Behind them, in the east, the sky was going pink. Off to the west, the direction from which those rock-gray dragons would be coming, stars still shone and night still ruled. But not securely, not even there. Purple-black had lightened to deep blue, and the dimmer stars winked out one by one. Day was coming. By all the signs, trouble would get here first.
A handler released the chain that held Sabrino's dragon to the spike driven deep into the black soil of southern Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad. It screamed at him. He'd known it would. He whacked it again, and it bounded into the air as much from sheer rage as for any other reason.
Sabrino didn't care why the dragon flew. He only cared that it flew. As the ground fell away below them, he spoke into his crystal to his squadron commanders: 'Get as high as you can. We don't want Swemmel's boys to know we're up here till we drop on them.'
'Aye, Colonel.' That was gloomy Captain Orosio. He was the senior squadron commander left alive. He'd been juniormost when the war started- or had he even had a squadron then? After close to four years, Sabrino couldn't remember anymore. He marveled that he himself still survived. If fighting on the ground in the Six Years' War didn't kill me, nothing here will, he thought.
Light spread in the sky as he urged his dragon ever higher. Before long, he spied the sun, low and red in the east. Its rays hadn't yet reached the ground, and wouldn't for some little time to come. He might have been on a mountaintop, looking down into some still-dark valley.
And then, as he'd hoped he would, he saw things moving in the air below his squadron. He whooped with glee. 'There they are!' he shouted into the crystal, and pointed for good measure.
'Aye, Colonel.' That was Orosio again. 'I saw 'em a little while ago.' Dour, laconic- he hardly seemed like an Algarvian, but he was a good officer. Had he come from a more prominent family, he would have had a better chance to prove it. No matter how fierce the casualties among dragonfliers, he wasn't likely to rise above his present rank.
Flashes of light from the ground said the Unkerlanters were plastering the dragon farm with eggs, no doubt thinking they were wreaking havoc on the Algarvian beasts. Sabrino hoped the handlers had found holes. King Swemmel's dragonfliers would do some damage down below, but they hadn't yet awakened to the realization that they were about to take damage, too.
With astonishing speed, the Unkerlanter dragons swelled beneath Sabrino. He had his pick of targets; sure enough, the enemy had no idea he and his comrades were above them. This time, the dowsers had been right on the money. 'And now the Unkerlanters will pay,' Sabrino muttered. 'How they will pay.'
The wind from his dive swept the words away. For once, it mattered not at all. Sabrino blazed not just one Unkerlanter dragonflier, as he had dreamt, but two in quick succession. Even as the beasts they'd ridden went wild and useless, his own dragon flamed another Unkerlanter's mount. Sabrino brought his dragon in as close as he dared before letting it flame. Quicksilver was in short supply, and without it a dragon's flame grew short, too. But his mount had enough. The dragon painted rock-gray fell out of the air.
Sabrino looked around the brightening sky, looked around and howled with savage glee. Almost every Algarvian dragonflier was having luck to match his. The Unkerlanters had hoped to catch them by surprise, but ended up caught themselves. In hardly more than the twinkling of an eye, the air was free of them. The ones left alive flew back toward the salient as fast as their dragons' wings would take them.
'Pursuit, sir?' Captain Orosio's voice came from the crystal.
Reluctantly, Sabrino said, 'No. We take the dragons down, we get them fed- we get ourselves fed, too, while we're at it- and then we go back to hammering the Unkerlanter positions on the ground. I wish we could rest them more, but we haven't got the time. We land.' He emphasized the words with hand signals, so all the dragonfliers could see what he meant.
They obeyed him. He would have been astonished- horrified- if they hadn't. Down they went. Now the sun had reached the Unkerlanter plains. Dead dragons, almost all of them painted rock-gray, cast long shadows across those plains. Sabrino whistled softly to see how many he and his comrades had knocked out of the sky.
'A good morning's work,' he said to the handler who started tossing his dragon gobbets of meat. 'The dowsers gave us a hand today.'
'Aye,' the handler agreed. 'Wouldn't have been much fun if those buggers had caught us unawares.'
'No.' Sabrino shuddered at the thought of it. As he freed himself from his harness and slid to the ground, he asked the handler, 'How's the cinnabar holding out?'
'All right so far,' the fellow told him. 'We'll get through this fight without any trouble, I think. Don't know what we'll do about the next one, though.'
'Worry about it later. What else can we do?' Sabrino hurried off toward the mess tent. He would rather have gone back to his cot, but that wouldn't do. He yawned enormously. Falling asleep aboard his dragon wouldn't do, either. He gulped hot, strong tea, gulped it and gulped it till it pried his eyelids open. Breakfast was more of the stew that had been in the pot for supper the night before. He recognized barley, buckwheat, carrots, celery, onions, and bits of meat. He couldn't tell what the meat was. Maybe that was for the best.
Colonel Ambaldo raised his mug of tea in salute, as if it held wine. 'Here's to the Unkerlanters outsmarting themselves,' he said.
'I'll gladly drink to that,' Sabrino said. 'This morning's ours. Till they can bring more dragons forward, we'll pound 'em to our hearts' content.'
'Sounds good to me, by the powers above,' Ambaldo said. 'The lads down on the ground need all the help they can get.'
In Sabrino's eyes, Ambaldo wasn't too much more than a lad himself. That didn't make him wrong. Sabrino said, 'Swemmel's men have been waiting for us too cursed long in these parts. Row on row of fieldworks, and they fight to hold every miserable, stinking little village as if it were Sulingen.'
'Too right they do,' Ambaldo agreed. 'Brigades go into those places and companies come out. It's butchery, is what it is.'
'Never saw anything like this in Valmiera, did you?' Sabrino couldn't resist the jab.
Colonel Ambaldo shook his head. 'Never once. Not even close. They're madmen, these Unkerlanters. They fight like madmen, anyhow. No wonder we started killing Kaunians to shift 'em. Though from what I hear, we're using up the blonds so fast, we're liable to run short.'
'Swemmel won't ever run short on people to kill to power his magecraft,' Sabrino said gloomily. 'Unkerlant has more peasants than it knows what to do with.' He scowled. 'That's not quite right. Swemmel knows too bloody well what to do with them- and to them.'
Both wing commanders slammed down their empty mugs at the same time. They hurried out of the mess tent, shouting for their men to join them. Sabrino spent a little while cursing because the dragon handlers hadn't finished securing the eggs under all the dragons in his wing.
But the delay was only short. It might even have worked to the dragonfliers' advantage, though Sabrino wouldn't have admitted that to the handlers. Feeling how his dragon labored under him, Sabrino knew it needed rest, rest it couldn't have. A few more quiet minutes on the ground had surely done it some good.
Not having many fresh Unkerlanter dragons to face did the Algarvians a lot of good, too. Most of Swemmel's dragonfliers wouldn't have been allowed to mount an Algarvian beast, but they had more dragons than did Sabrino and his countrymen. A bad dragonflier on a fresh beast could match a master aboard a worn, overworked dragon.
A fresh Algarvian attack was just going in against the village of Eylau. The wreckage of a couple of previous assaults still lay outside the place: dead men and behemoths. By all the signs, the new brigades assailing the Unkerlanter strongpoint would have had no easier time of it. But, after two wings of Algarvian dragons delivered an all but unopposed attack on Eylau, the strongpoint wasn't so strong anymore. The footsoldiers and behemoths battled their way into the village.
They fought their way in, but would they fight their way out? Already, more Unkerlanter soldiers were moving forward to try to hold them there. Even if the Algarvians did advance, how much good would it do them? Eylau was less than ten miles west of the point from which the assault had begun. At that rate, how long would this army take to join the one pushing east toward it? And would either of them have any men left alive by the time they joined?
Sabrino had no answers. All he could do was command his wing as best he could and hope those set over him knew what they were about. He ordered his dragonfliers back to the farm. More meat for the dragons, more
