Jacob and I exchanged worried looks. “I thought it had to do with the smugglers,” I said, even more quietly than before. “But could it somehow be related to our research?”
Mr. Wilker’s gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?”
I did not want to draw attention. Nodding to Jacob, I prodded my horse forward, and let him give Mr. Wilker a précis of our suspicions—even more abbreviated than the one I had given Jacob, by the rapidity with which it concluded. Mr. Wilker’s horse, choosing its path, detoured to the side of me, and the gentleman and I met each other’s gazes.
That wordless moment ended the minor war between us that had waged since I was added to the expedition back in Scirland. If I was right—if the boyar had killed his own razesh for uncovering something he should not, and it had anything to do with our own work—then the points of friction between us were trivialities, not worth so much as another second of our time. Mr. Wilker was not certain I was right, and neither was I; but the possibility was too grave to dismiss for lack of certainty.
The three of us were in accord, then. It only remained to inform Lord Hilford, and to devise some response. I left the former to the gentlemen, while all three of us considered the latter. Soon, however, Khirzoff and the others began hunting, bringing down several pheasants for our feast that night, and the crack of the rifles only added to my tension. How easy would it be for someone to suffer an “accident” out here? I flinched when Lord Hilford fired without success at a fleeing bird, and found myself wishing the pheasant success in escaping.
Behind the pheasant’s line of flight, a little distance above us, a stony promontory stirred.
With menacing and predatory slowness, it expanded to either side; and because I had been thinking of the pheasant and its madly flapping wings, my first reaction was—hard though it may be to believe—to think anatomically, watching how the outer “fingers” of the wing spread first, before the upper structure stretched out to catch the air.
Then, belatedly, the rest of my mind pointed out that a dragon was about to stoop upon us.
I cried out a warning, all the more frantic for being delayed. Two of Khirzoff’s men brought their guns to bear on the looming figure, but held their shots until it came into closer range. My gelding shied: he might not have been born to the mountains, but he recognized the approach of this predator just the same. I swiftly weighed the likely outcome if I were on his back, and flung myself from the saddle, diving for cover in a thick stand of trees.
Because of that action, I failed to see what ensued; I could only hear and feel. Several shots rang out. By the cursing that followed, they had done no good. A shriek from above then heralded the dragon’s attack; branches snapped like kindling as it tried to seize its prey, but I heard no cries to suggest that it had met with any better luck. Khirzoff bellowed orders in Bulskoi, probably for his men to keep shooting—and then a gust of wind raked through my pitiful cover, bringing with it a shower of needle-sharp ice fragments.
If you must be the victim of a dragon’s extraordinary breath, I recommend the rock-wyrm. Its ice shards are capable of cutting the skin, but not deeply; the chief danger lies in the body’s instinct to curl up tight against the sudden, bone-aching cold. This renders one more vulnerable to the dragon’s subsequent dive.
Further gunshots told me that at least some of the men were still in a position to defend us. I forced my reluctant body to uncurl and peered out above a fallen branch. Jacob was alive—I sucked in a great gasp of relief—and there were Mr. Wilker and Lord Hilford; after them I spotted Khirzoff and his two men. All seemed intact, and one final volley of shots brought a cry from above that might have been either frustration or pain. Whichever it was, it seemed to persuade the dragon to seek easier prey, for after a few tense moments, we emerged from cover.
All our horses had scattered, with the exception of the boyar’s stallion; for a wonder, none had broken their legs or necks, though Jacob’s mount had gone lame. My idiot gelding surprised me by being perfectly fine, and I patted his neck soothingly. He might not have been pleasant to ride, but I was glad he had not been killed.
Khirzoff was spitting words in Bulskoi that I doubted were fit for a lady’s ears. Lord Hilford asked him a question in the same tongue, and got a curt answer. Translating for us, the earl said, “This isn’t the first attack they’ve seen, of course. He’s quite vexed they failed to bring the beast down, though for my own part, I feel it’s just as well. We haven’t any of our equipment with us; such observations as we could make would hardly be worth the effort.”
One of the Bulskoi men gave Jacob his horse, and led the lamed one on foot; it seemed we were going back to the lodge. Though I dreaded the place, I would be glad to have a roof over my head, concealing me from a dragon’s gaze.
The beast had done me the service, though, of breaking my thoughts away from fears of conspiracy, toward other matters of equal—or perhaps greater—importance. Sotto voce to my husband, and in Scirling so the foreigners would not understand, I said, “Could it be the gunshots roused the dragon to such fury? It did not stir until after Lord Hilford had fired.”
“As an immediate cause, perhaps,” Jacob mused, glancing back at the place where the rock-wyrm had been napping. “But if you mean an ultimate cause for the attacks, I doubt it. The locals shoot game all the time. If that upset the dragons, these incidents would be a constant thing, all over Vystrana.”
True—and yet, one of our drivers had shot at a wolf not long before the attack on the road. Iljish had been shooting rabbits. Even the boy who brought me the sample of skin had said he and his father were hunting deer. It was not enough to constitute proof; as Jacob said, there were many other shots fired in this region, and not all of them brought down draconic wrath. It was, however, the closest thing to a common factor we had observed, and might be significant.
Back at the lodge, we had little opportunity to speak privately. Mr. Wilker must have managed to say something to Lord Hilford, though, because shortly before supper, Jacob conveyed a message to me. “We’ll look for an excuse to leave. If there is a danger, though, that may provoke him. For now, we stay.”
My first instinct was to protest. I had spent the entire afternoon dwelling more and more obsessively on my desire to escape this place; to have that prospect drawn back felt cruelly unfair. And if there were danger, should we not leave sooner? Yet I immediately saw Jacob’s point about provocation. So far, Khirzoff had offered no violence to us. The violence I suspected him of, moreover, was purely theoretical.
I am—and was, even then—a scientist. When I find myself with an uncertain theory, my impulse is to gather evidence that will prove or disprove it.
Jacob is capable of sleeping under any circumstances; I am not. I lay awake quite late that night, and finally could endure the uncertainty no longer. Moving quietly, I rose and stuffed myself into the most easily donned of my dresses, tucking my notebook into my pocket. Working by touch alone, I located the candle and matches at the bedside, which I would light once I was safely away. Then I lifted the latch on the bedroom door and stepped out into the corridor.
Where I promptly fell over something on the floor. It was a soft-but-bony something, and it swore as I kneed it in the stomach; the voice was Dagmira’s. Extricating myself from the girl and her blankets, and wondering if my heart was going to pound its way right out of my rib cage, I hissed, “What in Heaven are you doing there?”
“Sleeping—or trying to,” Dagmira hissed back. I scrambled to my feet and dragged the bedroom door shut before we could wake Jacob. By the time that was done, I understood. For all my airs about needing “Dagmara,” I had not asked where she and Iljish were being housed. It seemed that Khirzoff had no room for them, or else was fond of the old ways, where a servant slept outside his master’s door, or at the foot of his bed. This gave me entirely new reasons to detest the man.
Dagmira, for her own part, quite rightly demanded to know what I was doing. “Snooping,” I said. �
��Will you help me?”
She knew me well enough by then to take my bluntness and audacity in stride. We collected the fallen candle and matches and went downstairs, where we discovered that despite the late hour—I judged it to be midnight, or nearly so—someone else was also awake. We heard noises from the vicinity of the kitchen, and stole quietly in the other direction, toward the cellar door from which Rossi had emerged that morning.
It proved to be locked. I lit the candle and examined the latch, unwilling to be thwarted so easily. From what I could see, the lock was of a simple sort; the key acted to pivot a narrow bar on the other side. The gap was just large enough to admit the cover of my faithful notebook. With nary a tinge of remorse, I tore the cover off, and with its length was able to reach through and lift the bar, allowing the door to swing open.
Stairs led downward, into a veritable sink of Rossi’s distinctive and unpleasant odor. Dagmira followed me with the candle, its light bobbing and dancing with each step. And then, when we reached the bottom, the flame reflected off a hundred glassy surfaces.
The cellar was no taxidermist’s workshop. It was a chemical laboratory, the likes of which I had never before seen, and have only seen since on the premises of a university. I lacked the proper names for most of the things I saw: bottles and beakers and retorts, rubber tubing and large, shallow tubs. Poor judge of such things though I was, the entire array must have cost a fortune, in transport costs alone.
Dagmira touched the candle flames to a pair of lamps, brightening the room so I could see further. The light played over a well-used notebook on the table, crates of chemicals underneath. I knew their labels would be familiar before I even looked: Chiavoran make, most of the names unknown to me, but the sulfuric acid immediately recognizable. So Astimir had indeed gotten it from here. But why?
The answer, or at least part of it, lay at the far end of the room.
There was no question of mistaking the bones for ursine or lupine. I had drawn their like in the open air, hurrying for fear that they would disintegrate before I could record all the details. I had seen mineral-encrusted samples preserved by some trick of chemistry in the great cavern near Drustanev. Here they lay in an enormous pile: uncounted numbers, far too many to come from a single beast, not with that stack of femurs against the wall.
Dragon bones. Processed in this laboratory so that they would not break down—my breath stopped at the thought. With what Rossi had developed, we could study them with vastly greater accuracy; we could answer mysteries of anatomy and osteology that had puzzled dragon naturalists since the founding of the field.
But he did not want them for study; of that, I was sure. Had he intended to sell them to collectors, he would have kept each individual’s skeleton separate, and he would have preserved all the bones. I saw none of the smaller, more irregular components, and only one skull, placed atop a table in the manner of a trophy. The rest were roughly sorted, and they were long bones all: femurs and humeri and great, curving ribs.
ROSSI’S LABORATORY
My hand trembled as I reached out and picked up a rib. Even in those days, with my limited experience of animal physiology, I marked the extraordinary lightness of the thing. It was necessary; the weight of ordinary bone would never have allowed something so large as a dragon to fly. And where the bones of birds were delicate, these were tremendously robust for their thickness, or they would have collapsed under the burden of muscles and organs. Acting on sudden suspicion, I gripped the rib and tried to snap it across my knee. It did not give.
Dragon bones, perfectly preserved, as if they were still within the body of their dragon.
How many had Rossi and Khirzoff killed, to achieve this success?
Behind me, I heard Dagmira gasp. It broke me from my stunned contemplation of the bones. I turned and found her standing, candle holder almost slipping from her nerveless fingers, staring into the palm of her other hand, where something small gleamed.
I went quickly to her side. “What is it?”
Wordlessly, she extended her hand to me. The object was a ring: a small, cheaply made signet. The emblem, when I examined it, bore words abbreviated in a manner I recognized as Chiavoran. In a voice made tight with fury, Dagmira said, “That is Jindrik’s ring.”
Gritelkin. “You are sure?”
“That is the school he went to, in Chiavora, after he ran away from Drustanev.”
It did look like a university ring. And when I turned it over in my fingers, I found letters engraved on the underside of the face: J.G. Not Rossi’s own ring, then. It was proof enough.
We had to leave the lodge as soon as possible. All of us.
But when I slipped the ring over my thumb and turned with Dagmira to go, we found a new light descending the stairs. A moment later, it emerged into the cellar, and it was borne in Gaetano Rossi’s hand.
His surprise, I think, was for finding two women in his laboratory. Our lights would have long since given away that someone was prying about in his things. I wondered, briefly, whom he had expected. Jacob? Lord Hilford?
In his other hand he carried a plate of sausage, cheese, and bread. A midnight snack, I supposed, to fortify him in his work. He laid it down atop his notebook, not taking his eyes off us, and then said, “Well. What do I do with you two?”
He spoke Chiavoran, of course, which Dagmira would not understand. I imagined she could make out his tone well enough, though: speculative and threatening. Licking my lips, I answered in his own tongue, hoping to flatter our way out of this cellar. “Your work is remarkable. Men have tried to preserve dragon bone before, but so far as I know, you’re the first to succeed. It’s a tremendous discovery for science.”
Rossi dismissed that last word with a sneer. “Science is for withered-up old men in dusty rooms. We have better plans for those bones. Stronger than wood, and lighter than steel; what could we not do with that?”
It was not at all what I had expected him to say. “You—you are talking about industry?”
“I’m talking about wealth,” he said. “And power. The nations of the world already squabble over iron; that will only grow worse with time. The man who can offer them an alternative will be able to name his price.”
Despite the circumstances—which should have held my attention very firmly indeed—I could not stop my mind from leaping to consider Rossi’s point. Stronger than wood and lighter than steel, yes; as braces or struts, dragonbone would be worth—well, far more than its weight in gold. But you could not build an engine out of it, not by riveting ribs or ilia together. Unless he had some notion of how to—
That was as far as my thoughts got before Rossi put down his light, and picked up a knife.
“But never mind what I’m doing with the bones,” he said. “The real question is what to do with a pair of spies.”
I had thought myself frightened when that rock-wyrm attacked us on our way to Drustanev, or when I believed us stalked by an ancient demon. It was nothing, I discovered, to facing a man who might be about to murder me in cold blood.
Threats from natural sources I can handle calmly; threats from humans bring out the most foolish impulses in me. The next words from my mouth were very ill considered indeed, from the standpoint of wanting to survive, but I could not stop them. “You killed Gritelkin. Why? Because he learned about this?” I gestured toward the dragon bones.
Rossi’s mouth twisted. “No. Because he was sniffing around the smugglers too much.” Knife reflecting gold in the light, he advanced a step toward me.
“Wait!” I flung my hand up to stop him—the hand bearing Gritelkin’s ring; not a very wise choice. But there was the faintest chance that my scientific conclusions might do some good. “Please, you must listen. You saw the bones in the cave, didn’t you? Or Khirzoff did. That’s how you knew it was possible to preserve dragonbone after death. You must know they use that cave for a graveyard—the dragons do—they mourn their dead, don’t you see?”
“And what if they do?” he
said impatiently.
I doubted a moral argument would sway him, but a pragmatic one might. “That’s why they’re attacking people! I’m sure of it. Because you’ve killed so many of them, and likely because you haven’t let them carry off their dead; it has made them angry. If you continue on like this, more people will die.”
His lip curled, and he answered with disdain. “Peasants.”
His next words were cut off by footsteps, coming in a staccato rush down the stairs. I had never before heard that sound in such a panic, but even so, I recognized my husband’s step.
I opened my mouth to call out—with what words, I will never know—but Rossi had no more patience with intruders. As Jacob came off the stairs, the Chiavoran turned and plunged the knife into his gut.
The horror of that sight paralyzed me, from my hands to my voice. I could not even shriek. But Dagmira was not thus frozen; she had been waiting for Rossi’s distraction, and when it came she moved without hesitation, snatching up a jar and smashing it over the man’s head.
Rossi went down like a felled tree. The chemical that spilled over his head and shoulders was soon joined by more, as he collapsed sideways into the table and then to the floor, taking glassware and the lamps with him.
His fall broke my paralysis at last. Jacob had staggered backward against the wall; I rushed to his side, one hand hovering over the crimson stain that flowered across his shirt. I knew how to draw the body. I did not know how to fix it.
Jacob fumbled in his pocket, came up empty-handed. The motion roused me to my own search; I found a handkerchief and, after brief hesitation, pressed it to the wound. Jacob covered my hand with his own and met my gaze. What he saw there must have alarmed him, for he put on something like a smile and said, “I will be all right, Isabella.”
I would have liked to believe him. But the blood seeping through the handkerchief was hot against my fingers.
A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent Page 25
