Out of the Darkness

When he looked down, he saw his left leg was on fire. So was the dragon. He beat at the flames with his fist. The dragon could still fly, though, after a fashion--the Unkerlanter beast had flamed at long range, not wanting to close. Had its dragonflier come closer, he would be dead now, and so would his mount. Things were bad enough as they were. Sabrino wanted to pass out, but the torment in his leg wouldn’t let him. He pounded the dragon with the goad, steering it back toward the southeast.

It didn’t make it all the way to the dragon farm. It came down in the middle of a field of beets. The shock of the landing made Sabrino scream again.

The stench of the dragon’s burnt flesh, and of his own, filled his nostrils.

He loosened the harness and fell to the ground. If the dragon crushed him or flamed him in its own agonies, everything would be over, and he wouldn’t have minded at all. But it rampaged away, leaving him lying there and hoping for death.

Before it found him, Algarvian soldiers did. They’d come to deal with the wounded dragon, but they took Sabrino back to a healer’s tent. The healer took one look at what was left of his leg and said, “I’m sorry, Colonel, but that will have to come off.”

“Oh, please!” Sabrino groaned. The healer blinked in surprise, then nodded. A couple of stalwart helpers lifted Sabrino and set him down in what looked like an oversized rest crate. His awareness of the world was interrupted.

When it returned, so did pain. The healer gave Sabrino a bottle of thick, sweet, nasty stuff. He drained it dry. After what seemed forever but couldn’t have been above a quarter of an hour, the pain retreated. The healer said, “You’ll live, I think. With a cane and a peg, you may even walk again. But for you, Colonel, the war is over.”

Under the drug, that hardly seemed to matter. Under the drug, nothing much seemed to matter. Maybe I should have started taking this stuff, whatever it is, a long time ago, he thought vaguely. He smiled at the healer. “So what?” he said.

Up till the Derlavaian War broke out, Ilmarinen hadn’t known many Unkerlanters. The vast kingdom had its share of talented mages, but they published less often than their colleagues farther east--either that or they published in their own language rather than in classical Kaunian. And Unkerlanter, in Ilmarinen’s biased opinion, was a language fit only for Unkerlanters. Mages from Unkerlant didn’t come to colloquia as often as their counterparts in the kingdoms of eastern Derlavai. Maybe they were afraid of revealing secrets. Maybe King Swemmel feared they would, and didn’t let them out.

Now Ilmarinen had all the chances he wanted to see Unkerlanters up close. A regular ferry service ran across the Albi River, which separated Kuusaman occupiers of Algarve on the east bank from Swemmel’s soldiers on the west. Ilmarinen found the idea of a ferry interesting, too. In Kuusamo, where the rivers froze up in wintertime, they were used less often than here in the mild north of Derlavai.

Ilmarinen, of course, found almost everything interesting. Whenever he got the chance, he stuck his mage’s badge in the pocket of his tunic and crossed over to the west side of the Albi to learn what he could about the Unkerlanters. The ferry, a stout rowboat, had a crew half Kuusaman, half Unkerlanter. When a man from one land needed to talk to one from the other, he was more likely to use Algarvian than any other tongue. For the master mage, that was one more irony to savor.

On the west bank of the Albi, the Unkerlanters looked less than delighted about having visitors from the east. But the Kuusamans were their allies, so they couldn’t very well point sticks at them and keep them out. Ilmarinen wondered what Swemmel’s men made of him. Without his mage’s badge, what was he? A colonel with too many years on him and too much curiosity for his own good.

As far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as too much curiosity for his own good. He walked here and there, peered at this and that, and asked questions whenever he found someone who would admit to speaking a civilized language--which didn’t happen very often; a lot of Unkerlanters seemed to go out of their way to deny knowing anything.

For a while, that not only perplexed Ilmarinen but also annoyed him. But he had a mind quick to see patterns. If Swemmel was apt to make someone disappear for saying or doing the wrong thing, what could be safer than saying and doing nothing? But Swemmel’s people couldn’t very well have beaten the Algarvians by doing nothing. It was a puzzlement. Ilmarinen loved being puzzled.

He did find a young lieutenant named Andelot who spoke some Algarvian and didn’t seem afraid to speak it to him. The fellow said, “Aye, is true. We have not so much initiative. Is a word, initiative?”