That was bravado, and he knew it. Facaceni lay farthest west of Sibiu's main islands. He expected to run a gauntlet before he could escape into the open ocean. The Algarvians would be after him like hounds after a rabbit. He'd had to run from them enough times before. No, not like hounds alone- like hounds and hawks. They'd surely put dragons in the air, too.
And so they did- a couple. They flew search spirals, but didn't happen to spot him. And Mezentio's men sent out a couple of swift little ley-line patrol boats after him, but again, only a couple. He had no trouble making good his escape. It was, in fact, so easy it worried him. He kept anxiously looking around, wondering what he'd missed, wondering what was about to drop on his head.
But nothing did. After a while, the pursuit, never more than halfhearted, simply gave up. He had an easy time returning to the harbor at Setubal.
He almost got killed before he could enter it, though. Lagoan patrol boats were thick as fleas on a dog. They could go almost anywhere in those waters; more ley lines converged on Setubal than on any other city of the world. He got challenged three different times in the course of an hour, and peremptorily ordered off his leviathan when the third captain decided he sounded like an Algarvian. To his surprise, the fellow had a rider on his ship, a man who examined the leviathan, made sure it was carrying no eggs, and took it into the port himself.
"What happened?" Cornelu asked, over and over, but no one on the patrol boat would tell him. Only after Admiralty officials vouched for him was he allowed to learn: the Algarvians on Sibiu had been quiet, but the ones in Valmiera hadn't. They'd sneaked a couple of leviathan-riders across the Strait, and the men had planted eggs on half a dozen warships, including two ley-line cruisers.
"Most embarrassing," a sour-faced Lagoan captain said in what he imagined was Sibian but was in fact only Algarvian slightly mispronounced. Most of the time, that playing fast and loose with his language offended Cornelu. Not today- he wanted facts. Instead, the captain gave him an opinion: "Worst thing that's happened to our navy since you Sibs beat it right outside of Setubal here two hundred and fifty years ago."
It was, at least, an opinion calculated to put a smile on Cornelu's long, dour face. He asked, "What will you do now?"
"Build more ships, train more men, give back better than we got," the captain replied without hesitation. "We did that against Sibiu, too."
He was, unfortunately, correct. Here, at least, he and Cornelu had the same enemy. "Where do I make my report?" the Sibian exile asked.
"Third door on your left," the sour-faced captain answered. "We'll get our own back- you wait and see." Cornelu didn't want to wait. He hurried to the third door on his left.
"In the summertime," Marshal Rathar said, "Durrwangen can get quite respectably warm."
"Oh, aye, I think so, too," General Vatran agreed. "Of course, the naked black Zuwayzin would laugh themselves to death to hear us go on like this."
"I won't say you're wrong." Rathar shuddered. "I was up in the north for the end of our war against them, you know." He waited for Vatran to nod, then went on, "Ghastly place. Sand and rocks and dry riverbeds and thorn-bushes and camels and poisoned wells and the sun blazing down- and the Zuwayzin fought like demons, too, till we broke 'em by weight of numbers."
"And drove 'em straight into King Mezentio's arms," Vatran said mournfully.
"And drove 'em straight into King Mezentio's arms," Rathar agreed. He stared north across the battered ruins of Durrwangen toward the Algarvian lines not far outside of town. Then he turned to Vatran. "You know, if the redheads wanted to come straight at us, they could push us out of here."
Vatran's nod was stolid. "Oh, aye, they could. But they won't."
"And how do you know that?" Rathar asked with a smile.
"How do I know?" Vatran's shaggy white eyebrows rose. "I'll tell you how, by the powers above. Three different ways." As he spoke, he ticked off points on his gnarled fingers. "For one thing, they learned at Sulingen that coming straight at us doesn't pay, and they haven't had the chance to forget it yet. For another, they're Algarvians- they never like doing anything simple if they can do it fancy and tie a big bow and red ribbons around it besides."
"Huh!" Rathar said. "If that's not the truth, curse me if I know what is."
"You hush, lord Marshal. I wasn't done." Vatran overacted reproach. "For a third, all the signs show that they're going to try to bite off the salient and trap us here, and all the captives we take say the same thing."
"I can't argue with any of that," Rathar said. "It's your second reason that worries me a little, though. Doing it fancy might mean setting us up for an enormous surprise." But he shook his head. "They're Algarvians, and that means they think they're smarter than everybody else." He sighed. "Sometimes they're right, too- but not always. I don't think they're right here."
"They'd better not be," Vatran said. "If they are, it'll mean we've wasted a cursed lot of work in the salient."
"We've done what we can," Rather said. "Anybody who tries to break through there will have a rough time of it." He sighed again. "Of course, the Algarvians have done things I would've sworn were flat-out impossible. How they got into Sulingen last summer…"
"They got in, but they didn't get out again." Vatran sounded cheerful, as he usually did. Rathar had a good soldier's confidence, even a good soldier's arrogance, but he was not by nature a cheerful man. Nobody who'd served so long directly under King Swemmel had an easy time being cheerful.
"We beat them in the wintertime, the same as we held them out of Cottbus the winter before," Rathar said. "It's summer now. Whenever they attack in the summer, they drive us before them."
"Nobody's driving us out of this salient," Vatran said. "Nobody. And just because you're talking about what they have done, what's that got to do with what they're going to do? Not a fornicating thing, says I."
Rathar slapped him on the shoulder, not so much for being right as for trying to raise both their spirits. But if the Algarvians had gone forward by great leaps in the two earlier summers of their war against Unkerlant, what was to keep them from going forward by great leaps in this third summer of the war?
Unkerlanter soldiers, that's what, he thought. Unkerlanter behemoths, Unkerlanter dragons, Unkerlanter cavalry. We've learned a lot from these redheaded whoresons the past two years. Now we'll find out if we've got our lessons right.
If they hadn't learned, they would have gone under. He knew no stronger incentive than that. They might still go under, if King Mezentio's men did break through what Unkerlant had built here to hold them back. But the Algarvians would know they'd been in a fight. They already knew they'd been in a fight, a harder fight than they'd had anywhere in the east of Derlavai.
Vatran had been thinking with him. "Invade our kingdom, will they? We'll teach them what we think of people who do things like that, powers below eat me if we don't."
"If we don't, the powers below will eat both of us," Rathar said, and Vatran nodded. They trudged through rubble-strewn streets- or perhaps across what had been yards from which most of the rubble had been blown- back toward the battered bank building where Rather had made his headquarters. A lot of eggs had fallen on Durrwangen since, but the building still stood. Banks had to be strong places; that was one of the reasons Rathar had chosen this one.
No sentries stood outside to snap to attention and salute as he and General Vatran came up. King Swemmel would have had sentries out there; Swemmel insisted on show. Maybe because his sovereign did, Rathar didn't. Also, of course, sentries outside the building would have been likely to get killed when the Algarvians tossed in some more of their endless eggs. Rathar had sent uncounted tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths, but he wasn't deliberately wasteful. He hoped the war never made him so hard or simply so indifferent as that.