Patterns in the Dark (Dragon Blood Book 4) (21 page)

“Thoughtful,” Cas said. “Did he also go into your house?”

“Not that we were aware of. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was just thinking he might have tracked us here somehow, but unless he’s become a sorcerer in his spare time, I don’t know how he could have followed us across the ocean, to multiple stops.”

“I assume he’s the one who came down on the dirigible?” Sardelle asked.

“I didn’t ask, but it seems likely,” Cas said. “And that was a civilian craft, wasn’t it?”

“Perhaps someone else in the city is aware of the dragon blood and wants to make sure the possibility of the Cofah weaponizing it is eliminated,” Sardelle said.

“Not many people should know about it,” Zirkander said. “The king, General Ort, Colonel Therrik, and possibly other men on his team.”

“Colonel Therrik,” Sardelle mused. “Perhaps he didn’t care for being left behind and took matters into his own hands.”

“I doubt he makes enough to hire Cas’s dad. If he does, I’m going to have a chat with the king about my own insufficient wages. Besides, how would he have known to send Cas’s dad
here
? We had to do some figuring to learn where the dragon was.”

“Others may have figured more efficiently.”

“Really,” Zirkander said, sounding slightly offended.

“Judging by what we’ve seen so far, this isn’t a small operation. One of the Cofah who was stationed here might have blabbed at some point.”

“Hm.”

Cas shifted her weight, feeling the press of time on her shoulders. Maybe Tolemek had been right and they should have gone inside immediately.

“Would the king hire an assassin?” Sardelle asked.

“I suppose it’s possible. We’re not close drinking buddies. He doesn’t confide his feelings about these things to me.”

“Sir,” Cas said, “I definitely got the feeling my father was planning to do something in the pyramid tonight. Maybe we should make sure we get in there right away. In case what he plans to do isn’t what we plan to do.”

“If someone in Iskandia hired him, it might just be to destroy the dragon blood,” Zirkander said.

“Or the
source
of the dragon blood,” Sardelle said.

“Er, how much does it cost to hire a sniper to kill a dragon?”

Cas didn’t have an answer for that. It didn’t sound like something that would be possible, even for her father.

“I’ll get Duck and Tolemek,” she said.

She slipped through the brush, hearing Zirkander grunt as he hefted his pack to his shoulders. Good, he was ready to go. Cas didn’t want to delay any longer.

She found Duck snoring softly as he lay on a log. But Tolemek wasn’t in the spot where she had left him. With an uneasy feeling dropping into the pit of her stomach, she circled the area, calling his name softly. Nothing except for a few frogs answered her.

* * *

Tolemek followed the wall of the ziggurat, staying close as he approached the entrance, so the guard wouldn’t see him until it was too late. He trod softly through the tall grass swaying about his waist, placing each foot with care. With one hand, he followed the lumpy, moldy contours of the great rectangular stones that had been used to build the place. With the other, he held a small leather ball that could unfurl and deliver knock-out gas. Sardelle wasn’t the only person who could convince people to take naps.

He glanced up the trail before creeping the last few steps to the entrance, making sure it remained empty. If there were any pirate treasure hunters descending on the ruins, they hadn’t made an appearance yet. He couldn’t see Zirkander and the others from down here, either. Good. Once he had Tylie out and some place safe, he could reunite with them.

A soft rain had started falling, sifting through the woven vines and leaves that comprised the ceiling far overhead. Tolemek crept to the recessed doorway, listened for a moment, and didn’t hear so much as a rustling of clothing or a sigh of breath. He leaned around the corner, ready to throw his ball at the guard’s feet.

But the guard lay crumpled on the ground, unmoving.

Tolemek glanced behind him again, expecting to see Zirkander and the others strolling down the trail, Sardelle with her hand held out, showing some indication that she had just slung her magic about. But the path remained empty, as did the entire crater.

Tolemek eased through the doorway, into a stone tunnel lit by hanging lamps that burned a stinky animal fat and left sooty stains on the walls. He knelt beside the guard, curious as to whether magic had felled him, or if something more mundane had been responsible. As soon as he touched the man’s neck, he felt the stickiness of still-warm blood and had his answer. A small dart stuck out of the side of his throat. It didn’t appear big enough to have punctured his jugular, but it might have delivered some fast-acting poison. Tolemek could name a number that might work, some that could be made from ingredients procured around here.

He pulled his hand back, wiping his fingers carefully before walking deeper into the ziggurat.

As Jaxi had mentioned, there was far more stone inside the structure than open air. The tunnel was tight, claustrophobic, and he wondered how a dragon could have found its way inside to start with. Surely, they couldn’t suck in their bellies and fly through spaces this narrow. But he no longer found himself skeptical as to whether there truly was a dragon. He might not be as sensitive as Jaxi or Sardelle, but he could feel a presence now too. Something weighing on his mind, like an impending headache.

By now, it didn’t surprise him that etchings of dragons had been carved into the walls. The edges had worn away, but many of them were still visible. Though he was determined to press ahead and find his sister, not take his time sightseeing, one block of images did make him pause. Unlike with the dragon carvings, these were paintings, the colors fairly vibrant, more recent perhaps. They were of people instead of dragons, of bare-chested warriors carrying spears and attacking other groups of warriors. The war scenes were normal enough, and wouldn’t have made him slow down, but others featured men around a fire, eating from skulls as if they were bowls. Given the dead people he had seen in the grave, the skulls cut open for examination, the parallel made him uncomfortable.

He took a deep breath and forced himself onward. Another time, he could consider the cannibalistic nature of the local tribes. After he found Tylie.

When he came to the first intersection, a maze of options opened up to him, three tunnels that continued horizontally, two holes that led downward, into darkness, and two more that rose upward. A rope dangled from one of those. Interlocking stones formed the walls on all of the passages, even those dropping into the earth. He would have assumed nothing but dirt lay beneath the “ground floor” of this strange dwelling, but clearly, it had a basement of some sort and an extensive foundation.

He would have chosen to continue straight ahead—the horizontal passages were lit—but voices came from that direction. He considered his ball and the fact that it was the only one he had remaining, then stuck it in his pocket and jumped, catching the rope instead. He pulled himself up, not certain what he would find, but the darkness should hide him from view, even if he only climbed ten or fifteen feet.

“…so ready to leave this hell,” came a muffled voice from the tunnel below. The speaker was drawing closer to the intersection, boots clomping ponderously as he walked, almost as if he was carrying something heavy.

“Think they’ll let us?” another asked, his voice also sounded oddly muffed. “If we’re not sick?”

A soft draft brushed Tolemek’s cheek. He had reached a cross passage. He patted the cool wall around him with one hand, identifying a hole about three feet wide by three feet high. He thought about pulling himself in, but the conversation below made him pause. If he could learn more about the disease, he couldn’t pass up that opportunity, especially when it might become painfully relevant soon.

“Dragon’s spit, I hope so.”

He stilled himself on the rope, hoping the men walking below wouldn’t notice it twitching. But the two figures who plodded past probably wouldn’t have noticed if the rope had hit them in the heads. They were wearing dark leather head coverings, like nothing Tolemek was familiar with. Helmets? He couldn’t tell exactly from his brief view from ten feet above the men, but they wore similar suits,
heavy
suits if the tread of those boots was an indicator. He hadn’t seen anything like them in the Cofah army.

Unfortunately, the men continued straight ahead, in the direction of the dead guard. They would know someone had infiltrated the structure before Tolemek had gone a hundred meters, before Zirkander’s team even came down from the crater. He didn’t know who had killed that guard, but it was going to make things inconvenient for everyone else.

He considered whether to go back down to the lit corridors, but decided to try the new tunnel instead. Though dark and tight, it was paralleling the one he had meant to check out below. Maybe it would end up in the same place and help him avoid the Cofah.

“Or maybe you’ll get yourself hopelessly lost,” he muttered.

Tolemek felt his way down the passage, resolving to turn around and go back to the ground level if it didn’t take him anywhere within a few minutes.

The sound of voices and other life faded from hearing, and he had the sense of being in a tomb. Every time his shoulders brushed the walls, he grew certain the tunnel was closing in on him. He was trying not to think too much about the architecture of this place and what such a small passage might have been used for, but he wondered, nonetheless. When the wall opened up to one side, he slipped out a match, wanting to make sure he wasn’t bypassing a branch in the tunnel that he might want to use.

He scraped the bulbous head on the stone floor, and flame flared to life. The light showed the tunnel continuing on but also alcoves opening up to either side ahead of him. Oblong stone boxes about two feet high rested in those openings, the sides carved with people in robes and dragons flying over their heads. It wasn’t until after his match went out that Tolemek realized he had been looking at sarcophagi. At least they weren’t painted with cannibalistic imagery. That didn’t make him any happier about crawling through the passage, but he pushed forward, anyway, hoping their presence suggested another way out. It would have been hard, if not impossible, for people to maneuver the big boxes in here via that vertical shaft.

As he crept along in the dark, he worried he had made a mistake in leaving the others. Would it have been easier to find Tylie with Sardelle’s input? Or maybe he should have attacked those two men below and tried to subdue them for questioning. In those clunky uniforms, they wouldn’t have reacted quickly. By leaving them ambulatory, so they could discover that dead entrance guard, he may have condemned Cas’s team to walking in on an alarm. He sighed, again irritated with whoever had killed that guard. He would prefer to rely on stealth until he had Tylie.

After another fifty meters, the outline of the passage grew visible, and Tolemek no longer needed a match to see the sarcophagi-filled alcoves. The route took a ninety-degree turn, and even more light became apparent, a glow slightly different from that of a fire, a more reddish tint. Maybe it was his imagination. Or maybe he was approaching some room lit by magic. Anticipation made the nerves in his stomach twitch. The intensity of his headache increased. Did dragons glow? Maybe he was about to see the creature that had started all of this, that was somehow tied to his sister. He hastened forward, banging his elbows in his eagerness to get closer.

A square of reddish light appeared after another bend. The end of the tunnel. He crept closer, not spotting a floor or ceiling beyond the opening. He forced himself to slow down, in case he was about to poke his head out on some busy area.

A cavernous opening waited for him. He had reached the hollowed core of the ziggurat. Its walls stair-stepped upward toward the top, high above him. His first thought was to wonder how the architecture could support the weight of all those giant rocks. His second was to look down.

And stare.

For a long moment, thoughts refused to form in his mind. The prone figure of a silver dragon filled much of the space below, its sleek, scaled back rising at least ten feet, even though the creature rested on the ground, its legs hidden from view under its body. Its thick sinuous tail curved about its form, almost reminding Tolemek of a dog curled up on its side to sleep. The dragon wasn’t moving, but large bunches of muscle lay beneath those scales, promising great power.

Yeah, dragons aren’t known for their wimpy natures.

Jaxi
, Tolemek blurted in his mind—he almost blurted it out loud, but he caught himself. More than the dragon might be down there.

Right below Tolemek’s perch, the walls became vertical instead of following the exterior contours of the ziggurat, and one of those walls was made from glass instead of stone. A door was set into one side with an instrument panel embedded next to it emitting the red light he had seen. There was light coming from somewhere behind the glass wall too. From his viewpoint, he could not see far into the room, only glimpsing the ends of a few tables and counters, but one held a rack of vials and another a few beakers. Had he found the laboratory where they were extracting the blood? As far as he could tell, the dragon was asleep—or unconscious—so maybe they were simply walking up, sticking a needle between its scales, and extracting its blood. Strange that the big creature would allow that, unless it was indeed working with them. Or maybe the Cofah had injured it somehow.

I don’t think that’s the case
, Jaxi thought.
Also, did you know the others are worried about you and wondering why you ran off?

Yes, I’m sure you can point them to this location, so they can do whatever it is they deem fit.
He tilted his chin toward the dragon and the laboratory below.
Is there any chance you can tell where my sister is?