The dragon was curled in a loose half circle against the vast wall of the cavern, with the pool of black water spreading out between it and the girls. Nemienne felt a strange relief that the pool was there, as though the water was somehow a protection or a barrier between them. As though they needed that protection.
The dragon’s head and part of its neck had been carved free of the far wall. Its head, huge enough to engulf a small house without difficulty, was nevertheless surprisingly graceful. Stone antennae rose in supple curves above the dragon’s eyes, more delicate than even the finest cave formations. Behind the head, the dragon’s sinuous neck melded imperceptibly into the wall of the cavern. Some distance farther back, the great muscled bulk of its shoulder swelled again out of the wall, leading in turn to the suggestion of a deep chest. Far away along the wall, the dragon’s tail looped in and out of the stone of the cavern like a reiterated melody, disappearing and reappearing as though the stone carvers had wanted to suggest infinite length.
“Oh,” Karah breathed.
Nemienne knew how her sister felt. She herself felt half dazed by the size and beauty of the carving. A king must have commanded it done. Several kings. Surely this dragon was too vast to have been the work of just one king. How many generations had it taken to carve this dragon in the heart of the mountain?
“How beautiful,” Karah whispered. “How splendid.”
Nemienne glanced at her sister. Karah was transfixed, her hands gripping each other, her head tipped back, staring at the dragon as though she would never be able to look enough. She did not seem frightened at all.
Nemienne, in contrast, felt as though they stood on the edge of a great height, where a sudden gust of wind might press them forward and send them tumbling through clouds to the unseen rocks far below; or as though they stood underneath a vast avalanche that was poised to roar down toward them. Stunned by the dragon’s magnificence, she was also frightened of it, though she could not guess what peril it might pose to them. “We… I don’t think we should be here,” she whispered. She was afraid to speak too loudly, as though too loud a voice might loose the avalanche.
Karah put an arm around Nemienne’s shoulders and hugged her close. “You’ll find the way home,” she said, not as though she was offering reassurance, but confidently, as though she sincerely believed this.
Nemienne shook her head. She was flattered by her sister’s confidence, but she didn’t know how to explain that she wasn’t afraid because she thought they were lost. It wasn’t even fear she felt, exactly. Not really fear. It was more like awe. She thought there were depths to the darkness here that her sister didn’t see. But she saw those depths, or at least guessed they were there. She said again, almost in a whisper, “We shouldn’t be here.” Then she added, “This isn’t a place for men at all.”
“Well, then—”
“Yes,” said Nemienne. “Shh.” She looked at the cats, who both sat at the extreme edge of the black pool with their tails wrapped around their feet and gazed back at her with pale light glimmering in their unreadable green eyes. We’ve brought you here, their eyes seemed to say. Now it’s up to you to understand what this place is, and why you needed to see it. And if Nemienne had no ideas about that, well, she should learn to think like a cat, she supposed.
In fact, though she had no idea why Enkea should have brought them to this place and had never felt farther from the ordinary places of home and hearth, Nemienne was somehow becoming increasingly confident that she could indeed find a path for Karah and herself from this uncanny cavern to that ordinary world. She almost thought she knew how to do that right now. The other time she had been trapped in the dark, she had drawn herself back into the world by remembering ordinary light. Now, in this place where nothing was ordinary, she shut her eyes in favor of the more familiar darkness behind her own eyelids, and searched within that personal darkness for some place more recognizable than the dragon’s cavern. The sound of water droplets falling from the dragon’s wing intruded, each musical plink echoing across the next until the reverberations of sound crept into her bones. That reverberation was almost familiar, but not quite.
Beside her, Karah murmured, “Nemienne, what are you thinking? You’re frowning.”
“Am I?” Nemienne whispered. It still seemed to her—she couldn’t quite decide why—that it would be rude or imprudent, even dangerous, to speak aloud in this place. “Karah, does this cavern remind you of somewhere else?”