Treasure. Everybody, even the half of our group who weren’t adventurers and treasure seekers, latched onto the idea of unearthing some unfathomable treasure down here as though it were a lifeline.

  And why wouldn’t they? They needed something to distract them from the fact that we were pretty much trapped unless we wanted to open the massive doors I’d closed against Behold Her’s killing mist. And who hasn’t dreamed of stumbling upon some lost or hidden fortune great enough to transform your life beyond your wildest dreams? I know I’d certainly had that dream back when I first started spelunking. Not pirate treasure or anything like that, of course, but wasn’t there a chance, however small, that of all the hundreds or thousands of people who’d come before me, I might be the one to stumble across some bushranger’s secret stash of gold bars, or a hoard of opals or stolen jewels? I’d always known that it wouldn’t happen, and yet a girl could always dream.

  Little had I known that I’d have my own hoard one day, one that rivalled any lost treasure. It was even mostly semi-legitimately acquired; it wasn’t stealing when the leaders of a city just handed over several pounds of gold, even if you did sort of have them over a barrel, nor were there any laws here about trading in ancient artifacts. Really, there was very little of my hoard that was straight up stolen. For a dragon, I was impressively law-abiding!

  More than half a day after Herald and I were rescued, as afternoon slowly moved into evening, we were working ourselves up to break open that vault door. Or try to get to it, at least. Spirits were running high, and the adventurers of the group were regaling each other with the stories of their best finds.

  “Mercies, you should have seen it!” Herald said with remembered awe. She was sitting with her back against Maglan’s chest, one of his hands resting on her stomach, and she was telling Sarina and Marvan how we’d found the perfectly preserved ancient book that was the foundation of House Drakonum’s fortune. She must have told that same story a dozen times, but I for one would never get tired of hearing it. “With our eyes, I mean. You have seen the lockbox, I know, and it has plenty of gold and silver in it now as well. But imagine never being sure if you would have a roof to sleep under in a month’s time, and then only weeks later finding that. A wealth of silver coins, enough to live on for years. And there, nestled among them, a book. A book looking almost as new as the day it was bound, with crisp pages and fine black text, and illustrations so sharp and bright that they might have been inked yesterday. I cried. I am not at all ashamed to admit that I cried.”

  “Don’t put too much meaning on that,” Mak interjected from next to her. “She’s never ashamed to cry. Very open with her emotions, our Herald.”

  “Yes, well, it deserved crying over!” Herald snapped. She tried to sound stern, but broke into a giggle as she swatted lightly at our older sister.

  “Ow! Yeah, fine, perhaps it did!” Mak cried in mock surrender, laughing as she made a half-hearted effort to fend off Herald’s playful smacks.

  Satisfied, Herald settled back against Maglan in triumph, with a huff of, “Damned right it did. And that was in some villa out in what must have been the countryside. Imagine what we might find here!”

  “What was your best haul?” Mag asked the married couple, resting his chin on Herald’s shoulder as he embraced her from behind. “You’ve been at this for a while, haven’t you?”

  “Best part of our adult lives,” Sarina said. “I got my Major pretty early, at just shy of nineteen summers, and got to be in high demand with the more serious groups of adventurers almost immediately. That’s how I met Mar—”

  Her husband kissed her on the temple, drawing a giggle out of her. Once she’d settled and kissed him back she continued. “So, that’s how we met. I just knew, on that first expedition together, that he was the one. And with the way he kept looking at me when he thought I wouldn’t notice, he clearly felt the same.”

  “I honestly thought you wouldn’t notice,” Marvan chuckled. “Learned quickly that not much gets by you.”

  “Damned right it does not,” Sarina replied, getting some laughs as she did a fair job of mimicking Herald from just a few moments earlier. “So, that was quite a few years ago now, and a respectable number of expeditions to the north or into the mountains. As for our best haul…” She turned to face her husband. “What do you think, love? The statue, or the chalices?”

  “Oh, gods, Mercies, and Sorrows, too, please do not remind me of the statue!”

  At that point Ardek chose to get involved, with an enthusiastic, “Well, now we got to hear about it, don’t we? What about this statue?”

  “Go on. Tell them,” Sarina said. “It’s long enough ago to laugh about, isn’t it?”

  Marvan, despite his earlier objection, caved immediately. Heaving a theatrically exaggerated sigh, he asked, “Do you know about the shrines in the mountains? No? Well, there are these shrines up there, hidden in shallow caves and under ledges. No idea what gods they’re to. Same as that temple we spent a few nights in, maybe. Might be to important people, for all I know. Anyway, Parvek, an old friend of ours whom we used to go treasure hunting with, he’d heard of one way up on a mountainside from some prospectors. He thought of me, of course.”

  “Yeah, I saw you climb when we were getting up here,” Maglan said. “Pretty sure you’re half goat. Or maybe spider.”

  Marvan laughed. “What can I say? I was already a damned fine climber, and then I spent a Major to become the best there ever was. Show me a wall of oiled glass, and I’ll find a way to scale it. Now, where was I?”

  “Parvek,” Sarina murmured.

  “Right. So, Parvek came to me, and Sarina and me, we’d been married for a while by then, so we were a package deal. And that suited Par just fine, since anyone would count themselves blessed to have Sarina along. So it was Par, the two of us, and two other guys we all knew and trusted. It took a few days to get out there; the place was deep into the mountains, and high up. Then we got stuck for two days in a freak storm, lost a mule to a rockslide, were attacked by sorrows-begotten gremlins in the middle of the night, and had to bargain with goblins for passage. It was a whole ordeal. You can imagine. So we finally get there, and it’s a couple hundred feet of sheer mountainside to climb, but I did it easily enough. Sarina was the only one confident enough to follow me even once I prepared a path, of course, but that was nothing new. And then we get up there, and what do we find?”

  By then everyone was listening with rapt attention. Marvan looked around the group, waiting for an answer, and finally got one from Kira. “You find a statue?” she asked timidly.

  “We found a statue,” Marvan agreed, nodding emphatically. “A statue, and what else? Tell them, dove.”

  “A statue and fuck-all else!” Sarina laughed. “Gods and Mercies, we were so… let’s just say that disappointed doesn’t even begin to describe what we felt. These shrines, if they’re untouched they’ve usually got little golden idols and magically preserved scrolls and things hidden somewhere, but my nose told me on no uncertain terms that the statue was it. There was absolutely nothing else up there! But the statue… oh, what a statue it was. The artistry and craftsmanship that must have gone into it! It was about half Marvan’s height, a woman in a robe and nothing else—”

  “You could tell, because it was open at the front,” Marvan added, doing a weird little dance with his eyebrows that left absolutely no room for interpretation as to what he meant by his comment.

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  Sarina cleared her throat loudly. “Right. Well, it was tasteful. Mostly. The robe streamed sideways a bit, so true to life that when I first saw it I thought it was some white and grey cloth caught in a wind I couldn’t feel. And the figure herself, she was so lifelike that when you touched her, you expected the surface to be warm and yielding like flesh, not the cold, hard stone that it was. Absolutely marvelous.”

  With an exaggerated groan, Marvan continued. “So we had to take it, right? We got it loose, which was another ordeal and a half, and hauled the damned thing down from there. It was the most amazing piece of stonecarving either of us had ever seen, and Sarina’s nose was damned near in love with the thing, so what could we do? Well, I say we. What I mean is that I hauled it down from there. I climbed down all those hundreds and hundreds of feet with over a hundred pounds of stone woman on my back. And then, because we couldn’t strap it to the remaining mule in a way that didn’t make us worry it might fall off and get smashed to pieces, we carried it all the way back to Karakan. My hands were useless claws half the time, just from the fatigue. And we had to fight more damned gremlins on the way back, and then there was a damned rainstorm that lasted for two days!”

  “But we got it back to the city, that’s the important part,” Sarina went on. “And when it sold, it sold for gold, and a fair bit of it. I’m sure it sits in some fine garden in the high city now, being admired by some rich old pervert.”

  “We could have lived for two years on that,” Marvan sighed. “We went through it in three months. But what’s money for, if not to spend it in good company? Excuse me, did I say something funny?”

  Off to the side, Zabra was laughing. “No, no!” she said between giggles. “It’s just… I think I know the statue, and the rich old pervert, as you put it.”

  With a burst of excitement, Sarina leaned forward. “Really?! Do tell!”

  “Her name is Sarion. She trades in cloth, and she’s one of the most prudish women I know!” Zabra fell into another burst of giggles, after which she continued, “...except when it comes to statuary. Gods, I’ve never seen so many nude or provocatively underdressed sculptures in one place, and I own several brothels! She insists that it’s not salacious as long as it’s art!”

  “And she owns the statue we found?” Sarina insisted. “You’ve seen it?”

  “Seen it? It’s the centerpiece of her collection! She shows it off any chance she gets! We had a meal together and there it was by the end of the table, a stone woman with her… everything out!” Zabra accompanied this with some unnecessarily descriptive gestures.

  After the laughter died down we decided it was time to go. The mood was as high as it could possibly get down there, and we wanted to see what we were dealing with. We’d leave the story about their chalices to some other day.

  The mood got more sombre again once we arrived. The vault was located down a hallway, behind two sets of heavy bars that came down from a wide slot in the ceiling and disappeared into the floor, where the corresponding slot was filled with dirt. There was no obvious way of opening them.

  Between those bars was a small, square room, and in that room lay four ancient bodies.

  “They did not die with the people in the chamber, did they?” Herald asked solemnly.

  “No,” I agreed. “I don’t think they did.”

  The dead hadn’t fallen where they’d sat or stood. They’d laid themselves down, or had been laid to rest, on the remains of what might once have been bedding. There was a small stove, small enough to fit through the bars we crowded by, and in one corner was a pile of what was probably weapons and armor, though they were too badly worn by time to be definitely recognizable. In another corner was a large pile of unrecognizable detritus, though a few still-recognizable shapes by the bodies suggested what the majority of that pile might be made up of: water- or wine-skins.

  It all painted a pretty grim picture.

  “They were trapped,” Kira said, her voice thick with a sympathy that reached out across the centuries to those dead souls. “They were trapped, and they were left here to die when they had nothing left to eat or drink.”

  “Yeah,” Ardek agreed, pulling her tightly against him. “Whoever else was here left in enough of a rush that they didn’t even try to break them out. Didn’t even leave them the tools to try themselves.”

  “I’d say it’s more noteworthy that they left in such a rush that they didn’t even try to get to the vault,” Mak said.

  “Sure, sure,” Ardek agreed. “Doesn’t bode well for us though, does it? I mean, if they didn’t even try to open these things, they must be pretty damn hard to open, mustn’t they?”

  Mak ballooned her cheeks, blowing out a long, frustrated breath. “Can’t really argue with that,” she said, giving one of the bars a hard smack. It didn’t so much as vibrate. “I’m thinking they opened and closed by magic, and they stopped working when that crystal cracked, or whatever it was that happened. It wasn’t enough to kill these people, but it trapped them and made it hard enough to get past that nobody even tried when they evacuated.”

  “They didn’t have a dragon, though.”

  Everyone fell into thoughtful silence at Ardek’s statement, delivered with the carefree confidence of a fool-proof solution.

  “No,” Mak finally agreed. “No, they didn’t.”

  “So what do you expect me to do?” I asked. “Just lift the thing? I’m guessing we think it goes up, yeah?”

  “It’ll be hard to get a good grip on just the bars, and there’s no way to say how deep it’s set into the floor,” my smaller sister said. “Still, it’s worth a try.”

  “I suppose…” I was willing, but I couldn’t help some doubt slipping into my voice. Not doubt in her or her suggestion, but in my own ability. Even after being healed, I still felt weaker than I was used to.

  “Nothing to be shame if fail,” Mak whispered to me in broken English. She very rarely used my human mother tongue, and it amazed me to hear it every time.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, hoping that she could feel how much I appreciated her encouragement. “No shame in failing, only in failing to try.”

  “That is not fair!” Herald complained from beside us. “Draka, you were supposed to teach me more ingliss! What happened to that?”

  “Sorry!” I laughed at her mostly performative outrage. Mercies, it felt good to laugh after the days I’d had. “We’ve both been busy, yeah? We’ll take some time soon, I promise.”

  “We had better! You were my friend first, and it is not fair that Mak gets to have a secret language and I do not!” This time the petulant way that she said it, hands on her hips, voice high and pouting, was entirely for our sake. She’d never act so childishly except to make us laugh. It was perhaps not entirely respectful to the dead, and Kira shot Herald the closest thing I’d ever seen to a dirty look between those two, but it kept my laughter going and did wonders for my mood.

  “Right,” I said, still laughing. “Mak’s right. We may as well give it a try. Worst case, we fail and we’re no worse off.” I looked around a bit and then, when I didn’t find what I was searching for, added, “We’ll need something to slide under there in case we actually manage to raise it a bit.”

  “And we should dig out some of this dirt before you try,” Herald added, back to her normal, serious self. “I do not expect it will do much, but it cannot do nothing. And it might tell us how far you need to raise the bars to be even with the floor, if it is even possible.”

  “Good call, yeah,” I agreed.

  It took a fair while of digging before Marvan struck metal some two feet below the floor. The deeper they dug the more my doubt grew, but we still decided to have a go at it.

  We must have looked absolutely comical, Mak and I, as we squeezed in next to each other. The bars were about an inch thick and spaced four inches apart, with the whole passage through which they barred passage—no pun intended—being six feet wide. Large for a doorway, but I took up so much space that Mak was pressed against my side. Then there was the sheer difference in size between us. Mak was a small woman, and squatting next to me, her hands on the bars, she must have looked absolutely tiny. I, meanwhile, almost filled the damn passage. There was no possibility of me getting anything resembling a good posture; I crouched as low as I could without laying on my stomach to avoid squashing my wings against the ceiling, and I had to contort my neck awkwardly to get close enough to the bars to grip them. Mak was going to be doing a textbook lifting from the legs; I was glad to have two healers on hand, because I was going to be lifting with my upper back and little else.

  “Are you ready?” Mak asked, and I was glad that she didn’t even try to keep a straight face as she looked at me. We both knew how ridiculous I looked, and I would have felt far more awkward if she’d tried to spare my feelings.

  “What do you think?” I said, grinning down at her.

  “As ready as you’ll ever be, then,” she said, grinning back. “I still say it’s worth a try.”

  “And I still agree. I just don’t think it’ll work. Let’s get it over with.”

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