Rulers of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  His image winked out. The crystallomancer said, “That’s it, sir.”

  Turpino said, “You made him angry when you reminded him what he was really doing back there.”

  “What a pity,” Spinello growled “If he’s unhappy about it, let him come to the front and see what we’re really doing up here.” That earned him one of the few looks of unreserved approval he’d ever had from Turpino. He went on, “Besides, if he’s not getting screams from every other officer on this field, I’m a poached egg.”

  Regardless of whether he was a poached egg, the mages back at the special camp must have decided the Algarvian army did need help. Spinello knew to the moment when the sacrifices began. A great cloud of dust rose from the hillside as the ground shook there. Cracks opened, then slammed shut. Flames shot up from the ground.

  “Now we’re in business,” Turpino said happily. “Cursed Kaunians are good for something, anyhow.” This time, he rose and ran forward first, leaving Spinello to hurry after him. Spinello did. So did the crystallomancer, evidently glad to have someone giving him orders even if it wasn’t his proper commander.

  But they hadn’t gone far before the ground trembled under their feet. A huge crack opened under the crystallomancer. He had time for a terrified shriek before it smashed him as it closed. Violet flame engulfed two behemoths and their crews not far from Spinello, and more men and beasts elsewhere on the field.

  Spinello fell. He clutched the ground, trying to make it hold still. “Powers below eat the Unkerlanters,” cried Turpino, who had also fallen. “Their mages are hitting back harder and faster than they ever did before.”

  “Can they spend more peasants than we can spend Kaunians?” Spinello asked—a question on which the fate of the battle might turn. He gave the only answer he had for it: “We’ll find out.”

  Even before the mage-made earthquake ended, he fought his way back onto his feet. He hauled Turpino up, too. “Thanks,” the company commander said.

  “My pleasure,” Spinello said, and bowed. He looked behind him. “I think we’ve got more still standing than the Unkerlanters do.” After blowing his whistle, he yelled, “Come on! Aye, all of you—you Forthwegians, too! We can take that hill!”

  Take it they did, though the Unkerlanters who hadn’t been overwhelmed by Algarvian magecraft sold themselves dear and weren’t finally driven back or killed till after sunset. By then, nobody on the blood-soaked field had any doubts left about whether the men of Plegmund’s Brigade could fight. Algarvians and bearded Forthwegians sat down together and shared food and wine and water and lay down side by side to rest and ready themselves for the next day’s horrors.

  Spinello found himself trading barley bread he’d taken from a dead Unkerlanter for the sausages a couple of men from Plegmund’s Brigade had. One of them looked more like a bandit than a soldier. The other was younger, but might have been grimmer. Speaking pretty good Algarvian, he said, “I hope they get rid of all the Kaunians. It’s the only thing they’re good for.”

  “Oh, not the only thing.” Tired as he was, Spinello still laughed. “I was posted in Forthweg before I came here, in a little pisspot village named Oyngestun.”

  “I know it,” the man from Plegmund’s Brigade said. “I am from Gromheort.”

  “All right, then,” Spinello said. “I found this Kaunian tart there named Vanai, who …” He’d been telling stories about her since coming to Unkerlant.

  Tonight, to his astonishment, he was interrupted. “Vanai! By the powers above! I remember now,” the Forthwegian exclaimed. “My cousin, the cursed fool, was sweet on a Kaunian bitch named Vanai, and she was from Oyngestun. Could it be …?”

  “Don’t ask me, for I don’t know,” Spinello said. “But I do know this: I was in there first.” And he got to tell his bawdy stories after all, there in the brooding night filled with the stink of fire and the far worse stink of death.

  Even in his dreams, Count Sabrino flew his dragon against the Unkerlanters. He had few dreams. He had little time for sleep. He and the men of his wing and Colonel Ambaldo’s wing and all the other Algarvian dragonfliers on the eastern side of the Unkerlanter salient around Durrwangen had been flying as often as their flesh and that of their mounts would stand, or perhaps rather more than that.

  But Sabrino was dreaming now. He’d blazed an Unkerlanter dragonflier and made the man’s beast fly wild when suddenly his own beast was flamed from behind. It stumbled in midair, trying to right itself, but could not. It stumbled, it staggered, it shook. It shook …

  Sabrino’s eyes came open. He discovered a dragon handler shaking him awake. Sabrino groaned and tried to roll away. The handler was inexorable. “Colonel, you’ve got to get up,” he said urgently. “The wing’s got to fly. You’ve got to fly now.”

  “Powers below eat you,” Sabrino said.

  “Dowsers have spotted a great swarm of Unkerlanter dragons flying our way,” the dragon handler said. “They’ll want to catch us on the ground, drop their eggs all over the dragon farms hereabouts. But if we get into the air first …”

  Sleep, and the need for sleep, fell away from Sabrino like an abandoned kilt. “Get out of the way,” he growled, springing off his cot. He checked himself, but only for an instant. “No. Run and sound the alarm.”

  Before the dragon handler could ever begin to turn, horns blared in the predawn darkness. Sabrino grunted in satisfaction. He pulled on his boots, donned the heavy coat he’d been using as a blanket, and put his goggles on his head. Then he ran past the dragon handler and toward his own stupid, eviltempered mount.

  Other dragonfliers, from his wing and Ambaldo’s, were dashing to their dragons, too. Sabrino grudged a quarter of a minute to cry out, “If we get into the air, we slaughter the Unkerlanters who are coming to call. If they catch us on the ground, the way they want to, we’re dead. Come on. Mezentio!”

  “Mezentio!” the dragonfliers shouted.

  Behind them, in the east, the sky was going pink. Off to the west, the direction from which those rock-gray dragons would be coming, stars still shone and night still ruled. But not securely, not even there. Purple-black had lightened to deep blue, and the dimmer stars winked out one by one. Day was coming. By all the signs, trouble would get here first.

  A handler released the chain that held Sabrino’s dragon to the spike driven deep into the black soil of southern Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad. It screamed at him. He’d known it would. He whacked it again, and it bounded into the air as much from sheer rage as for any other reason.

  Sabrino didn’t care why the dragon flew. He only cared that it flew. As the ground fell away below them, he spoke into his crystal to his squadron commanders: “Get as high as you can. We don’t want Swemmel’s boys to know we’re up here till we drop on them.”

  “Aye, Colonel.” That was gloomy Captain Orosio. He was the senior squadron commander left alive. He’d been juniormost when the war started—or had he even had a squadron then? After close to four years, Sabrino couldn’t remember anymore. He marveled that he himself still survived. If fighting on the ground in the Six Years’ War didn’t kill me, nothing here will, he thought.

  Light spread in the sky as he urged his dragon ever higher. Before long, he spied the sun, low and red in the east. Its rays hadn’t yet reached the ground, and wouldn’t for some little time to come. He might have been on a mountaintop, looking down into some still-dark valley.

  And then, as he’d hoped he would, he saw things moving in the air below his squadron. He whooped with glee. “There they are!” he shouted into the crystal, and pointed for good measure.

  “Aye, Colonel.” That was Orosio again. “I saw’em a little while ago.” Dour, laconic—he hardly seemed like an Algarvian, but he was a good officer. Had he come from a more prominent family, he would have had a better chance to prove it. No matter how fierce the casualties among dragonfliers, he wasn’t likely to rise above his present rank.

  Flashes of light from the ground
said the Unkerlanters were plastering the dragon farm with eggs, no doubt thinking they were wreaking havoc on the Algarvian beasts. Sabrino hoped the handlers had found holes. King Swemmel’s dragonfliers would do some damage down below, but they hadn’t yet awakened to the realization that they were about to take damage, too.

  With astonishing speed, the Unkerlanter dragons swelled beneath Sabrino. He had his pick of targets; sure enough, the enemy had no idea he and his comrades were above them. This time, the dowsers had been right on the money. “And now the Unkerlanters will pay,” Sabrino muttered. “How they will pay.”

  The wind from his dive swept the words away. For once, it mattered not at all. Sabrino blazed not just one Unkerlanter dragonflier, as he had dreamt, but two in quick succession. Even as the beasts they’d ridden went wild and useless, his own dragon flamed another Unkerlanter’s mount. Sabrino brought his dragon in as close as he dared before letting it flame. Quicksilver was in short supply, and without it a dragon’s flame grew short, too. But his mount had enough. The dragon painted rock-gray fell out of the air.

  Sabrino looked around the brightening sky, looked around and howled with savage glee. Almost every Algarvian dragonflier was having luck to match his. The Unkerlanters had hoped to catch them by surprise, but ended up caught themselves. In hardly more than the twinkling of an eye, the air was free of them. The ones left alive flew back toward the salient as fast as their dragons’ wings would take them.

  “Pursuit, sir?” Captain Orosio’s voice came from the crystal.

  Reluctantly, Sabrino said, “No. We take the dragons down, we get them fed—we get ourselves fed, too, while we’re at it—and then we go back to hammering the Unkerlanter positions on the ground. I wish we could rest them more, but we haven’t got the time. We land.” He emphasized the words with hand signals, so all the dragonfliers could see what he meant.

  They obeyed him. He would have been astonished—horrified—if they hadn’t. Down they went. Now the sun had reached the Unkerlanter plains. Dead dragons, almost all of them painted rock-gray, cast long shadows across those plains. Sabrino whistled softly to see how many he and his comrades had knocked out of the sky.

  “A good morning’s work,” he said to the handler who started tossing his dragon gobbets of meat. “The dowsers gave us a hand today.”

  “Aye,” the handler agreed. “Wouldn’t have been much fun if those buggers had caught us unawares.”

  “No.” Sabrino shuddered at the thought of it. As he freed himself from his harness and slid to the ground, he asked the handler, “How’s the cinnabar holding out?”

  “All right so far,” the fellow told him. “We’ll get through this fight without any trouble, I think. Don’t know what we’ll do about the next one, though.”

  “Worry about it later. What else can we do?” Sabrino hurried off toward the mess tent. He would rather have gone back to his cot, but that wouldn’t do. He yawned enormously. Falling asleep aboard his dragon wouldn’t do, either. He gulped hot, strong tea, gulped it and gulped it till it pried his eyelids open. Breakfast was more of the stew that had been in the pot for supper the night before. He recognized barley, buckwheat, carrots, celery, onions, and bits of meat. He couldn’t tell what the meat was. Maybe that was for the best.

  Colonel Ambaldo raised his mug of tea in salute, as if it held wine. “Here’s to the Unkerlanters outsmarting themselves,” he said.

  “I’ll gladly drink to that,” Sabrino said. “This morning’s ours. Till they can bring more dragons forward, we’ll pound’em to our hearts’ content.”

  “Sounds good to me, by the powers above,” Ambaldo said. “The lads down on the ground need all the help they can get.”

  In Sabrino’s eyes, Ambaldo wasn’t too much more than a lad himself. That didn’t make him wrong. Sabrino said, “Swemmel’s men have been waiting for us too cursed long in these parts. Row on row of fieldworks, and they fight to hold every miserable, stinking little village as if it were Sulingen.”

  “Too right they do,” Ambaldo agreed. “Brigades go into those places and companies come out. It’s butchery, is what it is.”

  “Never saw anything like this in Valmiera, did you?” Sabrino couldn’t resist the jab.

  Colonel Ambaldo shook his head. “Never once. Not even close. They’re madmen, these Unkerlanters. They fight like madmen, anyhow. No wonder we started killing Kaunians to shift’em. Though from what I hear, we’re using up the blonds so fast, we’re liable to run short.”

  “Swemmel won’t ever run short on people to kill to power his magecraft,” Sabrino said gloomily. “Unkerlant has more peasants than it knows what to do with.” He scowled. “That’s not quite right. Swemmel knows too bloody well what to do with them—and to them.”

  Both wing commanders slammed down their empty mugs at the same time. They hurried out of the mess tent, shouting for their men to join them. Sabrino spent a little while cursing because the dragon handlers hadn’t finished securing the eggs under all the dragons in his wing.

  But the delay was only short. It might even have worked to the dragonfliers’ advantage, though Sabrino wouldn’t have admitted that to the handlers. Feeling how his dragon labored under him, Sabrino knew it needed rest, rest it couldn’t have. A few more quiet minutes on the ground had surely done it some good.

  Not having many fresh Unkerlanter dragons to face did the Algarvians a lot of good, too. Most of Swemmel’s dragonfliers wouldn’t have been allowed to mount an Algarvian beast, but they had more dragons than did Sabrino and his countrymen. A bad dragonflier on a fresh beast could match a master aboard a worn, overworked dragon.

  A fresh Algarvian attack was just going in against the village of Eylau. The wreckage of a couple of previous assaults still lay outside the place: dead men and behemoths. By all the signs, the new brigades assailing the Unkerlanter strongpoint would have had no easier time of it. But, after two wings of Algarvian dragons delivered an all but unopposed attack on Eylau, the strongpoint wasn’t so strong anymore. The footsoldiers and behemoths battled their way into the village.

  They fought their way in, but would they fight their way out? Already, more Unkerlanter soldiers were moving forward to try to hold them there. Even if the Algarvians did advance, how much good would it do them? Eylau was less than ten miles west of the point from which the assault had begun. At that rate, how long would this army take to join the one pushing east toward it? And would either of them have any men left alive by the time they joined?

  Sabrino had no answers. All he could do was command his wing as best he could and hope those set over him knew what they were about. He ordered his dragonfliers back to the farm. More meat for the dragons, more eggs loaded under them, a little food and a lot of tea for the men, and back into the fight once more.

  Sidroc wondered why he still breathed. Everything he’d been through before this great fight on the flank of the Durrwangen bulge, however horrid and terrifying it seemed at the time, was as nothing beside reality here. He’d always thought a fight would start, and then it would end. This one had started, aye, but it showed no sign of ever wanting to end.

  “A week and a half,” he said to Sergeant Werferth, who by some miracle also had not been blazed or gone up in a burst of sorcerous energy or been butchered by a flying fragment of egg casing or flamed by a dragon or had any other lethal or disabling accident befall him. “Have we won? Are we winning?”

  “Futter me if I know. Futter me if I know anything any more.” Werferth scratched his hairy chin. “I’ve got lice in my beard. I know that.”

  “So do I,” Sidroc said, and scratched like a Siaulian monkey.

  Smoke stained the sky above them. Somewhere not far away, eggs burst: Unkerlanter eggs, pounding the Algarvians, pounding the men of Plegmund’s Brigade who fought at their side. Werferth said, “Every time we think we’ve knocked those buggers flat, they pop up again.”

  “If we kill enough Kaunians—” Sidroc began.

  But Werferth s
hook his head. “What good would it do us? They’d just kill some more of their own, and we’d be back where we started. We’ve seen that happen too cursed often already.”

  Sidroc wanted to argue. He wanted Kaunians dead. What else were they good for?—except the enjoyment that Algarvian major had taken from the one his cousin was sweet on. “Vanai,” Sidroc muttered under his breath. It had gone clean out of his head till the Algarvian spoke—knocked out when Cousin Ealstan slammed his head against the wall while they were fighting. But he remembered now. Aye, the pieces fit together again.

  He laughed, a sound not far from honest mirth. He wondered what had happened, up there in Forthweg. Had the Algarvians gone in and cleaned the Kaunians out of Oyngestun, the way they should have? Or was dear old Ealstan still getting that redhead’s sloppy seconds?

  “We might as well kill some more Kaunians,” he said, thinking of a new argument. “You think the Unkerlanters’ll stop slaying their own if we quit? Not bloody likely, you ask me. They’ll keep right at it, they will. Even if we don’t kill blonds to strike, we’ll need to do it to shield ourselves.” He stuck out his chin. “Go on. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Werferth grunted. “I’ll tell you you talk too cursed much, that’s what I’ll do.” He yawned so wide, the hinge at the back of his jaw cracked like a knuckle. “I want to sleep for a year. Two years, with any luck at all.”

  “I’m with you there.” Sidroc had never known a man could be so worn. “I don’t think I’ve slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch since this cursed fight started. I feel drunk half the time.”

  “I wish I were drunk,” Werferth said. “Haven’t even had a nip since I found that one dead Unkerlanter with a canteen half full of spirits.” He stretched himself out on the torn ground. A couple of minutes later, he was snoring.