“Aye, sir.” Sabrino got to his feet and left Zerbino’s tent. Captain Domiziano loyally followed. “Go back if you care to,” Sabrino told him. “You’ll do better for yourself staying than leaving. Besides, I know you think I’m wrong.”
“You are my commander, sir,” Domiziano said. “We guard each other’s backs, in the air and on the ground.” Sabrino bowed, touched.
He was gladder to see the dragons than he had been to stay in Brigadier Zerbino’s tent, a telling measure of his distress. The Algarvians and the handful of Yaninans still with them gave him curious looks as he stalked among the dragons. The beasts themselves glared and screeched at him in the same way they glared and screeched at one another: they weren’t fussy in their mindless hostility.
He wasted no time in ordering extra patrols into the air. Zerbino was bound to be right about that: if the enemy discovered Kaunians were being brought up to the front, they would know what was coming and might be able to take precautions against it. Since the army was several days’ march east of Heshbon, he had plenty of time to get the patrols as he wanted them before the Kaunians arrived.
On the day the blonds trudged wearily into camp, a clan of Ice People also came in, to sell camels to the Algarvians. The robed, hairy natives watched impassively as the Kaunians, covered by Algarvians with sticks, made a separate camp for themselves. The mages who’d come in with the Kaunians had ridden out from Heshbon instead of walking. They were fresh and smiling, unlike the men and women in trousers.
Sabrino didn’t want to hang around the Kaunians. In Zerbino’s eyes, he’d already given notice he was an obstructionist. Hanging around only made things worse. But he couldn’t help himself.
Though Zerbino didn’t say anything, Sabrino knew he’d drawn his notice. He also drew the notice of one of the Ice People. The old man-Sabrino assumed it was an old man, though it might have been an old woman-wore a robe covered with fringes and bits of dried plants and the skins of small animals and birds. That made him a shaman: what passed for a mage among the Ice People. As far as Sabrino could tell, though, the savages of the austral continent knew as little of sorcery as they did of everything else.
By his voice, the shaman did prove to be a man. He spoke in his own guttural language. Sabrino spread his hands to show he didn’t understand. The shaman tried again, this time in Yaninan. Sabrino shook his head. He turned away, not wanting to waste any more time on the barbarian. But the old man seized his arm in a grip of surprising strength, and surprised him again by speaking Lagoan: “You not want them to do this.”
Sabrino wasn’t fluent in Lagoan, but he could understand it and make himself understood. The shaman’s dark eyes bored into his. He was suddenly sure exactly what the old man was talking about. How did the savage know? How could he know? In whatever way, he did know. Maybe there was more to the Ice People’s sorcerous talents than most folk credited. Slowly, Sabrino answered, “No, I am not wanting that.”
“Make them stop,” the shaman said, squeezing his arm harder than ever. “They must not do this thing. The land will cry out against it. I tell you this- I, Jeush, I who know this land and its gods.” The last word was in his own tongue.
Gods, as far as Sabrino was concerned, were more laughable nonsense. Somehow, though, he didn’t feel like laughing at this Jeush. But he shook his head again. “I cannot be doing anything to be changing this. You must be talking to Brigadier Zerbino. He is commanding here, not I.”
Sadly, Jeush shook his head. “He will no hear me.” He spoke with great certainty.
“He is not hearing me, either,” Sabrino said, which was all too true.
“If this thing is done …” Jeush shuddered. The fringes on his robe swayed as they would have in a breeze. So did the defunct creatures and branches tied to them. In a horrid sort of way, it was fascinating to watch. Sabrino only shrugged. Had he thought Zerbino would listen to the shaman, he would have brought Jeush before the brigadier. But, as best he could guess, the old man was right: Zerbino would pay no attention to a barbarian who babbled of gods.
“What will happen?” Sabrino asked, wondering why he wanted the views of a babbling barbarian himself.
“Nothing good,” Jeush answered. “Everything bad. This is not your land. These gods is not your gods. You not understanding the hereness of here.” He waited to see if that would make Sabrino change his mind. When it didn’t, the old man turned his back with sad deliberation and slowly walked away.
He spoke to the leader of the band of Ice People. Whatever he said didn’t keep the nomads from selling camels to the Algarvians. Once the bargains were done, though, the Ice People rode south at once instead of hanging around the camp begging and stealing as they usually did. Sabrino seemed to be the only one who noticed or cared.
And he didn’t care for long. Getting ready for the attack on the Lagoans that would follow up the sorcerous onslaught took most of his time. During the rest, he was in the air making sure the enemy’s dragons didn’t sniff out the new camp full of Kaunians. By the time the Algarvian mages announced that all was in readiness, he’d almost forgotten about Jeush and his maunderings.
Standing before his wing of dragonfliers, he said, “This sorcery is supposed to knock the Lagoans into a cocked hat. But the mages are braggarts, remember, so we may have a little more work than they expect. Be smart. Be careful. Let’s win.”
With a great thunder of wings, the dragons leapt into the air one after another. The Algarvian army was already on the march. Only the mages and enough soldiers to guard and slaughter the Kaunians stayed behind. Every beat of his dragon’s wings took Sabrino farther from the camp that held the blonds, and he was thoroughly glad of it.
Though no mage himself, he knew when the massacre and the magecraft springing from it began. His dragon seemed to feel it, too, and staggered in the air for a moment before recovering. Maybe Jeush had known something of what he was talking about after all. “But the Lagoans are catching it worse,” Sabrino muttered.
Then he looked down at the advancing Algarvian army, looked down and cried out in dismay. He knew what sort of sorcery the mages wrought, and now he saw it visited not upon the Lagoans against whom it was aimed but upon his own countrymen. Crevasses yawned beneath them, holes closed upon them, flames seared soldiers and behemoths alike. In the blink of an eye, the Algarvians on the austral continent went from army to ruin.
Sabrino flew on for a little while, too numb for the time being to think of doing anything else. Somewhere down on that frozen waste, a hairy old shaman was saying, “I told you so.”
Once upon a time, Sergeant Leudast thought, Sulingen wouldn’t have been a bad town in which to live. Oh, it would get cold in the winter, he had no doubt of that; he came from the north of Unkerlant, which had a milder climate. But it would have been pleasant, sprawled as it was along the Wolter, with plenty of little patches of wood and parkland and with steeply sloping gullies to break up the blocks of homes and shops and manufactories.
But it wasn’t pleasant any more. Algarvian dragons had been plastering it with eggs for weeks, and many of those blocks of homes were nothing but rubble. Leudast, as a matter of fact, didn’t mind rubble as terrain in which to fight. It offered endless places to hide, and he knew how to take advantage of them. The soldiers who hadn’t learned that lesson were mostly dead by now.
Captain Hawart pointed north, though he was careful not to let the motion expose his arm to a beam from the enemy who lurked too close. “Let’s see the cursed Algarvians outflank us and run rings around us in this,” he said.
“Let’s see anybody do anything in this,” Leudast answered, which made his company commander laugh and nod. Men could move freely enough. The company had spent some time digging trenches through the rubble, which made them much less likely to get blazed if they scrambled from one stretch of wreckage to another. But even behemoths had a hard time going where no paths had been cleared among piles of brick and stone and broken boards.
Hawart said, “The only thing they can do now is come straight at us and slug. They’re quicker than we are. They’re more supple than we are. By the powers above, they’re more clever than we are, too. But how much good does any of that do them here?”
“Do you really think they’re more clever than we are?” Leudast asked.
“If we were more clever, we’d be attacking Trapani-they wouldn’t be here,” Hawart answered, and Leudast had a hard time finding a counterargument. But Hawart went on, “But that only takes you so far. If I hit you in the head with a big rock, how clever you are doesn’t matter anymore. And here in Sulingen, we can hit the redheads with lots of big rocks. If they were really clever, they would have made the fight somewhere else.”
