He looked the dragons over as well, to make sure that all was right with them, as they lifted their heads curiously to sniff the morning wind off the desert. Oddly enough, they were all four of the same color family, variations on blue shading to green. They would look very smart with bronze trappings on their harnesses.
“Hem-serit,” he said, nodding to the most responsible of the lot. “You are temporary wingleader. Any other disposition will have to be confirmed by—” he looked at the dispatch, “—Vizier Nef-kham-het. You will be reporting to him directly when you arrive. Land at the Dragon Court, and there will be a servant waiting for you. After that, what happens and who you report to will be determined by the vizier. If he is displeased with your performance, he will send you back here.”
Hem-serit gave him the fist-to-shoulder salute of the Tians; he nodded. They mounted up—not together, and their dragons seemed inclined toward mischief, since they tossed their heads and pretended not to understand the “Knee” command until he barked it out. Yes, they had a ways to go before they were ready for any sort of responsibility on trail guarding.
He sent them off with a wave and they took off raggedly, diving down into the canyon to pick up speed, then pulling up and out of it and pumping hard for height; for as long as he could see them, they flew in tolerable formation, though blue dragons against a blue sky were a bit difficult to track after a while.
Then, finally, he was able to signal to his wing to mount up. They did much better, although they did not all mount at once with military precision. All their dragons promptly gave a place to climb up on the “Knee” command, and if there was still a little awkwardness getting settled into the saddle, that would pass soon enough. This time the signal to fly was when he sent Avatre diving into the canyon himself; he never got over the thrill, the feel of falling, hurtling toward the ground, bracing himself in the saddle. Then the sudden, hard snap of Avatre’s wings opening, the fall turning abruptly into a climb as he was pushed down into the saddle on her shoulders, the ground being replaced in front of him by sky. His skin tingled, and a laugh of delight rose in his throat.
His wing was not going to be patrolling the trade routes, however. He had another assignment for them all.
The Blue People were being raided, probably by the same lawless deserters and former soldiers that were making up the majority of the bandits. And it was not that the Bedu could not defend themselves; they most certainly could. The problem was that the raids were taking place at night, and animals were being stolen one and two at a time. Clearly the bandits were treating the nomads’ flocks as their private larder.
So Kiron and his wing were doing a different sort of hunting today. They were going to look for the bandits’ camp. It had to be within distance of the latest tribe to be raided, and since the nomads always occupied an oasis, the bandits might be filling their waterskins before helping themselves to a goat or a sheep. Or perhaps not. In the part of the desert where the Bedu tended their flock, water was not as difficult to come by as one might think.
The camp was almost certainly concealed from ground level. It might not be from the air.
After the debacle just before their first successful foray into bandit hunting, all the members of the wing were determined to carry this out with no “incidents.” The dragons were all fed, enough to be full, not so much as to be ready to laze about. Every inch of saddle and harness had been checked and checked again. Their weapons of choice were where they should be.
Kiron nodded with satisfaction, then gave Avatre the signal to fly off into the north.
Well, there they were, all right.
I was right. Hidden from the ground, but not from the air.
This part of the desert was not barren; the Blue People would not have been able to live there if it had been. There was some water here, enough to allow the occasional oasis to dot the landscape, and enough that there was vegetation outside an oasis to allow grazing. There were acacia trees and scrubby brush, which the nomads used thriftily, to start fires, but never for the fire itself.
In short, this made a good place for the bandits as well as the nomads.
Kiron kept Avatre circling in the air above the place, studying it, while the rest of his wing made wide circles around them. The encampment, clearly not one of the nomads’ nor of honest traders, was concealed in a narrow, twisting wadi below them, hardly more than a crack in the earth, and just wide enough to pitch a tent. A dangerous place to camp, because if there was an unexpected storm anywhere “upstream,” there would be a flash flood with no warning at all, one that would probably kill most of them and would certainly wash away their gear and drown their animals.
On the other hand, they could dig down below the surface and probably find water there, making a “seep well” for themselves that would ooze a cup or two of water over a reasonable period of time. Several seep wells spaced out over the wadi would produce enough water for men and mounts with patience. That would mean they wouldn’t have to raid the nomads’ oasis for water as well as food. It was a calculated risk, made all the more clever by the fact that no one who knew anything about the desert would expect someone to camp in a wadi.
Now, the question was, what to do about them? The walls were high, the canyon very narrow. In no way would dragons be able to get down there, and so far, all of Kiron’s tactics had relied on spooking the bandits’ mounts as the first attack. The bandits were entrenched there; if they had enough bows, they could do some serious harm to the dragons and the Jousters.
He waved his wing off, and pointed into the distance. They needed to get out of sight of the camp before they landed to confer. He hoped he would have some ideas by then.
He led them off to an eroded, wind-sculpted hill with a flat top. It would make taking off easier for the dragons. He didn’t dismount immediately. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the horizon in the direction of the camp, frowning, trying to think of something clever to force the bandits out. Short of finding one of the Magi to brew up a storm, he couldn’t think of anything.
But somewhat to his surprise it was one of the older Jousters, one of the Altans, who slid down off the back of his young dragon. “Captain,” he said with a formal salute. “Do you think we actually have to attack this lot now? Could it wait until tomorrow?”
Kiron pondered that a moment. “I take it you have an idea? As long as they don’t move, no, there is really no need to try and hit them when we are ill-prepared.”
The grizzled fellow nodded. “Then if you’ll dismiss me, Captain, I’ll go to Sanctuary first and talk to that Akkadian Healer, Heklatis. You see, sir, if he knows how to make it, there’s something called—”
But Kiron already knew where he was going with this. His mind leaped back to the attack he and his original wing had made on Alta, to rescue Aket-ten. “By the gods, Thesis, you’re right! No need for just you, we’ll all go by way of Sanctuary! Because, yes, Heklatis does know all about it. He’s already made Akkadian Fire—and my old Wing knows how to use it!”