Ian dropped his hat. “A dragon. Flying.”
“I flew there myself and brought you back. You and the girl.”
“Your wurm has wings? This is why you have never invited me to see him.”
“In part, yes.” The Prince shrugged. “Since Happy Valley Mugwump has been a bit testy. He’s been growing, molting several times. I’d planned, in another month, to expand the wurmrest.”
Ian shook his head. He’d seen many a wurm in the army, but none had wings or could fly. He wanted to think the Prince was having him on, but the gravity underscoring the man’s words did not allow for humor. If Horse Guards knew… Suddenly Ian’s promise to keep the Prince’s confidence choked him.
The Prince nodded. “I know. My exacting a promise from you was not at all fair. If we are able to resolve the situation in the west, I shall release you from it. I make that offer freely, and do not hold it as a condition of your agreeing to help me.”
Ian bent and retrieved his hat. “What would you have me do?”
“Assuming the Shedashee tales are true, the Norghaest will attempt to establish a colony in the west. I am attempting to determine where. Our job will be to find it and destroy it. Because we only have one dragon, it will be up to us to prove as hazardous to the Norghaest as were dragons of old. If we cannot do that, and the Norghaest emerge from their subterranean nests, we’d best hope that they can neither swim nor sail. If they can do either, Norisle shall be their first victim in Auropa, and far from their last.”
Chapter Forty-six
1 April 1768 Bounty, Mystria
Owen firmly clutched the knob on the side of the rectangular surveying box, leaving his thumb free to stroke the single string stretched across the hole in its top. He waited for Hodge Dunsby, who stood a hundred yards further to the west, to raise his left hand. Once Hodge gave the signal, Owen raised his own left hand and strummed the string, producing a mid-range tone. Hodge paced to the south, then back to the north, and on a five count, Owen strummed the string again.
Hodge lowered his hand and took up a position about five feet to the south of where he’d started from. He brought both hands up, then returned them to the survey box hanging around his neck. Owen raised his hand, Hodge followed, and the mid-range tone sounded from Owen’s survey box. As Owen stepped south, the tone became higher, then returned to its original middle-C. He paced north and south again, narrowing the field down to the line on which the tone shifted. He stopped on it and the note remained consistently high.
He raised both hands. Hodge aped him, then each man stuck a stick in the snow. Hodge came trotting back to Owen, as Owen shucked his survey box and plotted the points on his map. He looked toward the horizon in both directions and estimated the angle in regard to landmarks. He added notes in his notebook, then pulled mittens on.
Hodge smiled proudly. “That’s a strong one.”
“Yes it is.” Owen smiled. “The Prince, he’s a fairly smart fellow.”
“I don’t like having much truck with Ryngian methods, but I do like being out here doing surveys.” Hodge nodded as he looked around. “Might learn to do surveying, I think.”
“I don’t know if I can spare you, Hodge.”
“Oh, I’ll always be there for you, sir.” Hodge looked away for a second. “It’s just, well, since being back, I’ve been seeing some of Felicity Burns there in town.”
Owen dimly recalled a slender slip of a girl, sitting with her family in Church. “Her father is a bookseller, yes?”
“Yes, sir; that’s where I bought the journals for this journey and last. Her brother Virtue courted Bethany Frost for a bit. I was thinking that if I had a career, then I might be able to ask her father for her hand, and he’d not think ill of me.”
Owen closed his journal. “That’s wonderful news, Hodge. If I can help in any way…”
“You have done, sir. Just the fact that you mentioned me so nicely in your book-she liked that.”
“Good. We survive what comes, you’ll get an even greater mention.” Owen laughed. “And I am certain you’re right. This land will have need of many surveyors. It’s a wise choice.”
“Thank you, sir. Shall we do more readings, or go back to camp?” Hodge studied the sky for a moment. “Going to be clear, which means it will be cold.”
“I think we go back now, start a fire, stay warm.”
“I’ll pack up then, sir.”
Back in camp, which consisted of a small lean-to nestled against the southern side of a cliff near a stream, Owen set about transferring notes into his larger journal. Prince Vlad had noticed that messages shifted register up or down depending on certain phenomena. Having the check number incorporated helped guard against errors in transcription. The Prince had also dictated that the messages begin with the same phrase, so transcribers could check that known value against what they heard, indicating if they needed to adjust their note values up or down. The Prince was even considering adding the means to quickly retune a thaumagraph so the correction could be done immediately.
Owen’s survey, and he assumed that he was not the only one doing such work, had showed two things. When messages flowed across lines-and rivers were the easiest to plot-or upriver, the notes moved lower. The Benjamin, being a broad and deep river, tended to push them lower than a shallow stream, and the stream’s effect might not even be noticed depending on how strong the sender was and the distance the message traveled. Long messages tended to have the tones even out.
If the message traveled with the river, the notes rose. A storm, depending on its ferocity, would make the notes rise, but also tended to mute the message, to the point where some notes might not get through at all. Some initial messaging trials with the thaumagraphs had produced evidence of the speeding and slowing effects of rivers, and they had detected something else which had been labeled ghost rivers.
The Prince’s initial thought was that the disruptions on dry land might have been at the site of ancient riverbeds which had since gone dry and had become overgrown. The difficulty with that idea was that these ghost rivers didn’t show up where rivers might have run. Instead of just trailing through a valley, they would cut across it in a way that water would never run. Moreover, they ran in straight lines from point to point, then broke at angles. Some seemed to be very broad, but then became narrower as they split, just to broaden again at another point where others connected up. And, like wet rivers, the ghost rivers definitely had a speed to them, but appeared to flow both directions simultaneously.
Hodge and Owen had been sent west into Bounty to map out rivers, streams, and ghost rivers to create an image of how messages would move over the land. A message that might take two days to go from Temperance to Plentiful, could travel significantly faster if the sending and receiving station were on the same ghost river line. While a message traveling from point to point along a ghost river might actually travel further than a direct-line message, the speed of transmission would still make it quicker, and tended to override interference from storms and streams.
To conduct their survey they’d started from the Count’s home and worked west, paralleling the Benjamin River. They would pick a point, then test for ghost rivers in a circle at one hundred yards. If they found something, they’d mark it, then test further along that line. When they lost any sign of it, they’d work to locate the split, then use that as a starting point to see where ghost rivers radiated from there. This method had sent them on a zigzag course to the west, and had produced a trickle of leads for ghost rivers shooting off in all directions along that path.
Owen had hoped the Prince would give them a thaumagraph to take into the field, but he didn’t have many of them, and didn’t want to chance losing one. Owen understood, but he wanted the Prince to get the information as fast as possible. As it was, they had one more day in the field, and had to be back to Temperance inside a week.
Not having a thaumagraph is likely best. Owen had been one of the first trained on the thaumagraph which, until November, had consisted of wheels that clicked and spun. Depending on the power of the person sending, the wheels might jump about, and recording a message required the operator to watch a wheel, then look at paper to
