I was glad of that surety when we ventured out into the exposed space of the col. No sooner did we leave the shelter of Cheja’s flank than the winds struck us with titanic force, carrying razor crystals of ice. We staggered one careful step at a time, mindful of the risk that a fall could be the trigger that began an avalanche. But the true risk lay above us, where the steep upper slopes of Gyaptse held a heavy load of snow, which might come loose at any moment.
My attention should have been on that, and on the ground ahead. But although we had conquered no mighty peak, we shared with such pioneers a rare and precious experience: the knowledge that we were quite possibly the first human beings to stand upon that ground. And depending on the success of the caeligers, we might even be the first to look past the col into the uninhabited terrain beyond.
The ground on the western side sloped away in a much gentler fashion. To my right and to my left, the mountains circled in a formidable wall, as if to guard the peak in the center: a beautifully formed pyramid I thought taller than Gyaptse, reigning like a queen amid her subjects. It glowed like a diamond torch in the early light. In the shadows below lay deep valleys, low enough to support trees and meadows, some of them yet free of snow. Altogether, it had the appearance of an alpine paradise.
I came to realize Tom was standing at my right shoulder. We could not converse in low tones, for the wind flung our voices away; he had to shout as he said, “We can’t do it, Isabella.”
“I know we can’t,” I shouted back. In order to make this ascent, we had left a substantial portion of our gear at the base of Cheja; we carried only enough food for a few days, and no guns for hunting. Descending into those valleys would be suicide by starvation.
But Tom and I were of one mind. Looking down into that region, we both thought: Perhaps they are not extinct. Perhaps that unknown breed lives in this place, isolated from all human observation, and if we go there we will see them alive.
The season was too far gone; we could not plan any expedition there until next year at the earliest, and probably much later than that. And it would be exceedingly difficult to bring enough men and materiel up to this col, however much easier the descent might be on the other side. But with that possibility before my eyes, I would not be deterred: whatever it took, however much money I had to pour into the task and political maneuvering I had to engage in, I would come back and explore that lost world.
The cosmos has a fine sense of humour.
*
The col is not a perfect ridge; at its crest it flattens out, and even dips down slightly to create a shallow bowl. In the month of Seminis in the southern hemisphere, at six thousand meters of elevation, you would not think it is possible for one such as I to become overheated, but I did; the deep snow of this bowl reflected the sun like a mirror, and the slight shelter it provided gave enough respite from the wind that I found myself sweating heavily in my layers of wool and silk and fur. But I did not want to stop long enough to remove my pack and shed layers; and so I slogged onward, through the deep, wet snow.
Even with our goggles on, the light was blinding, and we could not effectively search while floundering through the snow. At regular intervals one member of the party or another stopped to catch their breath and look around, scanning for any hint of something other than snow, rock, and ourselves, praying all the while that we had not climbed up here for naught. However glorious the view, however tempting the vista beyond, we had come here with a specific purpose in mind. And it was Tom, the most eagle-eyed among us, who spotted it at last.
“There!”
It was a tiny thing, an aberration in the smooth expanse of snow. Near to a small shoulder of Gyaptse on the north end of the col, it protruded only about fifteen or twenty centimeters; had the snow been any deeper or the winds here less fierce, we would have missed it entirely, for the monsoon had gone a long way toward burying it. But that tiny thing was enough, and we set off for it with new life in our limbs.
Suhail dragged us to a halt a few meters away, quite literally grabbing our sleeves to stop us. “Wait. Wait!”
There was nothing in the world I wanted less to do. Sun-dazzled though my eyes were, I could see enough to make my breath race even more than it already did. A pale, pebbled surface very similar to the scales Thu had shown us. A flattened lump I thought might have been a brow ridge, before the bone beneath gave way and collapsed the flesh. We had at least part of a specimen, and the rest … the rest might lie just a little distance under the snow.
But if Tom and I were here for our expertise with dragons, and Thu and Chendley for their expertise with mountains, Suhail was here as our archaeologist, to make certain we did not damage what we had come so far to find.
As he had done when we discovered the Watchers’ Heart, he made us proceed with care. While we hovered and twitched, he circled the visible remains at a safe distance, considering their disposition. Finally he said, “If the rest of the body is still attached, it most likely lies here.” One hand indicated an area of snow. “But without the skeleton, we can’t really be sure. It might have twisted in any direction.”
The only way to know for sure was to dig.
We began at the head—or rather I should say Suhail began, for he did not want more than a single person’s weight atop the snow there, in case it crushed something delicate. He brushed away the looser snow with his gloved fingers, exposing enough to reveal that we were indeed looking at the flattened head of some draconic creature. Then, with careful taps of a small pick, he began to chip away the older encrustation.
While he did this, the rest of us brushed the ground in a circle around the head, scooping away the snow. Ordinarily I would have stood back and drawn the scene, but not on this occasion, for two reasons: first, that my heavily gloved hand could not wield a pencil with any accuracy, and second, that I could not have stood back for any sum of money. I took the southern quadrant, where Suhail thought the rest of the carcass was most likely to lie; Thu was to my left and Tom to my right.
I did not have to dig far at all before it began. “I found something!” I exclaimed. Only a sharp order from Suhail kept Tom and Thu from hovering over me. But they turned their efforts toward mine, and we went on digging.
One centimeter at a time, it emerged. At Suhail’s end, the collapsed head; at mine, a misshapen lump it took me a long time to be certain was a foot. Rather than chipping too far downward, I went horizontally, following the line of the leg. Hindleg, or fore? I kept changing my mind; we had not uncovered enough to be certain. Fore, I thought, based on the distance from the head, and the relative sizes—but then I reached something that did not look like a shoulder. And Tom, lying full-length to distribute his weight and digging between myself and Suhail, stopped without warning.
“Isabella,” he said. “Look.”