The Dive of the Blind Gorge

Julian did not pull his fingers away. Maya held his gaze for two dull heartbeats, feeling the thick heat radiating from the animal's scales as if an iron brazier had been lit in the middle of a saltpeter cellar. The reptilian beast snorted, and a gust of cold sulfur swept across their ankles with the slowness of a filthy tide. Beneath both of their boots, damp straw crackled, mixed with the rancid ox tallow that still greased their knuckles and which no amount of fine sand would manage to wash off before noon.

"The lower buckle is loose," she said, with a dryness that aimed to sound professional and managed to be nothing more than fatigue.

"It is not loose. It gives way because the leather is fifteen years old, Soler."

"Well, tighten it before Ordoño comes down to dock our pay."

Julian yanked on the straps with a dry grunt. The old leather groaned like bones bending against their will. A pine splinter had lodged itself under his right thumb fingernail during the scuffle in the stables, but he made no move to pull it out; he merely pressed his blackened palm against the beast's ribs, leaving a dull mark upon the earthy dampness of the scales.

It hurt, but he said nothing.

Up above, the iron gates leading to the launch ramp grated on their ungreased hinges. Instructor Ordoño did not bother to walk down the spiral staircase; he stayed on the masonry landing, wrapped in a brown cloak frayed at the collar and chewing on a strand of bitter bark that stained the corners of his lips an ash-gray. The man watched the pit with the mineral patience of someone who had seen forty classes break their teeth against the Kestrel Ravine and had long since forgotten the names of almost all of them.

"Six minutes and two seconds," Ordoño announced from the wrought-iron railing, with a voice that bounced off the vault with the hollow weight of a minor sentence. "At six-five I release the counterweight bolt. If the beast is still chewing on straw when the iron falls, logistics will dock both of you for the double harness and two weeks of rations equally."

"Let's go," Maya said.

She pulled two pieces of bitter bark from her doublet pocket, wrinkled and stiffened by the frost, and handed one to Julian without looking him in the face. The cadet snatched it out of the air with a sharp flick of his grease-blackened fingers. The resin numbed the tips of their tongues almost instantly, turning their saliva into a leaden paste that neither of them bothered to spit out. They pushed the ash-gray beast down the sloping passage toward the milky light outside. The reptile stumbled forward in heavy, sluggish, and stubborn lulls, as if it were not a war mount but a monumental piece of furniture that two clumsy servants were trying to haul down a narrow staircase.

The east ramp was nothing more than a tongue of slate jutting out over the abyss, a ledge carved out by pick and axe a century ago where meltwater had carved tiny channels that now shone like needles under a treacherous crust of thin ice. Beyond the edge there was no landscape: only a dense, white fog stagnating over the blind gorge, as if the world had simply ended right at the edge of the stone and the fortress builders had left the emptiness unfinished for lack of a budget.

They mounted.

The double harness was a crude contraption, designed in the years of the northern war by some saddler who despised pity with the same devotion he harbored for bronze rivets. Maya took the front position, wedging her thighs into the hardened leather guards; Julian settled behind her, pressed so close against her shoulder blades that his chest harness struck her dorsal anchorage every time the beast drew a breath. Julian's safety carabiner—a massive piece of hand-forged iron with three hand-filed grooves on the latch—snapped shut with a dull thud as it hooked onto the tarred hemp ring.

"Your foot is crooked in the left stirrup," Julian murmured against the back of Maya's neck, his breath coming in gasps.

"I know perfectly well how I place my feet, Vane."

"Your heel is going to jam if we veer to leeward."

"If we veer to leeward it will be because you insisted on pulling the short rein ahead of time. Shut your mouth and breathe deep."

Julian did not reply. He shrank down inside the collar of his rough wool doublet, where the billowing fog of his breath was already beginning to cake into white crystals upon the coarse fabric.

Ordoño dropped the release lever with a deliberate blow of his spiked boot. There was no bugle call or harangue. The academy's imperial manuals spoke of sacred oaths and the glory of the banner, but the reality of the peaks always smelled of rancid lard, moldy straps, and the indifference of veteran officers who only thought of returning to the hearth of the guardhouse before the bean stew grew cold.

The bolt falls. The granite counterweight plummets into its shaft with a shrill whistle of rusted chains, and the exit gate swings wide open into the fog.

The ash-gray beast launches itself. It neither roars nor seeks momentum: it simply rams into the air with the blind fury of a runaway siege engine. The four hind claws skate across the frozen slate with a screech that drills into the eardrums. The surface ice shatters into shards. The ancient stone slabs splinter into sharp fragments that rattle like shrapnel against the leather greaves and fly out into the void. The reptile takes two violent, asymmetric strides seeking purchase on the live rock, and suddenly the solidity of the ramp vanishes beneath its scaled belly.

They fall.

The air rips the breath from their lungs in a swipe of pure ice. They plunge into the fog like someone throwing themselves dressed into a pit of whitewash. Visibility vanishes completely: there is nothing left save the beast's dorsal ridge, which radiates a heat dense as an iron stove, and the mist tearing apart a couple of spans from their eyes. There is no sky, no bottom, no notion of a horizon; only a deafening howl that seeps through the seams of the leather and freezes the sweat on their temples in a matter of seconds.

Maya pulls the right rein to spread the wingspan and check the descent, but the animal shakes itself with a clumsy spasm. Behind her, Julian's heart gallops at a runaway, chaotic rhythm, while hers tries to maintain a long, heavy cadence. The misalignment shoots like an electric shock down the whalebone leather cinches: the dragon's left wing hesitates, folds into a blind angle with a dull snap, and the beast instantly enters a vertical tailspin, whirling around toward the invisible walls of the abyss.

"Follow my pulse!" Maya screams, swallowing a gust of fog that scorches her throat like ground glass.

"You're riding the reins too long!" Julian fires back, his voice broken by the wind. "You're steering us headfirst into the slate wall!"

"Release the auxiliary catch or we'll crash!"

"If I release the catch we lose the tail, idiot!"

The ash-gray plummets in an uncontrollable dive, lurching in ways that make the harness rivets grind against the ribs of both riders. The hurricane-force wind deforms their features, and the frozen mist piles up on their eyelashes until they are half-blinded. A colossal wall of black granite and fossilized lichens suddenly emerges from the mist: the rock brushes past the edge of the left membrane at less than three paces away, throwing off debris and an acrid smell of crushed stone.

Maya drives her heels into the double stirrups and throws the entire weight of her torso backward, slamming against Julian's sternum with desperate violence. The impact knocks the wind out of his lungs and grates against the iron of the buckles.

"Either you shift your weight with me or we smash our teeth against the wall!" Maya yells against his chest, her jaw clenched and swallowing the freezing wind.

Julian hesitates for a fraction of a second, but yields. He relaxes the stiffness in his shoulders, locks the rhythm of his lungs into the bellows of Maya's breathing, and pulls in unison on the second rein. The ash-gray responds: the arrhythmia of its dorsal musculature quiets down, the left wing unfolds with a crack of tautened tendons, and the beast cuts through the fog in a tense arc, stabilizing the glide flush against the thermal currents roaring at the bottom of the blind gorge.

For a few seconds, calm seems to prevail over disaster. Only the heavy beating of the membranes against the damp air mass and the regular snorting of the reptile can be heard, expelling hot sulfur that envelopes their numb legs.

Maya lets out her breath slowly, feeling the leaden saliva on her palate.

"You see how—"

A thermal shear strikes them from the bottom of the pit without the slightest warning.

It is a vertical, dry whip-crack, as if a colossal mace had struck the animal's belly from the depths of the ravine. The ash-gray rears up at an impossible ninety-degree angle. The double harness twists over the scaled back, creaking at every seam.

Julian's safety carabiner takes the full violence of the turn. The piece of forged iron, battered by fifteen years of saltpeter and camp fatigue, gives way with a metallic blast that sounds identical to the dry crack of a crossbow.

Julian is hurled out into the void.

Maya's hand, guided by a blind reflex before her brain can process the jolt, shoots backward and catches the frayed hemp dangling from the auxiliary anchorage at the exact moment Julian's boot slips from the stirrup. The jerk is brutal: her shoulder tendons groan and the rough rope bites into her skin through her soaked doublet.

Julian is left dangling in nothingness, suspended over three thousand feet of mist and invisible boulders. The wind whips his body violently, while the cadet's dead weight drags Maya sideways against the edge of the mount. She clenches her teeth, her forearm completely numb from the frost and her muscles burning in spasms, gripping the rope with white knuckles without knowing whether the next gust will finally tear her arm off or plunge them both down to the rocks below.