by Naomi Novik
Kulingile turned back to help with the digging. Nitidus had been working industriously on the stones directly before Temeraire’s chest, clearing a safe path; he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh! I hear them; I am sure I do,” and in another quarter of an hour Sipho scrambled out of the first narrow opening, and a little while after Ferris and Forthing came staggering out over Temeraire’s forearm, which was still pinned in place.
Then at last Temeraire could heave himself free, the last of the stones pouring away from his hindquarters as he lunged out, and he collapsed wearily with a sigh beside Arkady. “Oh! how tired I am,” Temeraire said, closing his eyes, only for a moment, as Laurence came to his side and stroked his muzzle again. “But I am not going to wait an instant. We must get back to camp, and I will squash General Fela, and I do not mean to let Hammond or anyone else talk me out of it, either.”
But somehow his eyes did droop shut; they closed, and he heard Laurence saying, “He must have some water, and something to eat. Can we get it out of the camp, without being observed?”
He woke again with Mei nosing at him anxiously, and an even more anxious cow lowing in his ear: fortunately this second might be dealt with in the most summary fashion, if somewhat indecorously. Temeraire swallowed down the last bite of the head, spat out the horns, and said, “I beg your pardon: I was extremely hungry.”
Arkady himself was still sleeping, and Laurence was drowsing as well beneath the remains of one of the encampment’s tents, ragged and much abused by the landslide. Immortalis and Kulingile had gone back to camp. “We do not at all want General Fela to know you have uncovered his treason,” Mei said, much to Temeraire’s outrage. “We must find proof of his treachery which can be demonstrated to the Emperor, first. You have killed everyone here, so we have no-one to obtain a confession from.”
She sounded faintly reproachful about the last. “Well, they were trying to kill us, so I do not see how you can complain of that,” Temeraire said. “It is the outside of enough to say that we must have more proof. They are soldiers, they are under Fela’s command, and they were holding Arkady prisoner here, hidden away from all of us, and pretending that he brought the opium.”
“But you must see that Fela can make any number of excuses,” Mei said. “He will say that he did not know of these soldiers, that they are some small band of deserters; or he will say that Arkady did bring the opium, and is a false witness, and demand that he be put to torture.”
“What is she saying about me?” Arkady said, pricking up his head, his eyes sliding open. “And what is there to eat? I smell blood: have you not left me anything?” he added accusingly.
Temeraire did not think it was very prudent to tell Arkady that there might be any question of torture. “She is saying we must have more proof that General Fela is guilty, and that you did not bring the opium here,” he said. “And you needn’t complain; there is a nice goat, right there.” He also did not think it needed to be mentioned there had been a cow, too, just lately; anyway he was much bigger than Arkady, and needed a larger meal.
“Hm,” Arkady said, and reaching out seized the tethered goat with a practiced blow, to break its neck. “I do not see that question is sensible at all,” he said, around a mouthful. “Where would I have got any opium, and why would I have brought it here if I had? What good is it? Is it worth a lot of money?”
“Well, it is,” Temeraire said, “but General Fela would have it that you brought it here to give to some rebels.”
“He could scarcely have brought so many chests, alone,” Laurence said, coming out of the tent and buckling on his sword as he did. “Temeraire, pray inquire where he was intercepted, and how long ago? Why did he not come through Guangzhou?”
Arkady was disinclined to be helpful; he was already sagging back into exhausted sleep, and complained that he was tired after his meal, but after a little prodding muttered fretfully, “A month, and all this while I have been alone, and in chains, and now you will not let me sleep. Why would we have come so roundabout a way as the ocean? We had to come quickly: we have an important message for you.”
“Who does he mean by ‘we’?” Laurence asked.
“Oh,” Arkady said, lifting his head abruptly, looking more wide-awake and to Temeraire’s instant suspicion guilty; then he said in feigned tones of great surprise, “Why, Tharkay was with me, of course; haven’t you rescued him yet?”
“My God,” Granby said, springing up with dismay, when he heard the name. “You don’t remember,” he added to Laurence, “but he is a damned good fellow; he has saved all our necks more than once. I suppose Roland must have asked him to play the courier. He knows those roads backwards and forwards; his people on his mother’s side are in Nepal. He took us to Istanbul overland, the last time we were in this country.”
Laurence briefly caught at an elusive twist of memory: running beside someone through dark half-deserted streets, and a great echoing vaulted chamber half-drowned in water, drops striking like bells; but it meant nothing, and slid from his grasp without leaving him a face or a voice, though from what Granby said they had known the man five years and more.
“It was some human thing, about the war,” was all Arkady could tell them, maddeningly, of the message Tharkay had carried, “—something that fellow Napoleon means to do.” This ominous news might have encompassed everything from another invasion to offering peace on terrible terms, but Arkady flipped one wing in a small shrug when they pressed him. “It did not seem very important to me; I had my egg to think about. You will have to ask Tharkay.”
“If he is even alive,” Granby said, “and we can find him: Fela and his crew have been torturing him, no doubt, to get a confession out of him to use against us.”
“What we’re to do about it is the question,” Captain Harcourt said, later that night. They had gathered in her tent, as secretly as they might, to discuss the matter; Mei had smuggled Laurence back to the camp, under cover of dark, while Temeraire and Arkady remained hidden in another valley. “We haven’t the faintest notion where they are keeping him, and if we challenge Fela, he will claim it is all a lie and he has no idea where Tharkay is; and like as not will kill him.
“I suppose Fela must be wary already,” she added. “Those guard-dragons are his, that much is sure enough. They are watching everything we do: they will have noticed Temeraire has been gone more than a day, and have seen Immortalis and Kulingile and Mei flying back and forth as well. If anything, we are giving him all the cause he needs to accuse us of going about and giving more aid and comfort to the rebels, in the meantime.”
“Rebels,” Hammond said slowly, from the chest upon which he sat, “—rebels, of whom we have seen not the least sign, and have no evidence for, but General Fela’s own reports,” and they all regarded him in surprise. “Oh! It is the prettiest arrangement,” he added, answering their growing astonishment, “I wonder I did not guess at it before. The conservative party required some excuse, some argument, to resist an alliance and to undermine Prince Mianning’s growing influence at court. They trumped up this rebellion, General Fela sent in a few false reports—”
“The devil,” Berkley said. “Are you saying there are no damned rebels at all?”
“I dare say there are some number of malcontents, and some quantity of small banditry here and there: enough to make reports plausible,” Hammond said. “But we have not heard a peep of any kind of truly organized force—no rebel army, no real fighting.”
They none of them spoke a moment; the implications hideous: “Good God, Hammond: if it is true, he put that village to the sword without cause,” Laurence said.
“Pray consider the desperate nature of Fela’s situation,” Hammond said. “He might have expected to vanish away a false rebellion as easily as he had created it, with no such measures required. Yet quite unexpectedly, the crown prince proposed your superceding him in command, with a substantial force and an experienced senior officer to back you. From that moment, he has known the lie of the rebel
lion could not long be preserved. His only hope is to quickly discredit us, and have General Chu and his force recalled—and he has made excellent headway on that front. But if Prince Mianning had not made the suggestion, and we had been sent here alone as the conservatives wished, I am sure he would have been delighted to keep us traipsing about these mountains looking for mythical rebels until the end of days.”
“Doing his best to arrange Laurence’s murder in the meanwhile,” Granby said. “But how are we to prove any of it?”
There was scarcely any hope of their finding Tharkay, or any other evidence, so unfamiliar with the territory as they were; General Fela and his own forces knew it far too well themselves, from having been stationed here for some time. “We must have help,” Laurence said.
Temeraire could not but feel the most dreadful awkwardness, marching coolly past the guard-dragons to General Chu’s tent, and summoning him out of it. Of course Laurence was nominally in command, and he himself as a Celestial technically took precedence over any other breed, but oh! What did that matter when everyone knew perfectly well that General Chu was a most senior dragon, a great general, and really meant to be in command; he could feel the outrage of the other dragons’ eyes upon him, and writhed inwardly to be behaving so rudely.
General Chu came out of his pavilion, between the two scarlet dragons whom Fela had appointed his personal honor-guard, and very stiffly bowed his head. “How may I be of service?” he said shortly.
Temeraire did not know how he could have answered; but Laurence had not the least hesitation. He said in quite a calm voice, “General Chu, have you found any trace of the rebels that the Emperor has commanded us to destroy?”
Chu’s mane bristled. “As yet we have not discovered their base of operations,” he said, even more shortly. “The search continues.”
“Then you would oblige me greatly by coming with us to discuss how we may improve that search,” Laurence said, and nothing more—no explanation, no polite adornment. One of the guard-dragons flattened his own heavy brows, and Temeraire avoided their eyes.
Chu’s eyes narrowed under the forward ridge of his mane. “If I may propose to Your Highness, there is no reason we cannot discuss the matter profitably here,” and indicated with his claw the great maps laid out just inside his pavilion, with clustered markers of red upon them showing the maneuvers of the dragons.
“I prefer to be surveying the territory directly, with my own eyes,” Laurence said. “We will seek out a higher vantage point, if you please. You there, you may keep your places,” he added, when the honor-guard would have risen. “We do not need an escort.” He touched Temeraire’s side; Temeraire was desperately glad to leap aloft and escape the mortification and the cold glares. He hovered just out of ear-shot, pretending not to notice the outraged expressions on the other dragons, and their flattened wings and spines, as General Chu heaved himself into the air and followed.
Arkady was not yet well enough to fly, but that dawn they had loaded him onto Kulingile, who was good-natured enough not to mind his ongoing sighs and restless shifting. He had shown them the way to a pass through the mountains, not far from the encampment where he had been chained, and a valley at its end with a small and glacier-cold pond fed by a trickling cleft in the rock.
“Here,” he had said, “this is where they took us. We saw them having a drink, so Tharkay thought we should ask them for direction; but after he climbed off my back, and spoke with them, suddenly they sprang on him.”
“What did you do?” Temeraire said.
“Oh, well,” Arkady said, “I thought it would be a very good thing if I could only get away, so I could come round and free him later, of course—so I tried to fly away as quick as I could; but those red fellows are fast, even if they do not look it much,” he added disgruntled.
“As though he had any right to be,” Temeraire had said indignantly to Laurence, after, “once he turned tail and left poor Tharkay, and I am sure would never have given him another thought.”
Arkady and Kulingile were waiting for them there in the valley when they descended with Chu; Temeraire had been sure to fly on ahead as quickly as he could, without pausing for conversation. “What is this?” Chu demanded. “Who is that peculiar dragon, and why have we come here?”
“Sir,” Laurence said, “I beg your pardon for the maneuver which has brought you here. We have reason to believe we have all been practiced upon, to an extent difficult to swallow; but we have not a hope of demonstrating it, without your assistance.”
But Chu received the explanation of Arkady’s presence, and of Fela’s treachery, with enormous skepticism; Temeraire laid back his ruff to see it, and said angrily, “I suppose you would rather believe that we are all liars—that I am a liar, and Laurence as well, even though he is the Emperor’s adopted son.”
Chu snorted a little. “That does not disqualify anyone to be an emperor’s son, or an emperor for that matter: what is an emperor but one who tells a lie that all the world believes?”
Temeraire was rather taken aback by this remark, which made an uncomfortable sort of sense, and did not quite know how to answer it. Chu waved a wing-tip dismissively and said, “But in any case, I do not think you liars; I think you want China to make alliance with this foreign nation of yours, and so you are willing to believe the lies of others. General Fela, to have committed such treachery? To have sent false reports, and connived at the attempted murder of the crown prince?”
“Sir,” Laurence said, “have you seen any evidence at all, of the rebellion which he claimed was so greatly resurgent as to challenge his own forces?” General Chu was silent in answer, frowning; in the cold mountain air, the breath from his nostrils drifted forth in pale clouds.
“Then I ask you to indulge us this far,” Laurence went on. “You yourself commanded the army which cleared away the last insurgency. You are well acquainted with these mountains, and whatever rebel fastnesses were taken and secured by the army at that time. Is there anywhere close-by, where they might have taken and concealed a prisoner? If we can find our man, we may find answers with him; his guards may be questioned, and other evidence found.”
“Hm,” Chu said, after a moment, and then he said, “Well, it will not hurt for us to take a look.”
He leapt aloft, Temeraire after him, both dragons beating far up to where the air grew thin and cold. A thin clouding layer of haze reduced the mountains to faded blue, but the sharp and angular lines of their peaks might be clearly seen below. Temeraire heard Laurence’s breath coming quickly; his own was laboring in his chest, and his wings working mightily to keep with Chu.
Chu did not keep them so high long, but soon dropped to a more comfortable height. There he flew in ruminative circles a while, and then beat up a second time, as though to confirm some conclusion; then he swung in easy circles back down to the clearing. He plunged his head into the cold pool and drank deep, then raising his head shook water from his mane vigorously.
“It is a long while since I hunted these mountains,” he said, half-aside to himself, “but I have not forgotten all the bolt-holes of the rabbits yet. There was a White Lotus fortification, a cave, near Blue Crane mountain. And there is some smoke coming from the mountain-side now.”
• • •
“Ha, this makes me feel like a young soldier again,” Chu said, peering over the mountain’s ridge, “flying over the northern plains looking for the enemy, under the great Kang-Xi Emperor! It is not at all respectable, of course,” he added, “for either of us; but it can be excused in this case, I think.”
There was some sort of activity at the cave, certainly: as Temeraire raised his head cautiously to peek over, alongside, he could see that the fortifications by the mouth of the large cavern had been rebuilt, and fresh traces of cart wheels tracked through the dust of the slope and into the entryway.
“Either we have found your nest of traitors, which I do not suppose in the least,” Chu said, “or we have found the rebels. But we w
ill soon find out. We will go back to camp, and send ten niru here to investigate thoroughly—”
“Temeraire!” Laurence said sharply, and Temeraire sprang for Chu and bowled him over the slope, only just in time as three dragons plunged towards them from a concealed height above, talons outstretched, and plowed dirt and stone into a cloud where they had been: three scarlet dragons, the very honor-guard which had been appointed to Chu by Fela.
Though flung off his feet, Chu nimbly rolled his entire body over itself and got up roaring. “What is this outrageous behavior?” Chu said, rearing up onto the slope and bellowing at them. “You are traitors! Lost to all decency and right thinking!”
The scarlet dragons half-cowered from him a moment, plainly hesitant, as well they ought to have been, but Temeraire could see that they did not mean to stop. He gathered his breath, his chest swelling, and as the red dragons steeled themselves to leap he roared, shaping the thunder of the divine wind into their path, and the slope crumbled away and left them tumbling down in a heap of stones and broken shale, falling trees entangling their limbs. That seemed poetic justice to him, after his own half-burial. “It serves them all very well,” he said, dropping down to his own feet.
“Temeraire!” Laurence called to him. “We must away at once, before they can call more assistance. If you and Chu only return to camp, with this evidence, Fela is undone; they must slay you at once, or face disaster.”
“The disaster they have made for themselves!” Chu said angrily. “Come: your companion is right, we must get back to camp.” But there was no chance; more of the scarlet dragons were spiraling down from the clouds, all the dozen dragons and more who had been guarding them in the camp: Fela’s loyalists, and all too plainly a willing part of his conspiracy.
“Let me down!” Arkady was squawking, further down the slope, where he and Kulingile had waited for Temeraire and Chu to finish their spying.