Darkness Descending

King Mezentio did not visit the dragon farm again. Sabrino told himself that was because his sovereign had come to Unkerlant for other reasons, which was no doubt true. But he knew he hadn’t endeared himself to Mezentio. Men seldom found favor by questioning kings.

Whether or not Mezentio was there to watch it, Sabrino’s wing kept on fighting the Unkerlanters. In that miserable weather, they did less than they might have earlier in the year, but the Unkerlanter dragons were similarly hampered. Sabrino began using the victory camp full of Kaunians as a landmark. It was far larger and easier to spy from the air than his own dragon farm.

And then, about the time he began wondering if decent weather were gone for good, the sun returned to the sky. Days remained chilly, but the ground began to dry. Behemoths were once more able to move at something more than a squashy, heavy-footed walk. The Algarvians wasted no time in going over to the attack.

But the Unkerlanters wasted no time counterattacking. They had been gathering men and beasts and dragons against the day of need, and threw them into the fight without seeming to worry about how many came out again, if only they stopped their foes. They didn’t quite stop the Algarvians, but slowed their advance from gallop to crawl.

Sabrino and his wing spent as much time over the front as their dragons could stand to stay in the air. They attacked Unkerlanter soldiers and behemoths on the ground and fought hard to keep the Unkerlanter dragons from savaging their own countrymen.

One fine, bright, almost springlike morning, the dragonfliers were over the Unkerlanter lines when the world changed below them. The earth shook, a roar Sabrino could hear even high in the air. Trenches and holes closed on the Unkerlanter soldiers in them. Flames burst from the ground, consuming men and behemoths, unicorns and horses. Not all perished, but the greater part did, up and down the front as far as Sabrino could see. He shouted into his crystal: “Now we slaughter the ones who are left!”

As the dragons stooped on their horrified, bewildered foes, Algarvian foot-soldiers and behemoths and cavalry erupted from their lines and joined in the assault. Their exultant shouts reached high into the sky; the disaster that smote the Unkerlanters had not hurt them in the least. They tore through the gutted enemy positions and swarmed westward.

When Sabrino flew over the victory camp, bringing the dragons back to their farm in triumph at the end of the day, he saw what he knew he would see: a camp full of corpses.

Seven

Cornelu pulled his socks up above his knees. He wished they were thicker wool, so they might keep his legs warmer. The wind that blew into the hills above Tirgoviste came from the southwest, off the Narrow Sea and die land of the Ice People, and carried the chill of the austral continent with it. Snow wouldn’t have surprised him.

He stared down from the hills toward the harbor town. With three Algarvian officers quartered in her house--my house, too, curse them, Cornelu thought--Costache would assuredly be snug and warm, and so would Brindza. The Sibian naval officer consigned the Algarvians to the powers below all the same.

“Come on, you lazy bugger,” shouted the boss of the woodcutting gang for which he’d been working the past few weeks. “Swing your axe or I’ll throw you out on your cursed arse.”

“Aye,” Cornelu said, and then again, wearily, “Aye.” The weariness was more of the spirit than of the body, though the work made a man sleep every night like one of the logs made from trees he cut down. But Cornelu had lived his whole life in polite company, and was used to politely phrased orders. He found few of those here.

He returned his attention to the pine he’d been attacking. When he swung the axe, he imagined it bit into the Algarvian’s neck rather than the dark, scaly bark of the tree, and that blood spurted in place of dribbles of fragrant, resinous sap. The gang boss, a wide-shouldered bruiser named Giurgiu, grunted in something approaching satisfaction and went off to shout at another woodsman who wasn’t working so hard as he might have.

To give Giurgiu his due, he did almost as much work as any two of the men in the gang. He handled an axe as if it were light as a schoolmaster’s switch and did far more than his share on a two-man saw. His hands bore calluses half an inch thick, and looked and felt hard as rocks.

Cornelu’s hands had bled the first several days after he’d joined the woodcutters. He’d never used them so roughly before. Rubbing them with turpentine made him want to shriek, but it had also helped him gain calluses that gave him some protection. By now, swinging the axe was just work, not torment.

Chips flew as he struck the tree again and again. “Come on, you whore!” he panted. Having been reviled, he in turn reviled something that could not argue back. He let out a snort. Maybe this work wasn’t so much different from the Sibian navy after all.