paused again at a fresh spring with a larger outcropping of harder, stony ground near-by where Laurence thought they might encamp safely; whether for this reason, or the accepted bribe, they did not suffer further attacks that night, and Temeraire declined to risk his supper again, and ate his portion of game once more only seared.
They might also by now have been outstripping the speed of the bunyips' communications, whatever method they used. Tharkay was not particularly sanguine of their chances of finding still more traces of the smugglers' route, and did not encourage the fervent searching for scraps which Temeraire and Iskierka would have indulged in, left to their own devices.
"If they are not going to some central location lying in this direction we have been given, as limited as it may be," Tharkay said, "then we have no hope of catching them: a few shards of five years of age and half-buried samples do not make a trail worth following. We may as well hope for a more cooperative fate, and make the only attempt which has a hope of success."
So the dragons flew on with much less investigation of the countryside, and quicker: the red miles were eaten up swiftly with Temeraire's wingbeats, the unvarying dunes rising and falling, vanishing away beneath the leading edge of the black wings, only to be exposed once more, falling behind them like waves receding. The desert might have gone on forever: everywhere one looked, the world was flat and barren and strange to the curving blue-hazed edge of the horizon. Occasional taller hills would swell out of the low dunes; salt pans stretched pallid white; a trickling stream or a hollow full of water. These fell away and rode the earth over the horizon and disappeared, one after another.
The shapes were at first easily mistaken for clouds, low on the horizon; but they remained, and grew, and grew, until the brick-red stone was struck by the sunset and glowed fiercely against the sky. They reared up from the flat plateau, enormous and uncanny domes clustering together in the absence of all other company, their surfaces pitted and streaked in grey, a faint clinging fuzz of greenish moss upon a few of their heads. Temeraire slowed, as they approached; Laurence did not know what to think of the peculiar construct, so alone.
It was not possible even from the air to encompass the whole: at different angles it had a wholly different appearance, even as that first intensely glowing color faded, and a twilight cast of violet dampened the domes' presence, blurring them into the sky. Though the stone would have offered a certain refuge from the bunyips, they did not land upon the rocks. They had from habit and the fatigue of extreme toil begun, Laurence thought, to grow used to the alien and rust-red landscape; but in their strangeness, the monoliths made all else around them once more strange, a reminder.
They encamped instead upon a few dunes, not far removed; a little trickle of water came past the camp, not very much to drink from, and with no sign of bunyip management, which they now had a little cause to regret. They dug out a hollow in the curve of the creek, and it gradually filled; meanwhile Laurence stood with Temeraire watching the strange monumental stones blur and fade away into darkness, as all the stars of the Southern Hemisphere came wheeling out above.
They were all quiet that night, in the unseen shadow of the monoliths. In the morning Temeraire said, "Laurence - Laurence, there is another one, over there; look," and Laurence rising saw one last monolith standing at a distance: alone, wholly alone, even without a separated hillock for company: pink and palest orange cream in the early sunrise, and then Temeraire said slowly, " - is that a dragon?"
Iskierka roused up looking, and Caesar said, "Well, what else would it be?" - to be glimpsed at this distance, standing beside the monolith and casting a shadow against the smooth red wall, of wings outspread. Huge wings, even half-furled: and there were tiny dark figures of men to be glimpsed, moving around the dragon; there were bundles upon the ground, bales tied up with string, boxes, which they were taking off the beast: and still others, smaller bags, were going up to be stowed in replacement upon the dragon's back.
Iskierka said, "Whyever are we only sitting here? Let's go and have a look, and see if it has