Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

“They’re signaling,” one of the junior pilots said with relief. “Army code. One of them has got a broken arm, but they’re alive.”

It is truly a wonder, how thoroughly circumstances can alter one’s perception of a situation. I will not claim I slept warm and happy that night, but knowing the others were relatively unharmed did much to improve my outlook. In the morning, when there was sufficient light to travel safely across the intervening ground, the four of them trekked back to our camp.

According to Tom’s report, our equipment had taken a bit of a tumble, but nothing we could not redress. “Then we stay?” I said, looking from him to Suhail, to Lieutenant Chendley, to Thu. I knew my own inclination—but this was our last chance to change our minds. After this, we were on our own.

They nodded. Adler said, “We can’t fly the third caeliger out of here, not when one man has a broken arm.”

I must confess my heart leapt a little, before logic caught up and hauled it back to earth. There was no way they would leave the vessel with us, and the gas and fuel to fly it: the risk of it being captured was far too great, and we had no real piloting experience among us. “I expect you will want to destroy it,” I said.

Suhail made a muffled sound. The caeliger represented a tremendous outlay of resources and effort on the part of Scirland; now I proposed to simply throw that away. But he understood my reasoning—and, more to the point, that my reasoning was merely a guess at the army’s.

“We’ll cannibalize some of it for parts,” Adler said. “But yes. And we have to move quickly, before others find us here.”

He meant what he said. Crossing back to the broken vessel took us what remained of the morning, but by mid-afternoon they had stripped it of whatever equipment and spare components they thought they could use. “Now what?” Tom said. “Try to start a rockslide to cover it?”

“Too risky,” Adler said. “And we have something better.”

I had taken no particular note of the small canisters among the caeliger supplies, assuming them to be oil or fuel or some such. Now, however, the pilots uncapped them and began to scatter the liquid within across key portions of the caeliger. It hissed when it struck dragonbone, and to my astonishment, the bone began to crumble and break.

Standing beside me, Tom hummed low in his throat. “Of course they’d bring something like that,” he murmured to me. “They can’t let these vessels fall into enemy hands. I wonder—are they replicating the process that decays natural dragonbone, or is this something new?” But he pitched the question so it carried no further than myself and Suhail. Military men do not take kindly to civilians prying into military secrets.

When this task was done, pieces of dragonbone yet remained; the pilots had not troubled to douse the entire thing, likely because they could not spare enough of the dissolving reagent. Nothing of any possible use was left intact, though. And bits were still disintegrating when the pilots gathered up the salvage and prepared to head out. “We’ll fly onward tomorrow morning,” Adler said to my group. “If something goes wrong—if you change your minds—light a signal fire before dawn, and we’ll wait.”

I wondered how sincere the offer was. With one caeliger lost already, they would not be eager to spare another to fly us back east. Still, it was a kind thought. “Thank you, Captain,” I said, and the others echoed me.

We did not light a signal fire. The next morning, at the very crack of dawn, we heard the buzzing of engines and saw the remaining caeligers lift into the air. Their pale undersides worked as intended, making them difficult to track across the sky, but I followed their course northeast until they came parallel to a gap in the peaks, whereupon they tacked hard to the west and out of sight. They had vanished into the empty heart of the mountains, and were gone.

That quickly, we were alone in the Mrtyahaima.

As soon as the caeligers were gone, Thu laid out a sheet of paper on which he had sketched his best guess at our location and the surrounding terrain. He said, “We are here.” His finger tapped one spot along the ramparts at the western edge of Tser-nga. “The village of Hlamtse Rong is here.” He tapped another, northward of us.

In between lay a forbidding stripe, roughly where I had seen the caeligers turn west the night before. “What is that?” I asked.

“A river gorge,” Thu said. “I think it may be a tributary of the Lerg-pa.”

Which we could not fly across. Before I could select from among the curses that rose to my lips, Suhail asked, “And the scale of this map?”

“If we could go directly there, two days? But we must go east, then north, then west again. If we are lucky… five days, perhaps. If we are not lucky…” Thu shrugged.

There was no use railing against the contrary winds that had kept us from landing closer to our destination. With the caeligers all gone or destroyed, we could only tackle the challenge thus presented, or give up—and none of us, of course, were willing to give up.

Unfortunately, there was simply no way we could carry all of our equipment the necessary distance. We would have needed the relative strength of ants to each toil along beneath a fifth of the pile, and that was without accounting for the harsh terrain. “We’ll have to leave some of it here,” Tom said reluctantly, “and send people back for it once we’re established in Hlamtse Rong.”

Chendley looked grim. “Even if we leave all of your scientific equipment, it’s still too much. We’ll need rations, shelter, clothing, equipment for crossing the river. Either we take twice the time making a supply depot at the edge of the gorge, or…”

“Or we need help,” I said, finishing the thought he was too reluctant to voice.

Help might be available—but we would have to ask for it. And of the five of us, only Thu spoke Tser-zhag to any real extent (though Suhail had been practicing assiduously, and was making good progress). He would also attract less attention, I suspected; after all, the Yelangese had been through here before, and his features and coloration were not so wildly different from the local norm that he could be identified as foreign at a distance. Tom, on the other hand, would stand out like a daisy in grass, and the rest of us would not fare much better.

Chendley objected with great force when we proposed to send Thu to find the nearest village by himself. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “Handing him a pile of barter and letting him go off on his own—”

“Why, Lieutenant,” I said with insincere mildness. “Whatever do you imagine will happen? Your concern for his safety is touching, but I think it unlikely that he will fall victim to a footpad out here, in the middle of nowhere.”

His concern, of course, was for something quite other than Thu’s safety. Although ostensibly the lieutenant had been assigned to us as an aid in mountaineering, we all knew perfectly well that he was also there to be Thu’s watchdog—for, our newfound alliance with the Khiam rebels notwithstanding, the army was composed of suspicious types who did not trust anyone with a Yelangese name. Unfortunately for Lieutenant Chendley, his military associations did not give him any sort of command authority over the expedition, and so Thu went to the village alone.

He returned before sunset on the second day with two ponies. Chendley, scowling like a thunderhead, declared them utterly inadequate to our needs, but no amount of complaining would improve our options: those two were all the village could spare, whatever enticements Thu offered in return. (Indeed, we were lucky to have two.) I think Chendley had visions of all five of us riding, with a string of pack ponies to carry everything for us, such as recreational mountaineers often enjoy. Perhaps it is just as well that we could not. I have seen people riding Mrtyahaiman ponies, perched on saddles and piles of blankets so high there can be no possibility of communicating with one’s mount by means of legs or seat. I might as soon have tried to communicate with the mountain through a meter of snow. The rider can only perch and offer prayers to whatever deity they honour that the pony will do as intended. Lacking enough to use as mounts, we loaded those two as high as we could with food and other necessities, thanked our lucky stars that Tser-zhag ponies are as hardy as mules, and carried what we could of the remainder upon our backs. Then, groaning beneath our loads, we began walking toward Hlamtse Rong.