“I had more,” Mr. Thu said, “but they were confiscated by my commanding officer. I kept these only by hiding them in the lining of my clothing.”
Tom and I grilled him on the shape, size, and thickness of the ones he had lost, and the details of where on the carcass the remaining pair had been found. At one point during this conversation, Suhail pounded his fist against the table in a rare display of frustration. “Oh, to have been there myself! I know you did not have much time to search,” he hastened to assure Mr. Thu. “But there may have been other scales or teeth scattered along the ground, not obvious to the eye. And even looking at where they fell… we might have guessed at the path your carcass took on the way down, how the scavengers tore at it, and used that to tentatively reconstruct where the loose scales had been.”
I understood Suhail’s vexation, feeling much the same myself. It was maddening to have such disconnected fragments. I was no archaeologist, accustomed to making do with what little evidence the depredations of time and decay saw fit to leave behind; my subjects were usually alive or recently dead, and in either case they were whole. If only we had been there when this specimen was discovered, to see it with our own eyes!
My brain had not yet carried that thought through to its logical conclusion when I rose and pulled down the world map from its roller on one wall. I was thinking only of elevation, temperature, possible food sources. “Can you show me where you found this?”
Mr. Thu came to join me. “You do not have a more detailed map?”
“Not of that region. Though I can certainly obtain one.”
He bent to peer at the area shaded to represent the heights of the Mrtyahaima. After a moment’s consideration, he stabbed one finger onto the sheet. “Here. Roughly.”
I looked, and my shoulders drooped. “Of course it was.”
He had pointed at a spot in the hinterlands of Tser-nga, an area very poorly known to outsiders. Sheluhim and various emissaries had visited in past ages, but the kingdom periodically closed its borders, and at present they were shut. It was no surprise that Mr. Thu and his compatriots would have been exploring there: to their east lay the high plateau of Khavtlai, which had been a Yelangese possession for more than a century. Given the remoteness and seclusion of Tser-nga, if the Yelangese came through the mountains there, they could be well established on the eastern side before we heard anything of it.
It also made going there myself more than a little difficult.
Only then did I realize what plan had been taking shape below conscious thought. I said nothing of it yet, though. Instead I asked Mr. Thu, “And what was the terrain like where you found the specimen? You said it was above the snow line?”
“Not when I found it,” he said, returning to his seat and opening the notebook to another page. It was not, I later learned, the same book in which he had originally recorded his observations, for that held too much in the way of other information he did not wish to share. Once the notes on the specimen were safely copied over, drawings and all, he gave the original to his Khiam Siu allies. But the copy included a terrain sketch of some truly forbidding mountains and the valleys beneath.
He indicated a specific location with the tip of his finger. “Here. But I believe it fell from higher up.”
“Six thousand meters,” Suhail said, translating the unfamiliar numerals written above. “More or less. Assuming I’m converting the units properly.”
That elevation marked a high col or saddle between two peaks. If Mr. Thu was correct, the specimen had fallen several hundred meters down a nearly sheer face to the spot where he found it. “What makes you think it was up there originally?” Tom asked.
“It would not have remained frozen otherwise,” Mr. Thu said with certainty. “Down in the valley, it is very sheltered from wind, and can become quite hot. And besides…”
His hesitation could not have been more effective at piquing my interest had he deliberately calculated it for that purpose. “Besides?” I prompted him.
“I think,” he said, uncertainty dragging at his words, “there may have been another up above.”
FOUR
From the moment Mr. Thu said “another,” I believe my fate was set.
That Tser-nga was closed to outsiders was not enough to deter me; I had to go and see. “That site is barely within their territory at all,” I said every time someone protested. “I can skirt their borders almost entirely, if I travel up the Lerg-pa River—”
But everyone who knew the first thing about the region assured me I could not possibly do that. The river, though it may look appealing on paper, is apparently the next best thing to impassable in person. “Very well,” I said, “then I will come at it from the west—” But of course that meant Khavtlai, which meant Yelang. And no one was prepared to let me sneak into a country I had been formally deported from, with whom we were currently at war. Nor could I go through Tser-nga itself.
We were at an impasse.
“Just wait,” people said to me, over and over again. “In a few years, when the Aerial War is over and Tser-nga has opened its borders—”
They presumed, of course, that the Aerial War would conclude in favour of Scirland, instead of with the Yelangese occupying Tser-nga and barring my entry even more thoroughly than the locals had. They also presumed that the specimen Mr. Thu had seen (if indeed there was more than one) would still be there in a few years, unharmed by the intervening time, rather than tumbling to the valley below and rotting away as the first one had.
“However old that first one may have been,” Tom said, trying to reassure me, “it survived all this time. There’s no reason to assume the others will perish in a few short years.”
He was endeavouring to be optimistic, and so he did not say the rest of what we were both thinking: it has already been more than a year since Mr. Thu found the first one. It would be longer still before I got there, even if I went immediately. My chance might already be gone.
But I could not allow myself to believe that. I had to hold tight to possibility and move as rapidly as I could. At least then, if my hopes were dashed, I could tell myself I had done everything in my power.
How, though, to reach my destination?
My difficulties could have been worse. Had Mr. Thu found the specimen on the western side of the mountains, I would have needed to dodge Yelangese forces at every turn. But his expedition was unable to scout the Khavtlai edge of the Mrtyahaima satisfactorily; sickness in the district had turned them away, forcing them to seek an approach from the far side. And the area he indicated was so far removed from the Tser-zhag heartland that which nation controlled it depended on which map you consulted: some said Tser-nga, some Khavtlai and Yelang. Either way it was a mere fiction, for the mountains in between were uninhabited.
But never had such tempting bait been dangled in front of me, with so many obstacles between.
Suhail watched me chew on this problem for days. Then, one evening as we sat in my study, he said, “Please do not take this the wrong way. But… why are you so determined to go?”
Another man might have failed to understand the magnitude of my obsession with dragons, but not Suhail. He had come with me into the depths of the Jefi in summer; he knew that risking life and limb for knowledge was nothing new to me. His question carried a different implication. “You mean, why am I pursuing this so passionately, when there are other, easier goals I might more plausibly attain. Goals which would have a much better chance of furthering our knowledge of dragonkind.”