All the dragons were by now reconciled to the porridge-pit, but while this made feeding their enlarged force possible, it did not make it easy. With so many bellies of such enormous capacity to fill, their supply was in regular danger of running out and required the most careful and constant attention.

Laurence straightened up from the ledgers when they had finished their tallies, and nodded to the young aide whose duty it was to send their numbers on to Blücher’s staff. He stretched backwards, hands pressed into the small of his back, thoroughly stiffened after the hours bent low: he ruefully thought he felt his years more sharply after an afternoon in a tent than after two days aloft. He and Dyhern stepped outside together, while Ilchenko stayed in to finish the letter which he would send to the Tsar with his report: a rather more formal affair.

“I cannot delight in this book-keeper’s work, Laurence,” Dyhern said, “but I have no right to complain. When I think how we gnashed our teeth at you for twenty dragons, before Jena! And look upon our coverts now. My heart must be appeased.”

They were encamped in the bowl of a nameless valley perhaps a hundred miles from Leipzig, dragons strung along the heights and hillocks all around like decorations, nearly covering all the open ground. The steam rose in pearlescent gusts from the cooking-pits, in the center of the camp, and on every side the voices of dragons—the hissing of their breaths, their deep rumbling speech, the dry rustle of scales rubbing over one another. The sheer number of them echoed the tales of the uncountable hordes of the Huns, of fairy-stories; Laurence could well share Dyhern’s dissatisfaction and pleasure both, in the scale of their force and the difficulties of its management.

A tiny figure came gliding down over the tree-tops to the north-east, a bird Laurence thought at first, but moving very fast; the sentry-dragons did not even lift their heads until she was already far beyond them, and before they could raise a warning, she had darted twice across the bowl of the valley, her head seeking, and then dropped with startling speed to the ground directly before Laurence, folding her disproportionate green wings in. “Yu Li,” Laurence exclaimed, very surprised, as the Jade dragon bowed very low as well as she could, with the dragging ends of her wings.

“Forgive this clumsy one’s rude and hasty approach,” she said. “I have been sent to establish lines of communication with Your Imperial Highness and Lung Tien Xiang—”

“Why, you are very welcome to startle us all ten times over, on that account,” Laurence said, and turning to Dyhern explained, “She is the leading edge of the Chinese legions.”

But Yu Li was not finished. “Honored Brother of the Dread Lord,” she said, and Laurence turning caught the change in her address, and realized with a start that the Emperor must have died, and Mianning by now crowned, “I beg your forgiveness for my hasty and improper address, but I have grave news to impart. Having mistaken your location, I first sought to find you in the small town not three hundred li from here, where a great many noble officials were encamped.”

By small town she must have meant Dresden; any Western city would bear a peculiarly shrunken character to a Chinese dragon, who expected to find in these places thoroughfares and pavilions suitable for draconic inhabitants and not merely humans—which meant, in turn, that she had flown some one hundred miles in an hour, a remarkable achievement even for one of the Jade Dragons. Her chest was indeed heaving rapidly, and her wings trembling. She extended one limb towards him, the golden mesh upon it carrying a letter.

“I was honored to meet there with your advisor Mr. Hammond,” she said, “who has entrusted me with this letter and begs you consider it as soon as you think wise.”

Laurence took the letter—a note, not even enclosed, and scrawled in an irregular and hasty version of Hammond’s usually tidy hand, at least large enough to be easily legible. A moment was enough to read it; he handed it on to Dyhern and turned to Yu Li. “Did you see the French advance, yourself?”

“Yes, august one, and in hopes of offering you further intelligence, I crossed their body from aloft,” she said: Jade Dragons flew at a far higher altitude than most dragons, and with her small size, she would certainly have been taken for a bird, even if anyone had glimpsed her. “Their beasts are not very orderly, so it is difficult to properly tally their numbers, but there were in excess of five hundred assembled. Their carrying-harnesses held perhaps a hundred men, for each dragon, and the larger carried guns, as well.”

“My God!” Dyhern said. “He will smash them to pieces. There are not twenty beasts at Dresden, and those convalescent.” He turned to explain the situation to Admiral Ilchenko, who had come out of the tent at the commotion; Laurence had seized pen and paper from his runner and was hastily scrawling a reply. “Yu Li,” he said, “will you take this back to Mr. Hammond at once, if you please?” She accepted the note with another bow, and as soon as it was stowed away she gathered herself, leapt, and was gone.

“What is to be done?” Dyhern said.

“Gentlemen,” Laurence said, “I am taking every beast that can travel at speed—every one that can sustain sixteen knots or better. Les Cossacks, il faut que je les emmener avec moi,” he added to Ilchenko, who was nodding intently. “Dyhern, you must take my heavy-weights, and your own, to our depot at Leipzig. Stupefy every pig and sheep in the place with opium and bring them, with all the grain you can carry. The Russian heavy-weights must remain with Field Marshal Blücher here. We must take it as a certainty that the rest of the French infantry is coming up on our rear. Napoleon plainly intends to cut our lines of communication and supply—perhaps even capture the Tsar—and then smash us between the two wings of his force. We must try and hold him at Dresden long enough for you to come up behind him, instead. Do you agree?”

There was so little room to dispute the plan that Laurence had not hesitated to send to tell Hammond that he was coming: his force was the only one substantially composed of dragons who could manage the speed necessary to catch the French; certainly neither Eroica nor Ilchenko’s dragon Sorokshest could do so. They shook hands in agreement, and Dyhern took Hammond’s letter. “I will go and speak with Marshal Blücher,” he said. “Begin your preparations! I will send as soon as he has confirmed the order of battle.”

ISKIERKA DID NOT HIDE her delight that Requiescat had to be left behind, to go with the Prussians; although her pleasure was a little dimmed by Laurence’s saying to him, “You may be sure that the rôle of providing supply to our forces is no less urgent, and will merit no less recognition, than direct engagement with the enemy—if we cannot eat, after the battle, then hunger will rout us as thoroughly in victory as any defeat Napoleon might inflict.”