The whole drake dove into the ocean. Nothing got between a seadrake and his kill, and Ullery imagined the points about his tactics that the vos Vacus tutors in the palanquins above would be making to their charges right now.
Silverstreak shivered and trembled with her need to follow, but Ullery held her back with every bit of will he could muster. He let her pick at a bit of cake, dropped from above and missed in the handler’s slaughter, but he had no desire to enter the fray he and Silverstreak had arranged for Blackfang.
But then his drake shied right as a bottle was hurled down at them. It shattered on the beach nearby, and Ullery realized some of the yells above were directed towards him. He glanced up to see Kon vos Vacus gesturing urgently at him to enter the fight.
Ullery didn’t go so far as to shake his head at the Master, but he had no intention of obeying. Still, the spectators needed a show, and as the only remaining handler, it was up to Ullery to give them one. If he didn’t, they’d change something about the arena fight, and it probably wouldn’t be survivable, so he urged the quivering Silverstreak to slink around the edge of the low dune island to give him a view of the ocean melee.
Blackfang’s dexter head cracked the spine of a sharkbeast and tossed it high overhead. It missed the red palanquin but not by very much. Small arms reached out trying to touch this second bleeding projectile before it fell back into the sea.
The crowd roared approval. And cookies rained down from the heavens.
Mostly they fell on Silverstreak who caught them with elegantly arched necks and flicking tongues.
Blackfang’s center head took a frosted coconut puff to the nose and went cross-eyed staring at the thing lodged between the horns of his muzzle.
And that was the point at which Ullery’s drake, dancing in the fall of sweets, slid off the island into the waves herself.
A sharkbeast bit her. Probably entirely by accident in the chum-thickened waters, but Silverstreak’s center head responded with a lightning-quick jawlock on the beast’s dorsal fin and a flip that snatched the creature into the air. And then, just before the jaw should have released for a clean upward toss, the center head spasmed.
The stunned sharkbeast tumbled tail over rictus mouth directly at Blackfang.
The drake’s dexter head caught it just by the tail fluke. The sinister head crunched through the shark’s skull, and the center curved back and forth watching Silverstreak.
Ullery pressed his drake towards the island and she took an unwilling half step in the direction of partial safety.
Then Blackfang’s center head tore out the sharkbeast’s liver and tossed it in a clean throw straight at Silverstreak who swallowed it whole.
There weren’t enough sharkbeasts in the water to satiate both seadrakes, so in the end Silverstreak licked the frosted coconut puff off Blackfang’s nose while Ullery tried to keep his pulse steady and his breath even. Someone else, someone with magic, would have to be the one to tell Silverstreak Fleshrender and Blackfang Heartripper they wouldn’t be permitted to mate.
High above, adults hurried to end the children’s party before the events on Arena Island became too explicit to explain to inquisitive young Mythlan nobles.
Chapter Twenty
January 4
“Thank you for coming aboard, Master Yanusa-Mahrdissa,” Battalion-Captain Hymair chan Yahndar said, standing behind the desk in his cramped-extremely cramped-shipboard office. There was too little room, as his Karmalian grandmother would have said, to swing a sheep. Of course, chan Yahndar had never understood who’d want to swing a sheep, but the phrase certainly offered all of the earthy color anyone could have desired. And however tiny his office was, he was lucky to have it. TTE’s mass-produced steamships were scarcely noted for their palatial accommodations, and Voyager Osprey was no exception to that rule, although-thank all the gods! — she’d at least been intended as a transport from the beginning. That meant he and his men hadn’t ended up stacked in six-high pipe-frame bunks in a converted cargo hold whose last contents had reeked to the gods themselves.
“Well,” the dark-skinned Shurkhali said with an expression halfway between a grimace and a smile, “given all we’ve got to do, it seemed like a good idea to get started early. I’ve been practically camped on that damned dock for two days, now.”
“Sorry about the delay.” Chan Yahndar’s expression was all the way over on the grimace side of the scale. “We lost thirty-six hours getting the horses loaded. They didn’t much care for the princely quality of their accommodations.”
Which, he thought dryly, once again demonstrates how superior “horse sense” is to human sense.
“And I don’t envy the crewmen who have to muck out the holds, either,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa observed.
“Don’t feel too sorry for them,” chan Yahndar said dryly. “The ship masters are pretty damned insistent about who’s doing what before our baggage gets released.”
“Trans-Temporal’s ship masters are about as ornery as they come,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa agreed with something suspiciously like a chuckle.
“True, but they got us to Shosara in handsome style once everyone was onboard,” chan Yahndar conceded. “And now that we are here,” he continued, waving his visitor into the sole vacant chair, “I suppose we’d best get down to it.”
He waited while the civilian seated himself, then swept his hand in a gesture which indicated the other two officers squeezed into the compartment.
“Master Yanusa-Mahrdissa, allow me to present Company-Captain Grithair chan Mahsdyr and Battalion-Captain Francho chan Hurmahl. Company-Captain chan Mahsdyr has Gold Company of Second Battalion, and Battalion-Captain chan Hurmahl has the Fourteen-Oh-Seventh Mounted Engineers.”
Yanusa-Mahrdissa nodded to the other two Ternathians, and chan Yahndar leaned back in his chair while he contemplated the task which confronted them. He’d always known Division-Captain chan Geraith wasn’t afraid to think outside the box, but this was considerably farther outside than even the division-captain was accustomed to straying, and if even one thing went wrong…
He shifted his contemplation to the maps on the office’s bulkheads and tried not to shudder as he thought about the sheer scale of the task before them. Even assuming the Arcanans truly didn’t know they were coming, and that they weren’t spotted en route by one of their godsdamned flying beasties, simple logistics were enough to make the mission a nightmare. But in the words of one of the Imperial Ternathian Army’s legendary commanders, if a job was easy, they wouldn’t need Ternathians to get it done.
And just your luck you’ve got no less than two deployments to the PAAF on your resume, isn’t it? he thought dryly. When the Division Captain needed someone who’d spent time crawling around the backside of nowhere, he didn’t have far to look. And it’s a damned good thing young Grithair can say the same.
The truth, unfortunately, was that for all its immense experience and proud traditions, the Imperial Ternathian Army had never operated as a unit outside its home universe. There’d never been any need for it to…which meant it had no experience as an institution of the rigors of moving from one universe to another. That wasn’t as simple as a walk in the park-not when the two sides of any given portal might literally be half way around the world from one another. The transition from scorching summer to the middle of a howling blizzard was nothing to take lightly. In fact, far too many men had died because of just that sort of shift, and the need to supply both tropical and arctic equipment-and to haul it along as they went-was a quartermaster’s nightmare.
And it’s exactly what we’ll have to do moving from Resym into Nairsom, too, he thought grimly.