I liked that saying.
Sometimes, you’ve got to help the assholes of the world help themselves by turning them into roman candles.
I glanced around at three women surrounding me.
Saya, riding on the back of her gray Gargoyle dragon, Scopula, flashed me a knowing smile. She knew precisely how my mind worked.
“I was thinking we rip down past our coteries and do our best impressions of sharks falling on a shoal of fish,” I said. While the wind was rushing around us, we could easily communicate. Anyone else would have had to yell, but a special kind of magic allowed dragonmancers to communicate with each other easily while astride their dragons.
“I can follow that.” Tamsin bared bright white teeth as she snarled in anticipation. Her predatory eyes narrowed against the blasting wind.
We had been sent to subdue a couple of clans of wildmen. These assholes were robbing the merchants and caravans that used the Watervale Pass to avoid the more dangerous Granite Belt mountain route to the north. But that wasn’t all. The wildmen had started getting creative. They had been shoving stakes up the asses of the merchants that they overwhelmed, Vlad the Impaler style, and leaving them out for the crows to pick at.
As savage and, well, wild as the wildmen looked, there were some dudes among them who had quite the knack for keeping people alive for as long as possible, even with about four feet of sharpened pine stake shoved up the fartbox.
This practice of theirs probably sat only a little less comfortably with the Empress Cyrene as it did with the poor people being rogered with the great, big splintery dildos.
The reason that dragonmancers, and not regular troopers of the Drako Academy, had been called in to deal with these particularly enterprising wildmen was because the regular guard already had been called in to deal with them.
The Empress had stipulated that a spice caravan be sent out into the hill country of the Watervale Pass and used as bait, along with a contingent of soldiers, to draw the wildmen out.
We of the Crystal Spire had received word early that morning from a messenger drake sent from the captain of the company of Drako Academy soldiers. He said that the troopers and the caravan had been surrounded by hostiles of far greater numbers than anticipated. The soldiers had formed a defensive perimeter around the merchants and their spice caravan. They were doing everything they could to keep the wildmen at bay, but they were in need of some immediate aid.
So, that was how things lay, as I signaled for my three fellow dragonmancers to follow me down.
The four dragons cocked their wings back, once again adopting the flight position of peregrine falcons, and dived toward the Watervale Pass. The world below smeared into streaks of watercolor as we rocketed toward the ground.
Penelope, Saya, Tamsin, and I shot past our squads in their flying longboats like they were sitting still. As we streaked by, I heard Rupert—my twitchy medic and engineer—give a long whoooooop of encouragement.
Below us, there wound a ribbon of dirt road, running through some strangely even hill country. The road cut perfectly through the hills, ten huge perfect mounds of grass-covered earth that sat, five aside, on both sides of the roadway.
In the middle of this snaking piece of highway was the besieged caravan. There were half a dozen great wagons, pulled by two pairs of oxen of each, strung out in a line on the road. The four oxen of the lead wagon had been shot full of arrows, as had the ones attached to the rearmost cart. This had effectively made it impossible for the other wagons to get the hell out of the killbox that the wildmen had created.
The Drako Academy soldiers had formed an oval shield wall, using the wagons as cover. They were obviously well-trained, and had clearly been in that same position for quite some time. There were a few dead men and women wearing the armor of the Academy dotted around the battleground, but I guessed that they had fallen when the convoy had been initially ambushed, before the troopers had gotten into a defensive formation.
The wildmen milled around the paralyzed caravan like a swarm of thoroughly enraged locusts gathering about the last cob of corn in the field. They were clad in a motley assortment of furs and skins, and they carried crude but lethally efficient weapons. The men sported the kinds of beards and hair that made Hagrid look like Ryan Gosling.
Arrows and spears periodically rattled down on the upturned shields of the defenders. At least twenty dead wildmen were scattered around the caravan. Blood stained the dust of the road where they had been hewn down by the Academy soldiers.
The dragonmancers fell upon the wildmen like a firestorm sweeping through dry grassland. Our quarry let out harsh, croaking cries. Some of the quicker thinkers among them lobbed spears at us as we descended, but they may as well as have tried to kill armored knights with peashooters.
Bursts of flames in various colors engulfed the shaggy-haired warriors as we swept over.
Garth’s dragonfire was the palest rose color. It cut a short swathe through the ranks of the milling wildmen, blowing some of them into the air. Penelope’s mount, Glizbe, had a deep blue flame that burst out of him like a withering mushroom. Scopula’s flame came out in a blistering streak of dark gray, crackling as it made contact with the helpless enemy. The dragonfire produced by Tamsin’s dragon, Fyzos, was a barely discernible burst of pale yellow. It did not burn so much as
