‘What are you looking for?’ he called to Sedric, and his words bounced back to him from the silent stone.
‘I’m not sure.’ Sedric stared all around him like a man wakening from a dream. ‘The streets just suddenly seemed very familiar. As if I’d been here before, and often. For an important reason. But every time I try to remember that part of the memory, it fades out of reach. But in an odd way. The Elderling memories I’ve taken from stone usually stay with me clearly. But this is like fog …’
‘In a purposeful way.’ Carson finished the thought for him.
‘Yes. As if something were being deliberately concealed.’
The buildings that they passed now were no longer homes or mansions, but were designed to allow dragons to enter as freely as humans. They walked quietly past them, their softly shod feet whispering on the paving stones.
‘It’s older here,’ Sedric said suddenly. ‘The way the streets are paved, the buildings … this is older than the part of the city where the dragon baths are, or that grand Hall of Records with the map tower.’
‘I suspect this is where Kelsingra began.’ Carson nodded to where worn steps went down into a building’s entrance. ‘It seems to me it would take a lot of feet walking down stone steps before they were worn like that. And these buildings are actually lower than the street, if you look at it. As if the streets have been repaired and raised.’ In reply to Sedric’s startled glance, Carson looked aside. ‘I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard that Old Jamaillia is like that. One fellow who had been there told me that openings that used to be first-floor windows are doors now, the streets have been built up so much.’
Sedric nodded, a slow smile curving his lips. ‘I have been there, and you’re right. Strange. I was looking right at it and not really seeing it.’
For a time, they walked in silence. The streets grew narrower and the buildings humbler, as if when people had first settled here, they had not known the full ambition of Elderlings. Carson found that Sedric had drawn closer to him. Carson linked arms with him, and felt himself more alert than he usually was in this city. The din of memories simply didn’t exist in this part of the city. Perhaps it had been built before the Elderlings had gained the magic of storing memories in stone. The scuff of their footsteps on the cobblestones seemed louder, the warmth of Sedric’s skin under his fingers more intimate. All his senses were keener here. He felt more himself, and wondered uneasily who he had been before.
‘There!’ Sedric said suddenly, and pointed.
‘What is it?’ Carson asked. Recognition tickled at the back of his mind but he could not summon the memory.
‘I don’t know,’ Sedric admitted. ‘I only know it’s important.’
Carson shivered suddenly but not with a chill. Something else. Danger? Anticipation? He lifted his head and sniffed the air, wondering if the scent of a predator had triggered it. Nothing. But an almost sexual excitement infused him suddenly, and as it tingled through his body, he recognized it was not his own. Spit, never far from him in thought, knew something about this place. Or almost did. Somewhere, the little silver dragon had tipped his wings, ignoring the dozing deer below him. He was winging back to the city as fast as he could. Carson stared around him, trying to see what his dragon had glimpsed through his eyes.
‘It’ was an open plaza, not as wide nor as grand as many in the newer part of the city. In the centre of it was a tumble of rubble. The destruction looked both deliberate and recent; or at least much more recent than the other quake damage to the city. A length of black chain coiled like a dead snake. Timbers of green and gold and red had been rendered to kindling. They approached the collapsed structure slowly, and Sedric was the first to speak. ‘It’s sticking out of a hole there. See the low wall around it, or what is left of it? It looks like a well, for drawing water, but much wider. But with a river so close by, why would they dig a well here?’
‘It wasn’t for water,’ Carson said quietly. He listened to his own words as if someone else were speaking them, then fell silent, chasing an elusive idea. At last he spoke a single word. ‘Silver,’ he said aloud, echoing his dragon’s thought, and then shook his head in denial. ‘It makes no sense.’
But Sedric seemed to grow taller, as if he were a puppet and someone had just drawn his head string up. His eyes opened wider. ‘Silver? SILVER!’ He shouted the word. ‘This is it, Carson. From my dreams. The Silver place. Sweet Sa, you’re right. This is the Silver well, the whole reason Kelsingra was first built. Remember, a long time ago, you wondered why they’d built such a grand city here. What was the reason for it, what trade, what industry, what port anchored it? Why build a city for dragons in a place so chill and damp in the winters? Why did the Elderlings stay here? And here’s our answer. The Silver well. The secret heart of Kelsingra.’