A Single Pulse in the Storm

Maya pulls with her entire body. The raw hemp rope slips and bites into the cracked leather of her gloves. It smells of the rancid beef tallow reluctantly smeared on the girths before dawn and of the sulfurous, cold, and metallic stench that the reptile expels through its nostrils every time it loses lift in the void.

The left wing flutters. It folds halfway, clumsy and out of sync, like a sail with its main halyard snapped in the middle of a sleet storm.

"Julian!" she shouts, though the gale drives the words right back down her throat.

Julian doesn't answer with full sentences. He gives a blind yank upward. His face is smeared with dirty sleet; the bitter bark he chews to keep his head clear stains the corners of his lips a blackened brown. He kicks at the air, searching for a foothold that doesn't exist three thousand feet above frozen air. The broken carabiner, with its three hand-filed grooves striking falsely against the chest harness, rattles with a hysterical click at every convulsion of the descent.

"The stirrup," he says, or rather spits out between his teeth. "Lower the stirrup, Soler!"

Maya doesn't think.

She slides her left boot half a span toward the animal's burning flank. The ashen beast's spine boils beneath the roughness of its earthy scales, a damp mass radiating heat like an iron blacksmith's plate abandoned in the snow, in wild contrast to the cold that cakes her eyelashes and stiffens the collar of her coarse wool doublet. Maya unlatches the strap with her heel and shoves the leather loop toward the abyss.

Julian catches it on the fly with his right hand—the very hand dragging that pine splinter under his thumbnail since dawn—and climbs up by pure arm strength, panting with the dull fury of one who refuses to swell the cloister's casualty list. He scrambles up, without a shred of the gallant posture mandated by Marshal Gault's plates, crawling along the backbone until he lodges his knees with a dull thud behind her.

The dragon tosses its head.

The mountain closes in on them. The slate slabs of the blind gorge's walls blur past at less than ten paces, gray, polished by centuries of blizzards and dripping with icicles that shatter with a dry hum at the passage of the wings.

"Breathe," Julian says against the nape of her neck.

His breath is a warm gust of chewed resin and fatigue.

"Shut up and grab the left latch," she replies, though her wrists tremble with a vibration she cannot shake off.

"If we don't go in together, that membrane won't open, Maya. We smash against the lower parapet."

He was right, of course—the academy chroniclers always omit from their parchments the petty humiliation of depending entirely on the person you swore to surpass in the ranks. For three years they had disputed every tenth of the list with scowling looks in the mess hall and muffled shoves in the armory; now, Julian's weight against her shoulder blades was the only anchor keeping gravity from erasing their names from the slate.

The left wing remains dead, dragged by the tail's vortex, and the sky does a cartwheel toward the gray of the rocks.

"Three," Maya counts aloud.

"Two," he follows.

They close the distance. Julian's chest presses against Maya's back through the layers of coarse cloth and greased leather. She holds her breath, fixes her gaze on the strap adjustment ring, and waits for the rhythm of Julian's breathing to match hers.

It's an idiotic second, almost ridiculous.

They inhale.

The air cuts sharp, as if swallowing shards of crushed glass in a roadside tavern.

And they yank in unison on the leather latch commanding the membrane.

A tremendous crack resounds in the ravine, identical to the snap of a bale of linen tearing as it falls from a cart. The left wing stretches out abruptly, tensioning the cartilaginous ribs. The reptile arches, halting its free fall with a jolt that makes every joint of the harness creak and climbs back up the abyss mere meters from the stony floor below.

A flock of black jackdaws stirs the fog around them, screaming and scattering into the gloom of the gorge's depths.

Maya lets out her breath slowly. Her eyelashes feel heavy, laden with microscopic drops turned to hard frost.

"That was..." Julian begins, but the sentence frays into a dry cough.

"Not a word," she cuts him off, steering the mount toward the opening leading to the armory courtyard.

"I was only going to say that the buckle of your doublet left a bruise on my ribs."

"You deserve it."

"Probably."

The silence of the heights is not like the silence of closed rooms. In the heights, as the old scribes who spent their lives noting deaths in ledgers no one ever reopened well knew, silence is not the absence of sound, but the constant hum of the wind erasing any thought that doesn't serve to stay alive for five minutes longer.

They flew now in a long, tense glide over the Valley of the Spires. The reptile kept its wings steady, soaring on the thermal currents rising from the fortress furnace boilers. Its back, warm and earthy, rose and fell with a rhythm that no longer threatened to capsize them.

Maya looked down. The Academy walls were no bigger than the meticulous drawing of a fortification in the margin of an instruction codex: gray walls stained with saltpeter, dark tiles, and the main courtyard covered by a pale crust of morning ice.

In the barracks, the squads would be breaking hard bread with their hands and cursing the damp firewood. It was a banal certainty, but it brought her back to earth with more force than any maneuver.

Winning was no longer about getting there before anyone else, but about touching ground without having dropped the person who came with you.

Marshal Gault had filled entire volumes with scholarly theories on individual glory and the supremacy of the front line, but Gault hadn't had to hold a rival dangling by three fingers over a sea of sharp rocks while his mount rolled sideways. Men's defeats are rarely recorded by their true causes; they are jotted down in gall ink on clean vellum: snapped cable, stirrup failure, loss of altitude. Nothing is said of the rotten wood of the handholds, nor the cold in the knuckles, nor the stupidity of pretending to fly alone when the rope measures barely two spans.

"We're losing lift on the starboard side," Julian said behind her, in a calm, almost bureaucratic tone, readjusting his doublet collar to fend off the freezing air.

"I know. Shift weight to the right stirrup. Slowly."

Julian obeyed without argument. It was a greater miracle than the takeoff itself.

"The entry's going to be messy," he muttered. "There's frost on the guard ramp."

"Hold on to my belt. And don't yank my harness again or I'll throw you into the moat myself."

"Noted."

The final descent is a flash of stone and snow.

They dive toward the northern parapet of the armory courtyard. The ashen reptile folds its membranes fifty yards from the ground, turning into a heavy dart cutting through the mist.

Below, instructor Ordoño's solitary silhouette stands out next to the slate wall, motionless like a supply gargoyle with his brown felt cloak crossed over his chest. He doesn't raise his arms. He gives no guiding signals. He only watches, his jaw working lazily on his habitual piece of bark.

The ground rises to meet them at a maddening speed.

"Now!" Maya screams.

The beast's four hind claws impact against the frozen slate slabs. The sound is a sharp, crisp crunch, a detonation of splintering stone that sends black fragments and cold sparks flying in all directions.

The reptile doesn't brake: it skids sideways, belly flattened against the paved ground, kicking up a dust cloud of old snow and rotted mud. The screech of bone and claws against rock reverberates through the deserted galleries of the cloister.

Julian grips the front girth with white knuckles. Maya sinks her heels into the leather loops, withstanding the centrifugal onslaught that threatens to tear them from the mount and hurl them against the outer railing.

The reptile halts abruptly against the armory courtyard parapet with a stone screech echoing through the arcades. In the back, by the wall, instructor Ordoño passes a damp rag over the slate and erases two names without looking at them. Julian dismounts first, staggering barely over the ice-covered cobblestones, and hands Maya his still-warm brass flask.

"There are four of us left on the list," he says. "Drink before he finds out we're still in one piece."