Marie Brennan: Voyage of the Basilisk

My question was a foolish one. I knew by his expression that everything was not all right. Before he saw me and put the letter away, he was as grim as I had ever seen him, though now he looked resigned. “A message from home,” he said. “My father has died.”

“Oh,” I said. Words seemed to have escaped me entirely. Here I had been fretting over scurrilous gossip, as if the tattered state of my reputation were the most important thing in the world. I felt ashamed of myself. “My condolences.”

Suhail shook his head. He seemed to be dismissing my unspoken imputation of grief. I still knew nothing of his family, save that he was estranged from them to a sufficient degree that he did not even use their names. Whatever had lain between him and his father, it meant he did not weep now.

“Thank you,” he said, as if realizing that a shake of the head was not a proper response to condolences. “But I’m afraid it means I must return to Akhia.”

I blinked. “What—now?”

“Yes.”

The grimness was there again, a stony layer beneath the resignation. “Yes, of course; how foolish of me. Your family will want you with them at a time like this.”

“It is not that—not precisely. Rather—” Suhail caught himself, stopped, and shook his head again. “It does not matter. But I will not be able to go with you to Ala’ase’ama.”

My heart sank. I had, without realizing it, begun thinking of him as a member of our expedition, fully as much a part of my work as Tom was. But chance had brought him to me, and now chance would take him away again.

I have written before about the regret I feel upon parting from the individuals I come to know in my travels. This parting, I confess, struck deeper than any other. Suhail had weathered more trials at my side than anyone save Tom; with him I shared secrets I could not even permit Tom to know. My association with him was not respectable—and I would bear the consequences of that for some time—but I had come to treasure it. Only a determination not to end our partnership by embarrassing myself kept me from showing the depths of that loss.

To conceal it, I reached into my pocket and took out my little notebook, then tore a page from it and scribbled a few brief lines. “Here,” I said, giving it to Suhail. “That is my direction in Falchester. I hope you will at least write to me, as occasion permits.”

He accepted it with a smile that was a mere ghost of its usual brightness. I noticed that he took care not to brush my fingers as he did so: we had returned once more to propriety. “Thank you,” he said. “And I wish you the best of luck in the rest of your journey. Peace be upon you, sadiqati ”—which means “my friend” in the Akhian tongue.

By the next evening he was gone, having taken passage on a ship bound for Elerqa. That quickly, he was lost to me, and the melancholy of it stayed with me for a long time after.

There is little I can say about the remainder of the expedition that would hold a tenth so much interest as what has come before. I will instead speak of what happened after I returned to Scirland, which was not documented in my reports to the Winfield Courier, nor collected in my travelogue afterward.

Part of it is widespread knowledge regardless. As I had predicted, Tom became a Fellow of the Colloquium, because of the work he had done during our expedition. It both pleased and saddened him: acceptance from that body was a goal we both pursued, but his Fellowship did not magically transform the world around him into one where his birth did not matter. He had not expected it, but the disappointment was there nonetheless.

The Colloquium did not unbend so far as to admit me to their ranks, but the following Acinis, in a grand ceremony of the Synedrion, the king inducted me into the Order of the White Horn, making me Dame Isabella Camherst. Officially, this honour was given in gratitude for my courage and quick action in saving the fort at Point Miriam from attack by the Ikwunde army. The Crown had reviewed those events and concluded that, accusations of treason notwithstanding, I had indeed acted in the best interests of Scirland, and so they wished to reward me. (This did not, however, prevent the aforementioned unnamed member of the Synedrion from drawing me aside and reminding me that I was still under no circumstances permitted to return to Bayembe.)

That story, of course, was cover for the truth, which is that I was knighted for my part in the rescue of Her Highness: the woman who now rules as our queen. This, again, was Her Highness’ doing, but naturally none of us could speak of it directly. Admiral Longstead had told me before I left Keonga that any whisper of that matter would see me put on trial and likely imprisoned, and so I held my tongue.

It is often said that the poor are insane, while the rich are merely eccentric. So it is with knighthood, I discovered: as Mrs. Camherst I was disreputable, but as Dame Isabella Camherst, I was just scandalous enough to be worth inviting places. The more frivolously social invitations I declined, but the Nyland Brothers approached me about publishing my travelogue as Around the World in Search of Dragons, which sold through its first edition in less than two months, and I soon embarked upon a lecture tour throughout the kingdom. If my audiences at times asked more questions about my personal life than my professional work, and if I suffered the occasional heckler who chose to mock my retraction of my sea-serpent theory, I took care not to complain where any but my closest friends could hear.

As pleasing as these developments were (not to mention a welcome improvement to my financial situation), I found myself wishing for the peace and quiet of my Hart Square townhouse, where I might work on the material I had gathered during my expedition.

Much of this work concerned my taxonomical questions. I had learned my lesson from the premature publication of that article in the Journal of Maritime Studies ; I would not publish this theory until I was certain of its strength, and moreover could prove it with an abundance of supporting evidence. As it transpired, that evidence would not come into my hands for some years yet, but in the interim I accomplished a great deal that laid the groundwork for the discoveries that would follow.

I also took up a hobby that puzzled many around me. I told everyone I was interested in the fossils then being uncovered in several parts of the world, and in pursuit of that, I studied with both a sculptor and a lapidary, learning to cut and carve stone.

My true aim, of course, was the dissection of the petrified egg. It sat for the better part of a year on one of my bookshelves, seeming like nothing more than a stone carving of an egg (which is what I told everyone it was). Given the wealth of firestone concealed inside, I could not trust its dissection to an outsider; I must learn to do the work myself. When at last I deemed myself ready, I made a plaster cast of the egg, weighted the cast with lead (so the housekeeper would not notice a change in its mass), and began the process of extracting the embryo within.

First I chipped away the rocky exterior, which had formerly been the shell. The mass of firestone glowed with muted light, its usual brilliance dimmed by sheer thickness. I held an inconceivable fortune in my hands, and was about to cut it to pieces. (Somewhere, I fancied, the lapidary who had taught me gem-carving was weeping inconsolably, and did not know why.)

I was more concerned with what the firestone held. When I held it up to a lamp, I could see the outline of the embryo within, and nearly melted with relief. For a year I had worried that the egg we carried away from Rahuahane would prove to be sterile, or that its contents would have been destroyed by the petrification.