Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369)

by Marie Brennan

  I staggered forward, unsteady as much because of my shock as because of the splinter in my foot. Now it was my turn to fall to my knees and dig into the soil, trying to free one of the eggs from its bed.

  RAHUAHANE

  It was surprisingly heavy and utterly hard to the touch. That was how the eggs had survived: they were fossilized, turned from organic matter to a kind of stone. I wondered what had transmuted them—some process akin to that which preserved dragonbone? And what species of dragon had laid them? They were not sea-serpent eggs; of that much I was sure. Some amphibian or terrestrial creature had produced these, one much larger than a fire-lizard. A dragon of some kind unknown in the Puian islands today … my breath stopped at the very thought.

  Suhail was calling my name, but I could not find my tongue to answer. All disappointment had flown. There was enough here to make an academic reputation for both of us.

  He came to see what had so entranced me, and fell silent at the sight. “It is proof,” I said reverently. “These eggs were not laid here by accident, by some opportunistic creature that found a safe hatching ground. The Draconeans placed them here. They did tame dragons—tame them, and breed them.” Even domesticate them? I could hardly begin to guess.

  “It was a theory,” Suhail said, his voice hardly louder than my own. “That the statues we find now, the broken fragments I told you of, depicted fertility gods. Or guardians of the young—we are not sure. Were not.”

  My gaze drifted across the array of stone eggs, abandoned here by their breeders. What calamity had forced the Draconeans to flee? Even if the seas had risen, as Suhail argued, they had not done so over the course of three days. Why did the people of this island not take their incubating dragons with them?

  “The eggs must not have been viable,” I said out loud. “Otherwise they would have hatched long before they could be fossilized. But why so many? What happened?”

  I picked the shard of wood from my foot and rose to search the pit. Many of the eggs were three-quarters buried and hard to dislodge from their places, but after a minute or so of searching, I found what I was looking for: an egg which had been smashed by a falling piece of stone, affording me a view of its interior. I tore my nail pulling it free, turned it over—and froze.

  Even crusted with dirt, the inner stone glimmered. A dozen different colours danced beneath my trembling wrist as I used my sleeve to wipe it clean. I had never seen—never imagined—a piece even half so large; its light was dimmed by the sheer bulk and the dark backing of the shell behind. But there was no question in my mind as to what I held.

  “Suhail,” I whispered.

  He was at my side in a moment, and stopped dead when I held the broken egg out to him. “Is that—it cannot be—”

  “The albumen of the egg,” I said. “Petrified. That is what firestone is.”

  We had known for centuries that firestones were often associated with Draconean ruins … but scholars had always assumed that was because the lords of that ancient civilization had prized them. Their rarity and the lack of any natural source for them was explained away by the supposition that there was only one mine, or very few, and that its location had been lost or exhausted in prehistory. The closest thing to a “vein” of firestone anyone had ever found was a cache buried in the dirt, like the one we discovered in Vystrana.

  Why had no one ever found one intact before? Time and weathering were not enough to explain it. A great many eggs must have been petrified, to create the world’s supply of firestone—petrified, and then smashed. As if by deliberate action.

  I cannot recall how many of those thoughts came from my mouth while I stood there in the egg pit, how many came from Suhail, and how many we pieced together later on. Certainly we did not sort out everything there was to be known. That would require time and further discoveries. But that afternoon, on the cursed island of Rahuahane—the place where the naka’i had been turned to stone—I took hold of one end of a thread, and did not stop pulling until years later, when at last I had the whole of it in my grasp.

  We dug out the remainder of the broken egg, and I brushed my finger over flaws within the firestone. “The embryonic skeleton,” I said. “If we were very careful in carving apart one of the intact eggs, we might see what kind of dragons they were breeding.”

  “It will not be easy to carry back,” Suhail warned me.

  “Would you have me leave them all here? I cannot be sure of ever visiting this island again.” I could not even be sure of surviving my return from it.

  Suhail hesitated, torn between pragmatism and his own intellectual curiosity. Then he nodded. “Choose a small one, if you can. We will find a way.”

  * * *

  I took the smallest egg I thought had any hope of a recoverable skeleton. Even that would soon be a significant burden: it was fifteen centimeters long, and heavy to match (though firestone, fortunately, is among the lighter gems). Suhail tore his shirt to make a sling and bound the result around his body. I begged his pardon for the encumbrance, but he waved my apology away. We both knew he was by far the stronger swimmer of us two; if I was to have any hope of reaching Lahana, I could not be carrying a millstone around my neck.

  We were both lost in thought as we made our way back through the lava tube toward the beach, variously pondering what we had seen, and what we must now face. This saved our lives: had we been chattering as we went, we would have been discovered and very likely killed.

  Suhail was ahead of me. He stopped abruptly, and I almost ran into his back. “What—” I began.

  I got no further than that one word. Clapping one hand over my mouth, Suhail seized me and pressed me against the side of the tunnel, behind a branch jammed there by some long-ago flood.

  Through that imperfect cover, I could still see glimpses of the tunnel’s mouth. A shadow was moving out there—something too large to be a bird. And then I heard a voice.

  It spoke neither Scirling nor Keongan; that was all the sense my disoriented mind could make of it. Then the tunnel mouth darkened as someone stood in front of it and crouched to look within.

  Only the dimness of the tunnel and Suhail’s quick thinking kept us from discovery. I did not so much as dare to breathe, and squeezed my eyes shut lest their whiteness give me away. I held myself utterly still against the stone, my mind racing through a useless catalogue of everything that might be visible, about which I could do nothing now. My clothing? Usefully drab, and darkened by the seawater that had soaked it not long ago. My skin? Browned by the sun, though still far paler than Suhail’s; I prayed it was very dirty from our passage through this tunnel. I wore no jewelry of any kind, and my eyes were shut. It would have to do.

  But with my eyes closed, I could not see what the man at the tunnel mouth was doing, and ignorance made the tension worse. I heard a crack as he stepped on a branch, and wished I could melt into the stone. If he entered the lava tube …

  He did not. He called out to someone else, sounding annoyed, and then moved away. And as he went, I recognized the language, though I did not understand a word.

  It was Yelangese.

  We remained there until they were gone, and for several minutes afterward. Propriety had long since been flung to the wind, and I took comfort in the solidity of Suhail’s body against mine. But we could not stay there forever. Eventually he stepped back, and we stared wide-eyed at one another in the dim light.

  “Could you understand them?” I whispered.

  He nodded. “They are soldiers. On their way back to camp.”

  The word jolted me like a fire-lizard’s spark. Yelangese soldiers, on Rahuahane. More than two of them, from the sound of it. How on earth had they gotten here without anyone seeing? Fewer people lived on the leeward sides of Keonga and Lahana, but “fewer” was not the same as “none.” I did not think even a single Yelangese vessel could have come in secret—not unless they came at night. In which case they were exceedingly lucky, for the reefs should have torn the bottom out of their sh
ip.

  Oddly, these pragmatic thoughts gave me strength, even as they frightened me. A part of me had been dreading the perilous swim across to Lahana. Having something else to focus on—anything else, even so ominous a thing as this—put a bit of steel back in my spine. “We must learn how many there are, and what they are planning.”

  Suhail stared at me as if I had gone mad. “You want to go spy on soldiers?”

  “If they are preparing for an invasion—” I stopped myself, shaking my head. “There cannot be that many of them yet; the Keongans would have seen. So these are scouts, perhaps. They may have a boat we can steal, or at least sabotage. And even if we cannot, the intelligence we might bring back to the islanders could make all the difference in the world.”

  He had not ceased to stare. “I cannot tell if this is courage or foolhardiness.”

  “They are not so very far apart,” I said dryly. “It is both, I imagine, and experience as well. I have found myself between an invading army and its target before. This time, at least, I am not a prisoner.” At least I was not yet. I hoped very much to remain that way.

  By the look on Suhail’s face, someone—certainly not I—had told him a version of what occurred in Eriga. He tipped his head back, as if looking through the stone to heaven for aid. “I will go and look. You must swim for Lahana; that way if I am caught, the islanders at least know the Yelangese are here.”

  “I will never make that crossing on my own, and we both know it. If we are to divide our efforts, then I will spy on the soldiers, and you will swim for Lahana.”

  It was a sensible plan, I thought, but I also knew Suhail would never accept it. Anyone caught by the Yelangese would likely be taken prisoner, and he could not abandon a lady to that risk. He extracted a promise that, if we were seen, I would immediately run for safety, and swim for Lahana as soon as I could. This I gave; and so we went after the soldiers.

  They were not particularly hard to find. Clearly they had scouted the island and found it abandoned; perhaps they even knew the reputation of Rahuahane. Knowing themselves to be alone, the men we followed made little effort to hide their trail, and their compatriots practiced no concealment at all.

  When we heard voices ahead, Suhail and I sought a vantage point up the slope. This involved a good deal of belly crawling (I was extremely glad to be in trousers) and some swallowing of curses as my scale-cut knees were pressed into the dirt. Ahead of me Suhail had stopped; by this I knew he could see the camp, and thought he was so still only to keep the Yelangese from seeing him.

  When at last I reached his side, though, I discovered a great deal more.

  The Yelangese ship towered over their camp, stretching the full length of the curving beach. A net of ropes caged an enormous balloon that swayed gently in the wind. Below this hung a propeller and a long, narrow craft—and it was the sight of that craft, rather than the ship itself, that stopped my breath in my throat.

  Lashings and tarpaulins obscured the shapes, but not enough. The structure beneath the balloon was unmistakably made from bones.

  The Yelangese had made a caeliger.

  And they had made it out of dragonbone.

  SEVENTEEN

  The caeliger—Looking for a woman—Flight from Rahuahane—Our reception on Lahana—What and who we found there—Politics of the Broken Sea—A second flight

  “That is how they got here in secret, without striking the reefs,” Suhail whispered to me, not taking his eyes off the camp. “They flew.”

  He sounded impressed. I could only feel sick. There had been attempts to build caeligers before; I knew that from Natalie Oscott, though I did not share her interest and therefore remembered little of the specifics. Most of them had foundered on the problem of weight: the lifting methods available to us at the time were relatively weak, and so the burden of the internal framework, the machinery, and the gondola below had limited their ranges quite sharply.

  Dragonbone offered the twin advantages of great strength and minimal weight. With it, caeligers could fly much greater distances. I had always known that society would find uses for dragonbone once they knew it could be preserved—and had myself once used the skeleton of a savannah snake to construct a makeshift glider—but I had not anticipated this.

  It was to build these caeligers that the dragons of Yelang were being slaughtered.

  My eye could not help but try to identify the bones. The long ones had been employed in greatest number, of course, with wires and lashings to hold them together in a framework, but someone had been quite clever in their use of the smaller and more irregular pieces. I saw vertebrae at corners, bone slices forming walls. The caeliger would have looked ominous to me regardless, owing to the circumstances, but the materials of its construction made it outright gruesome. And yet there was a morbid beauty to it; like the great ossuary of Kostratzy, which has been decorated with the bones of deceased villagers, this vessel transformed death into a kind of art.

  Suhail’s attention had been on the camp and the Yelangese soldiers, who numbered four. When his gaze returned to the caeliger, he frowned. “What is that made of?”

  “Bone,” I said. “I will explain later.”

  A resolve had formed in me, as strong as the bones of those slaughtered dragons, that I would turn this discovery against its discoverers. I now knew, or at least guessed, the identity of that shape I had seen out at sea, the day the fleet arrived from Raengaui. And if the caeliger was capable of flying such a distance, I could not leave it in their hands.

  I turned my head and regarded Suhail fiercely. “Can we steal that ship?”

  His eyes went wide. “Can we get ourselves on board? Very likely. Can we move it once we do? Perhaps. Can we take it where we want to go?” His breath hissed out. “I have flown in a balloon before, but that is no simple balloon.”

  It was still more experience than I had. My only aerial adventure had been in a glider, and I had crashed. “We must try,” I whispered. “It cannot be any more hazardous than attempting to swim to Lahana. And if we deprive them of their ship, we may well prevent whatever they are here to do.” If we could not steal it, I was determined to sabotage it somehow.

  We crept down and around the perimeter of their camp until we were as close as we could get to the ship without revealing ourselves. I blessed the technical considerations that limited the crew to four rather small men, and the cursed reputation of Rahuahane that meant they did not have to post a guard. Otherwise Suhail and I would not have stood a chance.

  They were settling in for their meal, cooked over a well-sheltered fire. Suhail’s brows knit as he watched them—no, I realized, as he listened. “What are they saying?” I asked, scarcely doing more than mouth the words.

  “It sounds as if they are looking for someone,” he murmured back.

  Waikango, I thought. The king of Raengaui, whom the Yelangese called a pirate, fearing his growing power. Had he escaped captivity? His cousin was married to the king here; he might take refuge with her, thinking the Yelangese would not look for him in the Keongan Islands. Perhaps the foreign canoes I had seen had been carrying an important passenger.

  Suhail went on, sounding puzzled. “They are discussing how best to get over to the other islands in secret to search for.…”

  I waited, but he did not finish the sentence. Finally I nudged him. Suhail looked at me, shaking his head minutely. “Her,” he said. “They are looking for a woman.”

  Only with great effort did I stifle my exclamation of surprise. “Are you certain?” I whispered.

  He nodded. I tried to think of what woman could possibly merit a Yelangese caeliger looking for her in secret—and then clutched at the palm tree concealing me as one possibility suggested itself.

  It was mad. They had deported me from Yelang, and I had gone. I knew enough now to speculate that this caeliger was the reason for my deportation; they did not want me investigating where the dragon bones were going and uncovering their new innovation. But why pursue me to Keon
ga? No, it was even madder than that; no one knew I was in the Keongan Islands. It was sheer chance that the storm had blown us here. The only way anyone could find me was if they went through the Broken Sea with a fine-toothed comb. Why on earth would the Yelangese trouble to do that—and send in pursuit the very thing they wanted to keep secret from me?

  That was not a question I could answer while hiding on the edge of a tropical beach, waiting to steal a caeliger. Nor could I explain my suspicions to Suhail. I shook off the matter (or tried to, with limited success) and addressed myself to that task once more. “Should we wait until dark?” I asked him.

  Suhail shook his head. “I would not be able to see the controls. The sooner we go, the better.”

  We did not bother with a diversion. Any such thing would have only roused the Yelangese to alertness, making it likely they would respond with much greater speed once they realized we were stealing the ship. Our plan was quite simple: we went down to the water’s edge, out of sight of the men, and swam out into the lagoon. Then we swam around and back in, keeping the ship itself between us and the soldiers at their supper. The rushing of the waves covered what little noise we made. Then it was a quick dash across the sand to the caeliger itself.

  The sides of the gondola were high enough to conceal us if we crouched. I stayed low while Suhail oriented himself. At least he could read the Yelangese script on the controls, which I could not. I diverted myself by examining the gondola, noting how the floor was a taut mosaic of scapulae wired together. At least the Yelangese were not squandering carcasses needlessly.

  Then Suhail tapped my shoulder. He gave me my instructions in mime: I should flip this lever when he signaled, spin that wheel counter-clockwise, and then man a crank with every ounce of strength in my body. I nodded, my heart beating so loud I was certain the soldiers must hear it. This was madness. Madder than hurling myself off a waterfall. Gravity, at least, had no personal animus against me; it had not travelled through the Broken Sea to find me.