“Well, we do not know for certain that they do,” Temeraire said hastily. He was already aloft again and hovering, looking around at the nearby mountains, trying to decide where he might have liked to perch, if he had been coming to and from the village, or wished to observe it unseen. “What do you think of that mountain, over there—the one with the double ridge. I suppose anyone might have hidden between the two.”
Ferris had a glass in his belt, and he took it out and looked as Temeraire flew towards the ridge. “He isn’t wrong,” he said to Forthing, and passed him the glass; but Sipho was the only one who was of any real use, for as Temeraire flew along the ridge he said, “Is that a trail, over there?” pointing downwards.
It was a trail: with at one end a clearing full of gnawed bones, and fresh claw-marks on the rock. “We must get back to camp,” Forthing said. “Temeraire, you must see—”
“Why, those could be anyone’s markings,” Temeraire said, outwardly dismissive; inside his heart leapt with excitement. By the signs there had not been very many dragons, perhaps even only one, and not very large; he was sure he could win out over one, or even a few. “We cannot merely waste everyone’s time. If you like, you may wait here, and I will go and have a look.”
“Give over,” Ferris said to Forthing, grimly. “He’s looking for a fight. Have you anything to make a light with, or some noise? Blast this notion of not having Celestials in harness; we ought to have half-a-dozen flares to hand.”
Forthing had his pistols. “Whatever are you doing?” Temeraire said in irritation, looking round, as he shot them off one after another into the air. “If there is anyone, you will warn them off.”
“I hope I do, before you run yourself into their teeth,” Forthing returned, and he fired again. He was sitting on Temeraire’s back directly between his wing-blades, where Temeraire could not conveniently reach around to stop him.
Temeraire snorted in irritation, and beat on quicker following the trail, and coming round had to pull up hard as it descended abruptly between two jagged rising walls of stone. He caught an updraft and threw himself up along the wall and caught onto the summit so that he might take a quick look over, unsuspected from below—he did not at all mean to be foolishly reckless, whatever Forthing and Ferris might think.
And then “Oh,” Temeraire said, in astonishment, and pulled himself up higher to peer over the ridge and into the valley below. “Arkady? Whatever are you doing here?”
? ? ?
Arkady stood in the midst of a small encampment otherwise hastily and very recently abandoned: tents left pitched and a fire-pit still smoking; ragged bundles of supplies everywhere and one bleating sheep staked out at the far end of a gully.
“Why am I here?” Arkady said. “I am looking for you, and see what it has got me.” He did present an appearance very unlike himself, drooping and his grey hide dull and grimed with dust.
Temeraire landed beside him, baffled extremely. The last he had seen Arkady, they had parted on the shores of Britain, not long before Temeraire had embarked on his transportation and taken ship with Laurence for New South Wales. Arkady and his feral band of dragons had been persuaded to take up service with the Aerial Corps in exchange for a regular payment of cattle; but they were natives of the Pamirs, nearly two thousand miles west of China. If he had decided to throw over the Corps, Temeraire could not imagine why he would have come here; and in any case, he was still under harness.
Under harness, and something else: “Whatever is that thing upon your back?” Temeraire said, nosing at it cautiously. Temeraire had never seen its like: iron bars linked together in a long chain, the ends of two bars pierced through Arkady’s wings, and others dangling down to Arkady’s back—and then Temeraire drew his head back in horrified disgust: the ends were barbed spikes, and they had been planted into Arkady’s flesh.
“They put it upon me,” Arkady said, “so I cannot fly; it is dreadful if I even move my wings a little. Take it off me at once!” And he leaned against Temeraire miserably.
Forthing and Ferris had already leapt cautiously from Temeraire’s back to his, to inspect the chains. “I don’t dare touch that,” Forthing said to Ferris, “do you? We want a surgeon, double-quick: I dare say we could spoil him for ever flying again, if we took it out wrong.”
Ferris was looking with grim disgust at the bindings also. “We ought try and get the links open, if we can,” he said. “Then at least he won’t be forever pulling on it.”
“But who put it on you?” Temeraire said, still bewildered, “and what did you want with me? And if you were looking for me, why would you be here? I was not here, until presently; are you saying you have just come from Peking?”
“Why do you say such ridiculous things?” Arkady said. “As though I meant to be here, in this dreadful condition! We were going to Peking: there was some letter you sent, that you meant to go there, or so Admiral Roland said. And as for what did I want with you, how dare you ask me such a thing. What has happened to my egg?”