Within the Sanctuary of Wings

by Marie Brennan

  His phrasing was conservative. In truth, he and I had begun to formulate a theory which did away with the six criteria Sir Richard Edgeworth had used to distinguish “true dragons” from mere “draconic cousins,” and put in their place only one: developmental lability. We did not yet have a good understanding of how the different breeds related to one another—indeed, this is a question that continues to vex dragon naturalists to this day—but we had long since begun to suspect that whatever the anwer was, lability played a large role in the diversity we see today. As it is not a characteristic anyone has documented outside the draconic family, it might serve as an admirably simple means of differentiating that family from unrelated creatures.

  I would dearly have liked to try breeding mews, or at least conduct experiments with their eggs. After my conversation with Suhail in Falchester, a part of my mind was constantly examining my research, asking at every turn, And what else? It was a peculiar feeling. On the one hand, I lamented the loss of my girlish glee, the sense that it was enough simply to see a new thing and record it for other people to learn. On the other hand, it was also exhilarating, for I was challenging myself to look further, to think harder, to fit what I saw into a larger picture and then tease out its implications.

  Unfortunately for our mew-related aspirations, we were again there in the wrong season. Unlike honeyseekers, who will mate at any time of year, mews did so only toward the tail end of winter, with their eggs hatching in mid-spring—“And if we are still here then, something will have gone terribly wrong,” Tom said.

  “Can’t you trap a pair and try to carry them out?” Chendley said, when he heard this.

  It was a mark of how restless our lieutenant had become that he showed any enthusiasm for the prospect. Even granting that we would carry a smaller quantity of supplies out of the mountains than we had carried in, adding a pair of caged mews to the pile would not make things any easier. But it was a moot point regardless. “If they’re anything like yaks,” Tom said with a wry grin, “they’ll go toes-up from heat exhaustion at the searing temperature of fifteen degrees. But who knows. If all else fails, I’ll have a shot at it.”

  One thing Tom and I did not attempt: bone preservation. We had not brought any of the necessary chemicals with us, as Thu’s report had made it clear that we should not expect any bones to survive in one of his mystery specimens. Besides, the process had gone from a matter of great industrial import to a minor curiosity, of interest as a footnote in the history of dragonbone synthesis, but otherwise of use only to individuals like ourselves, who wished to study the skeletons of dragons at leisure. We did dissect several mews, working from carcasses provided by the spinsters who hunted them, and confirmed that their bones disintegrated according to the common habit of their kind; but for records we were dependent upon my drawings.

  One other activity kept us occupied during the monsoon, and that was mountain climbing. Once Suhail had enough fluency in Tser-zhag to handle minor daily matters, Chendley went out on a regular basis with either him or Thu to hone their skills on the nearby ridges and peaks. Tom and I went less frequently, but the weeks we spent with the herdsmen involved a great deal of clambering around by routes that made the Nying laugh at us. It was preparation for what was to come: the snows would have made our route much more treacherous, and the five of us could not afford the suspicion and lack of coordination that had weakened us on the journey to Hlamtse Rong. By the time the monsoon ended, we were in the best fighting trim of our lives, and ready—we thought—for anything.

  EIGHT

  Leaving Hlamtse Rong—Across the glacier—Gyaptse and Cheja—Speculations—Clear weather—Climbing—Buried in the snow

  Although the Nying had been willing to accept us as guests, the strain upon their resources meant they were pleased to see us go—though not in the direction we chose.

  I mentioned before that the nearby peak, Gyaptse, is named for its supposedly cursed nature. There are meadows below it which might be profitable for the grazing of yaks, but the locals never used them; they were certain that anyone who went there would die. They held to this certainty even though, upon questioning, none of them could name a single person who had done so within living memory—for this is how folklore works.

  What caused this belief? Elsewhere in the world (that is to say, in Vystrana and Keonga), it had been the presence of Draconean ruins which inspired such dread; but as I have mentioned, it was deeply unlikely that any such things should be at so high an elevation, and Thu had seen nothing of the kind during his own exploration there. No, the fear had a more fleshly source … or so I suspected.

  Elsewhere in the Mrtyahaima, there are stories of monstrous snow-apes, variously called yeti, mi-go, and an assortment of other names. But in Tser-nga, the stories tell instead of ice demons. Could these, I wondered, be derived from the creature Thu had found?

  We had seen no sign of any such creature during our time in Hlamtse Rong, despite locals who swore up and down that they had seen them with their own eyes. Again, this is customary with folklore; Scirling farmers will swear equally blind that they have seen giants and fairy hounds on the country roads at night. But this did not mean that, once upon a time, something had not existed and roamed the mountains. Even if they were all gone now, their memory might survive.

  Thu and Suhail managed, through weeks of effort, to persuade three youths from the village to help ferry our supplies to a spot at the foot of Gyaptse’s neighbour Cheja, which we could then use as a depot while we explored the area. In addition to this we had our two ponies—which was still not enough to carry everything, but one of the virtues of our long delay was that we had learned which items we could, upon reflection, do without. Eight humans and two equines sufficed to convey the remainder, though we could not have hoped to do so were the ponies and Nying youths a whit less sturdy and tireless.

  In theory it should have taken us four or five days to reach the valley below the col, where Thu had found his specimen. But he had been travelling in the spring; now it was autumn, and the snow lay deep on the higher slopes over which we must toil.

  And toil we did. In the first day we climbed at least five hundred meters, counting ourselves fortunate that our monsoon-imposed delay had put us into so fit a state. That night it snowed, for while the season arrives quite abruptly, it does not depart in the same fashion; and by then we were at a high enough elevation for precipitation to come in solid form. But the snow was not so bad as the wind. This howled about our tents and proved to us that we had not pitched one of them securely enough; I think the only thing that prevented it from blowing away was its burden. (We were sleeping four to a tent in structures designed to hold three, so that our porters would not be left exposed. I was glad my nose had become entirely stuffed up, as it protected me from the aroma of so many unwashed bodies in such proximity—my own not excluded.)

  But all of that was nothing compared to the obstacle that lay ahead, which was the Cheja Glacier.

  This is named for its associated peak, the lesser companion to the towering Gyaptse. It descends off Cheja in a long, curving arc that wraps around the southeastern side of its base like a tongue. Until I took that holiday in southern Bulskevo, my image of a glacier was of a towering block of ice, intensely blue in its center, bordering a frozen northern sea. But glaciers, of course, can form on inland mountains provided they are high enough, and they are far from the uniform mass I imagined. Glacier ice flows: more slowly than water, to be sure, but it moves all the same. Where it moves quickly enough, it forms an icefall—the solid-state equivalent of a waterfall. Such areas are shattered with crevasses (into which one may fall) and seracs (tall pillars of ice that may collapse without warning on the unwary traveller). Even a short traverse of a glacier is exhausting at best, injurious or fatal at worst.

  Upon reaching its edge, we sent one porter back with the ponies, those being our parting gift to the people of Hlamtse Rong. It meant we would have to move our supplies in stages, but tha
t was unavoidable: no pony, however surefooted, could hope to manage what lay ahead.

  Crossing that glacier was not a very technical challenge, compared with some of what we did in the following days. For the most part it involved exceedingly careful walking, with Thu or Chendley in the lead testing the ground with their alpenstocks, those iron-tipped, pick-headed staves which have proven so useful to the serious mountaineer. Where a crevasse divided the ground we sometimes crossed via a snow bridge, if our leaders judged it stable enough, but more often went around—assuming we saw the crevasse at all, as many of them are covered with a layer of snow thick enough to conceal, but not to support human weight.

  We did not see the one into which I fell.

  I do not blame Chendley for missing it. I was the careless one; rather than following strictly in his foosteps as I should have, I strayed leftward in my course. I had just enough time to think that the snow beneath my foot had settled rather more than usual before it gave way entirely, plunging me into the hidden blue abyss.

  My shriek echoed off the walls around me, then cut short as the rope tied about my waist did its job and stopped my fall. My alpenstock slipped from my hand and scouted the depths for me. I did not hear it strike bottom, though I must admit I was not exactly listening.

  When I could draw breath, I caught the rope with one flailing hand, steadied myself, and looked upward. To my horror, I saw Chendley’s legs dangling over the edge of the crevasse. The collapse of the hidden snow bridge had taken him completely by surprise, and my fall yanked him straight off his feet. He had attempted to arrest his slide as a mountaineer should, by digging his alpenstock into the snow, but this only found purchase when he was almost in the crevasse with me.

  What saved us was the gift I mentioned before, from the mountaineers who had trained Tom, Suhail, and myself. Before we left Scirland, the inestimable Mrs. Winstow had given us a brilliant innovation of her own devising, which has since become so vital to those who climb on ice: a framework one straps to one’s boot, whose downward-pointing teeth provide far superior purchase compared to hobnails, without transmitting as much chill to the foot. This is called a crampon, and the sets Mrs. Winstow had gifted to us were made of synthetic dragonbone.

  Suhail was behind me on the rope. When I fell and Chendley made as if to follow me into the abyss, my husband would also have been pulled down were it not for his crampons. They gave him sufficient traction that he was able to keep his feet and slam the point of his alpenstock into the snow, further stabilizing him. Had Chendley gone over the edge, committing his weight to the rope along with my own, this might not have been enough; but Chendley caught himself at the last instant, and Suhail held.

  I did not know any of this until after I was safely on the surface once more, of course. At the time I could only dangle, for no part of the crevasse wall was quite within my reach, and I dared not swing for the nearest. Soon Chendley was up, though, and Tom joined Suhail; he belayed Thu as our Yelangese companion approached the edge and lowered the ropes he and the porters then used to raise me up.

  When I reached the top, I could not immediately speak. Suhail enveloped me in a fierce embrace. I returned this as best as I could, notwithstanding the painful bruising I had received about the middle. (I recall thinking, rather inanely, that I had come a long way since my first experiment with abseiling in Vystrana, but that I did not recall my ribs hurting quite so badly back then. At the time I chalked this up to the difference in my age, but later I realized I had likely cracked one of the aforementioned ribs. Which I ought to have mentioned to those around me … but it seems I have never quite outgrown my youthful stupidity.)

  Suhail might not have released me had Chendley not called out, reminding us that he stood on the opposite side of the crevasse. I tugged my clothing straight, managed a smile for the others, and said, “While I was down there, I looked about for any other frozen dragon specimens. Alas, I did not see any.”

  Thu stared at me, clearly wondering if he had suffered a failure of translation. Tom swore, laughing as he did so. Chendley, shouting across the crevasse, demanded to know what we were going to do next.

  Roped as we were, we could not conveniently go around the gap; and after that scare, none of us were quite willing to unrope. But fortunately the crevasse had a nearby bit where the walls sloped more agreeably inward, and we were able to improvise a crossing. Our supplies we later brought by a much safer route, around the end of the chasm.

  Such were the incidents that delayed us. I will not recount them all; our report on the journey was published years ago in the circular of the Peak Club. Any mountaineering enthusiast interested in the details may look up that account and marvel at the primitive state of the sport in those days, and our sheer dumb luck in not getting ourselves killed. For me, the next point of relevance comes after we reached the far side of the glacier, dismissed our remaining porters, and entered the little valley where Thu had found his specimen.

  * * *

  I must take a moment to lay the scene, for not all of my readers are familiar with the topography of mountains in general (much less that particular location), and the specifics are vitally important to the progress of this tale.

  Gyaptse is the highest peak in the wall that marks the western boundary of inhabited Tser-nga, and a more forbidding mountain one would be hard-pressed to find. There are taller—it does not even come close to claiming the title in that regard—but few with so unfriendly an aspect. Its southern facet, the one visible from our approach, falls in an array of nearly sheer faces, of so dark a stone as to appear almost black in anything other than direct sunlight. Snow and ice can only cling to scattered footholds, and I could not help but mentally arrange their harsh, slanting lines into a face, as if the mountain were frowning at me. The peak itself is peculiar in shape, almost like a tower; and a more unassailable tower I have never seen. In recent years three expeditions have tried to assail it: none have succeeded, and one perished almost to the last man.

  Fortunately for us, we had no need to climb the peak. Our initial interest lay in a valley below, the cirque between two aretes or ridges descending off Cheja and Gyaptse. The latter, which is the route by which those later mountaineers have attempted the peak, has come to be known as the Dumond Ridge, after the leader of the first of those expeditions. The other I attempted to name Thu Ridge, in honour of our companion (without whom none of us would have been there); and it is called so in Yelangese. But in my homeland this attempt resoundingly failed, and mountaineers there speak of it as the Trent Ridge instead.

  Thu and his compatriots had come here in search of a route through the mountains. Staring up at the col between the two peaks, I spoke to Thu. My breathlessness owed something to the altitude and exertion—but not all. “You thought that could be your path?”

  The saddle where the slopes of Cheja and Gyaptse meet is far lower than either summit, but still towers over the valley below. Like the southern face of Gyaptse, the descent from the col to the valley floor is the next best thing to sheer: more cliff than slope. There was no direct route from where we stood to the top, and the Dumond Ridge does not connect to it; one would have to traverse the face of Gyaptse to reach it from that side. The reasonable approach—I am tempted to scar the adjective with quotation marks—is up Cheja’s ridge, along the mountain’s shoulder, and then up again to reach the col. It was feasible, I thought, for any moderately skilled mountaineer; but not for people in quantity.

  “We did not think it for long,” Thu said wryly. “But we were trying to find some kind of pass, and this is the most approachable one for two hundred kilometers in either direction—if you can believe it.”

  Unlike his previous expedition, we were not searching for a way across; our attention, at least to begin with, lay in the valley below. By a stroke of good luck, this was not as deeply blanketed in snow as we had feared. The arrangement of the surrounding terrain shelters it a little from the prevailing monsoon wind, while its southern exposur
e means it receives a great deal of sun. A brisk little stream of snowmelt poured down the lower slopes; we pitched our tents next to this, too exhausted to attempt any reconnaissance that day.

  What we intended as a brief pause stretched two days longer than planned, on account of the winds. We were fortunately spared additional snowfall, which would have made our task even harder than it already was, but neither Chendley nor Thu would allow any of us to venture toward the head of the cirque. Though the winds were not bad where we camped, they would be much worse up at the col, and they feared the risk of avalanche. Such an event, Thu believed, had brought down the specimen he found, for the valley was far too low for flesh to be preserved year-round by the cold. Indeed, there were times there when even I felt quite warm—a very incongruous sensation, when one is at high elevation and surrounded by snow.

  This delay did not prevent Suhail from surveying the area with an eye toward planning our search. He looked at the deeper snow piled where previous avalanches had landed and shook his head. “If there is anything under that, I don’t know how we’ll find it. With a settlement, you can make educated guesses about where to dig based on buildings, streets, and so forth. But here? You could be half a meter from what you’re looking for, and never know. And digging it all out would take all year.”

  THE COL

  “While the mountain drops more on your head,” Tom muttered.

  But Thu hastened to reassure us. “It was not where the snow is so deep. More to the right, I would say—though it is difficult to be sure.” He looked embarrassed.

  “Quite some time has passed since you were last here,” I said. “Anyone would have difficulty remembering.”

  In the area Thu had indicated, the snow was thin enough that Suhail thought we might be able to at least attempt an organized search. He prepared a series of thin cords, and when the wind dropped to a more reasonable level he ventured out and staked them down, delineating a grid of squares. “We’ll take these one at a time,” he said, “one person per square. The snow there is only about half a meter thick. Stop if you find anything out of the ordinary: bones, teeth, claws, flesh, whatever you may turn up. I’ll come take a look at it.”