Marie Brennan - The Tropic of Serpents

My own mother… I will not go into detail regarding the conversation between us, save to say that “conversation” is an exceedingly polite name to give it. She had heard the rumours about Tom Wilker, and drawn very erroneous conclusions from them, not the least of which was the notion that I had only gone to Eriga for his sake. I took great exception to her readiness to condemn me, and after that I no longer had to ignore her letters, for she wrote me none.

Andrew I apologized to for the loss of the penknife he had given me when we were children. He listened to the tale of its demise with all the wide-eyed excitement of the eight-year-old boy he had been, and afterward clapped me on the back as if I were a man. “It fell in a noble cause,” he said solemnly, and then demanded to know whether Erigan women really went bare-breasted.

I had expected to return to my life as a recluse, albeit for different reasons than before. I imagined myself rising each morning to write papers on our observations, Tom and I having agreed to bombard the Philosophers’ Colloquium and other scholarly bodies with material until they were forced to acknowledge our existence and our merit. We had plans for another book as well, which ultimately turned into two: Dragon Breeds of the Bayembe Region and Dragon Breeds of Mouleen .

But I had not accounted for my celebrity, which brought a flood of mail and even some curiosity-seekers to my house in Pasterway. Natalie dealt with these, but I could not (and did not) refuse all invitations to events and house parties; if I wanted the Colloquium to acknowledge me as a scholar, it was to my benefit to present myself as such in public. (This also lent strength to my assertions that any scandals, real or imagined, associated with my time in Eriga were secondary at best to my true purpose there.) I set to work making a place for myself in Society, even if it was not the place Society intended for me.

And, one Athemer morning in early Pluvis, I sat down in Kemble’s parlour with Tom, Natalie, Lord Hilford, and Frederick Kemble himself, to discuss the matter of dragonbone.

“It was Canlan,” Lord Hilford said. “I have no proof of it—nothing I could take to a court, not with a marquess as the defendant—but I’m certain he is the one behind the break-in. The man I set to investigating wrote to me recently, reporting that Canlan received a very large sum of money from a company in Va Hing. A new outfit, one whose members include several chemists and industrialists.”

Tom frowned, drumming his fingers on one knee. “But why sell the information, when he could profit more by exploiting it himself?”

The earl snorted. “Because he needed ready money. The Canlan estates are not what they once were; to invest in this research himself would require more funds than he can spare. And also, I suppose, because he’s lazy. Gilmartin isn’t a chemist himself, which means he would need to hire men who are, which means dividing his profits, and also a great deal of work I doubt he’s inclined to undertake. Much easier for him to hand it off to someone more energetic.”

I thought of the accusations against me, that I had betrayed Scirland by helping Bayembe do without our help. That had largely been inadvertent on my part, but Canlan had sold this knowledge to Va Hing with malice aforethought.

Of course, I could hardly throw stones, not when we had stolen the seeds of it from a Chiavoran working for a Bulskoi lord in Vystrana. Whatever came of this would be an international collaboration, against the will of all involved.

“What do you have for us, Mr. Kemble?” I asked.

He rose and unlocked his desk, taking from it a small oblong wrapped in canvas. Because I was the one financing his work, he handed it to me first.

My hopes were too high; I nearly dropped the thing, surprised by its heavy weight. This was not the feather-light material from which we had built the Furcula. I unwrapped it nevertheless, and found in my hands a solid bar the color of dragonbone, no longer than my palm.

“Chemically, it’s the right substance,” Kemble said. “Which is more than I had a year ago. But the structure is entirely wrong. It’s too dense; it weighs more than lead. Though it’s stronger than lead, for what that’s worth.”

His tone said he did not think it was worth much. “If it has the strength of dragonbone, surely that is of use,” I said, giving Tom the bar to examine.

Kemble grunted. “Only if you could produce it in large quantities, easily and cheaply. Which, right now, you can’t. Or at least I can’t. I gambled on making that; it cost all the funds you gave me for the next year. I had to know if it would work. But you might as well build your machines out of firestones as use that for any industrial purpose.”

I could not contain my wince. His funds for a year ? I could not fault him for the experiment, but even so…

Kemble proceeded to outline the method by which he had created the bar, while Tom and Lord Hilford asked intelligent questions. I followed none of it, but slouched in my chair in a most unladylike fashion and chewed on my lower lip. It was progress, though not success. And I was determined to follow through until it became success, even if it bankrupted me—but far better, of course, if it did not. With Natalie now a part of my household and Jacob steadily growing, I would need a greater income.

Up to that point, my sketches had only been for private pleasure, and later for field notes and scholarly illustrations. But news of what transpired in Eriga had ignited public interest: all the world knew the Moulish had just defeated the mightiest warriors of the Ikwunde with dragons. Might there not be a market for pictures? Several news-sheets had offered me money for the “true story” of what happened in Eriga, and while I did not trust them to report my experiences honestly, it suggested I might profit by selling a non-scholarly book as well. Something of more substance than A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana , but less density than what I would present to the scholarly community.

I had more reasons than just Kemble’s research and the maintenance of my own household to spur me. Lord Hilford had been my patron for this expedition, but I could not depend upon his generosity forever; he had his own financial security to consider, and besides which, he was not a young man. By the time I was ready to begin the project I had in mind, he might not be in a position to fund it.

The sea-snake we had seen on the voyage to Nsebu; the lack of difference between savannah snakes and arboreal snakes; the drakeflies in Mouleen; the swamp-wyrms and their queenly kin and the fangfish I had not known were related. Wolf-drakes and sparklings and wyverns, and all the other creatures that we classed as mere cousins. I was increasingly convinced that our entire draconic taxonomy needed to be rethought—but to do that properly, much less persuade anyone to heed me, I would need a great deal more data than I had now. For all my reading, there were still woeful gaps in my knowledge, particularly where the scholarship was in another tongue; and once I had remedied that lack, I would need to undertake a much larger study than anyone, so far as I knew, had ever attempted.

Tom saw me chewing on my lip and leaned over. “Something troubling you?”

“Not troubling, precisely,” I said, keeping my voice down so that I might not interrupt Kemble and Lord Hilford.

He raised one eyebrow, inviting me to elaborate.

A slow grin crept over my face, against all rationality and common sense. “How much do you suppose a voyage around the world might cost?”

A Natural History of Dragons