by Chris Bunch
The Roche dragons were trying to get into the air, but Hal's formation swept across the field, dragon riders spattering down crossbow bolts.
Hal suddenly remembered when he'd used bowman mounted behind the fliers, cursed that he'd not had time to use the tactic again.
A dragon in front of him was hit, tucked its head down as if entering a rainstorm, and crashed, rolling, bouncing across the field, killing half a score of Roche as it and its rider died.
Then the light cavalry and the raiders came into the nest, still on line, not pausing to reform into a battle line, but spreading out as they came.
They hit the Roche hard, smashing them back, into knots. But the Roche held firm, trying to reform as the cavalry came back on them.
The Roche dragons were all in the air, and banked hard away from the field.
Hal sent his dragons after them, and there was a low-level melee that sent four Roche and one Derainian dragon down.
Trumpets blared, and Hal chanced a quick look back at the Roche base.
The heavy cavalry had come on the field, its ponderous chargers moving from the walk into the trot, long lances coming down.
The Roche men held for an instant, then broke, running, scattered.
As they broke, the light cavalry and infantry swarmed after them, swords slashing.
The Roche dragons clawed for altitude, but Hal's squadron denied it to them.
The black monsters fled low, across country, heading east, back for their own lines, abandoning the men on the ground.
Hal sent his dragons after them, and there was a long pursuit in the dusk, dropping a dragon here, and there.
None of them carried the fringed banner of Ky Yasin.
No more than a handful of Roche were able to escape their harriers.
Finally, Hal blew the recall, and they turned back to the Pinnacles.
Hal wondered if the Roche dragon fliers had also panicked and fled, or if they'd been under orders to abandon the foot soldiers, fliers being vastly more valuable than any ground troops.
Ordered or not, that tasted very nasty to him, and he wondered if the flight also rang sour in the mind of Yasin. Hopefully it had, and would eat at him, possibly clouding his judgment in the future.
It was near dark when they came in on the battlefield, the dragons' wings cracking as they braked for a landing.
It was strewn with bodies, and there were only a few wounded. The Roche hadn't asked for quarter, and, generally, none had been given.
Hal landed, reported to Cantabri.
Lord Bab was a bit angry. There'd been no ranking prisoners taken, and so no one to tell Lord Bab—or the king—just what had been intended by the ambush, whether capturing Asir… or just killing him.
The formation's support units came up the road, and the Sagene and Deraine forces moved down to the highway, to rest, and wait for the king.
Skirmishers were still busy on the battlefield, stripping arms and armor from the dead, and, supposedly, succoring the Roche wounded.
Hal doubted if there would be much of that.
* * * *
"So that's that," King Asir said, after full reports had been made. "If we had time, I would have liked to have visited that field myself.
"But we've wasted enough time as is.
"Now, let's get back to the lines, and get this damned war over with."
31
It took almost three weeks for the Grand Offensive to be mounted. By the time the banners waved and the bugles blew, Hal had revised his opinion of the plan's validity.
With almost a month of rumors and whispers, it was inevitable that the Roche would realize something was going on.
Their spies went to work up and down the line, and Derainian and Sagene counterspies went after them.
Roche dragons overflew the lines, trying to see what was happening below.
Hal and the other dragon flight commanders had patrols out from dawn until nightfall.
There were snarling fights in the skies as a Deraine or Sagene formation would attack a Roche scout. Roche reinforcements would hurtle to the rescue and Derainian support would be airborne within minutes.
The sky would be a great melee of death, dragons pin-wheeling about, men and monsters falling, screaming, into death, and then, as if on a signal, there would be nothing but clear, blue, peaceful summer heavens.
Hal killed his share, probably more, but didn't bother keeping a count. He was too busy trying to keep his own men and women alive and fighting.
Alcmaen and Danikel did keep score, or rather Alcmaen did. He claimed seventy-five kills, although only forty were allowed.
Hal had decided that if people were going to make numbers important, the only way he'd allow them was with a witness. Naturally, Alcmaen always came back from a flight claiming a victory, although too many of them were accomplished with no other allied flier in sight.
Danikel didn't bother with numbers, but his chief handler did, and gleefully reported that Baron Trochu somehow always remained in the lead.
The supposed rivalry got out to the taletellers, and the First Squadron's base had at least one or two of them, generally Sagene, fawning over Danikel and Alcmaen on a daily basis.
At least they weren't bothering Hal.
Khiri had gone back to Deraine with King Asir and his company, so he didn't have her on his mind, as much as he would've liked to.
Then the orders came by courier, and, from the Chicor Straits to the Southern Ocean, Deraine and Sagene went on the attack. There was no subtlety here, no room for it, as the allied divisions stolidly marched forward against the Roche.
The Roche fought hard, but slowly fell back.
But they never broke.
A formation would be hit hard, and retreat. But the Roche would leave ambush teams in any cover that presented itself, who, as often as not, fought to the death.
The Roche, fighting on their own soil, poisoned the wells and used magic to blanch the soil when they could.
Their sorcerers sent spells against Deraine and Sagene, which were sometimes caught and stopped in time. Other times, demons would ravage and tear until Derainian wizards could cast a counterspell, then another spell aimed at the Roche magicians.
No one envied the wizards—a magician could be in mid-spell, all calm about him, and then fire would raven him, and anyone within range.
To Hal and the other dragon fliers, the world below was almost meaningless. Their war was in the skies. But it was still fascinating, if distressful, to see a green land slowly being turned muddy brown as the armies fought and marched across it.
The days were a blur of flying, fighting, killing, and the nights blank unconsciousness, with not a flier wanting to remember if he dreamed or not, and, if he did, what his dreams were.
The days were bad enough.
Hal remembered a new flier who reported in one morning with a dragon he'd been trained on. He was sent aloft on a noon patrol, in a supposedly safe sector. But a flight of Yasin's black dragons was waiting, and neither flier nor his mount came back.
What bothered Hal was that he couldn't remember the flier's name, and had to look it up in the records.
That first time was troublesome. But after the sixth time the same thing happened, Kailas almost got used to it.
Brandy might have helped somewhat.
But Hal couldn't allow himself that luxury.
* * * *
Bodrugan and Goang returned from Deraine. They'd managed to procure large glass carboys, journeyed to a mine, and somehow managed to trap the deadly firedamp gas in the carboys.
Now all that remained, Goang told Hal, was to put the gas in smaller containers, put the containers in some sort of sack with nails and broken glass, come up with a bursting spell, and Hal would have his anticavalry weapon.
A week later, the pair asked for Hal and a dragon to try the thing out.
Bodrugan said, apologetically, that the spell was still a little complicated, so he'd prefer to ride behin
d Hal, and cast it himself.
"Of course," he assured Kailas, "when it works, we'll have a much simpler incantation."
It was a misty day, and there were no more than two or three pairs of dragons assigned missions, so Hal summoned the squadron to witness the great event.
Bodrugan had a wicker basket with half a dozen small bottles inside canvas sacks.
They put a target in the center of the landing field, and Hal took Storm off.
He took the dragon up to about a hundred feet, then turned back toward the field.
"Now," he said over his shoulder, "I'll bring it down to about fifty feet, and then come in over the target. Are we safe that low?"
"Yessir," Bodrugan said. "I mean, I'm almost certain, sir."
"Wonderful," Hal muttered, and only dropped to seventy-five feet.
"Start incanting," Hal said, and he heard Bodrugan muttering behind him.
The target was below, then directly underneath, then past.
"I'll take Storm round again," Hal said, "and give you a longer approach. Do you want me to give you a release point?"
"Thank you, sir," Bodrugan called back. "I'd appreciate it."
This time, the muttering started earlier.
"And five and four and three and two and… drop!" Hal shouted, and the bag dropped down toward the target.
It struck the ground about ten feet short of the marker.
And nothing happened, at least as far as Hal could tell.
They tried again, and again, until there were no more sacks.
Hal brought Storm in for landing, trying to decide if he should be angry or amused.
He settled for amusement, especially when Farren Mariah reported, "The bottles smashing, crashing, sounded just like geese farts on a muggy day when they struck… sir."
Hal kept back laughter until Bodrugan and Goang had shamefacedly picked up their sacks and gone back to Goang's tent to figure out what went wrong.
Mariah watched them go.
"Ah," he said. "That's what 'tis to be a knight of the dragon, privy to all kinds of secrets and magics.
"You should've asked me to do the spell, sir.
"Give a real wizard from the depths of the city a chance."
Hal told him he was welcome—in his off hours—to work with the pair.
Mariah made a face.
"Nawp, nawp, nawp, as my grandfather used to say. Once a spell's been spellt and spillt, there's no place for somebody to come in behind the goat."
The firedamp never did work.
* * * *
Hal was called to Cantabri's headquarters for consultation.
The king had decided there should be dragon flights devoted solely to casting the sorcerous pebbles, and had named a pair of nonflying but high-ranking lords—Gurara and Hakea, one Derainian, one Sagene—to command these flights.
They weren't nearly as dunderbrained as might have been expected. By this stage of the war, there was little room for fools.
The pair had already gotten flying volunteers, had Limingo on standby and wanted Hal to help them develop a training curriculum. This Hal did, starting with the idea that perhaps these casting flights should have two fliers aboard—one solely to fly the dragon and watch for intercepting enemy, the other to do the casting.
They also wanted a couple of fliers who'd been on the Carcaor raid, and Hal grudgingly loaned them a couple of Derainians.
Then Cantabri proposed a flanking attack on a fortified Sagene position, and needed Hal's entire squadron to give his plan a bit of surprise, and Kailas put the matter in the back of his mind.
* * * *
Hal called Chincha in, told her she was being commissioned and would take over the 11th Flight. Hal had been trying to run both the flight and the squadron long, and had forced himself to let go.
"But… but there's fliers better suited," Chincha stammered.
"Such as?" Hal asked.
"Farren, for one."
"You think he'd take the promotion?"
Chincha considered, slowly shook her head.
"But he's going to cast a kitten when he hears about this."
"Tell him, from me, that he should consider adopting a more mature attitude toward life and such."
Farren Mariah, as Hal had known he would, found the whole matter hysterically funny, and it didn't affect his relationship with Chincha at all.
Chincha took the whole matter very seriously, and tried to spend all day and night at her duties.
That was something else Hal had known.
* * * *
Moving was always painful. The fliers would establish a base, and fly from it as long as they could. But eventually the armies plodded on east, and it was time to move.
Hal or one of the flight commanders would find a new location, near to the front lines, and then the tents would be struck, the wagons loaded, and the squadron would creak into motion.
At the new base the tents were repitched, various holes dug, and paths made.
Then it would take days for a new routine to be established—just where the mess, the farriers, the jakes, and such, were. Generally two or three mistakes, usually involving garbage or worse pits, were made in the learning.
The replacements complained bitterly about the discomfort, but there was generally a veteran around who'd remind them that it might be a little uncomfortable, particularly when it rained, but it wasn't even close to being as bad as it was for the infantry.
Nothing was that bad.
Some of the replacements never bitched, and Hal knew that they'd come from one of the line formations, and were most grateful that they could get out of a warm, dry bed before going out to be killed.
Someone in the commissary department made a mistake on one move, and didn't check the fresh meat that was bought.
Everyone, dragons and men, got embarrassing cases of the runs, promptly dubbed the "Roche gallop," and Hal was forced to take the squadron off the duty roster for three days, although Mariah insisted they should still be flying: "Just sit farther back in the saddle, and you and your beastie can come in on our foes and both poop 'em to death."
Then he grimaced and set out at a rapid trot for the nearest jakes.
Sir Loren called the hoary old army joke after him to be sure and cover his flanks.
One good thing that came out of the enforced idleness for Kailas was figuring out how he might use the locating spell the Roche had used against the king for his own ends.
But he still wasn't precisely sure how to do it.
* * * *
There were four fliers in the room, part of a shattered manor house, listening to Lord Hakea and staring at the map he kept touching. His companion, Lord Gurara, sat behind the fliers.
The fliers were Hal and his four flight commanders: Chincha, Gart, Richia and Cabet.
"Yarkand is the key," he said once more. "It's one of Roche's most important trading cities. There's the major highway from Carcaor to the front, plus this north-south highway, and these two coming in from the northeast and east.
"The city is mostly stone, very ancient, so knocking down as much as we can will stop passage, not to mention ruining Yarkand as a warehousing center and replacement depot.
"It's packed with refugees and soldiers trying to get forward, so the attack should be a serious shock to Queen Norcia and her barons.
"We'll hit them with almost a hundred dragons, the biggest raid of the war so far."
"It's a long flight," Hal said.
"It is," Hakea said. "My casting flights will lift out of here not long after midnight, and I calculate, if the winds are right, that we'll reach Yarkand about midday.
"We'll want you to join us when we get over the Roche lines."
"Then we—or rather you—cast our rocks," Richia said, a bit doubtfully, "and then we fly back, getting back over our own lines about…?"
"Midnight."
Richia whistled, shook his head, eased his bulk to a more comfortable position. "A long damned flig
ht," he said, almost to himself.
At least, Hal thought, the two commanders were going on the mission, even though they weren't fliers, but flying as casters.
"We've been training for this mission for two weeks."
Hakea said. "And if everything goes well—and your squadron, Lord Kailas, keeps any attacking dragons away—this could be a major step toward ending the war."
The flight commanders looked at Hal.
"We would have appreciated a chance to rehearse this attack with you," Kailas said.
"There wasn't the time," Hakea said. "Besides, you have enough duties on your plate already."
"I mean no offense," Hal said. "But this scheme is more than a bit chancy."
"It has been approved by the king himself," Gurara said stiffly.
"Then," Hal said, getting up, feeling weary, "there's nothing left to discuss except the details, is there?"
32
Things went wrong from the beginning.
Hal, and the rest of the First Squadron, were to take off three hours before dawn, since their dragons would fly faster than the casting monsters, and fly east on a compass heading until they reached Yarkand.
No one had allowed for a heavy summer fog.
Hal was roused a little after midnight by the watch, reporting the fog rolling in.
He ordered his squadron commanders wakened, then washed his face, and walked out on the field. The fog was dank, thick, and he could barely make out the dragon tents half a hundred feet away.
Now Hal was forced to make one of those decisions never seen in romances—one man, alone, staring up at the night sky and trying to decide what the weather would be at dawn and, more importantly, later, over Yarkand.
Not to mention, of course, whether the casting dragon flight commanders would abort or continue the mission.
For once, Kailas chose the safe option.
No one argued with him, when he announced it, but he could feel a swell of disapproval from the other flight commanders and pilots.
There was one way to check his decision to proceed, and so he took his squadron up, as scheduled, but with a slightly different compass heading.
The squadron took up a series of vees behind him, flying very close, but still barely able to see Kailas through the roiling fog.
