Voyage of the Basilisk

SIX

There is a great deal I am glossing over in this account, of course. Some of it is documented elsewhere (such as in Around the World in Search of Dragons), but some of it is simply of no interest to anyone.

Into this latter category I place the finer points of the difficulties we faced upon arrival in Va Hing, one of the great conquered cities of Yelang. Contrary to popular assumption, going on an expedition around the world is not merely a matter of obtaining a ship and charting a course. There are visas to be considered, and bureaucracy to navigate when those visas fail to arrive in time, expire too soon, or meet with blank stares on the receiving end. The politics of nations and their economic markets may interfere with your journey. In short, you may spend an appalling amount of time mired in stuffy little offices, trying to get permission to be where you are.

I was fortunate in that the dragon’s share of this burden fell on Tom, not me. He had greater patience for such things than I did; but more to the point, he was male, and therefore more to be respected in matters of bureaucratic deadlock. I am not often grateful for the way in which my sex has historically been dismissed, but in this instance I must admit I was glad to leave the task of arguing to him.

Tom was also more capable than I of reading the gentlemen on the other side of the argument. He spotted, as I would not have, an oddity in their conduct.

“I think they know who we are,” he said, after another fruitless afternoon ashore.

My afternoon had been spent in study; my head was full of dragons. I blinked owlishly at him. “What do you mean? Our papers give our names, quite clearly.”

Tom shook his head, mouth opening to answer me. Then he glanced around. We were on deck; I was not about to closet myself in the coffin that passed for my cabin when I did not have to. All around us were sailors who might overhear. Tom put his hand on my elbow and nudged me toward the bow, where we might speak in something more like private.

Once there, he said in a low voice, “I think they recognize our names.”

Various scandal-sheets had made me notorious at home, but it was absurd to think anyone cared about such matters here, on the other side of the world. “There is no reason they should know us.”

“Isn’t there?” Tom said. “We are in Va Hing, Isabella. And we are here to study dragons.”

My jaw sagged loose as I caught his meaning. Several years previously, just before our departure for Eriga, the Marquess of Canlan had stolen our research on the preservation of dragonbone, and possible methods for synthesizing the material. We had never acquired proof—not enough to risk accusing him—but it would have brought little good if we had; the damage was already done. Needing ready money, that nobleman had sold the information to the Va Ren Shipping Association, based here in this city.

“What should it matter if we are here?” I said, my bitterness no less for the wound being so many years old. “They have what they wanted. Let us conduct our research in peace.”

“If they believed that was all we were here for, they might. But put yourself in their shoes. We might be using this expedition as cover for something else.”

“Such as what? Espionage on behalf of Her Royal Highness?” The princess’ diplomatic mission had not yet arrived in Yelang, nor was she due to visit Va Hing, but that would not prevent excitable minds from spinning tales. More likely, though, what they feared was specific to us. “Do they think we will steal the notebooks back? There’s no point; by now they’ll have made any number of copies.”

Tom’s eyes were grim and hard in his weathered face. “Sabotage.”

I could not help myself; I let out a bark of laughter that attracted curious looks from the nearest sailors. “Would that I could! They greatly overestimate me, if they think I can do such damage.”

“I believe the phrase is ‘better safe than sorry,’” Tom said, so dry it burned. “Even if we are innocent of such schemes, there’s no benefit to them in allowing us to wander about Yelang, looking at dragons. So they’ve taken steps to block us.” Then he stopped, sighing, and ran both hands over his hair, smoothing it back into place against the constant lifting of the harbour wind. “At least, I think they have. This seems like too much of a bureaucratic—”

He caught himself before he could use whatever term he intended; I expect it was very foul. “Too much so for chance,” I said, with a sigh of my own. “Very well. How do we circumvent it?”

Tom’s mouth twisted. “Money. Isn’t that the way of bureaucrats everywhere? Either they’ve only been told to refuse us—not paid to do so—or they weren’t paid that much. One of them was distinctly hinting that he’d be amenable to a bribe.”

If they had indeed been paid, then apparently the going rate for keeping Scirlings out of Yelang was higher than it had any right to be, for our bid had to be even higher. The sum was enough to make me quail. “This… will not do anything good to our finances,” I said in my cabin, staring down at the ledger.

“It’s that,” Tom said, “or give up on visiting Yelang entirely. Or ask Aekinitos to put us ashore in a longboat along some uninhabited stretch of coastline, and hope no one asks for our papers.”

Aekinitos would have done it, I had no doubt. I had no desire to risk arrest in a foreign country, though. Among other things, it would cause great embarrassment for Princess Miriam’s diplomatic mission, which should soon be arriving in Yelang—and I was already in bad enough odor with His Majesty’s government. “Then we pay,” I said. We would worry about the consequences later. I could try selling my art in the market square, perhaps.

Tom conveyed the bribe to the necessary officials, and we received our stamps. After all that trouble, I had half a mind to seek out the Va Ren Shipping Association and see if I could interfere with them somehow. Common sense asserted itself, however—the aforementioned lack of desire to be arrested, not to mention that I had no idea where in the city they were—and so, as always, we turned our attention to dragons instead.

One of the first things I did was scour the bookshops of Va Hing until I found a volume on the Yelangese taxonomy of dragons, which is quite different from our own. At least, that was what I hoped it was: there were very fine woodcuts of dragons in it, and I had brought along one of the sailors from the Basilisk, who could read a little Yelangese. As I have said before, I am not much of a linguist, and Yelangese characters had defeated me entirely. I could learn their shapes well enough, but my mind persistently failed to link those shapes to sound and sense.

(Why, you ask, did I bother to acquire the book if I could not read it? Because I intended to have it translated when I returned home. Which, it is true, would have been rather late in the day for my consideration of taxonomy—but as it happened, I was able to have it translated much sooner. That, however, comes later in this tale.)

I had no hope of studying all the dragons to be found in Yelang. There are simply too many, from the subterranean hok tsung lêng to the aquatic kau lêng to the winged bê lêng, not to mention the various draconic cousins: the lêng ma or dragon horse; the hung, said to have two heads; the pa siah, which will hunt even elephants. One could spend a lifetime simply attempting to understand them all—as indeed several naturalists have done, from Kwan Jan Siong in the forty-ninth century to Khalid ibn Aabir in recent years.

My chief aim was a simple one: to lay eyes on one or more Dajin dragons. The specimens of that continent constitute a major branch of the draconic family tree, quite distinct from the Anthiopean one, and no amount of reading about them would give me the same understanding that observation could. I knew that many Dajin dragons were not winged (which led Edgeworth to dismiss them as not ‘true’ dragons), and that a number of them were water-loving; I knew they had often been revered in Yelang, though not in the same manner as the Draconeans were thought to have done. With the quetzalcoatls of Coyahuac so fresh in my mind, I wanted to study the creatures to be found here, and see if I could derive any insight regarding possible relationships between them.

To do that, of course, we had to find them first, which has always been the most vexatious hurdle encountered in my work. Lacking a friendly tsar who might provide us with a guide, we had to hire one ourselves; and this task, too, belonged to Tom, while I scoured the bookshops for that text.

The day after I returned victorious, Jake came running down the deck toward me, with Abby in hot pursuit. I would have liked to take a hotel room in Va Hing, as we had done in Namiquitlan, but the expense of the bribe meant I had to practice economy and stay on board the Basilisk. I was therefore ensconced near the bow, perusing the woodcuts in my new acquisition, when Jake skidded to a halt beside me. “Mama! Mama! Can we go to see the dragon turtles?”

“The what?” I said, which I fear did not make me sound very clever.

“The dragon turtles! The man said there are lots just down the coast. He said I could go swimming with them. Please, can we go? Please?”

My son seemed liable to vibrate right out of his skin with excitement. Abby puffed to a halt behind him, one hand on her stays, and said between gasps, “He ran all the way from the other end of the docks.”

How could I say no? It was the first time Jake had shown much interest in anything draconic. I suspected his interest would have snuffed right out had they been dragon tortoises instead of turtles, and therefore land-bound—but I was not one to look a gift drake in the mouth.

Presuming, of course, that there were any such things as dragon turtles. I could not read my book, but paging through it, I found a woodcut of something that indeed appeared to be a swimming dragon with a turtle’s shell. That did not guarantee that the beast existed; the book also had a woodcut of a hung that showed it with two heads, which is arrant nonsense. (It has a club at the end of its tail, which can be mistaken for another head in poor light or stressful conditions.) But it was enough to merit investigation.

Asking questions around the docks, I learned that there was indeed a region just down the coast where dragon turtles or lêng kuh were known to be found; unsurprisingly, the place was generally called Dragon Turtle Bay. I also learned that the fat of the creature’s body is considered a great delicacy, and that the poor beasts are rather easily slaughtered, being on the slow and trusting side. The only reason that any of them survived in the area was because the local villagers take pains to cultivate good conditions for them, ensuring that the breed does not go locally extinct.

Tom was still engaged in the hunt for a guide to the interior, and Aekinitos was busy trading, to keep our expedition in hardtack and potable water. I therefore bought passage on a small junk for myself, Abby, and Jake, as well as Elizalde, the Curxia sailor who had helped me with the book. He served as our interpreter, and I must note for the record that without him, we would have been entirely adrift.

The Basilisk would not have been able to sail in close regardless. The region of Dragon Turtle Bay is breathtaking; the coastline there curves in for a small bay, which is dotted with countless steep-sided islands, their rocky slopes thick with greenery. The waters are treacherous for any ship with a draught deeper than two meters or so, especially if her helmsman does not know his way about.

Through Elizalde I heard the legend of the bay, which holds that those islands are all the bodies of dragon turtles, variously said to be either sleeping or dead and petrified. Even in the latter case, however, the fishermen assure you that if not kept happy with offerings of incense and charms, the lêng kuh will rise from their places and swim away into the sea, taking the wealth of the bay with them.

This last point was particularly stressed to us, for the locals insisted on our making suitable offerings before we could be permitted to go swimming with the dragon turtles. When I nudged Jake to cooperate, he looked at me with wide eyes. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

“I am sure you can report to me very well,” I said.

“But—they’re dragons!”

“They may be dragons. Or they may simply be turtles with peculiar-looking heads.”

Jake nodded firmly, as if I had proved his point. “Exactly. You have to come and see!”

I sighed and knelt, lowering my voice. Of all the people around us, I think only Abby and Elizalde spoke any Scirling, but I still did not want to advertise my thoughts to the world. “Jake, I cannot go swimming. I haven’t brought the costume for it.”

He stared at me, a puzzled line creasing his brows. “What do you mean? What costume?”

My son had grown up in Pasterway and Falchester, at a time when we could not spare the money for seaside holidays. “When ladies go sea-bathing, they wear special clothing. So as not to be… indecent when the fabric gets wet.”

You may doubt that I delivered this explanation with a straight face, given that I was kneeling on the shore in men’s trousers at the time. But I meant it quite sincerely: trousers were an eminently practical choice—even the local women wore them, with long tunics over—but getting sopping wet in them was another matter entirely. It had happened from time to time in Eriga, but only by accident or when I had no choice. And besides, when those around you are wearing only loincloths, immodesty becomes a relative thing.

“Who cares?” Jake said, with the careless shrug of the young. “There’s nobody here to see. Only Abby.”

“And Elizalde,” I pointed out. “And all the people of Dragon Turtle Bay.” I might never see them again, but that did not mean I wanted them telling stories for years to come about the scandalous foreign woman who went swimming in men’s attire.

Jake did not see my reasoning. “So? There’s dragon turtles! Isn’t this what you came here for? Isn’t this the whole point of us going around the world?”

It was. And as much as I hoped to encourage my son to follow in my footsteps as a naturalist, sending him to observe dragon turtles in my place was not the best way to conduct my research. Why, then, was I so reluctant to go into the water?

Again, readers may disbelieve me when I say this, but the reason was right in front of me: my son. Jake knew I was a naturalist, and knew this involved me doing a variety of things that were not considered socially acceptable at home. He had heard some percentage of the rumours about me, I was sure, because it is impossible to quash such matters entirely. But if I had been outrageous on previous expeditions, I found myself surprisingly reluctant to behave in such ways in front of my son. The nobler part of me said I did not want to set a bad example for him. The more selfish part said that I did not want him to think less of me.

But which sort of mother would I rather be? The sort who did not go swimming without a proper costume—which in those days consisted of voluminous pantaloons and a knee-length overdress, all in a stiff fabric which would not cling when wet—or the sort who did what she had sailed halfway around the world to do?

“Very well,” I said. “Let us go swimming with dragons.”

We paid two local women for the use of their goggles, which they employed in pearl-diving. With the glass lenses protecting my eyes, I was able to see clearly beneath the water—and found myself in a different world entirely.

The ocean floor spread out below me, plunging steeply downward in narrow gulches between the islands. Kelp forested the sides of these gulches, and fish swam through them in glittering schools. The sunlight here became a visible thing, bars of radiance slicing through the water. Floating above it all, I felt as if I were flying—and my readers, I trust, understand what joy that brought me.

Jake became my instructor, passing on what he had learned from Suhail: how to pike my body and dive, how to pinch my nose and blow to relieve the pressure in my ears. I was not as agile in the water as Jake, for he was young, had more (and more recent) experience, and was less burdened by fabric besides; he swam in his drawers, while I swam fully clothed. But I did not need to be a champion swimmer to see the dragon turtles, for they are both huge and relatively fearless of human company.

In shape they are more like enormous turtles than anything else. Their shell alone is often two meters or more in length, and when they extend their flippers, a swimmer feels positively tiny in comparison. The name “dragon turtle,” however, derives from the shape of the head, which is indeed like that of a Dajin dragon: a thrusting, squarish muzzle; flaps of skin depending from the jaw; long whiskers which dance in the current as the turtle swims.

They come on land to lay their eggs, and I am told they are pathetically clumsy then, hauling themselves along the ground with their flippers. In the water, though, they are serene and graceful, propelling themselves with easy strokes, changing direction with the casual turn of one limb. I floated above one, watching as he steered a course between two up-thrusting rocks, and scarcely remembered to lift my head for air. (There are hollow tubes one may use for breathing without having to lift the head. They were not employed in that region of Yelang, however, and I lacked the experience to know in advance that such a thing might be of assistance.)

When I had seen all I could for the moment, Jake swam over to me. “May I? Please?”

“By all means,” I said, and my son dove.

We had delayed this maneuver because of the risk that the lêng kuh would startle and swim off. As indeed it did—but not before Jake had laid hold of its shell.

Then its slow drift turned much more business-like, moving off at what I estimated to be two or three meters per second. Which is not so very fast when compared with a galloping horse, but in the water it is impressive—and all the more so when your son is not moving under his own power, but rather is being pulled along by an enormous dragon turtle.

I swam after them in some alarm, fearing to lose my son out among the islands, but did not have to go far before Jake released the creature and kicked for the surface. He broke into the air with a shout of joy. “Mama! Did you see?”

“I did,” I said, and then did not get another word in edgewise for several minutes, as Jake told me every detail several times over. I had never seen him so exhilarated. His only regret was that he had not been able to go farther, but it transpired that when the lêng kuh began swimming away, the sudden acceleration had startled Jake into releasing some of his air. He wanted to try again, but by then the creature was gone, and despite the tropical waters I was beginning to feel a chill. We returned to our fisherman’s boat, and thence to the shore, where Abby had bargained for blankets to wrap us in. I was grateful for both the warmth and the concealment of my bedraggled state.

Once I was something more like dry, we ventured among the tile-roofed huts of the village to one where some men were butchering a dragon turtle. Much of its substance was already gone, but I was able to study the flippers and the shell, and (through the good assistance of Elizalde) confirm with the men that neither the bones nor the carapace disintegrated after death. Indeed, the people of that region make use of almost every part of the lêng kuh, even carving the bones into needles—though not fish-hooks, for they believe it would be deeply offensive to the creatures of the sea if they put the bones to such use. The scutes of the shell, once separated, boiled, and polished, are used in the same manner as ordinary tortoiseshell, and are much prized for ladies’ hair ornaments throughout Yelang, for their distinctive blue-and-green mottling.

I would very much have liked to see a carcass that had been less thoroughly interfered with, but the people of the bay do not take a dragon turtle every day, and we could not afford to spend too long there. We therefore bid them farewell, with many thanks, and returned to Va Hing.

SEVEN

The city of Va Hing has long been a cosmopolitan port. It drew trade from all over Dajin well before Yelang seized it as one of their possessions, and although that seizure still draws resentment from the native Hingese (who dislike being forced to exchange their own ways for the pigtail and other Yelangese habits), no one can deny that the local economy has thrived under Yelangese control. From the deck of the Basilisk I could see the streets and buildings of the city spreading out through the shallow bowl of the valley in which it sat: a sea of orange roof tiles packed closely together around small courtyards and narrow lanes, more densely populated than any city in the world. Va Hing is not large in terms of geography, but it boasts wealthy merchants and great temples, industrial companies and busy markets, two separate universities and a strong navy.

It also, like all great cities, has an underclass of people who engage in work that skirts the line of legality, where it does not cross that line entirely. During my absence, one fellow of this sort approached Tom with a peculiar offer.

“He thought I was here to hunt dragons,” Tom said upon my return, quite late that night.

I was caught between exhaustion and elation for what I had seen that day, and did not quite follow him. “I would not object to studying a carcass—although I thought there were laws restricting the hunting of dragons?” (Their status as a symbol of imperial authority means that the emperors of Yelang do not much like having the common folk shoot them. It strikes a little too close to home.)

Tom nodded. “This wasn’t what you would call a legal offer. But it seems there’s a lot of money to be had in hunting dragons right now, laws or no laws.”

“What?” This penetrated the fog that had enveloped my brain, making me sit upright on the barrel where I had perched. “For sport?” I had not forgotten M. Velloin, the big-game hunter we had clashed with in Eriga.

“With the kind of money apparently on offer, I don’t think so. And it seems to be more of a local phenomenon—Yelangese doing the hunting, rather than foreign visitors. But it’s been going on for long enough that this fellow assumed I had heard about the business and wanted my share.”

If people were thinking to profit… I let out a soft but heartfelt curse. “Dragonbone.”

Even in the scant light of the moon and the distant docks, I could see the grim set of Tom’s mouth. “I think so. I didn’t pursue it, though—didn’t want to make any promises to this fellow before telling you.”

I forced myself to think it through, ignoring the cold knot that had formed in my stomach. “We already know who has the formula for preservation, but it would be of value to know for certain whether that is where the remains are going.” I snapped my fingers as a thought came to me. “If this is for preservation, they must be sending chemists with the hunters; the bones would be too badly decayed otherwise. Did the man who approached you sound like he was working with the Va Ren Shipping Association?”

“No, he sounded like an opportunist. But that’s entirely plausible: if there’s a gold rush on for dragonbone, there will be all sorts of fellows jumping on board, without really knowing what they’re doing.”

As much as I wished for Tom to be wrong, I knew he wasn’t. Which meant this could be the start of what I had feared when we first discovered what Gaetano Rossi had done: the wholesale slaughter of dragons for their bones, with potentially disastrous consequences.

I rubbed my hands over my tired eyes, willing my thoughts to stop racing ahead. We didn’t know for certain that there was a rush, only that one man in Va Hing thought he could turn a profit by taking Scirlings to hunt dragons. But it merited investigation.

Tom said in a low, cynical voice, “I wonder if they even bothered to try synthesis.”

“It has been years since they obtained the formula,” I pointed out, trying to be optimistic. “If they had been harvesting bone so energetically all that time, we would have heard about it before now. They may have spent some time trying, at first.”

Neither of us said what we both must have been thinking: if they did try, then it seemed they had failed. Just as Frederick Kemble had, thus far. If so much effort could not produce an answer—if synthesis was ultimately impossible…

I was not doing a very good job of improving the mood, and I was too tired to do better. “I think you should follow up with this man,” I told Tom. “If nothing else, we need someone who knows how to find dragons. The rest… we will deal with it later.”

Tom’s contact reminded me of nothing so much as a squirrel: small and full of seemingly inexhaustible energy. He was not entirely trustworthy; no man who offered to take another on an illegal hunt for dragons could be given such a recommendation. But his untrustworthiness was, as Tom said wryly, “within allowance”—a phrase we had both acquired from Natalie and her engineer friends. It meant that working with the fellow was unlikely to harm us, or at least unlikely enough that we could risk it.

The risk was minimized in part because we were not, in fact, going to hunt a dragon. Tom and I suspected that the spate of men doing so would bring on an equal (if not larger) spate of government officials or soldiers trying to put a stop to the practice; and our desire to avoid prison, which I have already mentioned, argued in favor of keeping our noses clean of anything worse than ink.

We therefore set out armed only with field glasses and notebooks. We did not carry a single gun between ourselves, nor any knife longer than a hand’s span. If accosted, we could say with perfect honesty that we had not the means to kill a dragon, much less the desire.

For this side expedition, our company consisted only of myself, Tom, Elizalde, and Khüen, our guide. I was not entirely convinced of our safety, and if arrest should happen, I did not want it to catch my son or his long-suffering governess in its net. We intended to be gone for approximately three weeks, during which time the Basilisk would go about its other duties, meeting us back in Va Hing in mid-Ventis.

Those of you who have read the earlier volumes of my memoirs may notice an oddity here. Of the four in our group, I was the only woman. The same had been true in Vystrana, but my husband was with me then; in Eriga, I had Natalie as my companion, excepting only when I was separated from her by the events at the Great Cataract. Never before had I deliberately gone gallivanting off without any kind of chaperon for my virtue.

It was not my wisest decision. Though I could not know it at the time (our mail being most irregular; it had to await us where we might arrive soon, or else chase us from port to port), the letters and reports I had written about our time in Namiquitlan had excited comment back home.

Ever since I went to Bayembe, rumours of loose behaviour had dogged my steps, particularly where my interactions with Tom were concerned. I was, after all, on a first-name basis with the man, and there were some who could not conceive that we might simply be friends and professional colleagues. (Or, I think, that any woman might be in such a relationship with any man.) I had learned to shrug off these whispers, largely because I lacked any viable alternative: insisting on their groundless absurdity only encouraged those who wished to think the worst of me.

But meat loses its savour after it has been chewed for long enough, and so various gossips had begun to link me with every man who crossed my path for more than five minutes. At home, that had been the assorted gentlemen who attended my Athemer gatherings; now that I was on this expedition, Dione Aekinitos had been drawn into the net. And so, it transpired, had Suhail.

I had written too effusively of him in my reports to the Winfield Courier—though perhaps any effusiveness was too much, where a strange man was concerned. That, in combination with some of my letters to various correspondents, had planted the notion that our interactions in Namiquitlan were something less than innocent. When I wrote to the Winfield Courier about my trip to the interior of Yelang, I did not think to conceal the fact that my companions consisted of Tom (my supposed long-term lover), Elizalde (a sailor and therefore salacious), and Khüen (who, as a foreigner, provided an exotic spice to the whole ménage). Primed by tales of my supposed fling with a handsome Akhian traveller, the scandal-sheets back home were quick to declare me now fallen beyond all hope of redemption.

I knew nothing of this as we journeyed away from the coast. We were not headed into wilderness; where Yelang extends its control, it also extends its highways, which are excellently maintained. We stayed in roadside inns or, when those ran out, the houses of hospitable locals. At all times I had a room of my own, or else shared with other women. Not once did I share with Tom or the others, whatever the rumours later claimed. But I was unmarried and unchaperoned, and that was more than enough.

We did not originally intend to travel so far into the interior. Khüen meant to bring us to a place much closer, where we could spend two weeks or so in observation before returning to Va Hing and the Basilisk. But when we came there, the village headman told us, with much regret, that there were no dragons to be found in the vicinity. He recommended a neighbouring town, a day’s journey farther inland. There we met with much the same story, and so onward, until we were nearly at the end of our rope: if we went any deeper into Yelang, we would not return to Va Hing in time.

Tom and I could guess the cause of our difficulty. We assured Khüen, over and over, that we did not blame him for the failure to find dragons; it was not his fault that others had already denuded the countryside. Each time we heard yet again that there were no dragons there, however, I grew more sick at heart. I felt terribly adrift, more than a week’s journey into a land where I spoke scarcely two dozen words of the language, with evidence all around me that dragons were being exterminated for their bones. If I could have wished myself back home in Falchester, the entire expedition of the Basilisk canceled, I might have done it.

But I could not, and so I pressed onward. We were at the foot of the An Kang mountains, and on their slopes, the locals assured us, dragons could be found. “Two more days,” I said to Tom.

He inhaled, looking apprehensive. “We’ll be late coming back.”

“Aekinitos might be late himself,” I said. “Winds and weather are not fully predictable. And he will not begrudge us a few days, not when the alternative is to have wasted this entire effort.” So I hoped, at least; but I did not let my doubts show.

Tom did not want our side trip to end in failure any more than I did. “Two more days,” he said, and we went on.

I am grateful we travelled two days farther into the interior, not only for what I learned of Yelangese dragons, but for the other things I learned along the way—though at the time I was not grateful at all.

First I should speak of the dragons. What we found there in the mountains were two of the broad type the Yelangese call ti lêng or “earth dragons” (as contrasted with the tien lêng or “celestial dragons,” which can fly). There is debate even now about the precise classification of that breed; I will not delve into the specifics of that debate here, but merely note that the locals termed these particular creatures tê lêng, which in Yelangese writing includes a component that likens them to mountain demons. If I were to call them “mountain demon dragons,” though, it would give you entirely the wrong impression of their nature. I shall therefore leave it at tê lêng, on the grounds that those of you who know enough of Yelangese writing to know the reference also know not to read too much into the term.

They are not demonic in the slightest, save insofar as they are majestic and dangerous creatures, which gives them a supernatural aura in the eyes of the humans who encounter them. Their scales shade beautifully from grey to black in wavering stripes, which makes for excellent camouflage in the mountain rivers where they spend much of their time. (Many Yelangese dragons are either aquatic or amphibious.) Like most of their kind, they possess long, whisker-like tendrils on the snout, not unlike those found on sea-serpents, and a shorter fringe beneath the jaw; but unlike most, they have no horns—those being a particular characteristic of the Dajin branch of the draconic tree.

One other thing distinguished them from the rest of their kind: the two we found were a mated pair. I can say this with certainty because we came upon them mating—a rare sight, as they are long-lived creatures and do not breed frequently. I was perhaps more elated by this good fortune than is proper to admit; once again, I fear I shall give my editor the vapors by discussing such matters outside a purely scholarly context (where the more distant phrasing can lend a veneer of respectability to the otherwise prurient-seeming habit of a naturalist spying on other creatures’ intimate lives). But it was a tremendous sight: they danced in the midst of a river, twining about one another’s bodies, occasionally rising into the air in a manner not unlike that of the sea-serpent which had attacked us. Upon being asked, the locals confirmed that the two shared the river and had mated together before, with their successful offpsring migrating elsewhere in search of homes. Dragons are often solitary; when they are not, they most often form sibling bands, or juveniles stay for a time with one parent after they are mature enough to survive on their own. Tê lêng are one of the few breeds known to mate for life.

That discovery first elated me, but as we observed the dragons afterward, it made me melancholy. In part this is because I was thinking of the absence of dragons we had encountered on the way here. I cannot pretend, however, that my mood was entirely scientific in origin.

The mating put my mind on offspring, which caused me to miss my son. We had made great strides since those early days in which I could hardly bear to look at Jake, let alone take an interest in his upbringing; and as I had hoped, this journey was bringing us closer still (albeit not without some difficulties along the way). I hoped he was enjoying himself in Va Hing, and not disobeying Abby too much.

But more than that, I found myself envying the dragons before me.

The words look absurd as I write them out. I admire dragons and have made them my life’s work, but I have never wanted to be one. (These were not even flying dragons, whom I might have envied for their wings.) Watching the two tê lêng sunning themselves on the riverbank to dry, though, I was struck by the companionship they shared—or rather that I imagined them sharing. It is not as if they were reading the latest scholarly journal together, or doing anything else I associated with the domestic harmony of marriage. But they were mated, and according to the villagers had been so for many years. I had that briefly, and then I had lost it. Whether I would ever have it again… at the time, I could not say.

Perhaps it is just as well that we could not stay for long. Tom and I had already pressed too far in coming here; we could not risk angering the captain by going completely off the leash. Even if we had allocated weeks in which to study the tê lêng, however, we would not have gotten the chance.

“Someone’s coming,” Tom said, as I searched for a good path up a rocky face.

“Elizalde?” I asked, for we had left him behind in the village with Khüen while we gallivanted about after dragons.

Tom did not answer immediately. When he did, the tension in his voice stopped me mid-search. “Yes. But he isn’t alone.”

It took me a moment to turn myself about, lest my precarious footing slip out from under me. Once that maneuver was complete, however, I saw why Tom’s voice had gone tight. There was a group of nearly a dozen men headed our way, and while our sailor-interpreter was among them, the rest wore the high-collared uniforms of Yelangese soldiers.

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” I said to Tom, but it came out apprehensive. We had not done anything wrong—that we knew of. In a foreign country, though, it is easy to step awry, simply out of ignorance. And pleading innocence on those grounds does not always find a sympathetic ear.

Whatever conversation we were about to have, it would not be helped by being conducted atop a slope of scree that threatened to go out from underfoot if one inhaled too vigorously. Tom and I picked our way to flatter ground, and by the time we got there, Elizalde and the soldiers had reached us. “What’s going on?” Tom asked.

Elizalde’s answer was simultaneous with the soldiers’ actions: two of them came forward and dragged our packs from our backs, unceremoniously emptying them onto the ground. “They want to know what we’re doing here. They haven’t said it, but I think they think you’re here to hunt dragons.”

In a way, it was almost a relief. This was a difficulty I had imagined before, rather than one which took me by surprise. “They can see for themselves,” I said, trying not to sound too bitter as the soldiers picked through our notebooks and other gear. “We have no weapons of any sort.”

They saw, but it did not seem to impress them. One of them snapped a command at Elizalde, who translated. “He wants to see your papers.”

These we carried in our pockets. Tom and I produced the visas we had bought at such expense and handed them to one of the soldiers, who gave them to the man I supposed was his captain. This fellow looked them over, then tossed them to the ground in annoyance. A second command to Elizalde produced confusion; our interpreter engaged in brief discourse with him. Then he said, “He wants to see your papers for the dragons.”

I frowned in puzzlement. “Our notebooks? There, on the ground.”

Even as I said it, I suspected that was not what he meant. There was a delay, however, when Tom—not wanting to see our investment go blowing off into mountainous oblivion—moved to collect the visas; this provoked some shouting, and only when that was done was Elizalde able to say, “I think he means a permit.”

“A permit to study dragons? No one told me we needed such a thing.” Under other circumstances, it might have occurred to me to wonder whether this was the sort of trick used in bureaucracies the world over, telling the ignorant visitor that he needs to pay for some document the bureaucrat has just made up. These circumstances were specific, though, and my thoughts went elsewhere. I straightened and looked the captain in the eye. “He means a permit to kill them. Doesn’t he.”

The man did not like me staring him down. Or perhaps he spoke some Scirling; I have done it myself, pretending to know nothing of a language so as to eavesdrop on the conversation of others. (It is not polite, but at times it is necessary.) He began a rapid battery of questions, filtered through Elizalde, probing into our purpose and our past; it was all we could do not to inadvertently admit that we had to bribe a functionary in order to enter the country at all.

It might not have made any difference if we had admitted it. The end result was much the same: we were permitted to collect our belongings, then marched downslope to the village, where we gathered Khüen and our remaining gear. We were, the captain made it clear, to return immediately to Va Hing, not pausing or detouring along the way.

And we might have gone quietly, were it not for one thing.

As we prepared to leave, I saw three of the soldiers talking to the village elder who had originally directed us toward the dragons. His gestures now were the same: pointing up the slope, then his hand curving to indicate a bend in the river. The three men nodded and shouldered their rifles, then set out with purposeful strides.

“Isabella,” Tom said in warning, but by then I had already launched myself toward the captain.

It did not matter to me that the man likely did not speak Scirling; the words burst out of me regardless. “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? To kill those dragons! Are you the ones who laid waste to the countryside below? Now you will come up here and slaughter this pair—”

At this point Tom caught up with me. Eschewing propriety, he flung one arm around my waist and stopped my forward charge, catching my wrist with his free hand when I fought against his grip. I think he tried to say calming words, too, but I did not hear them over my own shouts. “They just mated, you fool! The female is likely pregnant. If you kill her, there won’t be any new generation; you’re burning the forest down just to get a few logs. You can’t shoot them, you can’t!”

I will not relate the rest of my words. Few of them were polite; some were the unfortunate byproduct of months spent in the company of sailors, whose language can be as colourful as advertised. Tom dragged me away bodily while Elizalde and Khüen fell over themselves with apologies; no doubt they had visions of my tirade ending in the lot of us being shot. What the captain said to them, I do not know, for Tom quick-marched me out of the village, not even bringing our packs with us, trusting the other pair to collect what we had left behind.

Which they did, and then we went back to Va Hing.

I would like to tell you that I came up with some clever plan for protecting the tê lêng against the soldiers who had come to kill them. I would not kill the soldiers myself, and my attempts to persuade them (if I may use the verb loosely) had failed—but perhaps I might have found a way to scare the dragons off, at least for long enough that their hunters would give up the hunt.

But I did not. I tried; I racked my brains for any method that might suffice. Unfortunately, this was not Vystrana or Mouleen. I had not spent long enough in this locale to know the terrain, nor even the habits of the dragons themselves in any great detail. None of the information that might have given me a chance of success was in my possession. I was a stranger here and a foreigner; and I had a son waiting for me in Va Hing, who needed me to come back to him, rather than being arrested in a foreign country—or shot.

Some of you reading this memoir may think me a hypocrite for my rage. After all, had Tom and I not killed dragons in the course of our research? It was not long since I had sat astride the corpse of a sea-serpent, wet to the knee in water bloodied by its death. But I thought then, as I do now, that there is a great deal of difference between shooting one or two animals for the purpose of better understanding their live cousins, and hunting many for profit. The one makes it more possible for humans and dragons to live in harmony. The other… I had seen the first fruits of that already.

We went in silence for the rest of that day. When we stopped for the evening, Tom said, “Soldiers. Are they doing this on their own time, for money? Or is this something the Yelangese government is backing?”

“I thought dragons were supposed to be protected by the government,” I said.

He shook his head, baffled. “So did I.”

Against my better judgment, I turned to look back in the direction of the mountains—where, I feared, one or both tê lêng already lay dead. “Give me the jungles of Mouleen again,” I said. “I had rather face wild beasts and diseases than the perils of civilization.”

There is a proverb, which Tom was kind enough not to voice: be careful what you wish for. Unfortunately, not only did I get it, but so did those around me.

EIGHT

In our absence, Jake had assembled a monumental collection of starfish and miscellaneous shells, which he showed to me with great pride. I praised it, wondered where we would put it aboard the Basilisk, and decided it did not matter; I remembered my own childhood collection of oddments and how it had pained me to lose them. I would not subject my son to the same.

Aekinitos might have complained, had he not been distracted by the delay in our return, which had left the Basilisk sitting for several unproductive days in port. Fortunately—for suitably broad values of that word—he was almost immediately distracted by yet another matter, which was our impending deportation from Yelang.

“What did you do?” he demanded of me, after a visit from a very stern-faced official.

It says something about Dione Aekinitos that he sounded less angry than impressed. Because I do not wish to defame the man, I will not say here what suspicions I had about his past and the activities he engaged in then… but he had a tendency to admire trouble with the law, provided the cause was either good or entertaining enough.

Tom and I had already related to him what occurred during our overland sojourn, but we had not given him the background: dragonbone, the Va Ren Shipping Association, and the apparent trade in dragon poaching. Now we exchanged glances, for we had not planned in advance what to say on that topic if queried.

(And why, I ask you, did Aekinitos look at me when asking what we had done? I did not think I had done anything while aboard the Basilisk to make him assume that between Tom and myself, I would be the troublemaker. Perhaps the stern-faced official had said something of my behaviour during the incident in the mountains.)

Now, choosing my words very carefully, I said, “There may be an… organization here in Va Hing that has a grievance against the two of us. It is a long story, and involves some research being stolen from an associate of ours in Falchester several years ago. We did not expect it to cause trouble.”

Aekinitos was standing in front of the windows that formed one wall of his cabin. He linked his hands behind his back and paced the short distance available to him, side to side before the windows, the light briefly limning his profile from each angle in turn. “Research. On dragons? I have never yet heard of dragons causing someone to be barred from entering a country.”

“It happens, I assure you,” I said dryly. “This is not even the first time it has happened to me.”

The novelty of that statement halted him in his pacing, with a tilt of his head I interpreted to mean curiosity. I waved it away, saying, “That is a story for another day. In the interim—are we truly barred from Yelang?”

“You are.” Aekinitos sighed and pulled out the chair behind his desk, then dropped onto it with a complete lack of grace. “We are permitted to go into Yelangese ports, but you may not leave the ship. Either of you.”

Tom made an inarticulate noise of frustration. “But that makes complete hash of our plans. We were going to the Phăn Shân river to look at the kau lêng, so we could compare it to Moulish swamp-wyrms. The hung, the yin lêng—”

Aekinitos cut him off with a growl. “And if you had kept to your schedule, coming back here rather than pressing on ahead, you might have had a chance to do those things. But now? You have a choice. Sit aboard the Basilisk with your specimens and your notebooks while we trade through Yelang, or make different plans.”

The galling part, of course, was that he was right. Going up into the mountains had been a mistake—one that had cost us more than we knew at the time. Our fleeting observations of the dragons there did not counterbalance all the work we might have done elsewhere, which was now barred to us. It is possible the Shipping Association might have caused us difficulty elsewhere; I did not know if the hunt for dragons was confined to the lands around Va Hing. But they were a Hingese company, and I had to believe their reach did not extend clear across the Yelangese Empire. We might have been able to work in peace. But Tom and I had chosen wrong, and this was the price.

We were not the sort to sit idle, so it will surprise no one when I say we chose to make different plans.

We had promised to do various bits of surveying for the Scirling Geographical Association, and one of the places they showed an interest in was the Melatan island chain of Arinevi. After our Yelangese debacle, we backtracked to spend more than a month in this region, tramping about doing the meticulous (not to say tedious) work that surveying requires. It felt like penance: our zeal for dragons had led us to err, and so we separated ourselves from dragons for a time, putting our efforts into repaying those whose support had made this voyage possible at all.

With all due respect to the organizations that funded my expedition, our time in Arinevi was sheer drudgery of a sort I did not enjoy at all. Furthermore, hindsight proved it to be an unwise choice—though in all fairness, the same misfortune could have befallen us elsewhere in the tropics, whether we were studying dragons or not.

The islands of Arinevi are tropical, with all the perils that implies. Several of the sailors fell ill with malaria, which is a common enough occurrence. (Several others fell ill with diseases endemic to ports the world over, or rather to certain establishments within those ports.) We thought very little of this, and upon completion of our survey work, set sail with the intention of resuming our draconic research.

Not long after we departed, however, I was struck by a fever. I choose the word “struck” quite deliberately, for it seemed to come out of nowhere; one moment I felt fine, and then before the hour was out I was shivering in my hammock. “It can’t be yellow fever,” I said to Tom, through my shudders. “I’ve had it already.”

The hammock was soon an agony to me, for all my muscles and joints ached, while my skin flushed and became quite sensitive. The ship’s doctor, who had been through the tropics before, diagnosed my affliction as dengue fever. As the more colloquial name of “breakbone fever” implies, the aches can become quite painful, and my flushed skin soon developed into a rash not unlike the measles.

Upon hearing I was ill, Aekinitos promptly locked Jake and Abby into his cabin, allowing no one other than himself in to see them; he even brought them their meals. (It did little good; we know now that dengue is transmitted by mosquitos, of which there were none at sea. But at the time that was not certain, and so I am grateful to him for the precaution.) Jake, I am told, objected strenuously to confinement, and spent an entire afternoon shouting imprecations through the door at the man who would not let him go tend to his mother, until his voice quite gave out.

Three of the sailors who had assisted us similarly fell ill with dengue. Like myself, they were fortunate enough to escape with a mild case of the disease—mild meaning that we suffered a few days of nauseating, painful fever, during which we bled from the nose and the mouth, but after that we recovered. Partway through this ordeal, I was shifted from my hammock to a proper bed; I did not understand until my fever broke that Aekinitos had brought us to Seungdal, which was the nearest port of any real size. When I woke free of pain for the first time in days, Abby told me where we were—and why Aekinitos had diverted from his course.

Weak as I was, I insisted on rising from my bed. With Abby’s aid, I limped from my room to Tom’s.

When I had fallen to yellow fever in Eriga, I had been one of the unlucky few who pass from the first, milder stage of the disease to a more serious secondary one. For Tom, it was the same with dengue. His breathing was rapid and shallow, as if he could not get enough air, and he was shockingly pale. Someone—I later learned it was the ship’s doctor—had shaved his head to bring down his fever. Bereft of that cap, his face seemed raw and unfamiliar, as if it belonged to a different man, and the alienation unnerved me greatly.

I will not pretend that what I suffered then in any way compares to Tom’s own trials. His life was in great danger; we were exceedingly lucky that he recovered not long after. But I was weak with my own recovery, and it had not been long since I was forced to abandon those mated dragons to the soldiers who were trying to kill them. Now it seemed I might lose the man who had been my friend and comrade for the better part of my adult life. My knees gave out beneath me; Abby very nearly had to carry me back to my bed, where I wept into my pillow and wondered if this entire journey had been a mistake.

The storm of my emotional outburst soon passed, leaving in its wake a terrible itching and the realization that my head, like Tom’s, had been shaved. I scarcely recognized my own drawn, mottled face in the mirror, bereft of the hair which had been its frame since I was a child. When I recovered enough to go out, I wrapped my stubbled head in a kerchief before putting on my bonnet, and still felt terribly self-conscious.

It did not help that our location was completely unfamiliar to me, and unwelcoming. Seungdal only allows travellers from their favoured allies to roam freely about the city and countryside; all others are confined to an islet in the harbour. Scirland not being one of those favoured allies, we were on that islet, and furthermore lodged in a rather dreary hotel used for quarantine. I could not blame the authorities for their caution, but it meant my immediate surroundings were dingy and the streets beyond them dedicated to little other than trade.

I had some cause to be grateful for the menagerie of foreigners, at least, in that among them I could find a few with whom I shared a language. On a voyage of this sort, visiting so many different parts of the world, I could not hope to do as I had done in Vystrana and Eriga, attempting to learn the native tongue: there were simply too many. I had until now gotten by mostly on what I possessed of Chiavoran, Thiessois, and Eiversch, and the mercy of those who spoke some Scirling. I had also studied the simplified pidgin known as Atau, a Puian language spoken by traders throughout much of the Broken Sea—but that did me no good in Seungdal, where the locals (who are of Dajin stock, not Puian) frown on that tongue as a degenerate interloper. As a result, I was unable to engage with much beyond my own door, and between that and my exhaustion, I stayed largely in the hotel.

There my mind worried incessantly at the problems that beset me. Aekinitos, Abby told me, had taken the Basilisk out for trading; he would return in a few weeks and see where matters stood. Although I initially cursed him roundly for abandoning Tom at such a critical time, I had to accede to his logic; they could do nothing for Tom that they had not done already—the hotel had a doctor who was probably superior to the Basilisk’s in any case—and Aekinitos could not afford to sit in harbour doing nothing. I mean that quite literally: it takes a great deal of money to keep so many men fed, to say nothing of the pay they are owed, and had he kept the Basilisk in Seungdal the entire time, our expedition would have ended in bankruptcy. So long as Aekinitos was earning money somewhere, he could give both us and himself a financial reprieve.

But this did not solve the underlying problem, which was that we were growing alarmingly short of money. The bribe in Yelang had gone almost entirely to waste, the changes to our itinerary had thoroughly mangled our budget, and doctors do not come cheaply. I sat on my sickbed, staring at maps, and thought with bleak resignation that we would have to abbreviate our journey. I did not know what sorts of trading opportunities Aekinitos might find in the Broken Sea, but it was not a region we could sweep through in a week—not even if we ignored both the sea-serpents and the fire-lizards that dwelt on the volcanic islands. If we bypassed it entirely, however, the remainder of our voyage might yet be saved.

These were not thoughts I enjoyed having. It felt like admitting defeat, in a way I had not done since the beginning of my grey years, when I attempted to forswear my true interests in favour of more ladylike behaviour. But it was no virtue to forge ahead and deepen our difficulties; better to salvage what I might from the situation, while I still could.

I owe Jake a great deal for his actions during that time: first because he kept me company even when I was not good company to keep, and second because, once I regained a modicum of strength, he insisted on dragging me from the hotel into the streets of Seungdal. Without his determination, my voyage might have been far shorter and less interesting, and my own life less complete.

Abby had of necessity allowed Jake to run about on his own while she looked after Tom and myself, but Jake had taken his freedom with surprising maturity. He showed me about the place, indicating which merchants he had dealt with in obtaining food and other necessities; he spoke none of their language and they spoke none of his, but gestures will go a surprisingly long way in bargaining. Even that small grounding, orienting me in the crowded and unfamiliar maze of the harbour islet, did a great deal to make me believe that this problem, too, could be surmounted.

My optimism did not long outlast my strength, and the latter flagged with alarming rapidity. Jake, carefully solicitous, was about to lead me back to the hotel when he gave a sudden yelp of recognition and dove into the waterfront crowd.

His abrupt departure left me off-balance and grasping for the nearest wall. I could not spot him in the press, and called out his name with growing alarm. Then my searching gaze lit upon a face that I, too, recognized.

“Mrs. Camherst!” Suhail said, his familiar grin spreading across his face. It faltered, though, when he took in my state. “Are you well?”

I let go of the wall, intending to tell him that I was fine, but gave the lie to those words before I could even speak them. As Jake said later, I turned an alarming shade of paper-white and swayed like a reed. Suhail was there in an instant, one hand on my elbow, the other on my waist, first catching and then guiding me to a seat on the nearest crate.

When I was sure of my stability, I said, “I have been ill.”

“I can see that,” Suhail murmured. “Please forgive me. I would not ordinarily touch a woman outside my family, but—”

I waved away his apology before he could finish it. “I had rather you catch me than let me fall down in the street. If propriety takes issue with that, it can go hang.” I drew in a steadying breath. “Forgive me. I was clearly too ambitious in coming out today.”

“Are you in the quarantine hotel?” Suhail asked, and I nodded. “Let me help you back.”

A minor comedy ensued, in which his sense of good behaviour, my own determination not to be a complete milksop, and Jake’s eager gallantry all collided in their rush to determine whether I could get home without leaning on Suhail again. Jake ended up being my support, for all that he was less than half my size, and I could not decide whether I was relieved at not needing a grown man to keep me on my feet, or humiliated that I needed to lean on my own son.

Once back at the hotel, Suhail offered to leave and come back when I was feeling better, but I said, “No, no. I only need to sit for a little while, and perhaps drink something. It gave me quite a turn, seeing you—not that it was unpleasant! Just a surprise.”

Suhail nodded, glancing about the unimpressive lobby as he took his seat. “And your companion? Is he here as well?”

“He is recovering,” I said, and gave him the briefest outline of our recent misfortunes.

Suhail listened with a grave expression, and shook his head when I was done. “Truly, you have both been very lucky. I have had dengue myself, some years ago, and although I survived, others with me were not so fortunate.”

“Did they shave your head, too?” Jake asked.

I could have quite cheerfully strangled my son in that moment, for his question caused Suhail to look first at him, then at me; and after a moment he realized that the kerchief beneath my hat was not covering a very large volume of hair. To his credit, however, he did nothing more than nod in silent acknowledgment of my loss. To Jake he said, “They did not. But they did tie me to the bed, to keep me from scratching myself bloody.”

As I had frequently been tempted to do the same to myself, I could sympathize. “How long did it take you to recover?” I asked.

“To be on my feet, only a few days. But I was tired for a fortnight after. Your companion…” Suhail paused, the tip of his tongue resting against his lip as he thought. Then he shook his head. “I cannot remember the name of it. There is an herbal concoction, common in this region, which will restore his strength more quickly.”

I sighed. “I already asked the doctor here, and he had no suggestions.”

Suhail waved this away. “Any herbalist here should know it. If you ask them, they can tell you.”

“If I could ask them,” I said, too tired to hide my frustration.

“Then I will do it for you. If you would like.”

He said it so matter-of-factly, apart from the belated realization that perhaps he was overstepping his bounds. That was not at all what put me aback, though. I knew from our interactions in Namiquitlan that he spoke the Coyahuac tongue quite well. His Scirling was accented but grammatically impeccable, and one could presume a mastery of his native tongue of Akhian. “How many languages do you speak?”

Suhail cocked his head to one side, eyes fixed on a high corner of the room, as if counting silently. “Speak? Or should I also include the ones I can only read?”

“Good heavens,” I said, marveling. “I have never learned any language as well as you speak mine, let alone so many beyond it. I haven’t the head for such things.”

He shrugged, seeming unimpressed by his own ability. “I have always enjoyed languages. They are like ciphers. When I was a boy, my father—” Upon that word, Suhail stopped. For the first time in our acquaintance, I saw a hint of bitterness cloud his normally bright disposition.

Jake rescued us both from that awkward moment. “Can I go with you?”

Suhail blinked, momentarily confused. Then he recalled the offer he had made, before we embarked upon our tangent. “You should perhaps stay with your mother.”

My words overlaid my son’s, both of us assuring him that I was perfectly capable of sitting quietly in a hotel without supervision. “Besides,” I said when I was done, “Abby is upstairs with Tom.” (She had proved a patient nursemaid, having worked for a family with sickly children before coming to mine. Such labors are often unappreciated—especially with patients as grumpy in their recovery as Tom became—and so I want to express my gratitude toward Jake’s governess here, for all posterity.)

I think Suhail had exaggerated in saying that “any herbalist” should know the concoction, for he and Jake were gone quite some time. They returned victorious, however, and whether Tom’s subsequent improvement was due to the medicine or his own stout constitution (which had shrugged off wyvern poison with remarkable ease), I was nevertheless grateful to Suhail for his aid.

He returned the following day, and found me well enough to feel that I could not bear facing the quarantine hotel’s dreadful food yet again. They had, during my illness, fed me a broth made with pig meat in it. In Dajin lands, where few people are Segulist or Amaneen, pigs are quite commonly used for food, and Abby had been too distracted with her duties to realize. When I heard about it afterward, I was nearly ill in a new way, and scrubbed my mouth thoroughly before I consumed anything else. After that, I insisted on pig-free meals, but what I was given in its place was scarcely more appetizing.

We went therefore to Suhail’s hotel—myself and Jake; Tom was not yet recovered enough to leave his bed, and Abby would not leave him unattended—and found it, unsurprisingly, to be much better than our own. I would gladly have shifted there as soon as Tom was judged no longer a risk, but our strained finances weighed heavily upon me. The quarantine hotel at least had the virtue of being cheap.

The server at this establishment greeted Suhail with familiarity and seated us right away. Once settled, I asked, “How long have you been here? He seems to know you quite well.”

Suhail thought it over. “A month? No, not quite so much.”

My brow furrowed. “Are there ruins here of particular interest? I do not recall hearing of any.” Akhia was no more a favoured ally of Seungdal than Scirland was, but I knew it was possible for individuals to gain permission to move about more freely. Perhaps he was attempting to obtain such a permit.

But he shook his head. “There is only record of one ruin here, and it is long since gone. The Jeonhan Dynasty had it dismantled, stone by stone, for being idolatrous. No, I am… not exactly here by choice.”

“Were you shipwrecked?” Jake asked.

Suhail laughed. “Only in a manner of speaking. I had a disagreement with the captain of the ship I was on. The end of the disagreement was that he put me ashore here, to find new passage as I might.”

“That’s not like a shipwreck at all,” Jake complained, as the server arrived with bowls of soup Suhail assured us were entirely free of pig.

The beef stock and cabbage were very welcome after my illness, even if the quantity of pepper was rather more than I liked. My eyes watered a little as I said, “But surely it should not take a month to find passage off this island—not with the number of ships that come in to port. Where are you trying to go?”

Suhail had no apparent problem with the pepper; Akhians like their food well spiced. He ate quick, tidy spoonfuls in between bits of his answer. “It isn’t my destination that poses the problem. It’s my baggage.”

When I gave him a mystified look, he elaborated. “A device I had made for me by an artificer in Tuantêng. It was the source of my disagreement with the captain, for the size and weight of it made him very unhappy. Have you ever heard of a diving bell?”

“I have!” Jake said, before I could admit my ignorance. “It’s a big dome of metal. You sink it down into the water and it keeps the air inside, so you can go swimming out and come back for air.”

“That is the general idea, yes, although the details are more complex—especially with the diving bell I had made. A friend of mine designed it, and—” Suhail caught himself and waved the rest away. “You would not be interested in the technical details. The heart of the issue is that with the addition of this bell, my baggage became rather more substantial than it had been, much to the displeasure of the captain. And although I offered to pay him well for his trouble, he chose rather to seek new employment.”

Jake looked very much as if he wanted to argue the assertion that he would not care about the technical details, but I had something else on my mind. “Why burden yourself with such a thing, though? I thought your interest was in archaeology.”

Suhail’s grin spread across his face, as if he could not hold it in. “How else am I to study the ruins underwater?”

“Draconean ruins?” I asked dubiously. “Whyever should they—oh. Of course they would not build underwater. You mean that the ruins have been drowned since their day, like the lost city of Cyfrinwr.” Despite my usual disinterest in ancient civilizations, the notion intrigued me. “Are there such ruins? Or are you hoping to find some?”

“I know there are several,” Suhail said. “Scattered throughout the Broken Sea.”

Jake was bouncing in his seat at the thought of this. Draconean ruins on land held only moderate savour for him, but underwater? He could imagine nothing finer. For my own part, I was arrested by a sudden thought.

The Broken Sea. To which I very much wished to go… assuming our finances could support it. In the meanwhile, here was Suhail: with money, but no ship.

I almost asked him there, in the middle of our luncheon, without pause for consideration or consultation with my fellows. But it was not the issue of what Tom would say, nor Aekinitos, that stopped me that day. Rather I found myself questioning my own impulse. I had enjoyed Suhail’s company in Namiquitlan, and certainly he had been good to us here in Seungdal—but I knew from personal experience that a ship is not a spacious home to share with a near stranger. We had our share of tiffs with the crew, and they fell under Aekinitos’ authority, which meant he could punish them when necessary. How would we handle it if we came into conflict with Suhail?

(Furthermore, I was by then self-aware enough to consider a different question, which was how pure my motives were in desiring his company. The irregular packets of mail that awaited us in different ports had not yet included any of the rumours back home, but I knew such things start easily enough, even when they are entirely baseless. Any supposition of attraction to Suhail would not have been baseless, and so I had to be doubly careful of my behaviour.)

But he might rescue us from our current straits, and I did not want to lose that chance.

I fear that what I said then was an utter fabrication. “Our captain knows the routes through here quite well, and many of the ships that sail them. Do talk to us before you make any decisions. We may be able to point you toward a better option.”

“Thank you,” Suhail said, and I felt like a terrible bounder for lying. But I could hardly take it back now—and, in the end, it hardly mattered.

I put the matter to Tom once he was strong enough to consider it. He was propped up against one of our packs, with a pillow over it, for the hotel would not give us enough pillows to support him sitting upright in his bed. I had never seen Tom like this, with the hair on his jaw almost longer than that on his head; the next day he begged until Abby entrusted him a razor, so that he might at least remove the former, while he waited for the latter to grow back.

He shrugged wearily. “I’m used to close quarters. If our paths lie together, why not take advantage of it?”

“If we can find a place that serves both our interests at once, it could work very well,” I said. “Many of the Puian islands are volcanic, though of course not all of the peaks are active. There are sure to be fire-lizards in abundance, and sea-serpents. Though we cannot be certain of their relation to the ones near Siaure, given how far we’ve come around the world.”

“Observing them there doesn’t stop us from looking elsewhere. But we’d need to find a place with interesting ruins, too. And unless Suhail can fund this entire byway out of pocket, we’ll need to make an arrangement with Aekinitos.”

That, of course, required our erstwhile captain to return. Which he did near the end of Graminis: somewhat after he had intended, but I suspected he knew enough of dengue to guess that if Tom lived, he would not be up and about any sooner than this.

(This makes Aekinitos sound heartless, which I do not intend. Indeed, I feel for the man, at least in this regard. His line of work made him accustomed to facing off against forces beyond his control, but he relished those cases because there was something for him to do. Where illness was concerned, there were no sails to reef, no items of ballast to rearrange. He could do nothing, and so it was no loss for him to at least go where he could distract himself.)

We met in his cabin, and I put the matter to him thusly. “I may have found a way to resolve, or at least lessen, our financial difficulties. But it will require your approval, for it involves an additional passenger aboard your ship—one whose research would likewise shape our itinerary.” Then, realizing that sounded ominous, I hastened to add, “I do not expect the disruption to be much, or I would not suggest it.”

Aekinitos made a low, thoughtful rumble. “Who is this mystery passenger?”

“A fellow we met in Namiquitlan; you may recall me mentioning him. It is Suhail, the gentleman who took us to the ruins.”

The captain’s black brows drew together as if pulled by a magnet. I should like to blame my recent illness for the erroneous thought I had then—but the truth is, I was simply foolish, and thinking too much of propriety, not enough of politics. I thought Aekinitos’ frown was due to my terming Suhail a gentleman, when we had no evidence of his family one way or another. In his defense, I would have pointed out that anyone who could afford to commission a special design of diving bell was at the very least wealthy, and in Akhia as in Scirland, I imagined that wealth could go a long way toward purchasing the right to claim good breeding.

Fortunately, Aekinitos spoke before I could embarrass myself with such protests. “An Akhian,” he said, and it was almost a growl.

Then, at last, I understood. I was from northern Anthiope, and while I was moderately well acquainted with the politics of the continent’s southern reaches, they were not often my first thought. The Nichaean Islands, off the southwestern coast, have fought more than one war against Akhia. (Now that I pause to look it up, I count at least seventeen distinct conflicts throughout history, and possibly more; it depends on whether one considers matters like the Atelephaso Schism to have been one war or several, all sliding into one another.) Relations between their two peoples are like those between Thiessois and Eiversch, with the added provocation of religious difference—which is to say, they are not good at all.

“He does not seem to be very close to his people,” I said, feeling it was quite an inadequate response. “At least, I do not think he is on speaking terms with his family.”

Aekinitos’ snort told me this might recommend the gentleman, but not very far. “What kind of research does he do?”

“Archaeology. His particular interest is in underwater ruins. He is not a treasure-hunter, though—he is a scholar.”

The captain almost looked disappointed at my last comment. Treasure-hunting would have been far more lucrative for our expedition, and I already knew Aekinitos cared relatively little for respectability.

“It will soon be the season of storms,” he warned me. “They are powerful things in this part of the world, and the Broken Sea is not easy to sail in the best of times.”

Had our plans not been overturned by deportation from Yelang and dengue from Arinevi, we would have been safely inland somewhere in Dajin about now, with Aekinitos free to sail the safer coastal waters. “Is it too dangerous to attempt?” I asked.

Aekinitos chuckled. It was not a reassuring sound. “The storm has not blown that can sink me.” I had enough time to reflect that this only meant he had not been sunk yet before he asked, “Where is it you intend to go?”

At my request, he brought out a map. It was not as complete as I might have liked: the Broken Sea was in those days very imperfectly charted by Scirlings, and more accurate maps were jealously guarded by the Heuvaarse, who dominated trade through the region. Still, it was clear enough for me to indicate the general area I considered our best prospect.

The captain barked with laughter when he saw it. “Of course. I should have known that you, with all the Broken Sea to choose from, would want to sail into the dragon’s mouth.”

You may laugh to read this, but after a year travelling about studying dragons, my first interpretation of his words was anatomical rather than metaphorical. “What makes it so perilous?” I asked, once I understood his meaning.

“Pirates or Yelangese—take your pick.” He saw my perplexity and explained, jabbing one finger down at a cluster of islands. The name his fingertip obscured was Raengaui. “The king of this place is a man named Waikango.”

“I know that name!” I exclaimed. “At least, I read it in one of the news-sheets that was discussing Her Highness’ diplomatic voyage. He is one of the pirates, yes?”

Aekinitos snorted derisively. “That is what the Yelangese call him. They’d rather say they’re hunting a pirate than admit they’re trying to stop a king from unifying part of the Broken Sea against them. The Puians do their share of piracy, though—ambushing Yelangese vessels, that sort of thing. Keeping the empire out while Waikango marries his female relatives off to the kings of other islands in exchange for support.”

I bit my lip, studying the map. “Do they ambush ships that are not Yelangese?”

“They might,” Aekinitos said. “Or they might not.”

The smile lurking in his beard suggested he relished the thought of sailing into trouble. I did not; I had seen battle in Mouleen, albeit on a small scale as such things go, and did not like it at all. And although the Basilisk carried guns (as most deep-sea vessels did back then), and her crew practiced briefly with them every Helimer afternoon, none of us had signed on for a naval battle.

And yet that was one of the more volcanically active regions of the Broken Sea. If I wanted to study fire-lizards, it was a good place to look for them.

“We can head in that direction, and change our plans if it seems too dangerous to proceed,” I said. “I have no wish to involve myself with either pirates or Yelangese. But what of Suhail?”

Aekinitos’ face pulled into graver lines, and for a moment I doubted my chances. Then the smile returned, fierce and showing teeth. “Tell the Akhian he may board.”

NINE

Jake was utterly delighted by this addition to the Basilisk’s complement. Quite apart from the fact that he liked Suhail, he could not wait to see the equipment our new companion was bringing on board.

Suhail’s personal effects were extremely sparse, scarcely filling a large rucksack. In addition to that, however, he brought with him not only the diving bell but several large crates of equipment and books. The volume these occupied had been a point of contention when Aekinitos learned the full extent of it, but he had been mollified by the price Suhail offered for his passage. (Later on, their arguments would revolve around the effect that equipment had on the Basilisk’s sailing efficiency. I do not pretend to understand the details, but the diving bell was exceedingly heavy, which caused difficulty. It could not be lashed into place on deck, as that put the weight too high; but maneuvering it through the main hatch and into a better position below was not so easily done, given the lack of elbow room down there. Eventually Aekinitos got it stowed to his satisfaction, though—not long before we had to take it out again, of course.)

“I can’t say I’m eager to get back on board,” Tom said with a sigh, looking out at the Basilisk while we waited on the dock. His colour had improved, but he could not yet stand for long without becoming fatigued.

I admitted, “Nor I. But if we find a good location for research, we may settle ourselves there while Aekinitos seeks out opportunities for profit. And the Broken Sea is not reputed to be as plagued with fevers as some other regions.” After the places he and I had been, it sounded positively idyllic.

For the price he had paid, Suhail was put with Tom and the officers of the ship, rather than with the common sailors. It was for the best: not only because to do otherwise would have been an insult, but because although the Basilisk’s crew was a motley assemblage, a goodly number of the men were Nichaean or Haggadi. Only one of them ever showed outright hostility to Suhail, but I think that if he had been living in their midst, an ugly situation might have resulted.

My son, by contrast, was over the moon to have him with us. He babbled incessantly from the moment Suhail came on board, telling the man everything he had done in Yelang and elsewhere since leaving Namiquitlan. (The tale of the dragon turtle must have been recounted a dozen times in the next week, for Jake never tired of it.) Suhail took this in stride, and deflected Jake’s insistence that the diving bell be demonstrated that very minute. “Soon enough,” he said, grinning at my son’s impatience. “There is nothing of interest to show you here—too much debris and filth from the ships. The bell needs a place worthy of its use.”

We set out for such places not long after. As I had discussed with Aekinitos, we directed ourselves toward Raengaui and the other archipelagos making up that cluster within the Broken Sea, but did not rush; there were opportunities for us along the way, and if political trouble lay ahead of us, we preferred to hear of it before diving in headfirst.

As is my wont, I shall take a moment here to describe the region. To many of my Anthiopean readers, the Broken Sea has the status of a legend: a beautiful and exotic realm on the far side of the world, whose reality seems dubious at best. Indeed, four hundred years ago there were Anthiopeans writing of the Broken Sea as the abode of men with three heads and islands that floated in the air.

But it is a real place, if not so fantastical as our literature has sometimes painted. Its boundaries are indistinct, owing to the fact that geographers divide the islands into different groupings, some of which do not lie wholly within the area customarily referred to as the Broken Sea. But in general terms, it is the sea between Dajin and Otholé, which is pocked with more islands than even the geographers can count. (They have tried, but some of the islands vanish at high tide, or become divided into smaller islands as the sea rushes through the channels between them. Meanwhile, volcanic activity in the region can raise up new land with very little warning. Add to this confusion some general disagreement over what size a rock must be before one can term it an island, plus the sheer scale of the endeavour, and it is no wonder that the numbers vary so widely.)

This complex array lies between the Tropic of Serpents and the Tropic of Storms, but its climate is made extremely pleasant by the mitigating influence of the sea. Oh, it can become airless and despicably hot where the vegetation grows thick—but compared with what we had endured in Eriga, I could find very little to complain about here. Fruit trees grow in abundance, and fish swim the warm, shallow waters in even greater abundance, so that in many places dinner requires little more than pulling a breadfruit from the nearest tree and roasting it over a fire, alongside the fish you have scooped from a lagoon. It may not offer the comforts of what we term civilized life, such as padded armchairs and running water… but for those who idealize a return to nature, it is easy to imagine those islands as close kin to the world described in the very first lines of Scripture, before the Fall of Man.

The social world of the Broken Sea is not so easily described. The geographers group the islands according to one scheme; ethnologists have different groupings entirely, following the divisions of culture. The peoples in the southwestern portion of the sea are generally Melatan, except where other countries have laid claim to territory, while those in the northeast are Puian. Neither group is a unified state, but like neighbouring peoples the world over, they have warred against one another (when they have not been warring against themselves), and in the zone between them a creole strain prevails, mixing the physical and cultural qualities of the two.

The lack of a unified state meant that we could not be certain of our welcome anywhere we went. At each port of call we would have to negotiate with the inhabitants anew; a local king might rule as many as three dozen islands, but that is a mere pebble in the great expanse of the Broken Sea. I could not recall whether the princess’ diplomatic voyage included any ports of call in the region, but I doubted it; Scirland did not have a large presence there. We were therefore strangers in strange waters, even more than was usually true.

We began our efforts in Melatan territory, for I wanted to see the beasts referred to as “komodo dragons.” Their claim to that term was not under debate by dragon naturalists for the simple reason that nobody had yet taken a good look at them and ventured an opinion one way or the other. They were said to be wingless and reptilian, perhaps three meters in length; beyond that and the name, I knew little.

There were no ruins for Suhail to study on the island we chose, for which I apologized. He shrugged and said, “I have already seen what remains of the great complex at Kota Cangkukan.” (This he had done before visiting Tuantêng.) “After that, I am not certain anything in the Melatan region could compare.”

He offered his services as a linguist, though. Tom and I had both studied the simplified Atau pidgin, which would suffice for basic requirements throughout much of the Broken Sea (and give us a solid base for learning any related Puian language), but Suhail’s gift for such things meant he spoke far more fluently than either of us. With his aid, we obtained a guide—and a warning.

“They’re dangerous,” the guide (a swarthy fellow named Pembi) told us bluntly.

“Do they have extraordinary breath?” I asked in Scirling, for I could not think how to render the concept in Atau. Suhail found a way, and got a shake of the head in return. “Not wind. Bite.” Pembi peeled his lips back from his teeth to illustrate, mime being the closest thing humans have to a universal language.

Tom snorted. He was not going with me; his strength was not yet sufficient to face a journey through the island’s interior. He refused to lie quietly on deck, though, “as if an invalid”—never mind that he was an invalid, or at least a very tired convalescent. Thus he was with us at the teahouse where Suhail had found Pembi. “Sharp teeth, eh? That makes an improvement over most dragons. They’ll have to get close enough to bite you.”

“After facing things that can breathe at you from meters away, it does seem almost tame,” I agreed. “Tell the man we shall take all due care.”

Pembi, upon hearing this, shrugged with the philosophical air of a man who is willing to leave fools to their fate. We made arrangements to depart the next day, and returned to the Basilisk to prepare.

Jake and Abby came with us, as did Aekinitos himself and two of the sailors, for there were apes on the island whose pelts were considered valuable. (Whether Aekinitos wanted to keep an eye on Suhail, since Tom could not be there to do it, I cannot say, though in light of what transpired I think it may be so.) We departed from the leeward side of the island, where the terrain is drier and the vegetation scrubbier; Pembi assured us the greater number of komodos were to be found there.

I will not bore you with a full account of our days out there. We forced our way through tangled undergrowth that often required the assistance of a parang, a machete-like blade. Aekinitos and the sailors, two fellows named Rostam and Petros, shot various things for food and profit; Jake got lessons in wilderness survival from Pembi; and I stalked creatures that, I was increasingly sure, were not dragons at all.

My suspicions began with my very first sighting. Apart from the fact that most dragon breeds are scaled, a komodo has very little in common with them. Its head is serpentine in shape, entirely lacking the ruff or other cranial characteristics that tend to mark the draconic from the merely reptilian. It has no extraordinary breath, and when Aekinitos shot one for me to dissect, I found no sign that it had ever possessed anything like a wing.

The final test was to wait for the bones to dry, to see if they would decay. Pembi did not know; his people do not eat them (for good reason), and although they are shot as predators, no one particularly cares to do more with them than sling the carcass into the forest. We therefore defleshed a few and set them in the sun, then prepared to make camp a little distance away.

It happened with very little warning. There was a rustling in the undergrowth, not far from where Rostam was pitching his tent. He turned to look—and then screamed, as a komodo charged at him.

I would not have believed the squat creatures could move so quickly, had I not seen it with my own eyes. Rostam had only enough time to fling his arm up in a warding gesture; because of that, the komodo’s jaws closed on his hand and forearm instead of his shoulder. He shrieked, and then it was chaos everywhere as the men lunged for their guns and blades.

I ran for Rostam as he fell. In hindsight, it was not a wise thing to do; I risked being shot by one of the others, or at least fouling their aim. But he needed aid, and in any event by the time I reached him, the komodo was dead.

Rostam’s arm was a horror, blood soaking his sleeve up to the elbow. I knocked my hat aside and tore the kerchief from my head, pressing it to one part of the wound, shouting for someone to bring other bandages. Then Suhail was at my side, his own neckerchief in his hands, and his eyes met mine. They were wide with horror.

“The bite,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s venom or infection—Pembi wasn’t clear—but it will kill him.”

Aekinitos was close enough to hear this. He stood over us, gun dangling from his hand, and stared down at Rostam. “He needs a doctor.”

“There isn’t time for that,” Suhail said violently. He cast about, as if looking for something, then shot to his feet, leaving me to try and stanch the bleeding. “Help me,” I snarled at Aekinitos.

Before the captain could move, Suhail was back. In his hand was Pembi’s parang.

Aekinitos growled something in Nichaean and tried to seize Suhail, who evaded him with a swift step. “It’s the only chance he has,” Suhail said. “Damn it—the longer you wait, the worse his chances are!”

“That could kill him!” Aekinitos shouted.

“And if I don’t, he will die.”

Even now, I can hear Suhail’s voice at that moment. Most men, when facing an ugly decision in a time of crisis, become harsh. Their voices grow hard and cold. His did not: it was soft, compassionate. He regretted the necessity—but did not flinch from it.

Aekinitos said nothing. But he stood without moving as Suhail stepped past him and took Rostam from me.

I think I screamed when the parang came down, severing Rostam’s arm above the elbow. Certainly Rostam did, just before he fainted. The world went dark around the edges for a few moments, and I stayed sitting in the dirt, because I knew that if I tried to rise I would find myself on the ground in a heap.

When my vision cleared, Suhail had finished tying a tourniquet around the stump, to keep Rostam from bleeding out. I gathered my wits and went to fetch Petros’ bottle of arrack. I had no idea whether the alcohol would help, but we had nothing else with which to disinfect the wound. Suhail poured it over the stump before bandaging it in the cleanest fabrics we had. Then he stopped, looking helpless, for the terrain was entirely unsuited to beasts of burden, and so we had come out on foot.

Aekinitos solved the issue by carrying Rostam on his own shoulders. He set out in the direction of the port without a word, leaving the rest of us to scramble in gathering our gear. I found Jake standing white-faced by my tent, and had to shake him gently before his eyes focused on me. “You have to help,” I said. “We cannot tarry.”

He did help, as did Abby. Aekinitos outpaced us in any event, even burdened as he was; Jake could not endure a forced march of that speed for long, and it was vital that Rostam be taken care of as soon as possible. Not that anyone could do much for him, beyond washing the wound and putting him in a bed to rest. By the time we reached town, those things had been done, and Suhail, who had gone with the captain, was nowhere to be found.

I weighed my options. Exhausted as I was, Aekinitos had to be even more tired, and heartsore to boot. He was not the sort of captain who behaved as a father to his crew, but their well-being was his responsibility. And yet… I could not allow this to go unremarked, for my sake or Suhail’s.

Aekinitos was sitting in the shade of the house where they had put Rostam, a pipe in his hand. I do not think he had drawn on it other than to light it, for it dangled unused from his fingers the entire time I conversed with him.

“I am so very sorry,” I said to him. Inadequate words, but all I had.

The captain shook his head, a slow movement that soon halted. “We face enough dangers. Sooner or later, luck runs out.”

“In this case, it ran out because of me. I was warned that the komodos were perilous, but I pursued them anyway.” I hesitated, then added, “I also brought Suhail. Please—I do not know if what he did was right, but I do know that his only thought was to give Rostam a chance of living.”

The concealing mass of his beard made it hard to see, but I thought Aekinitos’ jaw tightened at Suhail’s name.

The silence stretched out, like a ship’s cable pulled tighter and tighter. Finally, my voice very quiet, I asked, “Did you send him away?”

“Yes.”

My heart sank within me.

Then Aekinitos said, “He wanted to remain until Rostam woke—or did not. But if he stayed here, I would have taken that parang and cut off his arm. He is on the ship.”

On the Basilisk. At first I envisioned him packing, making arrangements for the diving bell to be extricated from the hold. But Aekinitos said nothing more, and then I understood: Suhail had not been sent away for good. Only evicted from the captain’s presence for the time being.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. “Would you like me to remain?”

Aekinitos shook his head. “You have your son to see to. Go.”

I think he wanted solitude, and Jake was the first reason he could think of for occupying me elsewhere, but it was a good one. Up until now, this had all been a grand adventure for my son. Seeing a man’s arm cut off was shocking beyond words for a boy of ten. He had nightmares for some time afterward, and was much subdued.

As were we all. We remained there long enough to know that Rostam would not die; infection did set in, but it was of a mild sort, not the horrific and lethal fever the islanders told us was the hallmark of a komodo bite. Suhail’s quick work with the parang had indeed done some good. But we could not stay there forever, and so Aekinitos left Rostam with the pay he was owed and the price of passage home, and I gave him more besides. Then we put to sea once more, but we were not the excited band we had been before.

I sat at the table in our snuff-box of a cabin, with a vertebra in front of me as I wrote. Abby had retrieved it while we were packing up and given it to me after our return. My feelings on the thing were quite mixed: it was for this that Rostam had lost an arm and very nearly his life, and all it did was prove that komodos were not dragons. The lack of any visible decay was the final nail. No decay, no wings, no extraordinary breath; even with my doubts about Edgeworth’s criteria, I could find no grounds to call the beasts anything other than very large lizards. It was a useful discovery—but when one’s subject of study is dragons, it is upsetting to think a man was so badly maimed in order to prove something about mere lizards.

The air in that little cabin was stifling, even with the tiny windows of the skylight open to catch what breeze they could. I put down my pen and went out on deck.

Suhail was in the bow. The crew’s opinion of him had grown even more dubious once they heard what happened to Rostam, even though the captain placed no opprobrium on him (and showed tacit approval by allowing him to remain). I did not blame him for trying to keep apart.

His expression as I approached was a sad half-smile, and I realized with a start that Suhail had not been the only one practicing avoidance. I had hardly spoken with him since our return. The smile said that he had noticed, and did not blame me, but he mourned the loss.

I straightened my shoulders. I had not been thinking about that matter when I came in search of him, but now it must be addressed before anything else. “Please forgive me,” I said, once I was close enough to speak in normal tones. “It must look like condemnation, that I have been avoiding you. It is not.”

He nodded, waiting as I searched for a way to explain. “I have been close to violence,” I said at last. “My husband was murdered—stabbed in front of me, though he did not die until some days later. I have also seen men savaged by animals. But it is still shocking to be within arm’s reach when a man—” I realized the terrible irony in my choice of words, and winced. “You understand. And it is all the more shocking, I think, because you did not wish him ill. You were doing the best you could for him.”

Suhail’s hands knotted about one another. I followed their motion, and remembered once more the way they had gripped the parang. “I have hunted,” he said, “and I have given aid when men have been injured. But I have never done that before.”

I stilled. It had not occurred to me that the event might have left its mark on Suhail as well. Now that I looked, however, I saw shadows around his eyes, a slackness that spoke of poor sleep. I remembered the dove I had dissected when I was a small girl, and the way the visceral memory of it had stayed with me. The dove had not been screaming.

“Are you all right?” I asked him, so quietly the wind almost stole my words away.

He glanced away, shrugging. “I will be. I am not the one who lost an arm.”

“If you would like, I can leave you in peace,” I said, half-turning. “I quite understand if you would prefer not to think about research just now.”

A ghost of Suhail’s usual smile returned. “I would be grateful for it. Research, that is—not you leaving. I could benefit from distraction.”

As that was much how I would have reacted, I needed no persuasion. I went to lean against the rail; Suhail rose and offered me the coil of rope upon which he had been sitting, and after a brief argument of polite gestures, I gave in. He leaned against the rail in my place. When this was done, I said, “I thought you might be able to assist me. One of the reasons I shoot the subjects of my research—or rather, ask others to shoot them for me—is because there is no easier way for me to observe them closely, except when they are dead. Few dragons will tolerate a human measuring them and poking at their joints.”

Suhail nodded. “How may I be of service?”

“Your diving bell,” I said. “It has windows in its sides, does it not?”

“Small ones.” He cocked his head to one side. “Are you after sea-serpents?”

I gave him a seated bow, acknowledging the point. “I know I would not be able to observe much from within the bell, but it would be a substantial improvement compared with leaning over the rail. And it would let me see them while they are alive.”

It was our swim with the dragon turtles that had put the notion into my mind—or rather the desire, for at the time I did not know it was possible to observe from underwater for any longer than one could hold one’s breath. The notion seemed to have fired Suhail’s mind, too, for he came off his slouch against the rail in a burst of energy. “You could see much more than that! There is a suit—a waterproof one, with a bell that fits over the head and locks into place. A hose supplies air. It allows you to move about as you please, so long as you do not go too far.” He stopped, thinking, looking out across the channel we were currently threading between islands. “Though you would not be very safe if a serpent chose to bite you. We could construct a cage, though, with steel bars, large enough that you could float in the middle—”

“And be blasted through the holes on the far side if a serpent took offense at my presence.”

He had clearly forgotten about the jet of water a serpent can expel. I almost found myself apologizing as his face fell. But he recovered soon enough, saying, “I see now why you thought the bell would serve. It might do. But I would not call it safe.”

“Do you think a serpent could crush it?” I asked. The thing had seemed very sturdy to me when it was loaded onto the ship—its sides were solid steel—but he would know its limitations better than I.

Suhail shook his head. “Perhaps, but that is not my concern. The diving bell is open at the base. There are reasons for this, but chief among them is that I intend to use it for excavation: if I sink it into the ocean floor in shallow waters, I can pump the water out and then dig in the silt for artifacts.” He dismissed this with a wave of his hand, for it was a digression from his true point. “An attack from the serpent, whether a blast or simply a strike of its tail, could turn the bell on its side. If that happens, the air will escape.”

And I would be left floating in the water, easy prey for the serpent. “Oh,” I said. Now it was my turn for my face to fall. It had seemed like such a very good idea.

When I looked up, I found Suhail standing with one hand hovering in front of his mouth, fingers poised as if to catch something. His eyes were wide. “You have had an idea,” I said, smiling. “Should I be afraid?”

“If we were to close off the bell,” he said, still gazing into the distance. “It would not be able to go as deep—there are issues of pressure. But ten meters should be safe. Do sea-serpents swim in water that shallow?”

I rose to my feet, feeling suddenly alive again. “We shall find out.”

TEN

We did not find out immediately, for it was some while before we had the chance to put our theory to the test. As chronicled in Around the World in Search of Dragons, we did not have much luck in locating a place where both the draconic and archaeological halves of the expedition could further their efforts.

Modern-day dragon naturalists are much more organized about this than I was. They correspond with colleagues in their intended region, or at least with people who know the place, and make plans in advance for where they will go and how long they will stay. At the time, however, the Broken Sea was too unfamiliar to Scirlings, and my sense of what I needed to do too vague. I could only flit about, chasing rumours of possibility. For a while we were largely a trading expedition, Aekinitos choosing where we went, the rest of us asking questions in every port, seeking fire-lizards, sea-serpents, and ruins.

Jake grew bored, and annoyed Abby in equal proportion to his boredom. I sent them through the markets to hunt scales and fangs from the serpents, so that I could try to make a comparative collection. Tom occupied himself with a careful regimen of exercise to regain his strength. I pored over the book I had acquired in Va Hing, which Suhail had been kind enough to translate for me; it sparked a great many thoughts on evolution and taxonomy. (Also no small amount of frustration that I had so little gift for languages. I would have liked to compare that book against others, for of course with only one author to draw from, I could hardly be certain that the facts were rigorous to begin with.)

Suhail fared better than the rest of us, at least initially. At our first Puian port of call, the island of Olo’ea, he discovered that the locals used bits of carved stone as charms for good fortune—stones which were retrieved from beaches or found by pearl divers in the course of their work. He traded for one of these and brought it to me in great excitement. “Look!” he said.

I looked, but shook my head, for I did not see the significance. “These are found around Draconean ruins,” he said. “Very common—too common to fetch any great price among treasure-hunters. I think there is a ruin offshore.”

“Will you use the bell?” Jake asked, almost bouncing in his excitement.

Suhail grinned at him. “Not to begin with. I will use something else.”

The “something else” proved to be the contents of one of the crates he had brought on board. I had never before seen anything like it: a suit of bulky, waterproof canvas twill over rubber with a metal collar, and a copper globe I initially thought was a pot of some kind. It had a glass window in one side, however, and proved to be a helmet, which could be affixed to the collar in a perfect seal. A hose entered the helmet at the back.

It was what we now call a standard diving dress, though Suhail referred to it by an Akhian term. As he had described to me, it allowed him to range underwater for an extended period of time, thanks to a pump supplying fresh air to him via the hose. “For excavation, it is not the best,” he said ruefully, showing me how stiff his fingers were in the canvas gloves. “That needs the bell. But I can use this to find the site.”

Jake, of course, would not hear of being left behind. We went out in a canoe paddled by men from Olo’ea, and Jake splashed around on the surface while I oversaw the operation of the pump.

It was not very interesting to watch from above. Through the waves, I could just make out Suhail below, drifting across the shallow seafloor. Clouds arose wherever he poked into the sand, and fish startled away in a quick rush. Jake called out reports to me: “He just tucked something into the bag! Now it looks like he’s found a wall!”

I scarcely listened, content to wait for the more detailed account after Suhail was done. Instead I sat in the canoe and contemplated taxonomy. In my pocket I had a set of three sea-serpent scales—one from our specimen in arctic waters, the other two acquired locally—which I laid along the bench in front of me.

Examined under the microscope we had on board the Basilisk, they did show differences. All sea-serpents possess ctenoid scales, meaning that they have a toothed outer edge, but certain structural features are more similar to the placoid scales of sharks. This created an interesting puzzle for the taxonomist: are the serpents more closely related to bony fish (and evolved to acquire characteristics of cartilaginous fish); are their nearest cousins cartilaginous fish (while the serpents evolved to in some ways resemble bony fish); or was the answer some third thing entirely? But while the basic structure was the same in all three instances, the arctic one was substantially thicker, and the features of its exterior surface less prominent. Small differences—but in the field of natural history, such minor discrepancies can herald a large enough separation to merit distinguishing two different species.

Or it could simply be age. I knew from my reading prior to the voyage that ctenoid scales grow outward in rings, like trees. The arctic sample, in addition to being thicker and less textured, had many more rings. Very well, so far as it went: our arctic serpent was older. Did that explain all the differences? Or was it simply a bias in my (admittedly small) sample, that the tropical scales came from younger specimens? Perhaps there was a scale somewhere in the Broken Sea that would show as great an age. Or perhaps the Puians and Melatans hunted their serpents too energetically for them to ever become so elderly.

It is a very good thing that the canoes we had hired were outriggers, with a stabilizing lateral float on the port side. Had I been in an ordinary canoe, I might well have tipped myself into the water when Suhail broke the surface. I had been too caught up in my contemplation of scale anatomy to notice him rising from below.

Jake swam over to help me fumble the weighty brass helmet off. Suhail could not assist us; all his effort went into staying afloat. (Ordinarily this was no challenge for him, but diving dress includes lead weights all over the body to keep the air within the suit from constantly dragging it upward.) Once the helmet was off, Suhail and Jake removed the weights, and then he easily hoisted himself over the gunwale into the canoe.

I retrieved the scales just before he would have sat on them. “Did you find anything interesting?”

“Of artifacts, very little,” he said, turning out the string bag he had taken down with him. A few pieces of stone fell free. “The waves have washed most of the small pieces ashore, I think—I will not find more without excavation. But there is definitely a site there. Likely a peasant village.”

“A peasant village?” I said, startled.

Suhail laughed. “Did you think the Draconeans lived only in great cities and temples? There must have been many villages, but most of them are gone now. Plowed under by later peoples. This is why I’m looking underwater: because those sites are untouched, except by the sea.”

Jake hung off the side of the canoe, kicking his legs idly in the water. “Why are they underwater now? Did the islands sink?”

“Quite the reverse,” Suhail told him. “A geologist I know thinks the seas have risen since the glory days of the Draconeans.”

I laughed. “Like the tale in the Book of Tyrants? I do not know if you have that one in your Scriptures.”

“We do,” Suhail said. “And if you read through the metaphors, there might be truth hidden there. What if the great beasts that ruled over mankind were in fact the Draconean kings?”

“Great beasts?” The canoe rocked slightly as Jake pulled on it in excitement. “What great beasts?”

Readers of these memoirs know that I have never been very religious. I am not ashamed of this fact; I have endeavoured to be a good woman nonetheless, and to do good for those around me. Still, it was embarrassing to have it revealed that my son was a little heathen, ignorant of even the most basic stories in Scripture. Flushing, I said, “I thought that most scholars agree the beasts are symbolic of the state of sin into which mankind had fallen.”

Suhail shrugged. “There is no reason they cannot be both. The Draconeans worshipped dragons as gods; surely their civilization would count as greatly degenerate because of it.”

“Does your geologist friend also think the other calamities described in that book took place? The plague of vermin, the skies falling dark for a year and a day, the slaughter of the children?”

Jake was listening in openmouthed fascination. The islanders were sitting idle, enjoying their leisure, as we were speaking in Scirling (and they might not have cared a fig for our conversation even had they understood it). For my own part, I had never thought to discuss theology while sitting in a canoe in the middle of the Broken Sea; but here I was. Suhail said, “The writer of the Book of Tyrants surely exaggerated to make his point. But why should there be sunken villages, if the waters did not truly rise? And archaeologists have found remnants of things—trees, plants, animals—far south of where they should be. Creatures of cold weather, in areas that are too warm for them.”

“Too warm now,” I said, following him. “But why should warmth—oh. Seas cannot rise without water to swell them. He truly thinks it changed enough to melt such a volume of ice?”

The notion seemed outrageous to me, but Suhail nodded. “It would not take as large a change as you think. Or at least, he does not think so.”

It was hardly my field of expertise. Still—“I cannot imagine the temperature rose overnight, however small of a change it might be.”

“No,” Suhail agreed. “And so we are back to metaphor: the oceans swamped the coastal settlements under, but it happened over a long period of time. Not in three days, as Scripture would have it.”

“A fascinating theory,” I murmured. It will surprise no one, I think, that I was less interested in its implications for Draconean civilization (or theology, for that matter) than in the consequences for draconic species. They are so well adapted to their circumstances that such a change in the environment would necessitate migration or further change—or else it would drive them to extinction. I cursed again the peculiar quirk of their osteology that robbed me of any fossil record to study… even though I knew that without it, I likely would not have any dragons larger than ponies to study, and those almost certainly flightless.

This speculation put new thoughts into my head, though, which stayed with me long after we returned to shore, and kept me up quite late that night. Suppose (I said to myself) the world had indeed changed in that fashion, many thousands of years ago. It had—according to Suhail—driven many cold-weather creatures toward the poles, allowing residents of warmer climates to expand their ranges. Might this have some bearing on the question of the sea-serpents? I could imagine the changing world inspiring a great deal of movement and turmoil, as the beasts went in search of waters whose temperature was more congenial. But because there is variation in all species, some tended toward higher latitudes, while others preferred to remain closer to the tropics.

If that were the case, then it put a new wrinkle in my taxonomical questions. What if they had been a single species, back in the days of the Draconeans… but were in the process of differentiating into two?

I did not know if the hypothetical progenitors had been tropical or arctic to begin with, but I suspected the former. Our globes, after all, featured the Tropic of Serpents, not the Arctic Circle of Serpents. They were more common in tropical latitudes than temperate ones, let alone the far north. Which made sense if they had gotten their start here, and had expanded as the world changed around them.

Some of you may read the preceding paragraphs and shrug at them. I had an idea; very good for me. The scientists among you, however, may understand why this was a matter of sufficient excitement to keep me awake well into the night. I had studied dragons before, and contributed something to our stock of knowledge about them. I had even made a few discoveries of note, among them the natural preservation of dragonbone, the mourning behaviour of Vystrani rock-wyrms, and the peculiar life cycle of the dragons of Mouleen.

But never before had I devised a theory. Even my purpose on this voyage—to reconsider draconic taxonomy—did not have the same glamour as this new idea. The former was merely (I thought) a revision of other people’s ideas. It might win me acclaim in some quarters, but others would resent me for it, as an upstart woman arguing that a respected authority like Sir Richard Edgeworth was wrong. My theory regarding sea-serpents, however, was entirely new. It brought natural history together with observations from archaeology and geology to craft something never before considered. It was a fresh contribution to the field—and, I thought, the one that would make my name.

I said in the first volume of my memoirs that one must be cautious of imagining patterns in data, especially when that data is scant. Alas, on this occasion I did not take my own advice.

That night I rose from my hammock, crept out onto deck, and by the light of the moon penned an explanation of my ideas. This was the first draft of an article later published as “On the Differentiation of Sea-Serpents,” which I, in a state of great excitement, sent off to the Journal of Maritime Studies not one week later, when we came into port at Moakuru and had an opportunity to send mail. Tom, to his credit, cautioned me to wait; although he found great merit in my idea, he felt it would be better to submit a more substantial work after the expedition was done. I, however, wanted this to be the first volley in a series of publications that would astonish the scientific community.

In a way, it was. “On the Differentiation of Sea-Serpents” garnered quite a bit of attention while I was still abroad, and while a portion of that was negative (for the aforementioned reason of my being an upstart woman with little scholarly standing), many found merit in my ideas. And certainly I have followed that article with many later works that have indeed made my name.

Unfortunately—as many of you know—my theory was entirely wrong.

I did not know it when I posted my article back to Scirland. I did not even suspect until some months later, and confirmation had to wait until M. Esdras de Crérat published the definitive work to date on sea-serpents, years after my expedition ended. But had I delayed and allowed my ideas to mature, I might have escaped a great deal of embarrassment later.

I suffered a scholarly frustration of a different sort soon afterward, when we had left Olo’ea for a more volcanically active archipelago—one that might be home to fire-lizards.

On that day Suhail had asked to have the use of our cabin, because it was out of the wind. When I returned some time later (intending to retrieve one of my sketching pads), I found him ensconced with a stack of three books, one small notebook, and an array of little boxes, which seemed to be filled with cards. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, peering shamelessly at the notebook. Suhail was doing mathematics; that much and no more was apparent to me.

“Oh,” he said, looking up with the distracted air of one who had not noticed his interlocutor approaching. Given the minuscule size of the cabin, that meant he had been concentrating very hard indeed. “I am working on Draconean.”

Given his talent for languages, I was not surprised. Good manners warred with curiosity, and lost. “Very well; I concede my ignorance. What use are mathematics in deciphering an ancient language?”

He stretched the kinks from his neck and gestured at the little boxes full of cards. “An analysis of the frequency of each character—that is the simplest part of it. Sadeghi thinks he has found a mark that indicates separation between words, so if he is correct, it is also possible to record how often a character is found at the beginning of a word, or the end, or in its middle. After that, it becomes more complex: the likelihood that two characters will be found in conjunction, or three.”

When I described this to Natalie much later, she saw very quickly what Suhail was about, but between my difficulty with languages and my limited grasp of mathematics, I did not. “Very well—that would give you a sense of the patterns in the language. But it cannot tell you what the words mean… can it?”

“Not yet,” Suhail said. “It tells me, though—or rather it told ibn Khattusi, who was the first to observe this—that the Draconean script is likely a syllabary, with many characters representing groups of sounds.”

“How can you be sure of that?” I asked, fascinated.

“Because of the number of characters. There are only so many individual sounds in a language; even the largest has no more than a few dozen. Your alphabet has twenty-six letters, while mine has twenty-eight, with marks sometimes employed for vowels. The largest have fifty or sixty. But even a small syllabary usually has at least eighty characters—more often hundreds.” He nodded once more at the cards. “Draconean has two hundred forty-one—perhaps. It is not easy to count. If an inscription carved in clay adds a downward serif on one symbol, is that a different character, or was the scribe simply careless in making his mark? If three marks overlap one another, is that significant, or is it just an artifact of the small size of the writing?”

My eyebrows went up, and he dismissed his own rambling with a wave of his hand. “The point is this: knowing the script is a syllabary tells me something of how it must have sounded. And calculating the frequency of different arrangements helps me find patterns—”

“And where there are patterns, there are words,” I said, understanding at last. “You can find the shape of them, at least.”

“That is the hope.” Suhail stretched in his seat, and his back popped alarmingly. “It will be a great deal of work, though, and I have only just started.”

Getting from the shapes of words to their meaning seemed like another hurdle entirely, but Suhail did not need me to point that out. Instead I reached my hand toward one of his boxes, and when he nodded permission, browsed through the cards. I could read nothing of his notes, which were all in a tidy (and microscopic) Akhian hand, but the Draconean characters in the upper left were vaguely familiar to me. “I have found a few inscriptions myself,” I admitted.

“Oh?”

“Most of them from a ruin in Vystrana—near a village called Drustanev.”

Suhail made a sound of recognition and picked up one of his books, flipping through it with practiced fingers. “These, yes?”

The book, I later learned, was the most recent supplement in a series begun by the Akhian scholar Suleiman ibn Khattusi, who had made it his mission to collate all the Draconean inscriptions then known and to encourage people to gather more. At the time, all I knew was that I was looking at two pages of unintelligible Akhian script, captioning a pair of line drawings I knew quite well.

My voice was much too loud for the small cabin. “Where did you get these?”

“The books? I—”

“Not the books, these.” I stabbed one finger down on the Draconean inscriptions.

Suhail took the volume from me, perhaps as much to rescue it from my violence as to read what was on the page. “It says these were gathered and submitted by Simon Arcott of Enwith-on-Tye.”

The first sound to emerge from my throat was an outraged squawk. It was shortly followed by a string of epithets, the kindest of which was, “That sneak! I sent him those drawings myself, made from the rubbings I took in Vystrana. And he has the gall to pass them off as his own work?” I snatched the book from Suhail once more, studying the images to make certain there was no error. Indeed there was not; I had painstakingly copied them for Mr. Arcott, and knew every line.

Suhail did not question my certainty. He said, “If you wish, I can send in a correction.”

I did my best to moderate my tone. “That is very good of you. ‘Correction’—pah. That is the word, but it makes the attribution here sound like a regrettable error, rather than a damnable lie. Oh, when I get back to Scirland… or really, why wait? There is such a thing as mail service.”

“Having been in a similar dispute once myself,” Suhail offered, with the wary air of a man who is hoping a cat will not bite him, “I would advise waiting. If you write to him now, he will have months in which to prepare a defense.”

What defense could protect Mr. Arcott, when I had the original rubbings in my study and he had never been to Vystrana in his life, I could not imagine. Still, Suhail’s advice was good, and I nodded in reluctant agreement.

(When I finally did confront Mr. Arcott, after my return to Falchester, he had the cheek to try and argue that his intellectual thievery had been a compliment and a favor. After all, it meant my work was good enough to be accepted into ibn Khattusi’s series—but of course they never would have taken a submission from a woman, so he submitted it on my behalf. What I said in reply is not fit to be printed here, as by then I had spent a good deal of time in the company of sailors, and had at my disposal a vocabulary not commonly available to ladies of quality. But I had greater satisfaction in due course: he was drummed out of the Society of Draconean Scholars, and subsequent editions of ibn Khattusi’s series had not only my name but a note explaining the discrepancy in thoroughly condemnatory terms.)

I returned the book, restraining my uncharitable urge to throw it across the cabin. It would not have gone far, but the impact might have satisfied my sudden need for violence. “Well. I may take comfort that he cannot possibly have stolen the other inscription I found, as I never took a rubbing of it.”

Suhail gave me a sharp look. He knew well enough by then that I was not often the sort to pass up a chance to record knowledge. “Why not?”

I laughed, my ill humour not gone, but receding to where I could think of other things. “I had very little paper with me at the time, and nothing fit for a rubbing. Nor could I stay long enough to try and draw it—I had other tasks to address.” (To whit, getting off an island in the middle of a waterfall without breaking my neck.) “Besides, I am not certain it would be useful to anyone. The Draconean part of the inscription looked very odd—quite primitive.”

My dismissive words might as well have been the scent of prey, for Suhail perked up like a hound that has caught the trail of a rabbit. “Primitive? How so? Where was this? And what do you mean, the Draconean part of the inscription?”

“Which question do you wish me to answer first?” I asked with asperity, for he seemed likely to go on pestering me without pause for reply.

He apologized, and I said, “It looked… well, let me show you.” I fetched out my own notebook and sketched a few shapes as best as I could remember them: awkward scratches at bad angles.

Suhail frowned at the images. “Were they arranged precisely like this? No vertical stroke here?” One brown finger traced a line through what I had drawn.

“My dear fellow, this was six years ago, and I have already said I kept no record of them. This is me trying to recall the general style. I have no idea if there were any characters that even looked like this.”

He conceded this with a nod. “And the rest of the inscription?”

“You mean the part that wasn’t Draconean? I have no idea what it was. Rounded little blocks; they might not even have been writing at all.” I sketched another few shapes. These were decidedly more fanciful, as I had not even my vague familiarity with Draconean to aid recollection.

Suhail seemed to recognize them nonetheless. “Like this?” He took my notebook from me and wrote a quick line.

“Yes!” I exclaimed, hands flying up. “What is it?”

“Ngaru,” he said slowly, looking at the page. “A very old script—logosyllabic—ancestral to the writing systems now used throughout eastern Eriga.”

“Well, that makes sense. I was in eastern Eriga at the time.”

Suhail pushed the notebook back at me. His movements had gone suddenly cautious, as if too quick a gesture might cause the mirage in his mind to dissipate. “Draw the whole thing, if you will. Not the inscriptions themselves—I know you do not have them recorded—but what it was that you saw.”

I obligingly laid out the general shape of it: the slab of granite, divided roughly in half, with the chicken scratches of Draconean at the top and the Ngaru script below. When I showed it to Suhail, his expression gradually lit up, until he was glowing as if every birthday gift for the rest of his life had arrived all at once.

“Truly God has sent you!” he cried. I think that, had I been a man, he would have embraced me on the spot. “Do you realize what this is?”

Laughing despite myself, I said, “Clearly I do not.”

“If my guess is right—if I am the most fortunate man in all of creation—then this is a bilingual!” He saw my incomprehension. “The same text, written in two languages. Draconean above, Ngaru below. We cannot read the former, but the latter…” His hands flapped with his excitement. “That has been known for years!”

During my childhood education, I had labored through various works of foreign literature in facing translations, with Scirling on one side and the original on the other. The idea had been that my native tongue would aid me in learning the other language—and so it would have done, I imagine, had I been inclined to effort, instead of reading only the Scirling side.

I mentioned this to Suhail, and he crowed with delight. “Better than that! It is the key to the code. Find names in the Ngaru, or some other element that will not change much between languages—count them. Count the Draconean, and find the words with the same frequency. Likely they will even write the same sounds, or close to it. This is the key!”

He did almost seize me then, so caught up was he in his joy. I startled at the movement, and that recalled him to his manners; he clasped his own hands instead, shaking them with his eyes to the heavens.

His good cheer was infectious. I came down to earth a moment later, though, when he asked me, “Where is this stone?”

“In Eriga,” I said, drawing out the words while I thought. “But the stone—it is not very accessible.”

“I do not care,” Suhail vowed. “God willing, I will climb the highest mountain to reach it, cross the deepest gorge. Is it in a desert? I grew up in one. I do not fear the heat of the sun.”

His grandiose declarations made me smile, but my heart was heavy. “It is not that. Well, it is that to some degree—the way is indeed dangerous. But the greater problem is not the land; it is the people. The stone sits in a place that is… sacred. I was permitted to go there as part of a trial, a rite of passage. But I do not know if they would let you do the same.”

This checked him in his headlong dreams of success. “Is the stone itself sacred to them?”

“Not that I know of. I am not even certain they know it is there; I only found it because I went searching.”

“Then I could buy it from them.”

I opened my mouth to tell him how little the Moulish cared for money, but stopped myself. I had not yet said the stone was in the Green Hell, and thought it better to leave that unspecified. Everything I knew of Suhail said he was a good man, but the dual inscriptions dangled before him the possibility of the kind of achievement most scholars can only dream of. I did not think he would go after the stone without permission… but without certainty, I could not risk it. The Moulish had shown trust in sending me to that island, and I did not want to betray it.

“I do not know,” I said at last. “But I can tell you who to contact. There is a woman in Atuyem, the half-sister of the oba—Galinke n Oforiro Dara. She knows the people who keep the stone, and can ask them on your behalf.”

This roundabout path made Suhail sigh with impatience, but he nodded. After all, we were halfway around the world from Bayembe and Mouleen; he could hardly go racing off there right now. I fear I quite destroyed his concentration, though, for soon after that he packed up his notebooks and cards and took to pacing the deck instead—dreaming, I suspect, of what secrets the Draconean inscriptions might hold.