Free Emperor Mage by Tamora Pierce Page A

and firmly. I will not touch any of
them. To emphasize her point, she thrust her hands into her pockets, where they
could start no more trouble, and looked around.
     
    To the
right of the three-horn, where the large hall connected with a smaller one, she
discovered a far different dinosaur. Ten inches tall, it stood beside a nest of
eggs, some whole, some broken.
     
    "A
mountain-runner lizard. We don't know what killed him, but at least we kept him
with his nest." Lindhall had returned. "There's an adult of his kind
standing guard." Daine looked where he pointed, and found a somewhat
larger skeleton, eight feet long, peering at her. They were clearly the same
animal, and there did seem to be a protective air about the big one. It stood
in front of a doorway that led to a chamber full of smaller dinosaurs.
     
    "They
almost look as if they could move, don't they?" the mage asked.
     
    Daine
winced. "How did you fit the bones together?" she asked. "Did
you find them like this?"
     
    "The
process is fascinating," replied Lindhall. "It was developed by the
School of Bardic Arts and the School of Magecraft. If you understand magical
theory, you know that things once bound to one another retain the occult tie,
even when separated. Knowing that, the bards and mages create special musical
pipes. Played correctly, they call the bones together to form the original
owner."
     
    Daine
nodded; she had seen Numair do the same thing with skeletons at home. Together
she and Lindhall roamed the collection. Behind the three-horn she had briefly
awakened, she discovered another, smaller three-horn, whose neck frill was
larger and flatter and whose brow horns curved up, rather than pointed straight
ahead. A brass plaque set into the base of his stand identified him as a bull
three-horn, listing his height, weight, and the place he was found. Following
this line of skeleton stands, which ran down the center of this branch of the
hall, she discovered other horn-faced lizards, whose neck frills grew more and
more ornate: a spiked three-horn whose frill was topped by large, curved
spines; the thick-nosed horn-face with extra bone plates instead of a nose
horn; and the so-called well-horned three-horn, who boasted down-turned spikes
on his frill. None of them were less than eighteen feet in length, from nose to
tail tip'
     
    "Don't
you wish you could have seen them when they were alive?" the girl asked
Zek.
     
    The
marmoset, as fascinated as she was, shuddered. Daine translated his answer
aloud for Lindhall: "Only if they were grass eaters. Even so, I should
prefer to see them from the top of a very tall tree." The mage laughed at
that.
     
    They
saw bony-headed skeletons like giant, long-legged crocodiles, covered with back
and head spikes and wearing solid bone clubs on their tail tips. All were more
than ten feet long and belonged to a family called armored lizards. They gave
way to cousins, plated lizards, each with leaf-shaped plates and spikes running
along their backs. These, too, were giants, ranging from thirteen to thirty
feet in length. Each one's tail was laden with a collection of spikes that
looked like a mace.
     
    "There's
so much learning here," she remarked softly. "The king's trying to
build a university to equal yours, but it'll take years. And when it comes to
things like this..."
     
    "Once
Carthak was famous largely for its treasures." LindhaU's voice was equally
soft. "It was a citadel of learning, arts, and culture. It still has those
things in abundance, but now the army and the navy garner the attention of the
world and of the emperor."
     
    When
she glanced to her left, her jaw dropped. The skeleton before her, labeled
Great Snake-neck, was ninety feet long. Its tiny head, at the end of an
extremely long neck, stared down at her from nearly twenty-five feet in the
air. With small teeth only at the front of a light jaw, and eyes that faced to
the sides like the three-horns, she knew it was a plant eater—"A very
large