Within the Sanctuary of Wings

by Marie Brennan

  “I’m trying not to think about it,” Tom muttered, but with a good nature.

  Suhail had been in hot-air balloons before, as well as caeligers. They troubled him not at all; the frowning line between his brows was there for a different reason. He said, “It’s all well and good to have ourselves flown in—but how will we get back out again?”

  “If push comes to shove, we walk out. The Tser-zhag are in the habit of evicting outsiders found within their borders, not imprisoning or executing them.” I laughed. My mood had improved tremendously since Jake put this notion into my mind. It mattered little to me that the possibility was so far-fetched; merely the dream of it was enough to give my spirit wings. “It might even make our lives easier if they capture us, so long as they do not do so before we complete our work. Then at least we would have experienced guides showing us the way out.”

  Tom drew in a deep breath and straightened in his chair. “Speaking of guides. Thu said they found the specimen a good four days’ hike from the village—what’s it called, again? Hlamtse Rong. That’s a long way to go with nothing more than a small notebook sketch to lead us.”

  “He said they hired porters in the village. Presumably those men would know where the Yelangese party went.”

  Tom grimaced. “Assuming those men are still there, and haven’t died or gone elsewhere for work. Assuming they’re willing to hire out with more foreigners. Assuming they haven’t decided that it’s better to keep people away from where those remains were found.”

  He had a point—several of them, really—and after this many years together, I knew where his thoughts were headed. “You think we should bring Mr. Thu with us.”

  Jake had been leaning back in his chair so that it balanced on two legs only, a habit of which I had failed to break him. Now he almost overbalanced, and came down with a heavy thump. “That Yelangese fellow! The major-general will love that.”

  I thought it through out loud, speaking slowly as each part came to me. “He will say it is out of the question, of course, because they are still not certain of him—or of the Khiam Siu … but there will be three of us and only one of Thu Phim-lat. Not counting any soldiers they send along, of course. Even if we hypothesize his intentions to be false, no one can possibly suggest with a straight face that he has left an ambush waiting there for us. Not when our arrival is so improbable in the first place. If the Yelangese were doing anything there they did not want us to see, they would not send him to draw our attention; and if they have begun doing something since his exile, we are just as likely to wander upon it without him as with. The greatest danger is that he will, for some obscure reason of his own, lead us into the wildnerness to die.”

  “And that,” Suhail said dryly, “is again just as likely to happen without his help as with. If not more so.”

  He did not exaggerate. Although we had done a bit of mountaineering in recent years, this was like someone who has dog-paddled across a quiet lake proposing to swim the channel between Scirland and Eiverheim. Of the lot of us, Mr. Thu was by far the most experienced. “We could take other mountaineers with us; Mr. Brucker has been to the Mrtyahaima before. But none of them will know the place we seek.”

  I looked at Suhail, and at Tom. It was not only my own life I would be placing in a stranger’s hands.

  My husband nodded. “We need someone. Let it be the man who found the specimen to begin with.”

  I got up and went to my desk, where I slid a fresh sheet of paper onto the blotter. “Then first let us see if he agrees.”

  * * *

  Thu Phim-lat stared at me as if I were mad. “One day, I cannot be allowed to listen to a lecture without being thrown out. Now you trust me with this?”

  “I see no reason not to.”

  His mouth opened and closed once, as if he had too many possible rejoinders, and none could make it through the scrum. I would not have heeded them regardless. He drew in a breath, then said, “And what if I do not wish to go?”

  “Then I would ask your reason.”

  Mr. Thu spread his hands. “Here I am safe—as safe as I may be, at least. You ask me to go into danger again.”

  “We will be travelling for the most part through Scirling-controlled territory in Vidwatha, and Yelang does not have an eastern foothold yet. Would they have any cause to expect your return to Tser-nga?” He shook his head, and I gave him a bright smile. “Then one could argue that you will be even safer there than here, for the simple reason that no one will be looking for you there. Though I must allow that the risk of avalanches and rocks falling on your head is greater in the Mrtyahaima.”

  “Rocks and avalanches I fear only as much as they deserve.” This statement reassured me more than if he had declared no fear at all. A man who has no fear in the mountains is soon rendered a dark smear upon the valley floor. Mr. Thu held his breath, considering, then asked his final question. “If I refuse, will this harm the Khiam cause?”

  “No,” I said. The major-general did not even yet know we wanted Mr. Thu to come, for we judged it best to get the man’s cooperation before that of the authorities. In that moment, though, I wished we had done it the other way around, for I was certain my truthful admission would cause him to refuse.

  He said, “But it would aid my people if I came.”

  “Among those who would take your participation as an encouraging sign of cooperation, yes. Among those who suspect treachery every time you sneeze, no. I cannot begin to tell you which might win out in the balance. But if this carries any weight with you, I should like to see you come. And not only,” I hastened to add, “because your expertise would be useful.”

  “Why, then?” he asked curiously.

  The last time I brought a man along on an expedition of this kind, it was because I loved him. In the case of Thu Phim-lat, my answer was much less scandalous. “Because you found the first specimen. You deserve to be there when—if—we find the second, and document it for the world.”

  I spoke with pure honesty, not out of calculation. My acquaintance with Mr. Thu was so short, I had no way of anticipating whether my words would move him or not.

  Despite my ignorance, I chose the perfect reply.

  Thu said, “Then I will come.”

  * * *

  On the very day we received our permission to go, I sat down in my study for one final conversation—this one with my son.

  “If you tell me not to go,” I said, “then I will not.”

  Jake gaped at me. “Why would I say that?”

  “Because the Mrtyahaima peaks are possibly the most lethal region in the world. I cannot promise I will come back alive.” No more than I could have promised my survival in the Green Hell … but back then I had been grieving for my first husband, fighting to establish myself as a scholar, and fleeing a responsibility I had never particularly desired. Moreover, I was young and naive enough not to realize just how much risk I was facing. Now I knew, and a portion of my heart would have been content to remain at home, secure in what I had already achieved.

  But not all of it—and Jake knew that. “If I wanted you to stay here,” he said, “I would have already told you so. This is who you are, Mother. If you don’t go, you’ll always wonder what might have happened. What you might have learned. Besides, you need something new to shove in the faces of those—” (He used a phrase to describe the gentlemen of the Philosophers’ Colloquium that I will not repeat here.)

  My eyes pricked hot, and hotter still when he added, “But don’t get yourself killed. Or arrested by some foreign government. Getting arrested at home is quite enough.”

  “I have only done that the once,” I said. Our tones were light, but the sentiment behind them was not. Sniffling a little, I embraced my son; and not long after, I left Scirland for the heights of the Mrtyahaima.

  PART TWO

  In which the memoirist signally fails to get herself killed

  FIVE

  Summing up—The caeliger base—Flight into the Mrtyahaima�
�A less than perfect landing—The third caeliger—We are alone

  Under any other circumstances, our journey from Falchester to Hlamtse Rong would be enough to fill half a book all on its own. Our party consisted of myself, Suhail, Tom, Thu Phim-lat, and one Lieutenant Chendley, on loan to us from the Royal Scirling Army for mountaineering assistance (largely because they did not trust Thu). We travelled in separate groups, the better to deflect notice; three Scirlings (one of those a woman), an Akhian, and a Yelangese man form a sufficiently motley assortment as to sound like the beginnings of a banal joke.

  From Falchester we travelled in stages across the Destanic Ocean and along the eastern coast of Dajin to Alhidra, where we boarded river boats travelling up the Mahajanya into the interior. This is of course the “Father of Vidwatha,” one of the two great rivers between which ancient Vidwathi civilization sprang up, and I could have remained there for months, quite happily. Like much of Dajin, Vidwatha boasts a number of river-dwelling dragons, who are often venerated and propitiated by the local farmers in the hopes of preventing destructive floods and drought. I was particularly curious to know whether there was any truth to the folklore which said all the dragons in the Mahajanya were male and all those in the Mahajani, female, the two coming together during the River Marriage Festival to mate. If so, it would have been a fascinating echo of the swamp-wyrms in the Green Hell, where the Moulish bring select males up to the Great Cataract to mate with the queen dragons in the lake there. (As it transpires, the folklore is not true; the physical differences between dragons of the two rivers are a matter of species differentiation rather than sex.)

  But our aeronautical carriage awaited, and so I fixed my attention on the west and went onward. Unfortunately for us, the Mahajanya was in those days only partially in Scirling control: the people of that land did not much like seeing one of their spiritual parents in foreign hands (which is why Scirland controls none of it now). We returned to land once more and skirted the disputed stretch—a task which ultimately involved disguises and a good deal of lying, when my party discovered we had not skirted quite far enough—and then, after a brisk gallop away from bandits who attacked both sides indiscriminately, finally convened in the village of Parshe. But this portion of the journey, however lively a tale it makes in its own right, is a mere prelude to the true story, which is our flight into the Mrtyahaima peaks.

  Here Lieutenant Chendley took the lead, as he was the only one among us who knew precisely where the Scirling caeliger base was located. Indeed, I never did find out its location, for the lieutenant went off alone and came back with soldiers, who blindfolded us and led our horses the remaining distance. All I know is that it lay approximately two days from Parshe and as close to the Tser-zhag border as they dared, so as to shorten our flight across the closed territory.

  Even at that distance, we could see the Mrtyahaima.

  Not in any great detail—though I’m told that when the air is truly clear, the vista becomes crisp enough for the knowledgeable to identify individual peaks. For the short time we were in Parshe, though, the air was sufficiently humid that the mountains were simply a dark haze, a hulking mass on the horizon. I thought at the time that we were seeing where we must go, and I marveled at the sight. I did not realize that this was only the edge of the great range, the chain geographers identify more precisely as the Dashavat Mountains. The Mrtyahaima proper lay behind, beyond my vision, rising even higher than I could imagine. Had I seen what I faced while still in Parshe … I believe I would have continued, for my life has been a recurrent tale of my failure to truly understand my peril until it is too late for me to turn back. But I cannot be certain.

  The base had a rather slapped-together look quite at odds with the usual Scirling military standards. I suspected it was a temporary arrangement, which did not surprise me; we were some distance from the nearest garrison, and of course they would not want their caeligers to spend much time out where others could seize them. It positively swarmed with activity, though, and the first person I saw when I dragged my gaze away from the mountains was my brother, Andrew.

  I dismounted in a trice and threw my arms about him. “I suspected I would see you here! But no one would tell me for certain.”

  Andrew pounded my back as if I were a brother rather than a sister. “It’s all very hush-hush, isn’t it? Fear of spies and all that. But of course I’m here; I couldn’t send my favourite sister off into the Mrtyahaima without so much as a farewell.”

  His touching concern might have been a little more touching had he not called me his favourite sister. Since I was his only sister, the phrase was invariably a sign that he wanted something from me. “Andrew,” I said, “you aren’t hoping we’ll bring you with us, are you?”

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t mind—You there! Be careful with that!” He darted off to chide a private who was handling our belongings with insufficient care. That clinched it: my brother was never so diligent in showing his use unless he had some ulterior motive in mind.

  Unfortunately for Andrew, I had no authority to bring him along. It is easy enough to add a person to a journey made by boat, horse, or foot, at least if rations are not too limited; but caeligers are another matter. The great limiter there is not space but weight, and all of the crew for long-range missions were at least twenty centimeters shorter than my brother. (Indeed, the army had made an exception to its usual regulations, actively recruiting into their nascent aerial corps men who would ordinarily have been deemed too slight.)

  Even with our small party of five, we needed three caeligers for the journey; a single one, or even two, could not carry all of us, our gear, the pilots, and equipment for the caeligers, such as fuel for their engines and canisters of the lifting gas which made it possible for them to fly. “Will they go straight on after they leave us in Tser-nga?” Tom murmured, eyeing the vessels in their row, and the quantity of fuel in a depot some distance away. None of us knew the answer, and would not get one if we asked.

  The caeligers themselves made for a striking sight. It is a very great pity that peacetime never spurs development as quickly as war: these craft bore as little resemblance to the caeligers of the Broken Sea eight years ago as an ancient longship does to a modern frigate. Those early vessels had been wired together out of natural dragonbone: shaped with saws where possible and fitted together most cunningly, but still peculiar and not quite suited to the purpose. The frameworks of these caeligers, being made from synthetic dragonbone, consisted of tidy rods and slats, with propellers far larger than any dragon species could provide (which I learned was a necessity for flying in the thinner air of high altitude). All of it looked quite ordinary, with nothing but its pale colour to hint at its origin.

  MILITARY CAELIGERS

  That colour was a happy accident, for the purposes of a military caeliger. Seen from below, everything about these craft was pale, from the gondolas in which the crew rode to the undersides of the balloons, and every piece of structure that could be made light with bleach or paint. Being a natural historian, I needed no explanation as to why. Anyone standing on the ground would have a difficult time picking out the caeliger against the backdrop of the sky. The upper part of the balloon, of course, was painted with a camouflaging pattern, so that should another caeliger happen to overfly it (or the vessel come to ground in a low-lying area), an observer might not distinguish it from the terrain below.

  The crew was minimal, so as to ensure we could bring everything we needed. Our baggage formed a tremendous mountain, easily as large as the equipment for all my other expeditions put together (save Vystrana, where Lord Hilford had brought along a great many things for his own comfort that were not, strictly speaking, necessary). We had our scientific equipment, of course, including tools for the excavation of any specimens from the ice, and the means of preserving same. We had cold-weather clothing, which takes up far more room than it ought, along with tents, ropes, alpenstocks, snowshoes, and other tools of mountain travel—including a g
ift from our mountaineering friends Mr. and Mrs. Winstow that we would be very glad of in the coming days.

  But the greatest bulk of it was food, for we could not be certain of buying or even hunting what we needed. Colonel Dorson, the commander of that base, had done what he could to gather up Tser-zhag coin, but it was not much; and we did not wish to draw attention to ourselves by paying in foreign currency. Besides, Thu warned us, the locals did not have much to sell. They scraped a marginal existence in a marginal land, and money would do them no good if they could not travel down to places where they might spend it and still return home in good time. As for hunting, although bears were not unknown in the region, the main large animals were the wild cousins of the yaks herded by the villagers. But these had been pushed out of their grazing meadows by those domesticated kin, leaving them few in number. And certainly no one would thank us if we shot their livestock.

  We hoped it would be enough to sustain us. We had to plan our expedition carefully, for there are two seasons in which it is difficult to do much in Tser-nga: the winter, which was behind us, and the period of the monsoon, which lay ahead. In the lowlands that means rain, but at the elevation of Thu’s valley, it would be snow instead. Foul weather during the sea crossing and our adventures making our way up the Mahajanya had put us behind schedule; we had hoped to depart for Tser-nga by the first of Nebulis, but it was already nearly Gelis. The monsoon would begin in a month, possibly sooner. But even if we did not make it back down to the lowlands before the snows came, we ought to have enough.

  Unfortunately for our plans, everything seemed to go awry. Dorson had underestimated the weight of our gear, and after we had loaded the caeligers we found the distribution was entirely unsuitable, so it was all to do over again. Then the weather turned against us, with a hot and dusty wind that threatened to clog the caeligers’ engines if we attempted to fly in it. The soldiers took precautions to guard the machines against the infiltrating grit, but when at last we set out for Tser-nga, we discovered the hard way that those precautions were insufficient.