Laurence opened up his glass and squinting against the glare of the sun could just make out the approaching forces: a shifting group of perhaps as many as twenty dragons, coming in fast and low over the water. There was nothing more to be said; he took Temeraire down to the courtyard, to alert the garrison to the oncoming attack and to take shelter behind the fortress guns.
Granby was standing anxiously by the sleeping Iskierka in the courtyard, having overheard Laurence’s shout. “Well, that has torn it,” he said, climbing up to the city walls with Laurence and borrowing his glass for a look. “Not a prayer of getting past two dozen more of—”
He stopped. The handful of French dragons in the air were hurriedly taking up defensive positions against the newcomers. Temeraire rose up on his hind legs and propped himself against the city wall for a better view, much to the dismay of the soldiers stationed on the ramparts, who dived out of the way of his great talons. “Laurence, they are fighting!” he said, in great excitement. “Is it our friends? Is it Maximus and Lily?”
“Lord, what timing!” Granby said, joyfully.
“Surely it cannot be,” Laurence said, but he felt a sudden wild hope blazing in his chest, remembering the twenty promised British dragons; though how they should have come now, and here to Danzig of all places—but they had come in from the sea, and they were fighting the French dragons: no formations at all, only a kind of general skirmishing, but they had certainly engaged—
Taken off their guard and surprised, the small guard of French dragons fell back in disarray little by little towards the walls; and before the rest of their force could come to their aid, the newcomers had broken through their line. Hurtling forward, they set up a loud and gleeful yowling as they came tumbling pell-mell into the great courtyard of the fortress, a riot of wings and bright colors, and a preening, smug Arkady landed just before Temeraire and threw his head back full of swagger.
Temeraire exclaimed, “But whatever are you doing here?” before repeating the question to him in the Durzagh tongue. Arkady immediately burst into a long and rambling explanation, interrupted at frequent junctures by the other ferals, all of whom clearly wished to add their own mite to the account. The cacophony was incredible, and the dragons added to it by getting into little squabbles amongst themselves, roaring and hissing and trading knocks, so that even the aviators were quite bewildered with the noise, and the poor Prussian soldiers, who had only just begun to be used to have the well-behaved Temeraire and the sleeping Iskierka in their midst, began to look positively wild around the eyes.
“I hope we are not unwelcome.” The quieter voice drew Laurence around, away from the confusion, and he found Tharkay standing before him: thoroughly wind-blown and disarrayed but with his mild sardonic look unchanged, as though he regularly made such an entrance.
“Tharkay? Most certainly you are welcome; are you responsible for this?” Laurence demanded.
“I am, but I assure you, I have been thoroughly punished for my sins,” Tharkay said dryly, shaking Laurence’s hand and Granby’s. “I thought myself remarkably clever for the notion until I found myself crossing two continents with them; after the journey we have had, I am inclined to think it an act of grace that we have arrived.”
“I can well imagine,” Laurence said. “Is this why you left? You said nothing of it.”
“Nothing is what I thought most likely would come of it,” Tharkay said with a shrug. “But as the Prussians were demanding twenty British dragons, I thought I might as well try and fetch these to suit them.”
“And they came?” Granby said, staring at the ferals. “I never heard of such a thing, grown ferals agreeing to go into harness; how did you persuade them?”
“Vanity and greed,” Tharkay said. “Arkady, I fancy, was not unhappy to engage himself to rescue Temeraire, when I had put it to him in those terms; as for the rest—they found the Sultan’s fat kine much more to their liking than the lean goats and pigs which are all the fare they can get in the mountains; I promised that in your service they should receive one cow a day apiece. I hope I have not committed you too far.”
“For twenty dragons? You might have promised each and every one of them a herd of cows,” Laurence said. “But how have you come to find us here? It seems to me we have been wandering halfway across Creation.”
“It seemed so to me, also,” Tharkay said, “and if I have not lost my sense of hearing in the process it is no fault of my company. We lost your trail around Jena; after a couple of weeks terrorizing the countryside, I found a banker in Berlin who had seen you; he said if you had not been captured yet, you would likely be here or at Königsberg with the remains of the army, and here you behold us.”
He waved a hand over the assembled motley of dragon-kind, now jostling one another for the best positions in the courtyard. Iskierka, who had so far miraculously slept through all the bustle, had the comfortable warm place up against the wall of the barracks’ kitchens; one of Arkady’s lieutenants was bending down to nudge her away. “Oh, no,” Granby said in alarm, and dashed for the stairs down to the courtyard: quite unnecessarily, for Iskierka woke just long enough to hiss out a warning lick of flame across the big grey dragon’s nose, which sent him hopping back with a bellow of surprise. The rest promptly gave her a wide respectful berth, little as she was, and gradually arranged themselves in other more convenient places, such as upon the roofs, the courtyards, and the open terraces of the city, much to the loud shrieking dismay of the inhabitants.
“Twenty of them?” Kalkreuth said, staring at little Gherni, who was sleeping peacefully on his balcony; her long, narrow tail was poking in through the doors and lying across the floor of the room, occasionally twitching and thumping against the floor. “And they will obey?”
“Well; they will mind Temeraire, more or less, and their own leader,” Laurence said doubtfully. “More than that I will not venture to guarantee; in any case they can only understand their own tongue, or a smattering of some Turkish dialect.”
Kalkreuth was silent, toying with a letter opener upon his desk, twisting the point into the polished surface of the wood, heedless of damage. “No,” he said finally, mostly to himself, “it would only stave off the inevitable.”
Laurence nodded quietly; he himself had spent the last few hours contemplating ways and means of assault with their new aerial strength, some kind of attack which might drive the French away from the city. But they were still outnumbered in the air three dragons to two, and the ferals could not be counted on to carry out any sort of strategic maneuver. As individual skirmishers they would do; as disciplined soldiers they were a disaster ready to occur.
Kalkreuth added, “But I hope they will be enough, Captain, to see you and your men safely away: for that alone I am grateful to them. You have done all you could for us; go, and Godspeed.”
“Sir, I only regret we cannot do more, and I thank you,” Laurence said.
He left Kalkreuth still standing beside his desk, head bowed, and went back down to the courtyard. “Let us get the armor on him, Mr. Fellowes,” Laurence said quietly to the ground-crew master, and nodded to Lieutenant Ferris. “We will leave as soon as it is dark.”