Mak and I didn’t get that grille open by sheer grit and determination, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. To our credit, we lifted the damn thing nearly a foot—ten inches, perhaps—before the bars slid out of our grip. They may have been ancient, but they were as smooth and shiny as though they’d been newly polished. Maybe we could have managed it if I could lift with my whole body instead of from my shoulders, but as it was, it didn’t seem like it was happening.

  “Right.” After we tried and failed a second time, I turned to Herald and Kira. “Put those lightstones out for a moment, would you?”

  They did as I asked without question, but as I Shifted Maglan asked, “Why? Why does it need to be dark?”

  “This is less effort for her if she does not have to fight the light,” Herald answered as I squeezed between the bars, then passed through the small square room and the second set of bars beyond.

  “What is?” Maglan asked behind me.

  “You will see in a moment, love.”

  The space between the bars and the presumed vault door wasn’t large, exactly, but it was large enough for me to fit without a squeeze. I Shifted back, then called over my shoulder, “Alright, you can light the stones again.”

  “Gods and Sorrows!” Maglan’s outburst came as soon as he saw me. “How did she get over there?!”

  “You saw her the first time she went down those stairs into the tunnels,” Herald said reasonably. “That was a bit of a squeeze, was it not?”

  “Sure, but, I mean…” Maglan gestured to the bars. “I couldn’t get my head through those things even if I put my mind to it. Calling that a squeeze for Draka, that’s pushing it a bit, isn’t it?”

  “It is just a matter of scale, though,” Herald argued, prompting a snort from Ardek. “Anything to add?” Herald asked him.

  He chuckled. “Matter of scale.”

  “Thank you for that insightful observation.”

  While Herald explained to Mag just how much I could stretch and squeeze in my shadow form, I investigated the door. It was vastly different from the one behind which we’d found our precious book, and the one back at the inn. It was, in many ways, a matter of scale, like Herald had just said. Not in the sense that it was much larger; it was big, sure, at about eight feet tall and four wide, but it wasn’t gigantic. Nor was it the choice of materials; it was made of wood banded with metal, just like the other serious doors I’d seen in this place. It was more the totality of it, the balanced, almost artistic distribution of all its elements that made you see not just a door, but something that approached the ideal of A Door. Looking at it, at the lacquered wood and the wide, thick bands of metal that were held in place by an army of studs, gave a sense of not just mass, but permanence. It looked as though once closed, it was never intended to be opened except by the will of its master.

  It was also different from those other doors in that it was as pristine as the bars I’d just passed. The wood was dark and lustrous, and the metal, from the bands to the individual studs and the heavy ring that served as a handle, was shiny and untouched by rust or tarnish. Not even our own vault door could boast that.

  Still, wood was wood. And no matter how tough of a bastard the door was, it was set into stone that was already scratched and chipped in places. If we couldn’t go through the door itself, we’d go for the hinges, same as under the villa. Because one thing was for damn sure: we weren’t leaving without getting into that vault.

  Well, perhaps I exaggerated a little. I wasn’t going to let anyone starve, or anything, and I’d start growing desperate for my hoard soon enough. And perhaps, if we were lucky, Indomitable hadn’t written me off as dead or fled, and would keep digging and find the right place by trial and error. We’d pretty much have to come out then, if only to not let on that we suspected there was a treasure here. And the mules might start starving, too. I wouldn’t want that. But until one of those became a problem, we weren’t leaving without setting foot on the other side of that door!

  As I pondered The Door, Mak’s voice carried over the sound of Herald and Ardek’s friendly bickering. “What do you see, sister?” she asked. “Can you get past it?”

  “Same as with the bars, I’m afraid,” I replied. “I’ll try, but I doubt it. Pretty sure we’ll have to figure out a way to get you all in here.”

  “Bet you’re wishing you’d taken those adamantium claws about now,” she said innocently. “Would’ve really come in handy, I bet.”

  “You’re just saying that because you want them! I never should have told you about them.”

  “I really want those claws.” Mak looked at her fingertips wistfully. “Those or the acid spit. Or those and the acid spit!”

  “Shouldn’t have told you about that, either,” I grumbled fondly.

  She was right, though. As I got to work, scratching doubtfully at the door with my very normal dragon claws, I really wished I had either or both of those Advancements. While I couldn’t be sure that the acid would actually do anything to treated wood and metal, the sense I got for Adamantium Claws was that they’d go through damn near anything with enough force behind them.

  I gave it a couple of minutes, a real honest attempt, before I gave up. All I’d done was to lightly deface an ancient artifact, leaving me feeling vaguely guilty and no closer to getting inside that vault.

  “Right,” I called across the short distance. “Next steps? Suggestions?”

  “I don’t suppose it looks any different from that side?” Mak replied.

  “Not really. Though my shadow sight is worthless for anything written or painted, so… give me a moment.”

  A minute later I had a lightstone shining brightly between my front teeth, having Shifted, gone over to the humans, and brought it back with me. “Oh! Huh,” I said after contorting to look around the small space for a moment.

  “What did you find?” Herald asked.

  Taking the lightstone out of my mouth I replied, “A hand print, with some text above it. Looks like it was painted on.” After another moment I said, “There’s a matching one on the opposite wall.”

  Herald’s voice rose with excitement. “What does the text say?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. Let me see if I can sound it out.”

  It had been a little while since I’d practiced reading Old Mallinean, or Malyoni as Herald insisted on calling it, that seemingly being the ancient people’s own word for themselves and their language. But my little sister had drilled me thoroughly, and I recognized all of the letters. I just needed a moment. “Pal-tya-nguh-tyan-ti,” I read, careful to pay attention to the little modifiers on each letter. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Loss…” she muttered, low enough that I barely heard across the small room between us. “Loss-work-if, perhaps? I’m not sure about nguhtyan. Might also mean heat from the contexts I’ve seen it in. There was no single equivalent in Tekereteki in the primer.”

  Loss-work-if. Loss-heat-if? I thought, rolling it around in my head.

  Energy! Power! Conscience exclaimed with a level of excitement I very rarely heard from her. In case the power goes out! Use in case of emergency! It’s a manual— what’s the word? Override!

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  “If the magic goes out!” I repeated out loud for the humans’ benefit.

  “What?” Herald asked skeptically. “How do you figure?”

  “Work, heat, energy, power, they’re all related,” I explained, Conscience’s excitement bleeding over into me, and my own growing as I accepted her reasoning. “And the Malyoni, they used magic to do work, right? They used it for power? Maybe it was so important to them that they just used one word for all those concepts?”

  “Eh… maybe?” Herald allowed, still not entirely convinced. But she hadn’t grown up with a ubiquitous source of power that was used for almost everything in her life. “So what does that tell us?”

  “Well… I mean, it’s a handprint,” I said, covering one of said prints with my free hand. “I figure I just push some magic into it, and we’ll see what happens.”

  I was about to do just that when Marvan shouted, “Wait! Please, Lady Dragon, wait!”

  I stopped myself just in time, looking at him expectantly.

  “Last time— forgive me, Lady Drakonum, but last time someone activated something here, it didn’t end well. Perhaps we should leave before you try?”

  “Oh. Right.” A memory of Mak, Herald, and Tam all unconscious on the floor played vividly in my mind. I’d rather not repeat that. “Good idea. Everyone, back to camp! I’ll let you know how it went.”

  Mak and Herald took some convincing, both because I was sending them away to safety while I stayed behind, and because they really wanted to see for themselves what might happen. With a combination of reason and asking nicely I finally got them to go, though not without a parting shot from Herald.

  “Do not dare get hurt back there,” she warned me. “We will work our hands to the literal bone if we must to get to you, and Mak and Kira’s exhaustion after healing us will be your fault.”

  “If I see any real danger, I’ll stop,” I promised her, and she accepted that it would have to do.

  Once I was alone I put the lightstone back in my mouth and steeled myself. I really didn’t know what might happen. Maybe a repeat of when Mak powered up the control panel in the food court; maybe nothing. And maybe it would open the grilles, or the vault, or both.

  I placed my hand back on the indicated spot on the wall, dwarfing the human palm painted there with my own draconic one. I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. I hoped to God and the Mercies that I wasn’t about to blow something up. Then I pushed a trickle of magic into the wall.

  Nothing happened.

  Well, not nothing. I couldn’t just push magic into any old wall or object; there was definitely something there that accepted what I gave it. But it didn’t have any effect. And I couldn’t increase how much I gave it, either. It took the barest trickle, and then no more.

  “Wehll, hhit,” I muttered around the stone sphere in my mouth. At least there was no one there to see me fail.

  There’s two handprints, Conscience reminded me. Far enough away from each other that no human could touch both. Maybe they’re supposed to be activated together?

  Huh. I thought about it. She was right; the prints were on opposite walls of the small vestibule between the guard room and the vault door, about eight feet apart. Perhaps the tallest human ever to live could have touched both with his fingertips, but surely not his whole palms. But me? I could do it without much trouble at all. It was getting into position that was tricky, not reaching. Sitting back on my hindquarters put my shoulders too high, and I couldn’t angle my wrists the right way; laying on my front put them too low, and I couldn’t raise my arms enough. I ended up using my head and neck to support myself while pressing my hands into the walls, like some bizarre endurance exercise.

  Then I pushed magic through both palms, and things happened.

  Whatever it was that had received a trickle of my magic before now latched on, happily accepting as much as I would give it. There was a crackle, then a hum, and finally, just what I’d been hoping for.

  With a grinding, squealing noise, the bars began to retract into the ceiling. They rose slowly; I could barely even see them move, with how smooth and lacking in surface detail they were. But we hadn’t dug away any dirt from the bars that were closest to me—right in front of my face, in fact—and the way it began piling and then spilling to either side of the gateway was proof that things were moving. Soon enough the thick plate at the bottom came into sight. It rose, inch by inch, for about a foot before abruptly slowing its ascent and then, with agonising slowness, reversing direction and dropping again.

  “Oh, no, no, no!” I muttered to myself. I tried to push more magic into the walls, but I’d hit a limit; they were taking as much as they were going to.

  With a depressing sense of inevitability, I watched it return to its original position, deep in the floor, and stopped.

  Well, that’s promising! Conscience opined cheerfully. I don’t know what you’re so glum for. Try again!

  Fine, I replied. No reason not to, I figured.

  It went the same way.

  Conscience was elated. Great! You’ve got this! she cheered.

  How do you figure? The damn thing won’t open more than a foot, and it won’t stay open!

  No, but you can prop it up, can’t you? Then you can raise it more after it settles, or if that doesn’t work they can crawl under.

  Uh… nah, yeah, that could work! I agreed excitedly. I wasn’t even annoyed that I hadn’t thought of something that seemed obvious in hindsight. I just thanked her for the suggestion and went to fetch the humans.

  To my embarrassment, I was about the only one who didn’t see the solution immediately. When I told the humans about what had happened, not only did they burst with excitement, but Marvan blurted, “So we can just prop the grilles up and crawl under!”

  “Or maybe Draka can raise them more once they settle?” his wife suggested, to nods and murmurs of agreement from around the group.

  “Right, nah, yeah, that’s what I thought,” I fibbed. Conscience was kind of part of me, and I’d decided that her ideas counted as mine as far as the humans were concerned. And Conscience herself very kindly didn’t absolutely roast me for doing so, which I took as either tacit agreement, or that my silent embarrassment was good enough for her.

  Once we were back at the hallway before the vault door things proceeded quickly. I went back past the bars and got into position. The humans prepared the stone blocks they’d liberated to prop up the grilles, while doing their best not to laugh at how ridiculous I looked. Then I pushed magic into the handprints and things just… worked. The bars rose. The humans propped them up, with Mak buying them some extra time by holding the grill up with a proper grip on the bar across the bottom. And then, after waiting a while, I activated whatever magical mechanism made the bars rise again, and the bars rose another three feet. The humans stacked more stone blocks. We repeated the whole thing one final time, and the first grille was functionally open. Then they went looking for more stone blocks, and we did the whole thing all over again with the second grille.

  And then, there we were, gathered before the vault door. They all agreed that it had looked impressive from a distance, and was very much more so close up.

  “Still,” Marvan said with a relaxed confidence, “getting it open shouldn’t be a problem. Doors aren’t to keep people out, right? They just make it take longer before a determined intruder gets in. And we’re all pretty determined, aren’t we, Lady Herald?”

  “We damn well are,” Herald agreed, her golden eyes bright with greedy anticipation. “What do we think? The door itself, or the hinges?”

  “May as well start with the hinges,” Mak said. “I can’t imagine this door is any easier to get through than the one in the villa, so we may as well do it the way that looks hard but will probably turn out to be the easy way after all.”

  As it turned out, there was no easy way. We gave up late in the evening, and it took us well into the afternoon of the next day before we got that damn door open. We didn’t just have to dig out the lock and the hinges—there were no less than eight bolts holding the door to its stone frame, two on each side, two on the top, and two on the bottom. We had to hack away the stone around all of those, too. The only mercy was that there wasn’t a bar on the other side, because that probably would have added another day.

  But finally, after copious amounts of very literal blood, sweat, and tears, and even more swearing, the door stood loose in its frame. I, as the defacto leader and also the only one likely to survive relatively unharmed if the thing toppled on me, was given the honor of pulling it down to reveal what we’d worked so hard for over the past day. With everyone else at a safe distance, but not too far away, I hooked my claws into the sides of the door, where we’d removed the stone to get at the various bits holding it in place. Then I started carefully jiggling it toward me.

  The door moved. Bit by bit, inch by inch, the massive thing exited the frame. And then, when it was standing on the floor, supported by nothing but its own thickness, I grabbed it by the top and backed away, pulling it down as I went.

  I Shifted to be on the safe side, and even then the bang of hundreds of pounds of wood and metal hitting the stone was deafening. Everyone else had been covering their ears in anticipation, and there was still plenty of groaning and loud complaints about the volume. But once the dust settled and the light fell into the vault they forgot all about their poor abused ears.

  The way was clear, and the vault of the palace of Malyon lay open to us. And as we approached, and the two lightstones illuminated what lay within, the first one to comment was Marvan.

  “I swear,” he said under his breath. “The gods are laughing at me.”

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