Through the Ashes- The Complete Series, page 8
part #1 of Through the Ashes Series
She said, “My mom told me how they’d met, once. They’d fought together when the Otto-humans found a passage into the warrens.”
Jaekob’s eyebrows rose. They’d fought together? That didn’t sound like his mother. “Safeholme is nowhere near Ottoman. Where were the warriors while that was happening?”
She looked down at her hands in her lap, and fidgeted with her fingers. “She said that’s what made most of us move to this place and creating Safeholme. Our warriors had Risen, at the time, and were fighting the Otto-humans. We burned most of Istanbul to the ground, too. We beat their army in our tunnels, and after they got the fire put out, they left us alone. That tunnel was collapsed so that they couldn’t find us again.”
Jaekob was speechless. The idea of his mother in battle was almost comical. She had been a petite woman who was, for a dragon, very gentle. That was how he remembered her, at least. “So. If the humans hadn’t attacked our home, our mothers would never have been friends, and you and I…”
“Would never have met or been friends, yeah.” Jewel picked up the cork, which had landed on the blanket between them, and tossed it at him. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that.”
“Thanks for telling me this. It means a lot to learn more about my mother. I only remember her as a small, graceful woman who smiled a lot and almost always got her way by being nice to everyone.”
“Well, your father is probably the busiest person in Safeholme. Too busy to talk about painful memories. My family may be poor, but I spend most of my time with my dad, either in the shop or after closing up for the night, at home. We get to talk a lot.”
He smiled, thinking how nice it must have been to grow up so close to her father. That was definitely not his experience. “I probably spend more time with Bruindy, my arms trainer, than I ever do with my dad. That’s only going to get worse when I tell him my plans.”
Jewel put one hand on his arm and took a drink of wine. Wiping her mouth, she said, “I thought you already told him you didn’t want to follow his footsteps.”
“True, but I didn’t exactly put my foot down, either. Like most of our talks, it was sort of a one-sided conversation. Plus, we never finish anything. As soon as it gets uncomfortable, some business magically pops up that he has to take care of right away.”
“So what are you going to do?” she said, peering at him intently.
He was keenly aware of her hand, still on his arm, and felt little tingles like electricity running up and down, raising the little hairs on his arm. “Um. Well, I just have to have another talk with him. Did you talk to your fa about our idea?”
“Buying into his shop as a partner and working together? Yes.”
Jaekob looked at her expectantly, one eyebrow raised. “And?”
“And he laughed and said he’d believe that when he saw it, but he thinks you’re a good man. Stupid and young, but learning the art quickly, and determined. He says that’s the most important quality.”
“And do you think that’s the most important quality?” He fidgeted with the cup in his other hand and it was a place to look at that wasn’t her. Actually, he wasn’t sure what he hoped she’d say in response. Or did he? He lost his train of thought when she began to stroke his arm lightly with two fingertips.
“I think those are important qualities. But if we’re going to be together like that… I mean, working together… then liking who you work with is more important than how fast they pick up the trade. With how long dragons live, there’s plenty of time to pick up the skills, and you’re already decent enough to be an apprentice smith.”
Jaekob felt his heart beat faster. Did she have a double meaning in there, somewhere? Did he want her to have?
After a comfortable silence while they finished their wine, she said, “I feel like we’re closer now than ever before. Am I an idiot? I mean, I like our time together and who you’re becoming. All that ‘growing up’ stuff, you know.”
He smiled and put his hand on hers, still on his arm. “We’re already adults, fool. No, you’re no fool. I feel… well, I hope you feel like I do. I think being with you all day is going to be my favorite part of buying into your fa’s shop.”
They spent the next hour chatting about nothing, as being together was the best part of the conversation. When the leisurely lunch was done, she helped him pack the basket up and fold the blanket. They were both smiling again when they finally left the abandoned chamber.
“I still can’t believe you told your dad what you really want to do, even if you didn’t put your foot down, as you put it,” Jewel said as they left the old, dusty chamber and headed into the tunnel system toward home. “Weren’t you nervous? I can’t imagine telling my fa if I wanted to leave the shop and become a trash hauler.”
Jaekob bumped into her, grinning, knocking her almost into the wall. She laughed as she shoved him even harder, and he did hit the other wall. He rubbed his shoulder where it had hit. “Ouch.”
“Don’t start it if you can’t finish it,” she said, grinning. Of course, it was all just horsing around. “But seriously, who knows what your future holds now? I mean, you could do anything. Everything is possible for you. You wouldn’t even be pressed into pair-bonding with some Councilor’s snotty, over-privileged daughter. Unless you’re into that kind of girl…”
Ha, she was always great at fishing for compliments. But was it more than that? Jaekob reeled from the possibilities. Had that been a different, more hopeful tone than her usual snubbing of women in his social class?
Watching her carefully from the corner of his eye, he said, “You have a point. If I wanted to pair-bond with a trash hauler, I suppose I could.”
The wall jumped out and hit his arm. Or rather, she shoved him into it, again. “If that’s what you want, go ahead. You don’t have any women you’ve known your whole life who’d have eggs with you, jerkface.”
“None who haul trash.”
They shared a laugh at that. Up ahead, though, a noise crept into hearing and then grew louder. There were bells and chimes mixed into a background noise of a low, non-stop hum that reverberated through the hallways.
Jewel stopped suddenly. “Jaek… Is that for the missing egg?”
Jaekob cocked his head, extending his senses, summoning a bit of his dragon to better hear the growing racket. “I think it must be. I didn’t know they had Dirges for lost eggs, but I’ve never been awake when one was lost, before. There must be dozens of people down there. That’s the Mourning an Infant chant, if I’m not mistaken. We should take some side tunnels.”
“That’ll add half an hour to getting back, and I have work to do,” she replied, but she didn’t sound very certain.
Jaekob took it as a sign she’d like him to convince her. “Yeah, but it could take an hour to get through that crowd, and besides, it’s disrespectful to interrupt a Dirge. I’m the future First Councilor, too, so they’ll expect me to make a eulogy. I’ve never done one for an egg, I’ll say something stupid without meaning to be disrespectful. Let’s just go around, okay? Please.”
She gave him a faint nod and he wrapped one arm around her waist, pulling her back toward the last side tunnel they’d passed.
He said, “If we go this way, I think it leads to the abandoned East Ward Tunnel. From there, we can come out into the Council District.” He led her into the narrower side tunnel. It ended in a T-intersection, which he didn’t remember seeing before. He paused and looked both ways, but they looked the same.
She said, “If we turn right, that’s the direction we want to go. We’ll find the tunnel eventually, if we just keep going that way.”
He shrugged and took his arm off her waist. They had to walk single-file to get through the narrower tunnel. As they walked, it snaked back and forth, but had an overall curve in one direction—away from the tunnel with the mourning party. A couple hundred yards later, it ended in another T. He wasn’t sure which way to go.
Jewel frowned, echoing his own feeling on it. She said, “I think if we go right, we’ll dead-end or be back into the big tunnel. Let’s go this way,” she said, and turned left. She took the lead walking them down the narrow, winding corridor.
He was surprised at the walls in the tunnel. They were rough-cut, but no one had even bothered to smooth them a bit with dragonfire. It looked old, but without dragonfire melting the dirt and dust into the walls and floor, it might have been cut a week ago for all he could tell for sure. He followed behind her, but the basket wouldn’t fit just hanging at his side from one hand. He had to hold it in front of himself, slowing him down.
“Don’t get too far ahead,” he said. The last thing either of them needed was to get separated and lost in unknown tunnels. She’d probably be able to backtrack—dragons had great direction sense—but it still wouldn’t be the safest thing they’d ever done.
From not too far up ahead, she called back, “Okay. But keep up, slowpoke.” Her voice echoed off the tunnel walls, but even though its winding path had cut off his view of her—and a great view it had been—she sounded close enough that he wasn’t concerned. He tried to speed up, though.
“It’s a dead end,” she called from up ahead, sounding frustrated. “We have to go back.”
He had spent a lot more time than she had in wandering through the warrens’ winding tunnels. Sometimes, there was more going on than met the eye. “No, wait. Stay there.”
When he caught up to her, he found her in a dead end just as she’d said, but the last ten meters or so expanded out wide enough for three people to walk side by side. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Sometimes these dead ends have a hidden entrance to another tunnel. See how this one gets wide here at the end? That’s almost a dead giveaway that there’s a hidden tunnel. It gets wider so people can stack supplies out of sight, then move them through the hidden tunnel. Check the walls and look for anything unusual. A bigger bump, a crack that shouldn’t be there. Anything.”
They spent several minutes examining the walls and running their fingers over the rough texture, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He had found a little stone with rough edges that stuck out of the wall, and was picking at it with his fingertips when Jewel said, “Here! I think I found something.”
He turned to look at what she was doing, and saw her running her finger over a shallow depression in the wall. “What is it?”
She said, “I think it’s a pattern. Like, maybe a symbol carved into the wall? If you stand back a bit you can just sort of barely see what I’m talking about.”
He stepped back and tried to see what she meant. Growing more excited, he said, “I think you’re right. I can almost see a glyph there. But it’s not one I recognize, do you?”
Jewel shook her head. She was tracing the symbol with her fingertip, but when she got to the bottom of the faintly visible mark, Jaekob sensed a faint, pulsing power deep in his eardrums, felt more than heard. Then, the entire symbol began to glow. Faintly at first, it got brighter by the second, but only enough to shift which spectrum his eyes used. A lavender symbol he didn’t recognize now shined clearly, though not brightly.
He was about to ask if she recognized it when the symbol faded out in an instant, like a light switch had been turned off. A half second later, there was a faint vibration that he felt in his feet, through the floor. Then a seam became visible, forming an archway from the floor to an apex, about seven feet up. A doorway! As he watched, the stone within the archway disintegrated in a puff of dirt, which first billowed out and then suddenly shrank back in on itself. It looked like a vacuum had been turned on, but instead of disappearing, the dirt formed itself from a cloud into a two-inch high ridge across the doorway’s threshold.
“That’s incredible,” Jewel said, her voice rising high with excitement. “Have you ever seen something like this?”
Jaekob nodded. He had, though not very often. Just like the other times, the hallway widening near the end and was a dead giveaway. “Once or twice, but not with that symbol, and not with the disappearing stone doorway. I wonder where this one goes.”
“Who knows? Let’s find out. If my direction sense isn’t messing me up, I think this curves toward Safeholme. I bet it comes out somewhere hidden. Probably somewhere cool.”
Before Jaekob could answer, she had run down the hallway laughing. He grinned as he remembered that excitement the first time he had found one of these hidden doorways. Neither of the ones he had found used a symbol, so that was pretty cool and new. With the others, one had a hidden lever of stone built into the wall and the other had a barely-visible button to press. Both of those made the doors slide to one side, rather than disintegrate. No doubt this one would soon reset itself, judging by the fact that all the debris had been gathered up automatically when the archway’s interior disintegrated.
“Catch me if you can,” she laughed, her angelic voice echoing through the stone corridor.
He snatched up the picnic basket and ran after her, though she was at least twenty yards ahead of him. He ran faster and caught a glimpse of her before the tunnel’s winding path took her out of sight again. “I’m coming for—”
His words were cut off when a deafening roar from ahead washed over him, and he felt like a mallet had struck him in the chest. It sent him flying backward five or six yards, and he landed on his back. He’d lost his grip on the basket when the shockwave hit him, but he didn’t waste any time looking for it. He scrambled to his feet and ran ahead, choking on the heavy dust in the air.
“Jewel!” he cried, but could barely hear himself scream over the ringing in his ears. If she answered, he couldn’t hear it.
It only took a few seconds to find out what happened. The entire tunnel had caved in. It had been sudden and violent, like an explosion—nothing like any cave-in he’d ever seen. Dazed, he looked at the walls. They were granite. There was no way they’d cave in like that.
“Jewel! Answer me.” The only answer he got was his own echo.
He attacked the rubble, digging frantically, but there was too much and the pieces were too big. When he did manage to remove some, more flowed in to replace it from up above. He couldn’t make a dent in it. Her only hope was for fast help, and he couldn’t give it to her.
But his father could…
“Jewel, hang on! I’m going to get help,” he screamed, half deaf, and sprinted back down the hallway the way they’d come from, tears of fear and rage streaming down his dirt-caked face. It was up to him to get her help in time, and he hated himself for thinking it was already too late.
Jaekob stood numb with shock next to his father and Kalvin. This couldn’t be real. It had to be a bad dream, and he’d wake up any minute to find Jewel laughing at his stupid nightmares. She still had to show him how she curved armor plates—he needed that to finish the wings on his skeletal dragon sculpture. She didn’t know it yet, but he was making it as a gift for her.
He shook his head, clearing the thoughts. Why was it so hard to stay focused on anything? He didn’t want to be there. Didn’t want his father to speak. If Mikah spoke, he knew the nightmare would turn real. Please don’t talk…
“I’m sorry, son. We did all we could for your friend.” Mikah shifted from one foot to the other. He raised his hand to put it on Jaekob’s shoulder, but hesitated, then dropped it to his side with the contact unmade.
Jaekob felt a rage at his father for not touching him, and at the same time, wished both Kalvin and Mikah were anywhere else but there with him in that damnable tunnel. But it wasn’t really them he was angry at.
“And you have no idea why the tunnel caved in?” Mikah asked.
“No.” Since the panic left and mental shock replaced it, Jaekob couldn’t muster the energy for a longer answer.
Quietly, Kalvin said, “Dragon-dug tunnels don’t cave in. But this one is rough-hewn. Like, really rough. It hasn’t been reinforced”—by melting the surface stone facing with dragonfire, like every other dragon tunnel—“and it isn’t all that old, either.”
Mikah nodded. “They’re still inspecting the stonework, but the investigators say there was a lack of dust. Lots of dirt, farther away from the cave-in site, but not the normal even layer of dust.”
“I get it, father,” Jaekob replied, struggling to squash his anger. Then, suddenly, he was completely numb again. His emotions had been swinging back and forth since the rescuers first started to dig out Jewel. What they’d ‘rescued,’ when they found her, couldn’t be identified. Tons of rock delivered punishment far beyond what even a dragon’s body could take.
Kalvin said, “I’m glad you weren’t here when they found her. No one should have to see a friend like that.”
Well, Jaekob wasn’t glad. He hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. Thank the heavens his father had sent someone else to tell Thomaes, Jewel’s father. Seeing that gruff old man who had taken Jaekob under his wings for so many years, hearing the news and looking at him with anger or disappointment or disbelief… It would have crushed him. He was already crushed. But neither he nor Thomaes could be as crushed as Jewel had been.
His morbid thoughts were interrupted when Kalvin said, “What is this? Jaekob, did you see this before?”
Irritated at the very sound of his friend’s voice—just as everything irritated him at the moment—he whipped around to say something rude that Kalvin certainly didn’t deserve, but when he saw what Kalvin was looking at, he froze and left his harsh words unspoken. His friend had found a faint etching in the tunnel wall, a few meters back from where the cave-in had happened. Jaekob hadn’t noticed it before because it looked almost natural, like a part of the excavation, but now that Kalvin had pointed it out, he saw the pattern, and more. Lines swirled and zigged and zagged, forming an odd shape. He stepped closer.
And then his heart dropped, face contorting with rage. It was a symbol. A glyph. Just like the one in the hidden door, the one that made the door disintegrate.
