He had a point, but I had irrationally hoped for more. With Suhail leaning in at my left shoulder and Tom at my right, I opened the notebook and found myself looking at a pencil sketch of a decomposing dragon.
Pieces of one, at least. Mr. Thu had not been exaggerating the scantiness of his material. We were fortunate that he found most of the head; his theory was that it had been the last part to emerge from the snow and ice, and therefore the least damaged by the warmer temperatures and passing scavengers. Apart from this, there were a few scraps of flesh, one of which might have been part of a leg, and a piece of wing, so thoroughly separated from the rest of the body that it must have been torn off by an animal. “Or by the avalanche,” Mr. Thu added. “Either before or after it died.”
I shuddered to think of such annihilating force. I had taken up mountain climbing in recent years, partly as a hobby, but more to toughen myself for future expeditions. I had only rarely climbed above the snow line—almost every instance taking place the previous summer, when my son Jake persuaded me to take him on a holiday with the mountain pioneers Mr. and Mrs. Winstow to the southern Netsja Mountains—and had narrowly escaped what our Bulskoi guides assured me was a very small avalanche. A collapse strong enough to separate wing from body was harrowing even to think of.
“This can’t possibly be the normal shape of its muzzle,” Tom said. “Even allowing for the collapse of the bone within.”
“The flesh is very—” Mr. Thu paused, searching for the word. “Dry, and thin.”
“Desiccated,” I said.
He nodded. “By the ice. And I think the weight of the snow crushed it over time, pushed it out of shape.”
“That often happens with frozen bodies,” Suhail agreed. “Like the pair found in the Netsjas thirty years ago. Without bone to provide support, I imagine the effect would be even stronger.”
With Suhail’s assistance, Thu translated the notes scribbled below and around the images. The head was approximately forty centimeters from back to front, and thirty centimeters from base to crown. Many of the teeth had fallen out, making dentition uncertain. There were sketches of the remaining teeth on the following page: a few incisors, one surprisingly small cuspid or “canine tooth,” which Mr. Thu had tentatively identified as mandibular. A broken piece of what might have been a carnassial. We were lucky to have even that many, without bone to anchor them in place. The neck was set low on the skull, suggesting a head carried more high than forward. Mr. Thu could only guess at its intact length, but thought it was possibly quite short.
“Not surprising,” Tom said. “In a cold climate like that, a long neck is only a way to lose vital heat.”
Indeed, the neck of a rock-wyrm is much shorter and stouter than that of a desert drake—and the Vystrani Mountains are mere foothills in comparison with the Mrtyahaima. “What of the hide?” I asked.
In reply, Mr. Thu delved within his pocket and brought out a small silk bag. With great care, he opened its drawstrings and slid the contents onto the table.
It was a pair of … scales, I thought, but they were unlike any I’d seen before. One was long and thin: sized, I thought, to a beast much larger than that head would suggest. The other was a good deal smaller, and irregularly shaped. They were exceedingly pale and bluish in tone, but not the same colour; the larger one was mottled with darker grey spots. When I picked it up and tapped my fingernail against it, the sound was dull and heavy, though the scale itself was light.
“I had more,” Mr. Thu said, “but they were confiscated by my commanding officer. I kept these only by hiding them in the lining of my clothing.”
Tom and I grilled him on the shape, size, and thickness of the ones he had lost, and the details of where on the carcass the remaining pair had been found. At one point during this conversation, Suhail pounded his fist against the table in a rare display of frustration. “Oh, to have been there myself! I know you did not have much time to search,” he hastened to assure Mr. Thu. “But there may have been other scales or teeth scattered along the ground, not obvious to the eye. And even looking at where they fell … we might have guessed at the path your carcass took on the way down, how the scavengers tore at it, and used that to tentatively reconstruct where the loose scales had been.”
I understood Suhail’s vexation, feeling much the same myself. It was maddening to have such disconnected fragments. I was no archaeologist, accustomed to making do with what little evidence the depredations of time and decay saw fit to leave behind; my subjects were usually alive or recently dead, and in either case they were whole. If only we had been there when this specimen was discovered, to see it with our own eyes!
My brain had not yet carried that thought through to its logical conclusion when I rose and pulled down the world map from its roller on one wall. I was thinking only of elevation, temperature, possible food sources. “Can you show me where you found this?”
Mr. Thu came to join me. “You do not have a more detailed map?”
“Not of that region. Though I can certainly obtain one.”
He bent to peer at the area shaded to represent the heights of the Mrtyahaima. After a moment’s consideration, he stabbed one finger onto the sheet. “Here. Roughly.”
I looked, and my shoulders drooped. “Of course it was.”
He had pointed at a spot in the hinterlands of Tser-nga, an area very poorly known to outsiders. Sheluhim and various emissaries had visited in past ages, but the kingdom periodically closed its borders, and at present they were shut. It was no surprise that Mr. Thu and his compatriots would have been exploring there: to their east lay the high plateau of Khavtlai, which had been a Yelangese possession for more than a century. Given the remoteness and seclusion of Tser-nga, if the Yelangese came through the mountains there, they could be well established on the eastern side before we heard anything of it.
It also made going there myself more than a little difficult.
Only then did I realize what plan had been taking shape below conscious thought. I said nothing of it yet, though. Instead I asked Mr. Thu, “And what was the terrain like where you found the specimen? You said it was above the snow line?”
“Not when I found it,” he said, returning to his seat and opening the notebook to another page. It was not, I later learned, the same book in which he had originally recorded his observations, for that held too much in the way of other information he did not wish to share. Once the notes on the specimen were safely copied over, drawings and all, he gave the original to his Khiam Siu allies. But the copy included a terrain sketch of some truly forbidding mountains and the valleys beneath.
He indicated a specific location with the tip of his finger. “Here. But I believe it fell from higher up.”