeeded where Tom and I had failed.
It was a disheartening thought, and no amount of telling myself that it was silly to feel disheartened in the middle of such a tremendous discovery changed my mood. I devoted myself to documenting this wall with assiduous care… and that is when I noticed something peculiar.