“Wing to larboard!” cried the fore larboard lookout. Not one wing but a hundred, two hundred, more: a cloud of dragons was rising en masse from a previously hidden valley, where they had evidently been resupplying. In pairs they carried large iron cauldrons suspended from yokes, steam rising from the innards, and as they turned and swept over the city, they tipped them over to pour out long billowing streamers of smoking tar and pitch. Behind them came a second wave, throwing out incendiaries to ignite the hot tar—these sometimes bursting in mid-air.

His glass trained upon the still-distant mass of dragons, Laurence could not escape the feeling there was more variation among them than he would have expected to see—variation not merely in color and size and pattern. There were too many dragons of sharper distinctions—the shape of the skull, or the mounting of the wings. “Roland,” Laurence said, before he remembered she was gone. “Mr. Forthing,” he said instead, “do you mark anything peculiar about those dragons?” He would have liked to consult Granby, but failing that any man who had been an aviator all his life, and more familiar with the variety of dragons.

Forthing peered over, holding determinedly to the straps of his flying-cap, which had lost its buckle in their tearing speed and now threatened to quit the field at any moment; he was trying to tie up the loose straps instead. “A lot of queer sorts, sir, if that is what you mean. Ferals—he has scraped the barrel, I suppose.”

Laurence shook his head, dissatisfied. “Would you call them French ferals?”

“One feral’s much like another,” Forthing said uncertainly.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Challoner put in, “I have been in the colonies, lately, and while I would not swear to it, those green ones on the left flank there have a look of Naskapi beasts—those are the natives up north of Halifax.”

“What, Indians, here?” Forthing said. “How should they ever get here, and why would they?” But Laurence had already put his glass on the green dragons, who were carrying sacks of incendiaries, and although it was too far to make anything of facial features, the men aboard were certainly not French officers—one only to each dragon, wearing long leather coats embroidered all over in patterns, fur-collared. Their beasts had the same angular, narrow-muzzled heads common among the Incan beasts, although their scales were not of the long feather-like sort.

He shook his head, dissatisfied and puzzled, but he could not spare the matter more thought: in five minutes more they would be upon the battlefield, if they continued on their straight-line course. They could strike directly at the bombing run: the slow pace and coordination required for the operation meant that even a little opposition would be sufficient to disrupt it. But the city was plainly lost already, and the only hope of defeating Napoleon was to save the army, if it could be done.

The breadth of that monstrous force would make any rear-guard defense hopeless without the support of guns. But there ought to have been guns: at least three hundred of them. All lost, in the fires? On that chance all hung: if they could establish artillery positions, a successful retreat might yet be accomplished. “Temeraire,” he said after a moment, “we will come around by the south, and get a better look at what Accendare is doing on the road over there.”

The signals went out, and they swung wide around the burning city: people below streaming into the countryside, carrying the wreckage of their lives—small carts laden, wheelbarrows, mothers with babes in their arms, a parade of misery. Accendare herself was flying over a rise of land near the eastern gates, circling with a crowd of light-weight hangers-on, mostly Pêcheur-Rayés. She had nothing to do with the fires in the city at all: she was instead striking at the efforts of the allied forces to establish a line of defense across the eastern highway, along which a straggling line of Prussian infantry were attempting to retire.

Infantry squares stood in tight formation, locked in defense around the artillery-crews struggling to bring their guns to bear. Their bristling bayonets held off a direct assault, but Accendare’s flames scorched and seared them, and the Pêcheurs, having spent their incendiaries, were dropping anything to hand upon them. One dropped a torn-up sapling, and crushed six men in a row—but the soldiers beside them heaved out the sapling and closed ranks, keeping their bayonets up; one of the fallen struggled up again, and another took the fallen rifles, and planted them in the dirt with the bayonets jutting up. Nearly every square was bristling with these unattended spikes, testament to the grinding toll the assault had been taking upon them.

Laurence could not help but admire the courage and steadfastness which had preserved the order of the Russian and the Prussian infantry under an aerial pounding so unopposed; he did not see a single beast in the air working to defend them. But no small force of dragons could have hoped to hold long against such a disparity of numbers.

Nor could his own. Still, he closed up his glass and nodded, not with relief but with certainty; the decision was made, and now there was nothing to do but to fight it out. “Tell Iskierka to take Accendare,” Laurence called to Temeraire, “and we will put a stop to that bombardment, across the eastern side of the city at least: we must give the infantry some chance to get onto the road.”

He gave the word to Quigley to signal the Cossacks to follow Iskierka: the smaller dragons clustering about Accendare were plainly French regulars, and the Cossacks were all veterans who had refined their boarding techniques against those troops over two years now of hard fighting. Granby’s signal-officer waved an acknowledging flag, and then Iskierka tilted and peeled away with her following, leaving Temeraire with a sadly diminished band—only thirty dragons, many of them only out of courier-class by a generous assessment—half a dozen of the Scots, two Prussian Mauerfuchs, and then seven Grey Coppers and five Xenicas robbed from the British formations; none of them with real muscle to speak of.

But Laurence signaled them into a diamond-shape, behind Temeraire, and their sheer furious pace made its own impact upon the enormous cloud of French dragons. Temeraire roared out, the divine wind opening a path before them like the sweep of some enormous scythe, and even when the echoes had faded the fear of it kept the dragons spilling away to either side. There was no slackening. All the small dragons packed tightly in a mass behind Temeraire, the chop chop chop of their wings beating close and frantic, and they carved a channel directly through and burst out over the eastern gates, leaving the bombing-pass disrupted: cauldrons spilled too soon, incendiaries fallen too late.