Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

This war was being fought on the pocked, battered, snow-streaked plains of southern Unkerlant. Swemmel’s men had a ring around Sulingen, and the Algarvians were trying to scrape together enough men to break through the ring and either get reinforcements to the army pinned down there or, that failing, to get the soldiers out before the noose tightened unbearably.

Looking down, Sabrino saw scattered units of footsoldiers and behemoths who flew banners of red and green and white to keep Algarvian dragonfliers from flaming them and dropping eggs on them by mistake. Where they were going to magic up enough soldiers for an attack, especially in this weather, was beyond him. They’d have to come from somewhere, though. He couldn’t imagine Sulingen left to wither on the vine.

On flew the dragons. The sun came out from behind a cloud, spreading a cold, clear light over the countryside. Clad all in white, the Unkerlanters and their behemoths were hard to see from any height. They couldn’t do anything about the long shadows they cast, though. Sabrino spotted a column of behemoths moving north and west from the Presseck River, as intent on widening the ring around Sulingen as the Algarvians were on breaking it.

He pulled out his crystal and spoke to his squadron commanders: “See ‘em down there, boys? Let’s cook up some of those ambling roasts in their own pans.”

“Aye, Colonel.” Captain Domiziano still sounded boyish. A bold swoop down on the foe was just his meat.

But the Unkerlanters had seen the Algarvian dragons, too. Sabrino bore a healthy respect for the heavy sticks Unkerlanter behemoths carried. One of them could blaze a dragon out of the sky-if the crew aboard the behemoth could bring it to bear. Down on the ground, the crews of those behemoths were going to try.

“Dive!” Sabrino shouted. He thwacked the dragon with the goad.

The dragon folded its wings and plummeted. The order to dive was one it obeyed with a better temper than most others, because even its feeble brain had learned that the order to flame would soon follow. If the dragon enjoyed doing anything, it enjoyed killing.

Wind whipped past Sabrino’s face. Without his goggles, it would have blinded him. He steered the dragon toward a behemoth with a heavy stick. The Unkerlanters riding that behemoth frantically slewed the stick toward him. If they got it pointed in the right direction before he came close enough to flame … In that case, his mistress would have to find someone else to keep her in her fancy flat, and his wife might be unhappy, too. On the other hand, she might not.

“Now!” he shouted as he thwacked the dragon again. It roared out a great gout of fire-not quite such a long gout as Sabrino would have liked, for cinnabar was in short supply. But the flame proved long enough. It washed over the behemoth, and its crew, and the stick. As Sabrino flew past overhead, he heard the drying groans and shrieks of the beast and the men who had ridden it.

He hit the dragon with the goad again, urging it to gain height for another pass against the Unkerlanters. His dragonfliers, veterans all, had had the same idea he had: they’d gone for the behemoths mounting heavy sticks, because those were the ones that were dangerous to them. And now, as best he could see, all those behemoths lay on the cold ground, either dead already or thrashing in mortal agony.

A dragon lay on the cold ground thrashing in mortal agony, too. Sabrino cursed: one behemoth crew had been a heartbeat faster than the first dragon that assailed them. He wondered who’d gone down. Whoever it was, the wing couldn’t afford the loss. One of the things Sabrino, like most Algarvians, hadn’t fully realized was how vast Unkerlant really was, how many men and dragons and behemoths and horses and unicorns King Swemmel could summon to war. Any losses against such numbers hurt.

“Second round,” he told his squadron commanders. “We’ve got rid of the ones who could really hurt us-now we deal with the rest.”

Behemoths carrying egg-tossers were deadly dangerous to footsoldiers, but not to dragonfliers. Hitting a dragon with an egg was possible, but anything but likely. And the behemoth crews’ personal sticks weren’t strong enough to blaze down dragons unless they caught one in the eye. Of course, if they blazed a dragonflier instead, his dragon turned back into a wild animal on the instant.

The Unkerlanters knew all that as well as he did. The column broke up, behemoths lumbering off in every direction. The more scattered the target they presented, the harder time the dragon would have hunting them down.

As Sabrino’s mount flew over the road where his wing had first assailed the column, a stink of burnt flesh filled his nostrils for a breath. Sure as sure, they’d roasted the behemoths in their own pans. They’d roasted some Unkerlanters in their own armor, too; charred man’s-flesh was part of the stench.

During the winter before, Algarvian footsoldiers had eaten slain behemoths, eaten them and been glad to have them. Sabrino’s dragon, and others in the wing, had fed on such flesh, too. As a dragonflier, he hadn’t had to eat of it himself. Rank and prestigious service had their privileges.

Choosing an Unkerlanter behemoth, he urged his dragon along after it. The behemoth was running as hard as it could, snow and dirt flying up from its feet at every bound. Compared to the speed a dragon made, it might as well have been standing still. Sabrino drew close enough to see that the Unkerlanters even covered the beast’s tail in a sleeve of rusty chainmail. That might have warded it against a footsoldier’s stick, but not against dragonfire.

Again, the tongue of fire his mount loosed wasn’t long enough to suit Sabrino. But he’d deliberately waited till he was almost on top of the behemoth before freeing the dragon to flame. That meant he had to lie low along the beast’s neck to present as small a target as he could to the Unkerlanters. He’d done that before; he did it again now.

After a couple of stumbling steps, the behemoth went down. Sabrino looked around for another one to pursue, and hoped his dragon had enough flame left to do what needed doing. He’d just spotted a beast he thought he could reach when Captain Domiziano’s visage appeared in his crystal. “Unkerlanters dragons,” the squadron commander said. “They’re coming up out of the south, and closing fast.”

Sabrino’s head whipped around. Domiziano was right. King Swemmel’s dragonfliers were getting closer in a hurry. Sabrino cursed again-they were already closer than they should have been. The rock-gray paint the Unkerlanters slapped on them made them demonically hard to spot.

Still cursing, Sabrino said, “We’ll have to pull up and deal with them. Then, if we can, we’ll get back to the behemoths.”

Once he’d given the order, his men knew what to do. They were better trained than the Unkerlanters opposing them, and they flew better-trained dragons, too. But Swemmel kept throwing fresh dragonfliers and fresh men into the fight, and Algarve didn’t have so many of either.

For a couple of minutes, the skies above the plains of southern Unkerlant were a mad melee. The Unkerlanter dragons might not have been well-trained, but they were well-rested. And the flames that spurted from their jaws proved their meat had been dusted with plenty of brimstone and quicksilver. Two Algarvian dragons plummeted to the ground in quick succession.

Then Sabrino’s wing, though outnumbered, rallied. Two of their dragons would attack one Unkerlanter. When the Algarvians were attacked, they came to one another’s aid quickly and without any fuss. Sabrino blazed an Unkerlanter flier, whose dragon promptly attacked the rock-gray beast closest to it.

By the time the Unkerlanters had lost half a dozen dragonfliers, they decided they’d had enough. Off they flew, back the way they’d come. “A good day’s work,” Domiziano said in the crystal. “We made ‘em pay.”