said.
“You’re a gentleman,” Sabrino said, and gave Orosio a seated bow. By his pedigree, Orosio wasn’t much of a gentleman, or he would have been a colonel with a wing of his own. Sabrino flexed his shoulder. Itdid still pain him; his wounded dragon had come down behind Unkerlanter lines, and he’d got blazed escaping Swemmel’s men. “Aye, you’re a gentleman, but it’s more than that. I can’t stand having my life turned upside down a new way every day as easily as I could when I was your age, and that’s all there is to it.”
“That’s not so good, sir.” Orosio lacked much of the spirit of fun that most Algarvians had. Serious and sober as usual, he went on. “War does what it wants to do, not what you want it to do.”
“Really?” Sabrino did his best to look astonished. “I never would have noticed.”
He hoped Orosio would laugh. He feared Orosio would believe him. He never found out either way. Before the squadron leader could react, a crystal-lomancer stuck his head into the tent, nodded to Sabrino, and said, “Sir, Brigadier Blosio from army headquarters would speak to you.”
“Would he?” Sabrino said. The crystallomancer nodded. With a sigh, Sabrino got to his feet. “The next interesting question is, would I speak to him?” He didn’t scandalize the young mage any further, but got up and followed him off to his tent.
It had been cold inside the mess tent. As soon as Sabrino poked his head out the flap, the Unkerlanter winter stabbed icy knives into the marrow of his bones. This wouldn ‘t have bothered me so much when I was half my age, either, he thought bitterly.
Dragons crouched in the snow, chained to the iron spikes that kept them from flying off and doing something stupid on their own. Dragon handlers moved among them, keeping them fed. This wasn’t a proper dragon farm, not the way the manuals back in Algarve said one should be organized. It was the best worn, overtaxed men could do. Ever since Cottbus failed to fall in the first winter of the campaign against Unkerlant, the whole war in the west had been one improvisation after another, each seeming more desperate than the last.
The crystallomancer ducked into his own tent. With a sigh of relief, Sabrino followed. A brazier in there warmed the air all the way up to frigid. A certain pungency in the air said the brazier was burning behemoth dung rather than charcoal: one more improvisation.
Sabrino sat down on what had probably been some Unkerlanter peasant’s milking stool and peered into the crystal. Brigadier Blosio’s image looked out at him. Sabrino took some consolation in noting that Blosio looked miserably cold, too. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. “What do you need from my wing?”
“You know how our drive for Herborn has cut off a good many Unkerlanter soldiers,” Blosio said, as if doubting Sabrino knew any such thing.
“Aye, sir,” Sabrino answered stolidly. “Still a good many in front of us, too. We just tore up some behemoths trying to come through a peasant village and smash in the head of our column.”
With a typically extravagant Algarvian gesture, Brigadier Blosio waved that away, as if it were of no account. He explained why: “They’re trying to break out and smash through our columns.”
When the Unkerlanters surrounded Herborn, the Algarvians and Grelzers had tried to do the same thing. They’d failed. Sabrino asked the obvious question here: “What do their chances look like?”
Blosio’s shrug was as unrestrained as his wave had been. “Neither one of our columns is as strong as one might wish, and we’ve cut off a lot of Unkerlanters. But we have to do what we can, you know.”
“Oh, indeed.” Sabrino nodded. “In case you’re wondering, sir, my wing has twenty-one dragons ready to fly.” Had the wing been at full strength, it would have had sixty-four. It hadn’t been at full strength, or anywhere close, for a couple of years.
Brigadier Blosio shrugged again. “That’s how things are, Colonel. And they’re not getting any better. Trapani is ordering some of our dragons taken out of the west and brought back home to Algarve. The way things are now, the Lagoans and Kuusamans are pounding our southern cities flat from Sibiu because we’ve hardly any beasts to put in the air against them.”
“That’s… not good, sir.”CountSabrino reckoned that a commendable understatement. “The way things are now, the Unkerlanters are pounding our armies here flat because we haven’t got enough beasts to put in the air against them.”
“We have to try there,” Blosio said.
“We have to try here, too.” Sabrino knew his protest wouldn’t change anything. And Blosio had a point: KingMezentio couldn’t very well let Algarve itself take a beating. For one thing, people back home might sour on the war if they kept getting hit without seeing their countrymen hit back. For another, the eggs the Kuusamans and Lagoans dropped hit manufactories that made things the army needed, and also slew the mages without whom Sabrino’s men would have had no eggs to drop and the Algarvian footsoldiers would have had no sticks with which to blaze.
“Then go out and try to put paid to that Unkerlanter counterattack,” Blosio said. “That’s the best thing your wing can do for Algarve.” He gave map coordinates.
“Aye, sir,” Sabrino said resignedly. He wasn’t sure Blosio heard him. The brigadier’s image vanished from the crystal. It flared for a moment before becoming an inert globe of glass. Sabrino nodded to the crystallomancer. “Thanks.” On second thought, he didn’t know why he was thanking the young mage. Because of the crystal, Sabrino now stood a better chance of getting killed.
Out into the cold again. He shouted for his men. They knew he was giving them no great gift-only the chance to die before their time. But knowing that, they affected not to. They scrambled onto their dragons and fastened the harnesses that held them safe as if they were going on a lark, not into battle. Sabrino also strapped himself into the harness at the base of his dragon’s neck. He knew he could die if any little thing went wrong. How vividly he knew it was another reminder of his years.
He also knew his dragon, like most Algarvian beasts, hadn’t been getting enough quicksilver. Its flames wouldn’t reach so far as they would have with more of the vital mineral in its system. Had Algarve taken the Unker- lanter city of Sulingen, had Algarve seized the vital cinnabar mines south of Sulingen… Had that happened, Mezentio’s men wouldn’t have been pushed back into Grelz.
A dragon handler slipped the chain that held Sabrino’s beast to its stake. The colonel of dragonfliers hit his mount in the side of the neck with his goad. The dragon screeched furiously, flapped it’s great, leathery wings, and bounded into the air. Looking back over his shoulder, Sabrino watched the rest of the dragons in the wing-all of them painted in varying patterns of green, red, and white-following him.
He murmured the charm that activated the crystal he carried with him, so he could give his squadron commanders the map square the wing was ordered to attack. They passed it on to their dragonfliers. So did Sabrino, with gestures and pantomiming. Maybe I’ll go on the stage after the war is over, he thought, and laughed at himself. He laughed doubly: by all appearances, the war would go on forever.
The landscape below did nothing to contradict that. It was a chiaroscuro blend of snow and smoke and soot. All the villages and a lot of stretches of forest had been fought over two, three, four times. Whoever finally won the war, the Grelzer peasantry would be generations recovering from it.
Fresh columns of smoke rising into the sky would have told him where the heavy fighting was even without the coordinates he’d got from Brigadier Blosio. He urged his dragon toward those columns. Urqed meant hitting it with the goad, harder and harder, till it did what he wanted. Every once in a while, a dragon would have enough of that and flame its flier off its back. Dragons were trained not to do that from the moment they hatched, but everyone who had anything to do with them knew they were too stupid and too vicious to be very reliable.
Sabrino’s dragon obeyed now. CaptainOrosio ’s image, tiny but perfect, appeared in the wing commander’s crystal. Orosio said, “By the powers above, sir, that’s a cursed broad front the Unkerlanters have opened up. How many of them are there, anyhow?”
“I asked Brigadier Blosio the same question,” Sabrino answered. “I gather we’re supposed to find out by experiment.” Orosio said something pungent and abruptly broke the etheric connection.
As soon as Sabrino spotted swarms of Unkerlanters trying to force their way north and east through a wavering line of Algarvian defenders, he ordered his dragons to the attack. They swooped low on an advancing column of behemoths, dropping eggs among them and flaming down several. Sabrino’s dragon didn’t have to be urged to attack. Restraining it, making it attack when and where he wanted it to, was harder, but he managed.
It was when he made the beast gain altitude for another pass at the enemy that he gasped in horror. The column of behemoths his wing had assailed was one of dozens, perhaps one of hundreds, all with footsoldiers
