Ambaldo grunted and rubbed his eyes. 'This whole business of killing Kaunians is filthy, if anybody wants to know what I think,' he said as he sat up. He looked defiance at Sabrino. 'And I don't care what you may believe about it.'
'No?' Sabrino said mildly. 'I told King Mezentio the same thing before we really started doing it. His Majesty didn't care what I believed about it.'
'Really? You said that to Mezentio? To his face?' Ambaldo asked. Sabrino nodded. Ambaldo let out a soft whistle. 'I will be dipped in dung. I knew you for a brave man, your Excellency, but still, you surprise me.'
'If I weren't a brave man, I wouldn't have come in here to get you,' Sabrino said. 'Shall we be at it?'
Ambaldo got to his feet and bowed. 'I wouldn't miss it for the world.'
When Sabrino went out to his dragon, he found it loaded with eggs. The handler was tossing chunks of meat to it. The dragon caught them out of the air one after another. 'How's the cinnabar holding out?' Sabrino asked the handler.
He got no more reassuring answers, as he had earlier in the fight. The fellow spread his hands and said, 'If they'd known this stinking battle was going to last so bloody long, they should've given us more.' Before Sabrino could say anything to that, the dragon handler added, 'Of course, maybe they didn't have any more to give.' On that cheerful note, he went back to feeding the dragon.
Sabrino climbed aboard the great scaly beast and fastened himself into his harness at the base of its neck. Distracted by raw meat, the dragon didn't even raise a fuss. Then the handler stopped feeding it and undid its chain from the iron spike driven deep into the soil of Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad, urging it into the air.
The dragon bellowed in fury at the idea that it should work for a living. As far as it was concerned, it had been hatched to sit on the ground so people could feed it to the bursting point. No matter how often Sabrino tried to give it other ideas with the goad, it was surprised and outraged every time.
It sprang into the air as much from fury as for any other reason. As usual, Sabrino didn't care why. As long as the dragon rose, he'd take that. The other dragons in his wing were every bit as offended at having to earn their keep as was his. They all screeched as they spiraled upward.
Colonel Ambaldo's dragons were flying, too. Sabrino, of necessity his own crystallomancer while on dragonback, murmured the charm that attuned the emanations of his crystal with that of the other wing commander. When Ambaldo's image appeared in his crystal, Sabrino said, 'Now that you're awake, your Excellency, how do you want to handle the strike at Braunau? If you like, we'll go in first and then fly cover for your wing.'
'Aye, good enough,' Ambaldo said, and Sabrino cursed under his breath. He'd made the offer for form's sake, no more. Ambaldo's dragons had been worked hard in this fight, but were still fresher than Sabrino's. They would have made a better covering flight than Sabrino's wing. Ambaldo should have been able to see that for himself. If he couldn't, though, Sabrino had too much pride to point it out to him. Ambaldo did say, 'We'll cover you on the way in.'
'Thank you so much.' Sabrino knew how little he meant that. Ambaldo was brave, but bravery didn't matter much, not here on the western front. The Unkerlanters were brave, too. What really set the Algarvians apart from them was brains. Without a guiding wit behind the fighting, it turned into nothing but a slugging match. King Swemmel's men could afford that better than Algarve could.
Sabrino's mouth turned down in discontent as he steered the dragon east toward Braunau. By the look of the battlefield far below, it had already turned into a slugging match. No more lightning thrusts around Unkerlanter positions to flank them out. The Algarvian attack had gone straight into the heart of the toughest and deepest set of field fortifications Sabrino had ever seen- on the eastern side of the Durrwangen salient and, by all the signs, on the western side as well.
No wonder progress was so painfully slow. No wonder so many dead men and horses and unicorns and behemoths lay on the ground. Where, Sabrino wondered, would their replacements come from? One thought ran through his mind. We'd better win here. If we don't, if we've thrown all this away with nothing to show for it, how are we going to carry the war to the Unkerlanters from here on out?
'Powers above,' he muttered as his wing flew over what would have been the place where the Kaunians were sacrificed in front of Braunau, 'we're even running out of blonds.' King Swemmel's mages had helped there, too. Sabrino cursed softly, and the wind blew his words away. All things considered, maybe he should have called on the powers below instead.
And then he had no more time for such worries, for there lay battered Braunau, corking the Algarvians' advance. He spoke into his crystal again, this time to his own squadron leaders: 'We'll dive to drop our eggs on the village, then climb quick as we can and cover Ambaldo's wing while they do the same.'
'Here's hoping the Unkerlanters don't hit us,' Captain Orosio said. 'We've got tired beasts. We'll have trouble giving our best.'
Because Sabrino knew that, too, he made his voice harsh as he answered, 'It's what we're going to do.' He never asked his dragonfliers to do anything he wouldn't do himself, so he was the first to urge his own mount into a dive over Braunau. Footsoldiers down there blazed at him. So did the crew of heavy sticks. If one of those hit his dragon, the beast wouldn't gain height again, and Sabrino's mistress and his wife might miss him. Just above rooftop height, he loosed his eggs, then beat his dragon as hard as he could to make it pull up.
He cursed again when a couple of dragonfliers didn't follow him back up into the sky. Maybe Ambaldo's fresher, faster dragons would have made the men at the heavy sticks miss. No way to know. Sabrino looked back over his shoulder. Ambaldo's dragons were delivering their load of death over Braunau, going in with as much indifference to danger as any Algarvian could want to show.
Sabrino thought he was the first one to spot the swarm of rock-gray Unkerlanter dragons racing toward Braunau from the southwest. He hadn't even the time to grab for his crystal and shout out a warning before the Unkerlanters swooped down on Ambaldo's wing, slicing through his own almost as if it didn't exist.
The Unkerlanters treated Ambaldo and his dragonfliers about as rudely as the Algarvians had treated the Unkerlanter attack on their dragon farms earlier in the battle. Dragon after dragon painted in green and red and white tumbled out of the sky, beset from above. Sabrino wasted no time ordering his own men back into the fray. But the enemy, having struck hard and fast, flew off. Sabrino's dragons were too weary to make much of a pursuit.
Worse, he feared flying into another Unkerlanter trap. With the tired beasts his men were flying, that would be the end of them. Ambaldo's dragons, or those of them that were left, aligned on his. When he shouted the other wing commander's name through the crystal, he got no answer. He didn't think anyone would get answers from Ambaldo again.
'Back to our dragon farm,' he told his own squadron leaders. 'We'll put the pieces back together as best we can and go on.' He didn't know where more dragons- or, for that matter, more dragonfliers- would come from. He didn't know how long the wing could keep going without them, either. All at once, without warning, he felt old.
'Come on!' Major Spinello shouted as he led his troopers east. 'We can still do it. By the powers above, we can! But we've got to keep moving.'
He wasn't commanding his own regiment anymore. The battered formation he headed was about as big as his regiment had been at the start of the battle of Durrwangen, but it consisted of the mixed-up remnants of three or four different regiments. As cooks threw leftovers together to get another meal out of them, so Algarvian generals stirred together broken units to get one more fight from them. Battle Group Spinello, they called this one. Spinello would have been prouder if he hadn't been so tired.
He pointed ahead. 'If we get over that ridge line and onto the flat land up there, we can tear Swemmel's whole position open. It's only a couple of miles now. We can do it!'
Was anybody listening to him? Was anybody paying any attention at all? He looked around to see. What he saw were men as filthy and unshaven and weary as he was. He looked ahead. Even the Algarvian behemoths seemed worn unto death. A couple of wedges of them led Battle Group Spinello ahead. Without them, every footsoldiers would have been wounded or killed by now.
More behemoths led more Algarvian footsoldiers toward that ridge line. Here and there, they dueled at long range with Unkerlanter behemoths. Spinello had never imagined that Unkerlant had bred so many behemoths. He'd
