Within the hour the lab had surrendered to Comonot and his exiles.
Eskar explained it to me later: the stronger fighters, storming the gates, had drawn the best of the Censors’ guard to the main entrance. The weaker fighters, sneaking into the escape tunnel, had relied on stealth and deviousness, ambushing Censors and scientists one by one. They’d reached the heart of the mountain virtually unopposed, and the Censors had had no choice but to admit defeat.
Well, most decided they had no choice. The Censors were not untainted by the new ideology Comonot and Eskar had observed. Five Censors fought to the death and took three exiles with them, injuring four more. Others seemed to subscribe to the extreme anti-human ideology but couldn’t quite make up their minds to die for it. They were herded down into holding cells deep underground, where they would have ample time to reconsider their political affiliation.
I was still with Dr. Fila when two exiles came to collect him; I followed them through twisting, darkened hallways to an enormous atrium at the heart of the mountain. Here, at least, light trickled in through several small windows in the ceiling, so far away they looked like buttonholes. Hundreds of dragons milled around the atrium, patching each other up and inventorying supplies. Dr. Fila, who still seemed woozy from his encounter with Mitha, was sent across the room to line up with scientists, technicians, and a dozen deviants from the holding cells.
“You are called upon to aid your Ardmagar,” Saar Lalo was screeching at them. “The world is changing; you may yet change with it.”
The quigs restored power to the ceiling lights, to my immeasurable relief. It surely reduced my chances of being trampled in that room full of milling dragons.
I needed to find Comonot. Orma had been sent back to Goredd, so that was where I needed to go; I only hoped the Ardmagar could spare someone to carry me south. As I searched for him, I passed Brisi and the four Porphyrian hatchlings. They’d shrunk into their saarantrai again and were excitedly recounting their first dragon battle to each other. “I bit a scientist right in the rostral protuberance,” boasted one.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Brisi. “I torched an auditor’s cloacal vent.”
I asked after Comonot everywhere, but only Ikat, who was patiently instructing quigs in the application of cobwebby bandaging, had noted where they’d gone. “Eskar took him up the north passage to the Censors’ archives.”
She indicated a wide ascending corridor, so steep it was like climbing a mountain itself. I was sweating and breathless by the time I reached a cavernous archival chamber, and then was utterly appalled by the sight of the Ardmagar—wearing his humanity and nothing else—dancing around in the middle of the floor. Behind him, in her natural shape, Eskar operated a viewing machine similar to the one Mitha had used, but scaled to dragons. Two other full-sized dragons lurked in a corner of the room: an exceedingly antique specimen, his eyes filmed over by cataracts and with strange wart-like growths on his snout, and a smaller hatchling, his head spines sharp and gleaming. The oldster leaned heavily on the young one, like an aged grandfather being helped about by his grandson.
Ardmagar Comonot caught sight of me and bounded over. I tried not to stare, but he was blubbery around the middle. “Seraphina!” he cried, and for a horrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me. “We did it! The lab is ours, and soon every Censorial secret will be, too.”
“You’re in your saarantras,” I said, aiming my eyes at the distant stony ceiling.
He actually laughed, which drew my gaze, and I saw him ripple all over like a bowl of aspic. “I wanted to feel it,” he said. “Triumph, right? I like this one. It’s inspiring.”
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Soon,” he said, holding up a hand. “Eskar is looking something up. She has made an extraordinary claim, based on a snippet of information stashed in a mind-pearl, and I require correspondingly extraordinary proof.”
Across the room Eskar waved a wing in acknowledgment.
“What did she claim?” I asked, suspecting I knew. “Was it that the Censors secretly imprisoned a half-dragon here and experimented on her?”
“How would you have heard about it?” asked Comonot. Eskar arched her spined neck to look back at me.
I darted my gaze toward the two unfamiliar dragons in the corner. I didn’t like to talk about this in front of strangers. “The quigutl told me she was Eskar’s reason for leaving, although Eskar herself neglected to mention it.”
Eskar’s third eyelid fluttered in confusion. “I didn’t think it relevant.”
“She’s been planning this subterfuge for years,” said Comonot admiringly. “She quit the Censors because of a reasoned, moral objection.” I forgot I shouldn’t look at him; he winked appallingly. “Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that’s like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.”
Across the chamber, the ancient dragon harrumphed, coughed up an enormous gobbet of phlegm, and spit it into a corner, where it smoldered. He wheezed as he spoke. “You’ll find its records under Experiment 723a … but I could find it faster … if you’d let me use my own machine.…”
“And erase anything else?” cried Eskar. “I don’t think so.”
“Routine maintenance,” screeched the old archivist, whining like a broken bagpipe. “Everything I erase is stored in my mind. I never forget.”
Eskar had called up the correct file on the reader and was skimming it rapidly, emitting impatient puffs of smoke from her flared nostrils. “Yes, this is it!” she cried at last. “General Palonn’s niece, born of his sister Abind, who died. The creature was locked up for twenty-seven years and used as a research subject.”
Comonot stood very still now, with his arms folded. “And for this action, which I agree is questionable, you think we should disband the Censors entirely?”
“She was intelligent, and intelligence has value,” said Eskar. “It’s the same principle you applied to humanity. A sound principle, Ardmagar, but it needs to be expanded, not contracted.”
“A ludicrous principle,” screeched an unfamiliar voice, and we all turned to look at the hatchling supporting the old archivist. He bared his teeth. “Other creatures may be intelligent, but only dragons are truly logical. Logic is pure and incorruptible. By engaging with non-dragon intelligences, dragons may be corrupted until they are no longer dragons. Consorting with humans degrades us; we must burn the corruption out of our own.”
His words made me shudder. I glanced at Comonot, as if he might have shared my sentiment, but he was staring intently at the youngster, clearly interested. “That’s it,” he said, nodding firmly. “That’s the new logic: I’m not a dragon in your estimation, and it’s worth your life to put an end to mine. Now I’ve heard it stated plainly. But where did it come from?”
“From that thing,” grunted the elder archivist, dribbling from a corner of his mouth. “Experiment 723a. You considered it intelligent, Eskar? It was too intelligent by half.”
I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Her name is Jannoula. She’s been helping them strategize. Remember telling me about General Laedi, Comonot? That’s her.”
“They’re taking advice from a half-dragon when there are perfectly whole dragons they don’t consider dragons at all?” said the Ardmagar, raising his bushy brows.
“Laedi is useful—for now,” screeched the archivist’s young assistant. “Don’t imagine we’ll let her live once the civil strife is over.”
“She has a talent for persuasion,” I said to Comonot. “She’s in the Southlands now, pursuing the Old Ard’s ends. She had Orma sent back to Goredd.”
“The Censors tortured her!” cried Eskar, pulling the control cups off her claws. “They made a monster.”
“A monster who does our bidding,” sneered the younger dragon.
Eskar gave him a withering look down her snout. “You hope.”
Eskar may have been baiting him, but she’d raised a crucial point. It wasn’t obvious that the Old Ard could rely on Jannoula. She hated dragons; I remembered how contemptuously she had spoken of them, how upset she’d been about Orma and me being friendly. She had talked her way out of prison at last, I suspected; the Old Ard believed they were using her, and she let them believe that.
Eskar had succeeded in provoking the youngster. Wisps of smoke leaked from his nostrils and he quivered all over, itching to fight her but unable to lunge because he was propping up the aged archivist. “You are a blot on draconic purity, Eskar. We know all about you, how you lived with a deviant in Porphyry and loved him, how you are afflicted with a creeping sympathy for quigs. We will burn out this cancer, to our last breath. It doesn’t matter how many of us die: two pure dragons are all we need to renew the race to its former—”
He cut off with a squawk. The elderly archivist, sudden as a snake, had clamped his crusty jaws upon the back of the youngster’s neck, just below his head. The hatchling’s jaws opened and shut reflexively, and his eyes rolled. The archivist held on until the younger dragon lost consciousness; when he let go, the hatchling’s head flopped to the floor, bounced once, and lolled grotesquely.
“I’d have bitten him sooner,” creaked the old dragon, “but I have trouble with my eyes. I had only one chance to hit that nerve, and I had to get it right.” The archivist limped closer to the unconscious hatchling and leaned against him; he sagged distressingly without support.
The Ardmagar saluted the sky. “All in ard. I take it you don’t subscribe to this new philosophy?”
“I am too old for philosophy,” squawked the archivist. “And the half-human didn’t have to work as hard as all that. All it did was hold a mirror to our biases and say, ‘Look how right you already are!’
“Those disgruntled generals had been plotting against you for decades, Ardmagar. Things might never have gone beyond scheming and spying if the half-human hadn’t goaded them into action. Its uncle, General Palonn, visited once a year, but Experiment 723a didn’t require much time. ‘Comonot is impure, Uncle. You could set things right. If you had a spy in Goredd, he could put an end to this foolish treaty in one blow.’ ”
“She knew about Imlann?” I blurted, appalled by the idea that my grandfather’s attack on Comonot and the Queen last midwinter had been due to Jannoula’s influence.
The ancient dragon bared his broken fangs disdainfully. “Not by name, but the half-human was an uncanny guesser. It inferred that the generals must have a spy. Only I considered its intuitions dangerous; no one else took the creature seriously.”
The archivist coughed, a sound like crashing boulders. “And thus have we sullied our own nest. Only I am old and farsighted enough to see how the parts constitute the whole, to read the words etched into this mountainside. We Censors have enforced a species-wide amnesia, thinking to protect and preserve dragonkind, but it makes us vulnerable to flatterers and blind to lateral thinking. I may be the last dragon living who remembers the Great Mistake; those who overruled me by keeping this half-human alive are doing their best to repeat it.”
Eskar, who had been listening with interest, lowered her head submissively. “Teacher, what is this Great Mistake you mention? My memories from my time here were excised.”
“You wouldn’t remember it in any case; you would never have been told about it. I speak now only because it is clear that the Ardmagar intends to disband the Censors.” The archivist blinked his rheumy eyes, avoiding the Ardmagar’s gaze. “Nearly seven hundred years ago, my grandfather’s generation undertook a secret experiment. They captured human women and bred with them on purpose to see what would happen.”
My breath caught in my chest. Here was the experiment Orma had long wondered about. What’s more, its timing was roughly that of the Age of Saints. More corroboration for Orma’s theory about the Saints being half-dragons? “H-how many half-dragons did they breed?” I asked, my voice thin and small in the vast chamber.
“Four hundred twenty-one half-humans!” cried the archivist, testily correcting my terminology. Of course he knew the exact number; he was a dragon. I, alas, did not know how many Southlander Saints there were. One for every day of the year, at least.