Within the Sanctuary of Wings

FIVE

Under any other circumstances, our journey from Falchester to Hlamtse Rong would be enough to fill half a book all on its own. Our party consisted of myself, Suhail, Tom, Thu Phim-lat, and one Lieutenant Chendley, on loan to us from the Royal Scirling Army for mountaineering assistance (largely because they did not trust Thu). We travelled in separate groups, the better to deflect notice; three Scirlings (one of those a woman), an Akhian, and a Yelangese man form a sufficiently motley assortment as to sound like the beginnings of a banal joke.

From Falchester we travelled in stages across the Destanic Ocean and along the eastern coast of Dajin to Alhidra, where we boarded river boats travelling up the Mahajanya into the interior. This is of course the “Father of Vidwatha,” one of the two great rivers between which ancient Vidwathi civilization sprang up, and I could have remained there for months, quite happily. Like much of Dajin, Vidwatha boasts a number of river-dwelling dragons, who are often venerated and propitiated by the local farmers in the hopes of preventing destructive floods and drought. I was particularly curious to know whether there was any truth to the folklore which said all the dragons in the Mahajanya were male and all those in the Mahajani, female, the two coming together during the River Marriage Festival to mate. If so, it would have been a fascinating echo of the swamp-wyrms in the Green Hell, where the Moulish bring select males up to the Great Cataract to mate with the queen dragons in the lake there. (As it transpires, the folklore is not true; the physical differences between dragons of the two rivers are a matter of species differentiation rather than sex.)

But our aeronautical carriage awaited, and so I fixed my attention on the west and went onward. Unfortunately for us, the Mahajanya was in those days only partially in Scirling control: the people of that land did not much like seeing one of their spiritual parents in foreign hands (which is why Scirland controls none of it now). We returned to land once more and skirted the disputed stretch—a task which ultimately involved disguises and a good deal of lying, when my party discovered we had not skirted quite far enough—and then, after a brisk gallop away from bandits who attacked both sides indiscriminately, finally convened in the village of Parshe. But this portion of the journey, however lively a tale it makes in its own right, is a mere prelude to the true story, which is our flight into the Mrtyahaima peaks.

Here Lieutenant Chendley took the lead, as he was the only one among us who knew precisely where the Scirling caeliger base was located. Indeed, I never did find out its location, for the lieutenant went off alone and came back with soldiers, who blindfolded us and led our horses the remaining distance. All I know is that it lay approximately two days from Parshe and as close to the Tser-zhag border as they dared, so as to shorten our flight across the closed territory.

Even at that distance, we could see the Mrtyahaima.

Not in any great detail—though I’m told that when the air is truly clear, the vista becomes crisp enough for the knowledgeable to identify individual peaks. For the short time we were in Parshe, though, the air was sufficiently humid that the mountains were simply a dark haze, a hulking mass on the horizon. I thought at the time that we were seeing where we must go, and I marveled at the sight. I did not realize that this was only the edge of the great range, the chain geographers identify more precisely as the Dashavat Mountains. The Mrtyahaima proper lay behind, beyond my vision, rising even higher than I could imagine. Had I seen what I faced while still in Parshe… I believe I would have continued, for my life has been a recurrent tale of my failure to truly understand my peril until it is too late for me to turn back. But I cannot be certain.

The base had a rather slapped-together look quite at odds with the usual Scirling military standards. I suspected it was a temporary arrangement, which did not surprise me; we were some distance from the nearest garrison, and of course they would not want their caeligers to spend much time out where others could seize them. It positively swarmed with activity, though, and the first person I saw when I dragged my gaze away from the mountains was my brother, Andrew.

I dismounted in a trice and threw my arms about him. “I suspected I would see you here! But no one would tell me for certain.”

Andrew pounded my back as if I were a brother rather than a sister. “It’s all very hush-hush, isn’t it? Fear of spies and all that. But of course I’m here; I couldn’t send my favourite sister off into the Mrtyahaima without so much as a farewell.”

His touching concern might have been a little more touching had he not called me his favourite sister. Since I was his only sister, the phrase was invariably a sign that he wanted something from me. “Andrew,” I said, “you aren’t hoping we’ll bring you with us, are you?”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t mind—You there! Be careful with that!” He darted off to chide a private who was handling our belongings with insufficient care. That clinched it: my brother was never so diligent in showing his use unless he had some ulterior motive in mind.

Unfortunately for Andrew, I had no authority to bring him along. It is easy enough to add a person to a journey made by boat, horse, or foot, at least if rations are not too limited; but caeligers are another matter. The great limiter there is not space but weight, and all of the crew for long-range missions were at least twenty centimeters shorter than my brother. (Indeed, the army had made an exception to its usual regulations, actively recruiting into their nascent aerial corps men who would ordinarily have been deemed too slight.)

Even with our small party of five, we needed three caeligers for the journey; a single one, or even two, could not carry all of us, our gear, the pilots, and equipment for the caeligers, such as fuel for their engines and canisters of the lifting gas which made it possible for them to fly. “Will they go straight on after they leave us in Tser-nga?” Tom murmured, eyeing the vessels in their row, and the quantity of fuel in a depot some distance away. None of us knew the answer, and would not get one if we asked.

The caeligers themselves made for a striking sight. It is a very great pity that peacetime never spurs development as quickly as war: these craft bore as little resemblance to the caeligers of the Broken Sea eight years ago as an ancient longship does to a modern frigate. Those early vessels had been wired together out of natural dragonbone: shaped with saws where possible and fitted together most cunningly, but still peculiar and not quite suited to the purpose. The frameworks of these caeligers, being made from synthetic dragonbone, consisted of tidy rods and slats, with propellers far larger than any dragon species could provide (which I learned was a necessity for flying in the thinner air of high altitude). All of it looked quite ordinary, with nothing but its pale colour to hint at its origin.

That colour was a happy accident, for the purposes of a military caeliger. Seen from below, everything about these craft was pale, from the gondolas in which the crew rode to the undersides of the balloons, and every piece of structure that could be made light with bleach or paint. Being a natural historian, I needed no explanation as to why. Anyone standing on the ground would have a difficult time picking out the caeliger against the backdrop of the sky. The upper part of the balloon, of course, was painted with a camouflaging pattern, so that should another caeliger happen to overfly it (or the vessel come to ground in a low-lying area), an observer might not distinguish it from the terrain below.

The crew was minimal, so as to ensure we could bring everything we needed. Our baggage formed a tremendous mountain, easily as large as the equipment for all my other expeditions put together (save Vystrana, where Lord Hilford had brought along a great many things for his own comfort that were not, strictly speaking, necessary). We had our scientific equipment, of course, including tools for the excavation of any specimens from the ice, and the means of preserving same. We had cold-weather clothing, which takes up far more room than it ought, along with tents, ropes, alpenstocks, snowshoes, and other tools of mountain travel—including a gift from our mountaineering friends Mr. and Mrs. Winstow that we would be very glad of in the coming days.

But the greatest bulk of it was food, for we could not be certain of buying or even hunting what we needed. Colonel Dorson, the commander of that base, had done what he could to gather up Tser-zhag coin, but it was not much; and we did not wish to draw attention to ourselves by paying in foreign currency. Besides, Thu warned us, the locals did not have much to sell. They scraped a marginal existence in a marginal land, and money would do them no good if they could not travel down to places where they might spend it and still return home in good time. As for hunting, although bears were not unknown in the region, the main large animals were the wild cousins of the yaks herded by the villagers. But these had been pushed out of their grazing meadows by those domesticated kin, leaving them few in number. And certainly no one would thank us if we shot their livestock.

We hoped it would be enough to sustain us. We had to plan our expedition carefully, for there are two seasons in which it is difficult to do much in Tser-nga: the winter, which was behind us, and the period of the monsoon, which lay ahead. In the lowlands that means rain, but at the elevation of Thu’s valley, it would be snow instead. Foul weather during the sea crossing and our adventures making our way up the Mahajanya had put us behind schedule; we had hoped to depart for Tser-nga by the first of Nebulis, but it was already nearly Gelis. The monsoon would begin in a month, possibly sooner. But even if we did not make it back down to the lowlands before the snows came, we ought to have enough.

Unfortunately for our plans, everything seemed to go awry. Dorson had underestimated the weight of our gear, and after we had loaded the caeligers we found the distribution was entirely unsuitable, so it was all to do over again. Then the weather turned against us, with a hot and dusty wind that threatened to clog the caeligers’ engines if we attempted to fly in it. The soldiers took precautions to guard the machines against the infiltrating grit, but when at last we set out for Tser-nga, we discovered the hard way that those precautions were insufficient.

I can only thank heaven that we discovered it before we were even so much as a hundred feet off the ground. Had the engine of our caeliger failed later than that, we would have been in dire straits, with no choice but to land in Vidwathi or Tser-zhag territory and attempt to repair it ourselves. Even with that good fortune, we had more than a few heart-pounding moments as our pilot guided the craft to earth once more. And as easy as our landing ultimately was, Tom staggered out of the gondola with his face white as parchment and collapsed to earth, shaking.

I knelt beside him. “Tom. If it is this hard for you—”

His jaw tensed and his fingers dug into the dirt. “I am not turning back, Isabella. I will be fine.”

To that I made no response. We both knew it was a lie.

Finally Tom shook his head. “I’d hoped to avoid this, but—well. Is there any task for which I might be needed during flight?”

“I don’t imagine so. If the pilots need aid, the rest of us can provide it.” If the hands of four others were insufficient, I doubted a fifth would make any difference.

“Then I’ll just dose myself with laudanum.” Tom climbed to his feet, brushing his hands and knees clean. “Better to be useless in flight than to not be there at all.”

Two days later he suited word to deed, after we had repaired the engine and loaded the caeligers one last time, in yet another distribution of weight—one which left rather more of our gear aboard a single craft than I would have liked. Andrew helped Tom into the gondola, then came back out to bid me farewell.

“Are you certain I cannot come with you?” he asked. His tone was both anxious and wistful, as if he feared for my safety, and also regretted missing the grand adventure he imagined lay ahead.

I forbore to remind him that he was even less of a mountaineer than I, or that we had no cold-weather clothing in his size, or any of the other practical objections. Instead I said, “You would be absent without leave, and I’m given to understand the army frowns upon such things. Besides, in a few months we may need you to ransom us back from the Tser-zhag government.”

It made him laugh, as I had hoped it would. “You’re depending on me to rescue you from a diplomatic situation? Good God, you’re doomed.”

That was not what my nerves needed to hear. Despite everything, though, I held to my course. The next morning Suhail looked at me and asked, “Any second thoughts?”

“None I care to listen to,” I said. Having given him one final kiss, I straightened my shoulders and marched across the camp to the waiting caeliger.

Although I had been in the air before, there was a part of me that wanted to curl up on the floor of the gondola with Tom, for I had never been on a flight like this one.

Suhail and I had never attained any tremendous altitude in our stolen caeliger, and much of our time had been spent over open water, where there are no features to threaten disaster or show you how far up you are. This time, we knew precisely where we were—especially as the lead craft carried a device called an altimeter which measured our vertical position, and the senior pilot, one Captain Adler, continually signaled to the others with flags when he decided to climb or descend. He did not test the upward limits of the caeligers, not yet; but we flew quite high in the air, the better to hide our presence from people below.

Any such people were mere specks from that height, difficult to see unless heralded by a dark stream of yaks making their way across a high meadow. We saw settlements, but steered clear of them when we could. Below us, the ground rose and fell, rose and fell… but rose more than fell, and we climbed yet again to keep our distance.

And ahead lay the mountains.

Even though I knew better, I had thought of them in terms of the mountains I had seen before, during my first expedition to Vystrana. I thought of dark trees, and those were there; I thought of alpine meadows, and those were there, too, fringed with snow in areas too sheltered for it to melt.

But in Vystrana, the peaks were little white hats atop the green beauty below. In the uplands of Tser-nga, life threaded through the valleys like branching fingers, clinging to the base of the mountains as if they might lose their grip at any moment. Above towered pinnacles of ice and snow and stark, unforgiving stone. There were fields of scree where nothing grew, passes which rose to sterile heights before descending once more to a level where humans might grudgingly be allowed to persist. I would never have guessed that so frigid a place might remind me of Akhia… but only in the Jefi have I encountered a landscape so indifferent to my presence. Men and women might easily die here—indeed, they have done so—and the Mrtyahaima would take no notice.

The higher we went, the more likely that fate seemed. In order for the propellers to gain much purchase in the thin air, we could not fly too high; but flying lower meant subjecting ourselves to the fickle winds, sculpted into diabolical knots by the terrain. In the early stages of our flight Captain Adler had chatted casually with Suhail: now that gave way to silence and the occasional barked command for a new signal, which Suhail rushed to post. Watching the pilot’s hands (for I could not long keep my eyes on the nearby peaks and slopes), I saw his knuckles whiten from the force of his grip. Tom’s own knuckles were even whiter, gripping the nearest hand-holds, for the caeliger frequently jerked one way or another, slammed to and fro by the changing winds.

I crouched next to him. “I can fetch more laudanum—”

Tom shook his head in a tight gesture. “No. I may be needed after all, and quite soon.”

In his shoes, I would not want to be drugged into a stupor either. It was obvious that matters were not going according to plan. Thu was nearby, clinging to the flapping edges of our map; he frowned and called out to Suhail in Yelangese.

My husband shouted something back. I could not understand his words, but his tone was clear: whatever Thu had said, Suhail had short patience with it. He bent to speak to Captain Adler, and I made my way to his side. “What is it?”

“We’re too far south,” Suhail said. “At least, Thu believes we are—who can be sure, with so little to go by. But there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. Heading north would require us to fly directly into the wind, and the engines don’t have the strength for that, not at this altitude.”

Ahead of us, the greenery ended in a forbidding wall of black and white: a range of peaks that might delight a dedicated mountaineer, but spelled death for us if we met them in flight. Below us lay the western fringes of Tser-nga, the scattered villages and herdsmen who fell under the authority of the Tser-zhag king only because there was no one else around to claim them. “What do we do?”

“Look for a place to land,” Suhail said. “If we can.”

My first two caeliger flights had ended in crashes. I drew in a deep breath, reminded myself of the later flights that concluded in perfect safety, and tried to believe they would be my model today. My heart, already racing from the altitude and thin air, kept up its pace.

The caeliger lurched. Adler swore. I wanted to ask Suhail how far we might be from our destination, but kept silent. The answer was irrelevant. We would land where we could; only after we were safely on the ground did anything else matter.

“There,” Suhail said, pointing.

“I see it,” Adler said through his teeth.

Up ahead lay one of those fields of scree. It was not exactly level—but given a choice between sliding on loose stone and risking our balloon’s integrity on a treetop, our pilot clearly chose the former. The only problem lay in the preposition: the field lay up ahead. To reach it, our caeliger would have to climb once more.

Were it not for the cold, thin air, I might have thought myself back in the Keongan Islands. With the same blind faith as before, I followed the instructions of Suhail and our pilot, doing what little I could to assist. Our craft banked and rose, but not as quickly as the slope ahead drew near—and we were too far to starboard, I could tell. “If we keep on this way,” I called out, “we shall miss it entirely!”

“Wait—” Adler shouted back, intent on the terrain ahead. He could not spare the attention for more.

Just as we drew abreast of our target, a gust of wind caught us and slammed us sideways. The caeliger’s frame crunched with bruising force into the scree, knocking us all off our feet. For one irrational instant, I was certain our landing had broken the gondola—but of course dragonbone is not so easily cracked.

“Kill the lift!” Adler gasped, scrambling back to his feet. We were sliding on the scree, partly forward, partly down, and would soon come loose if we did not settle.

Suhail made it to the valve before I did, and the caeliger’s movement lessened. I drew in a steadying breath. One of the other caeligers soon came to a halt above us on the slope; but the other overshot. Adler spat a curse, watching it go. We all stood, not breathing, until the third caeliger dropped out of sight behind a ridge.

It was, of course, the one carrying the majority of our gear.

But if only one caeliger were to suffer misfortune, I had rather it be the one with fewer people on board. In the meanwhile, as the lightest member of our brigade, I leapt from the gondola with a sack in hand and began to fill it with scree. The craft shifted ominously and slid several meters away as I turned to hand my bounty to Suhail, and I had to fill a great many more sacks before its position was secure.

Finally both caeligers were settled into position. I was by then tired enough to lie down on the rocks and declare my day over, but of course we could not do so. Lieutenant Chendley immediately tightened his boots and declared his intent to hike in the direction of the third caeliger. “I’ll go with you,” Tom said, lurching to his feet.

He clearly wished to be of use. I had no idea of how much laudanum remained in his body, however, and I was not at all certain he should be undertaking anything strenuous until his head had cleared. When I protested, though, he waved me off. “I am steady enough now that my feet are on the ground. And besides, they may need medical aid.”

I could not argue that latter point, and he proved his fitness by scaling a nearby boulder. The sight alone was enough to exhaust me, for even a small exertion is utterly draining at such heights, and our flight meant we had not been given the usual chance to acclimate. It must have set Tom’s heart to pounding, for bright spots stood out in his cheeks against the general pallor of his skin; but the laudanum at least seemed to have loosened its grip, and so we sent him off with Chendley.

The rest of us—myself, Suhail, Thu, and the four pilots allocated to the two remaining vessels—set about examining our craft for damage. I was relieved to see that while the canvas sides of the gondolas had torn in a few places, there was no harm that could not be mended.

While I helped cut a few pieces of spare canvas into patches, I heard Suhail address Adler. “What are your orders now?”

Silence followed this—apart from the wind, of course, which did not cease for even one minute during my time in Tser-nga. Then Suhail spoke again. “You cannot tell me, of course.” He sighed in frustration. Or perhaps he was only catching his breath; none of us could speak in more than brief bursts, as our lungs clamoured for more air. “Then let me rephrase. Should we empty the balloons? There will be much less risk of attention if we do so.”

“No, we’ll keep them filled.”

They had more than enough spare lifting gas to refill all three balloons and fly back eastward. If the pilot wanted them to stay as they were, it could only mean that they intended to fly onward, west across the Mrtyahaima—or at least as far as they could get. Could they return from their scouting mission the same way? I doubted it. In which case, how did they intend to get home? It was one thing for us to jest about the Tser-zhag taking us into custody and marching us back to the Vidwathi border. We were not in friendly territory, but neither were we at war with the locals. Every place the caeligers might plausibly reach, though, was either sufficiently inhospitable to life as to be uninhabited, or in Yelangese control. Unless the pilots managed to find and loot some caeliger supply depot over there, they could not hope to fly back. They would have to abandon the caeligers—likely destroying them first—and somehow sneak back to friendlier territory.

It says something about my own temperament, I suppose, that such a plan seemed astonishing to me. To creep into a hostile environment for the sake of scientific study, I understand; to do the same for military advantage is too daunting to contemplate—even though most would call the latter purpose far more comprehensible.

Had we landed without difficulty, I think the caeligers would have flown on as soon as they could repair the torn gondolas and unload our gear. But our pilots were military men, and would not so easily abandon their companions. Although they were clearly not happy with the delay (and concomitant risk of discovery), they settled in to wait for Tom and Chendley’s return.

Our companions did not appear before dusk, which came shockingly early in that region, the sun vanishing behind the snowy rampart to our west. What warmth the air held—not remotely enough for my taste—vanished as if it had never been, and after some conference, we moved down to a more sheltered spot.

I sat looking at the western sky, still brilliant with light, but cut by the dark knife of the mountains. Suhail sat next to me and said, “Even if the caeliger crashed, most of our gear will have survived. Though it may be scattered halfway to Akhia, and the gathering may be difficult.”

It sounds heartless, when I recount such words and thoughts. Yes, our gear had been on that caeliger—but so had Marbury and Lowe, two corporals in the Royal Scirling Army. What of them? But it was easier for us to talk of inanimate objects, while the fate of two people was in doubt. Both Tom and Chendley were experienced in field medicine; if anyone were injured, they would do everything they could to help. Until we heard from them, we could do nothing to assist. Forming contingencies for our own expedition at least gave us something else to think about.

Without our tents, the best we could do was to construct a makeshift shelter from stones and fallen branches, enough to cut the wind and hide our fire from eyes down below. Even in Gelis, which for that hemisphere is summer, the air was unpleasantly cold. I huddled next to the little flame, trying not to ask myself why I had volunteered for this lunacy, until Thu said, “I see light.”

He had been keeping vigil since the shelter was done, watching in the direction the third caeliger had gone. We all scrambled to see. Sure enough, a fire twinkled in the distance. Then it vanished—and came back. And again.

“They’re signaling,” one of the junior pilots said with relief. “Army code. One of them has got a broken arm, but they’re alive.”

It is truly a wonder, how thoroughly circumstances can alter one’s perception of a situation. I will not claim I slept warm and happy that night, but knowing the others were relatively unharmed did much to improve my outlook. In the morning, when there was sufficient light to travel safely across the intervening ground, the four of them trekked back to our camp.

According to Tom’s report, our equipment had taken a bit of a tumble, but nothing we could not redress. “Then we stay?” I said, looking from him to Suhail, to Lieutenant Chendley, to Thu. I knew my own inclination—but this was our last chance to change our minds. After this, we were on our own.

They nodded. Adler said, “We can’t fly the third caeliger out of here, not when one man has a broken arm.”

I must confess my heart leapt a little, before logic caught up and hauled it back to earth. There was no way they would leave the vessel with us, and the gas and fuel to fly it: the risk of it being captured was far too great, and we had no real piloting experience among us. “I expect you will want to destroy it,” I said.

Suhail made a muffled sound. The caeliger represented a tremendous outlay of resources and effort on the part of Scirland; now I proposed to simply throw that away. But he understood my reasoning—and, more to the point, that my reasoning was merely a guess at the army’s.

“We’ll cannibalize some of it for parts,” Adler said. “But yes. And we have to move quickly, before others find us here.”

He meant what he said. Crossing back to the broken vessel took us what remained of the morning, but by mid-afternoon they had stripped it of whatever equipment and spare components they thought they could use. “Now what?” Tom said. “Try to start a rockslide to cover it?”

“Too risky,” Adler said. “And we have something better.”

I had taken no particular note of the small canisters among the caeliger supplies, assuming them to be oil or fuel or some such. Now, however, the pilots uncapped them and began to scatter the liquid within across key portions of the caeliger. It hissed when it struck dragonbone, and to my astonishment, the bone began to crumble and break.

Standing beside me, Tom hummed low in his throat. “Of course they’d bring something like that,” he murmured to me. “They can’t let these vessels fall into enemy hands. I wonder—are they replicating the process that decays natural dragonbone, or is this something new?” But he pitched the question so it carried no further than myself and Suhail. Military men do not take kindly to civilians prying into military secrets.

When this task was done, pieces of dragonbone yet remained; the pilots had not troubled to douse the entire thing, likely because they could not spare enough of the dissolving reagent. Nothing of any possible use was left intact, though. And bits were still disintegrating when the pilots gathered up the salvage and prepared to head out. “We’ll fly onward tomorrow morning,” Adler said to my group. “If something goes wrong—if you change your minds—light a signal fire before dawn, and we’ll wait.”

I wondered how sincere the offer was. With one caeliger lost already, they would not be eager to spare another to fly us back east. Still, it was a kind thought. “Thank you, Captain,” I said, and the others echoed me.

We did not light a signal fire. The next morning, at the very crack of dawn, we heard the buzzing of engines and saw the remaining caeligers lift into the air. Their pale undersides worked as intended, making them difficult to track across the sky, but I followed their course northeast until they came parallel to a gap in the peaks, whereupon they tacked hard to the west and out of sight. They had vanished into the empty heart of the mountains, and were gone.

That quickly, we were alone in the Mrtyahaima.

SIX

As soon as the caeligers were gone, Thu laid out a sheet of paper on which he had sketched his best guess at our location and the surrounding terrain. He said, “We are here.” His finger tapped one spot along the ramparts at the western edge of Tser-nga. “The village of Hlamtse Rong is here.” He tapped another, northward of us.

In between lay a forbidding stripe, roughly where I had seen the caeligers turn west the night before. “What is that?” I asked.

“A river gorge,” Thu said. “I think it may be a tributary of the Lerg-pa.”

Which we could not fly across. Before I could select from among the curses that rose to my lips, Suhail asked, “And the scale of this map?”

“If we could go directly there, two days? But we must go east, then north, then west again. If we are lucky… five days, perhaps. If we are not lucky…” Thu shrugged.

There was no use railing against the contrary winds that had kept us from landing closer to our destination. With the caeligers all gone or destroyed, we could only tackle the challenge thus presented, or give up—and none of us, of course, were willing to give up.

Unfortunately, there was simply no way we could carry all of our equipment the necessary distance. We would have needed the relative strength of ants to each toil along beneath a fifth of the pile, and that was without accounting for the harsh terrain. “We’ll have to leave some of it here,” Tom said reluctantly, “and send people back for it once we’re established in Hlamtse Rong.”

Chendley looked grim. “Even if we leave all of your scientific equipment, it’s still too much. We’ll need rations, shelter, clothing, equipment for crossing the river. Either we take twice the time making a supply depot at the edge of the gorge, or…”

“Or we need help,” I said, finishing the thought he was too reluctant to voice.

Help might be available—but we would have to ask for it. And of the five of us, only Thu spoke Tser-zhag to any real extent (though Suhail had been practicing assiduously, and was making good progress). He would also attract less attention, I suspected; after all, the Yelangese had been through here before, and his features and coloration were not so wildly different from the local norm that he could be identified as foreign at a distance. Tom, on the other hand, would stand out like a daisy in grass, and the rest of us would not fare much better.

Chendley objected with great force when we proposed to send Thu to find the nearest village by himself. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “Handing him a pile of barter and letting him go off on his own—”

“Why, Lieutenant,” I said with insincere mildness. “Whatever do you imagine will happen? Your concern for his safety is touching, but I think it unlikely that he will fall victim to a footpad out here, in the middle of nowhere.”

His concern, of course, was for something quite other than Thu’s safety. Although ostensibly the lieutenant had been assigned to us as an aid in mountaineering, we all knew perfectly well that he was also there to be Thu’s watchdog—for, our newfound alliance with the Khiam rebels notwithstanding, the army was composed of suspicious types who did not trust anyone with a Yelangese name. Unfortunately for Lieutenant Chendley, his military associations did not give him any sort of command authority over the expedition, and so Thu went to the village alone.

He returned before sunset on the second day with two ponies. Chendley, scowling like a thunderhead, declared them utterly inadequate to our needs, but no amount of complaining would improve our options: those two were all the village could spare, whatever enticements Thu offered in return. (Indeed, we were lucky to have two.) I think Chendley had visions of all five of us riding, with a string of pack ponies to carry everything for us, such as recreational mountaineers often enjoy. Perhaps it is just as well that we could not. I have seen people riding Mrtyahaiman ponies, perched on saddles and piles of blankets so high there can be no possibility of communicating with one’s mount by means of legs or seat. I might as soon have tried to communicate with the mountain through a meter of snow. The rider can only perch and offer prayers to whatever deity they honour that the pony will do as intended. Lacking enough to use as mounts, we loaded those two as high as we could with food and other necessities, thanked our lucky stars that Tser-zhag ponies are as hardy as mules, and carried what we could of the remainder upon our backs. Then, groaning beneath our loads, we began walking toward Hlamtse Rong.

The verb “walk” is wholly inadequate to what followed. No single word will suffice: we walked, crept, climbed, slid, dragged, laboured, and occasionally fell our way across the intervening terrain. And all this effort was made worse by the awareness that, if we descended just a little way, we would find ourselves on much more hospitable ground, below the worst of the ridges which made a washboard of the area we traversed. But the farther down we went, the more attention we would attract. None of us had any illusions that our presence had not been noticed, of course; Thu had gone into the village, and we had undoubtedly been spotted a dozen times by distant herdsmen and traders. Habitation here might be sparse, but that did not mean it was absent. But the more inconspicuous we remained, the easier it was for the Tser-zhag to shrug and let us pass.

Before we ever embarked upon this journey, Tom, Suhail, and I had discussed what to do if our most experienced climbers, Chendley and Thu, disagreed on routes or techniques. Ultimately we chose to trust in Thu’s experience of that region, even if it meant frustrating our lieutenant. Which it most certainly did—but in one respect that journey to the village of Hlamtse Rong was beneficial to us all, for it gave Thu ample time to prove his competence in the face of Chendley’s distrust. When we roped ourselves together, we did so in two groups: myself following Chendley, and Tom and Suhail behind Thu, because Chendley considered it his sacred duty to keep me alive, and would not let me dangle from a rope tethered to our Yelangese companion. But by the time we reached Hlamtse Rong, he had seen enough of Thu’s skill and courage to accord the man his grudging respect. After all, it is difficult to question someone’s integrity when you have seen him fling his full weight upon his alpenstock to arrest the headlong plunge of his companions into the river below, then hold them both while another man unropes from a horrified baroness and joins him to set up a rescuing belay.

(When Suhail and Tom were upon solid ground once more, I discarded our usual public reserve and clung quite tightly to my husband for some time. “Please tell me,” I said, my nerves expressing themselves via unsteady humour, “that you did not engineer that incident merely to prove to Chendley that Thu is a good sort.” Suhail’s answering laugh was so shaky as to barely qualify, but it became a joke afterward among the five of us, that any setback or difficulty was a cunning ploy to create trust.)

I fretted at the slowness of our pace. How could I not? Every day we spent trying to reach Hlamtse Rong brought us one day closer to the onset of the monsoon. We moved at a crawl, for we could not carry every piece of our gear on our backs, and had to spend half our time raising it or lowering it over the same obstacles our bodies had to surmount—and raising and lowering our ponies, too. We were exhausted, gasping for breath, our hearts pounding at the smallest exertion. Our journey up to Parshe in the highlands had given us some time to acclimate to the increasing altitude, but from there to here we had leapt over a rise of more than a thousand meters, and every one of us felt the difference in our bones. Suhail suffered particularly, his hands and feet swelling, fatigue and dizziness threatening his balance as he moved. I fretted at not being roped to him, even though I knew he was safer with Tom and Thu, and examined him for fever or fluid in the lungs every time we paused to rest. It was a great relief when, after a few days, his symptoms began to subside.

But if I claimed I had no energy with which to conduct research during that time, you would know I had been replaced by an imposter.

I mentioned before the cat-like dragons supposedly kept as pets by the local people. One night, as I climbed out of the tent I shared with Suhail to deal with a certain necessity, I startled several creatures who were investigating our food stores. They froze—I took a step toward them—and they shot skyward in a burst of wings.

“Dragons!” I exclaimed, instantly awake with delight. I fear my voice was too loud; it disturbed Suhail, who (having not heard me properly) thought I was in some kind of distress, and his half-awake attempt to leap out of the tent ended badly enough that it roused Tom and Chendley both. With the two of them up and moving, of course, Thu could not long stay asleep.

“Oh,” Thu said when he heard my tale. He did not sound impressed. “Yes. We should be more careful in storing our food, or they will eat it all. They adore fat.”

At that altitude, it was not surprising. We had packed a large amount of pemmican (a mixture of powdered meat, fat, and berries), knowing that the cold and thin air would cause us to crave the fattiest, most filling food we could put down our gullets. I was fascinated to see it act as bait for dragons, though. “Are these the beasts you told us about? The mews?”

“Mew,” of course, is not any kind of official name. The locals have a variety of terms for them: drukshi, udrakor (“noisy trickster”), and others less polite. But Thu and his companions had dubbed them the Yelangese equivalent of “mews,” because of their call, which resembled that of a cat.

The Tser-zhag did not, as travellers’ rumours had it, keep them as pets. Quite the contrary, in fact, as mews are scavengers who will paw through garbage, steal shiny objects, and even (in large enough groups) dive at yaks. The locals say this is an attempt to burrow through their dense wool and chew at the fat beneath, but I never saw one succeed; I think a yak would have to be very far gone indeed to let that pass without retort. But their failures notwithstanding, they are far from popular with the human inhabitants of the region. Suhail and Chendley soon came to detest them as passionately as Thu did, after they perpetually broke into our stores and played havoc with our gear.

But for Tom and myself, they were very nearly as interesting as the frozen specimen we hoped to find. They could not be counted as true dragons, for they had nothing resembling extraordinary breath, but we relished the chance to dispel a misconception among our peers—not to mention answer new questions. I was especially eager to know how the mews avoided losing too much heat through the thin membrane of their wings.

Our curiosity was not sufficient to make us delay our forward progress, of course. A bird in the hand might be worth two in the bush, but a dragon in the ice was worth half a dozen of its diminutive cousins digging through our supplies. The latter would still be there next year; the former might not be. Nonetheless, we made what observations we could as we trudged to Hlamtse Rong, leaving out bait at night, studying their tracks, and keeping watch for them during our hikes.

Of the mews I will say more later—but first, the village.

Hlamtse Rong is named for the valley it sits in, which points toward the nearby peak of Hlamtse as if laid out by a landscape architect. In those days it was a flyspeck too small to even appear on Tser-zhag maps, let alone those made by foreigners, and it is not much larger now. Were it not for Thu, we should never have found the place, nor had any reason to go looking for it to begin with. Its population numbered less than one hundred, eking out their living through a combination of yak-herding and growing crops on what narrow terraces they could carve out of the slopes. The only reason anyone had built a house there at all was because it was unclaimed land: the people of the village belong to the tiny Nying minority, whose members had been evicted from more favourable regions by the dominant Tser-zhag.

Living where they do, on the extreme edge of a country in which they do not enjoy power, the people of Hlamtse Rong take a very cautious approach to strangers. When we entered the village, we might have thought the entire place deserted: there was no one at all in the narrow dirt track that served as a main street, no one in front of the houses or visible through windows. But here and there we saw eyes peering over a low wall, or caught the movement as a shutter swung hastily closed, and we knew we were being watched.

This, as much as the mountaineering, was why we had brought Thu. He called out in Tser-zhag, which is not the native tongue of the Nying, but they speak it quite well. Under his breath, Chendley muttered, “How do we know what he’s saying is friendly?”—but his heart was not in the suspicion; he said it more out of habit.

I could not deny that we were as much in Thu’s hands right now as Tom and Suhail had been when they went over that cliff above the river. Whatever he said caused a man to emerge from one of the houses: a small fellow, with the broad face typical of his people. This man peered at Thu, who spoke to him in what even I could recognize as very halting sentences. I alternated between watching the two of them and watching Suhail, who had the abstracted look that meant he was bending all his concentration to the task of parsing their conversation. I envied him his facility with such things.

Finally the local man nodded, and Thu sighed in relief. “He remembers me,” he said to us. “And no one has given them difficulty because we were here before.”

Apart from the weather and the mountains themselves, this was the biggest danger we faced. The Nying of Hlamtse Rong were so separated from their Tser-zhag countrymen in the “lowlands” (by which they meant those living a mere three thousand meters above sea level) that they hardly cared that the government in Thokha had closed the borders. But they might have gossiped about the Yelangese explorers to someone in another village, and so on down the chain until it reached the ears of some official who did care. If such a man had taken action against this village, our welcome might have been even colder than the environment itself.

With that hurdle cleared, we laid out our gifts, like foreign diplomats at the feet of a very ragged potentate. We had brought things useful to the Nying: copper pots, good steel knives, waterproofed silk. The sight of these items lured the other villagers out of their wary hiding, and soon we had everyone from old grannies to toddlers barely old enough to walk poking at our gifts—and at the five of us, too. Thu they had seen before, and his features and coloration were not too dissimilar to their own, but Suhail’s Akhian nose and cheekbones drew comment, and my pale skin and lighter hair even more. But they were the most fascinated by Tom, who was, as usual for him, already red and peeling from the sun, which is even more intense at high elevations than it is in the desert or at sea.

In exchange for these things (and the entertainment we brought), we were given leave to use the village as our base of operations while we attempted to search for another frozen specimen. “Have you asked them whether they’ve seen any other carcasses themselves?” I asked Thu, as we lugged our equipment to the house where we would be staying.

He shook his head. “Do not say anything of it to them yet.”

“I hardly could,” I said wryly, dropping my pack inside the courtyard wall. “Remember, I have not mastered above a dozen words of their tongue.”

Thu apologized for his error, then went on. “They consider Gyaptse, the nearby mountain, very ill-omened—its name means it is cursed. They did not like us going up there the first time, but it is the lowest col in the vicinity—the only one we had any hope of using as a pass.”

I thought of the Draconean site outside Drustanev, and the island of Rahuahane. “You did not see any ruins near there, did you?”

His answering look suggested I was mad. With justification, I suppose; no one builds structures of that kind at such an altitude. Even the monasteries of Tser-nga are never above five thousand meters. Once I explained my reason for asking, he said, “No. It is cursed only because those who wander too much around the area have died.”

And yet we proposed to go there ourselves. Well, it was not the first reckless thing I had done.

The houses in the village were all of a type common to the high regions: round and multi-storied, with livestock on the ground floor and the family above, and the attic space used for storage (which helps to insulate the people below). Shuwa, the woman to whom the house belonged, had been in the street for our arrival, and had raced ahead to make all ready for us—which, given that there was no guest room to prepare, largely consisted of brewing tea. When we climbed up the steep ladder into the living quarters, a tray was already set out, with five steaming cups on it.

It is natural that when we read a word like “tea,” our minds supply the most obvious interpretation, as shaped by our own experiences. For a Scirling, this means black tea, sweetened with sugar and milk. For a Yelangese, it might be green tea. But we were in Tser-nga, and that meant those five cups contained butter tea.

I understand why the people of the region drink such a thing. When your body is desperate to stay warm and fed in an environment that wishes you to be neither, butter is an excellent way to sustain yourself. Naturally, then, it appears in any food where it might profitably be added, and on this front I have no complaint. But I feel that adding it to beverages is a bridge too far; however much I reminded myself of its beneficial qualities (and however much my body, on occasion, craved the sustenance), I never reconciled myself to drinking the stuff.

My travels, however, have inured me to consuming many things I would not even consider at home, and despite its cheese-like odour, butter tea was less objectionable than some of the comestibles on offer in the jungle of Mouleen. The five of us arrayed ourselves on the floor of Shuwa’s house, and I smiled and thanked her, thus deploying two of my dozen words of Tser-zhag.

She ducked her head and spoke with the intonation of a question, casting a puzzled glance around at our group.

“What is it?” I asked Thu. “Did I give offense somehow?”

The months that had elapsed since Thu’s arrival at Caffrey Hall had given me some sense of the man’s character. Now I recognized, by the way his hand rubbed at the nape of his neck where his queue had been, that he was embarrassed and uncomfortable. (The Taisên had imposed the queue on all males; therefore its severing was a common gesture among those Khiam Siu who wished to publicly declare their allegiance.) “No. She—she only wants to know, ah, how this group fits together.”

Shuwa made a circling gesture that encompassed the four men in the party, then pointed at me, repeating her question.

“Ah,” I said. “She is wondering what I am doing here, female as I am?”

“No.” Thu sat very upright, then said in a rush, “She wants to know if all four of us are your husbands.”

Some unknown span of time later, I realized I was sitting with my mouth open, and closed it very carefully. “All my husbands?”

“I did not think to tell you—it did not seem relevant. Here, women can marry more than one man. Brothers, to be precise. She is confused because we do not look like brothers.”

“I should think not,” I said faintly.

The custom is not a common one; polygyny, the marriage of one man to multiple women, is far more widespread. But polyandry—one woman and multiple men—serves an important function in the property laws of Tser-nga and some neighbouring regions. Farming and herding there are marginal propositions already; if land were to be divided up among a man’s sons via partible inheritance, then within a few generations the harvest from each parcel would be insufficient to keep a mew alive, much less a human family. And simply practicing primogeniture would leave quite a lot of young men wandering about at loose ends, which tends to result in raiding, warfare, and murder. In other parts of the Mrtyahaima, excess sons are all shunted off to monasteries, with only the eldest inheriting anything at all. But in the highlands of Tser-nga, all brothers marry the same woman, and hold the property in common.

Suhail looked at me, bemused. I think I stared back. I have been married more than once in my life—three times, if one counts my temporary arrangement with Liluakame in Keonga—but never simultaneously. I tried to imagine being wed to both Jacob and Suhail at once, and felt as if I had sprained something in my head. The loss of Jacob still saddened me… but had he not perished in Vystrana, I could not imagine myself having met Suhail, or having considered him in anything more than a friendly light if we had met. How could I weigh that loss against what I had gained after? Even in Tser-nga, I do not think I could have had both: my Scirling husband and my Akhian one, the marriage arranged for me by my father and the one I impulsively made for myself. And so many joys have come to me as a result of that latter match, it is impossible not to think my life would have been impoverished without it.

There are no simple answers to such things. We can never know who we might have been had things gone differently. I only know that without Suhail, I would not have become the woman I am today.

Tom coughed, breaking the awkward silence. “You can tell her no—Isabella only lays claim to the one.”

“Yes, of course,” Thu murmured, and relayed this in Tser-zhag. Naturally he had known the answer, but I think the woman’s question so discomfited him that for a moment he could not think of the necessary words in her tongue.

Our hostess had three husbands of her own, all brothers. Two of them were away at the moment, on a journey down to Phen Rong, where they could trade for some much-needed supplies. This was why she could accomodate us in her house, although with all five of our party added it was a tight fit. I did not consider this entirely a bad thing: privacy was impossible to come by, but the close quarters meant I could at least be assured of sleeping warm. The yaks penned below us might be fragrant, but their body heat rose up through the floorboards, and with Suhail to one side of me and Shuwa to the other, I never had cause for complaint.

Not while in the house, at least. Outside, it was another matter.

We woke the morning after our arrival to the sound of gentle rain. This did not deter Thu from making arrangements with some of the local men to retrieve the remainder of our belongings—a process that left us in some difficulty, for we had only the one companion who was anything like conversant in Tser-zhag, and he could not be in two places at once. Ultimately we dispatched Chendley with the retrieval group, while Thu stayed in the village, where our topics were less easily explored in mime.

I was glad not to be going with Chendley myself. Although my body had more or less settled in to the elevation, I was still quite tired, and knew I would need a rest before tackling the hike to the col. But the next day it rained again… and then, after a respite of one day, a third time… and long before Chendley arrived back in Hlamtse Rong, we knew the truth.

The monsoon had begun.

SEVEN

Had we been able to land closer to the village… had our first attempt to fly west been successful… had we not been forced to evade bandits on our way to Parshe… had we only left Scirland sooner. I could list a dozen points at which we lost precious time, but it was no use wishing to have those moments back. The simple fact was that we had arrived in Hlamtse Rong too late, and now had no hope of journeying to the col before the snows made it impossible.

In my less bitter moments, I knew the delays were a disguised blessing. The monsoon that year began early, but we had no way of predicting that. Had we come to the village a week earlier, we would have set out in the cheerful confidence that we had plenty of time to conduct our research. The snows would have caught us at high elevation, far from shelter and support; we might all have died. But it was hard to weigh that hypothetical peril against my very present frustation, as I sat in the doorway of Shuwa’s house and watched the rain pour down.

Suhail sat next to me, a warm and comforting presence. Tom had gone out with Thu to speak with the village headman, but we all knew what answer they would return with: we could not set out today, nor tomorrow, nor any time in the near future. Not unless our destination lay below us, eastward, back in the direction of Vidwatha. The heights of the mountains were far too dangerous now.

“Ventis,” I said at last. I had not spoken in nearly an hour, but Suhail could follow my thoughts well enough. “Three months; that is how long they say the monsoon lasts.” Assuming it did not overstay its welcome, as it had shown up too soon.

“You want to wait,” Suhail said. “Attempt the search between the monsoon and the onset of winter.”

Somewhere out there, Chendley and the villagers were toiling back toward us with a pile of equipment. “If we do not, this entire journey has been wasted. It would be one thing if I could be sure of trying again later—then it would only be resources and time we have thrown away. But do you really think anyone will loan us another caeliger? That the Tser-zhag government will not have tightened its watch, or the Yelangese overrun this place?” I did not speak of the thing we had come here for, the way our odds of success decreased with every passing day. If uncovered, it might rot; if entombed in fresh snow, we might never find it. I had gambled on the chance of discovery, and like a bettor desperate to make good his losses, I refused to walk away from the table.

Three months rotting in Hlamtse Rong, waiting. Hoping.

A chorus of mewing came from a nearby house. A Nying woman, cursing, used a broom to drive out several draconic figures that had evidently taken up residence among her livestock.

Suhail turned to me, grinning. “Whatever will you do to keep yourself occupied?”

Shuwa and her fellow villagers looked at us as if we were mad when we expressed our intention to study the mews.

I have of course encountered this reaction many a time—but never more so than in Hlamtse Rong, where the dragons in question were nothing more than vermin. Rock-wyrms and desert drakes may prey upon livestock, earning the enmity of the local humans, but their grandeur also commands respect. Mews enjoyed no such reputation. They were simply pests, no more admired in Tser-nga than stoats are in Scirland. (Indeed, less so, for they provide no fur.)

Chendley looked at us in much the same way after he returned. In democratic fashion, we held a vote: only the lieutenant was in favour of abandoning this whole matter as a bad job, and his strenuous arguments did nothing to sway the rest of us—though in fairness I should note that his arguments were good ones. It is not his fault they lacked the power to penetrate our thick skulls and effect any change within. We would stay in Hlamtse Rong until the monsoon ended, and make our attempt then.

In the meanwhile, we would study the dragons we had on hand. Inquiries around the village revealed that the hunting of mews, if the enterprise can be given so grand a name, is the domain of unmarried spinsters—of which there are more than a few, what with husbands being distributed in sibling batches. A wife who finds mews plaguing her household calls for assistance, and the spinster in question builds and lays traps for the creatures in areas which attract their attention, such as kitchen stores and refuse pits.

“You are not a spinster,” Shuwa said to me (as translated by Thu). “Why on earth would you be interested in this?”

I searched for a diplomatic phrasing, then gave up; anything I said would be put through the grinder of linguistic differences regardless. “Please tell her,” I said to Thu, “as politely as you can, that perhaps I may learn something that will help the Nying keep the mews at bay? Without suggesting that I think their own efforts have been deficient—after all, they’ve lived with the creatures for generations. But I have studied many kinds of dragons in other parts of the world, and it might be that the comparison will shed some useful light on the matter.”

What Thu said to Shuwa, I have no idea. I only know that after a few minutes of back-and-forth she gave up on understanding his meaning, or my intentions, at all. Shaking her head, she merely said that if we wished to do something with the mews, it was our own lookout.

Tom and I began with their thieving behaviour, which did not require us to go any farther afield than a few houses in the village—though it did cost us some sleep. We sat up through the night on multiple occasions, observing how the mews raided storehouses, larders, and livestock pens. They proved to be cunning beasts, often sending one of their number ahead as a scout before descending to scavenge. Or perhaps that one might better be called a canary: if the advance mew is captured by a trap, it squawks a warning, and the others flee. “It might be more effective if the trap could be sprung upon them en masse,” I said to Tom.

“Yes, but how? It would require someone to sit up at night, in every place the mews might scavenge, and spring the trap by hand.”

Given the number of possible locations, such a requirement was utterly impractical. But under the current approach, I suspected that each incident only taught the mews how better to avoid traps in the future. One of the spinsters we talked to, an old woman named Kyewa, agreed with this theory. A congenital deformity that twisted her legs from birth had ended her marriage prospects before they began, but she made very fine traps, and was careful to use different kinds in a rotating sequence. According to Thu, she did this so the mews might have time to forget past traps and become vulnerable to them again.

“Now that would be a fascinating thing to test,” I murmured, as much to myself as to Tom. “Perhaps we could try laying out only two different kinds of trap in alternating sequence, then three, then four, to establish whether mews truly do learn from their errors, and if so, how long it takes them to forget those lessons.”

Alas for my curiosity, the Nying would not hear of any experimentation that might cause them to lose more of their stores to the little dragons. I understood their reluctance, for they often walked too close to the edge of starvation to gamble with their future in such fashion; and we certainly could not squander any of our own food, for we were saving as much of that as possible for our autumnal expedition. In the meanwhile, Chendley, Suhail, and Thu (when we could spare him) lent their aid to the herdsmen, and hunted as much as they could. Our continued residence in Hlamtse Rong depended heavily on our not becoming a burden to them.

Tom and I spent some time with the herdsmen as well, watching the diving behaviour of the mews. Suhail had devoted long hours to improving his own command of Tser-zhag, and put his growing skill to use in questioning the men about the little dragons. He said, “They all agree that mews eat the fat out of the yaks’ humps, but I’ve taken a look at the beasts, and I haven’t found a single one with scars or any other sign of chewing.”

“It might be an old wives’ tale,” Tom said. “On Niddey, the grannies all agree that cats have to be kept away from infants, because they’ll suck their breath away. I’ve seen a cat sniff a baby’s face, but no more—and certainly we’ve seen mews dive at yaks, which could be exaggerated in the same way.”

“But why on earth do they do that in the first place?” I tapped my fingers against my elbows, musing. The day was a bright one, and the alpine meadow around me dotted with flowers; at moments like this, it was hard to believe that bad weather was keeping us from our goal. The typical Anthiopean concept of the monsoon is a period in which it rains twenty-four hours a day, but even in the wettest regions, this is not the case. We had sunshine on an intermittent basis—along with enough rain to transform the hard-packed trail through the center of the village into a river of mud. I had only to look up at the wall of the high peaks, though, to be reminded of why we were passing the time with mews.

Tom was still pondering my question, rather than the weather. “Scavenging?” he said doubtfully. “Do they ever drive yaks into stampeding over a cliff edge? They might be hoping to feast on carrion.”

Suhail asked on our behalf, but turned up no reports of such a thing. “Which could be due to the vigilance of the herdsmen,” he said. “They do seem to be concerned that the mews will frighten a beast into injuring itself, if not falling to its death.”

After another week spent in observations, we had no better answers. “Perhaps it is a kind of play behaviour,” I said. “Like a cat toying with a mouse. The mews may simply find it entertaining to make a yak run.”

We had greater luck in our other endeavour, which was the trapping of a mew—not to kill it, as the locals do, but for study. Even this was not so easily done; as I have said, mews are quite clever about learning to avoid traps. We caught one the second night we tried, but made the error of going to sleep rather than sitting up in watch, fearing that our presence might frighten the mews away. We realized our mistake when we awoke the next morning to find the thin wooden bars of the cage chewed clean through. Tom swore colourfully in the several languages we had acquired in our journeys and built a new cage. With the mews forewarned, it took us several more nights before we met with success again, but at last we had a mew—and, having seen the fate of the first cage, we made certain to incarcerate our new captive in a much sturdier prison.

Honeyseekers and desert drakes were the only dragons I had kept in captivity before then. In size the mew more closely resembled the former breed, but whereas a honeyseeker is relatively mild unless provoked (whereupon it will spit toxic saliva at the source of its annoyance), a mew is much less cooperative. Watching it pace the boundaries of its new cage, gnawing speculatively at the joins, I said to Tom, “It does remind me just a little of a cat, beyond the coincidence of its call. Andrew once caged a stray he found in the village, and it behaved much the same way.”

“It’s a pity the Nying can’t set them after rats and shrews. It would do wonders for the grain situation here.”

Much to the bemusement of not only the Nying but also our companions, Tom and I did make some efforts to see whether the mew could be trained. Suhail was a great deal of help in this, although he found the entire enterprise hilarious. During his fosterage among the Aritat nomads, his “desert father” Abu Azali had taught him the noble art of falconry, which Suhail had continued to practice after we purchased the estate of Casselthwaite in Linshire. He was able to show us how to fashion jesses and a hood, and then teach our captive mew to fly to a glove. He did this by placing tidbits of food on the glove and whistling in a particular manner, so that the dragon would come to associate him, the glove, and the sound with reward. This stage of the process went well enough, but Suhail was less than convinced. Watching the mew, he said, “I think it’s cleverer than most falcons—too clever, even. You can almost certainly teach it to fly to a lure… but the first time you set it loose in the open air, it will be gone.” He pondered for a time, then said, “I wonder if they would imprint, as an eyass does. Raising a bird from the shell requires a great deal of effort, and I cannot imagine that a mew would be any easier; but it does offer the best results.”

We did not want to risk losing our mew by setting it after a lure, as capturing a replacement would be more trouble than it was worth. It therefore reigned alone in the shed we built for it—“the mews,” as Suhail insisted on calling the structure, grinning every time he did so. (This is of course the proper name for the place where trained falcons are kept… but the pun entertained him far too much.)

Tom did contemplate a second capture, though not for the purpose of training. “It would be interesting to see if they exhibit developmental lability, too. We’ve got evidence of that in a few breeds now, but we’ll need more before we can say for certain that it’s a broad characteristic.”

His phrasing was conservative. In truth, he and I had begun to formulate a theory which did away with the six criteria Sir Richard Edgeworth had used to distinguish “true dragons” from mere “draconic cousins,” and put in their place only one: developmental lability. We did not yet have a good understanding of how the different breeds related to one another—indeed, this is a question that continues to vex dragon naturalists to this day—but we had long since begun to suspect that whatever the anwer was, lability played a large role in the diversity we see today. As it is not a characteristic anyone has documented outside the draconic family, it might serve as an admirably simple means of differentiating that family from unrelated creatures.

I would dearly have liked to try breeding mews, or at least conduct experiments with their eggs. After my conversation with Suhail in Falchester, a part of my mind was constantly examining my research, asking at every turn, And what else? It was a peculiar feeling. On the one hand, I lamented the loss of my girlish glee, the sense that it was enough simply to see a new thing and record it for other people to learn. On the other hand, it was also exhilarating, for I was challenging myself to look further, to think harder, to fit what I saw into a larger picture and then tease out its implications.

Unfortunately for our mew-related aspirations, we were again there in the wrong season. Unlike honeyseekers, who will mate at any time of year, mews did so only toward the tail end of winter, with their eggs hatching in mid-spring—“And if we are still here then, something will have gone terribly wrong,” Tom said.

“Can’t you trap a pair and try to carry them out?” Chendley said, when he heard this.

It was a mark of how restless our lieutenant had become that he showed any enthusiasm for the prospect. Even granting that we would carry a smaller quantity of supplies out of the mountains than we had carried in, adding a pair of caged mews to the pile would not make things any easier. But it was a moot point regardless. “If they’re anything like yaks,” Tom said with a wry grin, “they’ll go toes-up from heat exhaustion at the searing temperature of fifteen degrees. But who knows. If all else fails, I’ll have a shot at it.”

One thing Tom and I did not attempt: bone preservation. We had not brought any of the necessary chemicals with us, as Thu’s report had made it clear that we should not expect any bones to survive in one of his mystery specimens. Besides, the process had gone from a matter of great industrial import to a minor curiosity, of interest as a footnote in the history of dragonbone synthesis, but otherwise of use only to individuals like ourselves, who wished to study the skeletons of dragons at leisure. We did dissect several mews, working from carcasses provided by the spinsters who hunted them, and confirmed that their bones disintegrated according to the common habit of their kind; but for records we were dependent upon my drawings.

One other activity kept us occupied during the monsoon, and that was mountain climbing. Once Suhail had enough fluency in Tser-zhag to handle minor daily matters, Chendley went out on a regular basis with either him or Thu to hone their skills on the nearby ridges and peaks. Tom and I went less frequently, but the weeks we spent with the herdsmen involved a great deal of clambering around by routes that made the Nying laugh at us. It was preparation for what was to come: the snows would have made our route much more treacherous, and the five of us could not afford the suspicion and lack of coordination that had weakened us on the journey to Hlamtse Rong. By the time the monsoon ended, we were in the best fighting trim of our lives, and ready—we thought—for anything.

EIGHT

Although the Nying had been willing to accept us as guests, the strain upon their resources meant they were pleased to see us go—though not in the direction we chose.

I mentioned before that the nearby peak, Gyaptse, is named for its supposedly cursed nature. There are meadows below it which might be profitable for the grazing of yaks, but the locals never used them; they were certain that anyone who went there would die. They held to this certainty even though, upon questioning, none of them could name a single person who had done so within living memory—for this is how folklore works.

What caused this belief? Elsewhere in the world (that is to say, in Vystrana and Keonga), it had been the presence of Draconean ruins which inspired such dread; but as I have mentioned, it was deeply unlikely that any such things should be at so high an elevation, and Thu had seen nothing of the kind during his own exploration there. No, the fear had a more fleshly source… or so I suspected.

Elsewhere in the Mrtyahaima, there are stories of monstrous snow-apes, variously called yeti, mi-go, and an assortment of other names. But in Tser-nga, the stories tell instead of ice demons. Could these, I wondered, be derived from the creature Thu had found?

We had seen no sign of any such creature during our time in Hlamtse Rong, despite locals who swore up and down that they had seen them with their own eyes. Again, this is customary with folklore; Scirling farmers will swear equally blind that they have seen giants and fairy hounds on the country roads at night. But this did not mean that, once upon a time, something had not existed and roamed the mountains. Even if they were all gone now, their memory might survive.

Thu and Suhail managed, through weeks of effort, to persuade three youths from the village to help ferry our supplies to a spot at the foot of Gyaptse’s neighbour Cheja, which we could then use as a depot while we explored the area. In addition to this we had our two ponies—which was still not enough to carry everything, but one of the virtues of our long delay was that we had learned which items we could, upon reflection, do without. Eight humans and two equines sufficed to convey the remainder, though we could not have hoped to do so were the ponies and Nying youths a whit less sturdy and tireless.

In theory it should have taken us four or five days to reach the valley below the col, where Thu had found his specimen. But he had been travelling in the spring; now it was autumn, and the snow lay deep on the higher slopes over which we must toil.

And toil we did. In the first day we climbed at least five hundred meters, counting ourselves fortunate that our monsoon-imposed delay had put us into so fit a state. That night it snowed, for while the season arrives quite abruptly, it does not depart in the same fashion; and by then we were at a high enough elevation for precipitation to come in solid form. But the snow was not so bad as the wind. This howled about our tents and proved to us that we had not pitched one of them securely enough; I think the only thing that prevented it from blowing away was its burden. (We were sleeping four to a tent in structures designed to hold three, so that our porters would not be left exposed. I was glad my nose had become entirely stuffed up, as it protected me from the aroma of so many unwashed bodies in such proximity—my own not excluded.)

But all of that was nothing compared to the obstacle that lay ahead, which was the Cheja Glacier.

This is named for its associated peak, the lesser companion to the towering Gyaptse. It descends off Cheja in a long, curving arc that wraps around the southeastern side of its base like a tongue. Until I took that holiday in southern Bulskevo, my image of a glacier was of a towering block of ice, intensely blue in its center, bordering a frozen northern sea. But glaciers, of course, can form on inland mountains provided they are high enough, and they are far from the uniform mass I imagined. Glacier ice flows: more slowly than water, to be sure, but it moves all the same. Where it moves quickly enough, it forms an icefall—the solid-state equivalent of a waterfall. Such areas are shattered with crevasses (into which one may fall) and seracs (tall pillars of ice that may collapse without warning on the unwary traveller). Even a short traverse of a glacier is exhausting at best, injurious or fatal at worst.

Upon reaching its edge, we sent one porter back with the ponies, those being our parting gift to the people of Hlamtse Rong. It meant we would have to move our supplies in stages, but that was unavoidable: no pony, however surefooted, could hope to manage what lay ahead.

Crossing that glacier was not a very technical challenge, compared with some of what we did in the following days. For the most part it involved exceedingly careful walking, with Thu or Chendley in the lead testing the ground with their alpenstocks, those iron-tipped, pick-headed staves which have proven so useful to the serious mountaineer. Where a crevasse divided the ground we sometimes crossed via a snow bridge, if our leaders judged it stable enough, but more often went around—assuming we saw the crevasse at all, as many of them are covered with a layer of snow thick enough to conceal, but not to support human weight.

We did not see the one into which I fell.

I do not blame Chendley for missing it. I was the careless one; rather than following strictly in his foosteps as I should have, I strayed leftward in my course. I had just enough time to think that the snow beneath my foot had settled rather more than usual before it gave way entirely, plunging me into the hidden blue abyss.

My shriek echoed off the walls around me, then cut short as the rope tied about my waist did its job and stopped my fall. My alpenstock slipped from my hand and scouted the depths for me. I did not hear it strike bottom, though I must admit I was not exactly listening.

When I could draw breath, I caught the rope with one flailing hand, steadied myself, and looked upward. To my horror, I saw Chendley’s legs dangling over the edge of the crevasse. The collapse of the hidden snow bridge had taken him completely by surprise, and my fall yanked him straight off his feet. He had attempted to arrest his slide as a mountaineer should, by digging his alpenstock into the snow, but this only found purchase when he was almost in the crevasse with me.

What saved us was the gift I mentioned before, from the mountaineers who had trained Tom, Suhail, and myself. Before we left Scirland, the inestimable Mrs. Winstow had given us a brilliant innovation of her own devising, which has since become so vital to those who climb on ice: a framework one straps to one’s boot, whose downward-pointing teeth provide far superior purchase compared to hobnails, without transmitting as much chill to the foot. This is called a crampon, and the sets Mrs. Winstow had gifted to us were made of synthetic dragonbone.

Suhail was behind me on the rope. When I fell and Chendley made as if to follow me into the abyss, my husband would also have been pulled down were it not for his crampons. They gave him sufficient traction that he was able to keep his feet and slam the point of his alpenstock into the snow, further stabilizing him. Had Chendley gone over the edge, committing his weight to the rope along with my own, this might not have been enough; but Chendley caught himself at the last instant, and Suhail held.

I did not know any of this until after I was safely on the surface once more, of course. At the time I could only dangle, for no part of the crevasse wall was quite within my reach, and I dared not swing for the nearest. Soon Chendley was up, though, and Tom joined Suhail; he belayed Thu as our Yelangese companion approached the edge and lowered the ropes he and the porters then used to raise me up.

When I reached the top, I could not immediately speak. Suhail enveloped me in a fierce embrace. I returned this as best as I could, notwithstanding the painful bruising I had received about the middle. (I recall thinking, rather inanely, that I had come a long way since my first experiment with abseiling in Vystrana, but that I did not recall my ribs hurting quite so badly back then. At the time I chalked this up to the difference in my age, but later I realized I had likely cracked one of the aforementioned ribs. Which I ought to have mentioned to those around me… but it seems I have never quite outgrown my youthful stupidity.)

Suhail might not have released me had Chendley not called out, reminding us that he stood on the opposite side of the crevasse. I tugged my clothing straight, managed a smile for the others, and said, “While I was down there, I looked about for any other frozen dragon specimens. Alas, I did not see any.”

Thu stared at me, clearly wondering if he had suffered a failure of translation. Tom swore, laughing as he did so. Chendley, shouting across the crevasse, demanded to know what we were going to do next.

Roped as we were, we could not conveniently go around the gap; and after that scare, none of us were quite willing to unrope. But fortunately the crevasse had a nearby bit where the walls sloped more agreeably inward, and we were able to improvise a crossing. Our supplies we later brought by a much safer route, around the end of the chasm.

Such were the incidents that delayed us. I will not recount them all; our report on the journey was published years ago in the circular of the Peak Club. Any mountaineering enthusiast interested in the details may look up that account and marvel at the primitive state of the sport in those days, and our sheer dumb luck in not getting ourselves killed. For me, the next point of relevance comes after we reached the far side of the glacier, dismissed our remaining porters, and entered the little valley where Thu had found his specimen.

I must take a moment to lay the scene, for not all of my readers are familiar with the topography of mountains in general (much less that particular location), and the specifics are vitally important to the progress of this tale.

Gyaptse is the highest peak in the wall that marks the western boundary of inhabited Tser-nga, and a more forbidding mountain one would be hard-pressed to find. There are taller—it does not even come close to claiming the title in that regard—but few with so unfriendly an aspect. Its southern facet, the one visible from our approach, falls in an array of nearly sheer faces, of so dark a stone as to appear almost black in anything other than direct sunlight. Snow and ice can only cling to scattered footholds, and I could not help but mentally arrange their harsh, slanting lines into a face, as if the mountain were frowning at me. The peak itself is peculiar in shape, almost like a tower; and a more unassailable tower I have never seen. In recent years three expeditions have tried to assail it: none have succeeded, and one perished almost to the last man.

Fortunately for us, we had no need to climb the peak. Our initial interest lay in a valley below, the cirque between two aretes or ridges descending off Cheja and Gyaptse. The latter, which is the route by which those later mountaineers have attempted the peak, has come to be known as the Dumond Ridge, after the leader of the first of those expeditions. The other I attempted to name Thu Ridge, in honour of our companion (without whom none of us would have been there); and it is called so in Yelangese. But in my homeland this attempt resoundingly failed, and mountaineers there speak of it as the Trent Ridge instead.

Thu and his compatriots had come here in search of a route through the mountains. Staring up at the col between the two peaks, I spoke to Thu. My breathlessness owed something to the altitude and exertion—but not all. “You thought that could be your path?”

The saddle where the slopes of Cheja and Gyaptse meet is far lower than either summit, but still towers over the valley below. Like the southern face of Gyaptse, the descent from the col to the valley floor is the next best thing to sheer: more cliff than slope. There was no direct route from where we stood to the top, and the Dumond Ridge does not connect to it; one would have to traverse the face of Gyaptse to reach it from that side. The reasonable approach—I am tempted to scar the adjective with quotation marks—is up Cheja’s ridge, along the mountain’s shoulder, and then up again to reach the col. It was feasible, I thought, for any moderately skilled mountaineer; but not for people in quantity.

“We did not think it for long,” Thu said wryly. “But we were trying to find some kind of pass, and this is the most approachable one for two hundred kilometers in either direction—if you can believe it.”

Unlike his previous expedition, we were not searching for a way across; our attention, at least to begin with, lay in the valley below. By a stroke of good luck, this was not as deeply blanketed in snow as we had feared. The arrangement of the surrounding terrain shelters it a little from the prevailing monsoon wind, while its southern exposure means it receives a great deal of sun. A brisk little stream of snowmelt poured down the lower slopes; we pitched our tents next to this, too exhausted to attempt any reconnaissance that day.

What we intended as a brief pause stretched two days longer than planned, on account of the winds. We were fortunately spared additional snowfall, which would have made our task even harder than it already was, but neither Chendley nor Thu would allow any of us to venture toward the head of the cirque. Though the winds were not bad where we camped, they would be much worse up at the col, and they feared the risk of avalanche. Such an event, Thu believed, had brought down the specimen he found, for the valley was far too low for flesh to be preserved year-round by the cold. Indeed, there were times there when even I felt quite warm—a very incongruous sensation, when one is at high elevation and surrounded by snow.

This delay did not prevent Suhail from surveying the area with an eye toward planning our search. He looked at the deeper snow piled where previous avalanches had landed and shook his head. “If there is anything under that, I don’t know how we’ll find it. With a settlement, you can make educated guesses about where to dig based on buildings, streets, and so forth. But here? You could be half a meter from what you’re looking for, and never know. And digging it all out would take all year.”

“While the mountain drops more on your head,” Tom muttered.

But Thu hastened to reassure us. “It was not where the snow is so deep. More to the right, I would say—though it is difficult to be sure.” He looked embarrassed.

“Quite some time has passed since you were last here,” I said. “Anyone would have difficulty remembering.”

In the area Thu had indicated, the snow was thin enough that Suhail thought we might be able to at least attempt an organized search. He prepared a series of thin cords, and when the wind dropped to a more reasonable level he ventured out and staked them down, delineating a grid of squares. “We’ll take these one at a time,” he said, “one person per square. The snow there is only about half a meter thick. Stop if you find anything out of the ordinary: bones, teeth, claws, flesh, whatever you may turn up. I’ll come take a look at it.”

It was arduous, back-breaking, hand-numbing work. However warm the air might be, we were still digging in snow, half a meter down to the thin grass which was all that would grow here. And we had to paw through what we removed, just to be certain there were no small remains that might herald the presence of something larger nearby.

We could not work for very long each day. The surrounding terrain cut off our light with shocking speed even when the sky was clear, and it was often quite grey. Clouds wreathed Gyaptse more days than not, sometimes descending low enough to bury the col itself. Only four of us dug at any one time; the fifth rested and watched Gyaptse, in case an avalanche should begin.

Chendley was the one who raised an objection, after careful study of the area. “I don’t think that thing was brought down by an avalanche,” he said.

We stopped and looked at him, most of us grinding our knuckles into our backs during this respite.

He gestured at where we searched. “Either you’re searching in the wrong place, and really ought to be digging into these big piles—or that thing wasn’t where most avalanches land. Oh, I won’t rule out the chance that some avalanches fall differently. Maybe that slide was one of the exceptions. But the odds say, probably not.”

“Then how did it get down here?” Tom asked.

“Could have been blown by the wind. Happened with a fellow on the Feillon—do you know that story? He died ten or fifteen years ago, trying to prove it could be climbed by a new route, and though people could see where his body was, nobody wanted to risk dying themselves just to retrieve it. But one day it vanished, and then a hiking party stumbled across it, some ladies out for an energetic stroll. People later worked out that it must have fallen in a gale.”

I was obscurely pleased that Chendley told this story without a single apology to me for speaking of such grim matters in front of a lady. “Where would our specimen have begun, do you think, if it fell on account of wind?”

He might not apologize for indelicacy, but his manners stayed with him well enough that he did not roll his eyes at me. A gesture upward sufficed to remind me why the question was foolish. We could barely even make out the col today, so shrouded was it in fog.

But none of us had forgotten what Thu said about seeing what might have been another specimen up there. If we could work out the path the first one had taken.…

I knew the truth. Every last one of us was hoping for a break in the weather that might allow us to attempt a climb up there. We searched below less because we expected to find anything of use, and more because we could not yet risk ascending higher. I am not often a religious woman, but I prayed for clear skies and calm winds.

In the meanwhile, we turned up nothing more than a few scraps of badly decayed flesh which might not even have come from a dragon. The night our search ended, I sat up with Tom and Suhail around the fire, discussing the entire situation.

“I do not think there can ever have been dragons living at the elevation of the col,” I said. I was sitting with my knees up in front of me, arms crossed over them. Even this close to the campfire, bundled in nearly every stitch I’d brought, I was cold. The day’s warmth fled promptly with the day’s light. “Developmental lability can achieve a great deal—but not, I think, a dragon that derives its sustenance entirely from rock and ice.”

Tom nodded. “Humans and yaks can adapt to living at altitude, and dragons might take it further. Insulation against the cold, more efficient respiration, that kind of thing. But they still have to eat. And nothing grows that high.” Even where we camped, the pickings were slim indeed.

“So what was a dragon doing there to begin with,” Suhail said. His intonation did not make it a question; he was instead stating the problem.

“Migration,” I said. “Wild yaks have been known to climb barren passes. A dragon could do it, too.”

Tom leaned back on his elbows and tipped his head toward the sky, thinking it through. “Then we have a few possibilities. One is that Thu was mistaken; there was only the one preserved carcass, and whatever he thought he saw in the col was only a rock or a strange formation of ice. The second is that more than one dragon tried at various points to cross that pass, and died in the attempt.”

“Humans have died in this region,” I said. “Remember the stories the Nying told. There is no reason the same could not have happened to animals.”

“And the third possibility,” Tom said, “is that the breed was social. Which would be quite unusual for a dragon of that size.”

Unusual, but not unheard of. “They could have been like savannah snakes, with unattached males hunting in sibling groups.” I paused, tapping my fingers against my elbows. It had become more of a habit lately, as I often kept my arms tight around my body to retain heat. “But migrating in such a group would be quite useless. Sibling males cannot breed.”

Suhail’s snort quickly tipped over into immoderate laughter. Tom sat up, and we both stared at my husband, who seemed to have lost his reason entirely. “My apologies,” Suhail said, once he’d regained a modicum of composure. He wiped his eyes. “It is the exhaustion at work, I suspect. But you made me think of those frogs you mentioned once, the kind that change their sex when needed. And then I imagined frog-dragons hopping their way through the mountains.” He illustrated with one hand, springing over imaginary peaks.

I giggled, but Tom looked thoughtful. “It isn’t impossible. Not the hopping, of course, but the other part. We already know that swamp-wyrm eggs can develop into either sex. The ability to change in maturity would be quite valuable to dragons living in a place like this, where populations can be very isolated.”

“We aren’t likely to be able to tell that from a carcass,” I said. “Assuming we can find one at all. But yes—it’s an interesting thought.” I wondered if mews were capable of such a change. If nesting in tamarisk leaves and incubating the eggs at high heat could produce an orange honeyseeker with salty saliva, who knew what kinds of variation could occur in the wild?

None of that was the kind of question I could answer while camped in the shadow of Gyaptse. But until the weather cleared, speculation was all I had.

And then some benevolent deity smiled upon us, for the next morning we woke to find the skies a brilliant, frozen blue.

The only cloud to be seen was a wisp trailing off the peak of Gyaptse, which is a frequent phenomenon at that altitude. No sooner did we discover our good fortune than we scrambled to bring out the field glasses and examine the col above.

Looking at it directly was painful; we could only do so for brief periods of time. The same clear weather that blessed us with a view also reflected off the snow with blinding radiance—quite literally blinding, if we did not take care. We had goggles with darkened lenses, but these could not be combined with the field glasses without losing so much clarity as to make the whole exercise pointless. So we looked with unprotected eyes, and took it in turns to risk the light.

“If you see that horizontal band of bare stone,” Thu said, “it was below that somewhere—I think.” He did not sound as certain as a man who hauled us halfway around the world should have been.

We searched. After a time, we realized that the band of stone Tom, Suhail, and I had been looking at was not the one Thu meant. We found a dozen suspicious-looking lumps, spent far too much time trying to direct the eyes of others to those lumps, and then realized they were only stones or piles of snow. Or were they? We scrutinized them, arguing size, shape, piling speculation atop guesswork, optimism conquering pessimism and then being conquered in turn.

It was Tom who finally put his field glasses down and said, “We can’t tell from here. Whatever you saw, Thu… if it’s still there, it’s been too deeply buried by the snow for us to have any hope of finding it again. Not at this distance.”

My shoulders sagged in disappointment. All this effort, and we had nothing. In the ordinary way of things my work with the mews should have pleased me—but not when I had hoped for so much more.

Then I realized what Tom meant.

I looked up to find him gazing steadily at me. I, in turn, sought my husband’s eyes. Suhail’s frustrated expression faded to quiet stillness; then a silent laugh shook his shoulders. I did not even have to explain. “God willing,” he said with a half smile.

Chendley was staring at the three of us. He tumbled to it an instant later, for he had been in our company long enough to understand our habits. “You can’t be serious. You don’t even know that there’s anything up there to find!”

“The only way to find out,” I said, “is to go up there and look.”

It was madness, of course. The decision to leave Scirland at all had been a gamble; this was a much larger one. The weather was clear now, but how long would that hold? “When we were here before,” Thu said, with the cautious air of a man offering up a slender thread of hope, “we planned out what I think is a route to the col. We did not attempt it because there was no point—it had no military use—but I believe our group could manage it.”

Assuming our skills were adequate to the task. Assuming the weather did not take a turn for the worse. Assuming that Gyaptse did not live down to its reputation, and crush this group of foolhardy humans who thumbed their noses at its power.

I had not travelled halfway around the world only to give up at the end.

Tom shook his head, not in disagreement, but in a gesture so familiar to me from years of partnership: disbelief at what he was about to say. “Well. If we’re going to get ourselves killed, we might as well get started.”

By the standards of modern mountaineering, Thu’s route up to the col is accounted a moderate challenge, but not a tremendous one. It is more than enough to deter the casual passerby, but within the reach of those equipped with ropes, alpenstocks, crampons, and the techniques of belaying. For this I am eternally grateful, because were it any more difficult, we should not have made it at all—and then not only my life but the field of dragon naturalism and, indeed, the world as a whole would have been quite different.

The first part was simply hiking, out of the valley and toward the ramparts of the neighbouring peak of Cheja. There we climbed the ridge I mentioned before and traversed the mountain’s lower slopes, heading for the dark tower of Gyaptse once more. But two technical hurdles stood in our path, and these tested my own meager climbing abilities to the utmost.

To attain the higher elevation of that traverse, the shoulder which would permit us to approach the col, we had to ascend a narrow chimney: a gap in the rocks where one climbs not by clinging to the outside of the stones, but by bracing against their inward faces and using this pressure for support. This is most difficult, and most hazardous, for the one who goes first, as that individual climbs without the safety of a rope from above. If he falls, there is nothing to catch him. This chimney was only about four or five meters high, so our leader might hope to escape serious injury at the first impact—but the terrain at the bottom was such that he stood a great risk of tumbling out and over the nearest edge, whereupon those behind him would have to arrest his fall. And our own footing there was none too secure, as by then the friendly ridge which had borne us to that point was deteriorating into crumbling, rotten rock.

Thu insisted on leading the way up the chimney. Chendley granted this only when we pointed out that Thu was smaller than anyone save myself, and thus we had the best chance of holding on if the worst should happen. Our Yelangese friend made short work of the chimney, but I do not think I took a single breath until he was safely at the top. And then I had to hold it again while Thu belayed Tom up. This done, Tom edged past him to a better spot, anchoring both Thu and himself while I made the climb.

In the mountains of Anthiope, in those places where the climbs are considered suitable for the frailty of ladies, it is not uncommon to see women in skirts being hauled up such obstacles by the main force of the men above them. Indeed, experienced women mountaineers such as Miss Collier and Mrs. Winstow have often had to argue strenuously to prevent themselves from being subjected to the same assistance. Had I been in need of that kind of aid, I would have found myself in dire straits that day: the footing above was no better than at the bottom, and while Tom could loop the rope around a nearby stone for support, he and Thu could not have lifted me without endangering themselves. Although I had their belay for safety, I had no option but to do the work of climbing on my own. My shoulders and knees ached by the time I reached the top, and I did suffer a stabbing pain or three from my cracked rib… but I must confess I felt pride in the achievement, and grinned broadly at both men while I took my place in the line.

The second obstacle was the location we dubbed, by universal agreement, the Cursed Crack. This is without a doubt the most absurd bit of terrain I have ever set myself against, and I hope never to see a worse. This too is a chimney, but one far too narrow for a climber to fit inside. The only way to ascend it is to wedge one hand and foot into the crack, and with the other pair to grip whatever discolorations in the stone might pass for holds. One’s instinct is to huddle as close to the crack as possible, but this will not do: safety lies in spreading oneself broadly, as if hugging the mountain. This is far from a reassuring position to be in, and Suhail exercised his creativity on the way up, formulating oaths in an astonishing medley of languages.

I felt no pride when I finally reached the top of the crack, for I was too exhausted. We had ascended at least a thousand meters since leaving Hlamtse Rong, likely more, and the change was palpable. The smallest exertion had me gasping for breath, much to the detriment of my ribs, and my heart never ceased its frantic pounding. Even the knowledge that our only remaining obstacle was a relatively easy trek across the icy expanse of the col to the area of our search could not put much life into my limbs, for each of them felt as if it weighed at least three times as much as usual.

No force in the world could have turned me back, though. It was difficult enough to accept that we must pitch our tents at the top of the crack, as the day was much too far gone for us to reach any other shelter before night fell, and the winds through the center of the col were vicious. (A fact for which we must be grateful: were it not for those winds, the snow there would have buried any specimens much too deep to ever be recovered.) But I do not think I slept more than two winks that night.

Dawn comes early in such a place: at that high an elevation, there are few peaks to block the sun. I was awake even before then, and although the air was most bitterly cold, I must confess that dawn ranks among the most glorious of my life. The light came first to the peaks of Cheja and Gyaptse, igniting them with brilliant fire, while below the shadowed slopes remained grim and dark. There is no contrast more stark in all the world, not even in the deserts of Akhia. It felt as if the descending line of the dawn was bringing life toward me one meter at a time, and when it arrived, the world transformed. Gut-curdling doubts about my decision to come to Tser-nga gave way to a bone-deep certainty that our quest would be successful. I had no scientific basis for this change of heart; but I was sure.

I was glad of that surety when we ventured out into the exposed space of the col. No sooner did we leave the shelter of Cheja’s flank than the winds struck us with titanic force, carrying razor crystals of ice. We staggered one careful step at a time, mindful of the risk that a fall could be the trigger that began an avalanche. But the true risk lay above us, where the steep upper slopes of Gyaptse held a heavy load of snow, which might come loose at any moment.

My attention should have been on that, and on the ground ahead. But although we had conquered no mighty peak, we shared with such pioneers a rare and precious experience: the knowledge that we were quite possibly the first human beings to stand upon that ground. And depending on the success of the caeligers, we might even be the first to look past the col into the uninhabited terrain beyond.

The ground on the western side sloped away in a much gentler fashion. To my right and to my left, the mountains circled in a formidable wall, as if to guard the peak in the center: a beautifully formed pyramid I thought taller than Gyaptse, reigning like a queen amid her subjects. It glowed like a diamond torch in the early light. In the shadows below lay deep valleys, low enough to support trees and meadows, some of them yet free of snow. Altogether, it had the appearance of an alpine paradise.

I came to realize Tom was standing at my right shoulder. We could not converse in low tones, for the wind flung our voices away; he had to shout as he said, “We can’t do it, Isabella.”

“I know we can’t,” I shouted back. In order to make this ascent, we had left a substantial portion of our gear at the base of Cheja; we carried only enough food for a few days, and no guns for hunting. Descending into those valleys would be suicide by starvation.

But Tom and I were of one mind. Looking down into that region, we both thought: Perhaps they are not extinct. Perhaps that unknown breed lives in this place, isolated from all human observation, and if we go there we will see them alive.

The season was too far gone; we could not plan any expedition there until next year at the earliest, and probably much later than that. And it would be exceedingly difficult to bring enough men and materiel up to this col, however much easier the descent might be on the other side. But with that possibility before my eyes, I would not be deterred: whatever it took, however much money I had to pour into the task and political maneuvering I had to engage in, I would come back and explore that lost world.

The cosmos has a fine sense of humour.

The col is not a perfect ridge; at its crest it flattens out, and even dips down slightly to create a shallow bowl. In the month of Seminis in the southern hemisphere, at six thousand meters of elevation, you would not think it is possible for one such as I to become overheated, but I did; the deep snow of this bowl reflected the sun like a mirror, and the slight shelter it provided gave enough respite from the wind that I found myself sweating heavily in my layers of wool and silk and fur. But I did not want to stop long enough to remove my pack and shed layers; and so I slogged onward, through the deep, wet snow.

Even with our goggles on, the light was blinding, and we could not effectively search while floundering through the snow. At regular intervals one member of the party or another stopped to catch their breath and look around, scanning for any hint of something other than snow, rock, and ourselves, praying all the while that we had not climbed up here for naught. However glorious the view, however tempting the vista beyond, we had come here with a specific purpose in mind. And it was Tom, the most eagle-eyed among us, who spotted it at last.

“There!”

It was a tiny thing, an aberration in the smooth expanse of snow. Near to a small shoulder of Gyaptse on the north end of the col, it protruded only about fifteen or twenty centimeters; had the snow been any deeper or the winds here less fierce, we would have missed it entirely, for the monsoon had gone a long way toward burying it. But that tiny thing was enough, and we set off for it with new life in our limbs.

Suhail dragged us to a halt a few meters away, quite literally grabbing our sleeves to stop us. “Wait. Wait!”

There was nothing in the world I wanted less to do. Sun-dazzled though my eyes were, I could see enough to make my breath race even more than it already did. A pale, pebbled surface very similar to the scales Thu had shown us. A flattened lump I thought might have been a brow ridge, before the bone beneath gave way and collapsed the flesh. We had at least part of a specimen, and the rest… the rest might lie just a little distance under the snow.

But if Tom and I were here for our expertise with dragons, and Thu and Chendley for their expertise with mountains, Suhail was here as our archaeologist, to make certain we did not damage what we had come so far to find.

As he had done when we discovered the Watchers’ Heart, he made us proceed with care. While we hovered and twitched, he circled the visible remains at a safe distance, considering their disposition. Finally he said, “If the rest of the body is still attached, it most likely lies here.” One hand indicated an area of snow. “But without the skeleton, we can’t really be sure. It might have twisted in any direction.”

The only way to know for sure was to dig.

We began at the head—or rather I should say Suhail began, for he did not want more than a single person’s weight atop the snow there, in case it crushed something delicate. He brushed away the looser snow with his gloved fingers, exposing enough to reveal that we were indeed looking at the flattened head of some draconic creature. Then, with careful taps of a small pick, he began to chip away the older encrustation.

While he did this, the rest of us brushed the ground in a circle around the head, scooping away the snow. Ordinarily I would have stood back and drawn the scene, but not on this occasion, for two reasons: first, that my heavily gloved hand could not wield a pencil with any accuracy, and second, that I could not have stood back for any sum of money. I took the southern quadrant, where Suhail thought the rest of the carcass was most likely to lie; Thu was to my left and Tom to my right.

I did not have to dig far at all before it began. “I found something!” I exclaimed. Only a sharp order from Suhail kept Tom and Thu from hovering over me. But they turned their efforts toward mine, and we went on digging.

One centimeter at a time, it emerged. At Suhail’s end, the collapsed head; at mine, a misshapen lump it took me a long time to be certain was a foot. Rather than chipping too far downward, I went horizontally, following the line of the leg. Hindleg, or fore? I kept changing my mind; we had not uncovered enough to be certain. Fore, I thought, based on the distance from the head, and the relative sizes—but then I reached something that did not look like a shoulder. And Tom, lying full-length to distribute his weight and digging between myself and Suhail, stopped without warning.

“Isabella,” he said. “Look.”

In science it is often possible to examine the bark so closely, one forgets the subject at hand is a tree, much less that it exists as part of a forest. I sat up, my back aching, and I looked.

At Suhail’s knees, the head. At mine, the leg, twisted and flat, leading to a structure that was not a shoulder. And where Tom dug, another limb—smaller than the one I had uncovered, equally twisted and flat, but leading to a structure that most definitely was a shoulder.

From foot to head, the entire thing was not more than two and a half meters. And it was bipedal.

We stared at it in frozen silence, while the wind howled around us. Imagine it alive, with a skeleton inside; imagine it standing, with one foot outstretched and the shoulders thrown back proud. We had seen that image a thousand times, in statues, carved into walls.

It was a Draconean god.

NINE

What does one do, when one finds a mythical creature buried in the snow of the Mrtyahaima?

One keeps digging, of course.

We could not spare the time to discuss its implications. We were too exhausted, and there was no good place to set our tents on the Gyaptse side of the col; if we were to return to our previous campsite, we could not stay where we were for long. But all of us shared the fear that if we left the specimen where it was, exposed by our efforts, it would be destroyed or lost to the valley below, as the previous one had been. We must free it from the ice now, and carry it with us. That this would likely damage it, we must accept as preferable to the alternatives.

Further excavation only confirmed that we were not hallucinating on account of altitude. The carcass was that of a bipedal, dragon-headed creature, with a head large in proportion to its body, as a human’s is. The first wing we uncovered was too poorly preserved for us to make any judgments; could it bear the body’s weight? How would a creature such as this fly, when it was built to walk upright? With the muscles so withered by cold and desiccation, we could only guess at its living mass, its sex, whether it was a juvenile or an adult.

It was a race against time. We had barely set our hands to the task once more when Chendley, keeping a worried eye on the sky, said, “The weather’s changing.”

In the Mrtyahaima, storms can blow in with shocking speed and very little warning. I soon took off my darkened goggles, for the sunlight had vanished behind a fresh layer of clouds. The wind picked up as we located the second wing, renewing the stinging onslaught of ice. And, worst of all, more snow began to fall.

I cursed steadily under my breath as I worked. It was too unfair—finding something so astonishing, only to have the sky itself turn against us. This was no mere fouling of the weather, but a genuine storm, and every minute we stayed there endangered us further. One entire side of the carcass was still buried in ice when Suhail left off and hauled me to my feet. “No!” I shouted, struggling against him. “We can’t leave it—we can’t go back—no one will believe us if we don’t have proof!” My scientific reputation was not powerful enough to support such a claim. They would think I was clawing for more attention, making up stories to inflate my notoriety. No one would believe that we had found a dragon-headed biped, not unless we could silence the doubters with a carcass.

But Tom was at my other side, helping Suhail drag me away. I knew they were right; I knew staying there would be suicide. And yet I fought them, even as we stumbled back across the col toward safety.

Then Gyaptse itself turned against me. “Avalanche!” Chendley bellowed, and the thunder began.

Had we still been roped together, as we had been during the climb, all five of us would have died. The rope itself would have broken our bones, yanked us this way and that, dragged us down into the torrent when we needed to swim for the surface.

Surviving an avalanche is a good deal like swimming—in violent, solid water. The snow overtook us before we got very far at all, but in the interim, we all charged to our right, desperate to get away from the cliff that dropped into the valley where Thu found the first carcass. If we went over that edge, we were dead. I ran with Suhail’s hand gripped in my own, both of us stumbling in the deep snow and alternately helping one another to our feet—and then the hammer of God struck us from behind.

Suhail was ripped from me in an instant. I lost sight of him, of Tom, of my entire party, and could spare no attention for anything other than trying to survive. The racing snow bore me along at terrifying speed. I floundered at what I hoped was an angle, trying to escape its current and keep myself near the surface. But which way was which? I had lost all track; I was only flailing, desperate, certain I would be buried and never found again.

Then my leg struck something, and pain flared white-hot at the impact. My fingers hit a solid surface, but it was gone before I could grab it. On and on I slid, so disoriented I wanted to retch, and then, at last, it stopped.

I woke buried in snow.

By purest chance, I had come to a halt with my hand in front of my face. Because of this, when I began to flail in panic, I did the most useful thing I could have done, under the circumstances: I compressed the snow, creating a pocket in front of my face.

I could not have been unconscious for long at all, or I would have suffocated. And although I did not realize it until later, I could not have been buried very deeply, or the snow would have been too firmly packed for me to create that pocket. Spittle trailed down my face; it ran sideways across my cheek, and I retained sufficient presence of mind to realize that the surface must lie in the other direction.

Clawing my way free of the snow felt like climbing out of my own grave—as it could easily have been. I was less than half a meter deep, I think, but even that weight was exceedingly difficult to move. Only the sheer animal panic of being trapped gave me the strength to drag myself out.

The wind was still howling, the snow still falling. I lurched upright and nearly bit through my tongue when I put weight on my left leg; the only reason it held was because I was too cold to feel the pain clearly. But I was alive, and that was more than I might have had.

Where were the others?

For once it was not a stubborn refusal to contemplate the worst that kept me from thinking about how they might be dead. I was concussed; I was hypothermic; I was not thinking at all clearly, though I had the delusion that I was entirely rational. Since I was not dead, I must not have gone over the eastern edge of the col; since I had not gone over the edge, I must have been swept down the western slope, which was the direction I had been trying to go to escape the avalanche. Therefore—by the logic of my addled brain—I must go uphill to find the others.

I set off, staggering in the snow.

The pain faded from my leg as I went. I was no longer shivering. I went on, up a small slope and down the other side; I stumbled onward, looking for the correct slope. The ground went down and down and down, not obliging me. I lost my footing and slid a good distance, and when I rose I didn’t know which way I was facing. The sky was much too dim for me to see anything clearly. I saw a spark of light ahead; that must be them. But then it went away, and I lurched in a circle, trying to find it again. This dizzied me, and I collapsed once more into the snow, which felt almost warm.

Just as my thoughts were fading, I saw them coming, and giggled in relief. I was all right. Suhail had found me. He and Tom and Jacob lifted me up and carried me to safety.