In the Labyrinth of Drakes (4 page)

Tom distracted Pensyth with an extended hand and a greeting. “I take it you are here to lead us onward to Qurrat?” Tom asked.

“Yes, we've arranged a river barge,” Pensyth said. “They'll be all day unloading your gear from the ship and loading it onto the barge, though, so Captain Hendemore and I have taken rooms at a hotel. After you've had a chance to clean up, perhaps you might join me in the smoking room.”

This last was very clearly directed at Tom, not me. Ladies were not expected to smoke (though of course some of them did, and more of them do now); the smoking room was therefore an entirely masculine precinct. I could not help but wonder if Pensyth had intended to exclude me, or whether it was merely thoughtless reflex.

Either way, I would look quarrelsome if I pointed it out—especially since Andrew elbowed me in the ribs, grinning. “You and I will have a chance to jaw, eh?”

“Indeed,” I said. Miffed though I might be at Pensyth, I could not deny that I looked forward to time with my brother. My relations with the rest of my immediate kin were not so bad as they had once been; the honour of a knighthood had at least partially mended the bridge with my mother, though from my own perspective it was more for the sake of familial harmony than because of any change of heart. And as well as I got on with my father, I had never quite discarded the childhood image of him as a minor pagan god, to be propitiated but never wholly embraced. Andrew was still the only relation with whom I felt truly warm—my son, of course, excepted.

Andrew stepped aside to chivvy a cluster of local men to their feet: dockside porters, who would undertake the labour of shifting our belongings from ship to barge. Then we went along to the hotel, situated up a very steep hill, which vantage allowed it to catch what cooling breezes were to be had.

The hotel, like many in the south of Anthiope, had separate women's quarters for the privacy of its female guests. I therefore left Andrew in the courtyard while I saw to my room. When I returned, he had arranged for cups of tea, of a variety I had not tasted before. It was delightfully warming on a day which, despite the sun, was rather more chill than I had expected.

“You know,” Andrew said, with the air that could only mean he was about to say something appallingly blunt, “I can't understand why anybody thinks you and that Wilker fellow are having an affair. All it takes is one look to know it's utter nonsense.”

Setting down my drink, I said wryly, “Thank you—I think.”

“Oh, you know what I mean. He might as well be a eunuch, for all you care. There are eunuchs here, did you know that? Mostly in the government. I swear that half the ministers I've met are missing their bollocks.”

The army clearly had been a wonderful influence on my brother's manners. “Have you dealt with a great many people in government?”

“Have
I
dealt with them? No, not hardly. Mostly that's up to General Lord Ferdigan and his staff in Sarmizi, or sometimes Pensyth. People senior to me. I just trot along behind them with files and such.”

Andrew's tone said he was glad to be at the back—a sentiment with which I could sympathize. I was unlikely to be invited to meetings with ministers here, as neither the Akhians nor my own countrymen would be eager to include me in matters diplomatic, and on the whole I was relieved … but I will admit there was a part of me that chafed at the exclusion, or rather at its cause.

It occurred to me that my brother had been present at a variety of meetings that might concern me. Whether he had paid attention, of course, was another matter. “Is there anything I should be aware of, before I go wading in?”

Andrew cocked his head to one side, considering. He had taken his hat off and was fanning himself with it, which was likely a breach of military protocol. Although I felt the day was rather cool, he had sweated through his uniform on the walk up to the hotel. “Everyone's annoyed. They didn't expect it to take this long—thought our superior scientific knowledge should make the problem easy, and never mind that people have been trying to breed desert drakes since time out of mind, with no success.” He stopped fanning and leaned forward, propping one elbow on his knee. “To be honest—and not to put pressure on you or anything, but—I don't know how long this alliance will last. It's only this business with Yelang and their caeligers that has us and the Akhians working together. If there isn't
some
kind of progress soon, that may fall apart.”

Nothing in what he said surprised me, but it was distressing all the same. Tom and I would undoubtedly be blamed for the failure, if we were left holding the baton when the end came. In fact, the dreadful thought crossed my mind that perhaps we had been chosen for precisely that reason. We made much better scapegoats than Lord Tavenor would have.

Well, if that was the plan, then I was determined to thwart it. And in order to do so, I needed information. Our predecessor's papers would be waiting for us in Qurrat, but I liked the notion of being well armed before we arrived. “Can you tell me anything about what Lord Tavenor was doing?” Andrew shook his head, and I remembered that he had only recently come into the country. “Have you at least met this sheikh? The one who is supposed to supply us with dragons?”

My brother brightened. “Yes! Only once, mind you, but Pensyth briefed me beforehand. Fairly important fellow, as I understand it. The Aritat helped put the current caliphate into power a few generations back, and he's their most recent leader.”

“Why is he involved with the programme? Is it because of political influence?”

“No—or at least, not entirely. His tribe's territory is in the Jefi, and apparently that's where you find the most dragons.” Andrew grinned. “He sends his nomad cousins to capture a few, and then they drag them back to Qurrat for you.”

I could not help but perk up at his words. You may think me mad for doing so: the Jefi is the southernmost portion of Akhia, the inhospitable desert valley between the Qedem and Farayma mountain ranges. It receives perishingly little rainfall; the nomads there survive by grazing and watering their camels at scattered oases. Even for a heat-loving creature such as myself, it cannot be considered anything like an attractive destination.

But it will come as no surprise to my readers that the prevalence of drakes there drew my interest. The Jefi was not so far from Qurrat—which made sense, as no one would wish to transport captive drakes any farther than they must. I was determined to see the creatures in their natural habitat before I left this country; now I knew where to go, and to whom I must speak.

Andrew clearly guessed at my thoughts, for he grinned widely. It lasted only a moment, though, before he sobered. “I wouldn't try to go down there without the sheikh's permission, Isabella. For one thing, you'll die. And if you
don't
die, the Aritat will kill you. They don't like trespassers.”

Not to mention that my actions would reflect on Scirland. Trespassing would endear me to no one. “I understand,” I said, and prayed for cordial relations with the sheikh.

*   *   *

The barge that took us up the river to Qurrat was not a swift vessel, but I did not mind, for it gave me opportunity to study the landscape around me.

The Zathrit, being the southernmost of Akhia's three major waterways, has its origin in the Qedem Mountains that separate that country from Seghaye and Haggad. An extensive network of irrigation canals spreads out from it like the branches of a tree; they were dry in this season, but come spring the farmers would knock down the mud-brick barriers at their mouths and channel the life-giving water to their fields of barley, millet, and wheat.

Along the banks of the river itself, the desert was far greener than I had envisioned. There were tall grasses and reeds, palm trees and other species I could not identify. Wildlife abounded, too, from fish to foxes to birds in the sky. But from time to time I would see the ground rising past the alluvial plain, and then I could see it desiccating into the distance, a dun colour not much different from my brother's uniform.

It was, in its own way, a landscape as lethal as the Green Hell. But whereas the jungle of Mouleen tries quite energetically to kill a person, with every tool at its disposal ranging from predators to parasites, the deserts of Akhia most often kill with indifference. Jackals may hasten one's end and then feast upon the carcass, but they rarely go to great lengths to hunt one down. Heat and thirst will do that work for them: one dies because the means of life are long since spent and gone.

That, however, was not my destination—not yet, and not (from the perspective of my military employers) at any point to come. Of course I did go out into the desert, more than once; but for the time being, I turned my attention to the settled lands of the river valley, and the city that ruled them.

Qurrat is a complex city, as many old settlements are. Unlike the Akhian capital of Sarmizi, it evinces little in the way of planned arrangements; there has been no equivalent to the caliph Ulsutir to knock down half the place and rebuild it in a grand style. There is no Round City at its heart, no sensible grid of avenues dividing one class from another. Like the central parts of Falchester, it simply
happened,
and people live in it as chance and circumstance dictate.

This does not prevent it from achieving a certain grandeur, all the more striking for its serendipitous distribution. The city is ruled by an emir or commander, one of the three who serve the caliph, and his palace overlooks the river from the vantage of a low hill, with gardens spreading like a green skirt down to the water's edge. Various plazas are decorated with stelae and statues taken from Draconean ruins, and these relics of the past alternate with Amaneen prayer courts, recognizable by their tall spires and elaborate mosaic tiling.

The area where Tom and I were to be lodged is not nearly so grand. The district known as the Segulist Quarter is one of the older parts of the city; and like many old neighbourhoods, it has long since been abandoned by the elite and given over to other segments of society. In this particular case, as the name suggests, the Quarter's residents are almost all Segulist (though they do not constitute the whole Segulist population of the city). It is a polite simplification to say that most of them are Bayitist, with a leavening of Magisterials. One might more accurately say the Quarter is a concatenation of a hundred Segulist factions, some of them borderline or outright heretical. To this day, for example, it contains a small enclave of Eshites, who seek the destruction of the Temple so that it might be rebuilt in what they view as purer form. Needless to say, this goal does not make them popular in Haggad; but they are permitted to live in Qurrat, so long as they obey the caliph's laws (and pay the caliph's taxes).

As Lord Rossmere had said, Tom was to be lodged in the Men's House, which some of the Quarter's residents maintain for the benefit of travellers and new immigrants. It meant sharing a room with three other men, but he did not expect to spend many of his waking hours there; when he was not asleep, he was likely to be at the compound which would serve as our base of operations.

Female travellers and immigrants being less common, there was no comparable Women's House for me to lodge in. I was instead to live with a local Bayitist family: Shimon ben Nadav and his wife Aviva.

Shimon was a merchant, dealing in fine linens from Haggad (as the intermittent hostility between those two nations does not preclude a certain amount of trade). They were an older pair, Shimon's first wife dead and their children long since grown and gone; most were married, but two unwed sons assisted in their father's business, accompanying caravans across the Qedem Mountains. They welcomed me in the courtyard of their house with a basin of water to clean my face and hands, and then dates and coffee to sate my hunger.

“Thank you so much for your hospitality,” I said, and meant it quite sincerely. My previous expeditions had put me in a variety of housing conditions ranging from a Chiavoran hotel to a ship's cabin to a hut of branches in the middle of a swamp. Only the Chiavoran hotel had matched this for comfort, and I had not stayed there long.

“We are very pleased to have you,” Aviva said in Akhian. It was one of her two languages; she and her husband spoke no Scirling, and I, being Magisterial, spoke almost no Lashon, as our liturgy is in the vernacular.

Despite the barrier posed by my fledgling Akhian, and perhaps a larger barrier of religious difference, she did not hesitate to carry out her duty. Leaving Andrew in the courtyard to talk with Shimon, I followed Aviva farther into the house. Their household was arranged in the southern style, with women's quarters not entered by male visitors, and a piercework screen looking out over the street, which permits the ladies to view the outside world without being watched in return. I expected to spend little more time there than Tom would in the Men's House, though, and so I fear I was perhaps less interested in what Aviva showed me than I should have been.

My attention was instead on the meeting that came the next day, when Colonel Pensyth and my brother took us at last to the compound where we would carry out our work.

 

THREE

Dar al-Tannaneen—The sheikh—Lord Tavenor's notes—Egg methods and results—Keeping dragons—Our challenge

Our destination lay a little ways outside the city, not too far from the Segulist Quarter. It had been the residence of a wealthy minister in service to the emir some ninety years before, but after his fall from favour it became the emir's property. That man being uninterested in an estate that did not benefit from river breezes, the site fell into disrepair. At his caliph's command, the current emir had leased it to Scirling interests, for the propagation of dragons.

Its semi-ruinous state was to our advantage, for we needn't concern ourselves with damaging the place further—always a concern when dragons are involved. The parts in decent repair served as offices or barracks for the small military garrison under Colonel Pensyth's command, while others had been gutted for scientific use. Tom and I would explore the entirety in detail quite soon … but first, we had to meet the sheikh who would be overseeing much of our work.