Harry Turtledove: Jaws of Darkness

When the Unkerlanters surrounded Herborn, the Algarvians and Grelzers had tried to do the same thing. They’d failed. Sabrino asked the obvious question here: “What do their chances look like?”

Blosio’s shrug was as unrestrained as his wave had been. “Neither one of our columns is as strong as one might wish, and we’ve cut off a lot of Unkerlanters. But we have to do what we can, you know.”

“Oh, indeed.” Sabrino nodded. “In case you’re wondering, sir, my wing has twenty-one dragons ready to fly.” Had the wing been at full strength, it would have had sixty-four. It hadn’t been at full strength, or anywhere close, for a couple of years.

Brigadier Blosio shrugged again. “That’s how things are, Colonel. And they’re not getting any better. Trapani is ordering some of our dragons taken out of the west and brought back home to Algarve. The way things are now, the Lagoans and Kuusamans are pounding our southern cities flat from Sibiu because we’ve hardly any beasts to put in the air against them.”

“That’s… not good, sir.”CountSabrino reckoned that a commendable understatement. “The way things are now, the Unkerlanters are pounding our armies here flat because we haven’t got enough beasts to put in the air against them.”

“We have to try there,” Blosio said.

“We have to try here, too.” Sabrino knew his protest wouldn’t change anything. And Blosio had a point: KingMezentio couldn’t very well let Algarve itself take a beating. For one thing, people back home might sour on the war if they kept getting hit without seeing their countrymen hit back. For another, the eggs the Kuusamans and Lagoans dropped hit manufactories that made things the army needed, and also slew the mages without whom Sabrino’s men would have had no eggs to drop and the Algarvian footsoldiers would have had no sticks with which to blaze.

“Then go out and try to put paid to that Unkerlanter counterattack,” Blosio said. “That’s the best thing your wing can do for Algarve.” He gave map coordinates.

“Aye, sir,” Sabrino said resignedly. He wasn’t sure Blosio heard him. The brigadier’s image vanished from the crystal. It flared for a moment before becoming an inert globe of glass. Sabrino nodded to the crystallomancer. “Thanks.” On second thought, he didn’t know why he was thanking the young mage. Because of the crystal, Sabrino now stood a better chance of getting killed.

Out into the cold again. He shouted for his men. They knew he was giving them no great gift-only the chance to die before their time. But knowing that, they affected not to. They scrambled onto their dragons and fastened the harnesses that held them safe as if they were going on a lark, not into battle. Sabrino also strapped himself into the harness at the base of his dragon’s neck. He knew he could die if any little thing went wrong. How vividly he knew it was another reminder of his years.

He also knew his dragon, like most Algarvian beasts, hadn’t been getting enough quicksilver. Its flames wouldn’t reach so far as they would have with more of the vital mineral in its system. Had Algarve taken the Unker-lanter city of Sulingen, had Algarve seized the vital cinnabar mines south of Sulingen… Had that happened, Mezentio’s men wouldn’t have been pushed back into Grelz.

A dragon handler slipped the chain that held Sabrino’s beast to its stake. The colonel of dragonfliers hit his mount in the side of the neck with his goad. The dragon screeched furiously, flapped it’s great, leathery wings, and bounded into the air. Looking back over his shoulder, Sabrino watched the rest of the dragons in the wing-all of them painted in varying patterns of green, red, and white-following him.

He murmured the charm that activated the crystal he carried with him, so he could give his squadron commanders the map square the wing was ordered to attack. They passed it on to their dragonfliers. So did Sabrino, with gestures and pantomiming. Maybe I’ll go on the stage after the war is over, he thought, and laughed at himself. He laughed doubly: by all appearances, the war would go on forever.

The landscape below did nothing to contradict that. It was a chiaroscuro blend of snow and smoke and soot. All the villages and a lot of stretches of forest had been fought over two, three, four times. Whoever finally won the war, the Grelzer peasantry would be generations recovering from it.

Fresh columns of smoke rising into the sky would have told him where the heavy fighting was even without the coordinates he’d got from Brigadier Blosio. He urged his dragon toward those columns. Urqed meant hitting it with the goad, harder and harder, till it did what he wanted. Every once in a while, a dragon would have enough of that and flame its flier off its back. Dragons were trained not to do that from the moment they hatched, but everyone who had anything to do with them knew they were too stupid and too vicious to be very reliable.

Sabrino’s dragon obeyed now. CaptainOrosio ’s image, tiny but perfect, appeared in the wing commander’s crystal. Orosio said, “By the powers above, sir, that’s a cursed broad front the Unkerlanters have opened up. How many of them are there, anyhow?”

“I asked Brigadier Blosio the same question,” Sabrino answered. “I gather we’re supposed to find out by experiment.” Orosio said something pungent and abruptly broke the etheric connection.

As soon as Sabrino spotted swarms of Unkerlanters trying to force their way north and east through a wavering line of Algarvian defenders, he ordered his dragons to the attack. They swooped low on an advancing column of behemoths, dropping eggs among them and flaming down several. Sabrino’s dragon didn’t have to be urged to attack. Restraining it, making it attack when and where he wanted it to, was harder, but he managed.

It was when he made the beast gain altitude for another pass at the enemy that he gasped in horror. The column of behemoths his wing had assailed was one of dozens, perhaps one of hundreds, all with footsoldiers moving with them and in support of them. The Algarvians hadn’t cut off a few brigades. They’d tried to surround a whole army, and a pugnacious one, too.

A man who hooked a salmon would eventually pull it to shore. A man who hooked a leviathan would be hauled out to sea and never seen again unless he threw away the line in a hurry. But who would do that soon enough?

In any case, his countrymen couldn’t throw away the line. KingSwem-mel ’s soldiers gripped them too closely for that. All they could do was hang on tight and hope for the best. They wouldn’t hold back this Unkerlanter attack. Sabrino could see as much. That meant they wouldn’t recapture Herborn, either.

Which raised an interesting question, or a couple. Who was fisherman here, who fish? And who’d caught whom?

Skarnu had discovered it was much harder to join in the underground fight against Algarve with a small baby in tow. He’d been fighting the redheads since the war began: first as a captain in King Gainibu’s army and then, after Algarvian behemoths and dragons shattered the Valmieran forces, in what wasn’t quite battle but could nonetheless have got him killed at any moment.

Gedominu started to cry. Merkela plucked her son and Skarnu’s out of the cradle. She checked to see if he was wet. Her grunt said he wasn’t. She undid the top three toggles on her tunic and shrugged it off her shoulder to bare a breast. That was what the baby had wanted, sure enough.

“He’s hungry,” Skarnu remarked.

Merkela nodded. The motion made some of her blond hair flip down onto the baby’s face; she brushed it aside with her free hand. “He’s getting bigger and stronger every day,” she said. “He needs to get bigger and stronger. Even if we lose the fight against Mezentio’s whoresons-”