Aerie by Mercedes Lackey Page A

what happens and who you report to will be determined by the vizier. If he is displeased with your performance, he will send you back here.”
    Hem-serit gave him the fist-to-shoulder salute of the Tians; he nodded. They mounted up—not together, and their dragons seemed inclined toward mischief, since they tossed their heads and pretended not to understand the “Knee” command until he barked it out. Yes, they had a ways to go before they were ready for any sort of responsibility on trail guarding.
    He sent them off with a wave and they took off raggedly, diving down into the canyon to pick up speed, then pulling up and out of it and pumping hard for height; for as long as he could see them, they flew in tolerable formation, though blue dragons against a blue sky were a bit difficult to track after a while.
    Then, finally, he was able to signal to his wing to mount up. They did much better, although they did not all mount at once with military precision. All their dragons promptly gave a place to climb up on the “Knee” command, and if there was still a little awkwardness getting settled into the saddle, that would pass soon enough. This time the signal to fly was when he sent Avatre diving into the canyon himself; he never got over the thrill, the feel of falling, hurtling toward the ground, bracing himself in the saddle. Then the sudden, hard snap of Avatre’s wings opening, the fall turning abruptly into a climb as he was pushed down into the saddle on her shoulders, the ground being replaced in front of him by sky. His skin tingled, and a laugh of delight rose in his throat.
    His wing was not going to be patrolling the trade routes, however. He had another assignment for them all.
    The Blue People were being raided, probably by the same lawless deserters and former soldiers that were making up the majority of the bandits. And it was not that the Bedu could not defend themselves; they most certainly could. The problem was that the raids were taking place at night, and animals were being stolen one and two at a time. Clearly the bandits were treating the nomads’ flocks as their private larder.
    So Kiron and his wing were doing a different sort of hunting today. They were going to look for the bandits’ camp. It had to be within distance of the latest tribe to be raided, and since the nomads always occupied an oasis, the bandits might be filling their waterskins before helping themselves to a goat or a sheep. Or perhaps not. In the part of the desert where the Bedu tended their flock, water was not as difficult to come by as one might think.
    The camp was almost certainly concealed from ground level. It might not be from the air.
    After the debacle just before their first successful foray into bandit hunting, all the members of the wing were determined to carry this out with no “incidents.” The dragons were all fed, enough to be full, not so much as to be ready to laze about. Every inch of saddle and harness had been checked and checked again. Their weapons of choice were where they should be.
    Kiron nodded with satisfaction, then gave Avatre the signal to fly off into the north.
     
    Well, there they were, all right.
    I was right. Hidden from the ground, but not from the air.
    This part of the desert was not barren; the Blue People would not have been able to live there if it had been. There was some water here, enough to allow the occasional oasis to dot the landscape, and enough that there was vegetation outside an oasis to allow grazing. There were acacia trees and scrubby brush, which the nomads used thriftily, to start fires, but never for the fire itself.
    In short, this made a good place for the bandits as well as the nomads.
    Kiron kept Avatre circling in the air above the place, studying it, while the rest of his wing made wide circles around them. The encampment, clearly not one of the nomads’ nor of honest traders, was concealed in a narrow, twisting wadi below them, hardly more than a crack in