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

by Marie Brennan

  I blinked. “What—now?”

  “Yes.”

  The grimness was there again, a stony layer beneath the resignation. “Yes, of course; how foolish of me. Your family will want you with them at a time like this.”

  “It is not that—not precisely. Rather—” Suhail caught himself, stopped, and shook his head again. “It does not matter. But I will not be able to go with you to Ala’ase’ama.”

  My heart sank. I had, without realizing it, begun thinking of him as a member of our expedition, fully as much a part of my work as Tom was. But chance had brought him to me, and now chance would take him away again.

  I have written before about the regret I feel upon parting from the individuals I come to know in my travels. This parting, I confess, struck deeper than any other. Suhail had weathered more trials at my side than anyone save Tom; with him I shared secrets I could not even permit Tom to know. My association with him was not respectable—and I would bear the consequences of that for some time—but I had come to treasure it. Only a determination not to end our partnership by embarrassing myself kept me from showing the depths of that loss.

  To conceal it, I reached into my pocket and took out my little notebook, then tore a page from it and scribbled a few brief lines. “Here,” I said, giving it to Suhail. “That is my direction in Falchester. I hope you will at least write to me, as occasion permits.”

  He accepted it with a smile that was a mere ghost of its usual brightness. I noticed that he took care not to brush my fingers as he did so: we had returned once more to propriety. “Thank you,” he said. “And I wish you the best of luck in the rest of your journey. Peace be upon you, sadiqati”—which means “my friend” in the Akhian tongue.

  By the next evening he was gone, having taken passage on a ship bound for Elerqa. That quickly, he was lost to me, and the melancholy of it stayed with me for a long time after.

  * * *

  There is little I can say about the remainder of the expedition that would hold a tenth so much interest as what has come before. I will instead speak of what happened after I returned to Scirland, which was not documented in my reports to the Winfield Courier, nor collected in my travelogue afterward.

  Part of it is widespread knowledge regardless. As I had predicted, Tom became a Fellow of the Colloquium, because of the work he had done during our expedition. It both pleased and saddened him: acceptance from that body was a goal we both pursued, but his Fellowship did not magically transform the world around him into one where his birth did not matter. He had not expected it, but the disappointment was there nonetheless.

  THOMAS WILKER

  The Colloquium did not unbend so far as to admit me to their ranks, but the following Acinis, in a grand ceremony of the Synedrion, the king inducted me into the Order of the White Horn, making me Dame Isabella Camherst. Officially, this honour was given in gratitude for my courage and quick action in saving the fort at Point Miriam from attack by the Ikwunde army. The Crown had reviewed those events and concluded that, accusations of treason notwithstanding, I had indeed acted in the best interests of Scirland, and so they wished to reward me. (This did not, however, prevent the aforementioned unnamed member of the Synedrion from drawing me aside and reminding me that I was still under no circumstances permitted to return to Bayembe.)

  That story, of course, was cover for the truth, which is that I was knighted for my part in the rescue of Her Highness: the woman who now rules as our queen. This, again, was Her Highness’ doing, but naturally none of us could speak of it directly. Admiral Longstead had told me before I left Keonga that any whisper of that matter would see me put on trial and likely imprisoned, and so I held my tongue.

  It is often said that the poor are insane, while the rich are merely eccentric. So it is with knighthood, I discovered: as Mrs. Camherst I was disreputable, but as Dame Isabella Camherst, I was just scandalous enough to be worth inviting places. The more frivolously social invitations I declined, but the Nyland Brothers approached me about publishing my travelogue as Around the World in Search of Dragons, which sold through its first edition in less than two months, and I soon embarked upon a lecture tour throughout the kingdom. If my audiences at times asked more questions about my personal life than my professional work, and if I suffered the occasional heckler who chose to mock my retraction of my sea-serpent theory, I took care not to complain where any but my closest friends could hear.

  As pleasing as these developments were (not to mention a welcome improvement to my financial situation), I found myself wishing for the peace and quiet of my Hart Square townhouse, where I might work on the material I had gathered during my expedition.

  Much of this work concerned my taxonomical questions. I had learned my lesson from the premature publication of that article in the Journal of Maritime Studies; I would not publish this theory until I was certain of its strength, and moreover could prove it with an abundance of supporting evidence. As it transpired, that evidence would not come into my hands for some years yet, but in the interim I accomplished a great deal that laid the groundwork for the discoveries that would follow.

  I also took up a hobby that puzzled many around me. I told everyone I was interested in the fossils then being uncovered in several parts of the world, and in pursuit of that, I studied with both a sculptor and a lapidary, learning to cut and carve stone.

  My true aim, of course, was the dissection of the petrified egg. It sat for the better part of a year on one of my bookshelves, seeming like nothing more than a stone carving of an egg (which is what I told everyone it was). Given the wealth of firestone concealed inside, I could not trust its dissection to an outsider; I must learn to do the work myself. When at last I deemed myself ready, I made a plaster cast of the egg, weighted the cast with lead (so the housekeeper would not notice a change in its mass), and began the process of extracting the embryo within.

  First I chipped away the rocky exterior, which had formerly been the shell. The mass of firestone glowed with muted light, its usual brilliance dimmed by sheer thickness. I held an inconceivable fortune in my hands, and was about to cut it to pieces. (Somewhere, I fancied, the lapidary who had taught me gem-carving was weeping inconsolably, and did not know why.)

  I was more concerned with what the firestone held. When I held it up to a lamp, I could see the outline of the embryo within, and nearly melted with relief. For a year I had worried that the egg we carried away from Rahuahane would prove to be sterile, or that its contents would have been destroyed by the petrification.

  With the greatest of care, I carved my way toward the nearest extension of the embryo. When I broke through, however, my disappointment was intense: instead of a bone, I found only a dust-filled hollow. I had hoped the petrification process was like that which preserved dragonbone, and that I might extract the skeleton entire. To find nothing but dust so discouraged me that I gave up for the day, hiding the egg where the maid would not find it.

  I woke up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea. Natalie, woken by the noise of me banging about, found me carefully pouring plaster into that hollow. “What on earth are you doing?” she asked.

  “Taking a cast of where the skeleton was,” I said. (She and Tom both knew of my inadvertent visit to Rahuahane, and what Suhail and I had found there.) “If I am very careful, I may yet be able to learn something.”

  “Could you not learn it during daylight hours?” Natalie asked, yawning. But by then I had enough money that I need not worry at all about the expense of candles or lamp oil, and I went on working.

  The entire process took weeks. I would carve until I neared a hollow, then drill through and fill it with plaster. When I had done this with all the easily accessible portions, I removed them and began the procedure anew with the deeper portions. The vacuoles did not quite form a continuous whole, and so I had to take my casts in stages, pausing each time to draw the current appearance of the mass, in order to be certain I could reassemble the plaster in the correct confi
guration afterward.

  But at last it was done, and I could see what manner of dragon the ancients of Draconean civilization had been breeding.

  “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Tom said when I showed it to him.

  “Indeed,” I said. “I have already ordered several books on embryology; they should be delivered soon.” (We knew virtually nothing of draconic embryology in those days, and do not know nearly enough about it now, though our understanding has at least advanced from the total disgrace it once was.)

  Tom bent to peer at the lumpy, imperfect casts, which I had wired together in my best approximation of their original posture. “The tail and wings are clearly not well-developed yet—the tail in particular,” he said.

  “Perhaps full development of the tail came after hatching. Human children, after all, are born with strikingly different proportions than they attain as adults.” I turned the casts around so he might view them from another angle. “Underdeveloped wings are certainly to be expected; it is a common feature of birds. But the jointing of the legs—well, it is difficult to make out, given the state of the casts. But it seems peculiar. I cannot tell whether this is an ordinary stage in draconic embryo development, or whether it indicates an extinct species.”

  “Or one not yet discovered—though that seems less likely, especially nowadays.” Tom straightened and grinned at me. “Admit it. You are already planning how to gather specimens of dragon eggs so that you can dissect them and sketch out the sequence of development.”

  I could not help returning his smile. “You only guess that because your thoughts tended in the same direction. But yes, I need comparative materials. It might go quite some way toward reconciling the stories of the Draconeans with the reality of modern dragons if the ones they tamed were in fact a species that has since gone extinct.”

  Tom gestured at the casts. “Will you be publishing this?”

  The question made me hesitate. It is a scientist’s obligation to share what she learns; only then may others examine her work and find where it is wanting. Nor can a single person discover everything there is to know, which makes it imperative that those investigating a topic build on each other’s efforts. But my error with the sea-serpent theory had left me shy of publishing anything I was not certain of—and besides, there was the matter of where and how I had acquired this specimen. I did not want to send treasure-hunters flocking to Rahuahane.

  “Not yet,” I said slowly. “It must be known eventually, yes—and I will write it up, though not send the paper to anyone, so that if something happens to me the information will not be lost. But I do not feel that I am ready to share this with others until I know more.”

  In hindsight, I am more glad than ever that I made that choice. Ordinarily I believe secrecy to be anathema in scientific endeavours; in this case, however, it allowed subsequent events to fall out in a fashion rather more controlled than it might otherwise have been.

  But as I so often do, I get ahead of myself. The answers I sought lay some years in my future still; they would have to wait upon news from Bayembe and fresh work in other parts of the world. The treasure I had retrieved from Rahuahane, though, was not the pile of poorly carved firestone stuffed in a hatbox at the top of my wardrobe. It was that plaster cast, and all of the questions it created.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MARIE BRENNAN habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Onyx Court series, the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and the urban fantasy Lies and Prophecy, as well as more than forty short stories.

  www.swantower.com

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  BY MARIE BRENNAN

  A Natural History of Dragons

  The Tropic of Serpents

  Voyage of the Basilisk

  Midnight Never Come

  In Ashes Lie

  A Star Shall Fall

  With Fate Conspire

  Warrior

  Witch

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Map

  Preface

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Illustration: RSS Basilisk

  Chapter 3

  Illustration: Jake for Scale

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Illustration: Quetzalcoatl

  Part Two

  Chapter 6

  Illustration: Dragon Turtle

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Illustration: Scale Detail

  Part Three

  Chapter 11

  Illustration: On the Beach

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Illustration: Fire-Lizard

  Chapter 15

  Part Four

  Chapter 16

  Illustration: Rahuahane

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Illustration: The Caeliger

  Chapter 19

  Illustration: Thomas Wilker

  About the Author

  By Marie Brennan

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  VOYAGE OF THE BASILISK

  Copyright © 2015 by Bryn Neuenschwander

  All rights reserved.

  Cover and interior illustrations by Todd Lockwood

  Map by Rhys Davies

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

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  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-3198-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-5636-9 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781429956369

  First Edition: March 2015