Victory of Eagles (31 page)

The nearest troop of guard were staying back, prudently, and the couple of courier-beasts also, all of

them with a nervous eye for whatever Iskierka might take it into her head to do, and so a clear path lay

open from the house towards her. “If we can only get hold of him,” Laurence said quietly to Tharkay,

creeping back to the stable door, “and get him out to the open, even an upper window might do,

anywhere she might reach us—”

“As soon as we are seen by anyone, looking like ragpickers, they will set up a howl,” Woolvey said.

“Begging your pardon,” the seaman said, “but there is six of them cavalry-officers sleeping upstairs over

the stable, in their clothes.”

The nervous stableboy they set to watch the door, and Woolvey to watch him. “Darby, sir, but Janus

they call me,” the seaman said, “on account of a surgeon we shipped in the
Sophie,
a learned bloke,

saying I saw both ways like some old Roman cut-up by that name; and there I would be still, but my girl

in the city losing her mum, and taking sick, and her with three, four mouths to feed,” he added, his

excuses with an air defensive and vague: likely it had been not one girl but several, and the general lack of

them aboard, which had induced him to quietly abandon the sea.

“Very good, Janus,” Laurence said, and gave him a pistol. They put out the one lantern, swinging by the

door, and at a nod from Tharkay the three of them went up the ladder into the loft one after another,

swift on bare feet. The men lay breathing the regular sighs of exhausted sleep, half-sunk into broken-open

bales of hay, with their sabers and pistols beside them: one after another Laurence woke them, a folded

pad of leather over their mouths, Janus to pin their heels and Tharkay with a pistol steady in the man’s

face, and they were turned over and trussed quickly with straps, heaved up onto the stack of bales.

The fourth man opened his eyes too soon, and managed to drum his heels as they reached for him; the

other two roused sluggishly and groped for the missing swords and pistols, which Tharkay had already

collected away, three of them thrust into his waistband in piratical fashion. It was a short but brutal

struggle, even numbers and the necessity of silence driving them: Laurence went for his knife and grimly

put it into the unarmed man’s throat as the Frenchman tried to wrestle himself up from the ground. The

man sank back limply, staring up empty and blind at the ceiling, blood spilling from his neck to soak into

the straw. Laurence took up a sword and killed another, quickly, while Janus held him. Tharkay

dispatched the last.

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The horses below were stamping again, whickering at the smell of blood. “Are you all right?” Woolvey

whispered, putting his head up into the loft, and stopped with his mouth a little open.

“Yes,” Laurence said shortly, his heart still hammering. “Go below, and keep that fellow at the door.”

Whether because of some note in his voice, or the scene, Woolvey made no protest but obeyed in

silence, vanishing again below. The trussed men fought and kicked as they were turned over and stripped

of their coats and cuirasses, and one of them made a low moan behind the gag as his eyes fell on the

dead men lying straight. Friends, or brothers, perhaps; Laurence closed his mind to the thought.

Or tried: Woolvey’s shocked expression lingered. The hard use, the necessary brutality of the service,

were not of the same world as England, as home; and it was that division which might let a man be a

gentleman and a practical soldier both. But now he was in the stables of Kensington Palace with his

palms wet with blood, on a spy’s errand: yet as necessary as any military action. No-one could deny its

necessity. Let it only take place in Paris, or Istanbul, or China, and Woolvey would read of it in the

papers and applaud, though the act were the same, or bloodier. But it did not belong here, a black rotten

canker taken root in the warm sour horse-smell of the stable attic, above the peaceful gardens.

They made shift out of the four scavenged uniforms not overly stained with blood, and Laurence threw a

stable-blanket over the men now stripped and bound again, against the chill. The coat sat uneasily on his

shoulders, warm from a dead man’s body, as he climbed down the ladder and gave the last coat to

Woolvey.

“We will bind you also,” Laurence said to the boy, “unless you will come along, to the rescue and to the

dragon—” but the boy shook his head vigorously, and preferred to be bound up and thrown into the loft

also.

“Perhaps half-an-hour now,” Tharkay said, meaning how long they might hope for, before discovery:

Laurence himself made it likelier a quarter.

“We go in quickly, then,” he said. “Not running, but with purpose: do you know where he is, Janus?”

“Well, sir,” Janus said, shrugging awkwardly inside his coat, and looking a poorer match for it than

Tharkay, “the maids will sometimes take a fellow up to the better rooms to see, and I don’t say I haven’t

had an invitation or two; but which his room will be, I am sure I can’t say.”

“There will be no difficulty there,” Laurence said. “It will be the door that is guarded.”

He went first, with Woolvey beside him: a quick glance would see their faces and perhaps miss the

others behind them; Tharkay had a handkerchief up to his face as if to catch a sneeze, for some more

concealment. They went up the back staircase, and at Janus’s whisper turned off the landing into the

hallway.

Some eight or nine men stood in the hall talking near one of the doors, of a room facing onto the rear of

the house. Undoubtedly there would be more guards within. Laurence did not pause, but kept walking

steadily towards them: the men not stiff at their posts but talking and lounging freely, unalarmed: some

sitting on the floor in a game of cards, others crouching by to observe, only a few standing. A maid was

coming down the hall past them, loaded down with washing, and picking through the knot of them had a

moment’s awkward struggle to win past one over-enthusiastic sergeant, who caught at her waist.

“Keep off your hands,” she said coldly, and jerked expertly free with a twist of her hips, while the other

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officers roared with laughter at their fellow’s expense. She won past them at last, cheeks angry with color

and her eyes downcast; Laurence was nearly even with her now, and as they passed one another he

seized one of the sheets from her pile and snapped it open over the entire company.

A confused babble of shouting arose at once: they all four rushed the swathed men, toppling the standing

men over. The door to the room opened and another man looked out: Tharkay shot him, and kicked the

door wide. Granby, warned by the commotion, took the opening at once and came rushing out of the

room, with a bruised cheek and a bandaged arm. “Thank God, give me a pistol,” he said, and threw off

the sling.

“The window,” Laurence said, and turning at the report of a shot, received Woolvey into his arms. There

was a startled look on Woolvey’s face, and a great stain spreading already through his shirt, visible

beneath the swallow-wing lapels of his coat. Another shot fired and another, bullets coming wild through

the sheet, small fires catching in the linen in their wake. The maid, screaming, had fled down the hall.

“Iskierka!” Granby was shouting: he had dashed into the room across the way and was leaning out the

window.

A look was enough to be sure: the light was already gone from Woolvey’s eyes; he was dead weight

sliding to the floor. “Laurence,” Tharkay said, and shot the first French officer struggling out of the

tangled sheet.

“Damn you,” Laurence said, not very certain if he meant Woolvey, or the man who had shot him, or

indeed himself; he, stooping, worked the wedding-ring from Woolvey’s hand, and went after Tharkay

into the bedroom. They shut the door and barricaded it with a wardrobe overturned. It would hold only a

moment, but they needed no longer: Iskierka’s talons were already seeking at the window, scrabbling

and tearing away glass and masonry and brick in great shattering blocks.

Chapter 11

I
T WAS NOTat all pleasant to wait, and wait, and keep waiting: Temeraire paced, and then went aloft

to look in case there should be any sign, and then came back down and paced a little more.

“There is no one coming, is there?” Perscitia asked, a little anxiously, worried in another direction

entirely. “No French dragons? Perhaps you should stop going up so much: someone might see you, and,”

she added quickly, “if we had to move, or had some fuss, it would make it hard for Laurence to find us

again, on his way back.”

Temeraire tried to settle; he could not help but see the sense in this remark, but he shook his head at her

offer of a haunch of cow: the smaller dragons had gone out quietly hunting for all of them, but he did not

have much appetite.

“It was not very fair of those dragons,” Arkady said, “all coming on at us at once like that. If you ask

me, they are all cowards. We should go fly in and get Iskierka out ourselves.” He had recovered his

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spirits and was eating a sheep, which Lester had gone and fetched for him, with great cheer.

“We are not going to do any such thing,” Temeraire said. “There are four times as many of them as of

us, with guns and soldiers, and they will only have us down. Anyway that would not help us get Granby

back: they will shoot him,” and maybe Laurence, too, he added silently, anxiously. It was all the more

unpleasant to have Arkady making such reckless suggestions, when it was all that Temeraire wished to

do himself.

“What are we going to do, then,” Arkady returned, “if they do not come back?”

“If they do not come back,” Temeraire said, and paused, and lamely finished, “then we will think of

something,” not liking to imagine the prospect. He had thought Laurence was dead, and it had been just

as dreadful in every way as if Laurence really had been dead. It made one unsure of the distinction

between the event imagined and real, and therefore, Temeraire felt, any sort of unnecessary speculation

perhaps a little bit of a risk. Laurence thought such concerns foolishly superstitious, Temeraire knew, but

it seemed to him a danger not worth courting.

“What is he saying, the scalawag?” Gentius asked, scowling at Arkady milkily, in great disapproval: he

was not very happy with the extra flying, which he had to endure on Armatius’s back, or the

uncomfortable state of their camp. “I hope he is properly ashamed of himself.”

“No,” Temeraire said, “he is not, at all, and he is making foolish suggestions, too.”

“Well, pay no attention to him,” Gentius said. “Now,” and he lowered his voice, “I don’t like to make

you worry, Temeraire, but have you thought about what we will do, if they don’t come back right off?”

Temeraire flattened back his ruff and, unable to repress the desire, went aloft to look again. It was

beginning to grow dark, out towards the eastern edge of the sky, when he went high: there was a vague

watery sort of moon near the west horizon ready to set, and a few plumes of dust here and there, herds

of cattle. Not a sign of Laurence though, or of Iskierka; and then he looked back the other way and saw

a Winchester in harness flying towards them.

Elsie landed panting. “Oh, we thought we would never find you: what are you doing here? Scotland is

not this way; you are going back towards London.”

“We are not lost!” Temeraire said, rather coldly: he did not much like Elsie. Hollin had been a very good

ground-crew chief. Fellowes did his best, but he was perhaps not quite as attentive to the way the

harness lay against one’s hide, or as prompt in getting it off, in the evenings—not that Temeraire had

much harness anymore at present, but it was the principle of the thing—and Fellowes was a little dull, if

one were alone in the evening, and wanted a little conversation; besides, Hollin had been first—in short,

Temeraire had not ceased to regret the loss. “We have not gone the wrong way,” he repeated. “We are

only waiting here for Laurence and Tharkay to rescue Granby: Iskierka has got herself captured.”

“Oh, Lord,” Hollin said, sliding down from Elsie’s back. He had a satchel over his shoulder. “When did

they go?”

“Hours ago,” Temeraire said, despondently, “though Laurence said, they should likely need most the day