Ian

The Royal Mountaineers Guild of Nidaros had its headquarters in a building that looked to me like a small palace. The front was a grand colonnade, the doors were at least nine feet by six feet each, and inside, everything was panelled in reddish wood polished to a high sheen. Old paintings with ostentatious frames glowered from every wall.

The reception area wasn't that large, but beyond the receptionists' desk I could see through to a main hall with a black-and-white checked floor where two wide staircases ascended to a mezzanine, all under a glass dome that pulled in all the sunlight anyone could ask for. From that space echoed the chatter of a tourist group on an official guided tour.

Trying not to look too scruffy, I walked up to the receptionists' desk. There were two young ladies behind the desk, respectable sorts with smart glasses and blouses who were probably well on their way to graduate degrees of some sort. The one who looked up to greet me spoke crisply, but she didn't seem unfriendly. "Hi, how can I help you?"

"Hi, I'm looking for information about dragons in the Kölen Mountains?"

Her face tightened, finely-sculpted eyebrows pinching together. "I'm sorry, we cannot and will not support expeditions to capture wild dragons."

I managed to turn my surprised gulp into a bit of an ugly laugh. "Capture? Oh, no, it's nothing like that, I'm a journalist, I'm trying to get an expert comment for an article about the race last weekend."

"Oh, excuse me," she said, making a similarly awkward noise.

"Don't worry about it. You've had a lot of requests?" I leant on the counter, pulling my shoulders in so I didn't look like I was trying to tower over her.

"You'd have been the fourth today." She treated me to a more composed smile. "Let me see if Dr. Nywur is available, she's probably the one you want to speak to."

I found myself in an office that lacked the grandeur of the entrance. The carpet was scraggly grey, and so was the light through the scratchy old blinds on the window. Shelving covered most of the walls, so that sitting in the middle of the room felt like being inside a cocoon of books, folders and loose papers.

Dr. Nywur was younger than I'd expected, with an old-school blonde perm and bags under her eyes. She had the brittle charm of someone suddenly much closer to the centre of an event than she normally expected to be, and I sympathised. Her Nordin accent was distinct, but nothing like Lachlan's stiletto purr.

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She said, "You want to know about the Gutefjellet flight, right?"

I nodded. A journalist arriving today – already five days after the race – would expect her to have spoken to several of his colleagues already and more or less have her spiel sorted out. My specific interest in the case could wait until I had a sense of how much she knew about Phoebe Tenryuu.

"It's an interesting one. We can't track every flight up north, beyond Gutefjellet the terrain's too wild and tagging wild dragons… you know it costs us forty thousand Royals just to tag one?" She didn't wait for my surprised face, but that explained the receptionist's initial hostility at least. "Anyway, it's rare for a flight to range this far south, especially mature drakes. We'd expect them to have established territories and ranges by that age.

"If you're here to ask about whether the IL dragon, Soot, comes from the same flight, I'd say it's eighty, eighty-five per cent likely. We're still waiting for the high-fidelity recordings of the calls, but those are definitely greetings, not challenges."

"The calls?"

My question knocked her off her stride for a moment, then she caught herself. "The dragons' cries and roars. Dragons don't have what we'd regard as a fully-formed language, but there's a lot of depth to the sounds they can make, and we have a pretty good idea of what they mean normally. Like I say, we're not a hundred percent yet, but we think we've isolated an ultrasound seeking call from the wild flight before any of the racing dragons even noticed them. Clutch bonds are strong, they might well have sensed that Soot was in the area and come looking for him."

I nodded, scribbling quick notes on the pad in my lap. I didn't need them but it was part of the journalist act. "So you think it's likely that Soot was tamed from the wild?"

"I didn't say that," she said, in the infuriating manner of an academic who thinks of every adult they meet as an errant student. "They're probably his clutchmates. Whether that means he was tamed from wild or not depends on whether the clutch was wild."

It was hard not to give too much away. "You think they might not be?"

"Like I said, it's interesting. It's rare for a clutch to stay so close together into adulthood, and to move this far south as a group." She uncrossed her legs and leaned towards me. "Listen, I can't say this on the record, but if I can trust you to keep my name and the Guild out of your article..?"

Pleased to find myself making a promise I could actually keep, for once, I made a show of closing my notepad and pocketing my pen.

Keeping her voice theatrically low, clearly not at all used to subterfuge, Dr Nywur said, "At first I thought it had to be that when this rider roped Soot, she disturbed the flight's territory and they migrated because of that. But then I thought, sometimes the mafia raise lunar dragons as pets. What if this is an escaped mafia clutch?"

"Escaped?" I hugged myself against a sudden chill, not entirely acting. "So how did one end up in the Imperial League?"

She sat up again. "That's what I'd like to know. If you figure it out, please send me a copy of your article."

"Got any idea where I might start looking?"

"Dragons in the Imperial League have to be properly registered. No-one in the sport will give you the registration information, but there are only so many vets in Norda who can register a dragon. If you can find the vet, they might be able to confirm when he was registered at least."