And there was no-one else to go. Iskierka had been the only one of their motley company with a proper crew, and all of them had been captured with her: lieutenants, midwingmen, even her ground crew all aboard. All that were left now were Laurence’s small handful of crew, and for senior officers only Dunne and Wickley, former midwingmen of Laurence’s crew who had acquired enough of the ferals’ language to be useful as translators. A handful of other officers had been similarly placed with the ferals for a gift with languages more than any other quality; most of them were young, very young: nearer fourteen than twenty, and not to be sent on an expedition little better than a dice-throw.
Tharkay shook his head at the lot of them, and said to Laurence, “Better if we go alone.”
Tharkay had taken a commission with the Corps, at least for the moment; but this was not something which any service could require. “You are not obliged—” Laurence began.
“No,” Tharkay agreed civilly, with one raised brow, and Laurence bowed and left it there.
Laurence exchanged his bottle-green coat for Blythe’s leather smock, with its pockets large enough to conceal a multitude of sins: two pistols and a good knife, and one of Blythe’s hammers. Tharkay gave him a handful of dirt to apply to his face, already rubbing more into his own hands and beneath his nails.
Dunne watched their preparations at a distance, sidelong and hesitating, with occasional glances at the other officers; but he did not say anything. It was not cowardice. He had made sufficient proof of his courage, in previous service, that Laurence did not doubt it now. Dunne’s reluctance had a source less palatable: plainly he did not wish to serve with Laurence again. There could be no harm to Dunne’s career from such cooperation here—some, indeed, might occur if he chose not to go and Laurence did not return—so the objection was one of principle.
Laurence bent his head over the fresh loading of his pistols, and did not see more of Dunne’s struggle than he had to; the sense of disapproval did not weigh upon him so greatly, now. He felt himself a righted ship, heaved off her beam-ends and into a course dangerous but for the immediate distance clear, even if there was a lee-shore off his bows and impenetrable murk ahead. He might be dashed on rocks, if the wind turned against him, but at least for the moment he knew what must needs be done, and he was free to do it.
They were ready in less than ten minutes, and would have gone at once, but Gong Su came and offered them a makeshift plate of bark with two small skewers upon it, tiny hearts and livers, still steaming from a makeshift butchering, and raw. Laurence regarded it with dismay. “A little of the divine wind inside,” Gong Su explained: they had come from the birds which Temeraire had inadvertently slain. “That makes good fortune.”
Laurence was not superstitious, but he ate; they could hardly refuse any advantage whatsoever. Tharkay took his own dose, pulled up the hood of his cloak over his face, and they went out to the road.
“THEY MAY ALREADY have sent Granby to France, of course,” Tharkay said to him, in Chinese, while they sat in the back of a drover’s cart.
“I hope not risk the Navy,” Laurence said, fumbling in his turn through the difficult language, which he knew he made nearly unintelligible, despite Temeraire’s many despairing attempts to correct his pronunciation. It at least gave them a privacy nearly impossible to breach, even by the hungry curiosity of the drover, who for a couple of quiet shillings had agreed to take them along to market with the cattle the man hoped to sell before they should be confiscated.
Tharkay nodded. If Napoleon were sure enough of his grip on London, or at least on enough of it to establish a prison, he might choose rather to be safe, and keep his valuable captive penned within it instead of risking Granby’s death in a crossing under fire, and the resulting frenzy of a Kazilik unleashed upon his forces. They could hope for at least a brief delay while the question was considered, during which Granby would be held nearby. They had to hope: otherwise there was no chance at all.
The last two crawling miles to the city were infuriating, when they had flown fifty this morning in what seemed less time, and the outskirts of London sounded already like a province of France. Tens of thousands of soldiers were busy making encampments, calling to one another and to the dragons who were helping them dig ditches and move stones and even widen roads, and those local shopboys more industrious than patriotic were running up and down the lanes of the camp, plying food and more commonly drink in high carrying voices and awkward, badly accented bits of French: “Une frank, monser” and “s’il voo plait,” but they were already improving.
“He is not shy of permanent alterations,” Tharkay said, indicating with a jerk of his chin the buildings which were being put up: large stones were being laid into the ground and pressed down by dragons, to make a raised platform once mortar had been poured over and between them, and logs sunk at the corners. There were no walls to the shelters, but as they came nearer the city Laurence saw one already finished and in use: dragons sleeping on three sides, and soldiers crammed into the sheltered space between them. They would sleep warm despite the coming winter; warmer than the British soldiers would. The work bore all the hallmarks of a long occupation; Napoleon was not planning any immediate campaign, Laurence realized grimly, but rather to entrench himself, and to let time and use dull the intolerable into the everyday.
The lowing cows plodded along after the cart, driven on by the drover’s boys, the sour grassy smell and the dust of the road rising up thick around them. Their shillings and tried patience did at least buy them an easy entry into the city: the French sergeant on duty on the Aldersgate road brightened at the sight of the cattle and waved them in with only a cursory question or two for the farmer and his companions, pointing them towards Smithfield and the slaughterhouses. Laurence and Tharkay stayed in the cart a little longer, until it had turned a corner towards the marketplace, the herd and the boys momentarily out of sight, then Tharkay touched Laurence’s elbow, and quick and unannounced they slipped from the back of the cart and into a narrow alleyway.
Newgate Prison was their target. A few coins at a pub bought Laurence a healthy dose of gossip and rumor, most of it worthless and irrelevant, but for the information that Bonaparte was staying in Kensington Palace, and “that unnatural white beast of his lying in Hyde Park like some overgrown eel, with those horrid red eyes,” and much shuddering all around.
Tharkay had better fortune, if so it could be called: some prisoners were indeed being kept at the prison, but there had been no new arrivals to-day: not that anyone had seen, and without prompting they had mentioned Iskierka’s appearance in particular. She had been seen in Hyde Park also, and eating two cows and setting the entire city ablaze, if some of the reports were to be believed; but one street-sweeper at least swore that no British aviators or crew had been brought to Newgate that day.
“In consolation,” Tharkay said, “neither have they been shipped to the coast. No large dragons have gone, since she came in, and certainly he has not been sending anyone by boat.”
“He might have Granby in Kensington Palace,” Laurence said after a moment.
“It would be very convenient for us, certainly,” Tharkay said, dryly.
“It sounds like folly, I know,” Laurence said, “but if I may be pardoned for forming an opinion on the grounds of one meeting, I would say that Bonaparte is unreasonably fond of seduction, to the point that he likes to believe he has a chance of persuasion where rationally anyone would see there is none. He will never miss a chance for a grand gesture, if he thinks he might coax Granby into service.”