“Usually I can,” Sardelle said, “but as I was telling Ridge, the density of life in the jungle makes it difficult to pick out individuals. Also…” Her gaze drifted up the slope.
“Yes?”
“I feel the dragon. Strongly. He’s such a presence that he blots out my ability to detect lesser life forms. Sort of the way you have trouble hearing someone sneaking up on you when you’re in the middle of a room full of talking people.”
“Oh.”
Sardelle tapped the hilt of her sword thoughtfully. “Jaxi and I did both think there was something familiar about that person who left the dirigible. I didn’t say anything because even then, the dragon’s presence was affecting my ability to discern different entities. I also thought it might just be that the ship was full of Iskandians and that they would seem more familiar to me than the pirates and natives in town.”
“I’ve wondered about that person myself,” Cas said. “I also believe it’s possible some of those pirates got away and may still be after us.”
“If they are, I don’t think they’ll find a treasure up here. Unless they want the dragon blood.”
“There are some who would pay a great deal for those vials.”
“Perhaps so.”
“Sardelle?” Zirkander called softly from his spot at the head of the column.
She and Cas jogged to catch up with him. Their trail had intersected a second perpendicular one, and the colonel had stopped, looking down at something.
“Don’t get too close,” Tolemek said.
Probably good advice, but as usual, Cas’s height meant that she had to push past the others to see what they were looking at. Tolemek’s hand dropped onto her shoulder, halting her, but she had already spotted the large dead animal slumped against a tree on the opposite side of the trail. She had never seen a tiger before, but recognized the black stripes on the orange fur. The black feathers were more confusing. The fact that the carcass had been gnawed on and pecked at made it difficult to figure out what she was seeing, but it looked like a giant bird had crashed into the creature. And then died. No, that didn’t make sense. She tried to take a step closer, but Tolemek’s hand tightened.
“Are those wings?” Duck asked.
“It’s a winged tiger,” Sardelle said. “I’ve read about them but never seen one. Remarkable.”
“It would be more remarkable if it wasn’t dead.” Zirkander shuffled back. “Look at the size of him. The muscles. That is—was—a top-level predator right there. And in the prime of his life. Things like that don’t just pitch over and die.”
Tolemek looked at him sharply. “Are you suggesting this is related to the dead humans?”
“You tell me, scientist.”
“I don’t know. I would have assumed it got in the way of some other top-level predator and lost the fight.”
“There’s not much sign of that.” Cas pointed. “No claw or tooth marks on its face or neck. Something’s been munching on its organs, but small creatures. Scavengers.”
“Munching on its organs, Raptor?” Duck asked. “Sometimes it’s a little chilling the way you talk about death. But maybe that just means you two—” he waved his fingers at Tolemek, “—are meant for each other.”
“Er.” It was such a random place for such a comment that Cas didn’t know how to respond.
Tolemek lowered his hand from her shoulder. He didn’t look like he knew how to respond, either.
“I don’t sense that it died of physical trauma,” Sardelle said, then looked at Tolemek, her eyes solemn. “It’s displaying the same swelling of brain tissue that the humans we examined did.”
Zirkander pushed his fingers through his hair a few times. “Does this mean… everything can catch this… whatever it is?”
“Viruses, if that’s what this is, usually have a limited range of hosts they can infect.” Tolemek shrugged down at the dead tiger. “But perhaps this one can affect all mammals.”
“Including those with dragon blood,” Sardelle whispered.
“What?” Zirkander asked.
“Unicorns, winged tigers, soaring lizards… some of the other near-mythological creatures. We’ve discussed this before. It’s believed they have dragon blood, the same as that fresh-water octopus. I don’t know if that creature was affected by the virus, but this one was.” Sardelle met Tolemek’s eyes again. “My theory that we may have more immunity to a virus, if that’s what this is, may not be worth much.”
“I knew the risks when I went into the village,” Tolemek said.
Cas frowned up at him. She didn’t know a damned thing about diseases or viruses or whatever they were dealing with and had no idea if Tolemek and Sardelle were in more danger than any of the rest of them, but the idea that he might have put himself at risk to learn more for everyone else’s sake gave her a sense of discomfort she didn’t quite know how to interpret. Guilt? Concern for him? Both?
“We’ve probably all been exposed at this point,” Zirkander said. “Sardelle, any thoughts on where we might find the dragon? I’ve been angling toward the top of the mountain, but that’s a vague destination. There are more trails up here than I expected too.”
“That way, I think.” Sardelle pointed at the corner of the intersection between the two trails, where a solid knot of trees made travel unlikely.
“Helpful.” Zirkander quirked his brows at her. “Will Jaxi be sarcastically carving the way again?”
“Duck and I will look for tracks,” Cas said. “Given how quickly the brush grows over the trails here, someone’s been maintaining these, and recently too.”
“Sir,” Duck said, “is she allowed to volunteer me to scrounge around in the dirt near diseased corpses?”
“Just the other day, you were remarking on how I have seniority over you,” Cas said.
“Remarking on it? I was lamenting it.”
“Just don’t get close to the body,” Zirkander said. “We’re leaving that for Tolemek.”
“Really,” he said.
“Don’t you want to get your microscope out and look at some brain bits?”
“Brain bits, Zirkander? How is it your people consider you a national hero?”
“We have low standards for heroism in Iskandia.”
“Obviously.”
Cas turned up the side trail while Duck walked farther on the one they had been following. Neither would qualify as a road, but this one appeared to have seen more use of late, though not since the heavy rains of the day before. Most of the prints were washed out, leaving her to judge the traffic by the compactness of the earth and the recently hewn branches on either side. She crouched to examine a rut that cut through the mud, running down the center of the trail. It was too deep and narrow to have come from a wheeled vehicle, but perhaps from a runner on a sledge or travois? Such as might hold a crate full of vials?
She squinted down the slope, then up the other direction. As Zirkander had said, the top was a vague destination since they didn’t have a map with an X marking the dragon spot. They had already reached an area that looked like the one in the mural, but the entire top of the mountain might house those flowers. At least if they headed to higher ground, they might find better views of the surrounding land.
“I think this is the most likely route,” Cas said.
Zirkander had been walking along the same trail as she, except heading downhill. He touched the ground and looked back. “You have the runner mark up there?”
“Yes. I was thinking it might have carried a crate.”
“Me too. Up it is, unless you’ve found something over there, Duck.”
“A few old footprints,” Duck said. “They were made by boots, not those hide shoes the natives wear.”
“Evidence of the same here.” Cas pointed to a two- or three-day-old print that had survived the rain.
Zirkander joined her, nodding up the slope. “We’ll see if we can follow that rut back to where it came from.”
This trail was wide enough fo
r two people to walk side by side. Zirkander stayed up with Cas while Tolemek and the others stretched out behind them. She caught Sardelle giving the dead tiger a long frown before following. Usually, Cas would stay in the back, to watch the route behind them, but she wanted to ask Zirkander something, something that it might be better if Sardelle and Tolemek didn’t hear. Sardelle, especially. The notion that she might hear Cas’s question, anyway, through Zirkander’s thoughts or however that worked, made her uncomfortable, but she was concerned that nobody had brought the subject up.
“Sir,” she said quietly, “about the dragon…”
“Yes?” He responded quietly too. Maybe he knew what she was going to ask and already shared her concerns.
“We’re here to get rid of the source of the dragon blood, right?” She might want to help Tolemek, as well, but it was her duty—being a part of Zirkander’s squadron—that had brought her here. “What happens if the dragon is truly an ally to the Cofah and voluntarily giving his blood? Do we… try to, uhm.” She wouldn’t normally hesitate to speak her mind, but the fact that everyone from Sardelle to her sword to Tolemek’s sister might be able to monitor her made her nervous. “Do we try to kill it?”
His face had gone grim before she had spoken the final question, and there wasn’t a hint of surprise in his eyes now. Yes, he had been pondering this question too.
“We have to eliminate the threat to Iskandia,” Zirkander said. “To have come all this way and to have… broken so many rules, to do anything less would be unacceptable. I don’t want to see the capital destroyed someday because the Cofah have unmanned fliers that can bomb the city without ever risking a Cofah life. And that’s only a hint to what they might be able to do with that blood. We have to assume that there are other labs out there and that the one we destroyed will be rebuilt.”
Cas nodded. Good, he had been thinking about this. “Two questions then. How does one kill a dragon? I know they didn’t have bullets back then, but from all the stories I’ve read, arrows and javelins didn’t do much. It was usually dragons that killed other dragons, wasn’t it? Some of them sided with humans, with specific nations, and fought with them, right? But if they’re as powerful as they sound, I’m not sure why they would have bothered.”
“We’ll have to ask our dragon expert about that.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder, toward Sardelle presumably.
Cas wished Apex hadn’t been sent back to Iskandia. For this conversation, she would rather talk to him than Sardelle.
“I’ll admit I’m hoping for a non-violent solution,” Zirkander said. “Like maybe we can use our pretty smiles and charisma to talk the dragon over to our side, or to at least convince it to leave the Cofah and become a neutral party.”
“Do pretty smiles affect dragons?”
“I don’t know, but the old songs claim the bard Frontier Festyr had the ability to tame a wild horse with a grin. They didn’t even take care of their teeth back then, so I ought to have the advantage.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “I want to see what the exact situation is before plotting dragon slayings. What’s your second question?”
“It’s tied in with the first. I get the sense that for Sardelle, the dragon, whoever he’s working for, is a relative of sorts. Or that she feels that way toward it. Will she allow us to… do what needs to be done?”
“I don’t think it’s likely it’s a relative, given that she’s from Iskandia and he’s… from here apparently.” Zirkander waved toward the top of the mountain. “Part of some long lost clan of dragons that’s been hiding out in this remote area, maybe. It’s more likely he’s related to that tiger back there.”
Cas grunted.
“But Sardelle is practical. I think if a peaceful solution can’t be reached, she’ll understand. And help us.”
Cas hoped that was true. She wasn’t as certain that Sardelle would be able to be objective about the dragon.
“Either way, you might not want to think about the possibility overmuch,” Zirkander said.
“Because Sardelle’s sword might hear?” The possibility of having it or Sardelle reading her mind made Cas uncomfortable.
“Because the dragon might hear. I figure if Jaxi can get in my head and root around, a dragon would have even less trouble. Just because it didn’t respond to whatever mental message Jaxi and Sardelle sent, that doesn’t mean it’s not aware of us coming. And if it’s aware of us coming, the Cofah might be too.”
“Comforting.”
A faint odor reached Cas’s nose. She held up her hand, stepped on a log, and peered into the brush to the side of the trail. In the thick shadows beneath the trees, it took her a moment to see anything besides leaves, but then she spotted another carcass, a deer-like creature this time. More of it had been devoured than of the tiger. Tastier meat perhaps.
“Another dead animal,” she said when she hopped down. The others had caught up.
“A lot of them here,” Duck said.
“I’m not sure two is a lot,” Zirkander said. “This is the wilderness. Animals kill and eat each other.”
Something plummeted from the sky and landed on the trail twenty meters ahead. Cas had her rifle pointing at it before she knew what it was, but she didn’t fire. There was no point. It was a big bird, a type of falcon, and it was already dead.
Duck cleared his throat. “Is three a lot?”
“Maybe,” Zirkander said.
“Does anyone worry that it might not be right healthy to keep heading up this mountain?”
“Trust me,” Zirkander said, “it’s on my mind. Every time I cough, I’m sure it’s going to end with me keeling over, after I go crazy and try to pummel everyone in the party.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Had he been coughing?
Tolemek lifted his chin. “You could try, Zirkander.”
While the men exchanged speculative stares, Cas headed toward a stream trickling past, parallel to the path. She had to clamber over a log, push past a thorny bush that wanted her rifle for a souvenir, and slip down the side of a mossy rock, nearly landing in the creek, but she made it. “Everything is a fight here,” she muttered.
She unslung her nearly empty canteen and dipped it toward the clear rippling water, but froze with its mouth an inch away. She looked up and down the stream, half-expecting more carcasses to be littering the area. They weren’t, but a new thought had jumped into her mind, chilling her. What if the water was the problem? What if it was the way the disease was being transmitted? Or what if it wasn’t a disease at all, but some poison or toxin that the Cofah were dumping into the streams as part of an experiment? An experiment that they wouldn’t undertake on their own soil, but one they might try on a remote island, assuming nobody would report their vile work here?
“Cas?” Zirkander called. “Are you coming back, or did you decide it was time for a bath?”
“No…” She stared down at her canteen, afraid now to fill it. But she had already filled it from water sources in the jungle. They all had. It might have looked clear, but Tolemek had said whatever was affecting those people’s brains was too small to see, even with his microscope.
“No, you’re not coming back, or no you’re not bathing?”
Foliage crunched behind her, and Duck and Zirkander came into sight. Cas stood slowly, facing them with her canteen.
“The water, sir. I realized we might have a problem.” Cas shared her thoughts, half hoping one of them would tell her that she was being silly, that diseases—or manmade poisons—couldn’t be transmitted that way.
Zirkander studied the stream and rubbed his jaw—he, Tolemek, and Duck hadn’t shaved for a few days, and Cas thought the scruff looked scratchy and grimy. “I would have expected Tolemek or Sardelle to mention something if we had to worry about the water, but maybe that was an incorrect assumption.”
“Where did they go?”
“They’re crouching over that dead raven, head to head, pointing and discussing it. I’m trying not to find their newfound int
erest in corpses alarming.”
“Scientists are strange,” Duck said. “Sorceresses, too, I suppose. But maybe they’ll save our lives.”
“I would be amenable to my life not needing saving.”
Cas frowned down at her canteen, puzzling over how to top off her supply without risking more exposure. Or did it not matter at this point? Had they already been exposed to what was making the rest of the jungle sick?
Duck took her canteen, stepped across the stream, and stopped in front of a bush with broad leaves. He folded one, held the mouth underneath it, and captured an impressive amount of water that ran off. “As long as it keeps raining every day, we gather water this way.”
“Did you lick the leaf first?” Zirkander asked. “You’re sure that’s not a poisonous bush?”
“I’ve actually been testing a number of shrubs along the way here—you can start out rubbing a leaf against your skin to see if there’s a reaction. And I’ve eaten some of the fruit. We have supplies for a few more days, but you never know when they’ll run out.” Duck nodded at the big-leafed shrub. “I wouldn’t eat this fellow, but the leaves aren’t toxic to humans.”
“I knew there was a reason I brought you along,” Zirkander said. “Those keen wilderness survival skills.”
“Yes, sir. They’re what keep me in high demand with the ladies back in the capital.” His mouth twisted wryly.
Back in the barracks, Cas had heard stories of Pimples’ dating woes, but Duck didn’t usually talk about his personal life. Or maybe she didn’t pay attention. She’d always had that tendency to focus on work instead of romance—especially the romantic lives of others—until a certain pirate had fallen into her cockpit.
Zirkander clapped him on the shoulder, filled his own canteen with the water from the leaves of an identical bush, then headed back to the path. Cas accepted her canteen from Duck, thanked him, and returned to find Tolemek and Sardelle standing up. Tolemek tucked something into an inside vest pocket. Some sample he had taken? Cas didn’t look too closely. Whatever Duck thought, she wasn’t interested in studying brain bits up close.