Nor did his caution end there. We sifted every bit of sand that had been removed from the staircase, making certain there was nothing more than ordinary pebbles mixed in, and took equal care with the interior of the site. Every bit of sand and dust from the hatching chamber was screened to a minute degree: that is the only reason I found the scales. Had there been teeth or other materials there, we would have found them.
When I was not peering at a tiny speck of rock to see whether it might be relevant, I made rubbings of every inscription in the place, then put myself to work recording the murals properly. I was not able to finish this task before the winter rains came, but I made good progress. As for the inscriptions… Abdul Aleem ibn Nahwas had finished refining Suhail’s Ngaru translation, and gave a copy to him before we left Qurrat. Whenever he could snatch a spare moment, Suhail was chipping away at the Draconean text of the Cataract Stone, seeking the correspondences that would enable him to puzzle out the phonetic content, and from there begin to identify vocabulary, grammar, and so forth. We had new inscriptions to read, and could not wait to discover what they said.
We did not speak of that aspect where anyone could hear, not until the text was ready for publication. There was already more than enough publicity surrounding the Watchers’ Heart: journalists from half of Anthiope had flocked to the site, some of them ill-prepared enough for the hazards of the desert that Suhail had to negotiate with the Ghalb to find and rescue those who might otherwise have perished. But this did not deter them from wandering by our camp in the hopes of seeing the hidden chambers, interviewing Suhail or myself, or both.
This is the point at which my public reputation underwent a revision of truly awe-inspiring proportions and speed. Scant months before, I had been the notorious woman who wed the man reputed to be her long-time lover on shockingly brief notice. With our discovery, however, we became the romantic tale of the century: two brilliant eccentrics, destined to be together, marrying in a whirlwind of passion for soft-hearted men and women to sigh over in envy. While I cannot dispute the “eccentric” part, and have a healthy respect for both my own intelligence and Suhail’s, I could not help but laugh at the image of us that journalists and gossips presented to the world.
I am glad I was in the desert for the worst of it, safely insulated from the stories spreading through Qurrat and beyond. Natalie compiled a scrap-book of articles published in Falchester, which she presented to me upon my return to Scirland; I can scarcely read some of them without expiring of laughter or embarrassment. But on the whole, my sudden transition from notoriety to genuine fame was a boon to my career, and so I cannot complain overmuch.
One other thing amuses me, looking back on that time. So much attention was focused on the discovery in the Labyrinth of Drakes—and rightly so, for the Watchers’ Heart has never been truly equaled by any archaeological site since (though the city of Jinkai, buried in volcanic mud, comes close). Virtually no one apart from myself and Tom, however, paid the slightest bit of attention to my work with the honeyseekers.
The turning point there came when the winter rains drove us out of the desert at last. Lieutenant Marton had faithfully carried out my orders regarding the egg incubation programme, and came to report to me almost as soon as I returned to Dar al-Tannaneen.
I knew something was amiss as soon as I saw him, for he was wringing his hands fit to dislocate a finger. “What is wrong, Lieutenant?”
“The data,” he said. “That is—one bit of it. A honeyseeker, I mean. One of the honeyseekers. It’s wrong. Not like the others.”
“Has it fallen ill? Which one?” I reached for the files in which I kept all my notes on the hatchlings.
The reference number he gave me, however, was not yet in my files, as it belonged to one of the eggs that had been incubating during my absence. I closed the ledger in front of me and said, “Lieutenant Marton. Take a deep breath, and tell me precisely what is amiss.”
He obeyed, straightening his shoulders. “I did as you asked, Dame Isabella, increasing the temperature. Well past the point where I expected all of them to die. But one of the eggs hatched anyway. And the thing that came out of it is—different.”
My chair nearly toppled over as I stood. “Show me.”
I saw immediately what Lieutenant Marton meant. Had I encountered this hatchling in the wild, I would have thought it very similar to a honeyseeker, but not quite the same. A related species, perhaps. Female honeyseekers are a dull green, and their mates black-and-yellow, with a bright blue crest; this one was female and had a similar shape to her body, but her scales were solid orange. Her body was even more attenuated than usual for her kind, and sported a much finer crest. All in all, she was not nearly so mutated as Lumpy—in fact, she seemed quite healthy—but she was, as Lieutenant Marton had said, wrong. This was not what a honeyseeker should look like.
Earlier in this volume I said I was eliding a certain incident whose significance was not apparent to me at the time. My mind returned to it now, in light of this new data.
Some months before, one of the hatchlings had become vexed at me for manipulating his body to obtain measurements of his growth. To express his annoyance, he had spat on me—the defense mechanism of honeyseekers, which acquires its toxicity from the eucalyptus nectar they consume.
Their saliva is not very toxic. It is neither as choking as a swamp-wyrm’s breath, nor as corrosive as the spray of a savannah snake. But it can irritate the skin, causing an unpleasant rash, and so I had hurried to wash the affected skin (leaving the honeyseeker to enjoy a brief freedom, before I returned and finished my measurements). Afterward, though, I noted that my skin was not even a little red.
“Lieutenant Marton,” I said. “How many times have the honeyseekers spat on you?”
He looked puzzled. “I don’t know, Dame Isabella. A dozen times, at least. Probably more.”
“How much has it irritated your skin?”
“It doesn’t bother me, Dame Isabella,” he said stoutly. “So long as I wash it off within a few minutes, I don’t have any problems.”
A few minutes was long enough for the full rash to set in, and even prompt washing leaves one with redness and tender skin. But I needed more evidence than that.
Marton categorically refused to let me use myself as a test subject—even going so far as to roll up his sleeves and take one of the juvenile honeyseekers directly out of my hands. My attempt to reclaim it produced the first test, as it provoked the creature into spitting on Marton’s bare arm. “Might as well do the rest,” he said with a hint of triumph, and reached for the next one.
I gave in. Soon a full dozen honeyseekers had spat on him, and I had written on him with my pen, marking each place where the saliva struck with the appropriate reference number. Half an hour later, there was no effect from any of them.
“Maybe it’s because we’re keeping them in cages?” he speculated.
“That should not matter,” I said. “We are still feeding them eucalyptus nectar. It should show up in their saliva.” (Had I been in less of a rush to test my theory, I might have been wiser and asked Tom to chemically analyze samples, rather than using Marton as my canvas.) “And that does not explain your orange honeyseeker, either.” The creature had hatched despite being subjected to temperatures that ought to have been lethal.