Chapter Twenty-Five High Mountain Cradle
Twenty-Five
High Mountain Cradle
The army of the Magisterium had met the first obstacle that seriously held them back.
The desert of Karamakan, and the only-just-reachable red building inside it, lay to the south and east of the high range of mountains known as the Tien Shan, or Celestial Mountains, which extended many hundreds of miles to the east before descending to the level sands where the wandering lake of Lop Nor lay restlessly, protecting the desert from that side.
Delamare and his advisers had considered ordering his army to take the route through the Kazakh steppe north of the mountains, and approach the desert from the Lop Nor side, but decided against it.
It would be too long a march, hard to supply, and vulnerable to attack from the unpredictable monarchies of Mongolia and Chingizia, not to mention the Golden Empire of Cathay itself.
The other main route from the west involved using one of the passes through the Hindu Kush, the mountains between the western end of the Tien Shan and the start of the great Himmaleh range, and Marcel Delamare was perfectly conscious of the parallel from ancient history: Alexander of Macedon had conquered everything between Greece and the Hindu Kush, but had never gone further and into Karamakan.
Delamare had moved his headquarters east from Constantinople, moving with his main force across the steppes towards Samarqand, and spent hours at his campaign desk looking at a globe and unfolding his maps of the region and folding them again and re-unfolding them, but whenever he looked at them, nothing had changed: the mountains were still there.
For the first time he began to wonder whether his army might be a little overextended. There was a reason Alexander had had to turn back; geography was implacable.
Alexander had no flying machines, of course, and the Magisterium had every kind of dirigible and gyrocopter at its disposal.
Aircraft made short work of mountains. An airlift—a dirigible, say, moving a large body of troops through one of the high passes that marked the limit of Alexander’s reach—could put the Magisterium’s army down at the edge of the Karamakan desert in no time, and from there the red building was only a few days’ march away.
Except for the oghab-gorgs.
These ferocious and abominable birds haunted the entire range of the Tien Shan, as well as the western part of the Himmaleh.
They were fearless lovers of war, man-sized eaters of carrion and makers of it too; nor were they limited to the mountains, but, as Pan had seen, they sometimes ventured a long way west and north, attracted by the scent of shed blood, or the prospect of it.
They were cannibals, of course; they were killers and eaters of anything that lived and could move, or had died and moved no more. Biology was implacable too.
In short, the Tien Shan was more or less impassable. A few early travelers had managed to come out alive, but it was only the high prices chargeable in the west for things like silk and spice and rose oil that made the travel worth the risk.
Again and again his advisers said, “Avoid the mountains,” and again and again he pored over his maps, and read further reports from travelers and geographers and even plain storytellers.
“No aircraft has ever crossed the Tien Shan,” Delamare’s owl daemon reminded him. “The birds mob them and bear them to the ground. They are fearless, fanatical, deadly. And then there are the gryphons.”
“Gryphons!” Delamare, who rarely showed any sign of irritation or impatience, swept the map in front of him off the desk and pushed his chair back hard.
“Marcel,” his daemon warned, “you’ll bring that officious young man in. Move quietly.”
The officious young man was Felix Murad, the assistant secretary Delamare had brought with him from Constantinople. He was competent and efficient, and Delamare liked him, though he did anticipate things a little too eagerly.
“Yes,” Delamare said shortly. “I know. Perhaps we should send him to the gryphons as an emissary. They have a king, do they? Remind me. Some kind of hereditary ruler?”
“A queen, at the moment. Why not send for Murad in any case? He will know things we don’t.”
Delamare nodded reluctantly and rang the little brass bell on his desk.
“I wonder,” he said to his daemon before the young man came in. “Gryphons…”
A knock at the tent post, and Felix Murad came in, his sparrow daemon alert and bright-eyed.
“Mr. President,” he said, inclining his head respectfully.
“Come and sit down, Felix. I want some advice.”
He took a chair and Murad sat upright on the bench nearby. “Anything I can tell you, sir.”
“Gryphons. I know nothing about them, but they seem to have some kind of authority in the mountains. Firstly, do they exist at all? Or are they travelers’ tales?”
“Yes, they do exist, sir, but they have very little to do with human beings. They have their own realms of influence, which hardly overlap with ours. That is why they are often thought of as being entirely mythical.”
“So they are only partly mythical, is that it?”
“Mr. President, that sort of distinction is too subtle for a secretary of my rank to understand.”
Part of Delamare’s mind automatically sifted out the insolence in the young man’s tone, and forgave it; another part admitted the truth of his words. Really, Murad was quite like Olivier Bonneville, in his way.
“When the late beloved St. Simeon was alive, did the Patriarchy have any dealings with these creatures?” Delamare asked.
“Not in a full diplomatic sense, Mr. President. There was a mutual recognition, at a subconsular level, and occasional exchanges over matters of trade, especially where gold was concerned.”
“Gold?”
“The gryphons are apparently obsessed with it. It’s almost a religious thing with them. So if there was a dispute involving ownership, for example, of a sum of gold, the Patriarchy recognized the importance of some kind of diplomatic channel in order to minimize the…You understand what I mean.”
“Of course. I would expect nothing else.” Delamare tapped the desk with his fingers, left to right, right to left. Then he looked up and said, “Schreiber. Where is he now, do we know?”
“With General Bentinck’s force in Khorasan, sir. Making adjustments to the tonnerre double.”
“Send to him and order him to join me at once, with all his men and their equipment.”
“Ah. Of course. At once, Monsieur le Président.”
And Murad left, with the slightest possible inclination of the head, and the slightest possible smile in his eyes.
He was thinking that the sounds made by Delamare’s fingers tapping on the desk were not the same as they usually were, and as he closed the door he saw why: all the President’s fingernails were bitten to the quick.
Delamare himself had forgotten Murad already, and was thinking about Bonneville. Where was that boy, anyway?
—
At that moment, Olivier Bonneville was lying sleeplessly on a hard bunk in a filthy rural prison somewhere in the Lesser Caucasus.
He was cold and hungry and frightened. His captors hadn’t been able to explain why they had arrested him, but it was clear that they expected to make something out of it; if not loot, then a reward.
They had his rucksack, which worried him most of all. The alethiometer…Why hadn’t he thought of some way of hiding it, a long time before this?
Well, he had to get it back. And then resume his search, and find the girl, and claim the reward from Delamare.
He knew he was on her trail. He didn’t know much more than that, because his readings had been scrambled and confusing, and more than usually nauseating, but then he hadn’t had somewhere quiet to work in and time to ease his way back into the experience.
And now it was in the hands of these bandits…It was intolerable. He said so to his daemon, who perched painfully on the end of the bunk.
Finally he slept.
He woke up to a bitter morning and the sound of heavy rain outside his cell, which had no window, of course, just bars across an opening too small to crawl through even without the bars.
The hideous glare of a light directly over his eyes, the clattering of a key in the lock, a voice shouting at him in some barbarous tongue spoken by hogs with their throats cut, and a solid kick to his right leg.
“All right! All right! I hear you! Yes, I’ll get up! Don’t kick me again, you bastards! Oh, God, this is too much…”
He struggled up, fending off another kick, and tried to make sense of what was happening.
“Yes—yes—I’m awake—all right, all right! Yes! I’m sorry I did whatever I did to make you arrest me! I won’t do it again! Sorry, you lumps of shit! I apologize! What is this? What do you want?”
The guard held out a tin mug, which turned out to be too hot for Bonneville to hold. He put it on the floor quickly. Then the guard threw him a lump of stale bread, and barked a word or two, and left.
Bonneville pulled the blanket up around his shoulders.
It was horribly cold, and his head ached abominably, and he was bursting to piss.
He stumbled up and made his way to the bucket in the corner, but it hadn’t been emptied and the contents had frozen solid, so his urine splashed out over his stockinged feet.
His shoes, he remembered too late, had been confiscated.
“Aaacchh—filthy bandits—bastard swine—dogs—tapeworms—dung eaters—oh, look at this—oh, this is intolerable…”
He hung his wet socks on the window bars, mopped his feet with the blanket, and slouched back to the bunk.
He thought he might as well take a little warmth from the mug of whatever it was, discovered it tasted even worse than the bitter drench he’d had at the priest’s house, and simply held it between his palms for the warmth as he gnawed a small mouthful of gritty bread.