Out of the Darkness

The kingdom was dying anyhow. Not enough Algarvians remained in uniform to matter.

“Maybe we ought to stand aside, surrender, let the Unkerlanters and the cursed islanders finish overrunning us,” Sabrino told Captain Orosio as they ate black bread and drank spirits in a miserable little tent that some pen-pushing idiot back in Trapani had surely recorded on a map as the headquarters of a full-strength wing. “Everything would be done then, and the kingdom wouldn’t get trampled like a naked man trying to stand up to a herd of behemoths.”

Orosio looked up from his mug. “Colonel, you’d better be careful what you say, and who you say it to,” he answered. “Even now--maybe especially now-- you can’t talk about giving up. They’ll grab you for treason and blaze you.”

Sabrino’s laugh held all the bitterness in the world. “And much difference that would make, to me or to Algarve. I don’t think it’ll happen, anyhow. Mezentio was going to raise us to the powers above. Instead, he’s dropped us down to the powers below, and he won’t quit till they’ve eaten every fornicating one of us.” He took a swig. The spirits held out, if nothing else did. “Won’t be long now.”

“You can’t talk that way, sir.” Orosio sounded worried. “It really is treason.”

“Go ahead and report me, then. You’ll make yourself a hero, a hero of Algarve!” Sabrino said. “The king’ll pin the medal on you himself, and give you your very own wing. You too can command eight dragons, you poor, sorry sod. That’s half as many as a squadron is supposed to have, but who’s counting?”

“Sir, I think you’d better go to bed,” Orosio said stiffly. He would never report Sabrino, but the wing commander realized he’d pushed further than even his longtime comrade could go. With a sigh, Orosio asked, “What’s left for us now?”

“What?” Sabrino waved his hand. “Nothing.”

“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.