Down they went, Jacob drawing ahead of Iljish, farther and farther until I could scarcely make him out at all in the darkness.
Then he moved, and a moment later Iljish turned to beckon me. Jacob had seen nothing, heard nothing; we could risk light.
I struck a match and lit the torch. We had lanterns, too, but those would not make the slightest difference in this enormous, black void. Even the blazing light of the torch created only a small island of light, bobbing nervously around me as I picked my way down to join the men.
“Stay behind me, Isabella,” Jacob murmured, not turning. “I don’t want the torch to blind me.”
In case he had to shoot something. But the cave had a dead feeling about it; the subconscious mind hears breathing, tiny movements, all the little sounds of life, and here we heard none. Nor, as we began to examine our surroundings, did we see any of the castings or marks we associated with a dragon’s lair. The stone all about us was formed into queer shapes, stalactites and stalagmites and things I didn’t have names for, flowing sheets of stone I would not have believed until I saw them for myself.
What we did note, faintly near the entrance, and more strongly the farther we went, was the smell. “Faugh!” I whispered, wishing, for the first time in my life, that I had one of those ridiculous little nosegays young ladies carry around and sniff from every time they want to politely imply an insult. “What is that? Are there dragon eggs down here that have gone rotten?”
“Sulfur,” Jacob murmured back. Our sibilants rebounded from the stone, whispering off into the depths of the cavern. “There must be a source of it here somewhere.”
Neither of us was a chemist, so I will annotate my husband’s comment with a detail from Mr. Pegshaw’s excellent geological treatise, Methods of Cavern Formation in a Variety of Environments, which will become quite relevant later. The rotten-egg smell came not from deposits of sulfur, but from hydrogen sulfide gas seeping up from some source far below. (We were fortunate in the extreme that its concentration was not high enough to pose an incendiary risk—and that we did not go deep enough into the cavern to encounter the stronger pockets.) When this gas meets water, it forms sulfuric acid, which created the cave system whose topmost chamber we were now exploring. The Drustanev Caverns, as they are now called, have been the object of mapping efforts by later speleologists, and as I understand it their more accessible parts have become something of a tourist attraction in recent years; but the full extent of the system is still unknown, and the mighty void we had entered is off-limits to all.
We certainly felt like trespassers. But as the floor leveled out for a time, Jacob ventured outward from the wall; we had no fear of becoming lost, not so long as we could see the pale oval of the cavern mouth at the top of the slope. And, before we had gone very far at all, we found something entirely unexpected.
I thought at first it was another rock formation. The light glistened off it oddly, though, and I realized—first with curious surprise; then with an unpleasant jolt—that it was a pile of rotting meat.
A pile in which a limb could be discerned.
To be precise, the hind leg of a dragon.
Had the sulfur stench not obliterated the competing smell, I suspect I would have felt very ill. As it was, my thoughts leapt instead to my original, nearly discarded hypothesis: that this was, in fact, the lair of a mighty rock-wyrm, and furthermore one that ate its own kindred. That, not the rot, was what turned my stomach.
Iljish was morbidly fascinated, going forward to inspect it. Jacob turned, quite incautiously, to stare straight at me and the torch. “Isabella—” he said.
My own logic had followed the same trail. The leg had not been eaten; it had been dropped here, perhaps in rather battered condition to begin with, and then left. I could not guess at rates of decay, not in this environment, where even flies would not come … but I only knew of two rock-wyrms that had died so recently. And one of them I had examined in quite a bit of detail before its body vanished.
This was, I was certain, the hind leg of our own missing dragon.
Nor was it alone. Farther up, we discovered what I could only surmise were the remaining pieces of the beast, though by then it was far enough gone that I was not eager to conduct a tally. We could discern enough to be sure that it had indeed been torn apart, as Mr. Wilker indicated that shocking morning; but it had not been carried off as food. Instead the dragons had borne the remains here.
Why?
We had been long enough about our explorations that my torch was beginning to gutter. The noxious air, too, took its toll on us. Collecting Iljish, we fled back to the green quiet of the ravine, and there collapsed on handy bits of stone to stare at one another and conduct a discussion the boy could not follow in the least, for we spoke Scirling. Neither of us was in any state of mind to force our ideas into Vystrani.
“Have you ever heard of elephant graveyards?” Jacob asked.
“Only in very sentimental tales,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow. The sun now stood overhead, bathing the still air with heat, but I could not say with honesty that was the cause of my perspiration. “I thought them a cloying notion invented for children.”
Jacob rinsed his mouth with water and spat into the underbrush, trying to clear away the sulfuric tinge. “They may or may not be real. Hilford would know. But dragon graveyards … no one has even speculated as to those.”
“We don’t know it is a graveyard,” I pointed out. “One burial—or deposition, or whatever I should call it—is not a pattern. But if there were others, they will have disintegrated by now.”
Because I am a practical woman, the thought did cross my mind that we could test the graveyard theory by killing another dragon, and seeing if his fellows carried him off in the same way. But although I am not above shooting creatures for science, I balked at doing it so callously, to answer only a single question.
Indeed, I was rather less sanguine about having done it at all, now that I faced the notion of dragons actually caring what happened to their brethren. It seemed such a peculiarly human thing to do—something that set us apart from the beasts. If they mourned their own kind …
At least we no longer feared the return of a hypothetical queen dragon, though we kept one wary eye out in case dragons of ordinary size were to visit the ravine. Indeed, I found myself wondering if the reason our dead beast had been torn to bits was because he was otherwise too heavy for his fellows to carry here. Without a tame dragon to try with different loads, I couldn’t be certain. Or perhaps if we observed one in the act of carrying off a bear … I dragged my thoughts back to the present question. Was this an aberration, or a pattern?
Mindful of the need to climb back out of the ravine before it grew too late, we could only explore a little farther. Torches in hand, we went back into the cave, finding once more the rotting pile (we had not imagined it, then), and branching out from there.
We almost overlooked the evidence. There were, as I have said, many peculiar rock formations in that cave; an additional knob or stick here or there hardly attracted the eye. I am embarrassed to say we might have missed it entirely had I not quite literally tripped over it.
My torch skittered across the ground, and Iljish picked it up. Jacob came to help me to my feet, and stopped halfway through the act of pulling me up. My heels slid across the slick stone, dropping me hard on my rump, and I made an indignant sound. “If you are going to offer, then kindly do not—”
Then I saw what he had already spotted.
It stuck out from the side of a lumpy pile, encrusted with needlelike crystals (those I had not shattered with my foot), but still recognizable as the epiphysis of a long bone. Deformed and half buried as it was, I could not identify it precisely; the femur of a small dragon, perhaps, or the brachial humerus of a larger one. Too large to come from a bear—that much was certain.
In a low voice, Jacob said, “Why has it not disintegrated?”
All in a rush, my brain started working again.
I had been so distracted by the wonder of a dragon graveyard that I had clean forgotten the simplest fact of dragon osteology: their bones did not long survive their deaths. Even the one we had hunted should have long since deteriorated to the point of collapsing under its own weight. This one had clearly been here long enough for stone to form around it; by now, it should have been dust.
THE GRAVEYARD
Jacob and I exchanged wide-eyed stares. Scrambling to my feet without his hand, I seized my torch from Iljish and ran back across the cavern floor to where we had left the dragon carcass.
Rotting meat could not deter me now. I plunged my hand into the mess, seeking. Sure enough, some of the bone crumbled beneath my fingers—but not all. I shouted toward Jacob, my voice echoing madly off the stone. “It should be entirely gone by now, should it not? Lord Hilford said.”
“Yes,” he shouted back. “Isabella, come see! I think all of this is bone!”
Once more across the cavern; how I did not fall and break my neck, running on that slick and uneven surface, I will never know. Jacob had given his torch to the mystified Iljish, and was hammering at the lumpy stone with the butt of his rifle. Soon he had cracked a bit off, and I realized what he meant: what I had taken for a cave formation was in fact a layer of accretion over a pile of dragon bone.
There could be no question now; any bone that had been there long enough for such a process to occur should have been dust ages since. “It’s somehow … petrified,” I said, dumbfounded.
Jacob raised his rifle again, then lowered it abruptly. “No, I’m just destroying it. We need—”
He stopped, helpless. What we needed was a stone carver’s tools, something delicate enough to chisel these remains out of their stony matrix without damaging them. But we had brought nothing of the sort with us—not to this cave, and not to Vystrana. Who would ever have thought we would need them?
“There are bound to be more samples here,” I said, though I shared his frustration. “What’s important is that we bring something back for Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker to see. Get a few more chips, and we’ll break off this long bone; we don’t have all of it, but some is better than none.”
With a pained look on his face, Jacob smashed his rifle down where the long bone vanished into the pile, cracking it clean through. We collected all we could, and might have gone looking for more, save that Iljish tugged at my sleeve. “Please, ma’am—”
I looked where he was pointing, and saw the light beginning to dim at the cave mouth. If we were to climb out of the ravine before it got dark, we needed to go soon.
Reluctantly Jacob and I bundled up our prizes and left the cavern. Even with our ropes, getting up the ravine wall was no easy matter; I could manage the partially walkable bits, but that bottom twenty feet, purely vertical, defeated me. I had not the first clue how to climb a rope, nor the arm strength with which to follow Jacob’s well-meant advice. I finally allowed Iljish to go before me, then clung to the line while the two of them hauled me up by main force. (Between that and the abseiling, I think I left enough skin behind on those rocks to cover an entire second person.)
With our bone fragments packed away as carefully as we could manage, we ate a hasty meal, then lay down to sleep. Or to try; Jacob took the first watch, and I knew it was because he was as wakeful as I.
Curling up on my side to regard him, I said, “Jacob—do you think this has anything to do with the attacks?”
He had, of course, been considering the same thing. He crossed his arms over his knees. “At first I thought it might—when we found the carcass. It might have been some change in the dragons’ behavior, them bringing their dead here, and showing aggression to people. But with those new bones, or rather the older ones … those must have been there for years, Isabella. Who knows how many. Long before the attacks began.”
“Unless it comes and goes. Dragons might have been attacking people when those older bones were placed there, too. If there were people in the region; as you say, who knows how old they are.”
“But what’s the logic, then? Why should dragons start bringing their dead here, then stop, then start again—and why should that have anything to do with this aggression? No, it makes more sense that it’s a disease.”
Not one brought about by eating their own kind, though. I picked up a twig and stabbed at the ground beyond the edge of my blanket. “Perhaps it’s something to do with this Zhagrit Mat.”
Jacob’s eyes glittered with the last flickers of the fire. He did not answer at first; then he shook his head, bowing it until it nearly rested on his folded arms. “I should say that’s superstitious nonsense. But I’m not certain of anything any longer.”
“Zhagrit Mat didn’t start haunting the village until after I went to the ruins,” I said. “The attacks started far earlier. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some connection that I’m missing.”
The last log-end collapsed into a heap of embers with a muffled sigh. Jacob said, “You won’t figure it out by fretting. Get some rest, Isabella.”
And hope for answers in the morning. I drew the blanket closer around my shoulders and waited for sleep to come.
EIGHTEEN
Lord Hilford’s answer from the boyar — More trouble in the night — Consequences in the morning — Return to the ruins — What Dagmira and I saw there
The hike back to Drustanev was quicker (though more punishing to the knees) as we descended toward the village, and blessedly undisturbed by dragons. We had a splendid view of Gritelkin’s house as we came in, and I saw the telltale signs of activity that said someone had returned.
It proved to be both Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker, each of who must have pressed quite hard on their journey for them to be back so soon. Unless— “Did you manage to see the boyar?” I burst out as we came into the workroom, suddenly worried that something might have turned Lord Hilford back.
“I did, and where the devil have you two been?” the earl said. He went on before I could answer him, making it clear the question had been rhetorical. “Really, Camherst—for a man who was so reluctant to let his wife come to Vystrana in the first place, you’re remarkably willing to drag her all over it now that she’s here.”
Jacob looked shamefaced at the accusation. For my own part, I was taken aback; it was unlike Lord Hilford to speak that way, when he had been so readily agreeable before. “Jacob dragged me nowhere,” I said with asperity. “We went for a lovely hike and discovered something completely unknown to the science of dragon naturalism—but you will not hear it until you say what has put this burr in your brain, that you should accuse my husband like that.”
Mr. Wilker had been seated on a stool by the window, his face in his hands; now he sat up and said, “The creature was stalking him.”
I blinked. “What?”
All my thoughts had been bent upon the wonderful news we had to tell them once they returned; I had quite forgotten what had sent Mr. Wilker after Lord Hilford in the first place. “We found more prints burned into the ground,” he said. “Along the path toward the boyar’s lodge.”
“Did you see it?” I asked Lord Hilford, with perhaps a touch more eagerness than was polite. I suppose I should have asked first if he was well, but I could see with my own eyes that he was; the other had to be asked.
“No,” the earl said, “and I wasn’t about to let that priest drown me in a stream, either. But that night…” He harrumphed into his mustache. “Well, I don’t know what I heard. Menkem declared I wasn’t coming back to Drustanev, though, unless I let him do his little ritual. It seemed more politic to agree.”
Jacob admitted, “We’ve had no trouble—not of that sort—since we let him, ah, ‘purify’ us.”
“Neither did we,” Mr. Wilker said.
“That’s settled, then,” I said briskly. “No more hauntings—and we can show you this.”
In the interests of not misleading the reader, I should admit that more than scientific rationality led me to dismiss the specter
of Zhagrit Mat so quickly. I had managed to half forget the sounds I heard, and the footprint burned into the slope behind our house; I did not deny the evidence, but I did trivialize it, for it had not been repeated. Hearing that Lord Hilford had been stalked by the beast—or whatever it was—unnerved me badly, and I responded by ignoring it.
This is not, of course, a terribly profitable response, and I do not recommend it to the reader. Problems rarely go away because you ignore them, and this one would prove no different.
But the choice was made, and the samples from our cave expedition laid out. These distracted Lord Hilford on the spot. He snatched them up, exclaiming, and Mr. Wilker was not far behind. The earl’s assistant, however, withheld his acclaim, examining the fragments closely.
“It’s a damned shame you could not get anything intact,” he said. I bristled at his critical tone, which seemed to imply that the shortcoming was due to sheer laziness on our part, and not a lack of suitable equipment. “With pieces this incomplete, and so crusted with minerals, I can’t agree that they are certainly dragon bone. More likely some other large predator—a bear, perhaps.”
“It is not a bear,” I said sharply before Jacob or the earl could respond.
Mr. Wilker gave me a pitying look. “On what do you base your declaration, Mrs. Camherst?” He laid the faintest stress on my title of courtesy, which put my back up as if I had been laced into the most severe of corsets. “What are the skeletal characteristics which mark ursine anatomy? Unless you have been studying a great many books we have not brought with us, my knowledge of such matters is far more complete than yours; it is my judgment we shall be trusting in this matter.”
A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent Page 20
