“Let it be as you wish, of course.” Broumidis was, as always, impeccably polite. “But I wanted to make sure you were aware of the possibility.”
“For which I thank you.” Sabrino matched courtesy with courtesy. And then, after one more glance over toward the Lagoans to make sure they weren’t trying to double back after his own wing, he put them out of his mind.
That turned out to be a mistake. The dragon farm wasn’t very far behind the line to which the Yaninan and Algarvian ground forces had advanced. Peering west, Sabrino spied a ragged column of smoke rising into the air. He frowned. Nothing in the neighborhood had been burning when the wing set out.
When he got a little closer, he exclaimed in horror. A moment later, Broumidis’ face appeared in the crystal again. “My lord Count,” he said, “I think we now know the true reason we saw the Lagoan dragons, may the powers below eat them, flying back toward the east.”
“Aye,” Sabrino agreed dully. He wished he’d ordered his wing and the Yaninan dragons after the Lagoans. If he had, they might have enjoyed a measure of revenge. But that wouldn’t have brought the dragon farm back into being. The Lagoans must have loaded their handful of dragons with all the eggs they could carry, then struck as hard a blow as they could at their enemies’ base.
“Curse them,” Sabrino muttered. The Lagoans were clever tacticians; since they couldn’t hope to oppose the vastly superior Algarvian and Yaninan dragons in the air, they’d hidden their own beasts as best they could till they could make life as miserable as possible on the ground for their foes.
They’d done a hideously good job. As Sabrino urged his dragon down in a long, slow spiral, he saw what a good job it was. The Lagoans had plastered the tents of the groundcrew men with eggs. A few of the Algarvians and Yaninans who cared for the dragons had survived unharmed, and waved to their countrymen as they approached. But more were down, wounded or dead; corpses and pieces of corpses littered the cratered ground where the tents had stood.
And there were more craters than the eggs from a small force of dragons could have accounted for. One of those craters, still sending up nasty smoke, was enormous-it looked as if something had taken a great bite out of the ground. Sabrino needed a moment to get his bearing and realize the Lagoans must have landed an egg right on the wagons that had carried the eggs his wing was using against the enemy. Till some more came forward from Heshbon, his dragonfliers wouldn’t be dropping any more.
His dragon landed with a thump that made him lurch against his harness. A groundcrew man shouted, “Colonel! My lord Count!” and then could go no further, but burst into tears.
“Let’s see to the animals,” Sabrino said-the first words in the dragonflier’s creed, as in the cavalryman’s.
But with so many groundcrew men dead, seeing to the dragons was a far longer, slower, harder job than it would have been otherwise. And the Ice People brought only a bare handful of camels to the dragon farm-not enough to content the voracious beasts. One of the hairy nomads spoke in Yaninan to Broumidis. The beard that grew up almost to his eyes and the hairline that started just above his eyebrows masked his expression, but Sabrino could hear the scorn in his voice.
“What does he say?” Sabrino asked.
The Yaninan dragonflier turned back to him. “He says he thought Algarve was great. He thought Algarve would drive everything before it. Now he sees it is not so. He sees that Algarvians are just another pack of mangy men coming down here from across the ocean, and nothing special at all.”
“He says that, does he?” Sabrino growled. Broumidis nodded. Did enjoyment for his powerful allies’ discomfiture spark for a moment in his black eyes? If it did, Sabrino hardly supposed he could blame him. The Algarvian colonel and count said, “Tell him we have hardly begun to show what we can do.” But even he could not deny-not to himself, at any rate, whatever he admitted to the man of the Ice People-that the work ahead had just grown harder.
Two
The shiver that ran through Cornelu had nothing to do with the chilly sea in which his leviathan swam: a rubber suit and sorcery shielded him against that. Nor was it even-or not entirely, at any rate-a thrill at returning to Sibian water, to his home waters. No, this was a fighting man’s excitement, the excitement any warrior worth his salt felt at being one small part of a large attack on a hated foe.
Dragons flew overhead, dragons painted in Lagoan red and gold. Ley-line cruisers showing Lagoas’ jack made for Sibian waters. So did a large force of Lagoan leviathans, of which Cornelu’s mount was but one. The exile shook his fist at the islands looming up out of the sea: not at his countrymen who’d lived on them for upwards of a thousand years, but at the accursed Algarvians who occupied them now.
“You will pay!” he shouted in his own language-which an Algarvian might well have understood, since the invaders’ tongue and that of the locals were not just cousins but brothers. “How you will pay!”
As if to imitate his gesture, the leviathan slapped the water with its flukes. He patted the beast, wondering how much, if anything, it really understood. Leviathan riders often talked about that when they sat around and drank wine. Cornelu looked up to the sky again. Dragonfliers never talked about how much their animals understood. They knew perfectly well the brutes understood nothing.
More dragons were in the air now, the newcomers flying off the Sibian islands. The Algarvians wouldn’t leave this challenge unanswered. Such had never been their way. If they couldn’t hit first, they would hit back and hit harder.
And their ships, the ones that weren’t already on patrol near Sibiu, would be sallying from their harbors. Cornelu patted the leviathan again. He’d already sunk an Algarvian cruiser. Another one would be very fine. He chuckled and said, “But a floating fortress would be even better.”
Some of the Algarvian dragons, eggs slung beneath them, were diving on Lagoan ships, one only a mile or so from Cornelu. Beams from the heavy sticks the ships carried reached up for them. A dragon, one wing burned off, plunged spinning into the sea. Its eggs burst then, sending up an enormous white plume of water.
But the dragons drove swiftly, and the sailors at the sticks could not blaze them all before they released their eggs. Bursts of sorcerous energy flung men into the ocean. The ship lurched and settled down deeper onto the sea from its track along the ley line: an egg must have slain the mages who tapped the energy channeled along the world’s grid. Survivors ran here and there. What would they, what could they, do aboard a vessel suddenly at the mercy of wind and waves?
Cornelu didn’t know and had no time to find out. A couple of dragons painted in strange patterns of green and red and white were circling overhead. They didn’t know whose side he was on. Eggs tumbled down from one of them, whose flier had evidently decided he wouldn’t take chances.
With a slap, Cornelu urged his leviathan into a dive and then, perhaps twenty feet below the surface of the sea, into a sprint away from the neighborhood where it had been. The eggs burst there. The sea transmitted sound very well-better than air, in fact. Cornelu’s head rang with the bursts. So did the leviathan’s. It swam harder than ever, fleeing those fearful sounds.
When it surfaced, Cornelu scanned the sky again, afraid the Algarvian dragons might still be after him. But they weren’t-Lagoan dragons had driven them off. “Lagoans are good for something after all,” Cornelu admitted.