Through the Darkness

“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.”