Their farm lay close to the fighting front. Before long, they flew south out of the land the Algarvians still held and into the terrain Unkerlanters had seized in this second winter counteroffensive. Footsoldiers on the ground blazed at them. Without a doubt, crystallomancers sent word of them farther south-in the direction of Sulingen.
Sabrino let out a glum, weary curse. He had to fly a nearly straight path to the besieged city. Had it been much farther from his dragon farm, the dragons wouldn’t have been able to get there at all, not if they carried anything worthwhile.
Clouds scudded through the air, getting thicker as the dragons flew farther south. Sabrino spoke into his crystaclass="underline" “Let’s use those to hide in. The less Swemmel’s whoresons see of us, the less chance they’ll have to try to blaze us down.”
Dragons didn’t care about clouds one way or the other. Sabrino was glad these were intermittent; otherwise, he would have had a hard time making sure he was flying south. As things were, he got glimpses of the terrain below every so often. He didn’t need more than glimpses. He’d flown this route a great many times.
And so it was, when he passed over the Presseck River, that he warned the men of his wing: “Don’t fly too straight and smooth and stupid around these parts. The Unkerlanters have a lot of heavy sticks waiting down there. Give ‘em a good target and you’ll pay for it.”
His own dragon didn’t take kindly to dodging now this way, now that, to speeding up and slowing down, or, indeed, to much of anything else. He didn’t care whether the beast took kindly to it or not. So long as the dragon obeyed, that sufficed.
Sure enough, beams came to life below the wing. He watched the flashes with respectful attention. None came particularly close to him. None brought down a dragon. He knew better than to rejoice too soon. The Unkerlanters would have another blaze at the wing on the way back. His dragons would be unladen then, but they would also be very worn.
Somewhere up ahead, Unkerlanter dragons, fresh ones, would be flying back and forth across the route he and his comrades would have to take. Sometimes they found the Algarvians, sometimes they didn’t. Sabrino doubted that was the most efficient way to use dragons, but King Swemmel hadn’t asked for his advice.
This time, he and his countrymen were lucky. If the Unkerlanters had spotted them, it would have meant a running fight in the air all the way down to Sulingen. As things were, the Algarvian dragons flew on undisturbed toward the still-burning pyre of the much-battered city.
Unkerlanter footsoldiers-the men besieging the Algarvians trapped in the wreckage of Sulingen-started blazing at the dragons. That didn’t worry Sabrino much. Footsoldiers brought down dragons only by the strangest of chances. But Swemmel’s army would have heavy sticks, too, and those were truly dangerous.
As he did on every trip into Sulingen, Sabrino marveled that anything there was left to burn. His countrymen had fought their way into the place in late summer, had fought their way through it as summer gave way to autumn, and had been trapped inside it since the middle of autumn, since not long after snow began to fall down here. Now, one block at a time, the Unkerlanters were taking back what they’d previously lost the same way.
A big green, white, and red banner marked a badly pocked city square. Up till a couple of weeks before, that had been the place where dragons landed to unload supplies and to take wounded men off to safety. Algarvian dragons didn’t land in Sulingen anymore. No part of the city that Mezentio’s men still held was out of range of Unkerlanter egg-tossers. Landing, these days, was suicidally risky.
But that banner still made a useful beacon. Sabrino spoke into his crystaclass="underline" “All right, boys, you can see where the goodies are supposed to go. Put ‘em down as close as you can.”
He used his saw-edged knife to cut the cord that attached the crates of food and charges and medicine to his dragon. Those crates plummeted down. He placed them as carefully as if he were dropping eggs on the Unkerlanters. And he clapped his hands with glee when they came down in the square, where Algarvian soldiers could recover them.
Most of his men were as careful, or nearly as careful, as he. He cursed when a few crates fell well wide of the mark the soldiers on the ground had given his wing. King Swemmel’s men would probably get their hands on those. But he clapped again to see Algarvian soldiers, tiny as ants from the height at which he watched them, run out to grab the supplies they needed so desperately. Some of
them waved or blew kisses to the dragons overhead. Behind Sabrino’s goggles, tears stung his eyes.
He spoke into the crystal again: “We’ve done what we came for. Now let’s get back, give our beasts as much rest as we can spare them-grab a little ourselves, too, come to that-and then come down here and do it all over again.”
“Aye, Colonel.” That was Captain Domiziano, smiling out at Sabrino from the crystal. “Who knows? We may find a way to lick those Unkerlanter buggers down there.”
“So we may,” Sabrino answered. He would not say anything that might hurt the wing’s morale, not in public. In the privacy of his own mind, he wondered how Domiziano managed to hold on to such boyish optimism.
For a little while, though, he could be optimistic himself. Freed of so much weight, his dragon flew like a young, fresh beast, which it assuredly was not. Or maybe, he thought, I haven’t flow a young, fresh dragon for so bloody long, I’ve forgotten what it’s like.
He found the answer to that riddle sooner than he would have liked. His wing hadn’t got very far north of Sulingen when Unkerlanter dragons assailed them. As often happened, his men were slower to spot the Unkerlanters than they might have been-in rock-gray paint, the enemy dragons looked like nothing so much as detached, hostile bits of cloud.
“Powers above, they’re fast!” he muttered as the Unkerlanter squadron closed with the men and dragons he commanded. After a moment, he realized they weren’t so very fast after all. It was just that his own dragons couldn’t come close to matching the foe’s turn of speed.
Had the Unkerlanters been able to equal his dragonfiiers in skill, his wing would have suffered badly, for Swemmel’s men flew fresher beasts. But, no matter how fast they were, none of the Unkerlanters had seen much action. They didn’t dive from on high as they might have, and they did start blazing too soon, when they weren’t close enough to their targets to have much chance of hitting.
No matter how fresh and fast their dragons were, they paid for those mistakes. Sabrino and his men were veterans. They knew what they could do, what they couldn’t, and how to help one another when they got in trouble. Had it been a tavern brawl, the Unkerlanters would have complained that the Algarvians didn’t fight fair. As things were, rock-gray dragons and the men who flew them tumbled toward the snow far below one after another in quick succession.
One of those Unkerlanters, intent on some other Algarvian, flew right in front of Sabrino’s dragon, as if he weren’t there at all. From fifty yards, perhaps less, even a poor blazer could hardly have missed. Sabrino was as good with a stick from dragonback as any man breathing. A quick blaze and the Unkerlanter dragonfiier no longer was breathing. His dragon, suddenly out of control, went wild. By luck, the first beast it attacked belonged to another Unkerlanter. Sabrino nodded in sober satisfaction.
But his men did not have it all their own way. Two of their number also plummeted to the ground before the Unkerlanters had enough and broke off their attack. One of the Algarvian dragons, wounded but not ruined, came down gently in the snow. The flier aboard it might well have survived the landing. How long he would survive once Unkerlanter footsoldiers got their hands on him was, unfortunately, another question.