Out of the Darkness

“No, sir.” The younger man sounded very sure. “We have to go on till we can’t go on any more. No point to quitting now, is there? We’ve come too far for that.”

“You’re right,” Sabrino said with a sigh. Orosio looked relieved. But the two of them didn’t mean the same thing, even if they said the same words. Orosio would go on fighting because fighting was all he had left. Sabrino would go on because he had nothing whatsoever left.

Maybe we aren‘t so different after all, he thought, and drained his mug.

Off to the west, the sound of bursting eggs was a continuous low rumble, and it had been getting closer. It might have been an approaching thunderstorm. It’s a storm, all right. It will blow away the whole kingdom. But, when Sabrino cocked his head the other way, he heard bursting eggs off to the east, too: Unkerlanter dragons, tormenting Trapani. Before long, he’d be in the air again, doing his best to knock some of them out of the sky. And I will. And it won’t change a

“Sir…” Orosio hesitated, then went on, “That mage who wanted to fly with you? Maybe you should have let him.”

“That filthy bastard? No.” Even without the spirits he’d poured down, Sabrino’s voice would have held no doubts. “He wouldn’t have thrown back Swemmel’s army, and you know it as well as I do. He’d have just given all our enemies one more reason to hate us and punish us. Don’t you think they’ve got enough already?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Orosio yawned enormously. “I don’t know anything, except I’m bloody tired.”

“Let’s both go to sleep, then,” Sabrino said, “and see how long till somebody kicks us out of bed.”

It wasn’t nearly long enough. Sometime in the middle of the night, a crystallomancer shook Sabrino awake and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but they’re screaming for dragonfliers up at the front.”

“When aren’t they?” Sabrino answered around a yawn. He climbed out of his cot and yawned again. His head hurt, but not too bad. “All right. We’ll do what we can.”

Popular Assault men and a few real dragon-handlers were loading eggs under the bellies of the wing’s surviving beasts as Sabrino and the handful of dragonfliers he still led strode out toward their mounts. “Northwest,” the crystallomancer told him. “That’s where the most trouble is.”

Sabrino shook his head. “The most trouble is everywhere. But if they want us to fly northwest tonight, northwest we shall fly.”

He didn’t like flying by night, either. Telling where he was going and what he was supposed to be doing was much harder then. No one had asked his opinion. If some officer thought things were desperate enough to need dragons in the darkness. . Well, with the war in its present state, the poor whoreson was all too likely to be right.

As the dragonfliers scrambled aboard their mounts, Sabrino said, “Try not to get killed, gentlemen. Algarve will need you again later.” If they wanted to think he meant, Algarve will need you to fly more missions, that was all right with him. If they wanted to think he meant, Algarve will still need you after the war is over and lost, that was all right, too, and closer to the truth.

He whacked his dragon with the goad. The beast screamed with fury as it flung itself into the air; it liked flying at night no better than he. But it obeyed. As dragons went, it was a tractable mount-not that dragons went very far in that direction.

A bright moon, nearly full, spilled pale, buttery light over the landscape. Fires and bursting eggs and the flashes from blazing sticks of all weights added more. For night flying, this was pretty easy work.

Sabrino had no trouble finding the fighting front. For that matter, he could have found it with his eyes closed, just from the din of bursting eggs. Every time he took his forlorn little wing into the air, the front lay farther east. Unkerlanter armies were lapping around the defenders despite all the Algarvians could do to hold them back. Before long, Trapani would be caught in a ring of iron, a ring of fire.

I hope my wife had the sense to flee, the wing commander thought. The city is going to fall, and it won’t be pretty. The collapse of the Kaunian Empire more than a thousand years before came to mind. Then, though, Algarvic folk had been doing the sacking. Soon, they would be on the receiving end.

I don’t see anything we can do to stop that. Maybe we can still push the day back a bit. The image of a harried-looking Algarvian crystallomancer down on the ground appeared in the crystal Sabrino carried. “Powers above be praised!” the fellow said. “They’ve bridged the stream in front of us, and they’re pouring men and behemoths across. Can your wing take it out?”

“We can try,” Sabrino answered, thinking again of symbols on maps. “You should know, though, that my wing consists of eight dragons, no more.”

“Eight dragons? Eight?” The crystallomancer made a horrible face. “That isn’t what I was given to understand.”

“I don’t care what you were given to understand,” Sabrino said harshly. “Everything we’ve been given to understand about this whole fornicating war is a pack of lies. Now where’s this Unkerlanter bridge?”

The crystallomancer told him. He soon discovered he could have found it without help. The Unkerlanters had torches at both ends and along the bridge itself to guide their men and beasts to and across it. Arrogant bastards, Sabrino thought. They don’t even believe we’re still in the game. Time to show them they’ve made a mistake.

He ordered his dragon down in an attack run as perfect as any he’d ever made. He released the eggs it carried at exactly the right moment. They both burst in the center of the bridge, sending Unkerlanter soldiers and behemoths splashing into the stream. One after another, the men in his wing followed him down. By the time they were done, not much remained of the bridge.

“Nice job, boys,” Sabrino said into his crystal. “Now let’s go home and go back to bed.”

He’d just turned toward the dragon farm from which he’d come when the Unkerlanter dragons struck his wing. There were only a couple of squadrons of them-but that meant they outnumbered his comrades and him three or four to one. And their dragons were fresh, not worn out, and were full of cinnabar. They flamed twice as far as the Algarvian beasts could.

For all that, Sabrino’s men were wise in the ways of dragonflying, and quickly took out a couple of the enemy beasts-one with flame from behind, the other by a canny blaze that killed the Unkerlanter dragonflier and let the dragon fly wild. Sabrino thought they might yet break free and win their way back to the dragon farm once more.

He saw the dragon that got him and his own mount as nothing but a blur in the moonlight, and then a tongue of flame licking toward him. An instant later, he screamed, but his shriek was lost, drowned, in the great bellow of agony from his dragon. Wind beat in his face as the dragon lurched toward the ground, but he hardly noticed. His left leg felt on fire.

When he looked down, he saw his left leg was on fire. So was the dragon. He beat at the flames with his fist. The dragon could still fly, though, after a fashion-the Unkerlanter beast had flamed at long range, not wanting to close. Had its dragonflier come closer, he would be dead now, and so would his mount. Things were bad enough as they were. Sabrino wanted to pass out, but the torment in his leg wouldn’t let him. He pounded the dragon with the goad, steering it back toward the southeast.

It didn’t make it all the way to the dragon farm. It came down in the middle of a field of beets. The shock of the landing made Sabrino scream again.

The stench of the dragon’s burnt flesh, and of his own, filled his nostrils.

He loosened the harness and fell to the ground. If the dragon crushed him or flamed him in its own agonies, everything would be over, and he wouldn’t have minded at all. But it rampaged away, leaving him lying there and hoping for death.

Before it found him, Algarvian soldiers did. They’d come to deal with the wounded dragon, but they took Sabrino back to a healer’s tent. The healer took one look at what was left of his leg and said, “I’m sorry, Colonel, but that will have to come off.”

“Oh, please!” Sabrino groaned. The healer blinked in surprise, then nodded. A couple of stalwart helpers lifted Sabrino and set him down in what looked like an oversized rest crate. His awareness of the world was interrupted.

When it returned, so did pain. The healer gave Sabrino a bottle of thick, sweet, nasty stuff. He drained it dry. After what seemed forever but couldn’t have been above a quarter of an hour, the pain retreated. The healer said, “You’ll live, I think. With a cane and a peg, you may even walk again. But for you, Colonel, the war is over.”