Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Peering over the top of his boulder, he saw Unkerlanters in rock-gray rushing up the road and through the woods toward the line the Algarvians were holding. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin-by the way they were advancing, Swemmel’s men didn’t know a solidly held line was waiting for them. Well, they’d find out.

  He brought his stick up to his shoulder and blazed down a couple of Unkerlanters who took no pains to hide themselves. Nor was he the only Algarvian blazing. King Swemmel’s men fell one after another. But they kept coming. As always, they were recklessly brave. And, as always, they had soldiers to spare. Soldiers to burn, Trasone thought, doing his best to make sure plenty of them did.

  But, before long, he had to scramble backwards to a new hiding place to keep from getting flanked out. He wasn’t the only one, either; he wondered if Spinello could keep any kind of control over his line for long.

  Then eggs started dropping on the Unkerlanters, both in the woods and beyond them. Dragons shrieked fury as they flew past at treetop height. Cries of panic replaced cries of “Urra!” The enemy attack foundered, cut off at the root.

  Major Spinello blew a shrill blast on his whistle. “Forward!” he shouted. “They had their chance. Now it’s our turn. Mezentio!” He was the first to rush against the Unkerlanters. Recklessly brave fit him as well as the enemy.

  “Mezentio!” Trasone yelled, and went forward, too. Caught by surprise by the dragons the crystallomancer had summoned, the Unkerlanters gave ground more readily than usual. Trasone’s battalion burst out into the open company south of the forest. Some of the grass was burning there, thanks to the Algarvian dragons. And on the blackened grass lay blackened bodies. Trasone trotted past them with hardly a sideways glance; he’d already seen plenty of dead Unkerlanters.

  And, a couple of miles farther south, he saw more: not soldiers, these, but row on row of peasants-old men and women, mostly-with their hands bound behind them and their throats cut. Those corpses did make him grimace: they were the fuel for the sorcery the Unkerlanter mages had aimed at him and his comrades. The mages, unlike their victims, had fled. Grimly, Trasone trudged after them.

  “Camel.” Sabrino spoke the word as if it were an obscure but potent obscenity. “If I never taste camel again, I’ll count myself lucky.”

  “Dragons like it well enough,” Lieutenant Colonel Caratzas said. As far as Sabrino was concerned, the new Yaninan senior officer wasn’t a quarter the man Colonel Broumidis had been. He was, among other things, much too fond of the anise-flavored spirits his countrymen brewed. About all he really shared with Broumidis-and most other Yaninans-was a passion for expressive gestures. “The only other real choice we have is eating marmots and voles and grubs.”

  “They’d have to be tastier,” Sabrino insisted. “They’d have to be more tender, too. Tell me I’m wrong. Go on, sir-I dare you.”

  Instead of answering right away, Caratzas scratched his mustache, which always made Sabrino think a large black moth had landed on his upper lip. “Even if I did tell you differently, you would not think it mattered. And why should you? I am only a Yaninan, after all, good for nothing but running away.” He breathed potent, licorice-scented fumes into Sabrino’s face.

  “Oh, my dear fellow!” Sabrino exclaimed. He didn’t want Caratzas knowing he thought he couldn’t rely on him; that would just make the Yaninan all the more unreliable. “I do not question your courage. Yaninan dragonfliers here have performed as well as anyone could wish-look at your predecessor’s extraordinary valor.”

  “You are gracious,” Caratzas said with a sad, half-sozzled smile. “You do not speak of the sorry performance of our footsoldiers here, nor of the even sorrier performance of our footsoldiers in Unkerlant. Not all of your followers, not all of your countrymen, show so much forbearance.”

  “Is that so?” Sabrino said, and the Yaninan officer inclined his head to show it was. Sabrino had a low opinion of the general level of Yaninan military skill himself. Caratzas doubtless knew as much, even if Sabrino didn’t trumpet that opinion to the skies. For his part, Sabrino had already known not all his fellow Algarvians in the land of the Ice People were so polite. “I shall discipline any man under my command who has offended you. We are allies, Algarve and Yanina.”

  And what a hypocrite I am, Sabrino thought. He would sooner have been fighting in Unkerlant himself. Had the Yaninans been able to hold their own against Lagoas here on the austral continent, he would have been able to do that. As things were …

  As things were, Lieutenant Colonel Caratzas said, “It cannot be helped. We are the small tagalong cousin. But it grows wearisome.”

  Sabrino didn’t know what to say to that. Yanina was Algarve’s small tagalong cousin in this war, and Algarve had to keep dragging that cousin out of trouble. No wonder some of his fliers had been less courteous than they might have. Staying courteous and telling the truth weren’t easy to do in the same breath. Still, the Yaninan dragonfliers had fought well-though better when Broumidis led them. What more could Sabrino tell this tipsy lieutenant colonel?

  He did his best: “As I say, I will punish any man who maligns you or your kingdom. Algarve needs your aid.”

  “It is better than nothing,” Caratzas said. “I myself, you understand, am able to keep my temper in the face of these insults.” He hiccuped. Those sweet-smelling spirits no doubt helped blunt the sting of any insults he heard. After another hiccup, he went on, “But we Yaninans are a proud folk, and some of us will have blood to repay any slight.”

  “I understand.” Sabrino wished the Yaninans were as prickly about doing a good job at war as they were about their honor. That was one more thing he couldn’t tell Caratzas.

  He looked east across the broad, rolling plains where the austral continent sloped down from the Barrier Mountains to the Narrow Sea. Somewhere out there was the Lagoan army. It had been driven a long way back from Heshbon, but it was still there, still dangerous, still very much in the fight. Both the Lagoans and Sabrino’s army kept dragons in the air all the time now, watching one another’s movements and making sure nobody got any unpleasant surprises.

  “If we had more men, more behemoths, more dragons, we could drive the Lagoans into the sea,” Caratzas remarked.

  “Well, so we could, but that might mean we didn’t have enough men to finish off the Unkerlanters, too,” Sabrino said. “The fight up on the Derlavaian mainland is more important than the war here.”

  Something glowed for a moment in Caratzas’ dark eyes, then vanished in their depths before Sabrino was sure he saw it. The Yaninan said, “In getting into a fight, or several fights, it is better to be sure one has enough men beforehand, not afterwards.”

  That was a painfully obvious truth. “If we’d taken Cottbus …” Sabrino’s voice trailed away. “Well, one way or another, we’ll just have to lick Swemmel’s men. We’re driving them in the south. The cinnabar there and the cinnabar we get here should keep us going till we beat all our enemies.”

  “Now there is a thought,” Caratzas said, sozzled awe in his voice. “Beating all of one’s enemies. .” Had he been an Algarvian, he would have bunched his fingers and kissed their tips. Yaninans used different gestures, but the naked longing on Caratzas’ face said more than any of them.

  For a Yaninan, beating all of one’s enemies had to be a dream, and an impossible dream at that. For an Algarvian … Sabrino remembered the heady days of the summer before, when Unkerlant looked on the point of collapse. Had Swemmel fled off into the uncharted west, how long could Lagoas have lasted without coming to terms with King Mezentio? Not long, by his way of thinking. And Kuusamo had still been neutral then. Sabrino sighed. Algarve had been on the brink, right on the brink.

  “It could still happen,” Sabrino murmured. “By the powers above, it could.” Unkerlant hadn’t been knocked out of the war, but she might yet be. If that happened, Lagoas and Kuusamo together could hardly stand against the united might of the entire continent of Derlavai. The world wo
uld be Mezentio’s-if Swemmel couldn’t contest it any more.

  Horns blew the alarm, startling Sabrino out of his reverie. Cries of alarm shredded dreams of all-embracing victory. “The Lagoans!” someone shouted from the direction of the crystallomancers’ tent. “The Lagoans are on our flank!”

  Cursing foully, Sabrino sprang from the rock on which he’d been sitting. “How did they get there?” he demanded, as if Caratzas would know.

  To his surprise, the Yaninan did, or at least had an idea: “I wonder if they made an arrangement with shamans from the Ice People. Magic down here is a funny business. I don’t pretend to understand all of it.”

  “Do you understand that we’re all liable to get killed if we can’t throw the Lagoans back?” Sabrino snapped. “How did they come up on our flank?” Like any Algarvian, he had trouble taking the Ice People seriously.

  The Lagoans, on the other hand, were deadly dangerous. He knew that. He’d known it since his days as a footsoldier during the Six Years’ War, when he’d faced them in southern Valmiera. Come to think of it, he’d been lucky to come through in one piece then.

  His dragonfliers rushed up to their beasts as the handlers got them ready to fly and to fight. Sabrino scrambled aboard his own mount while a handler detached the chain that bound it to its stake. He whacked the dragon with his goad. It let out a hideous, raucous screech and bounded into the air.

  As the ground fell away beneath him-and as, at the same time, his field of vision widened-Sabrino discovered how, if not why, the Lagoans had managed to escape the Algarvian scouts’ notice. Even knowing they were there, he had trouble seeing them. It was as if his eyes wanted to rest anywhere but on marching men and hurrying horses and bulky behemoths.

  That struck him as magecraft closely linked to the land, the sort of thing the shamans might do. The military mages attached to the army hadn’t tried any serious sorcery down here because the land felt strange, alien. It wasn’t alien to the hairy nomads who’d roamed it for eons. If they’d thrown in with the Lagoans. .

  “In that case, we have to smash them, too,” Sabrino told his dragon. It screeched again. Maybe that was approval-dragons liked nothing better than smashing things. More likely, it was random chance.

  And the dragon had no trouble seeing the Lagoans, even if he did. As soon as he gave it leave, it folded its wings and hurtled toward them in as terrifying a dive as Sabrino had ever known. The dive was terrifying for a couple of reasons: not only was he afraid the dragon would smash into the ground without being able to pull up, he also feared a heavy stick would blaze it-and him with it.

  But the heavy sticks some of the Lagoan behemoths carried weren’t so accurate when the behemoths were on the move. And the enemy started blazing later than they might have; maybe they thought for too long that the Algarvians didn’t know they were there.

  If they thought that, they were wrong. Sabrino’s dragon flew along just above their heads. The Algarvian wing commander gave the great beast what it wanted: the command to flame. He thought it would have flamed the Lagoans without the command, and didn’t want it breaking away from his control like that.

  Fumes loaded with brimstone and quicksilver made him cough. This can’t be good for my lungs, he thought, as if any dragonflier really expected to live long enough to have his lungs wear out. But breathing the fumes from dragonfire was better by far than being bathed in it. Some Lagoans shriveled and died where they stood. Others writhed on the ground or ran screaming, human torches who could ignite their friends.

  He and his wing hadn’t had such an easy time wrecking an enemy column since the early days of the war against Unkerlant. The Lagoans, aiming at surprise, hadn’t brought their dragons with them, so the Algarvians had the air to themselves. And even when King Vitor’s men did blaze down an Algarvian dragon, the dead beast fell among them and wrecked most of a company in its death throes.

  Sabrino’s dragon clawed its way higher. It was ready and more than ready for another run at the Lagoans. Looking down on them, though, Sabrino saw they’d been thrown into enough disorder. Their attack on the Algarvian expeditionary force would not come off. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Captain Domiziano’s image appeared in his crystal. “Enemy dragons flying hard out of the east,” the squadron commander reported.

  Sabrino looked that way. Sure enough, he saw them himself. “Back to our own men,” he said. “We can defend them, and they can defend us with their heavy sticks. And now, instead of the Lagoans’ moving on our soldiers on the ground, we’ll move on theirs. Try and pull the wool over our eyes, will they?”

  “We’ve already taught ‘em a good lesson,” Domiziano said.

  “So we have,” Sabrino agreed, waving for the wing to break off the attack on the Lagoans. “We’ve taught ‘em the magic the shamans of the Ice People use isn’t as good as they thought it was.”

  “We ought to see if we can find some friendly shamans ourselves, though, and use it along with everything else we’ve got,” Captain Domiziano said. Sabrino started to tell him that was nothing but foolishness. He stopped with the words unspoken. The more he thought about the idea, the better he liked it.

  Somewhere above Sergeant Istvan and his comrades, the moon and stars shone down. He couldn’t see them, though, except in brief, scattered glimpses through the treetops as he crept along on hands and knees. He knew they looked down on the whole world. The vast forests of western Unkerlant only seemed to cover the whole world. He’d been in them for what felt like forever, but that stood to reason.

  From a few feet away, Szonyi whispered, “Good thing we don’t need to see where we’re going, not for a while, anyway.”

  “Aye.” Istvan chuckled and sniffed. “We can follow our noses instead.”

  Kun was off to the other side of Istvan. He said, “Smells a lot better than anything our cooks have dished out lately.”

  Kun could always find something to complain about. As often as not, Istvan thought he was complaining to hear himself talk. This time, he thought Kun was dead right. The rich, meaty odor that wafted from an Unkerlanter cook pot somewhere up ahead would have draw him as rubbed amber attracted straws and bits of parchment even if his squad hadn’t been ordered out on a night raid against King Swemmel’s forward positions.

  One of the other troopers in the squad let out an all but voiceless hiss: “There’s their fire up ahead.”

  Istvan didn’t see the light till he’d scrambled past the trunk of a pine so huge, it might have been standing there since the day the stars chose the Gyongyosians, out of all the peoples of the world, as the folk they claimed for their own. Once he did spy it, he moved even more slowly and carefully than before. The Unkerlanters had proved time and again they were more woods-wise than his countrymen. The last thing he wanted was to give the game away before his comrades and he got the chance to steal that stew.

  The firelight ahead did draw him more accurately than the delicious smell coming from the pot had. He stretched out on his belly behind a clump of ferns and stared at the handful of Unkerlanters gathered around their little fire. They looked more alert than he would have liked; one of them sat a good way away from the flames, with his back to the fire and a stick in his lap: their lookout, without a doubt.

  He has to be the first one we kill, Istvan thought. If we blaze him down without making any noise, we can get rid of the rest of the goat-eaters a lot easier. He couldn’t pass the order along, even in a whisper-too risky. He had to hope the troopers in his squad would be able to figure things out for themselves. The men who couldn’t do that kind of figuring were mostly dead by now.

  One of the Unkerlanters walked over to the fire and stirred the pot with a big iron spoon. Another one asked him a question in their guttural language. Before the first fellow answered, he licked the spoon. Then he grinned and nodded. If that didn’t mean the stew was ready. .

  Istvan’s stomach thought that was what it meant. The growl that rose from his midsection might have come
from a hungry wolf. He glanced anxiously toward the Unkerlanters in the clearing. Attacks could go wrong all sorts of ways, but he’d never heard of one betrayed by a rumbling belly.

  Alarm ran through him when one of Swemmel’s soldiers looked his way.

  I’m not here, he thought, as loudly as he could. You didn’t hear that. After a moment, the Unkerlanter looked away. Istvan didn’t even dare sigh with relief.

  Ever so slowly, he brought his stick up to his shoulder. He had a clear blaze at the enemy sentry. He couldn’t assume any of his comrades did. If he managed to knock the fellow over, the rest of the soldiers in the squad would take that as their signal to blaze at the other Unkerlanters. If everything went right, the clearing-and the cook pot-would be theirs in minutes.

  If anything went wrong.. Istvan didn’t dwell on that. He’d seen too many things go wrong since getting hauled out of his valley and into the army. All you could do was make the best of them.

  His finger slid toward the touch hole at the base of the stick. The Unkerlanter sentry leaned forward, suddenly wary. He lifted his hand to point into the woods, not toward Istvan, but about where Szonyi would have been.

  Istvan blazed him. The beam caught the Unkerlanter just in front of the right ear. He toppled forward, dead before he could finish his motion. His stick made only a small thump as it fell out of his lap.

  But that thump was enough to make some of the soldiers by the fire turn their heads his way. The Unkerlanters got out a startled yelp or two before a storm of beams from the woods cut them down. Istvan and his comrades rushed forward into the firelight to finish them with knives.

  It was all over faster than Istvan had dreamt it could be. His squadmates and he dragged corpses in rock-gray tunics away from the campfire. “This position is ours,” he said happily. “So is this stew.”

  No one cheered. That might have drawn Unkerlanters down on the squad. But smiles stretched wide behind tangled tawny beards. As one man, the Gyongyosians brought out their tin mess kits. Istvan grabbed the iron spoon that still stuck out of the pot. He held the highest rank here, so he had the right to serve the other soldiers according to how well they’d fought.