Marie Brennan: Voyage of the Basilisk

With the greatest of care, I carved my way toward the nearest extension of the embryo. When I broke through, however, my disappointment was intense: instead of a bone, I found only a dust-filled hollow. I had hoped the petrification process was like that which preserved dragonbone, and that I might extract the skeleton entire. To find nothing but dust so discouraged me that I gave up for the day, hiding the egg where the maid would not find it.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea. Natalie, woken by the noise of me banging about, found me carefully pouring plaster into that hollow. “What on earth are you doing?” she asked.

“Taking a cast of where the skeleton was,” I said. (She and Tom both knew of my inadvertent visit to Rahuahane, and what Suhail and I had found there.) “If I am very careful, I may yet be able to learn something.”

“Could you not learn it during daylight hours?” Natalie asked, yawning. But by then I had enough money that I need not worry at all about the expense of candles or lamp oil, and I went on working.

The entire process took weeks. I would carve until I neared a hollow, then drill through and fill it with plaster. When I had done this with all the easily accessible portions, I removed them and began the procedure anew with the deeper portions. The vacuoles did not quite form a continuous whole, and so I had to take my casts in stages, pausing each time to draw the current appearance of the mass, in order to be certain I could reassemble the plaster in the correct configuration afterward.

But at last it was done, and I could see what manner of dragon the ancients of Draconean civilization had been breeding.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Tom said when I showed it to him.

“Indeed,” I said. “I have already ordered several books on embryology; they should be delivered soon.” (We knew virtually nothing of draconic embryology in those days, and do not know nearly enough about it now, though our understanding has at least advanced from the total disgrace it once was.)

Tom bent to peer at the lumpy, imperfect casts, which I had wired together in my best approximation of their original posture. “The tail and wings are clearly not well-developed yet—the tail in particular,” he said.

“Perhaps full development of the tail came after hatching. Human children, after all, are born with strikingly different proportions than they attain as adults.” I turned the casts around so he might view them from another angle. “Underdeveloped wings are certainly to be expected; it is a common feature of birds. But the jointing of the legs—well, it is difficult to make out, given the state of the casts. But it seems peculiar. I cannot tell whether this is an ordinary stage in draconic embryo development, or whether it indicates an extinct species.”

“Or one not yet discovered—though that seems less likely, especially nowadays.” Tom straightened and grinned at me. “Admit it. You are already planning how to gather specimens of dragon eggs so that you can dissect them and sketch out the sequence of development.”

I could not help returning his smile. “You only guess that because your thoughts tended in the same direction. But yes, I need comparative materials. It might go quite some way toward reconciling the stories of the Draconeans with the reality of modern dragons if the ones they tamed were in fact a species that has since gone extinct.”

Tom gestured at the casts. “Will you be publishing this?”

The question made me hesitate. It is a scientist’s obligation to share what she learns; only then may others examine her work and find where it is wanting. Nor can a single person discover everything there is to know, which makes it imperative that those investigating a topic build on each other’s efforts. But my error with the sea-serpent theory had left me shy of publishing anything I was not certain of—and besides, there was the matter of where and how I had acquired this specimen. I did not want to send treasure-hunters flocking to Rahuahane.

“Not yet,” I said slowly. “It must be known eventually, yes—and I will write it up, though not send the paper to anyone, so that if something happens to me the information will not be lost. But I do not feel that I am ready to share this with others until I know more.”

In hindsight, I am more glad than ever that I made that choice. Ordinarily I believe secrecy to be anathema in scientific endeavours; in this case, however, it allowed subsequent events to fall out in a fashion rather more controlled than it might otherwise have been.

But as I so often do, I get ahead of myself. The answers I sought lay some years in my future still; they would have to wait upon news from Bayembe and fresh work in other parts of the world. The treasure I had retrieved from Rahuahane, though, was not the pile of poorly carved firestone stuffed in a hatbox at the top of my wardrobe. It was that plaster cast, and all of the questions it created.

MARIE BRENNAN habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Onyx Court series, the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and the urban fantasy Lies and Prophecy, as well as more than forty short stories.

www.swantower.com

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A Natural History of Dragons

The Tropic of Serpents

Voyage of the Basilisk

Midnight Never Come

In Ashes Lie

A Star Shall Fall

With Fate Conspire

Warrior

Witch

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