Blood of Tyrants (23 page)

Lord Bayan hesitated, but after a moment kowtowed again and left them, the practiced smile already falling from his face as he went out the door. They were left alone.

Laurence himself remained standing by the desk. Mianning had given him the shorter of his blades; it was hidden yet beneath his robes, thrust into the waist of his trousers—for what use a single blade might be.

Mianning tapped his brush against the inkwell, noisily; Laurence glanced down and saw upon the sheet a message written in clear simple characters:
Having gone to such lengths, they likely cannot let me leave alive
.

Laurence inclined his chin halfway to his collarbone slowly, only once, to show he had heard and seen. Any act so overt as this would put the conspirators far beyond the pale, and surely demand reprisals. Except of course, if their plot succeeded. Laurence met Mianning’s eyes, in defiance of all Hammond’s laborious tutelage on the subject: in the moment they were no longer marionetting the forms of Imperial etiquette, representatives of states, but mortal prisoners together, and in that exchanged look shared the understanding of their likely fate.

Too many witnesses had seen them carried away alive, surely not all of them suborned, and the bomb had not wreaked much damage inside the building; Bayan could not easily claim they had been brought to him already dead, victims of the assassin. But some
other deadly outcome might now be engineered: perhaps Mianning murdered by Laurence’s own hand, the supposed culmination of a British plot to slay the crown prince, and Laurence slain in reprisal and wrath by Bayan’s guards.

That would be a good story, and the Emperor would have little alternative but to accept such an explanation on its face to keep the peace in his own court, to gain the time for the laborious process of grooming another heir. And in doing so, he would be forced as well to treat the British as the murderers of his son and heir, despite their having come under pretense of seeking friendship: betrayers of the worst kind. There would be no alliance; instead the reverse entirely, all the wrath of the Imperial armies flung upon their party and on the
Potentate
in Tien-sing harbor, and every last man of their company put to torture and death for so outrageous a crime.

Laurence went to the door and looked out of the room. Two dozen guards were lined against the walls to either side. Too many to fight: if they wished, they could put a knife in Laurence’s fist, close their hands around his arm, and force him to thrust the blade into Mianning’s breast. They did not meet his eyes, nor even turn their heads to look at him. He closed the door again.

Mianning was taking his scribbled note off the scroll-handles and putting it to the lamp to burn; Laurence looked at it catching the flames, at the oil, at the jug of rice wine standing; and then he took up another of the blank scrolls from the table and unrolled it into a long sheet at his feet. Mianning watched him, and then silently joined him: soon they had laid all the scrolls down in rows stretching from one end of the long chamber to the other. There were two lamps burning in the room. They each took one and poured the oil out, spilling it in a glossy line across the parchment, and after that splashed on the contents of the jug of wine, and dropped the first burning sheet down. Blue flame went leaping across the wooden floor.

They took scraps of flame, burning pieces of paper, and spread the fire to the delicate scrolls hanging on the walls, to the silken
draperies and furnishings. Smoke began to fill the room; the furniture, beneath its enamel, was catching. Laurence covered his mouth with a fold of his robe and kept to the work; the fire was climbing to a steady yellow-red crackling in a few corners of the room as the seasoned wood took light. His face was streaming sweat already, and Mianning’s was made distant and blurred by the smoke: Laurence had the strange unpleasant itching of a memory he could not quite grasp, something he should have remembered—flame and smoke, voices shouting, a crammed struggling belowdecks. A ship in flames, a ship burning; but he could not remember her name, or what had happened, or when.

He pushed the sensation aside and flung cushions down into the building blaze, and then at last the door opened: the nearest guard looked in and cried out. Others came running to the doorway: Laurence leapt for the narrow entry with the short sword in his hand and stabbed the first man coming through in one eye, and got away his longer sword. Mianning took the other side of the door, his own blade drawn. They took the first three easily and backed the rest away from the door for a moment’s hesitation: realizing the opposition that faced them, the guards began to group themselves together for a united rush, to bull through the door.

But the smoke was thickening now, and the sickening charred smell of human flesh rose as corpses fell amid the kindling: the opened door had fed the fire with a rush of air, and flames were now climbing the walls, leaping for the rafters. The house had caught, well and truly. Laurence drew a gulp of air from the doorway and then, catching Mianning by the arm, pointed to the fallen guards. Together they stripped off swiftly the slain guards’ helms and retreated into the grey haze of smoke even as more guards came pouring through the door.

Laurence threw off his elaborate robes behind the veil of smoke, dropping them into another corner of the fire. The milling guards were shouting to one another as they swiftly organized a defense: already buckets of water slopping were being brought from the
kitchens. The disorder was great. Laurence was dizzy and ill with smoke and struggling not to breathe; stinging burning cinders were falling into his hair, onto his bare chest and shoulders. He jammed on his helm, saw Mianning doing so as well beside him; Mianning caught his arm and they pushed out into the hallway together through the din of shouting and panic, and snatched empty buckets from the serving-boys who carried them.

They ran through the hallway towards the back of the house, where more servants came staggering under tubs and buckets; shouts pursued them almost at once. Laurence knocked down a burly cook’s assistant who tried to thrust an arm in his path, and reaching for the pots and deep-bowled skillets standing on the stoves flung them behind him, leaving a greasy slick of steaming water and cooking-oil upon the floor. They burst out through the back door of the kitchens and were in the courtyard in back of the house, looking out upon the grounds; more guards were running towards them. Laurence did not suppose they could defeat so many; together he and Mianning drew their swords, however, and ran towards the stables. If they could but get horses—

Laurence stopped and caught Mianning’s arm to halt him; he flung off his helm and bellowed aloft, “Temeraire!” waving his hand; and the guards slowed hastily and backed away as Temeraire landed in a rush of thundering wings, in the courtyard.

“Whatever is happening?” Temeraire said. “Why is that house on fire? Laurence, you see I did
not
let them keep me from coming after you, this time: although they tried; some fellow of the guards even had the gall to say that one of our friends threw that bomb, if you can credit it. But you may be sure I quite silenced him: I caught the fellow who threw it, though he was trying to put off his clothes, and he was not from our ship at all.”

“ ’Ware above you!” Laurence cried out: the four scarlet dragons who had abducted himself and Mianning were descending towards him, claws outstretched, bulkier than Temeraire himself and plainly bent on his destruction.

Temeraire, startled, sat up on his haunches, fanning back his wings. “What do you mean by this?” he demanded, and then had to make a writhing leap, twisting himself away from their talons and teeth as he got himself aloft again, eeling between two of them. “Oh,” he said indignantly, “I do not know in the least what you are doing, but if you mean to get between me and Laurence—!”

He beat up and away, drew breath, and roared at the foremost beast coming towards him: that terrible earth-shattering resonance again, which Laurence heard yet lingering in his dreams from the moment upon that hill in Japan, familiar and dreadful at once, and the scarlet beast’s eyes quite literally burst in their sockets, blood erupting in a sickening rush. The dragon plummeted from the sky. It was already dead when its corpse smashed into the roof of the house and in its sprawl tore down half the north wall: smoke and flame leapt out around it like a massive pyre, and other rooms left gaping open to the air, cries of horror and men and women looking out in astonished dismay.

The three other dragons fell back in dismay and horror, and dropped to the ground cowering: they flattened themselves before Temeraire as he came down, and remained there with their wings nearly covering their heads.

Temeraire still did not quite understand what had happened. First that wretched assassin had nearly slain Laurence, and then the Imperial guards had flown off with him—Temeraire had tried to be understanding; Hammond had shouted urgently to him that they meant only to protect Laurence, to protect Mianning, and take them to a place of safety. That sounded well enough, until several of the courtiers had begun to cry out that the British had tried to kill the crown prince; fortunately Temeraire had already snatched up the bomb-thrower, as that fellow tried to creep out a side door, and he could see that it was only a fellow dressed in Western clothes, which were anyway not quite right: his too-long wool coat
dyed royal blue, instead of navy or bottle-green, and no waistcoat, and his hair lightened somehow; he had been wearing a dented hat drawn low down his face.

Temeraire had been forced to knock down several guards, who had tried to advance on Mr. Hammond and the rest of his party with swords, to make them all listen to him; he had even been forced to roar—awkwardly; it had brought down a portion of the roof—and it had required the better part of an hour to straighten out the matter, and persuade the Imperial dragons to take charge of the scene. “Mr. Hammond,” Temeraire had said, at that point, having handed over the assassin to Mianning’s guards with what he considered was extraordinary restraint; he had not killed him straightaway, “I perfectly understand those fellows did not mean anything terrible by carrying Laurence away, and I will try not to be
very
short with them, but they certainly ought to have consulted my opinion on the subject of his protection, and you may be sure I will make that quite plain to them: I do not mean to have any repetition of such a misunderstanding. Now, someone had better tell me which way they have gone.”

To the Summer Palace, someone had told him; but Temeraire remembered the Summer Palace quite well, and it was not due west of the city at all; they had
not
gone to the Summer Palace, so it was no use his flying that way. So he had been forced to chase them down directly, even though his flying strength was not entirely recovered; when he had gone out of the city limits, he had at last been able to distinguish them from the ordinary traffic, a cluster of specks in the distance, but he fell further and further behind. Once he had even lost sight of them entirely, and panic had clutched his breast a little while, driving him to a speed greater than he could comfortably maintain, until he had passed a small porter flying in the opposite direction who, chirping, had said, “Oh, they are going to Lord Bayan’s estate, I am sure: he lives just over those hills. He is very rich,” the porter added, “and a great servant of the Emperor.”

“I am very grateful to you,” Temeraire said, and, feeling relieved to hear that Laurence was in such good hands, he had flown onwards at an easier pace, though even more irritated at the guard-dragons: there was no call for them to have made such haste. They ought to have considered, it seemed to Temeraire, that in taking Laurence further away from him, they were
not
improving his safety: and where, he wondered, was Mianning’s companion? Lung Tien Chuan certainly ought to have been there, at their meeting, and Temeraire would have felt a good deal happier to rely on
his
judgment, and not some soldier-dragons who had not even managed to stop an assassin getting into the room in the first place.

But still he had not been very anxious, and then he had sailed into the courtyard to find the house burning, the red dragons attacking
him
of all absurdities, and to cap everything Laurence fleeing the disaster stripped to the waist; his beautiful robes were gone. “Good God, that does not matter,” Laurence said impatiently, when Temeraire anxiously inquired after them. “I imagine they have burnt by now; I dare say no-one has the least concern for my costume at present.”

To his horror, Temeraire could hold out no hope for their rescue: even as he turned to look, bitter smoke and flames were boiling out of the windows, licking from under the eaves at the roof wherever the scarlet dragon had not smashed it to pieces. He leapt to action at once, and worked as quickly as he could, calling out instructions to the other dragons, who had cowered down now and were not behaving so stupidly: soon they were ferrying great loads of water back and forth from the nearby pond, while Temeraire himself tore down and stamped out the worst bits of the fire, and roared down other parts of it.

But it was no use. One wing of the house they managed to save; all else was a smoldering ruin, damp and stinking, the body of the scarlet dragon lying amid it blackened and surrounded by puddles. All the household stood huddled aside and watched it collapse, women with children in their arms and the servants still clutching
dully at the small buckets they had been trying to use against the flames, and not even a scrap of silk left of Laurence’s gown. Lord Bayan himself, the owner, did not do anything to help; he only stood surrounded by his guards watching his house burn, and when the flames had at last been conquered, Temeraire turned back and found the lord prostrating himself before Prince Mianning.

“I am desolate that my house should have been the scene of such events,” Lord Bayan said, “when you ought to have been confident of safety here.”

“Oh!” Temeraire said, glaring down upon him; his eyes were smarting from the smoke and ash flying through the air, “you may well apologize: how dare you have taken Laurence away from me, and the crown prince, too, when this is the consequence? And I should like to know what those dragons of yours meant, leaping upon me when I came in; it is absurd to say they did not know who I was, or thought I should be a danger.”