“Either we have found your nest of traitors, which I do not suppose in the least,” Chu said, “or we have found the rebels. But we will soon find out. We will go back to camp, and send ten niru here to investigate thoroughly—”
“Temeraire!” Laurence said sharply, and Temeraire sprang for Chu and bowled him over the slope, only just in time as three dragons plunged towards them from a concealed height above, talons outstretched, and plowed dirt and stone into a cloud where they had been: three scarlet dragons, the very honor-guard which had been appointed to Chu by Fela.
Though flung off his feet, Chu nimbly rolled his entire body over itself and got up roaring. “What is this outrageous behavior?” Chu said, rearing up onto the slope and bellowing at them. “You are traitors! Lost to all decency and right thinking!”
The scarlet dragons half-cowered from him a moment, plainly hesitant, as well they ought to have been, but Temeraire could see that they did not mean to stop. He gathered his breath, his chest swelling, and as the red dragons steeled themselves to leap he roared, shaping the thunder of the divine wind into their path, and the slope crumbled away and left them tumbling down in a heap of stones and broken shale, falling trees entangling their limbs. That seemed poetic justice to him, after his own half-burial. “It serves them all very well,” he said, dropping down to his own feet.
“Temeraire!” Laurence called to him. “We must away at once, before they can call more assistance. If you and Chu only return to camp, with this evidence, Fela is undone; they must slay you at once, or face disaster.”
“The disaster they have made for themselves!” Chu said angrily. “Come: your companion is right, we must get back to camp.” But there was no chance; more of the scarlet dragons were spiraling down from the clouds, all the dozen dragons and more who had been guarding them in the camp: Fela’s loyalists, and all too plainly a willing part of his conspiracy.
“Let me down!” Arkady was squawking, further down the slope, where he and Kulingile had waited for Temeraire and Chu to finish their spying.
“Well, hurry up then!” Demane said, as Arkady scrambled off Kulingile’s back and crept hastily away into a narrow crevasse, peering out and up at them with only the tip of his grey nose showing.
Still they were three against a dozen, and Temeraire struggling to gather his breath again. Chu said, “Quickly, behind me!” and leapt aloft. Temeraire and Kulingile dropped in behind him. Chu darted into a gap between two mountain ridges, angling himself sharply to pass his wings through the space, and led them onwards through a dizzying rush of mountains: thick green slopes and grey stone flying past at such a speed that Temeraire could only blindly follow, twisting himself to meet every new gap and losing his sense of direction all over again at every third turning.
Kulingile was gasping, but at last they burst out between two peaks into the air over a valley, and beneath them, chasing through the very channel they had fled along, were the traitorous dragons. “Now!” Chu said, and Temeraire gathered his breath and roared out, and the peak before him shattered; boulders toppling. Kulingile flung himself down after them, and bore two of the red dragons to the ground beneath his wickedly long talons, drowning them in the rockslide before he sprang aloft again.
The enemy had split up their ranks, however, and still more beasts were coming; six and six from either side approaching, and another six descending from above. The odds were too great. “We must try and fight a way through for you,” Chu said to Temeraire. “You must return to camp, with the Emperor’s son,” and while Temeraire could appreciate that sentiment, his heart recoiled at the idea that he should flee and leave others to fend off the enemy. He felt very sorry suddenly he had ever criticized Laurence for risking himself; he had never properly understood how dreadful it would be.
“We cannot on any account desert you, General,” Laurence said. “Your own survival must be of paramount importance: if you can win back to camp, you will be trusted and obeyed, where we may be considered too partial, and your death somehow laid at our door by further machinations.”
“Laurence,” Temeraire said, “perhaps you ought to go with General Chu, and—”