Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Under the protection of the storm of blazes, a couple of men ran forward and set an egg against the iron door of the naval offices. One of them fell as he dashed away from the doors. His comrade stopped and picked him up and started to carry him toward something more like safety. Then he too went down.

Tealdo cursed to see such courage wasted. He hoped somebody would try to get him away if he got hurt. He hoped whoever it was would have better luck than the fellow from the egg crew, too.

The egg burst then. Tealdo blinked frantically, trying to clear away the fuzzy, glowing green-purple spot in the center of his field of vision. When he could see straight ahead again, he whooped: the doors had not been able to withstand the energies unleashed against them. One leaned drunkenly on its hinges, while the other had been hurled into the building, with luck smashing a good many Sibians in the corridor behind it.

“Forward!” Larbino and Panfilo cried the order at the same time. Larbino added “Follow me!” and dashed toward the opening torn in the naval offices. Tealdo scrambled to his feet and did follow the captain. An officer who led from the front could pull his men after him: that was a lesson as old as war. An officer who led from the front was also horribly likely to die before his time: that was a lesson driven home during the Six Years’ War.

It held here, too. Larbino got through the riven doorway, but no more than a couple of strides farther. Then he crumpled bonelessly, blazed through the head. But the soldiers on his heels killed the Sibian who’d blazed him. Howling like wolves and calling Larbino’s name along with King Mezentio’s, the Algarvians fought their way into and through the naval offices.

“Hold it right there!” Tealdo screamed as a Sibian hurried toward a window to escape. Firelight coming in through the window showed a lot of gold braid on the fellow’s sleeves: an officer, but one intent on leaving the front, not leading from it.

For a moment, Tealdo thought he would try to jump out the window. That would have been a mistake, a particularly fatal mistake. The Sibian officer must have realized it. He raised his hands. “I am Count Delfinu; my rank is commodore,” he said in slow, clear Algarvian. “I expect to be used with all the dignity due my rank and station.”

“That’s nice,” Tealdo said. He might have to act polite around his own nobles. He didn’t care a fig for the fancy titles foreigners carried, though. Gesturing with the stick, he went on, “You come along with me, pal. Somebody’ll figure out what to do with you.” A captive commodore was an excuse plenty good enough to let him leave the fighting for a little while. And if the rest of the fight was going as smoothly as this… Tealdo laughed. “Come on, pal,” he repeated. “Tirgoviste’s ours. Way it looks to me, your whole cursed kingdom’s ours.”

Cornelu cursed. He and Eforiel had been out on a routine patrol, finding nothing much. When the leviathan brought him back toward Tirgoviste harbor, though… He cursed again, cursed and wept, mingling his salty tears with the salt sea. “The harbor is theirs,” he groaned. “The city is theirs.”

Fires burning up in Tirgoviste silhouetted the masts and spars of the Algarvian invasion fleet. Cornelu did not need long to figure out what King Mezentio’s men had done. In an abstract way, he admired their nerve. Had a couple of Sibian ley-line cruisers happened on that fleet of sailing ships, they could have worked a ghastly slaughter. But they hadn’t. The galleons, or whatever the old-fashioned name for them was, had ghosted across the ley lines with no one the wiser. The rest of the Algarvian navy, no doubt, would follow now.

“Costache,” Cornelu said: another groan. All he could do was hope his wife remained safe, and the child to whom she would soon give birth. He didn’t think the Algarvians would deliberately outrage her—were they not civilized men?—but anything could happen during a battle.

Eforiel rolled a little in the water, so she could look up at him from one large, dark eye. The leviathan let out what sounded like a puzzled grunt. Cornelu understood why: he wasn’t behaving as he usually did when the two of them returned to their home port. Eforiel didn’t understand that, if she blithely swam into Tirgoviste harbor now, Cornelu would get blazed and she would either have eggs tossed at her or would be captured and pressed into the service of King Mezentio’s men.

Instead of having her go into the harbor, Cornelu started to guide her toward a little beach just outside Tirgoviste. There he could slip off her back, gain the shore, and… And what? he asked himself. What would he do then? Go into town, rescue his wife, bring her back to Eforiel, and flee? The hero of an adventure romance might have managed that, pausing somewhere in there to make love to her, too. In real life, unfortunately, Cornelu had no notion how to bring off such a coup.

If he couldn’t rescue Costache, could he head inland and join whatever resistance to the Algarvian invaders might be brewing there? He wondered how strong that resistance could be. Algarve was a much bigger kingdom than Sibiu, and boasted a much, much bigger army. Sibiu had relied upon her ships to keep her safe, and Mezentio had found a way to hoodwink them.

Besides, as a soldier Cornelu was nothing out of the ordinary. He was far more useful to King Burebistu as part of a team with Eforiel than by himself. He wished the leviathan had several eggs in the harness under her belly. Were that so, he might have done the invaders some real damage. Eforiel grunted again, sensing his indecision: unlike dragons, leviathans liked men and understood them pretty well. “I need to know more,” Cornelu said, almost as if he were talking to Costache. “That’s what I need more than anything else. For all I know—powers above grant it be so—the invasion has failed on the other four islands. If it has, I can help reconquer Tirgoviste.”

He patted the leviathan, steering her west toward Facaceni, the island closest to his own. Eforiel obeyed, but more slowly than she might have. Had she been able to speak, she might have said something like, Are you sure this is what you want me to do? She was even more skeptical of anything that smacked of innovation than the briniest old salt in the Sibian navy.

Cornelu wished with all his heart that some better course lay before him. He could see none, though. With no chance to be useful around Tirgoviste, he had to hope the island and port of Facaceni remained in Sibian hands. If they did, well and good. If not… He would not let himself worry about that now.

Dawn broke while Eforiel was still swimming west. Dragons flew high overhead—far too high for him to tell whether they bore Sibian colors or those of Algarve. None of them swooped down to drop an egg on the leviathan. For that, at least, Cornelu was grateful.

It was the first thing he’d found for which he might be grateful since discovering his kingdom invaded. Before long, he became convinced it was the last thing for which he might be grateful for some time to come. Before he saw the hills at the center of Facaceni rise over the horizon, he spotted a great cloud of smoke towering higher than those hills. Unless Facaceni had suffered a natural disaster, it had suffered disaster at the hands of the Algarvians.

Cornelu had never wished so hard for an earthquake. But wishes, no matter how fervent, were sorcerous nullities. Cornelu had no skill in magecraft, any more than a mage was likely to have skill in riding leviathans. Learning to do one thing well was hard enough in this world; learning to do more than one thing well often pressed the limits of the possible.

Not that even magecraft could annul what had already happened. As Eforiel drew Cornelu ever nearer the harbor of Facaceni, he saw for himself that King Mezentio’s men were there before him. Sailing ships had emptied soldiers out on to the quays, as they had at Tirgoviste—as they had, probably, at every Sibian port.