He trotted back down the stairs and out into the canyon. Avatre had finished her first oryx and was beginning, in a much more leisurely manner, on her second. She looked up as he neared and made a little noise of inquiry.

“Eat, sweetheart,” he said, and passed on to the next building.

All the ones in this first canyon proved to be in excellent repair, although despite the uniform appearance of the facades, only a third of them were actually three stories tall once he looked inside. It was clear why; in some, the rock had flaws that would have made cutting a third floor dangerous, and in others, it appeared that work had stopped before a third floor could be put in. He wondered about that, but cutting so much rock was difficult and dangerous, and perhaps these places had all begun with single stories, then as the owners acquired wealth, second and third levels had been added.

He couldn’t imagine how a family would cope with the noise of having someone cutting away at the rock above them until the room was completed, though.

Maybe they’d moved elsewhere until the work was finished. Aket-ten would probably be full of theories about these people, but unless they ever found, say, wall paintings showing how they had lived, her hundreds of questions would go unanswered.

When he’d finished taking inventory, he found that a third of the structures were limited to two stories, and a third were only a single story inside. The rock itself told the tale for the most part; there weren’t too many of these places where the carvers had simply stopped without a good reason.

He moved into the first side canyon, and here, he met with his first disappointment.

This canyon, much narrower than the first, was nothing like as grand. The facades were simple blocks of stone, where the rough face had been sheared off in a flat plane, and the windows and doors were just geometric holes in the rock. Many of the facades had fallen, choking the entrances; it looked as if they were victims of earthshakes. The carving here was inferior, too, with nothing like the fine finish in the first canyon.

So, in this city, too, there were the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy. It was quite possible, actually, that farther down this canyon—or others—he would come to a place where the living spaces were nothing more than caves crudely recut.

The second side canyon was similar, and a third was completely blocked by fallen stone.

As in Sanctuary, however, there was no sign that people had ever shared their city with dragons, not even the wild, tala-controlled kind. That was disappointing, though he was sure that the buildings could be fitted with the sort of things the dragons needed.