The corridor led me on a short way before debouching into a smaller room. A mandala adorned one wall, but this one was different; a Draconean figure dominated the center of the design. I could not help but evaluate it with an artist’s eye, noting the similarities to ancient art as well as the changes. A great deal of time had passed since the height of their civilization, but religious artwork is often highly conservative, harkening back to the styles and motifs of one’s forebears. Gone was the strange perspective which depicted figures in a combination of profile and facing stances, but the Draconean still adopted a familiar posture, striding forward with its hands at its sides.
I caught myself thinking of the figure as “it,” and shook my head. “Truly,” I murmured under my breath, “I must contrive a way to see some male Draconeans.” Thus far I had no data on sexual dimorphism among their kind. Certainly the sisters had no breasts, which was only to be expected among organisms that laid eggs. (Monotremes notwithstanding—that is to say, the platypus and certain kinds of echidna—mammals are not generally oviparous.) There might well be some males upstairs, but I did not quite dare to go back up and search for them.
Indeed, I should have departed already. With one last glance about the room, I hurried back down the corridor, my little lamp flickering with my speed.
When I flung the curtain aside, two Draconeans spun to face me.
*
Ruzt leapt forward, clapping one hand over my mouth. She needn’t have bothered: by then the instinct to remain quiet was deeply ingrained in me. I sagged in boneless relief, for it was only Ruzt and Zam, not strangers, who had come upon me.
My relief did not last long.
Zam wrenched me from Ruzt’s grasp, snarling. I had seen the sisters confront their neighbours who came begging; I had never seen one in a true fury before. Her ruff stood up high, her wings spread, and her lips peeled back to expose her formidable teeth. The words she spat at her sister and myself were too gutteral for me to have any hope of making them out, but I could guess at their meaning: she was enraged that I had trespassed upon their holy place.
My reasoning in entering the temple was sound. But reasoning is of very little use when faced with a sight like that; guilt and fear came down upon me in equal quantities. I could only babble apologies in my broken Draconean: “I think no bad” was the closest I could come to “I meant no harm.” But “I am sorry” came easily to my tongue, for it was a phrase I had used a thousand times before, albeit never with such heartfelt fervor.
Zam was not mollified. She divided her snarls between me and her sister. When Ruzt stepped forward, hands outstretched, Zam hurled me toward the altar. I had seen her lift heavy sacks of feed, but had never been on the receiving end of that strength before. I was briefly airborne; then I struck a bench and went sprawling. Instinct told me to stay down, to appear as contrite and unthreatening as possible. Zam disliked me; Zam had feared me from the start. Now she could kill me with one swipe of those claws.
When she seized me again, all the restraint in the world could not keep me from yelping. Zam dragged me to my feet and shoved me forward, in the manner of one marching a prisoner to execution. But a swift, terrified glance showed me that Ruzt was re-lighting my fallen lamp and following along behind. Surely I could trust her to protect me, if Zam had decided upon my death? I did not know. Perhaps she had concluded that this enterprise was a failure, that they never should have troubled themselves to rescue a human from the snow. Our legends and Scripture were filled with tales of murderous Draconean rituals, and a part of me expected to be the victim of one now.
Zam shoved me through the opening to the left of the altar. I did not expect stairs, and half fell down several of them, catching myself against the walls. When Ruzt passed through the curtain, providing a pittance of light, I saw the path led downward in a spiral much like the one I had followed upstairs. More hibernating Draconeans? The ruler of this place, who would decide my fate?
Neither. Reaching the bottom of the steps, I stumbled into another small room, this one painted with murals in a much older style.
Zam took me by the scruff of the neck and spat out the first intelligible word I’d heard from her that day. “Look.”
I would have looked even if she had not forced me to. The murals were crude imitations of those I had seen in the Watchers’ Heart, but I could follow their meaning clearly enough. On the right, which was the customary beginning for Draconean sequences, adoring humans knelt at the feet of a splendid dragon-headed figure, who dispensed livestock, baskets of grain, and other largess to its subjects. But this was soon followed by scenes of strife: layered bands in which humans turned their backs on pleading Draconeans and set fire to buildings or killed cattle in pointless slaughter. Warfare ensued.
“This is the past,” I whispered, heedless of which language I was speaking. It might have been Akhian; it might have been Scirling. I cannot recall. “The past as you remember it.” Their account differed from ours rather a lot: Segulist and Amaneen scriptures tell of tyrannical rulers who lived in decadence and oppressed their subjects until the Lord’s prophets led the people to overthrow them. Stories in other parts of the world have their own variations on that theme.
The central image dominating the back wall also have parallels in our tales, though I had never thought to connect my own evidence to them. Human figures, now grown monstrously large, poured black liquid over a field of eggs. Inside the shells, tiny Draconean figures in postures of agony turned to grey stone.
My knees gave out from beneath me, and Zam let me fall.
The eggs on Rahuahane. I had wondered at the process that petrified them, turning the albumen to the gem we call firestone. We found that gem in so many places worldwide, often associated with Draconean sites … I had not thought it through, because my attention was on the disintegrated embryos, not the matrix that once held them. Why so much firestone? Why so many petrified eggs?
Because ancient humans had poisoned them. They had found some compound that, when poured over the eggs, induced a fatal change of state. It was the slaughter of the children from Scripture, the punishment the Lord levied upon those ancient tyrants for their sins. It was the Keongan hero Lo’alama’oiri, travelling to the cursed isle of Rahuahane and turning the naka’i to stone.
We had done that—we humans. Our ancestors had massacred unborn Draconeans in untold numbers.
Zam left me there on the floor. It was by my own will that I turned to see the end of the tale: weeping Draconeans, murdered by humans, or fleeing in terror. Retreating into mountains, hiding. The Sanctuary in which they now resided.
No wonder Zam feared me. No wonder the sisters were so determined to keep me out of sight. I was the monster of their myths: a human being, a vicious, merciless beast. Never mind that they towered thirty centimeters over me and had teeth and claws I could not hope to match. We fear poisonous snakes a hundredth our size, for they can kill us in an instant.
Were the Draconeans’ eggs hidden somewhere in this temple? Did Zam think I had come here to turn them to stone?