Out of the Darkness

What a company of footsoldiers could do on a battlefield swarming with behemoths was depressingly obvious: not much. More Unkerlanter behemoths did come down from out of the north to challenge the Algarvian beasts, but not enough. As if it were the early days of the war, the redheads had the bit between their teeth.

A week later, spring was in the air. Garivald was sure it would still be snowing down in the Duchy of Grelz, but northern Algarve was a long, long way from home. The wind blew warm from the sea. Birds started chirping in the trees. Fresh green grass sprang up; a few flowers bloomed. It would have been beautiful... if so much of the countryside hadn’t been wrecked by war’s fiery rake. And that rake had gone across the landscape first one way, then the other.

By that time, Garivald counted himself lucky to be alive. He’d never seen such a sustained Algarvian push before. It had driven his countrymen and him back a good thirty miles from the outskirts of Bonorva. He’d had to fight his way out of two encirclements, and sneak past Algarvian footsoldiers to escape a third. A lot of Unkerlanters hadn’t made it.

“They’re bastards, aren’t they?” he said to Lieutenant Andelot as the two of them sprawled by the bank of a little stream. They were both filthy and unshaven and desperately in need of sleep.

“We knew that from the start,” Andelot answered. “They’ve pushed us back some, aye, but look at the price they’ve paid. And they’re just about stopped now--we’re hardly lost any ground today. When we start moving forward again, what will they use to stop us?”

“I don’t know.” Garivald didn’t care about such things. I’m no officer. I don’t want to be an officer, he thought. Let them worry about where the fornicating war is going. I just want to stay alive till it finally gets there and stops, so I can get off.

By all the signs, Andelot knew what he was talking about. Streams of Unkerlanter soldiers and behemoths were moving up toward the front. Rock-gray dragons swarmed overhead, with few in Algarvian colors in the air to hold them back. The redheads had done everything they could to drive back the men of Unkerlant, and it hadn’t been enough.

More dragons flew by, all of them heading northeast to strike the enemy. Some had eggs slung under their bellies; others carried only dragonfliers. They protected the ones with the eggs, fought off the handful of Algarvian beasts that rose to oppose them, and swooped low to flame soldiers and civilians on the ground.

“They’ll make Mezentio’s men wish they were never born,” Garivald said smugly.

But then, as he watched, the whole flight of Unkerlanter dragons tumbled out of the sky. It wasn’t as if they’d been blazed down. It was more as if they’d run headlong into an invisible wall. Some of the eggs they carried burst while they were still in the air, others when they hit the ground.

“What in blazes--?” Garivald exclaimed.

Andelot took things more in stride. “Curse them, they made it work again,” he said. Garivald’s questioning noise held no words. Andelot went on, “The redheads keep coming up with new sorceries, powers below eat ‘em. This one congeals the air some sort of way. Don’t ask me how--I’m no mage. I don’t think our mages know how this spell works, either, come to that. The one thing we do know is, for every ten times the Algarvians try it, they bring it off once, twice if they’re lucky.”

“That’s too often,” Garivald said.

“I know,” Andelot said. “But it’s only a toy. It won’t change the way the war turns out, not even a copper’s worth. Most of the time, our dragons do get through.”

Garivald nodded. Looked at from the perspective of the war as a whole, that did make perfect sense. Looked at from the perspective of the dragonfliers who’d just run into the Algarvian sorcery . . . He tried not to think about that. Before long, the regiment was moving forward again, so he didn’t have to.

Ilmarinen stood in one of the passes that cut through the Bratanu Mountains. The air was as clear as mountain air was said to be. Finding a cliche that turned out to be true always amused him. Looking west--and looking down--he could see a long way into Algarve. There not too far away lay the town of Tricarico, with olive groves and almond orchards and rolling fields of wheat sweeping away till detail was lost even with this clear, clear air.

Beside Ilmarinen stood Grand General Nortamo, the commander of Kuusaman soldiers in Jelgava. He was, in fact, the overall commander of the Lagoans in Jelgava, too, however little they cared to acknowledge it. Grand general was not a usual rank in the Kuusaman army; it had been created especially for this campaign, to give Nortamo rank to match that of the Lagoan marshal who led King Vitor’s men.