We could carve the doors wider on the bottom floors to let our dragons in; make a sand pit there if the ceilings are high enough. . . .
It looked as if the bottom floors had been made with dragons in mind; twice as tall at least as the ones above. But the only way to find out, was to look.
He headed for the nearest, after another glance at Avatre to be sure she was all right, but she was nose-deep in her prey, and oblivious to anything else. He crossed the threshold—noting as he did so that there were places for hinges and, presumably, doors which were long gone—and paused inside for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
For dark it was, despite the windows cut into the façade. Kiron could see, however, this was a man-altered cave. And yes, the ceiling here was as tall as in the Temple of Haras in the Court of the Jousters in Mefis, a place where Kashet had walked comfortably. A dragon could live here.
The interior was simple: a box of a room, with thick square pillars holding up the ceiling, the spaces between fully wide enough for two dragons to pass. It was a big box, though, and that high ceiling gave it a cavernous feeling. After his first feeling of vague disappointment, he realized that the simplicity was the opposite of crude. Floor, ceiling, and walls, all were polished so smooth that when he touched the wall, and then the floor and the pillars, they felt like sueded leather under the hand.
And at the rear of the room, climbing up toward the ceiling, was a stone staircase. So there were more stories above this.
He moved toward the back, hearing his footsteps echo in the emptiness, feeling the room growing cooler and cooler as he got closer to the rear and away from the windows. This could be very good. With magic heating the dragon’s sand, the bulk of the stone would keep living quarters more than tolerable, they’d be comfortable.
And this was where the Jousters would eventually live?
Could there be any more perfect place for them to live?
He found himself smiling, then grinning with glee. How could anything be better? There was more rain here, as evidenced by the signs of flash floods and the bits of green here and there. But you wouldn’t have to worry about rain when your dragon’s pen was sheltered by all this rock. And there were midnight kamiseens, but when you were behind this sort of wall, who cared? The worst that would happen would be that you had a bit more sand to sweep downstairs into the pen. And if this became a city for Jousters and their helpers—
There might be problems in supplying all those dragons with food if there were no temple sacrifices to feed them, unless—
Sanctuary is going to be a city of temples. No law says we have to feed the dragons in their pens. That had been a necessity with the wild-caught, tala-controlled dragons; put two together while feeding and you’d have fighting. Not the current lot. So long as everyone had enough food, they ate peaceably side by side. And they had all learned that although a dragon wanted a nap when she was full, she didn’t have to have one. They flew perfectly well on a full stomach. They had to, after all, a wild dragon didn’t laze about after making a kill, and neither could the tame ones. So there might not be any issue here; you could fly to Sanctuary for the morning feed, go out on patrol from there, come back for the midday feed, go out on the second patrol, return for the evening feed, then come back home. The dragons would complain at first, but only until they realized that breakfast came at Sanctuary without having to hunt for it.
He looked around as his head came up through the floor of the next story; it was identical in every way to the room below it, except, of course, for the view from the windows and the height of the ceiling. He took a walk around the room, trying it on for size. It was comfortable; very comfortable. A brazier near the windows would keep it warm—or you could go down and spend the night with your dragon in the sand. The one thing it lacked was a place to bathe—well, there was nothing of the sort in Sanctuary either. No point in getting beforehand with things.
There was another story above this one—this time the room was a little smaller, but not by much. The view was amazing. Short of being on the back of a dragon, there was no view like this anywhere. Beneath him, the white-gold sand of the canyon stretched like a fat snake between the carved walls—and from here, looking down at how regular the floor of the canyon was, he had the feeling that it, too, had been smoothed by stonemasons.
How long had it taken to build this city? And why? Sanctuary supposedly had been a stop for caravans crossing the desert, but what had this place been? There were no legends telling about it.
And why had it been abandoned?
Perhaps because the caravans stopped coming?
Perhaps there had been something here worth mining, and when it ran out, so did the prosperity of this city, and gradually, people left it to the oryx and the lizards.
Across from him, stood a building façade with false pillars framing a mathematically precise doorway and windows with beautiful simplicity. Each façade reflected a different personality; some very rigid and formal, some less so, some so pure in their simplicity that they made him think of some of the temples in Alta. Some had false urns carved into the rock, or the stylized forms of gods that looked familiar, yet strange, reduced from the realistic, if rigid forms he knew to the kind of sketched-in shape that an artist would rough out before carving the details. Yet, he could tell by the elegant curves and carefully smoothed surfaces, these images were in their finished forms.
Yes, there was Thet, or something like Thet—the curve of an ibis-bill thrusting out of the otherwise featureless head, but as smooth as a bone fishhook. And there was Pashet, in her feline form; two of her, in fact, flanking a door, with the barest curves for brow ridges, and no sign of eyes or nose, and yet more the essence of cat than anything but a real, living feline.
After he had studied them, he began to have the feeling that he would never quite look at the images of the gods in the same way again. These seemed so much more powerful, purer.
From here, he could see four more canyons branching off from this one, and in at least two of them, there were more buildings. How many Jousters and dragons and their helpers and families could be accommodated here? Fifty? A hundred? More?
He felt dazzled by the idea. A city, an army of Jousters, whose duty was to guard the borders, and the priests of Sanctuary, and protect the caravans coming across the desert. Jousters who could actually have families—perhaps raising sons and daughters to ride dragons themselves? Dragons flying to mate, and new dragonets being raised from the egg by the children of Jousters. The vision was nothing less than intoxicating. Could that possibly come to pass?
I’m getting ahead of myself again. Far ahead. We’ve a long way to go before we’re safe from the Magi, and that has to be taken care of first. He shook his head. All that was for the future; for right now, he needed to keep his eye on the immediate needs.
Still, he ought at least to investigate this place and get some idea of how big it was, and whether it was all in as good a repair as this building was. Kaleth would want a report, and so would the others. Even if they weren’t going to be able to move here in the immediate future, they would still want to know everything about the place.
He trotted back down the stairs and out into the canyon. Avatre had finished her first oryx and was beginning, in a much more leisurely manner, on her second. She looked up as he neared and made a little noise of inquiry.
“Eat, sweetheart,” he said, and passed on to the next building.
All the ones in this first canyon proved to be in excellent repair, although despite the uniform appearance of the facades, only a third of them were actually three stories tall once he looked inside. It was clear why; in some, the rock had flaws that would have made cutting a third floor dangerous, and in others, it appeared that work had stopped before a third floor could be put in. He wondered about that, but cutting so much rock was difficult and dangerous, and perhaps these places had all begun with single stories, then as the owners acquired wealth, second and third levels had been added.