Chadwick Yates and the Ascent of Dolymtiud: The Adventures of Chadwick Yates, #4

By Bradley Verdell

“If it’s meaning you seek, there’s no better place to be than here, or perhaps, up there.”

A Shining Mountain.

Mt. Dolymtiud: the roof of Tanzia and the home of the godlike Altaicans. Their motives inscrutable, they have invited Yates and Sharp to the majikal palaces at the summit, where the House of Knowledge lies. But reaching the top quickly becomes more dangerous than either imagined. Hunted by pack after pack of Servants, they must battle the cold, the altitude, and the pursuers of Maraa that hound them ... without any help from above.

About the Series

“Yates shouldered his shotgun and poured cartridge after cartridge of triple-aught shot into the minotaur. The monster howled and turned to face him, ruby eyes alight like coals.”

Monsters and elephant guns face off as Ambassador Chadwick Yates and Navy Commander Thurston Sharp explore the Forbidden Continent of Tanzia. The pair must adapt to the curious cultures of Gremlins, Faeries, Anurans, and others to make allies, and fight off the evil creatures that serve an ancient sorcerer.

The Adventures of Chadwick Yates is for readers who love action in exotic locales. The series blends the Lost World literary genre of Indiana Jones and King Solomon's Mines with the magic and monsters of epic fantasy.

Featuring real 19th century gadgets and a gorgeously-realized world, the series was inspired by such works as Allan Quatermain, Sherlock Holmes, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Heart of Darkness, The Most Dangerous Game, and The Lost World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bradley Verdell
• Release date: Oct 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536543537

Book preview

Artwork and Lore

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For a collection of illustrations, including the world map, races, firearms, potions, and majik sigils, please visit www.chadwickyates.com. The website serves as a field guide to the world of Chadwick Yates, featuring: Weapons, Equipment, Majik, Monsters, Locations, Races, Characters, Cavendian History, and more.

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Your ship awaits. Enjoy your expedition.

Foreword:  On Diplomacy and Violence

By Mr. Thurston Sharp, former commander in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy

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The good editor of these special editions, Mr. Kingsford, tells me that my last tale has received great comment, both due to those details of the Anuran fortifications which seem fanciful and to the absence of violence, which I had led readers to expect with my earlier narratives.  With reference to the former, I have nothing more to say, as I have already passed my word of honor, and that shall have to suffice.

Let me say, with reference to the latter point, that it is my aim to detail the many challenges former ambassador Yates and I faced and the many remarkable facets of culture and geography that we came to learn.  Perhaps our greatest triumphs were overcoming ancient majikal beings with bullets, but these were hardly our most frequent successes. 

Though our run-ins with Servants were more regular than I had imagined they would be, we far more often did battle with hordes of buzzing insects, blisters, the furious sun, long marches to fresh water, walls of communication with the indigenous, and days of dripping rain.  These are not battles worthy of the poet’s pen or the evening reader’s perusal, what with so many sensational adventure novels sold at the newsstand for a shilling.

But for those who have experienced the same, they will know that the humble work of wilderness survival strengthened our wills and our bodies more than any shootout with monsters could. As any hunter knows, a fine eye for aim is worth little if it does not sit above the sturdy legs of a woodsman, yet we do not write books about the importance of walking.

The shot is but a single percent of the big game hunt. The hours of slow, careful creeping, glassing, and stalking form the largest amount of the endeavor, but we tell only of the shot.

Let my tale of the Anuran Contest stand as an example of the masterful diplomacy of Mr. Chadwick Yates, for creating good relations is far more complicated than fighting.  Value it for the details showing how Mr. Yates gained the trust of the most guarded and most distrustful race on Tanzia by painful work, sportsmanship, rapid adaptation, and his prior connection to the Altaica.  He nearly drowned to discover what we did. The whole episode of how he got us within the Anuran sanctum was really much more impressive than mere martial skill.

Let the reader who has no interest in the nuances and finer points of diplomatic technique take comfort, however.  The account I now put forth I find to be full of violent struggle.

It also changed my life in a profound way.

Chapter One:  The Sky Altar

That we would be in such terrible and prolonged danger was wholly unexpected, for to me it seemed the land between the Anurans and the mighty Altaicans would not be a place for hostiles to dwell.  I worried only about the long and weary climb up to the summit of Dolymtiud, where Yates had been before.  I expected only a test of my knees and my lungs, a long and miserable plodding up ridge upon ridge, rise upon rise.  I hadn’t done much mountain travel in the Navy. Yates, on the other hand, had lived years without level ground under his feet.

Yates told me of his first ascent as I sat shaving. I did this while straddling a log over a small stream. I was observing myself with the bottom of a stainless pot which the Faeries had charmed to always appear polished. The reflection was unclouded, and in the pure light of morning, I was cut not once by the straight razor, ragged as my beard had become.

It’s 20,341 feet at the summit, Yates said, though we’ll reach the Altaican Palaces at just over 19,000 feet.

And how on earth could you know that? I asked.

They told me.  And I have my trusty aneroid barometer, though it’s less exact than an Altaican guide.

They guided you, then?

Oh heavens no.  Scariest time of my life, it was. Well, not as scary as my first visit to the Gremlins, but I plowed up Dolymtiud without invitation alone the first time — took me seven days.  I was in a haste to get up, get to my goal, and get the hell down.  I think we’ll shoot for longer, nine days or so should do it.  The first time I went with the barest supplies and only two goats.  We’ll weather the time on the mountain better with one another and with better supplies, so let our journey be a bit longer, a bit slower, and much more comfortable.

Is there a path of level ground?

Hardly.  It’s all rock, scree and boulder. I mean that’s under all the snow, mind you.

Where shall we camp?

Any flat spot we can find. We have the better weather on this side of the mountain.

What’s on the other side of it, then?

The Inub Plains, Commander, and Imortum beyond that — the sorcerer’s land.  Once we get onto the western slopes, you can see a temperate land which was all fields, gardened by his slaves. With binoculars, you can examine it minutely.  There are temples of black majik scattered about too, from whence the Servants issue forth. They are where the slaves were finally sacrificed when they were no longer useful, or so I’m told.  Maybe that’s where he got some ingredient for his Servants.  To think his human, Faerie, and Anuran slaves tended the sorcerer’s livestock, and yet they too were a kind of livestock or crop, forced to breed, forced to ripen, only to be plucked and squeezed like grapes for wine. They were used in the crafting of monsters.

Your words make me shudder, Yates, I answered, suiting the action to the word.  Speaking of Servants, did you encounter any Servants on your first visit?  Surely the Altaicans keep them off their territory.

All Tanzia is Altaica territory, and yet there are Servants everywhere.  Altaicans roam where they will. So do Servants. I shot a dark hound on the third day of my first journey up.  It was out of order and straying, no doubt.  It rushed me from seventy-five yards across a scree slope. When it got close enough, I blasted it with Ol’ Brownfield here, and its mangy hide rolled out of sight.  I never got its eyes.  I reckon the sapphires are still lying on a ledge somewhere, to be found by another explorer, another day.  He’ll get a shock and no mistake.

I went back to my shaving, thinking mournfully about the previous two days we’d spent with Faeries, fattening ourselves on sweets, sleeping in tree hammocks in the night breeze, and preparing for our ascent of the great Mt. Dolymtiud.

We had purchased two watertight casks of nutritional crackers, each a bit larger than the brandy keg carried by a St. Bernard.  They were bland but appealing in the way of a graham cracker, and they could give us a constant snack on our way up, as well as impetus to drink, which Yates said would be critical in the cold.

I had rather enjoyed being Yates’ superior in the water — while rafting the White Goln and exploring the Anuran world — but here I was outmatched by Yates.  I was a boy of the Cavendian woods and forests, with its ivy, its hemlocks, its alders, its boxes, and its beeches, but I had never been an alpinist.  Whatever Yates advised, I determined to do, for all I knew of the great mountains was that they often collected the bones of venturesome climbers.

With the crackers and everything else, I did not assert any opinion, but let him do the purchasing and outfitting.

In Cavendia, tinned steel cans preserve meats, fish, and vegetables, the staple of soldiers and the last resort of lost seamen.  Such first-rate groceries were not available to us.  But on Tanzia, a Faerie named