“Dizzy?” He tried to help with that, but her body simply needed more time to recover. “Do you want some water?”
“I want some rubbings.” Rysha squinted toward the giant dragon statue and that sacrifice table.
Remembering the dried blood on it, Trip hated the thought of her going anywhere close to it. He also hated the thought of her confirming what he’d read in the leader’s mind, that all this, the entire sacrificing cult, had come into existence because of his sire.
“Demanding patient, isn’t she?” Kaika handed her a canteen.
Rysha frowned but accepted it and reluctantly allowed herself to be lowered down.
“I’ll get whatever you need,” Trip said. “What’s a rubbing?”
“Something neither Major Blazer nor Lieutenant Ravenwood was interested in doing to me while we were alone in a bedroom,” Duck said.
“That could be a lot of things,” Trip said.
Rysha dug into her pack and pulled out pieces of paper and charcoal. “Here. I only need them if you see carvings of writing, hieroglyphs, or interesting artwork. I’m not particularly interested in contributions from the cultists, as I believe they’re all much more recent. I get the sense that the outpost has been used off and on for various purposes by the locals from Lagresh.” Her lips thinned in disapproval, and she handed paper and charcoal to Trip. She handed identical items to Kaika and Duck.
“We’re rubbing things too?” Duck asked.
“Anything interesting. The faster you finish…”
Blazer sighed. “Do it. I’ll stand guard, but I’m already hearing some clangs from up above. I don’t think it’ll be long before they circle back down to check.”
We have a few minutes, Jaxi said. I’m prying tiles off the walls near the search groups and dropping them with a clatter. They’re convinced the party is hiding up there.
Prying tiles and breaking them? Trip asked. I better not mention that to Rysha. She’ll call you a delinquent for defacing an ancient ruins site.
I hardly think she has room to judge when she viciously slew one of the inhabitants. Jaxi shared the image of a giant tarantula, before and after death.
I don’t think spiders count as significant archaeological finds.
“Trip?” Rysha asked.
“Yes?” He stretched a hand toward her. “Do you need something else?” He worried some of her pain had come back.
“My rubbings.” She quirked her eyebrows in the direction Duck and Kaika had gone.
He snorted. “Yes, ma’am,” he said and trailed after them.
“Oh, and get me a sample of that mold, will you? Now that the water is receding, you can see that it truly is rather lush and interesting. I wonder if your mother found a use for it in one of her compounds.”
“Lush and interesting?” He made a face at the spongy stuff as he walked over to it.
“It’s surviving down here, despite dozens of feet walking over it however often. It acts more like moss than mold, but it’s definitely from the fungi kingdom. How intriguing that it’s growing on the rock like mold would usually grow on a piece of bread. Do you think it derives sustenance from the rock? And look at the variety. It’s like a whole garden of mold.”
“I think there’s a reason you don’t mind me being odd,” Trip said.
“You’re not going to call me odd, are you?” Rysha waved at the mold—implying that he should get to work collecting her sample.
“How about quirky?”
“I might accept that.”
12
Rysha managed to be good and rest for five entire minutes before curiosity drove her toward a doorway in the wall behind the dragon statue. A crudely improvised curtain hung on a metal rod, covering up the entrance, and clanks and clatters came from behind it. Trip had said the man they’d freed, Moe, was searching in there. Since the water level had fallen, she decided to ford the river to see what was keeping his attention occupied for so long. Another chamber?
More like an office, a voice spoke into her mind. Jaxi.
Had Rysha not been so exhausted, she might have jumped with surprise. The soulblade had spoken to her before, but not often.
An office full of garish things, Jaxi amended.
Like archaeologically significant artifacts?
I’d call it junk.
Do you have an archaeologist’s training?
You mean do I have the capacity to consider dusty old gross stuff anything other than junk? No.
Rysha felt certain Jaxi meant to deter her for some reason, but that only piqued her curiosity more.
She pushed aside the curtain and spotted the white-haired man on his knees, poking through a crate under one of many stone slab tables pushed against the walls of a room the size of her father’s study back home. The carpet of mold continued in here, and his knees were planted in it as he searched.
An office might have been a reasonable term for the stone room, but there weren’t any papers or pens that Rysha could see, and only a handful of books, the pages yellowed, the covers worn and faded. She might have headed straight for them, but all the ceramic cups on the tables made her pause, as did the bas-relief images carved into walls that appeared to be made from a softer stone than those in the majority of the outpost. Based on the style, Rysha suspected the artwork had been done by the cult rather than the dragon riders. Though dragons did feature prominently. They dominated the images, or maybe it was the same dragon repeated over and over. It posed often with its wings spread as it peered down at human beings chained on the floor before it.
Rysha realized these images were similar to what the cultists must have intended to recreate with the women they’d captured. How many times had these sacrifices happened over the years?
Steeling her heart, she walked in and examined the carvings more closely. “I don’t think these were original to the outpost. It’s hard to date them by simply looking, but they don’t even vaguely illustrate what dragon-rider outposts embodied, nor was the style favored by Iskandians of the time.” She thought of the dragon curving along the staircase railing. That had been much more in line with what she would have expected from the place.
“Absolutely not,” Moe said, pulling back from the crate and rising to his feet. He wore pocket-filled cut-off trousers that revealed knobby knees and wiry leg muscles that hadn’t lost much of their tone with age. “Those brotherhood fools perverted this whole outpost. As if the looting wasn’t bad enough. That dragon out there was originally Samar Shola, a gold who, along with his rider, deposited the first criminals on this continent, a rogue sorcerer and his equally rogue dragon. They’d schemed to steal the independence from the free clans of Iskandia through deceit and treachery. After depositing the criminals, Samar Shola and his rider led others to build an outpost here. The Rider Wars hadn’t begun yet and wouldn’t for many more centuries. They just believed someone had to keep an eye on those early, dangerous criminals.”
Rysha gazed at him. “Did something here tell you that, sir, or have you—”
“Of course, I’ve studied this area extensively. You can’t find the Forbidden Treasure of Amon Akarth without knowing something of the continent.” He made a disgusted noise, glared at the cups, and stalked toward the door. “My belongings are not here. Tell me those fools didn’t simply cast them into the ocean. My notebooks held years and years’ worth of work.” Groaning, he stalked out without a glance toward Rysha.
She shivered as she looked around the room again. Normally, she could study long-past civilizations and cultures without passing judgment on practices that had ranged from murder to ritual suicide to cannibalism, but this wasn’t the long past. This was now.
With Moe gone and his human presence, albeit an indifferent one, no longer in the room, she found the space more chilling. She was about to turn and leave, but noticed a lidded ceramic bowl on a table, colorful bones and skulls painted on the side in purples, greens, and reds. Had the subject of the artwork not been so macabre, it would
have looked like a soup tureen in someone’s kitchen set.
Rysha crossed the room, lifted the lid, and peeked inside. She immediately regretted it. The smell of butchered meat left out too long oozed out, and dark, thick blood pooled inside, several liters of it. A few meaty chunks floated around in the bowl.
She dropped the lid back down and hustled away. There was nothing to prove it was human blood, but she couldn’t imagine it being anything else, given the prisoners and the sacrifice table in the cavern outside.
As she backed toward the door, she bumped into something and gasped, spinning.
Trip lifted his hands, rolled paper and her charcoal in them.
“This place is horrible,” she blurted, not sure if he’d seen her looking in the bowl, or if he’d seen what was in it.
Judging from the sad cast to his eyes, he knew.
“I’ve come to the same conclusion,” he said quietly. “It’s appalling to think that all this might have evolved because of my… because of him.” His jaw tightened.
Rysha grimaced. She hadn’t meant to remind him that his sire, whether inadvertently or purposefully, might be at the center of this. “It could be some other dragon,” she said. “I haven’t had a chance to spend time looking at the rubbings yet. The name was only partially visible.”
“It’s not.”
“You’re sure?”
“We ran into the cult leader, and I saw into his mind.” Trip closed his eyes. “He named Agarrenon Shivar.”
“That doesn’t mean the dragon was responsible though. He may have no idea what the humans here were doing. There were a lot of old religions built up by primitive cultures that deified dragons. I’m sure it didn’t help that dragons like Bhrava Saruth were flying around, proclaiming themselves gods.” Rysha smiled.
Trip’s dark expression did not lighten. He handed her the rubbings he’d made and said, “If what that cult leader believed was even vaguely true, then Agarrenon Shivar was there at the inception. If it wasn’t his idea to begin with, he seemed content to go along with it.”
“People will think all sorts of odds things are the truth in order to validate their beliefs.”
Trip looked at the tureen of blood, shook his head slowly, and walked out.
Rysha wanted to protest his certainty that Agarrenon Shivar had been at the root of all this, but until she went over her findings more carefully, she wouldn’t know if she should. Still, whatever Agarrenon Shivar had been—or done—it didn’t mean Trip was to blame.
She headed for the doorway, but paused, eyeing the books. Though she ought to have learned by now not to poke her nose into things in here, she veered over to take a look. To leave a book unopened seemed a sin.
They were all handwritten, even the ones that appeared to be from the post-printing-press era. Two were full of notes scribbled in a brown ink that had faded over the years. She thought it might be blood, or blood-based, but decided not to dwell on that. One was a handbook with instructions for the cult leader, and she had the urge to drop it in a fire somewhere so nobody could find it and carry on. The others appeared to be logs of the ceremonies over the years. Judging by the dates, they held one of their sacrificial rites every full moon. She shuddered to think of all the blood spilled on that table over the years.
In the last book she opened, the pages were made from parchment rather than paper, but they were still brittle and frail. They’d all fallen out of the binding and were simply stored inside the cover. She recognized the writing inside as being in the trade language of the ancient world, one usually more concerned with economics and bookkeeping than recording history, but who knew what the book might contain? With time, she could decipher the contents. Maybe it was the original handbook for the cult. Or something else altogether.
Since she couldn’t take rubbings of written pages, Rysha borrowed the book to examine it more thoroughly later. She wasn’t sure how she would manage to return it, but she wanted to peruse it to see if it contained any useful clues.
She didn’t know if it would be possible, but she would love to exonerate Agarrenon Shivar from the taint Trip now associated with him. At the least, she wanted to know more about the dragon and whether it would truly be useful to find him. If he had condoned and fostered evil among humans, then perhaps he would be best left unfound.
• • • • •
Rysha had recovered some of her energy by the time the group headed up the stairs, but she noticed the weight of her pack far more than she had earlier in the day. She trailed after Blazer and Trip, with Duck and Kaika, and the rescued women following after them. She was surprised none of the cultists had found their group, especially after she’d seen the leader’s body sprawled on the floor near the base of the stairs, but Trip paused now and then, his head tilting as his eyes grew distant, and she suspected he and the soulblades were continuing to lead searchers astray on the floors above.
“Got it,” came an exuberant call from below them. Moe appeared at the bottom of the stairs, waving a leather journal with a lock on it and a pack bristling with climbing gear and numerous digging tools. “My belongings were cast in a pile with refuse to be thrown into the sea. Can you believe it?”
“You’re lucky these people don’t throw the trash out very often,” Kaika said.
Moe threw her an aggrieved look and joined in at the end of the group.
Would he want to come with them on their journey? There was an empty seat in one of the fliers, and he seemed to know a lot about the area. Rysha had no idea what they would do with the women. Would they be safe if Blazer simply pointed them down the path that led back to Lagresh? They might not be from the city. The one with the Iskandian accent had said she was the daughter of a merchant captain and had been kidnapped from their ship in the harbor.
As the group climbed higher and higher up the spiral staircase, Rysha caught her hand straying often to the rubbings the others had made for her and a couple she had done herself with the last of that paper. She had that book to examine too.
“Where will we go after this, ma’am?” she asked Blazer, hoping the answer would be that they would find a quiet place to make camp and contemplate their options. That would give Rysha time to study her finds.
Blazer shrugged without looking back. “Moe mentioned a mountain. Jralk Mountain.”
“Perhaps we should find some place to camp, and you could find it on a map while I study the various clues I’ve found.” Rysha called them clues in the hope that Blazer would be more likely to approve a clue-studying session. In truth, she had no idea if anything would help them find Trip’s sire.
“It’ll only take me two minutes to find a mountain on a map. It’ll take you two months to look at your clues.”
“I can restrain myself to a brief look. Say two hours? Doesn’t the group need to find a place to camp for the night?”
“We can’t camp on the beach or anywhere near the city,” Blazer said. “I checked in with Leftie earlier. He said a boat motored past, so the Lagresh authorities, such as they are, likely know our fliers are on the beach. They probably also know that we’re the reason their other boats never returned.”
“So, we can move the fliers ten miles inland and—”
“Let’s just get out of here and figure it out up there.” Blazer waved up the never-ending staircase.
Trip looked back and smiled at Rysha. He seemed preoccupied by dark thoughts, so she appreciated the gesture.
Realizing Moe might be as good a resource as her rubbings, Rysha dropped back until she was climbing next to the man. He didn’t seem to notice. He had his journal open and his pencil out, and he was putting checkmarks next to items on a list.
“Blazer said you think Agarrenon Shivar can be found at Jralk Mountain, sir?” she prompted.
“What?” He squinted at her.
Rysha didn’t know if he hadn’t fully heard the question or if she’d misinterpreted Blazer’s comment and confused him.
“We’re looking for Ag
arrenon Shivar, sir. That’s our mission.”
He glanced at the nametag on her uniform.
“I’m Lieutenant Ravenwood,” she said, realizing she should introduce herself. “Artillery officer training to be elite troops.”
“You’re not related to Jyvona Ravenwood, are you?”
“That’s my mother,” Rysha said, pleased at the recognition. She should have led with that. An archaeologist—or treasure hunter—would be more interested in the history scholars in her family than in her nascent military career.
“I’ve read her papers on infrastructures of the ancient world, and they’re moderately accurate, but it’s clear she hasn’t gone out into the field to look for herself very often.”
“She’s a full-time professor at the university,” Rysha said, her pleasure being replaced by a twinge of irritation at the dismissal from this… treasure hunter. He was probably the type of person to disturb ancient sites and think nothing of looting from them. Of course, since she had taken that book, she wasn’t in a position to judge.
“Teaching.” He sniffed. “What did you ask?”
“About Agarrenon Shivar. An elder gold dragon. We’re looking for him.”
“So I heard. I don’t imagine that will go well since he’s been dead for millennia.”
Rysha looked up the stairs toward Trip’s back. “We have evidence to suggest otherwise.”
Moe shook his head. “I came across a long list of known dragons once when I was looking for the lost treasure hoards of two elder golds that were known to collect valuables and squirrel them away. Agarrenon Shivar was on the list. Not as a hoarder, but as one of dozens of dragons that died from a virus that some early human scientists stumbled across. With the assistance of a bronze dragon that was tired of his lowly place in the pecking order, they found a way to encapsulate and disseminate the virus to key dragon leaders. Golds and silvers, predominantly.”
“Are you referring to the Kantiot Virus, sir?” Rysha had read about the illness that had caused the deaths of many dragons long ago, but she hadn’t heard anything about it being man- or dragon-made.