He did his best: “As I say, I will punish any man who maligns you or your kingdom. Algarve needs your aid.”
“It is better than nothing,” Caratzas said. “I myself, you understand, am able to keep my temper in the face of these insults.” He hiccuped. Those sweet-smelling spirits no doubt helped blunt the sting of any insults he heard. After another hiccup, he went on, “But we Yaninans are a proud folk, and some of us will have blood to repay any slight.”
“I understand.” Sabrino wished the Yaninans were as prickly about doing a good job at war as they were about their honor. That was one more thing he couldn’t tell Caratzas.
He looked east across the broad, rolling plains where the austral continent sloped down from the Barrier Mountains to the Narrow Sea. Somewhere out there was the Lagoan army. It had been driven a long way back from Heshbon, but it was still there, still dangerous, still very much in the fight. Both the Lagoans and Sabrino’s army kept dragons in the air all the time now, watching one another’s movements and making sure nobody got any unpleasant surprises.
“If we had more men, more behemoths, more dragons, we could drive the Lagoans into the sea,” Caratzas remarked.
“Well, so we could, but that might mean we didn’t have enough men to finish off the Unkerlanters, too,” Sabrino said. “The fight up on the Derlavaian mainland is more important than the war here.”
Something glowed for a moment in Caratzas’ dark eyes, then vanished in their depths before Sabrino was sure he saw it. The Yaninan said, “In getting into a fight, or several fights, it is better to be sure one has enough men beforehand, not afterwards.”
That was a painfully obvious truth. “If we’d taken Cottbus …” Sabrino’s voice trailed away. “Well, one way or another, we’ll just have to lick Swemmel’s men. We’re driving them in the south. The cinnabar there and the cinnabar we get here should keep us going till we beat all our enemies.”
“Now there is a thought,” Caratzas said, sozzled awe in his voice. “Beating all of one’s enemies. .” Had he been an Algarvian, he would have bunched his fingers and kissed their tips. Yaninans used different gestures, but the naked longing on Caratzas’ face said more than any of them.
For a Yaninan, beating all of one’s enemies had to be a dream, and an impossible dream at that. For an Algarvian … Sabrino remembered the heady days of the summer before, when Unkerlant looked on the point of collapse. Had Swemmel fled off into the uncharted west, how long could Lagoas have lasted without coming to terms with King Mezentio? Not long, by his way of thinking. And Kuusamo had still been neutral then. Sabrino sighed. Algarve had been on the brink, right on the brink.
“It could still happen,” Sabrino murmured. “By the powers above, it could.” Unkerlant hadn’t been knocked out of the war, but she might yet be. If that happened, Lagoas and Kuusamo together could hardly stand against the united might of the entire continent of Derlavai. The world would be Mezentio’s-if Swemmel couldn’t contest it any more.
Horns blew the alarm, startling Sabrino out of his reverie. Cries of alarm shredded dreams of all-embracing victory. “The Lagoans!” someone shouted from the direction of the crystallomancers’ tent. “The Lagoans are on our flank!”
Cursing foully, Sabrino sprang from the rock on which he’d been sitting. “How did they get there?” he demanded, as if Caratzas would know.
To his surprise, the Yaninan did, or at least had an idea: “I wonder if they made an arrangement with shamans from the Ice People. Magic down here is a funny business. I don’t pretend to understand all of it.”
“Do you understand that we’re all liable to get killed if we can’t throw the Lagoans back?” Sabrino snapped. “How did they come up on our flank?” Like any Algarvian, he had trouble taking the Ice People seriously.
The Lagoans, on the other hand, were deadly dangerous. He knew that. He’d known it since his days as a footsoldier during the Six Years’ War, when he’d faced them in southern Valmiera. Come to think of it, he’d been lucky to come through in one piece then.
His dragonfliers rushed up to their beasts as the handlers got them ready to fly and to fight. Sabrino scrambled aboard his own mount while a handler detached the chain that bound it to its stake. He whacked the dragon with his goad. It let out a hideous, raucous screech and bounded into the air.
As the ground fell away beneath him-and as, at the same time, his field of vision widened-Sabrino discovered how, if not why, the Lagoans had managed to escape the Algarvian scouts’ notice. Even knowing they were there, he had trouble seeing them. It was as if his eyes wanted to rest anywhere but on marching men and hurrying horses and bulky behemoths.
That struck him as magecraft closely linked to the land, the sort of thing the shamans might do. The military mages attached to the army hadn’t tried any serious sorcery down here because the land felt strange, alien. It wasn’t alien to the hairy nomads who’d roamed it for eons. If they’d thrown in with the Lagoans. .
“In that case, we have to smash them, too,” Sabrino told his dragon. It screeched again. Maybe that was approval-dragons liked nothing better than smashing things. More likely, it was random chance.
And the dragon had no trouble seeing the Lagoans, even if he did. As soon as he gave it leave, it folded its wings and hurtled toward them in as terrifying a dive as Sabrino had ever known. The dive was terrifying for a couple of reasons: not only was he afraid the dragon would smash into the ground without being able to pull up, he also feared a heavy stick would blaze it-and him with it.
But the heavy sticks some of the Lagoan behemoths carried weren’t so accurate when the behemoths were on the move. And the enemy started blazing later than they might have; maybe they thought for too long that the Algarvians didn’t know they were there.
If they thought that, they were wrong. Sabrino’s dragon flew along just above their heads. The Algarvian wing commander gave the great beast what it wanted: the command to flame. He thought it would have flamed the Lagoans without the command, and didn’t want it breaking away from his control like that.
Fumes loaded with brimstone and quicksilver made him cough. This can’t be good for my lungs, he thought, as if any dragonflier really expected to live long enough to have his lungs wear out. But breathing the fumes from dragonfire was better by far than being bathed in it. Some Lagoans shriveled and died where they stood. Others writhed on the ground or ran screaming, human torches who could ignite their friends.
He and his wing hadn’t had such an easy time wrecking an enemy column since the early days of the war against Unkerlant. The Lagoans, aiming at surprise, hadn’t brought their dragons with them, so the Algarvians had the air to themselves. And even when King Vitor’s men did blaze down an Algarvian dragon, the dead beast fell among them and wrecked most of a company in its death throes.
Sabrino’s dragon clawed its way higher. It was ready and more than ready for another run at the Lagoans. Looking down on them, though, Sabrino saw they’d been thrown into enough disorder. Their attack on the Algarvian expeditionary force would not come off. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Captain Domiziano’s image appeared in his crystal. “Enemy dragons flying hard out of the east,” the squadron commander reported.
Sabrino looked that way. Sure enough, he saw them himself. “Back to our own men,” he said. “We can defend them, and they can defend us with their heavy sticks. And now, instead of the Lagoans’ moving on our soldiers on the ground, we’ll move on theirs. Try and pull the wool over our eyes, will they?”