Blood of Tyrants (40 page)

“What?” Temeraire said, gasping for breath, and then looked
up as a thrumming noise came sharply from overhead: more of the red dragons were wheeling into view, but these were not Fela’s beasts; these were Chu’s soldiers, their armor polished and fresh, gathered in two formations of six and nine.

“This way,” Chu said, and led Temeraire to a flattened peak, broken earlier by the divine wind, high enough to let them see the wheeling, fighting dragons clearly.

“Come upon their left flank,” Chu roared to the smaller formation, and “Zhao Lien, bar their escape,” he shouted to the leading dragon of the other, then sat back on his haunches with satisfaction as the dragons moved skillfully and methodically to begin bringing down the traitor-beasts. “Where are you going?” he demanded, when Temeraire would have gone back aloft. “No, no: there is no excuse for that anymore. We have won the battle: it is only a matter of time, now.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff to his neck in irritation, especially when he saw Iskierka dart by, flaming another two beasts. But he could not quarrel with it; they were winning, that was plain enough.

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, and to his alarm Temeraire saw him unclasping his carabiners, and Forthing and Ferris with him. “We must get down and look into those caves: we must find Tharkay. When the traitors see the fighting going against them, they might well kill him rather than leave him to be witness against them and perhaps General Fela himself. General Chu,” he added, “you would oblige me if you might send down some soldiers with us, from your beasts.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said unhappily as Chu roared the command to his dragons: the cave-mouth was indeed not at all large enough to let him or another dragon go inside. He had only just resolved not to condemn Laurence for wishing to go into fighting, but he had not thought that resolve would be put to the test quite so soon. “Pray be careful,” he said, steeling himself to it, and watched in anxiety as Laurence plunged within the caves, Ferris and Forthing on his heels, and a number of Chu’s soldiers with them.

And then he could do nothing but sit and watch the battle, and wait, while Iskierka and Lily and Maximus and Kulingile helped knock about the traitors, as they well deserved; Temeraire clawed the slope in frustration.

“Hm! I must have a better look at that fire-breather of yours,” Chu said to Temeraire, adding insult to injury. “It is the accepted understanding that they cannot be bred without a grievous lack of balance, but I see she is a most skillful flier. Her temperament, I have observed, is not ideal, but one may make some allowances. Where was she hatched?”

“She is Turkish,” Temeraire said, rather coldly, as Iskierka went showing away again with a great corkscrewing spiral turn, flame sweeping the air like a banner. “She is a Kazilik dragon. I suppose you are quite an expert, on these matters.”

“I am indeed,” Chu said, equably. “I am a minister of the breeding office, and I have served three terms as overseer of the Imperial breeding programme.”

The ground before the cave-mouth still smoked with the Longwing acid, several crates burnt through: Laurence caught a glimpse, in one, of balls of opium charred through and wafting a thick rope of pale grey smoke into the air. He plunged between them and over the deserted fortifications, dead soldiers sprawled over the ground, one with a face half-eaten-away and stiffened hands still clutching at his own head stared as he went past and into the darkness of the cave-mouth.

Laurence’s eyes took a moment to adjust: a few lanterns hung from a thin rope strung overhead, and a honeycomb of tunnels dividing away in front of him. “Sir,” Forthing said, “we had better mark the way we’ve gone.” He took down a lantern, and tearing it open fetched out the candle.

Laurence nodded, taking a piece of the candle. “Each of you take a side,” he said, “and do not go down more than five branchings,
for the moment.” He spoke grimly; if the tunnels did go so deep into the mountains, they might search months without finding a concealed prisoner.

He shouted Tharkay’s name, and called in English as he led the way down the first tunnel; distantly for a little while he heard Forthing and Ferris doing the same, until the rock swallowed their voices. He dragged the softened wax across the rough rock wall, at each division of the passage, choosing always the rightmost way; it left a smudge of pale yellow that showed clearly in the light of the torch one of the soldiers carried by his side. The wind currents brought other noises: he heard shouts and footsteps, echoing queerly along the hallways, and his mouth held the unpleasant taste of bitter smoke.

They looked into storerooms, mostly empty and disused. By any fourth or fifth branching, the tunnel would begin to take on more the character of what the place had once been, Laurence supposed: a mine, the tunnels rough-hewn and pickaxed; when they reached a dead end in one, the torch gleamed on a thin line of silver, the remnant of a vein pursued to its end.

In one chamber, somewhere near the third branching, they found a writing-table, with a handful of scattered letters and pen and ink: but old; the ink dried to a black crumbled clot. Laurence glanced at the topmost sheet, a work broken off mid-stream, and then held it to the soldier nearest him, an officer he thought; the man wore a mark of senior rank. “Can you make anything of it?”

The soldier studied it and said, “This is a letter written to Ran Tian Yuan: I believe he was a chief of the rebels,” in a woman’s clear voice. “He was executed ten years ago.” Laurence with a start looked at her: deep lines about her eyes, her face not very old but leathered from sun and wind, and a peppered scar of burnt-in powder upon her cheek.

The woman took up the papers and held them out to one of the other soldiers, to be bundled up together; she fell in again with Laurence as they went through the tunnels. Laurence glanced back at the other soldiers behind them. Their hair was bound up beneath
snug caps, with wrappings bound down beneath their chins, likely for warmth when aloft; in the dim light he could not tell whether they were men or women.

The tunnel died shortly after, and they retreated towards the entry, to take another branch; before they could go down this, footsteps came towards them running. Laurence was appalled to find the soldier thrust him behind her arm as they drew their swords, and another of the soldiers push through the hallway to take her side instead.

The enemy soldiers coming had a look of desperation, drawn blades wet with blood, and pulled up short to see them; then it was a sudden, close struggle in the passageway. Their numbers were even, Laurence thought, but he could not easily tell; the tunnel was too narrow to see clearly, and the soldiers at the front, of both parties, had dropped their torches to free their hands for fighting. He took a blow from a fist to his temple and shook his head to clear it; then thrust back high, his long blade coming over the other’s guard. Then he caught another arm descending, and the woman soldier drove her own blade, a shorter one, into the man’s arm-pit beneath his thick jerkin. She grunted abruptly with pain and fell: one of the enemy had thrust a sword into her thigh. Laurence stepped into the gap. He killed three more, and then a sword took him hot in the meat of his arm; he dropped back and let another step into his place.

Abruptly the enemy soldiers gave over the fight: they made one heaving push, and then withdrew hurrying down the hall. Laurence said, “Let them go.” Twelve lay dead in the corridor, and five of their own party. The waste of it made him sorry, with the battle above already decided. They bound up their hurts as best they could. The woman officer was limping; another soldier, Laurence thought a man, looked dazed: his cap and its bindings were wet through with blood, and a trickle coming down his cheek. Two soldiers stood with him; he swayed between them and did not speak.

Laurence looked down the branching they had been on the
point of taking: he wished to get the wounded to safety, but the enemy soldiers had been coming this way. “Come with me, if you please,” Laurence said, to two of the unwounded soldiers, one of them a torch-bearer, “and the rest stay here. We will have a quick look, then return to the entry.”

The passageway smelled of smoke: burning wood, a torch, acrid. His head ached. Blood was wet and sticky upon his arm and on his fingers, and the orange glow of torchlight played from behind his back and over the corridor walls, leaping like a bonfire. There was a strange familiarity to it: the narrow walls in around him. And when he came to a wooden door set in the wall, he put his hand upon it and pushed it open.

There was a room, and a pallet inside it; a small torch burned low in a socket upon the wall. A man lay upon the cot, his face bruised and battered, his hands curled against his chest bloody: and Laurence knew him; knew him and knew himself. He remembered another door opening, in Bristol, three years before, and a voice asking him to come outside his prison, in a Britain under siege.

“Tenzing,” Laurence said, and, as Tharkay opened feverish eyes, went to help him stand.

“L
A
G
RANDE
A
RMÉE, HE
is calling it,” Tharkay had said, lying exhausted and thin against the cushions which propped him, in Laurence’s own camp-bed: they had carried him gently and carefully dragon-back, in a hammock of netting, back from the caves. “They have been mustering all winter; he will march into Russia in three months—in two—” He stopped, breathing hard, and asked, “What is the day?”

“It is the third of May,” Laurence said, quietly. The abuse had not marked Tharkay excessively: fortunately they had wished to preserve the appearance of a more honest confession, perhaps, when they had wrung one from him. But he had been lashed more than once, judging by the half-healed marks; there were burns upon his limbs as from a hot poker, and his hands were badly mangled.

“In a month,” Tharkay said. “He will march in June; that was our latest intelligence.”

“With near a million men?” Laurence said, low.

Tharkay nodded, minimally. “And some hundred dragons.”

It was indeed a message terrible enough to bring a man racing flat-out halfway around the world. The largest army ever heard of, and with it Napoleon meant to crush the last embers of resistance out of Europe: first Russia, and then he would turn all his attention to the Peninsula. Hammond was already rising, pale. “I must go speak with General Chu at once, and with Qin Mei: we must—these
events must require our immediate return to the capital. Oh! We must return at once.” He left unceremoniously, and Tharkay closed his eyes.

Laurence sat silently with him in the growing dark of the tent, groping back through patchwork scenes of memory. He remembered the
Goliath
sinking more clearly now; he remembered the faces of the officers at his court-martial; he remembered the cold bleak desperation of the flight across the Channel, to take the plague-medicine to France.

“I hope you will forgive my mentioning it, Will,” Tharkay said, eventually, rousing Laurence from his reverie. “—I recognize there is a certain pot-calling quality to my doing so under the circumstances, but have you noticed that the top of your head appears likely to come off?”

Laurence put up a hand: he had taken off his hat. The scalp-wound had crusted over, and the bandages had come loose in the fighting; he had not had an opportunity to repair them, and the scabbing made a gory line of dried blood around half his skull. “It is only an inconvenience,” he answered. “Will you try and take a little wine?”

He eased Tharkay up, and gave him the glass; Tharkay held it awkwardly between his bruised and bloody hands, drank thirstily, and sank back again.

Temeraire peered in through the tent-opening, with one enormous platter-like eye. “I have seen to General Fela,” he said, with an enormous and glittering satisfaction which made unnecessary any questions about that gentleman’s fate, “—General Chu acknowledged I had every right to do it; but how is poor Tharkay?”

“Not yet expired,” Tharkay said, dryly, without opening his eyes again. “Though I would be glad of some rest; and that, I think, I cannot rely upon.”

“No,” Laurence said, quietly. “We will have to leave at once; and, pray God, bring some of these legions with us.”

•  •  •

“Be careful, there,” Iskierka called, a hiss of steam escaping her spikes, and Temeraire craned his head over a little further, just to be sure there was not good cause for her concern. The egg was supported in a nest of furs, within a well-tried net, and there were three dozen handlers directly beneath it, their fingertips lightly touching the surface, in case the net should break, but still anything might happen; one could not be too careful. Temeraire was glad when the maneuver was complete, and the egg transferred at last from his back to the waiting, ceremonial dais where it would await its hatching.

He nosed at the dais again, to be sure it was just the right temperature. With his head close, he could hear the low gurgle of water running through it, which the head of the Imperial household had explained to him brought the heat, from a cistern below. It was indeed very pleasantly warm without being excessively hot, and a gentle breeze played through the hall in which the egg now stood: the central hall of Prince Mianning’s palace, where they had first made their bows on arriving in China; but in attendance now there were only Mianning’s trusted retainers, as well as Mei and a handful of Imperial dragons, and Temeraire’s own mother, Qian.