“Even Seelenjägers?” Isabelle asked.

He laughed. “Especially Seelenjägers. Most of my kind aren’t interested in any animal they can’t take a spirit skin from, and we can’t become insects.”

“Why not?” She was always curious about his sorcery.

“Because insects are too simple. They don’t have enough scaffolding to support a human consciousness.”

“But a mouse does?” Isabelle asked.

“A mouse has a brain. It has emotions. It can think and learn at least a little. When I become a mouse, there are enough points of contact that I can hitch that wagon to my own mind.”

A host of follow-on questions queued up in Isabelle’s mind, but she bit her tongue on them. She turned her attention to Lael’s journal, the largest book in the bunch, and flipped through several years’ worth of notes until she happened upon a sketch of the Conquest where it came to rest, the crumbling remnants of the wooden ribs jutting up from the broken behemoth spine.

Anticipating discovery, she turned the page and scanned the headings: “Arrival,” “Base Camp,” “The Wreck,” “Foraging” … It was as complete a description of Lael’s exploration of Auroborea as she could have hoped for. The Gyrine had guided their clan balloon through the Bittergale. Unfortunately, the text gave no hint as to how they had done so. It was very much like Lael to completely discount the labors of others when recounting his tale. They’d sailed up a fjord into a sweltering green jungle and found the Conquest high up on a scarp. There followed several days of looting the wreck and repairing the clan balloon, during which time Lael himself had been primarily occupied with finding the Sanctivore, a quondam device he had then used to unleash a plague on Rocher Royale.

With better guidance, he might have succeeded, her chorus said.

Isabelle wished she could plug her mental ears, but then would she be able to hear herself think?

Only after he’d finally recovered his prize did Lael venture away from the base camp, and his description of his exploration was cursory at best. He mostly rattled on about bringing justice to his royal father.

And then the swarm had attacked, a cloud of insects that darkened the sky and drowned out the wind. The Gyrine Windcallers had fought back valiantly, summoning hurricane-force winds to blow the swarm away, but the bugs attacked from all directions, and the black swarm covered the advance of monstrous insects the size of oxen that snapped men in half with enormous pincers.

The Gyrine fled, suffering heavy losses. Isabelle ran her finger along one passage: “The Gyrine lost nearly a fifth of their number along with many officers and Windcallers, including one of the capitaines. They were also forced to leave most of the treasure behind, it being too heavy for the balloon in such poor condition.”

“So Dok wasn’t lying about that,” Bitterlich said.