Darkness Descending

Nothing, was the first thought that sprang into Leudast’s mind. Stay where we are and keep getting pounded, was the second. He liked it no better, though doing it would have meant obeying orders to the letter.

He looked around again, trying to find any way in which the attack on Lautertal might succeed. Had he seen one, he would have ordered his men to keep trying: no war ever got won without casualties. But no war ever got won by throwing men into a meat grinder to no purpose, either. As far as he could see, that was all the Unkerlanters were doing here.

“Fall back!” he shouted. “Back to our own lines! We’ll take another blaze at these buggers later on.” He didn’t know whether the Unkerlanters would or not. He did know this attack had failed.

Getting away from Lautertal proved almost as expensive as assailing the place had been. The Algarvians, fortunately, could no more pursue than the Unkerlanters had been able to attack, but their egg-tossers punished the retreating soldiers all over again. Back at the soggy trenches from which they’d begun the assault on Lautertal, King Swemmel’s men reckoned up their losses. Leudast had seen worse, which was the most he could say.

“Who ordered the withdrawal?” Captain Hawart demanded.

“I did, sir,” Leudast answered, and wondered if an avalanche of official wrath would fall on his head.

But Hawart only nodded and said, “Good. You waited long enough.” Leudast let out a long, weary sigh of relief.

In all his years as a dragonflier, Count Sabrino had never faced such determined enemies in the air as the ones he met here in the land of the Ice People. Try as he would, he could not escape them. And all the wing he led suffered from their ferocious onslaughts.

He turned to Colonel Broumidis, who commanded the handful of Yaninan dragons on the austral continent. “Can we do nothing against them?” he cried out in torment. “Are we powerless?”

Broumidis’ shrug had none of the panache an Algarvian would have given it. The Yaninan officer, a short, skinny man with an enormous black mustache that didn’t suit his narrow face, seemed rather to be suggesting that fate had more to do with it than he did. All all he said was, “What can we do but endure?”

“Go mad?” Sabrino suggested, no more than a quarter in jest. He slapped, then cried out in triumph. “There’s one mosquito dead. That leaves only forty-eight billion, as near as I can reckon. The cursed things are eating me alive.”

Colonel Broumidis shrugged again. “It is spring on the austral continent,” he said, sounding even more doleful in his accented Algarvian than he would have in his own language. “All the bugs hatch out at once, and they are all hungry. What can we do but slap and light stinking candles and suffer?”

“I’d like to drop enough eggs on all the swamps to kill the wrigglers before they grow up, that’s what,” Sabrino said savagely. Broumidis raised a bushy black eyebrow and said nothing. Sabrino felt himself flush. He knew he’d been absurd. When the ice down here finally melted, half the countryside turned into a bog. And, as the Yaninan colonel had said, the bugs swarmed forth, intent on packing a year’s worth of life into the few weeks of mild weather the austral continent gave them.

Sabrino looked back over his shoulder at Heshbon, the Yaninan outpost he and his dragonfliers had to help protect. Miserable little place, he thought. I’ve flown over plenty of Unkerlanter peasant villages where I’d rather settle down, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in an Unkerlanter peasant village.

“Cinnabar,” he muttered under his breath, making it into a curse.

“Aye, cinnabar,” Broumidis agreed, mournful still. “It draw warriors as amber draws feathers. Us, the Lagoans--may the powers below swallow those wide-arsed whoresons--and now you.”

“I would have been just as well pleased to stay on the other side of the Narrow Sea, I assure you,” Sabrino said.

Colonel Broumidis sent him a hurt look. The Yaninan’s large, dark, liquid eyes were made for such expressions. Sabrino sighed. He could have said a good deal more, but he didn’t want to offend his ally. Shouting, If you buggers had done any fighting on your own, I could have stayed on the other side of the Narrow Sea, struck him as impolitic.

“Well, we shall have to carry on the war as best we can.” Broumidis sighed, too. The Yaninans were hardly happier witJh the Algarvians than the other way round. They were a proud and touchy folk, and all the more touchy because of their failures in the field. Broumidis pointed. “Here comes the food for our dragons.”

Several camels bore panniers full of chunks of meat. The meat came from other camels; cutting them up struck Sabrino as the best thing that could happen to them. They were almost as disagreeable as dragons. Sabrino know no higher dispraise.