rubber suit and sorcery shielded him against that. Nor was it even-or not entirely, at any rate-a thrill at returning to Sibian water, to his home waters. No, this was a fighting man’s excitement, the excitement any warrior worth his salt felt at being one small part of a large attack on a hated foe.
Dragons flew overhead, dragons painted in Lagoan red and gold. Ley-line cruisers showing Lagoas’ jack made for Sibian waters. So did a large force of Lagoan leviathans, of which Cornelu’s mount was but one. The exile shook his fist at the islands looming up out of the sea: not at his countrymen who’d lived on them for upwards of a thousand years, but at the accursed Algarvians who occupied them now.
“You will pay!” he shouted in his own language-which an Algarvian might well have understood, since the invaders’ tongue and that of the locals were not just cousins but brothers. “How you will pay!”
As if to imitate his gesture, the leviathan slapped the water with its flukes. He patted the beast, wondering how much, if anything, it really understood. Leviathan riders often talked about that when they sat around and drank wine. Cornelu looked up to the sky again. Dragonfliers never talked about how much their animals understood. They knew perfectly well the brutes understood nothing.
More dragons were in the air now, the newcomers flying off the Sibian islands. The Algarvians wouldn’t leave this challenge unanswered. Such had never been their way. If they couldn’t hit first, they would hit back and hit harder.
And their ships, the ones that weren’t already on patrol near Sibiu, would be sallying from their harbors. Cornelu patted the leviathan again. He’d already sunk an Algarvian cruiser. Another one would be very fine. He chuckled and said, “But a floating fortress would be even better.”
Some of the Algarvian dragons, eggs slung beneath them, were diving on Lagoan ships, one only a mile or so from Cornelu. Beams from the heavy sticks the ships carried reached up for them. A dragon, one wing burned off, plunged spinning into the sea. Its eggs burst then, sending up an enormous white plume of water.
But the dragons drove swiftly, and the sailors at the sticks could not blaze them all before they released their eggs. Bursts of sorcerous energy flung men into the ocean. The ship lurched and settled down deeper onto the sea from its track along the ley line: an egg must have slain the mages who tapped the energy channeled along the world’s grid. Survivors ran here and there. What would they, what could they, do aboard a vessel suddenly at the mercy of wind and waves?
Cornelu didn’t know and had no time to find out. A couple of dragons painted in strange patterns of green and red and white were circling overhead. They didn’t know whose side he was on. Eggs tumbled down from one of them, whose flier had evidently decided he wouldn’t take chances.
With a slap, Cornelu urged his leviathan into a dive and then, perhaps twenty feet below the surface of the sea, into a sprint away from the neighborhood where it had been. The eggs burst there. The sea transmitted sound very well-better than air, in fact. Cornelu’s head rang with the bursts. So did the leviathan’s. It swam harder than ever, fleeing those fearful sounds.
When it surfaced, Cornelu scanned the sky again, afraid the Algarvian dragons might still be after him. But they weren’t-Lagoan dragons had driven them off. “Lagoans are good for something after all,” Cornelu admitted.
His leviathan wiggled-indignantly? — beneath him. He hadn’t meant that personally. Had the leviathan taken umbrage at his mockery of its kingdom? Maybe it understood more Sibian than he’d thought. And maybe he was being silly.
Another wing of dragons dropped eggs on the harbor ahead: Lehliu, the smaller southern port on Sigisoara, the island east of Tirgoviste. Dragons were probably dropping eggs on Tirgoviste town, too. Cornelu wished he were there to see that. He wished he were there to see them drop eggs on his house, and on his faithless wife in it- provided his daughter were somewhere else. Brindza hadn’t done anything to him, even if Costache had.
As soon as the Lagoan dragons let their eggs fall, they flew off toward the east, toward the great island from which they’d set out. They’d had to do a lot of flying to reach Sibiu, and few were up to the challenge of fighting fresher Algarvian beasts. Once they were gone, the Lagoan ships grew more vulnerable to attack from the air. But the ships didn’t pull back. Indeed, they pressed forward with astonishing boldness. Some of them drew close enough to the shore to start tossing eggs into the harbor.
King Mezentio’s men had mounted egg-tossers of their own at the edge of the shore-or perhaps they’d simply taken over the ones Sibiu had emplaced. Cornelu wasn’t familiar enough with the defenses of Lehliu to say for certain one way or the other. He was certain the Algarvians defended the port as aggressively as they did everything else. Eggs burst all around the attacking Lagoan warships, and hit several of them.
And here came the first Algarvian ships out of the harbor: little patrol craft, long on speed, short on weapons. A Lagoan egg hit one of them-hit it and crippled it, all in the same instant. But others dodged past and started blazing at the Lagoans. No, Mezentio’s men weren’t afraid to mix it up.
“Come on, my beauty,” Cornelu told his leviathan. He would have spoken to Eforiel just the same way. (He thought of his old leviathan as he would have thought of a dead wife he’d loved. He’d loved his real wife, too, but she was still alive, and he loved her no more.)
The patrol vessels were faster than the leviathan, of course, but the ley-line cruiser he’d sunk had been faster, too. All he needed to do was come alongside and stay alongside for less than a minute. After that, the patrol craft could glide away. It wouldn’t keep gliding long.
But then his leviathan gave a startled twitch and began to turn aside from the path on which he’d set it. That had nothing to do with mackerel or squid, and he knew it. The great beast had sensed another of its kind close by, and was speeding to the attack.
In a clash between leviathans, Cornelu was unlikely to be anything but a spectator. He did jettison the eggs the beast had brought from Lagoas. He regretted that, but did it without hesitation. Speed and maneuverability counted for more than anything else in this kind of fight.
He wished he could have had more time to work with the leviathan. Sibian training enhanced the instincts inborn in the beasts, and gave them an edge over their counterparts from Lagoas and Algarve. But he hadn’t had the chance, and would have to rely on the leviathan’s speed and ferocity.
Somehow-not even the finest mages knew how-leviathans and their dumpy cousins the whales could unerringly find their way through the sea. The first Cornelu knew of the beast his mount had sensed was when it twisted away to keep his leviathan’s fanged jaw from tearing a great hole in its flank.
He got a brief glimpse of an Algarvian clinging to the other leviathan’s back as he was clinging to his. That other leviathan tried to bite his beast, too. It also missed, though Cornelu saw its teeth glitter. He pulled his knife from its sheath. He couldn’t do much against the Algarvian leviathan, but he might be able to harm the rider if the fight came to the surface.
His own mount writhed in the water, almost as lithe and limber as a serpent. It butted the Algarvian beast with its closed beak. The enemy leviathan writhed in pain. Cornelu understood why; a leviathan could stave in the side of a good-sized wooden vessel with a blow like that.
And, with the other beast hurt, Cornelu’s leviathan bit at it again. This time, the Algarvian’s mount could not escape. Blood gushed forth and darkened the water. All thought of fight forgotten, the other leviathan fled. Cornelu’s pursued, and bit another chunk out of its flank and one from a tail fluke. Either of those bites-to say nothing of the first one-would have been plenty to devour half a man, or maybe all of a man.
Cornelu wouldn’t have wanted to be the Algarvian aboard that wounded leviathan. The fellow would have a cursed hard time getting the animal to pay attention to him rather than to its own torment. And the blood pouring from it would surely draw sharks. Normally, a shark wouldn’t dare come near a leviathan, but normal rules didn’t hold with blood in the water. And the rider would be in at least as much danger as his mount.
How was the rest of the fight, the bigger fight, going? Cornelu needed a while to find out. Victory had made his leviathan nearly as hard to control as defeat had the Algarvian’s. Eforiel would have behaved better; the Sibian naval officer was as sure of that as he was of his own name. But Eforiel was dead, gone. He had to do the best he could with this less responsive beast.
At last, he got the leviathan to rear up in the water, lifting him so he could see farther. Few Lagoan dragons were still in the air; most had indeed flown back toward the dragon farms from which they’d set out. But the Algarvian dragons, flying close to the conquered islands, kept on attacking the Lagoan warships that had come to raid Sibiu. A couple of more Lagoan ships had already lost ley-line power, and drifted helplessly in the water. Before long, either dragons or leviathans would sink them.
The Algarvians were getting more and more ships out of Lehliu harbor, too. They had fewer in the fight than
