Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

I would have gained no traction at all were it not for my brother Andrew. As I had told Jake, a mere captain had relatively little influence within the army—but he had once saved the life of another man in Coyahuac. Samuel Humboldt was a colonel at the time; now he was a major-general, and closely involved in the nascent enterprise that a few years later would detach itself from the army, becoming the Royal Scirling Aerial Corps. Thanks to his fondness for my brother, I was able to gain an audience and explain myself.

“Show me where you mean,” Humboldt said when I was done.

I was quite incapable of reading the man’s expression and voice for any hint of his thoughts. He had not laughed at me, though, and I chose to take that as an encouraging sign. I spread the map I had brought onto a large table already occupied by many other papers. The drawing was far from as detailed as any of us would like (maps of Tser-nga in those days being more imaginative than accurate), but it was the best we had, and supplemented by Mr. Thu’s own observations. “There is a village up here,” I said, indicating a spot at the foot of the massif which demarcated the edge of the inhabited zone. “We were hoping that it might be possible for a caeliger to fly us there—or if it cannot go that high, then as close as possible—so that we could explore around the col between these two peaks.”

I expected the major-general to ask me what benefit this could possibly bring. The monetary costs, I was prepared to defray; the days when I had to scrape for patronage to fund my expeditions had ended for good the day we announced the discovery of the Watchers’ Heart. Money alone, however, could not buy me the army’s goodwill.

But Humboldt ignored that issue. He studied the map, one blunt finger tracing the edge of the massif, then venturing across the blank space between that and the eastern edge of Khavtlai.

How high, I wondered, could a caeliger fly?

The answer to that was a classified military secret. I had not gone terribly high on either of my flights—but those, of course, were carried out in some of the earliest dragonbone caeligers, before the art developed to its present state. Furthermore, none of us on board had more than the vaguest sense of what we were doing in flying the thing. A modern caeliger, with a skilled pilot on board… I had not the faintest clue what it might achieve.

But I might find out.

“It would be exceedingly dangerous,” Humboldt mused, still looking at the map. “The winds are fierce at high altitudes, and while a caeliger is safe enough high in the air, any landing or takeoff risks the craft being flung into a mountainside.”

He did not speak in the subjunctive or the conditional, as if speculating about what would happen if a caeliger were to test the heights. Someone, somewhere, had already flown one of those craft through similarly hazardous terrain—perhaps even in the Mrtyahaima itself. But not, apparently, at the western border of Tser-nga, where uninhabited mountains offered the chance to sneak a caeliger and its occupants across where they were not expected.

I curled my fingers around one another, uncertain of what to say. Back when Tom and I were hired to breed dragons, I had harboured reservations about the wisdom of allowing my research to be turned to a military purpose. Now I had planted a tactical notion in Humboldt’s head, without at all meaning to.

It helped only a little to tell myself that someone would have thought of it eventually: if not the major-general, then someone else in the military or the government. If we had scouts in the Mrtyahaima, as the Yelangese did, then sooner or later someone might have looked at that blank stretch of map and contemplated its potential. After all, was that not the exact reason Mr. Thu himself had been sent there? And if feet would not avail us in that terrain, caeligers might.

I knew all that was true… but it did not erase my apprehension over being the one who first called the possibility to mind.

On the other hand, I had a strong suspicion that even if I abandoned my ambition on the spot, a caeliger might well be sent up into the peaks regardless. Much like the formula for bone preservation, that notion was a dragon that could not easily be stuffed back into its shell.

I drew a deep breath and thought of Suhail’s common assertion, that I was both the most practical woman he had ever met, and the most deranged.

“If the army is willing to consider such a venture,” I said, “then I should look into what an expedition would entail. Such things do not plan themselves overnight.”

Not overnight; nor even in a month. It took far longer than I would have liked to make the arrangements, and I fretted at every day that passed.

For more than a month we hung in limbo, without even a tentative assurance that a caeliger would attempt to bear us up into the mountains. Despite that lack, we spent most of our time on preparations, knowing that if this scheme gained approval, we did not want to delay our departure by so much as an hour. (It would only give those in charge time to reconsider the wisdom of their decision.)

Tom had turned green when he heard the plan, and was slow to recover his colour. He had ridden in a caeliger precisely once, when Natalie and her engineering friends debuted an experimental model (not composed of dragonbone) at an exhibition. Mountaintops and cliff edges did not trouble him—but as soon as the “floor” beneath his feet became an ephemeral thing of fabric and rods, his equanimity vanished. Jake elbowed him, grinning with all the irrepressible perversity of an eighteen-year-old boy. “Think you’ll be able to do it, old chap?”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Tom muttered, but with a good nature.

Suhail had been in hot-air balloons before, as well as caeligers. They troubled him not at all; the frowning line between his brows was there for a different reason. He said, “It’s all well and good to have ourselves flown in—but how will we get back out again?”

“If push comes to shove, we walk out. The Tser-zhag are in the habit of evicting outsiders found within their borders, not imprisoning or executing them.” I laughed. My mood had improved tremendously since Jake put this notion into my mind. It mattered little to me that the possibility was so far-fetched; merely the dream of it was enough to give my spirit wings. “It might even make our lives easier if they capture us, so long as they do not do so before we complete our work. Then at least we would have experienced guides showing us the way out.”

Tom drew in a deep breath and straightened in his chair. “Speaking of guides. Thu said they found the specimen a good four days’ hike from the village—what’s it called, again? Hlamtse Rong. That’s a long way to go with nothing more than a small notebook sketch to lead us.”

“He said they hired porters in the village. Presumably those men would know where the Yelangese party went.”

Tom grimaced. “Assuming those men are still there, and haven’t died or gone elsewhere for work. Assuming they’re willing to hire out with more foreigners. Assuming they haven’t decided that it’s better to keep people away from where those remains were found.”

He had a point—several of them, really—and after this many years together, I knew where his thoughts were headed. “You think we should bring Mr. Thu with us.”

Jake had been leaning back in his chair so that it balanced on two legs only, a habit of which I had failed to break him. Now he almost overbalanced, and came down with a heavy thump. “That Yelangese fellow! The major-general will love that.”

I thought it through out loud, speaking slowly as each part came to me. “He will say it is out of the question, of course, because they are still not certain of him—or of the Khiam Siu… but there will be three of us and only one of Thu Phim-lat. Not counting any soldiers they send along, of course. Even if we hypothesize his intentions to be false, no one can possibly suggest with a straight face that he has left an ambush waiting there for us. Not when our arrival is so improbable in the first place. If the Yelangese were doing anything there they did not want us to see, they would not send him to draw our attention; and if they have begun doing something since his exile, we are just as likely to wander upon it without him as with. The greatest danger is that he will, for some obscure reason of his own, lead us into the wildnerness to die.”