Even with all our lamps, the light was less than ideal. I picked one up and carried it to the wall, so I might get a closer look. “Oy!” Andrew said. “I need that, or I’m going to lose my place!”
“Put your finger on it for now,” I said, distracted. “This dragon’s foot is wrong.”
The silence from behind me was disbelieving. Then Tom said, “Wrong how?”
“It’s on backward. As if the seamstress wasn’t paying attention, and sewed it on upside down.”
Andrew snorted. “It’s Draconean art. It always looks strange.”
By then I had gone to the other dragon. “This one, too. Their feet ought to be facing toward the edges of the wall, even if the claws dangle. Instead they’re cocked inward, as if—”
“As if pointing at something.” Suhail had gone outside again to pray. The month of fasting was supposed to be a time of piety; even if he was not observing the fast itself, he felt obliged to attend to his devotions—all the more so because he was spending the intervening time in a heathen temple. He had returned while I was distracted, and came now to stand just behind my left shoulder.
“And their scales are wrong, too,” I said. “That is—the entire depiction of their scales is very stylized, but we are used to that. I mean that even for the style, they are on upside down. But only on these hind legs.”
We had brought measuring tape with us. Tom fetched it and, with Suhail’s assistance, stretched it out to form a line from the left-hand dragon’s foot. He said, “I don’t know exactly what angle we should follow, here. The top of the foot? The medial line of the metatarsals? It makes a difference.”
The two dragons were not perfectly symmetrical; their feet were not cocked to the same degree, meaning that any lines we drew from them would not intersect in the middle of the wall. The left was cocked higher than the right, skewing the intersection to the right as well. I said, “All we need is for it to direct us to the correct area. Once we have that—”
I had only just begun to run my hands over the wall. But the tip of my index finger brushed something—not anything noteworthy; only the irregular shape left between the carved marks of a character—and when it did so, the stone shifted slightly. On instinct, I pressed, and the bit of stone slid into the wall.
Something clicked.
I had crouched to search, and now shied back with such alacrity that I landed on my rump. Above me, with a clatter of chain and a ponderous, grinding sound, a portion of the wall swung inward.
Less than ten centimeters. It shuddered to a halt after that, its mechanism corroded and clogged with the slow accumulation of grit. But it was a secret door, and it had opened.
With slow care, Suhail knelt at my side. I think his intention was to help me to my feet; but having knelt, he stayed there, his hands on my shoulders, staring at the door. As if his knees, like mine, had gone too weak to bear weight.
Andrew whispered, “I knew it.”
His faith had been stronger than mine. We had searched for this thing; we had assembled arguments for the possibility of its existence. But theories are one thing, and proof quite another. And if the invaders had not found this door—as it seemed they had not—
Then whatever lay beyond it would be pristine. A Draconean site, wholly untouched since ancient times.
I got to my feet, then helped Suhail up. He was still staring at the wall, hardly blinking. I licked my lips, swallowed, then inhaled deeply and said, “I for one am very eager to know what is beyond that door.”
Tom looked to Suhail, but my husband seemed to have lost the power of speech. “Well?” Tom asked. “Will it damage anything if we force the door open?”
The question brought Suhail to rationality once more. “It might,” he said, in a shallow, cautious voice. “From the sound, I think the mechanism is stone and bronze, which is why it survived; wood or rope would have snapped at the first pressure. But it is not working smoothly any longer. We may not be able to close the door again.”
Then he blinked and drew what I think was his first real breath since he returned from his prayers. “Whatever we find in there,” he said, fixing each of us with his gaze, “we must not touch it. No matter what it may be. We may look only. Then we will close the door if we can, and go back to Qurrat, before this treasure lures us into stupidity or starvation.”
“Or both.” I reminded myself to keep breathing. It was remarkably easy to forget. “All of this, of course, presupposes we can get the door open.”
Tom and Andrew put their shoulders to it, both of them being stronger than Suhail. The panel made very unpleasant noises as it moved, but move it did. The wall proved to be approximately twenty centimeters thick, and beyond it was darkness. When the gap was large enough for my hand, I put a match through, as Suhail had done at the staircase, to test the air.
His voice trembling, he asked, “Can you see anything?”
“No,” I said. “Not from only a match’s flame. But the air is good.”
The men redoubled their efforts. Soon, however, the door ground to a halt… and the gap it left was not very large.
Andrew made an anguished noise. “We can’t just leave it like this! To hell with the mural—do we have a hammer? We could smash the edges off—”
“No!” Suhail yelped.
I stepped up to the crack and measured myself against it. “I think I can fit through. It will be tight, but possible.”
I should not have looked at my husband when I said that. His expression was that of a man who has glimpsed Paradise, and been told he may not enter. Contrition gripped my heart: as tremendous as this moment was for me, of the two of us, I was not the archaeologist. How would I feel if he went on to see some new kind of dragon, while I stayed behind? “Never mind,” I said. “It has waited this long; it can wait a while longer.”
“No,” Suhail said again, this time in a softer voice. “We cannot leave without knowing, and I will not destroy this door just to see. If you can fit through, then go.”
Tom sighed when I turned to him. “I would say, Do you think that’s safe?—but I know what your answer would be. If this turns out to lead into the back end of a drake’s lair, though, please do think twice before settling down to sketch it.”
Andrew said only, “You are both my most favourite and least favourite sister in the world right now.”
I was, of course, his only sister. Squaring my shoulders, I addressed the task of sliding through that narrow gap.
I had to exhale completely to fit through, and lost a button even so. It was a tight enough squeeze that I suffered a moment of worry as to what would happen if I got stuck. But then I was through, and Suhail passed along my notebook and pencil and one of the lamps. Before handing me the latter, he took my hand and kissed it, his body blocking this from the sight of the others. In a voice meant only for me, he murmured, “Come back and tell me of wonders.”
“I will,” I said, and turned to face the next step.
I was in a narrow corridor, running parallel to the wall. Suhail had been right; the hidden chamber lay back in the direction of the entrance. Not far ahead, the passage descended in another staircase, to a level below that of the previous room. By my calculation, the lower level must be at least halfway down the plateau.
For the sake of my companions, I called these details out to them. “There are murals here, too,” I said. “Painted, like the ones in the room, not the plain ones in the first corridor. All of gods—there are no human or dragon figures here that I can see.” A mischievous impulse seized me, and I added, “Shall I stay and draw them, before continuing on?”