Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

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.