Darkness Descending (9 page)

Well, if they won’t, we’ll have to take it away from them,
Leudast thought. He blazed at a redhead in a hole. The fellow reeled back, clutching at himself.

“Surrender!” an Unkerlanter officer shouted in Algarvian. That was a word Leudast had learned.

“Mezentio!” was the only answer the officer got. The Algarvians intended to fight it out in the village. Captain Hawart had said reinforcements were coming to help the regiment he commanded these days. Leudast wondered if the redheads expected help from their friends, too.

If they did, best to finish them now, before that help arrived. “Follow me!” Leudast shouted to his comrades and leaped down into the trenches. To his vast relief, the Unkerlanters he led did follow. Had they hung back, he wouldn’t have lasted long.

As things were, he’d never found himself in such a vicious little fight. The Algarvians might have been used to overwhelming all the foes in their path, but they did not shy away from combat with the odds against them. Nor did they hang back from fighting at close quarters. Some of the work Leudast did was with his stick used as a club and with his knife: warfare as it had been in the days of the Kaunian Empire, and even before.

The last few Algarvians threw down their sticks and surrendered. They looked as frightened as Leudast would have had he been trying to yield to them. “They aren’t nine feet tall and covered with spines after all,” he said to Magnulf.

“No, so they’re not,” Magnulf agreed. He was tying a rag around his arm. Blood soaked through the wool; one of the Algarvians had had a knife, too. “Not too bad,” he told Leudast. “Should heal well enough—and that cursed redhead isn’t going to stick anybody else, believe you me he won’t.”

“Good,” Leudast said. He thought he’d come through without a scratch till he discovered a cut on one leg. He had no idea when he’d got it. In the heat of battle, he hadn’t noticed it till now.

Villagers—those who hadn’t fled or been killed—began coming out of their battered homes to shake the hands of the Unkerlanter soldiers. Some of them held out jugs of spirits. “We would have had more,” one of them said, “but these redheaded swine”—he spat in the direction of the Algarvian captives—”stole everything they could find. Still, they did not find it all.”

An old woman pointed to the captives. “What will you do with them now?”

“Send them off to a camp, I suppose,” Captain Hawart answered. “We start killing them in cold blood, they’ll do the same to our men.”

“But they deserve to die,” the woman shouted angrily. “They killed us. They took a couple of our girls to enjoy. They stole. They burned.”

Captain Hawart’s smile was hard and unpleasant. “They’ll have a thin time of it, granny, I promise you that.”

“Not thin enough.” Stubborn as an ox, the old woman stuck out her chin.

Hawart did not argue with her. He detailed a couple of men to take the captives back to the rear. As the Algarvians stumbled away, glad to keep on breathing, he waved his own men forward. “Up to the stream,” he told them. “See? It went just the way we planned it.”

So it had. Leudast scratched his head. He wasn’t used to things going as planned. Even retreats had been botched lately. Now the regiment had successfully advanced against the Algarvian army, the army that had thrown all foes back in confusion. Did that mean the line of the stream would hold after all? Leudast was willing to find out.

A couple of Algarvian behemoths came up toward the eastern back of the stream. Leudast suddenly got less optimistic about holding the position the regiment had just gained—to say nothing of living much longer. He hoped the redheads would come close enough to let him blaze them off their great beasts. But they were too warwise for that. They started tossing eggs at the Unkerlanters defending Pfreimd and the streambank from a range at which Leudast and his comrades could not hurt them.

But the Unkerlanter egg-tossers that had lobbed packets of sorcerous energy at the redheads in Pfreimd now shifted their attention to the behemoths on the other side of the stream. By chance, one of their eggs burst right on top of one of the beasts. That burst all the eggs the behemoth carried. Leudast shouted himself hoarse. More eggs burst all around the other behemoths and wounded or killed one of the men atop it, but it trotted away from the stream faster than it had advanced.

“Powers above. We held them.” Leudast knew he shouldn’t have sounded astonished, but he couldn’t help himself. Magnulf nodded, looking astonished, too.

Less than an hour later, a messenger ran up. After listening to him, Captain Hawart cursed furiously. “Pull back!” he shouted to his men. “We’ve got to pull back.”

Leudast cursed, too. “Why?” he burst out, 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 looking like toys. They ripped the canvas cover off one of those wagons. Sabrino wondered what they were doing, but not for more than a heartbeat. To his horror, he saw they’d concealed a heavy stick in the wagon. Soldiers in calf-length rock-gray tunics brought it to bear on one of the Algarvian dragonfliers.

“No!” Sabrino cried in dismay as the beam spat upward. To his frightened eyes, it seemed bright as the sun, wide as the sea. No dragon’s scales, not even if they were silvered, could withstand a beam like that at close range. The beam lashed out again.

But the stick had not been aimed his way. Since he was in the lead, he couldn’t tell whether it had struck one of the beasts behind him—no time to look back, not now. The stick slewed toward him as the Unkerlanters swung it on its mounting. If it blazed once more, it was death.

Sabrino slapped his dragon a different way. This time, the beast obeyed without hesitation, not least because he was ordering it to do what it already wanted to do. Its great jaws yawned wide. It belched forth a sheet of flame that engulfed the Unkerlanters’ heavy stick and the men who served it.

Fumes reeking of brimstone blew back into Sabrino’s face. He coughed and cursed, but he would rather have smelled that odor just then than his mistress’ most delicate perfume. Those fumes and the flames from which they sprang had just saved his life.

Nearer the head of the column, the dragon flamed again, incinerating a wagon and the horses that pulled it. Sabrino whacked it with the goad to make it gain height and come round for another run. As its great wings worked behind him—he could feel the mighty muscles contract and loosen, contract and loosen, with every wingbeat—he craned his neck to see how the rest of the dragonfliers had served the supply column.

He waved the goad with glee. Great clouds of black smoke rose into the sky, the pyre of dozens of wagonloads of food, clothing, eggs, sticks—who could guess what?—that would never reach the Unkerlanters struggling to hold back the Algarvian footsoldiers and behemoths.

A good many Unkerlanter soldiers and drivers had burned, too. So had a good many horses. Not all of them, men or beasts, died at once. A burning horse ran madly through a wheatfield, spreading fire wherever it went. It galloped close to half a mile before falling over.

And two dragons lay not far from the wreckage of the Unkerlanter column. That meant two Algarvian dragonfliers surely dead. Sabrino cursed; the Unkerlanters had caught him by surprise there. They fought hard. From what he’d seen, they fought harder than either the Forthwegians or the Valmierans. Already, the word had gone through the Algarvian army—don’t let yourself get captured behind the enemy’s lines.

Sabrino spoke into the crystal once more: “We’ve done what we came to do. Now we can head back to the dragon farm and get ready to do it all over again tomorrow.”

“Aye, sir,” Captain Orosio said. “I’m already bringing my men up into formation.” And so he was. Though a good deal older than Domiziano, he hadn’t commanded a squadron for nearly so long as the other man.
Poor fellow,
Sabrino thought.
His family connections aren’t all they might be.
Now that Orosio had the squadron, he handled it with matter-of-fact competence.
Too bad he couldn’t get it sooner.

Orosio’s squadron was, in fact, the first one to reform. Because of that, Sabrino ordered that squadron up above the rest, to cover them from attack by Unkerlanter dragons as they flew east. Here and there below them, knots of Unkerlanter troopers still held out against the Algarvians. Elsewhere, though, Algarvian behemoths, some carrying egg-tossers, others with heavy sticks mounted on their mail-covered backs, trotted west with next to no one even to slow them down. By all the signs, it was a rout.

But when the wing flew over land where there’d been fighting, Sabrino saw, as he’d seen before, that things weren’t so simple. The Unkerlanters had fought hard in every village and town; most of them were little more than charred rubble. And the corpses of men and behemoths, unicorns and horses, scattered through fields pockmarked with craters from bursting eggs proclaimed how hard they’d fought in open country, too.

“Dragons, Colonel!” Captain Orosio’s sharp warning snapped Sabrino out of his reverie. Dragons they were, half a dozen of them, painted in Unkerlanter rock-gray that made them hard to spot against the hazy sky. They were flying back toward the west, which meant they’d been raiding behind the Algarvian lines.