Marie Brennan - In the Labyrinth of Drakes

His explanation deflated me. I had believed this single key would unlock everything at once. In reality, it was not nearly that simple. “Even so… is it helpful?”

Suhail’s eyes went wide. “Is it helpful ? It is a gift from God himself, the Preserver who kept this stone safe through the years, the Bountiful who gave us this treasure that may not have any equal in the world. Without your discovery, we might have laboured another ten generations without ever knowing as much as we know today.”

His praise warmed me right down to my toes. “Are you confident enough in your translation to have that friend of yours look it over?”

My husband bit his lip, looking at the paper. “I—yes. Perhaps. I’d like to refine it a bit more, first—Ngaru verb tenses are quite different from Akhian or Scirling—”

I laid a gentle hand over his. “Then here is what I suggest. Give it to him when we depart for the desert; that way you will not fuss about like a mother hen while he works on it. When we come back, you can make preparations to publish the result.”

“ We can make preparations.” He turned his palm upward and gripped my hand firmly. “Both of our names will be on this. You have my word.”

He did not spend every waking minute between then and our departure on perfecting his mastery of Ngaru. As Suhail admitted, sometimes the best thing for one’s work was to step away for a time, to freshen the brain with other exercise.

Tom and I gladly ceded the preparations for our second expedition to him, as he knew far better than we what might be necessary. My own attentions were much occupied by the honeyseekers, for I had several more months of data now, and had to decide what should be done with the experiment while I was in the desert.

My purpose, you must remember, was not to find how best to encourage the healthy propagation of the breed. It was to test the limits of their hardiness—or rather, the hardiness of their eggs—and determine which factors were the most influential. There is a phrase engineers use: “testing to destruction.” It is not enough to know that a beam is strong; they must find out how much weight it can bear before snapping. The only way to do this, of course, is to pile on weight until it does snap.

This was the point I had reached with the honeyseeker programme. The plan I drew up involved extremes of both temperature and humidity, with multiple eggs in each scenario to ensure that any one failure was a pattern, not a coincidence. I could not subject them to any great influx of cold, as our budget did not stretch to cover large quantities of ice, but heat was easy to arrange. Lieutenant Marton had instructions to increase this one step at a time until he was certain no eggs could survive.

You may think it is cruel to subject unborn beasts to such stresses, in the knowledge that some will be harmed by it, and some even killed. You are correct. It is also, however, the only way to learn certain vital facts. I would not do such a thing lightly, and having learned what I can from it, I would not do it again. But I cannot regret my decision to test the honeyseeker eggs so rigorously, for it wound up bearing unforeseen fruit upon my return from the desert.

We departed for the Jefi once more in the second week of Messis: myself, Suhail, Tom, Andrew, Haidar, and al-Jelidah, with the best camels Suhail could provide. In hindsight it was an absurdly small group, and sorely under-equipped for our eventual needs. But of course we did not know that at the time, and Suhail’s preparations were entirely reasonable for the circumstances. For my own part, based on my previous excursion, I believed that I was prepared for this journey.

I was entirely wrong.

In past volumes I have claimed that I am a heat-loving creature, and it is true. But there is heat, and then there is the Jefi in summer. Perhaps the simplest way I can convey the difference is to say this: had Tom and I been kidnapped by the Banu Safr in that season, we both might have died.

The air was dry even in winter; in summer it became positively desiccating. I thought at first that I perspired surprisingly little. Then I realized the moisture was evaporating nearly as quickly as it formed, and in fact I was losing water at a shocking rate. There was no point between our departure from Qurrat and our eventual return when I was not thirsty, not even after I drank—for we could never indulge ourselves as fully as we wished. We had to conserve not only the water we carried but also what we found, for some of the springs we relied upon took hours to refill even a few liters, and the well-being of our camels necessarily took precedence over our own comfort. What water we obtained was bitter and unpleasant to drink, and it reeked of the hide skins in which we kept it.

Grit worked its way into every crevice. It was under my fingernails, in the folds of my ears. I half expected a grinding noise every time I blinked. The sun was more than punishing, it was torturous; its light beat down from above, then reflected off the sand and struck a second time from below. On Suhail’s advice, we added eye veils to our headscarves, restricting our vision but also protecting our eyes against the constant glare. We painted our lips with grease to reduce chapping, but our exposed hands did not fare so well. The paste that supposedly protected against the sun helped a little, but even with its aid, we were still miserably charred.

I cannot fault Andrew for snarling at one point, “Why the hell did I let you talk me into this?” I even forbore to remind him that he had wanted to come along, which under the circumstances I think was quite noble of me.

And it was only Messis: not yet the height of summer. We departed so early—well before hatching might begin—because Tom and I wished to see estivating dragons, drowsing in their rock shelters. But it meant we would be out here a dreadfully long time. Two of the camels we rode were in milk, and what they provided was a welcome alternative to and supplement for water; camels can extract moisture from plants that are inedible for humans, so by allowing them to graze and then drinking their milk, we could extend our supplies somewhat. When our food supplies were sufficiently reduced, we would slaughter and eat one of the pack camels; if necessary we would do this more than once. Such measures are necessary, when undertaking a journey of this sort.

Luck smiled upon us at first. We crossed tracks in the desert that al-Jelidah identified as belonging to fellow Ghalb, because they were from donkeys instead of camels. We followed these for a day and found the Ghalb camped at a Banu Zalit well. They were a small group, a family of eight, which is common for their tribe. Our Akhian companions exchanged news with them, as is obligatory among the nomads (enemies excepted), and learned that there was a drake not far away. I believe they thought us mad when they realized we wanted to go toward the beast, rather than away from it, but we parted from them in amity, and wasted no time in hurrying toward our mark.

I have been close to dragons on many an occasion, including riding upon the back of one. There is something especially hair-raising, however, about sneaking into the lair of one while it sleeps.

“Like al-Sindi the thief,” Suhail said with a wide grin. This turned to mock outrage when he learned that none of the Scirlings in the party knew that tale; he told it that night after we ate our meager supper.

This was not as comforting as it might have been, for al-Sindi, as my more literary readers may know, is the thief who crept into the lair of an estivating drake in search of its golden treasure. But there was no gold, and the drake woke while he was there; al-Sindi was forced to flee deeper into its lair. This being a fairy tale, the lair was an improbable complex of twisting passages and bottomless pits. There are many variant episodes in the tale of al-Sindi, recounting what strange wonders he found in the byways of the drake’s lair, but many of them end badly for the thief.