There was no point in pretending I did not know who Tom was talking about. There was little more in pretending carelessness, but I did my best—more for the sake of my own dignity than out of any hope of deceiving Tom. “I doubt I could find him if I tried,” I said, gazing out the window at the city rattling past. “There must be a great many men in Akhia named Suhail.”
Our erstwhile companion from the Basilisk, the man who had gone with me to the cursed isle of Rahuahane, who had stolen a Yelangese caeliger and tried to rescue a princess. I had given him my direction in Falchester before we parted company in Phetayong, but had not received a single letter in the nearly three years since. Possibly he had lost the notebook page upon which I scrawled the information. But it was not so difficult to find me; there were few lady dragon naturalists in the world, and only one named Isabella Camherst.
My words were a mask for that sorrow, but also a nod to the truth. As well as I thought I knew Suhail, I knew very little about him: not his father’s name, not his family name, not even the city in which he lived.
As if he could hear those thoughts, Tom said, “I imagine the population of archaeologists named Suhail is rather smaller.”
“Presuming he still engages in such work,” I said with a sigh. “I had the distinct impression that his father’s death meant he was being called home to his duties. He may have been forced to lay aside his own interests.”
Although I meant my comment to be temperate, the word “forced” betrayed my own feelings. I had once forsworn all my customary interests for the sake of my family; the “grey years,” as I called them, had been one of the dreariest periods of my life—surpassed only by the time spent mourning my husband Jacob. I knew Suhail’s passion for his work; I could not imagine him giving it up without a qualm.
“You could ask around,” Tom said gently. “What harm could there be?”
Embarrassment for Suhail’s family, perhaps—but having never met them, knowing nothing of them, I found it hard to muster much concern for their feelings. And yet, I did not want to get my own hopes up, only to see them dashed. “Perhaps,” I said. Tom was kind enough to let me leave it at that.
* * *
I did not have much leisure for melancholy after I returned to my Hart Square townhouse. If we were to leave in a week and a half, there was no time to lose. I sent the maid to begin an inventory of my travel wardrobe, and went into my study to consider which books I would bring along.
My study had, over the years, become a source of deep and quiet pleasure to me. It was not elegant, as some gentlemen’s studies are; one might rather call it “cluttered.” Apart from the books, I had notes, maps, sketches and finished paintings, field specimens, and assorted knick-knacks collected in my travels. Shells acquired by my son Jake weighed down stacks of paper; the replica of the egg I had taken from Rahuahane propped up a shelf of books. (The firestone carved out of the albumen of the real egg was still mostly hidden atop my wardrobe, although I had shaped a few of the pieces and sold them for funds along the way.) High on the wall, above the shelves, a series of plaster cast footprints marched in an unsteady line: the fossilized tracks of a prehistoric dragon, discovered the year before by Konrad Vigfusson in southern Otholé.
A large claw sat on my desk, where I had left it that morning. The claw was a complete mystery, sent to me by a fossil-hunter in Isnats; he guessed its age to be tens of thousands of years old, if not more. It was a fascinating glimpse into the distant past of dragons … presuming, of course, that the claw did indeed come from a dragon. The fossil-hunter had found no associated bones, which would ordinarily aid in classifying a specimen. In this instance, the lack of bones might be the identifier: if the owner of the claw had been a “true” dragon, then of course its bones would have decayed too rapidly for fossilization. (Although preservation can occur in nature, the chemical conditions for it are sufficiently rare as to make fossil dragon bones nearly unknown—although a great many hucksters and confidence men would have you believe otherwise.)
So: grant that it may have been a dragon. If so, then it was one of prodigious size, dwarfing even the largest breeds known today, as the claw measured nearly thirty centimeters around the curve from base to tip. Tom theorized that the claw might have been out of proportion to the rest of the dragon, which certainly made biological sense; what the purpose of such an overgrown talon might have been, however, is still a puzzle today. Hunting, defense, the attraction of mates … we have many guesses, but no facts.
My study also contained a box, high up on one shelf, whose battered exterior suggested that nothing of particular interest was contained therein. Unknown to any but Tom and myself, it held my greatest treasure.
This I lifted down, after first ensuring my door was locked. Shorn of its lid, it disclosed various plaster lumps held together with bits of wire. This, as readers of the previous volume may recall, was the cast I had taken of the gaps inside the Rahuahane egg—the emptiness where once an embryo had been.
The cast, unfortunately, was far too delicate to risk on a sea journey to Akhia, and as near to irreplaceable as made no difference. I had studied it a hundred times and drawn its appearance from every angle; the sketches I could take with me. Nothing replaced the experience of looking at it directly, though, and so I examined it one last time, fixing its shape in my mind.
I believed—but could not yet prove—that it constituted evidence of a lost breed of dragon, one which the ancient Draconeans had indeed tamed, as the legends said. Those legends had always been doubtful, owing to the intractability of most dragon types, but a breed now lost to us might have been more cooperative. Indeed, I sometimes wondered if that cooperative nature was why the breed was lost: we have so thoroughly domesticated certain kinds of dogs that they can no longer survive in the wild. If the Draconeans had developed such a creature, it might well have died out after the collapse of their civilization.
Such thoughts were mere speculation, though. Even the shape of the embryo was uncertain, owing to the petrification of the albumen and the flaws of the cast; who could guess what the adult form might have looked like? We knew too little of dragon embryology to say.
But with enough time in Akhia—and enough failed hatchings, which were inevitable—I might find a better answer.
A knock came at my study door. “One moment,” I called out, replacing the cast in its box, and standing atop a chair to put it once more on its disregarded shelf. A pang of guilt went through me as I did so: who was I to grumble about the Royal Army keeping its naturalists mum, when I myself was sitting on this kind of scientific secret? Nor was it the only one: I had two valuable pieces of information not yet shared with the world, and the other one was stuffed into a desk drawer a meter behind me.
The trouble with the cast was that I did not want to say where I had gotten it. My own landing on Rahuahane had been inadvertent; others would go on purpose, if they knew about the ruin there. And those others would become a flood if they knew that the cache of eggs there also constituted a massive cache of unshaped firestone. I had struggled since the day I made that cast to think of a plausible story for its origins that would not either distort true information with false or give away too much. I had yet to succeed.
As for the paper in my desk … there, my motivations were not a tenth so noble.
“Come in,” I called, once I was down and away from the relevant shelf.
The door opened to admit Natalie Oscott. Once my live-in companion, she had moved to her own lodgings shortly after Jake went away to school. “He does not need a tutor any longer,” she said at the time, “and you need more space for books.” This latter was something of a polite dodge. I had once promised to qualify her for a life of independent and eccentric spinsterhood; that had since been achieved, though I could hardly take the credit for it. Natalie had found her calling in engineering, and a circle of like-minded friends to go with it, who kept her tolerably employed. Her finances were somewhat strait—certainly far less
than she could have expected in life had she remained a proper member of Society—but she could pay her own bills now, and chose to do so. I could hardly stand in her way; although with Jake gone, I sometimes missed having company in the house.
She gave me a curious look as she came in. “Living alone has done odd things to you. What were you up to, that I had to wait in the hall?”
“Oh, you know me,” I said with an airy smile. “Dancing about with my knickers on my head. I couldn’t let you see. Please, have a seat—did Tom tell you the news?”
“That you’re leaving next week? Yes, he did.” They did not live in the same neighbourhood, but it would not have been much out of Tom’s way home for him to stop by the workshop where Natalie and her friends tinkered with their devices. “What will you do with the house?”
I sat down behind my desk and slid a fresh sheet of paper onto my blotter. “Close it up, I think. I can afford to do that now, and this is dreadfully short notice to be looking for a temporary tenant. Though you’re welcome to the place if you like; you still have a key, after all.”
“No, closing it makes sense. I’ll come in for books, though, if you don’t mind me playing librarian on your behalf.”
That was an excellent thought, and I thanked her for it. The so-called “Flying University” that had begun in my sitting room was now a whole flock of gatherings, taking place in many houses around Falchester, but my library still occupied a vital position in that web. Though of course my shelves did not cover every topic—which gave me another thought. “I also have a few books that should be returned to their owners. One from Peter Landenbury, I think, and two or three from Georgina Hunt.”
“I’ll take them,” Natalie said. “You have enough to concern yourself with. Is that a letter to Jake that you are writing?”
It was, though I had not gotten any farther than the date and salutation. How does one tell one’s thirteen-year-old son that one is leaving for a foreign country in a week—not to return for who knew how long—and he is not permitted to come?
Natalie knew Jake as well as I did. Laughing, she said, “Be sure to examine the contents of your traveling chests before the ship casts off. Otherwise you may arrive in Akhia and find your son folded in with your hats.”
“Akhia is a desert, and therefore much less interesting to him.” But Jake would want to come along regardless. When he was very young, I had left him behind so I might go to Eriga; when he was older, I atoned for that abandonment by bringing him on my voyage around the world. The act had given him Notions. It was true that Jake’s greatest love was the sea, but more generally, he had it fixed in his head that traveling to foreign parts was something every boy should do on a regular schedule. I had enrolled him at the best school my rank and finances could arrange—Suntley College, which in those days was not quite in the upper tier—but for a boy who had gone swimming with dragon turtles, it was unavoidably tedious.
Thoughts of my son should not have led me to animals, but they did. After all, Jake was no longer dependent on me for care and feeding, but other creatures were. “Do you want the honeyseekers? Or shall I ask Miriam?”
Natalie made a face. “I should be a good friend and tell you that I will take them, but the truth is that I fall asleep at the workshop too often to be responsible for anything living. I should hate for you to come home and find your pets are dead.”
“Miriam it is, then.” They were not birds, which were Miriam Farnswood’s specialty, but she liked them well enough despite that. I set my pen aside, knowing that I would need my full attention for the letter to Jake, and steepled my fingers. “What am I missing?”
“Respectable clothing for when you are in town; trousers for when you are not. Hats. No, you’ll want a scarf, won’t you, to cover your hair? Your anatomical compendium. They will have scalpels and magnifying glasses and so forth waiting for you there, I presume, and Mr. Wilker has the set you gave him—but better safe than sorry. I’m told Akhians have a kind of oil or paste they use to protect their skin from the sun; you might want to acquire some.” Natalie rolled her eyes heavenward, studying my ceiling as if a list might be found there. “Do they have malaria in Akhia?”
“I believe so. But I shall have to take my chances: Amaneen do not approve of drinking.” Some were more observant than others, of course; but I did not want to give the wrong impression from the start by showing up with a case of gin in my baggage.
She inquired after my living arrangements, which I described; then she said, “Tents? Other gear for camping?”
“Lord Rossmere made it rather clear I am expected to stay in Qurrat and work on my assignment for the army.”
Natalie regarded me with an ironical eye, and I laughed. “Yes, yes. I know. But if I should happen to go wandering out into the desert in search of things to learn, I am sure I can acquire suitable tents from a local merchant. Also the camel to carry them for me.”
“Then you are prepared,” Natalie said. “As much as you can ever be.”
Which was to say, not half prepared enough. But I had long since resigned myself to that fact.
* * *
I could not help but think on the past when Tom and I met in Sennsmouth and looked out at the ship that would bear us to Akhia. Reflections on the past
Fourteen years before, we had stood in almost this precise spot, preparing to depart for Vystrana. But there were four of us then: myself and Jacob, Tom and his patron Lord Hilford. Jacob had not lived to come home again, and Lord Hilford had passed away the previous spring, after many years of worsening health. I was pleased he had at least lived to see his protégé become a Colloquium Fellow, though I had not been able to follow suit.
Tom’s thoughts must have gone along similar lines, for he said, “This isn’t much like our first departure.”
“No,” I agreed. “But I think they both would have been pleased to see where we are now.”
The wind was brisk and biting, causing me to think longingly of the desert heat that lay ahead. (I was somewhat erroneous in so doing: even in southern Anthiope, Acinis is not the warmest month. It was, however, warmer there than in Scirland.) If I felt a chill, though, I had only to cast my thoughts upon what lay in my future: the desert drakes of Akhia.
They are in many respects the quintessential dragons, the sort that come to mind the instant one hears the word. Scales as gold as the sun, giving rise to legends that dragons hoard gold and sleep atop mountainous piles of it, until their hides are plated with the precious metal; fiery breath that sears like the desert summer itself. I had seen many kinds of dragons in the course of my career, including some whose claim to the name was exceedingly tenuous … but the closest I had ever been to a desert drake was when I gazed upon a runt in the king’s menagerie, so many years before. Now, at last, I would see them in their full glory.
I said, “Thank you, Tom. I know I have said it before, and likely I will say it again—but it bears repeating. This opportunity I owe entirely to you.”
“And to your own work,” he said defensively. But then he smiled ruefully and added, “You’re welcome. And thank you. We got here together.”
His tone was awkward enough that I said nothing more. I merely lifted my face to the sea wind and waited for the ship that would bear me to Akhia.
TWO
Arrival in Rumaish—Our welcoming party—Excluded from the smoking room—Upriver to Qurrat—Shimon and Aviva
Nature herself has provided the harbour of Rumaish with an awe-inspiring gate. Two rocky promontories rear pincer-like over a narrow strait between; in times of war it is easy to string chains between these to prevent the passage of enemy ships. The caliphs of the Sarqanid dynasty, however, felt this was not enough, and ornamented those two promontories with a pair of monumental Draconean statues taken from the so-called Temple of Silence in the Labyrinth of Drakes. The sea winds have taken their toll on the dragon-headed sculptures, and their features are now sadly all but indistinguishable; the effect of their stea
dfast presence, however, is no less impressive for that.
I stood at the ship’s rail and sketched while we approached these two guardians, looking up frequently at their massive forms. Sentimentality for that ancient civilization had never been among my weaknesses, but my interest in them had grown by leaps and bounds after we discovered the temple on Rahuahane. What breed of dragon had they hatched on that island? For what purpose? Was that dragon among the types alive today, or had it gone extinct during the intervening millennia? Entering the harbour that day, I permitted myself a moment of sentimentality, imagining those weathered stone eyes had seen the answers for themselves.
THE HARBOUR OF RUMAISH
Then we passed through the gate and into the harbour itself. This is not so busy a place as Saydir, which lies at the mouth of Akhia’s middle river; a more generous entrance makes that harbour better suited for commercial traffic on a large scale. Rumaish sees its share of activity, however, with ships from all over Anthiope. Even in those days, it was necessary to coordinate passage through the gate with a local official, so that the channel would not become clogged to the point of danger with too many ships at once.
Two men in Scirling military drab were waiting for us on the quay as we disembarked. One of them wore the cap and shoulder boards of a colonel. The other needed no insignia to identify him, for I recognized him immediately.
“Andrew!” My delighted cry was almost lost in the clamour of the docks. I dropped the bag I was carrying and hastened forward to fling my arms around my brother—the one sibling with whom I could say I was on good terms, rather than merely tolerable. “I thought you were still in Coyahuac!”