Temeraire nuzzled Laurence gratefully, too, all his quibbling silenced: he still wore the thick iron collar, much to his disgust, and a few clubbed lengths of cable dangling off it, blackened and brittle at the ends where Lily’s acid had weakened the metal enough for the two of them to break it. “But we cannot leave without Mrs. Erasmus,” Laurence said to him, low; but Dulcia was landing among them, and Mrs. Erasmus was clutching to the harness on her back.

They fled cautiously but quickly homeward, the rich husbanded countryside providing: Temeraire savage and quick, cutting out elephants from a herd, while the smaller herd-dragons yelled angry imprecations but did not dare give pursuit when he had roared them down; Lily doubling back sharp on herself, when a heavy-weight roused up in a village on their course and bellowed challenge, to spit with unerring precision at a branch of the great sprawling bao-bab tree beside him. Her acid sent it crashing down upon his shoulders: he jumped and thought better of giving chase; looking back he might be seen gingerly nosing the thick branch, large as an entire tree, away from the clearing.

The aviators wove grasses into makeshift cords, to tie themselves on with, and pinned their limbs under straps of harness so that whenever they paused for water, they all went down in staggering heaps, pounding on their thighs to drown out the prickling of returning blood. The desert they flew across almost without a pause, pale rock and yellow dust, the curious heads of small animals popping up from holes in the ground in hopes of rain as the dragon-shadows passed by like racing clouds. Temeraire had taken all of Dulcia’s crew but Chenery himself; and also some of Lily’s; the three of them made all the haste which could be imagined, and they broke over the mountains into the narrow coastal province of the settlements in the hour before dawn on the sixth day of flight, and saw the tongues of flame, where the cannon at the Cape were speaking.

Narrow pillars of smoke were lying back against the face of Table Mountain as they came across the bay driving into the city, drifting before a hard wind blowing into the bay, and fires all through the city: ships beating desperately out of the harbor into the wind, close-hauled as they could go. The cannon of the castle were speaking without cease, thunder-roll of broadsides from the Allegiance in the harbor also, her deck swathed deeply in grey powder-gusts spilling down her sides and rolling away on the water.

Maximus was fighting in mid-air, above the ship: his sides still gaunt, but the enemy dragons gave him still a wide and respectful berth, and fled from his charges; Messoria and Immortalis flanked him, and Nitidus was darting beneath their cover to harry the enemy in their retreat. So far they had preserved the ship, but the position was untenable; they were only trying to hold long enough to carry away those who could be saved: the harbor full of boats, crammed and wallowing boats, trying to get to her shelter.

Berkley signaled, from Maximus’s back, as they came on: holding well, retrieve company; so they flashed on past and towards the shore, where the castle lay under full siege: a vast body of spearmen, crouched beneath great shields of oxhide and iron. Many of their fellows lay dead in the fields just before the walls, cut dreadfully apart by canister shot, and musketry; other corpses floated in the moat. They had failed to carry the walls by climbing, but the survivors had withdrawn past the substantial rubble that had been made of the nearby houses by the cannon-fire, and now sheltered there from the guns, waiting with terrible patience for a breach in the walls.

Another corpse lay dreadfully stretched, upon the parade grounds: a yellow-and-brown dragon, its eyes cloudy and its body half-burst upon the ground by impact, a gaping hole torn into its side by the round-shot which had brought it down; scraps of bloody hide stood on the grass even a hundred yards distant. Some thirty dragons more were in the air, now making their passes from very high, dropping not bombs but sacks of narrow iron blades, flat and triangular and sharpened along every edge, which drove even into stone: as Temeraire dropped into the courtyard, Laurence could see them bristling from the earth as if it had been sowed with teeth; there were many dead soldiers upon the heights.

King Mokhachane was standing on the lower slopes of Table Mountain clear of cannon-shot, observing grimly, and occasionally mantling her wings in yearning when one of the men or dragons were struck; of course she was a dragon of no great age, and all instinct would have driven her to the battlefield. There were men hovering around her flanks, and others running back and forth to the company gathered before the fortress walls, with orders. Laurence could not see if the prince was by her side.

The city itself had been left untouched: the castle alone bore the attack, although the streets had nevertheless been deserted. Some large boulders lay also strewn in the corners, bloodstained, and others trailing behind them a line of smashed bricks, red under their yellow paint. The soldiers were mostly on the walls, sweating as they worked the guns, and a great crowd of settlers, men and women and children together, huddled in the shelter of the barracks waiting for the boats to return.

Mrs. Erasmus sprang almost at once from Temeraire’s back when they had landed, scarcely a hand to the harness; General Grey, hurrying to greet them, looked with astonishment as she went past him without a word.

“She has gone for her children,” Laurence said, sliding down himself. “Sir, we must bring you off, at once; the Allegiance cannot hold the harbor long.”

“But who the devil is she?” Grey said, and Laurence realized she must have been quite unrecognizable to him, still in her native dress. “And damn the bloody savages, yes; we cannot hit a one of those beasts, as high as they are keeping, even with pepper-shot; they will have the walls down soon if the place does not catch, first. This has not been built to hold against three companies of dragons. Where have they all come from?”

He was already turning, giving orders, his aides running to organize the withdrawal: an orderly, formal retreat, the men spiking their own guns before abandoning them, only a few gun-crews at a time, and hurling into the moat the barrels of powder. Mr. Fellowes had already gone, with the ground crew, for the dragons’ battle-gear: still where it had been stowed, fortunately, in the smithy. They came running with the belly-netting, and all the spare carabiner straps which they had. “The armor, sir, we can’t manage, without he come and lift it himself,” he said, panting, as they began in haste to rig Temeraire’s belly-netting again, and Lily’s; Dulcia had gone aloft again, her riflemen armed now with pepper-shot, to keep the enemy off their heads at least a little while.

“Leave it,” Laurence said; this would be no prolonged struggle, but a quick dash for safety, and back again for more of the men; they needed speed more than the protection of the armor, when the enemy had no guns.

Temeraire crouched for the first group of soldiers to climb into the netting: the men stumbling, some pale and sweating with fear, driven by their officers, and others dazed with the noise and smoke. Laurence now bitterly regretted he had not asked Fellowes, back in England, to rig up some of the Chinese silk carrying-harnesses which would now have allowed them to take many more than the normally allotted number for retreat; thirty for a heavy-weight, when by weight Temeraire could have managed two hundred or more at a run.

They crammed some fifty men in, regardless, and hoped the netting would hold for the short flight. “We will—” Laurence began, meaning to say they would return; he was cut short by a shrieked warning from Dulcia, and Temeraire sprang aloft only in time: three of the enemy, using a netting made of the metal hawsers, had brought overhead an enormous boulder roughly the size of an elephant and let fly. It smashed the delicate cup of the bell-tower with a sour, ringing clang, and came down through the short passage of the entryway, brick and mortared stone crumbling everywhere, and the portcullis moaned and sagged open to the ground.