along with many others.
“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Hawart answered. “The redheads have broken through in a big way farther south, that’s why. If we don’t pull back now, we’ll have to try to fight our way out of another encirclement. How many times can we stay lucky?”
Wearily, Leudast got to his feet. Wearily, he tramped back through the wreckage of Pfreimd. The villagers cursed him and his comrades for retreating. He couldn’t blame them. The regiment had done everything it was supposed to do and done it well. Even that hadn’t helped. Here he was, retreating again. Head down, he slogged on.
Looking down from his dragon on the Unkerlanter landscape far below, Colonel Sabrino smiled. From the day the Algarvians began their campaign, it had gone better than the nobleman dared hope. Columns of behemoths broke through one Unkerlanter defensive line after another, and footsoldiers flooded into the gaps the great beasts tore. The foe either found himself outflanked and surrounded or else had to flee for his life.
Sabrino peered back over his shoulder at the wing he commanded: sixty-four dragons painted in the Algarvian colors of green, white, and red. He wished he were wearing a hat, so he could wave it--like almost every Algarvian ever born, he delighted in theatrical gestures. Taking off his goggles and waving them didn’t have the same flair.
He contented himself with a wave of the hand. When he looked back over his shoulder again, half--more than half--the dragonfliers were waving back to him. His smile got wider and fonder. They were good lads, every one. Few had more than half his fifty-odd years; he’d fought on the ground in the Six Years’ War a generation before. One stretch of soldiering in the mud had convinced him he never wanted to go through another. Thus, dragons.
His mount twisted its long, snaky neck this way and that. It let out a fierce shriek that tore at his ears. It was looking for Unkerlanter dragons to flame out of the sky or--better yet, from its point of view--to claw and tear with its taloned forelegs.
It shrieked again. “Oh, shut up, you cursed thing,” Sabrino snapped. The only people who romanticized dragons were those who knew nothing about them. Like any dragonflier, Sabrino scorned the beasts he flew. Bad-tempered, stupid, vicious . . . No, dragonfliers never ran out of bad things to say about their mounts.
He looked down once more, looked down and spied a long column of wagons moving up toward the fighting front through the dust they kicked up rolling along a dirt road. He pointed to it, and also spoke into his crystal: “Let’s make sure those whoresons never get where they’re going.”
The crystal was attuned to those his squadron leaders carried. “Aye, sir, we’ll do it,” Captain Domiziano, one of those squadron leaders, said with a grin. “It’s what we’re for--it’s what we’ve been doing all along.” He seemed altogether too young and eager to hold his rank ... or maybe that was just a sign Sabrino was getting old.
“Down, then,” Sabrino ordered, and used more hand signals to pass on the command to the dragonfliers who didn’t have crystals. His squadron leaders were relaying the order, too, in case the men watched them and not their wing commander.
From his seat at the base of his dragon’s neck, Sabrino leaned forward to tap out the command that would send the beast stooping like an outsized hawk at the wagons and draft animals below. The dragon ignored him, or possibly didn’t notice the signal he’d given it. That was why he carried an iron-tipped goad. He gave the command again, this time with force that probably would have felled a man.
He did get the dragon’s attention. It screeched in outrage and twisted its head back to glare at him with great yellow eyes. He reached out with the goad and whacked it on the end of the nose. It shrieked again, even more angrily than before. Dragons were trained from the days when they were no more than new-hatched lizards with evil dispositions never to flame the men who flew them. But they were also very stupid. Every once in a while, they forgot.
Not this time. After a last scream, Sabrino’s dragon folded its wings and plummeted toward the Unkerlanter supply column. The wind whistled in Sabrino’s face. One more glance behind him showed that the rest of the wing followed.
Down on the ground, the Unkerlanters had spotted the dragons diving on them. Sabrino laughed as he watched them mill around. Not many could hope to run far enough or fast enough to escape the flames of destruction. Unkerlant, by all the signs, had been getting ready to attack Algarve before King Mezentio’s men struck first. Now the enemy was discovering what a mistake he’d made, imagining he could stand on equal terms against the greatest army the continent of Derlavai had ever known.
Here and there, footsoldiers marching with the column blazed at the Algar-vian dragons; Sabrino spied the flashes from the business ends of their sticks. They were brave. They were also foolish. A footsoldier couldn’t carry a stick strong enough to bring down a dragon unless he hit it in the eye, which required as near a miracle of blazing as made no difference. He might also hit a dragonflier, but Sabrino preferred not to dwell on that.
The Unkerlanters swelled from specks to insects to people with astonishing speed. Similarly, their wagons stopped
