Darkness: Through The Darkness Part 7

Though tempted to loiter in the air till all the dust cleared, Sabrino decided that wouldn't be a good idea. He spoke into the crystal again, this time to all his squadron leaders: "Let's go back to the dragon farm so the groundcrew men can give us some more eggs. With the sun shining almost all the time, the more we can pound the Lagoans, the better." A moment later, he pa.s.sed that on to Colonel Broumidis, too.

"Aye, Colonel!" The enthusiastic cry came not from Broumidis but from Captain Domiziano, senior to Orosio in time spent commanding a squadron-- he came from a family with better bloodlines and better connections--but far junior in overall experience. Domiziano never failed to remind Sabrino of a happy puppy, always ready to rush ahead. The wing commander knew that was an insult to a brave and talented officer, but couldn't drive the thought from his mind.

As the Algarvian dragons began flying off toward the west, several Lagoan heavy sticks that had stayed quiet up till then blazed at them. Sabrino waggled a finger down at the ground. "I thought you might have some surprises waiting," he said, as if the Lagoans far below could hear. "You won't see us coming down to peek at you as trustingly as we did when this round of fighting started."

Seeing that they were doing the Algarvians no harm, the Lagoan sticks soon fell silent again. Sabrino nodded in reluctant approval. Aye, King Vitor's men knew what they were doing, all right. No point to wasting charges they might really need in some later fight.

He led the wing of Algarvian dragons and their Yaninan hangers-on toward the positions Tsavellas and Mezentio's footsoldiers and behemoths were holding. As they neared them, Broumidis' face with its black hairy caterpillar of a mustache appeared in Sabrino's crystal. "If you look to the left of my dragons, my lord Count, you will see some of the Lagoan beasts coming east," the Yaninan officer said. "Is it your pleasure that we a.s.sail them?"

Sabrino turned his head to the left. Sure enough, he did see Lagoan dragons over there, a long way off. "You have good eyes," he told Broumidis; he made a point of complimenting Yaninans whenever he found even the vaguest occasion to do so. After a little pause for thought, he shook his head. "No, we'll let them go. They're likely trying to entice us into an ambush: look like easy meat and then lead us low over some sticks the Lagoans have hidden away somewhere. Best thing we can do is tend to our business and drop some more eggs on their army. If we hit it hard enough, sooner or later they'll have to come up and fight us on our terms."

"Let it be as you wish, of course." Broumidis was, as always, impeccably polite. "But I wanted to make sure you were aware of the possibility."

"For which I thank you." Sabrino matched courtesy with courtesy. And then, after one more glance over toward the Lagoans to make sure they weren't trying to double back after his own wing, he put them out of his mind.

That turned out to be a mistake. The dragon farm wasn't very far behind the line to which the Yaninan and Algarvian ground forces had advanced. Peering west, Sabrino spied a ragged column of smoke rising into the air. He frowned. Nothing in the neighborhood had been burning when the wing set out.

When he got a little closer, he exclaimed in horror. A moment later, Broumidis' face appeared in the crystal again. "My lord Count," he said, "I think we now know the true reason we saw the Lagoan dragons, may the powers below eat them, flying back toward the east."

"Aye," Sabrino agreed dully. He wished he'd ordered his wing and the Yaninan dragons after the Lagoans. If he had, they might have enjoyed a measure of revenge. But that wouldn't have brought the dragon farm back into being. The Lagoans must have loaded their handful of dragons with all the eggs they could carry, then struck as hard a blow as they could at their enemies' base.

"Curse them," Sabrino muttered. The Lagoans were clever tacticians; since they couldn't hope to oppose the vastly superior Algarvian and Yaninan dragons in the air, they'd hidden their own beasts as best they could till they could make life as miserable as possible on the ground for their foes.

They'd done a hideously good job. As Sabrino urged his dragon down in a long, slow spiral, he saw what a good job it was. The Lagoans had plastered the tents of the groundcrew men with eggs. A few of the Algarvians and Yaninans who cared for the dragons had survived unharmed, and waved to their countrymen as they approached. But more were down, wounded or dead; corpses and pieces of corpses littered the cratered ground where the tents had stood.

And there were more craters than the eggs from a small force of dragons could have accounted for. One of those craters, still sending up nasty smoke, was enormous--it looked as if something had taken a great bite out of the ground. Sabrino needed a moment to get his bearing and realize the Lagoans must have landed an egg right on the wagons that had carried the eggs his wing was using against the enemy. Till some more came forward from Heshbon, his dragonfliers wouldn't be dropping any more.

His dragon landed with a thump that made him lurch against his harness. A groundcrew man shouted, "Colonel! My lord Count!" and then could go no further, but burst into tears.

"Let's see to the animals," Sabrino said--the first words in the dragonflier's creed, as in the cavalryman's.

But with so many groundcrew men dead, seeing to the dragons was a far longer, slower, harder job than it would have been otherwise. And the Ice People brought only a bare handful of camels to the dragon farm--not enough to content the voracious beasts. One of the hairy nomads spoke in Yaninan to Broumidis. The beard that grew up almost to his eyes and the hairline that started just above his eyebrows masked his expression, but Sabrino could hear the scorn in his voice.

"What does he say?" Sabrino asked.

The Yaninan dragonflier turned back to him. "He says he thought Algarve was great. He thought Algarve would drive everything before it. Now he sees it is not so. He sees that Algarvians are just another pack of mangy men coming down here from across the ocean, and nothing special at all."

"He says that, does he?" Sabrino growled. Broumidis nodded. Did enjoyment for his powerful allies' discomfiture spark for a moment in his black eyes? If it did, Sabrino hardly supposed he could blame him. The Algarvian colonel and count said, "Tell him we have hardly begun to show what we can do." But even he could not deny--not to himself, at any rate, whatever he admitted to the man of the Ice People--that the work ahead had just grown harder.

Two.

The shiver that ran through Cornelu had nothing to do with the chilly sea in which his leviathan swam: a rubber suit and sorcery shielded him against that. Nor was it even--or not entirely, at any rate--a thrill at returning to Sibian water, to his home waters. No, this was a fighting man's excitement, the excitement any warrior worth his salt felt at being one small part of a large attack on a hated foe.

Dragons flew overhead, dragons painted in Lagoan red and gold. Ley-line cruisers showing Lagoas' jack made for Sibian waters. So did a large force of Lagoan leviathans, of which Cornelu's mount was but one. The exile shook his fist at the islands looming up out of the sea: not at his countrymen who'd lived on them for upwards of a thousand years, but at the accursed Algarvians who occupied them now.

"You will pay!" he shouted in his own language--which an Algarvian might well have understood, since the invaders' tongue and that of the locals were not just cousins but brothers. "How you will pay!"

As if to imitate his gesture, the leviathan slapped the water with its flukes. He patted the beast, wondering how much, if anything, it really understood. Leviathan riders often talked about that when they sat around and drank wine. Cornelu looked up to the sky again. Dragonfliers never talked about how much their animals understood. They knew perfectly well the brutes understood nothing.

More dragons were in the air now, the newcomers flying off the Sibian islands. The Algarvians wouldn't leave this challenge unanswered. Such had never been their way. If they couldn't hit first, they would hit back and hit harder.

And their ships, the ones that weren't already on patrol near Sibiu, would be sallying from their harbors. Cornelu patted the leviathan again. He'd already sunk an Algarvian cruiser. Another one would be very fine. He chuckled and said, "But a floating fortress would be even better."

Some of the Algarvian dragons, eggs slung beneath them, were diving on Lagoan ships, one only a mile or so from Cornelu. Beams from the heavy sticks the ships carried reached up for them. A dragon, one wing burned off, plunged spinning into the sea. Its eggs burst then, sending up an enormous white plume of water.

But the dragons drove swiftly, and the sailors at the sticks could not blaze them all before they released their eggs. Bursts of sorcerous energy flung men into the ocean. The ship lurched and settled down deeper onto the sea from its track along the ley line: an egg must have slain the mages who tapped the energy channeled along the world's grid. Survivors ran here and there. What would they, what could they, do aboard a vessel suddenly at the mercy of wind and waves?

Cornelu didn't know and had no time to find out. A couple of dragons painted in strange patterns of green and red and white were circling overhead. They didn't know whose side he was on. Eggs tumbled down from one of them, whose flier had evidently decided he wouldn't take chances.

With a slap, Cornelu urged his leviathan into a dive and then, perhaps twenty feet below the surface of the sea, into a sprint away from the neighborhood where it had been. The eggs burst there. The sea transmitted sound very well--better than air, in fact. Cornelu's head rang with the bursts. So did the leviathan's. It swam harder than ever, fleeing those fearful sounds.

When it surfaced, Cornelu scanned the sky again, afraid the Algarvian dragons might still be after him. But they weren't--Lagoan dragons had driven them off. "Lagoans are good for something after all," Cornelu admitted.

His leviathan wiggled--indignantly?--beneath him. He hadn't meant that personally. Had the leviathan taken umbrage at his mockery of its kingdom? Maybe it understood more Sibian than he'd thought. And maybe he was being silly.

Another wing of dragons dropped eggs on the harbor ahead: Lehliu, the smaller southern port on Sigisoara, the island east of Tirgoviste. Dragons were probably dropping eggs on Tirgoviste town, too. Cornelu wished he were there to see that. He wished he were there to see them drop eggs on his house, and on his faithless wife in it--provided his daughter were somewhere else. Brindza hadn't done anything to him, even if Costache had.

As soon as the Lagoan dragons let their eggs fall, they flew off toward the east, toward the great island from which they'd set out. They'd had to do a lot of flying to reach Sibiu, and few were up to the challenge of fighting fresher Algarvian beasts. Once they were gone, the Lagoan ships grew more vulnerable to attack from the air. But the ships didn't pull back. Indeed, they pressed forward with astonishing boldness. Some of them drew close enough to the sh.o.r.e to start tossing eggs into the harbor.

King Mezentio's men had mounted egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs of their own at the edge of the sh.o.r.e--or perhaps they'd simply taken over the ones Sibiu had emplaced. Cornelu wasn't familiar enough with the defenses of Lehliu to say for certain one way or the other. He was certain the Algarvians defended the port as aggressively as they did everything else. Eggs burst all around the attacking Lagoan warships, and hit several of them.

And here came the first Algarvian ships out of the harbor: little patrol craft, long on speed, short on weapons. A Lagoan egg hit one of them--hit it and crippled it, all in the same instant. But others dodged past and started blazing at the Lagoans. No, Mezentio's men weren't afraid to mix it up.

"Come on, my beauty," Cornelu told his leviathan. He would have spoken to Eforiel just the same way. (He thought of his old leviathan as he would have thought of a dead wife he'd loved. He'd loved his real wife, too, but she was still alive, and he loved her no more.) The patrol vessels were faster than the leviathan, of course, but the ley-line cruiser he'd sunk had been faster, too. All he needed to do was come alongside and stay alongside for less than a minute. After that, the patrol craft could glide away. It wouldn't keep gliding long.

But then his leviathan gave a startled twitch and began to turn aside from the path on which he'd set it. That had nothing to do with mackerel or squid, and he knew it. The great beast had sensed another of its kind close by, and was speeding to the attack.

In a clash between leviathans, Cornelu was unlikely to be anything but a spectator. He did jettison the eggs the beast had brought from Lagoas. He regretted that, but did it without hesitation. Speed and maneuverability counted for more than anything else in this kind of fight.

He wished he could have had more time to work with the leviathan. Sibian training enhanced the instincts inborn in the beasts, and gave them an edge over their counterparts from Lagoas and Algarve. But he hadn't had the chance, and would have to rely on the leviathan's speed and ferocity.

Somehow--not even the finest mages knew how--leviathans and their dumpy cousins the whales could unerringly find their way through the sea. The first Cornelu knew of the beast his mount had sensed was when it twisted away to keep his leviathan's fanged jaw from tearing a great hole in its flank.

He got a brief glimpse of an Algarvian clinging to the other leviathan's back as he was clinging to his. That other leviathan tried to bite his beast, too. It also missed, though Cornelu saw its teeth glitter. He pulled his knife from its sheath. He couldn't do much against the Algarvian leviathan, but he might be able to harm the rider if the fight came to the surface.

His own mount writhed in the water, almost as lithe and limber as a serpent. It b.u.t.ted the Algarvian beast with its closed beak. The enemy leviathan writhed in pain. Cornelu understood why; a leviathan could stave in the side of a good-sized wooden vessel with a blow like that.

And, with the other beast hurt, Cornelu's leviathan bit at it again. This time, the Algarvian's mount could not escape. Blood gushed forth and darkened the water. All thought of fight forgotten, the other leviathan fled. Cornelu's pursued, and bit another chunk out of its flank and one from a tail fluke. Either of those bites--to say nothing of the first one--would have been plenty to devour half a man, or maybe all of a man.

Cornelu wouldn't have wanted to be the Algarvian aboard that wounded leviathan. The fellow would have a cursed hard time getting the animal to pay attention to him rather than to its own torment. And the blood pouring from it would surely draw sharks. Normally, a shark wouldn't dare come near a leviathan, but normal rules didn't hold with blood in the water. And the rider would be in at least as much danger as his mount.

How was the rest of the fight, the bigger fight, going? Cornelu needed a while to find out. Victory had made his leviathan nearly as hard to control as defeat had the Algarvian's. Eforiel would have behaved better; the Sibian naval officer was as sure of that as he was of his own name. But Eforiel was dead, gone. He had to do the best he could with this less responsive beast.

At last, he got the leviathan to rear up in the water, lifting him so he could see farther. Few Lagoan dragons were still in the air; most had indeed flown back toward the dragon farms from which they'd set out. But the Algarvian dragons, flying close to the conquered islands, kept on attacking the Lagoan warships that had come to raid Sibiu. A couple of more Lagoan ships had already lost ley-line power, and drifted helplessly in the water. Before long, either dragons or leviathans would sink them.

The Algarvians were getting more and more ships out of Lehliu harbor, too. They had fewer in the fight than the Lagoans, but plenty to be dangerous, especially with so many dragons overhead. Cornelu had heard the Lagoans were building ships that could carry dragons and from which the big scaly beasts could fight. That struck him as a good idea, though he didn't know whether it was true. If it was, none of those ships had come to Sibiu.

He scowled. More and more, this was looking like a losing fight. The thought had hardly crossed his mind before a couple of Lagoan ships hoisted the red pennant that meant retreat. Every Lagoan vessel in the flotilla turned away from Sigisoara. "Curse you for cowards!" Cornelu cried. Sibiu wasn't the Lagoans' kingdom. Why should they fight hard for it?

And he had no choice but to turn away from his own native islands, either. His salt tears mingled with the salt sea. He wondered why. The life he'd had back in Tirgoviste had taken more wounds than the Algarvian leviathan. Even if the war ended on the instant, he had nothing to come home to.

But still he grieved. "It is my kingdom, curse them," he said, as much to hear the sounds of his own language--different from both Algarvian and Lagoan--as for any other reason.

When he brought his leviathan back into Setubal, he found the Lagoan sailors who'd returned before him celebrating as if they'd won a great victory. He wanted to kill them all. Instead, he found a bottle of plum brandy that wasn't doing anyone any good, took it back to the barracks set aside for Sibian exiles, and drank himself into a stupor.

"Ham," Fernao said reverently. "Beefsteak. Mutton. Endive. Onions." Longing filled his sigh.

"Don't!" Affonso's voice was piteous. "You're breaking my heart." The other Lagoan mage did look as if he were about to weep.

"I'm breaking my belly." Fernao sat on a flat rock. The first-rank mage stared in distaste--aye, that's the right word, he thought--at the charred chunk of camel meat and the half a roasted partridge on his tin plate. The camel would be fatty and gamy; the ptarmigan would taste as if Fernao were eating pine needles, which were the bird's favorite food and imparted their flavor to its flesh.

Other Lagoans scattered over the bleak landscape of the austral continent looked bleak themselves. Affonso had on his plate a supper every bit as unappetizing as Fernao's. He said, "The worst part of it is, it could be worse. We might not have anything to eat at all."

"I know." Fernao used his belt knife to cut a chunk off the camel meat. He impaled it and brought it to his mouth. "Those few days when we had no supplies coming in were very bad. Lucky this new clan of Ice People likes us better than the last one did." He chewed, grimaced, swallowed. "Or maybe it's just that this clan hates the Yaninans more than the other one did."

"Probably," Affonso said. The second-rank mage glanced warily up toward the sky. "What I hate are Algarvian dragons overhead at every hour of the day and night."

"Aye, even if they haven't been quite so much trouble since we smashed up their farm," Fernao said. "Until we have more of our own, though, they're going to keep on pounding us from the air."

"Where are we going to get them?" Affonso asked.

"If I could conjure them up, I would," Fernao answered. "But I can't. In this miserable country, who knows what any of my fancy magic would be worth?"

"You could talk to a shaman of the Ice People." Affonso laughed to show he was joking.

Even if he was, he left Fernao unamused. "I could do all sorts of things that would waste my time, but I won't," he snapped. Then he scratched at his coppery beard, which was at least as scraggly as Affonso's.

"All right." The other mage placatingly spread his hands. "All right."

Fernao took a resinous-tasting bite of ptarmigan. He thought of Doeg the caravanmaster, whose fetish bird was the ptarmigan. Fernao had eaten one as soon as he'd escaped Doeg's clutches, to show what he thought of traveling with the man of the Ice People. Every time he ate another one, he took more revenge.

He threw the bones down by the rock. Ants swarmed over them. Like everything else in the austral continent, they tried to cram a year's worth of life into the scant time spring and summer gave them.

Leaning back on the rock, Fernao looked up into the heavens again. The sun was below the northern horizon, but not very far below; the sky there glowed white and bright. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the deeper twilight near the zenith. Fernao narrowed his eyes (they were already narrow, for he had a little Kuusaman blood in him) to try to see more. He was sure he could have read a news sheet, if only he'd had a news sheet to read.

And then the dreaded shout went up: "Dragons!"

Cursing, Fernao ran for the nearest hole dug between rocks. He and Affonso jumped into it at essentially the same instant. He peered west. He hadn't expected the Algarvians to come back to torment his countrymen so soon.

He saw no dragons, not to the west. Turning his head, he spied them coming out of the northeast. He frowned. What point to attacking from a different direction? It wasn't as if they needed to surprise the Lagoans; Lieutenant General Junqueiro couldn't do much about them except hunker down.

Only when the cheering began among men who paid more attention to dragons than he was in the habit of doing did he realize they weren't Algarvian dragons. Some were painted in Lagoas' bright red and gold, others in the sky blue and sea green of Kuusamo, which made them hard to see. Fernao started cheering, too.

Down came the dragons, one after another. Lagoan soldiers rushed toward them, cheering still. They weren't experienced groundcrew men, but, at the dragonfliers' shouted orders, they started putting together a makeshift dragon farm.

Along with Affonso, Fernao also ran toward the dragons. "Keep some beasts in the air!" he shouted. "Powers above, the Algarvians might come back any time."

A Lagoan dragonflier pointed up to the deep blue sky. Craning his neck, Fernao saw several of the great creatures wheeling overhead. He bowed to the dragonflier, who grinned as if to say he forgave him.

Affonso asked, "How did you get here? Or should I say, how did you get here without the Algarvians' attacking you?"

The Lagoan dragonflier's grin got wider yet. "We kept aem too busy to notice us," he answered. "We laid on a big attack against Sibiu. While Mezentio's men there were busy fighting it, our dragon transports sneaked down south past the Sibs' islands and made it here."

"Nicely done," Fernao said, bowing again. "What else have you brought along? Any real food?" After camel meat and ptarmigan, that was a matter of sudden, urgent concern.

But the dragonflier shook his head. "Just us, the dragons, and some eggs. No room for anything else." A Kuusaman came up. The Lagoan grinned again. "Well, we brought some friends along, too."

"I see." Fernao nodded to the short, swarthy, Kuusaman. "Do you speak Lagoan?"

"Little bit," the fellow replied. He shifted languages: "But I am more at home in cla.s.sical Kaunian."

"Ah. Excellent," Fernao said in the same tongue. "Most of our officers will be able to talk with you. Some of them will speak Kuusaman, too, of course. I wish I knew more of it."

"You wear the badge of a mage, is it not so?" the Kuusaman asked. Fernao nodded. The Kuusaman held out his hand, saying, "I am pleased to make your acquaintance, sorcerous sir. This war will be won with magic as well as with footsoldiers and dragons and behemoths. I am called Tauvo."

Clasping the proffered hand, Fernao gave his own name, and added, "My colleague here is Affonso."

"I am pleased to know you both," Tauvo said after shaking hands with Affonso, too. "Lagoan mages have made a good name for themselves."

"So have those from the land of the Seven Princes," Fernao said. Tauvo smiled, his teeth very white against his yellow-brown skin. Fernao's praise hadn't been altogether disinterested; he went on, "Kuusaman mages have done some very interesting work in theoretical sorcery lately." It was work about which he knew less than he wanted, and work about which he'd tried without success to find out more. Maybe this Tauvo knew a little something.

If he did, he didn't let on. His voice was bland as he answered, "I am sure you honor us beyond our worth. If you ask me about dragons, I can speak with something approaching authority." He looked around, seeming to take in the grim, almost empty landscape for the first time. "What do dragons eat in this part of the world?"

"Camel meat, mostly," Fernao answered. "That is what we eat, too, for the most part, unless you prefer ptarmigan."

People called Kuusamans impa.s.sive. No matter what people called Kuusamans, Tauvo looked revolted. "I prefer neither." His dark, narrow eyes went from Fernao to Affonso. "Do I guess that I may not have a choice?"

"Well, you could eat gnats and mosquitoes instead," Affonso said. "But they are more likely to eat you." Right on cue, Fernao slapped at something crawling on the back of his neck.

Tauvo slapped at something, too. "There do seem to be a good many bugs here," he admitted. "They put me in mind of Pori, not far from the family home back in Kuusamo."

"You should have seen them a month ago," Fernao said. "They were three times as bad then." Tauvo nodded politely, but Fernao wasn't deceived: the dragonflier didn't believe him. He wouldn't have believed anyone who said such things, either, not without going through it.

Someone came running from the tent where Junqueiro's crystallomancers worked. "Dragons!" he shouted. "Scouts to the west say Algarvian dragons are coming!"

Tauvo forgot Fernao and Affonso. He ran back to his dragon, shouting in his bad Lagoan at the soldiers who'd just helped him chain it to a spike driven into the ground so they'd help get the chain off. All the dragonfliers were scrambling aboard their mounts. They fought their way into the air one after another.

The Algarvians came over the Lagoan army before many of the newly arrived dragons had got very high. King Mezentio's dragonfliers didn't seem to be expecting any interference. The little force of dragons the Lagoans had had before had stayed out of their way. No longer. The scouts from the new arrivals attacked the Algarvians before King Mezentio's men knew they were there. A couple of Algarvian dragons tumbled out of the sky. The cheers from the Lagoans on the ground made Fernao's ears ring.

But the surprise didn't last long. The Algarvians quickly rallied. They dropped their eggs--they'd been cursed quick about getting resupplied after the Lagoan raid--without bothering to aim. Some struck home among the Lagoan soldiers on the ground anyhow. Others tore up the gra.s.s and low bushes--many of which would have been trees in a warmer part of the world-- all around the encampment.