“Yes?” Laurence said, still asleep, and rubbed his hand over his face.

“I am not afraid myself, of course; but I should not like to alarm the men,” Temeraire added, “and I am afraid we may have got into the underworld, somehow: I cannot account for it otherwise.”

“—I beg your pardon?” Laurence said, opening his eyes, and standing; and then he was silent.

“I am sorry we should have pressed on during the night,” Temeraire said, “but perhaps it was Jack Telly’s spirit—”

“We are not in the underworld!” Laurence said, but the men when they woke were more of Temeraire’s mind; until the meager breakfast of biscuit had been shared out, and then one very stupid person said, “I reckon there wouldn’t be biscuit, in the hot place; we’m in China, I expect, and whoever would want to come here, I don’t know.”

At once the convicts all agreed: they had certainly reached China. They were not moved from this ridiculous opinion, either, even when Temeraire exasperated said, “But this is not China at all; China is across the ocean from here, and it is a very splendid place, not like this at all; there are thousands and thousands of dragons there, all over.”

“There you have it,” O’Dea said to the others with ghoulish relish, “a godforsaken place: we will see a horde of them fly out of the west, any morning now, coming to devour us; and then we will go down to Old Nick’s country in the end.” Temeraire put back his ruff in irritation.

“Some mineral in the soil gives it the color, I imagine,” Dorset said, scraping at the earth with the end of a stick and peering inquisitively at the still-brighter dirt revealed below.

“We must backtrack in any case,” Tharkay said, shading his eyes with a hand. “We must have overshot the turning of their trail.”

“I can’t see they would come into this countryside,” Granby agreed, absently rubbing his arms as he looked around him yet again, as though he could not help it; Temeraire could see many of the other men doing so as well, and it made him look again also: it was indeed very odd to find oneself in the middle of this queer red landscape. “It is a godforsaken country; I don’t suppose anyone can live here comfortably. Shall we go back to that water-hole we saw, last night? And we had better see the men all have a drink, before they come over ugly on us.”

But when they had flown on three miles—still the endless sweeping in either direction, and all the while their eyes on the ground, so the tiny distance took the better part of two hours—Tharkay suddenly leaned forward on Iskierka’s back, and Temeraire followed her to the ground: Tharkay leaped down in three bounds from her back to the sands, and he stooped at a mounded heap of red sand, exactly hollowed to that same eggshell curve, and beside it, stark and brilliantly reflecting in the sunlight, a white ochre handprint was marked freshly upon a jutting monolith of dark red stone.

Iskierka left them an hour later, winging her way back to Sydney, though not without a great deal of quarreling and dissension: she had not wished to leave, nor Granby; but there was no help for it. A smugglers’ trail, which should by necessity come to a definite conclusion in some fixed harbor, was one thing; but the natives might go anywhere at all in their own country, and in circles if they wished.

“All right, maybe it isn’t the smugglers; but what would the natives want with a dragon?” Granby had said. “I don’t say they have any reason to love us, but they can’t ever have seen a dragon before we landed in this country, and if you should tell me that a first glimpse of Temeraire, or Iskierka, or even Caesar, should make a man want to hatch a beast out for himself, I call it mad.”

They were all at something of a loss from the new discovery: but besides the handprint the heavy red sand had taken all around the imprint of bare feet, and Tharkay had uncovered, too, some remnants of their meal: emptied seed-pods, roasted, and the stems of berries from a bush near-by; native, and certainly no smugglers would have made such a meal at the risk of poisoning themselves.

Tharkay shrugged a little. “I do not pretend to an understanding of their motives,” he said, “but their tracks are reasonably clear, and I am afraid it answers a great many questions: I have already found it strange the smugglers should continue this far without making a turn for the coast, and such easy familiarity with their route was wholly unlikely even if the French had been colonizing this continent for a century.”

“They have stolen the egg because it was precious to us,” Rankin said impatiently. “We had it swaddled up as a great treasure; what more do you need? Likely they have not even realized it will hatch out a dragon, and think it some species of jewel.”

Laurence could not be so easily dismissive. He would once have given as little credence to a native power sufficient to rival those of Europe, or as sophisticate in its organization and its forces. Although this was not a country, he rather thought, looking around the barren landscape, which should easily sustain and conceal an empire so large as the lush heart of Africa had concealed that of the Tswana; still he was not inclined to again make so dangerous an assumption.

“They have at the very least evaded us, despite the most urgent and enthusiastic search, over many days,” Laurence added, “which ought command our respect and wariness. It would be a very unimaginative man who would look at a dragon egg and think it anything other than it is: they do have birds here, and snakes. Far more likely they should see us in company with Temeraire and Iskierka and Caesar, and realize the prize before them. They cannot be pleased with the usurpation of their territory by the farmers of the colony, and anything which offers them the power of resistance or of leveling the ground must appeal.”

Rankin shrugged. “Very well; in that case we must fear at any moment that several thousand wild tribesmen, full of loathing, will leap on us in the night: splendid.”

The greater danger of course was the far more certain one: that the trail might go on a long, cold time of searching; and it was this which necessitated Iskierka’s departure. “We must grant them every power of hiding themselves from us in it, and knowing their way,” Laurence said to Granby, “—and Riley cannot wait, weeks and weeks gone, and no word of us at all. We were already overlong, looking for our route through the mountains. By now he must be looking to see us return to Sydney every day.”

“Well, I am not haring off to leave you here in the middle of the desert, if that is what you are getting at,” Granby said.

“It is fairer to say that we are presently haring off, away from any reasonable course,” Laurence said. “If the natives are not our friends, they are at least not the French; and one middle-weight dragon will not give them the power of doing us much harm even if they should wish to, when Temeraire is in the colony.”

Fairer or not, Granby refused to like it, and Iskierka liked it still less. “Well, I am not going anywhere until we have found the egg,” she said, dismissively, “so there is no sense discussing it: Riley must wait, and that is all.”

But Riley would not wait, of course; they had already been gone nearly three weeks, on a trip that ought to have taken them one, and with no word sent back. Whatever misfortune could befall a party of two heavy-weight dragons and thirty men would not be lightly dismissed, and there was hardly anyone of the colony who could be sent in search of them, either. They would be written down as lost, victims of an unfamiliar territory; Riley might even leave the sooner, to bring the disastrous news back to England.

Even Temeraire was no ally, for once proving reluctant to see Iskierka go. “It is not that I am pleased with her company,” he said to Laurence, “or that I cannot rescue the egg myself, of course; only it would be churlish to send her away, as though she were not worth having along. And she has been very handy at hunting; one cannot deny it.”