belly. Beams from heavy sticks reached up for it. One of them found it before the dragonflier let the eggs drop. Burning and tumbling, the dragon fell into the sea. The ship kept gliding along the ley line.
“Up, my friend,” Cornelu told his leviathan, and it rose in the water. He, of course, rose with it. Taking advantage of that, he peered inland. He couldn’t see so much as he would have liked; smoke from the fires already burning in the seaside village obscured his view. But he could see that the Lagoan soldiers seemed to be making for some specific place in back of Dukstas, not fanning out all over the countryside. Maybe that meant they really did know what they were doing. He hoped so, for their sake.
Nobody’d bothered to tell him what they were doing, though. He sighed. That was no tiling out of the ordinary.
And, sure enough, here came an Algarvian ship from the east, the first, no doubt, of many to assail the Lagoan fleet. Cornelu’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. The Algarvians had come too fast. They were intrepid, sometimes intrepid to a fault. Having got the order to attack the Lagoans, they’d piled into their patrol craft and charged out of whatever harbor housed it, eager to be first on the scene and make King Vitor’s men pay.
“And here they are, out ahead of everyone,” Cornelu murmured, “and the next thought of leviathans they have will be their first.”
He’d sunk a ley-line cruiser. He had no trouble sneaking up on this smaller enemy ship: Mezentio’s men, their eyes on the target ahead, paid no attention to anything but the Lagoan ships on their ley line. The rest of the ocean? They worried about it not at all.
Cornelu secured an egg to the side of the Algarvian vessel, then urged his leviathan away from it. When the egg burst, the leviathan gave a startled jerk, then swam away harder than ever. After a while, it had to surface to breathe. Cornelu looked back toward the ship he’d attacked.
There wasn’t much to see, not any more. That egg could have put paid to another cruiser. It was ever so much more than enough to wreck a patrol craft. Only a few bits of flotsam floated on the water; only a few men struggled in it. If they kept their heads, they might be able to swim to shore. Most of their countrymen, though, had gone down and would never rise again.
Another Algarvian ship had been perhaps a mile behind the first one. Seeing it come to grief, Mezentio’s men frantically brought their vessel to a stop. Eggs from the Lagoan ships began landing near it, and quickly scored a couple of hits. Cornelu cheered. The Algarvian vessel reversed its course and limped away from the fight.
But more Algarvian ships were coming from the west, and more and more Algarvian dragons were overhead. A Lagoan ship caught fire and settled back to the surface of the sea, unable to ride on the ley line any more. Another ship, hit by several eggs, rolled over onto its side and sank.
When Cornelu glanced at the sun, he was surprised to see how far into the northwest it had slid. The fighting on land and sea around Dukstas had been going on for most of the day. The question was, how much longer could the Lagoans keep it up in the face of the superior forces Algarve was marshaling against them?
Though Cornelu hopefully peered south, he spied no new ships coming up from the direction of Setubal. Whatever he and his comrades were supposed to be doing, they were supposed to be doing it by themselves.
Soldiers started trotting back toward the beach and piling into the boats from which they’d gone forth to kill and burn. Oars flashing, they pulled out toward the ships that had brought them to Valmiera. But not so many of those ships were left, and some of the survivors were under attack. Cornelu cursed to see the punishment the soldiers took. It wasn’t as if they were Sibians, but they were fighting the Algarvians.
Sailors let down nets and rope ladders to help the ones who made it out to the ley-line ships come aboard. As soon as all the soldiers had been taken up, the ships glided east along their ley line till it crossed one leading south toward Lagoas. Cornelu urged his leviathan south, too, to cover their retreat.
No Algarvian warships pursued them, which surprised him-Mezentio’s men were not usually inclined toward half measures. But dragons from the mainland of Derlavai dogged the fleet almost all the way back to Setubal. Cornelu wondered how many men who’d landed at Dukstas would see their homes again. He would have been astonished if even half were that lucky.
The leviathan didn’t bring him to the Lagoan capital till after sunrise the next day. Exhausted almost beyond bearing, he staggered to the Sibian barracks and fell asleep without even wrapping the blanket on his cot around himself.
No one woke him. When he climbed out of the cot, the sun had crawled across the sky. Instead of barley mush, he ate fried prawns and washed them down with ale. Then he went out to learn what he could, not in the harbor but in the taverns next door to it.
He’d expected to find the sailors furious at such a botched assault on the Algarvians. Instead, they seemed happy enough. That puzzled him, but not for long. He had to buy only a couple of mugs before a Lagoan told him what he wanted to learn. “Aye,” the fellow said, “we did what we came for, we did, and no mistake.”
“And that was?” Cornelu asked in his halting Lagoan.
“Didn’t you know?” The sailor stared at him with something approaching pity. “They was building a captives’ camp back o’ that town, they was. Would have served us the way they served Yliharma, they would. Won’t be able to do that now, they won’t. Let a lot o’ poor cursed Kaunians run free, we did.”
“Ah,” Cornelu said slowly once he made sense of the Lagoan’s dialect, which took a little while. “So that was the game.”
“That was the game, sure was,” the sailor agreed. “Cost us some, it did, but Setubal won’t come crashing down around our ears, it won’t.”
“No, it won’t.” Cornelu raised a finger to the busy fellow behind the bar and bought the Lagoan sailor another mug of ale-and one for himself as well. The sailor gulped his. Cornelu sipped more thoughtfully.
How many more times would the Lagoans have to strike across the Strait of Valmiera to keep the Algarvians from using massacre to power magic against their capital? That had an obvious answer-
Most of the time, Talsu was convinced, the Algarvians would have been far happier had Skrunda had no news sheets at all. Every once in a while, though, the redheads found them useful. When enemy dragons dropped eggs on the town, the news sheets had screamed and brayed about it for days. Now they were screaming and braying again.
“Lagoan pirates try to invade mainland of Derlavai!” a hawker shouted, waving a sheet. “Enemy beaten back with heavy loss! Generals say they’re welcome to try again! Read it here! Read it here!”
Talsu gave him a copper, as much to make him shut up as for any other reason. The news sheet didn’t tell him much more than the hawker had. It just said the same things over and over, each time shriller than the last. When he’d finished that story and the ones about the great Algarvian victories in southern Unkerlant, he crumpled up the sheet and tossed it into the gutter. Then he wiped the ink from the cheap printing job off the palms of his hands and onto his trousers. His mother would complain when she saw the dark smudges there, but that would be later. For now, he wanted to get his hands somewhere close to clean.
More hawkers with stacks of news sheets cried out the headlines as Talsu strode through the market square. As far as he could tell, they used the same words as had the ragged fellow from whom he’d bought a sheet. He wondered if hawkers all over Jelgava were selling the exact same stories with the exact same words. He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
When he walked past the grocery store Gailisa’s father ran, he looked in the window hoping to get a glimpse of her. No such luck: her father ambled out from behind the counter to put jars of candied figs on the shelves. Talsu was heartily glad Gailisa favored her mother; had she been plump and doughy and hairy, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her.
Her father saw him through the window and waved. Talsu waved back, more from duty than from affection. He looked forward to marrying Gailisa- he certainly looked forward to some of the concomitants of marrying Gailisa- but he didn’t particularly look forward to being yoked to the rest of her family as well.
He got round a corner before her father could come out and start yattering at him. Hurrying like that, though, gave him a painful stitch in the side. It wouldn’t have before the Algarvian soldier stabbed him; he knew as much
