Temeraire was just about to inquire what additional sort of diversion she imagined they might be able to produce, which would not merely draw everyone’s attention to them straightaway, when she shook out her wings and leapt into the air. “No!” Temeraire hissed out in alarm. “Wait, come back; you will be seen at once!”

She was flying directly towards the house. The heads of several of the dragons were already turning towards her wingbeats.

“That is all that we needed,” Temeraire said, despairingly. “We had better go back to our pavilion at once, before she has got herself caught. Perhaps she will take the blame for it all: and serve her right.”

“I don’t want to go back to our pavilion!” Iskierka said. “We will only go back to being prisoners, and I am sure they will lock Granby away much better, no matter what excuse we give. Anyway, what do you suppose she is planning?”

“I do not know, and I don’t suppose she has planned anything,” Temeraire began, only to jerk his head around as a thin shrill whine pierced all the clamor, very like a pot boiling underneath a badly fitted lid. His ruff flattened against his skull involuntarily: a truly dreadful noise, and it kept rising so. The rest of the dragons began to make complaining sounds—not merely the guards but everywhere through the grounds, heads rising up on all sides.

“Why must she make that dreadful noise?” Iskierka said, jetting out a ring of steam in expression of her own displeasure. It was indeed the dragonet, Temeraire realized—she was hovering directly over the house now, escaping notice because all the other dragons were twisting their heads away from the noise, and then abruptly she pointed her head down and blasted out a stream of white flame directly along the ridge cap of the immensely long grey roof. It was quite thin, but it ran away from her with tremendous speed, rippling strangely, and a moment later a shockingly loud thunderclap noise followed it, as nearly every window in the building burst.

Temeraire found he had hunched into himself, head ducked under a wing for shelter, entirely without meaning to. He shook himself out. Glass was raining down with a tinkling noise, like the box of magnificent porcelain he had seen shattered on delivery, in New South Wales, ruined beyond repair—he still remembered the carnage with regret—and the roof was in flames, all over. “Laurence!” he cried out in staring horror, and flung himself into the air.

—

“Is it Temeraire?” Granby shouted over the dreadful shrieking noise, and Laurence could only shake his head without answering. It was like nothing he had ever heard in eight years of his experience of the divine wind, but Temeraire before now had managed to make some new and unexpected use of his abilities, and Laurence could not be sure. Their guards at least had no doubts, he saw from their faces, nor any lack of horror. Brouilly’s grip on Laurence’s arm, above the elbow, was bidding fair to squeeze all the blood from that limb as Aurigny led the way, the guards dragging them urgently down the staircase, surely towards some holding-place below.

Laurence was in an odd state to be flung into a dungeon: he had been dressing for dinner, and he was yet in the evening clothes which had earlier been sent him by the same emperor who had now commanded his imprisonment: knee-breeches with polished buckles, silk stockings and slippers, and his cravat just properly creased; a new coat in deep aviator’s green, lined with golden-yellow silk. The guards had burst in upon them unannounced just as Laurence had shrugged his way into the coat, and without ceremony or explanation had bundled them all off at once down the hallway. Laurence understood well enough; he had not even been unprepared, thanks to Tharkay’s earlier news. Temeraire and Iskierka had acted; they had been seen in some act of rebellion or escape, and the French now meant to secure their hostages. He would have liked to know what had happened, but there was no chance to ask in the confusion, and the guards in no mood to answer.

They had been bundled, pell-mell-tumble fashion, all the way along the hall and down one turn of the stairs, towards the ground floor and the kitchens. Then the thunder had come. Laurence looked round with his ears still ringing, and all down the full length of the hall the massive windows burst: a noise like a broadside full-on through the stern cabin of a first-rate, glass and splinters flying. A sheeting wave of white flame came washing down the outer wall, and reached in roaring through the shattered frames.

“Good God!” Granby said, shouting and yet muffled in Laurence’s half-deadened ears. The carpets were already aflame, and smoke was pouring into the hallway through every crack and open door, grey waves accompanied with screaming.

Brouilly, single-minded in the face of disaster, tried to continue onwards onto the cellar stairs, but Laurence caught the corner of the wall and planted himself. “No,” he said, shouting to be heard. “No: I would rather be shot here, than driven below to roast alive. I have no idea what has happened, but there will be no escaping this house in ten minutes. We must get outside at once: where is the nearest door?”

Brouilly looked down at his senior; Aurigny halted two steps down the stairs and turned, staring up at them a moment out of the dark, irresolute; abruptly he came back up and demanded, “Monsieur, will you swear you had no part of this?”

“I can give you my word as a gentleman,” Laurence said, “and although I cannot answer with certainty for my dragon, I will say Temeraire is not a fool, and I do not suppose, even if he could accomplish the act, that he would willfully set fire to a house where he knew perfectly well I was prisoner. I do not know what has happened, but he is hardly the only one who might wish your master any ill: where is he?”

This decided the matter; Brouilly said to Aurigny, “My God! What matter if they do go free, if the Emperor is lost?” and deserting their prisoners, the Guardsmen turned and rushed up the stairs they had just descended, going in leaps and bounds over the smoke that came rolling down the stairs to meet them in eddying waves.

“We seem to be abandoned to our own devices,” Tharkay said. “May I suggest the nearest window, however, in preference to a door? I will take being singed over choking.”

Laurence halted in the landing, halfway to following him, when a dreadful thought struck: “The child,” he said abruptly, as Granby and Tharkay turned to look back at him. “The Emperor and Empress meant to dine with us; the boy would have been in the nursery by now.”

The smoke was growing ever thicker as they forced their way up, past the torrent, back to their own landing. Men and women were running down the stairs in a frenzy to escape, coughing and half-blind. Laurence stepped into the hall to seize one of the enormous vases along the wall, full of flowers; he flung the flowers down and wetted himself and his cravat, wrapping it over his face, and handed it on to Granby and Tharkay.