Jaws of Darkness (4 page)

Sidroc threw himself down in the snow again. A footsoldier
could
blaze down a behemoth—if he put a beam right in its eye. What were the odds? Not worth betting. He tried to knock over the Unkerlanter footsoldiers who ran forward with the beasts. He had a better chance of that.

“Where are
our
behemoths?” he shouted. Eggs burst around the Unkerlanter animals, but only a direct hit was likely to slay one. The best way to fight behemoths was with other behemoths.

“Where
are
our behemoths?” That was Ceorl, and that was alarm in his voice. The summer before, Algarve had lost far more behemoths than she could afford to lose, trying to smash the Unkerlanter salient around the town of Durrwangen. Since then, the redheads hadn’t had enough to meet the Unkerlanters’ onslaught—which was one great reason Swemmel’s soldiers had pushed so far east since the battles around Durrwangen. The Algarvians had come up with a fair number of behemoths for the counterattack aimed at Herborn—which was one great reason Mezentio’s soldiers had been able to head west again.

If, however, they didn’t get some behemoths right here pretty soon, some of Mezentio’s soldiers and a good many Forthwegians who’d been rash enough to join them were going to have a very thin time of it indeed.

An egg burst right on top of an Unkerlanter behemoth. All the eggs it had been carrying for its tosser burst, too: a great flash of light, an enormous clap of thunder. Only a hole in the ground—a shallow hole in the ground, for it was frozen hard—showed where the beast had been. The Unkerlanters who served that egg-tosser couldn’t have known what hit them. Sidroc cheered. He didn’t raise his head to do it, though. Plenty of King Swemmel’s soldiers remained alive.

Flame enveloped another behemoth and its crew. This time, Sidroc saw the dragon that flamed the beast. It was painted in green, red, and white: Algarvian colors. He cheered again. The redheads had been short of dragons since Durrwangen, too, though not to the same degree as they’d been short of behemoths.

But the Unkerlanter behemoth crews who served heavy sticks also blazed at the Algarvian dragons. Their beams were strong enough to burn through silvery belly paint and the armoring scales beneath. A dragon slammed into the snow. It thrashed for a long time before it died; its great tail sent a couple of Unkerlanters spinning, smashed and broken, to their deaths. The dragon-flier, though, had surely died at that first crushing impact.

With most of the enemy behemoths dead, Algarvian officers blew their whistles. Their imperative cry rang out again: “Forward!”

Sidroc would sooner have stayed where he was and let somebody else take the chances. But, along with the other troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade— and along with the Algarvians, too; no denying the redheads had spirit—he scrambled to his feet and went forward. Even as he did, he wondered why. He didn’t particularly care about clearing the Unkerlanters from the village ahead. He didn’t even particularly care about retaking Herborn; he’d seen enough battered Unkerlanter villages and towns and cities to last him the rest of his days.

What
do
I
care about, then?
he wondered, blazing at an Unkerlanter in a snow smock not much different from his own. The Unkerlanter toppled. Sidroc whooped and slogged on.
Why am I giving these buggers the chance to do to me what I just did to that poor whoreson?

He whooped again when Ceorl blazed an Unkerlanter. He didn’t even like Ceorl, and he knew full well the ruffian had no use for him when they weren’t up against Swemmel’s soldiers. Oddly, that gave him an answer of sorts:
I
can’t let the fellows who are in this with me down.
If he stayed behind, they’d think he was a coward, and their opinions were the only ones that mattered to him these days. His mother was dead, killed when the Algarvians took Gromheort. His father remained back in Forthweg, and had no real understanding of what he was doing here. He’d killed his cousin Leofsig in a brawl. He’d brawled with Leofsig’s brother Ealstan, too—and Ealstan, from what he gathered, had run off with a Kaunian tart. Leofsig and Ealstan’s father and mother and sister hated him. Who was left, then, but the men alongside whom he fought?

More Algarvian dragons swooped down on the Unkerlanters. Behemoths died under the eggs they dropped and from the flame that burst from their jaws. The handful of behemoths that survived had had enough, and lumbered off toward woods beyond the village. The trees helped shelter them from dragon attacks.

“Forward!” shouted the Algarvian officers, and forward went the Algarvian footsoldiers and the men of Plegmund’s Brigade.

They overran the village King Swemmel’s troopers had defended so fiercely. Some of the redheads had weapons Sidroc hadn’t seen before: small pottery jugs that they flung at their foes, and that burst like miniature eggs. “I want some of those. When can we get ‘em?” he asked Sergeant Werferth.

“When the Algarvians have enough to spare for their poor relations,” Werferth answered. Sidroc swore and kicked at the snow; the sergeant was bound to be right.

Some soldiers pushed on down the snow-covered road toward Herborn. Others—the less lucky—were ordered into the woods to go after the last few Unkerlanter behemoths and the footsoldiers with them.

Werferth had never been given to wild flights of optimism—what veteran sergeant was? But now he said, “Maybe we really will drive these sons of whores out of Herborn. Looks like we’ve got a lot of ‘em in a pocket here.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Sidroc said. “But what’ll the Algarvians do for a new King of Grelz? Who’d be daft enough to want the job after what happened to the old one?”

Before the sergeant could answer, the Algarvian officers’ whistles started screeching again. But instead of yelling, “Forward!” as they had since the drive on Herborn began, the redheads shouted, “By the left flank! Crystallomancers say there’s an Unkerlanter attack coming in. We have to hold. We can’t let Swemmel’s men out of the box we’ve shoved ‘em into. By the left flank!”

“By the left flank!” Werferth echoed loudly. Then he sighed. “Something’s gone wrong somewhere.”

Sidroc only shrugged. “Not like it’s the first time.” He too turned to the left.

Count Sabrino had fought as a footsoldier during the Six Years’ War, which ended almost thirty years before the Derlavaian War broke out. That put the colonel of dragonfliers well up into his fifties these days. He was more than twice the age of most of the men in the wing he commanded. When the wing worked hard, as it was working hard now, he felt the weight of every one of those years, too.

I’m still strong,
he thought as he spooned up boiled oats with onions and carrots and chunks of meat cooked into them. Like every Algarvian fighting in Unkerlant, he’d long since given up asking what the meat was. Better not to know, /am
still strong, curse it. In a standup fight, I can take most of my men.

But that wasn’t what left him feeling like an antiquity in the museum back in Trapani. The youngsters he led could get by with irregular meals and not enough sleep—and much of that at odd hours—and stay fresh. He couldn’t, not any more. A hard stretch of flying left him feeling as if he were moving underwater. He had trouble trusting himself to make the right decisions when he was too worn to see straight.

Captain Orosio, one of his squadron leaders—the only one who’d been with the wing when the war was new—gave him a sympathetic look when he complained. “My guess is, your wound’s still troubling you, sir,” Orosio said.

“You’re a gentleman,” Sabrino said, and gave Orosio a seated bow. By his pedigree, Orosio wasn’t much of a gentleman, or he would have been a colonel with a wing of his own. Sabrino flexed his shoulder. It
did
still pain him; his wounded dragon had come down behind Unkerlanter lines, and he’d got blazed escaping Swemmel’s men. “Aye, you’re a gentleman, but it’s more than that. I can’t stand having my life turned upside down a new way every day as easily as I could when I was your age, and that’s all there is to it.”

“That’s not so good, sir.” Orosio lacked much of the spirit of fun that most Algarvians had. Serious and sober as usual, he went on. “War does what it wants to do, not what you want it to do.”

“Really?” Sabrino did his best to look astonished. “I never would have noticed.”

He hoped Orosio would laugh. He feared Orosio would believe him. He never found out either way. Before the squadron leader could react, a crystal-lomancer stuck his head into the tent, nodded to Sabrino, and said, “Sir, Brigadier Blosio from army headquarters would speak to you.”

“Would he?” Sabrino said. The crystallomancer nodded. With a sigh, Sabrino got to his feet. “The next interesting question is, would I speak to him?” He didn’t scandalize the young mage any further, but got up and followed him off to his tent.

It had been cold inside the mess tent. As soon as Sabrino poked his head out the flap, the Unkerlanter winter stabbed icy knives into the marrow of his bones.
This wouldn ‘t have bothered me so much when I was half my age, either,
he thought bitterly.

Dragons crouched in the snow, chained to the iron spikes that kept them from flying off and doing something stupid on their own. Dragon handlers moved among them, keeping them fed. This wasn’t a proper dragon farm, not the way the manuals back in Algarve said one should be organized. It was the best worn, overtaxed men could do. Ever since Cottbus failed to fall in the first winter of the campaign against Unkerlant, the whole war in the west had been one improvisation after another, each seeming more desperate than the last.

The crystallomancer ducked into his own tent. With a sigh of relief, Sabrino followed. A brazier in there warmed the air all the way up to frigid. A certain pungency in the air said the brazier was burning behemoth dung rather than charcoal: one more improvisation.

Sabrino sat down on what had probably been some Unkerlanter peasant’s milking stool and peered into the crystal. Brigadier Blosio’s image looked out at him. Sabrino took some consolation in noting that Blosio looked miserably cold, too. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. “What do you need from my wing?”

“You know how our drive for Herborn has cut off a good many Unkerlanter soldiers,” Blosio said, as if doubting Sabrino knew any such thing.

“Aye, sir,” Sabrino answered stolidly. “Still a good many in front of us, too. We just tore up some behemoths trying to come through a peasant village and smash in the head of our column.”

With a typically extravagant Algarvian gesture, Brigadier Blosio waved that away, as if it were of no account. He explained why: “They’re trying to break out and smash through our columns.”

When the Unkerlanters surrounded Herborn, the Algarvians and Grelzers had tried to do the same thing. They’d failed. Sabrino asked the obvious question here: “What do their chances look like?”

Blosio’s shrug was as unrestrained as his wave had been. “Neither one of our columns is as strong as one might wish, and we’ve cut off a lot of Unkerlanters. But we have to do what we can, you know.”

“Oh, indeed.” Sabrino nodded. “In case you’re wondering, sir, my wing has twenty-one dragons ready to fly.” Had the wing been at full strength, it would have had sixty-four. It hadn’t been at full strength, or anywhere close, for a couple of years.

Brigadier Blosio shrugged again. “That’s how things are, Colonel. And they’re not getting any better. Trapani is ordering some of our dragons taken out of the west and brought back home to Algarve. The way things are now, the Lagoans and Kuusamans are pounding our southern cities flat from Sibiu because we’ve hardly any beasts to put in the air against them.”

“That’s … not good, sir.” Count Sabrino reckoned that a commendable understatement. “The way things are now, the Unkerlanters are pounding our armies here flat because we haven’t got enough beasts to put in the air against them.”

“We have to try there,” Blosio said.

“We have to try here, too.” Sabrino knew his protest wouldn’t change anything. And Blosio had a point: King Mezentio couldn’t very well let Algarve itself take a beating. For one thing, people back home might sour on the war if they kept getting hit without seeing their countrymen hit back. For another, the eggs the Kuusamans and Lagoans dropped hit manufactories that made things the army needed, and also slew the mages without whom Sabrino’s men would have had no eggs to drop and the Algarvian footsoldiers would have had no sticks with which to blaze.

“Then go out and try to put paid to that Unkerlanter counterattack,” Blosio said. “That’s the best thing your wing can do for Algarve.” He gave map coordinates.

“Aye, sir,” Sabrino said resignedly. He wasn’t sure Blosio heard him. The brigadier’s image vanished from the crystal. It flared for a moment before becoming an inert globe of glass. Sabrino nodded to the crystallomancer. “Thanks.” On second thought, he didn’t know why he was thanking the young mage. Because of the crystal, Sabrino now stood a better chance of getting killed.

Out into the cold again. He shouted for his men. They knew he was giving them no great gift—only the chance to die before their time. But knowing that, they affected not to. They scrambled onto their dragons and fastened the harnesses that held them safe as if they were going on a lark, not into battle. Sabrino also strapped himself into the harness at the base of his dragon’s neck. He knew he could die if any little thing went wrong. How vividly he knew it was another reminder of his years.

He also knew his dragon, like most Algarvian beasts, hadn’t been getting enough quicksilver. Its flames wouldn’t reach so far as they would have with more of the vital mineral in its system. Had Algarve taken the Unker-lanter city of Sulingen, had Algarve seized the vital cinnabar mines south of Sulingen … Had that happened, Mezentio’s men wouldn’t have been pushed back into Grelz.

A dragon handler slipped the chain that held Sabrino’s beast to its stake. The colonel of dragonfliers hit his mount in the side of the neck with his goad. The dragon screeched furiously, flapped it’s great, leathery wings, and bounded into the air. Looking back over his shoulder, Sabrino watched the rest of the dragons in the wing—all of them painted in varying patterns of green, red, and white—following him.