League of Dragons (25 page)

This decided the matter; Brouilly said to Aurigny, “My God! What matter if they do go free, if the Emperor is lost?” and deserting their prisoners, the Guardsmen turned and rushed up the stairs they had just descended, going in leaps and bounds over the smoke that came rolling down the stairs to meet them in eddying waves.

“We seem to be abandoned to our own devices,” Tharkay said. “May I suggest the nearest window, however, in preference to a door? I will take being singed over choking.”

Laurence halted in the landing, halfway to following him, when a dreadful thought struck: “The child,” he said abruptly, as Granby and Tharkay turned to look back at him. “The Emperor and Empress meant to dine with us; the boy would have been in the nursery by now.”

The smoke was growing ever thicker as they forced their way up, past the torrent, back to their own landing. Men and women were running down the stairs in a frenzy to escape, coughing and half-blind. Laurence stepped into the hall to seize one of the enormous vases along the wall, full of flowers; he flung the flowers down and wetted himself and his cravat, wrapping it over his face, and handed it on to Granby and Tharkay.

“I suppose this is a judgment on me, for saying I should be grateful for any excuse not to go to dinner,” Granby said, grimly, dousing himself thoroughly. “Let's hurry: I am damned if I am going to die trying to rescue the crown prince of France.”

They went up another flight. In their rooms they had now and again heard a noise of childish wails and nursemaids singing, coming from above; now they ran down the halls, opening every door, until they found a room strewn with toys: the curtains ablaze and the silken carpet beginning to catch, and the loud determined cries of a distressed child coming from behind another door.

While Tharkay and Granby took the bottom edge of the carpet and dragged it away from the flames, folding it double and stamping upon it, Laurence ran to the inner door and threw it wide to find the bedchamber thick with smoke: one of the nursemaids lying on the floor by the window screaming, on the sooty wreck of a blanket that been used to smother her, her hair blackened and her blistered hands covering her face, while another huddled against the back wall with the crying child in her arms. The third was standing before them, beating at the flames catching around them with a wetted rag.

Laurence hurdled a line of flames and caught her by the arm. “Get out of the room!” he said, and the young woman cried out and pointed: he turned to find a single monstrous smoke-reddened eye peering in anxiously through the shattered glass and flames, calling.

Laurence dredged up a few words of Quechua: “This way!” he shouted out to the dragon, motioning to the next room. He turning caught the second nursemaid, with the child in her arms, and wrapping the wet sheet around her dragged her through the flames, the child between their bodies. Granby had pulled down the curtains with his hook-hand, arm wrapped in his sodden cloak, and now the dragon was tearing out the burning window-frame, emitting howls of pain as it did.

All at once wood and brick gave way, crumbling open a wide gap in the wall. The Incan dragon put its foreleg through the hole, and they got the nursemaids and the child carefully into its talons. Laurence and Tharkay dashed back into the burning bedroom—the other woman had fallen silent, and she lay heavy and limp in their arms as they carried her out, her skin red and scorched. As they heaved her into the dragon's claw, a roaring from outside, and the sound of beating wings: through smoke Laurence glimpsed Lien, her white belly lit brilliant orange by the flames, hovering before the house. She was calling something out; the Incan dragon called back, “Wait, wait!” urgently, and snatching its precious burden drew its talons out of the opening.

“Maintenant!”
Laurence heard Lien call, and from above a sudden deluge of dirt and water came pouring down the sides of the house, splattering enormous gouts through the gap in the wall. Laurence put his head out, afterwards, for a quick look up: fires still burned inside the house, licking out of the windows, but at least the outside had been smothered.

He turned as the door behind him flung open: Napoleon, with a party of Guardsmen crowding behind him, Aurigny among them—the Emperor also resplendent in a magnificent coat of red wool, now badly marred with soot. He stared at Laurence wildly, with the momentary bafflement of one trying to make sense of an unexpected meeting, and then leaping forward seized Laurence by the arms. “My son?” he demanded.

“Safely away,” Laurence said, pointing out at Lien, and the Incan dragon that had gone to join her.

One of the guards sprang to the opening—unwary, as Lien called out,
“Encore!”
and a second torrent came down the walls and carried him out of the window-hole and away, his feet slipping in the mud already present. The wave subsided; out of the hesitating body of guards Aurigny leapt forward, and cupping hands around his mouth bellowed,
“L'Empereur est ici!”

Two others followed him, all calling together, and Lien's head swung around as though pulled on a string; she had heard. She dived through the smoke, and the Guardsmen pushed him forward in a knot as Lien reached in for him. “The Empress!” Napoleon said, resisting.

“Safely out by now, Sire!” Aurigny was shouting as the men thrust him into the urgent talons.

Laurence started: Tharkay had his arm and Granby's, and was drawing them back. “There is a room with no smoke coming out, three windows down the hall,” he said, low. They covered their mouths and ran through the haze of the hallway to the third door, and kicking their way in found a bare room halfway through cleaning, the curtains stripped and in a heap on the floor. One of the window-frames was burning, but the other, though blackened, had not caught. They unhooked the window and pushed it wide. Down the side of the building, Lien was lifting away with Napoleon, and two middle-weight dragons were crowding in to the window to rescue the Guards.

There were many ledges running along the outside walls, some as wide as a man's foot, and the building was not pitching back and forth, which made the climb down light work for a sailor, much less an aviator. In ten minutes, they dropped down onto the lawns, not too wretchedly singed and bruised, and as he rolled to his feet Laurence heard a voice over the pandemonium, calling, “Laurence! Laurence!”

There was nothing to do but hope the confusion would save them: Laurence shouted, “Here! Temeraire, over here!” and Temeraire came down beside him with a gasp of relief.

“Oh Laurence!” he said, snatching him up at once. “I flew round and round and I could not see you in the least. I will wring her neck, see if I do not!”

“Don't tell me Iskierka has done all this!” Granby said, already tumbling into Temeraire's other claw with Tharkay.

“No!” Temeraire said. “It is not Iskierka's fault, except it is, for she
would
have an egg with the divine wind and fire both, and just look where that has landed us!”

“Free, and with your captains,” the dragonet said, which silenced Temeraire and Iskierka, in the midst of their heartily upbraiding her. She lifted a claw and licked her talons neatly—bloodstained, as though having fired the palace, she had taken a moment to go get herself something to eat. Recalling the voracious appetite of new-hatched dragons, Laurence supposed this was indeed the case, as she would otherwise have been complaining extremely. He stared down at the deceptively small creature in some dismay. She seemed entirely untroubled by the enormous chaos she had wreaked: in the distance behind them, clouds of smoke still blotted out half the night sky, and the palace was still limned in the reddish glow of embers.

“But that is only by good luck!” Temeraire said.

“I do not deny there was a risk,” the dragonet said judiciously, “but one must take risks occasionally to achieve one's ends, when there is no better way of going about it. There is no sense lamenting a necessary evil.”

“It was
not
necessary for you to nearly burn up Granby,” Iskierka said stormily, “and the next time you mean to
take risks,
you may take them with
your
companion, and not mine. Why you couldn't have made up your mind to take Napoleon's son, I am sure I don't know. He will be an emperor, too: it is all muchwhatlike.”

“That,” the dragonet said severely, “is an extremely shortsighted remark. As though one emperor were just the same as another, to all purposes!”

“It would certainly
not
be as good, as to be companion to the Emperor of China,” Temeraire said, “but for my part I do not see why you should have ever needed to consider becoming a
traitor,
and joining the enemy.”

“That term I reject, for I should have betrayed no-one in making such a choice: my loyalty has
not
been given either to China, or Britain,
or
France,” the dragonet said with a martial light in her eye, drawing herself up and thrusting her head forward in challenge towards Temeraire, although his muzzle loomed larger than her entire body. “I recall you telling me quite clearly that the choice of companion should be my own: did you only mean, so long as I should choose a companion agreeable to
you
?”

“Oh, well,” Temeraire said, and drew his own head back to rub against his flank in a gesture of embarrassment; Laurence indeed recalled overhearing him make such muttered lectures to the egg in its shell, when it had first sat in state upon the
Potentate.
“But I do not see why you should at all
want
to join the French, after they stole our egg, and after Napoleon has caused so much trouble for everyone.”

Satisfied to have defended her honor, the dragonet settled back down onto her haunches. “I cannot say that I have perceived any distinction among the nations of the world,” she answered, “which should entitle any of them to either my full approval
or
condemnation. I have heard more than enough, being carted here and there and exchanged from one side to another, to persuade me that none are without blame for this unhappy state of quarreling and perpetual warfare.
That,
I can heartily condemn. It seems perfectly plain to me that it is war itself which must be halted, without wanting one side or another defeated in particular.”

She spoke severely. Laurence supposed her time in the shell had certainly been an alarming period enough to give her a distaste for its cause, if she had been aware through much of it to remember; but she did not seem to have grown shy—perhaps not surprising, when she had already produced a disaster of such magnitude while not yet the size of a pony. It augured ominously for her future capabilities, and he could not help but be concerned to find her so willing to entertain all suitors.

“Certainly the war must be halted,” Temeraire said. “That is precisely why we mean to defeat Napoleon.”

“That would stop
this
war,” the dragonet said. “But I am quite certain that it would not end
all
war. I dare say you and your allies would all quarrel among yourselves straightaway, and start a new one.”

“Well, if there were
no
war, anywhere, how could one ever take a prize?” Iskierka put in. “That would not be agreeable at all.”

“I would be very happy to see war come to an end, myself; although a neat little skirmish now and then, with a prize after, no-one could really object to, I think,” Temeraire said. “But I should like to know a great deal how you suppose anyone should accomplish
that.
”

“Well, I don't know, yet,” the dragonet said, “but I mean to find a way: just because the business will be
difficult
is no excuse for not making the attempt. But of course my choice of companion is of great importance. I am not sure that the Emperor of France would not be best situated, after all, to help me.”

“You may be sure Napoleon will not want anything to do with you after
this,
” Temeraire said.

“Nonsense,” the dragonet said. “Most likely he does not even know I have hatched yet. Since you have escaped, I dare say he will blame the two of you, instead, and if anyone
did
see me do it, why, I am newly hatched, and no-one could expect me to know exactly what I was doing. Perhaps it was only an accident, or perhaps you even set me on it.”

“We did not, at all!” Temeraire said, with a gasp of indignation.

The dragonet flicked her tail-tip back and forth to wave this away. “I am only saying there are any number of reasonable explanations he might settle on, should he wish to excuse me. And I am sure he would wish to, if I chose to join his side; I imagine he will be quite impressed with what I can do,” which was inarguable. “I did hope it would answer,” she added, with a note of satisfaction, “after all this talk I have heard in the shell of the conjunction of the divine wind and fire-breathing, but I could not be quite sure until I had tried it. I am glad to have made proofs of it!

“But I cannot yet tell whether the Emperor of China or the Emperor of France will be better suited to assist my task. Or,” she added, earnestly, “perhaps the King of Britain: I hope you do not think I am unwilling to consider
him.
So hadn't we better be getting under way? Which way is this Dover of yours, that you want to get to?”

“Laurence,” Granby said, when at last they bedded down just before dawn, “what a perfect terror: what are we going to do with her?”

They were some ten miles from Dieppe as best Laurence could guess—they had found an isolated farm in disrepair, the house and barn abandoned, the latter with a collapsing roof: Temeraire and Iskierka were now hunkered down behind it, with a stand of trees and undergrowth to screen them from at least a first glance, if not a second. The dragonet, having slept nearly all the day on Temeraire's back, had roused only long enough to go and fetch a heap of straw out of the gaping hayloft; she made herself a nest in the warmest hollow between her progenitors, and satisfied with her arrangements went directly back to sleep.