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.
He couldn’t imagine how a family would cope with the noise of having someone cutting away at the rock above them until the room was completed, though.
Maybe they’d moved elsewhere until the work was finished. Aket-ten would probably be full of theories about these people, but unless they ever found, say, wall paintings showing how they had lived, her hundreds of questions would go unanswered.
When he’d finished taking inventory, he found that a third of the structures were limited to two stories, and a third were only a single story inside. The rock itself told the tale for the most part; there weren’t too many of these places where the carvers had simply stopped without a good reason.
He moved into the first side canyon, and here, he met with his first disappointment.
This canyon, much narrower than the first, was nothing like as grand. The facades were simple blocks of stone, where the rough face had been sheared off in a flat plane, and the windows and doors were just geometric holes in the rock. Many of the facades had fallen, choking the entrances; it looked as if they were victims of earthshakes. The carving here was inferior, too, with nothing like the fine finish in the first canyon.
So, in this city, too, there were the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy. It was quite possible, actually, that farther down this canyon—or others—he would come to a place where the living spaces were nothing more than caves crudely recut.
The second side canyon was similar, and a third was completely blocked by fallen stone.
As in Sanctuary, however, there was no sign that people had ever shared their city with dragons, not even the wild,
tala
-controlled kind. That was disappointing, though he was sure that the buildings could be fitted with the sort of things the dragons needed.
And there was no obvious water source, which was more worrying. Given the evidence of earthshakes, he had to wonder if the reason that the place had been abandoned was because a tremor had cut off the water source and it had failed.
In the fourth side canyon, however, which was almost as wide as the main canyon, the buildings were virtually intact—and had a sense about them that they were not private dwellings, but public places. Temples, perhaps, and schools, libraries, records houses, courts—he couldn’t have told why he felt this way, there was just something about the facades that seemed impersonal, yet open. Certainly they were all more uniform than the ones in the first canyon, even though the carving was just as high a quality.
As he approached the largest he caught a whiff of—water!
He sniffed eagerly; yes, there was no doubt of it, he smelled water! There was another scent along with the moisture; a hint of sulfur, that suggested that this might be a hot, rather than a cold spring. That was all right; they could make do. They could build catchments and cisterns for rainwater, so long as there was a water source that wouldn’t run dry.
Thinking now of nothing but the water, he broke into a trot, noting that for the first time he’d found a building that already had an enormous front entrance. Quite large enough for a dragon, actually—
Without thinking, he hurried toward that entrance, and the increasing dampness to the air as he neared made him move faster. From the scent, there was a
lot
of water there! Maybe as much as flowed beneath Sanctuary!
Then an angry hiss from the darkness made him stop for a moment, while his feet refused to move.
The hiss came again. And it wasn’t the hissing of steam escaping from a vent in the rock.
Slowly, never taking his eyes off that black rectangle of a door, he started to back away. His heart had started again, but now it was pounding, and he felt very much like a mouse that had inadvertently walked up to a cobra’s den. There was something moving in there, back in the deeper shadows. Something big. And he had a pretty good idea what it was—
Move slowly. Don’t run, or you tell it that you’re prey. Keep your eyes on it, and hope that it doesn’t decide you’re prey anyway.
It would be the height of irony if he had come through all he’d weathered so far, to be eaten by a wild dragon through his own inattention and carelessness.
If I get out of this one, I don’t think I’ll be telling the rest just how I discovered there were dragons living here.
He had managed to get about halfway back up the valley when the wild dragon inside that building made up its mind to charge him. Maybe it decided that it wasn’t going to let him get away. Maybe it thought he was going to bring back other humans—if it was a former Jousting dragon, it wouldn’t want to be caught again.
For whatever reason, he glanced back for a moment to see how far he was from the main canyon, and when he looked back, a thing that seemed to be all teeth and talons and three times the size of Avatre was bearing down on him.
Despite that he had thought he was ready to face an attack, he wasn’t.
All he could see was death with teeth as long as his arm, and eyes that held nothing but rage.
He couldn’t help himself; he screamed with fright, the sound was driven out of him, and his heart, which had been racing, now pounded like a madman’s drum. He ran backward as fast as he could go, still not daring to take his eyes off the beast. Bad decision; he tripped and fell and landed sprawling, and the dragon kept coming.
He scrambled in the fine sand, desperately trying to get to his feet without taking his eyes off the beast. “Get away!” he yelled shrilly, knowing the creature would never obey him, yet madly hoping for a miracle. “Get back! Back!”
It kept coming. He scrambled up, but he knew he could never get into cover quickly enough, and as the beast came close enough to rear back for a strike, he screamed, unashamedly—
Then felt himself shouldered aside as Avatre counter-charged.
He fell down, but this time he didn’t try to get up. She got within talon range of the wild dragon, swiveled to put her whole body between him and the other dragon, and put her head down, hissing defiance.
With a snort of astonishment, the other dragon, a green, skidded to a halt. He was much bigger than Avatre, but she caught
him
by surprise, and as she stood between him and Kiron, tearing at the sand with her talons, neck outstretched and hissing furiously, he backed up a pace, his neck stretching upward, eyes wide and shocked.
This was a strange dragon in his territory. A strange, young dragon, who should have given way to him. But she was defending the creature he had thought to make a meal of!
Kiron watched the wild dragon blinking at her as surprise turned to bewilderment. Wild—or now-wild, for although he didn’t recognize the beast, he thought that it probably was one of the Tian Jousting dragons. Most wild dragons avoided humans; they fought back with particularly nasty weapons, they didn’t taste as good as oryx or wild ass or ox, and there wasn’t as much meat on them. Wild dragons mostly didn’t see humans as worth the bother.
But a Jousting dragon would know the difference between an armed and an unarmed human, and a Jousting dragon wasn’t as good a hunter as a wild dragon. He’d settle for anything he could catch.
Poor thing, he was caught now in a war with his own instincts. Avatre was a youngster, and his instincts said she was off-limits to fighting. She was female, and that, too, cooled his aggression. But she was protecting the enemy—and standing between him and his next meal.
Kiron got to his feet again, and moved slowly, very slowly toward Avatre. This was not the time to startle her. She might turn around and lash out at him without knowing who she was striking at.
She glanced back at him briefly, and when the green male made no further move to attack, raised her head a little and turned it so she could watch both of them at the same time, though she was still hissing like a steam vent and kept most of her attention on the other dragon.
Kiron moved up beside her and put his hand on her shoulder. He’d never felt her so hot! She almost scorched his hand. He had the feeling that in this case he was going to be a lot safer on her back than on the ground. But he didn’t want her to crouch; that might give the other dragon a chance to attack. “Avatre,” he said quietly. “Leg.”
Without taking her eyes off the green male, Avatre slowly backed up a pace, then extended her foreleg for him to use as a step to vault up into her saddle. The moment he was in place, she straightened her neck, and still keeping her eyes on the other dragon, began to back up.
The male remained where he was, still looking thoroughly bewildered. Kiron, meanwhile, was losing no time in fishing for his restraining straps; he wanted to be buckled into place and quickly.
He hadn’t quite realized how frightened he’d been—and was!—until he tried to get the straps buckled and discovered that his hands were shaking so much he was having a hard time with that relatively simple task. He fought with the metal and leather, and it felt as if someone had glued all of his fingers together. They just wouldn’t work right—