Darkness Descending (56 page)

“Fetch me my wolfskin jacket,” Krasta said, enjoying the prospect of sending Bauska back upstairs. “I am going to go for a walk on the grounds here.”

“You
are,
milady?” Bauska sounded astonished. Walking the grounds was not Krasta’s usual idea of amusement. The only good Krasta usually saw in having wide grounds, as a matter of fact, was in keeping neighbors at a nice, respectful distance. But she was feeling contrary today, all the more so after than unsatisfactory conversation with Lurcanio.

And so she snapped, “I certainly am. Now get moving.” With a sigh, Bauska trudged up the stairs to get the jacket. She gave it to Krasta and gave her a reproachful look with it. That was wasted; Krasta never noticed it.

Fastening the wooden toggles on the wolfskin jacket, Krasta went outside. She exclaimed as the cold bit at her cheeks and nose, but neither of the Algarvian sentries at the front door stirred an inch. She cursed their indifference under her breath.

The skins in the jacket came from Unkerlant; few wolves survived farther east in Derlavai. Krasta patted the soft gray sleeve. At the moment, she quite enjoyed wearing something from Swemmel’s kingdom. She wished she could throw that in Lurcanio’s face, but knew she didn’t dare. He got quite stuffy where what he saw as Algarve’s honor was concerned.

Snow crunched under her shoes. It was a couple of days old; soot from the countless coal and wood fires in Priekule had already streaked it with gray. Everything was cold and quiet, so quiet she could hear the scream of a dragon high overhead. The Algarvians kept a couple of them in the air above Priekule all the time, to give warning of Lagoan raiders. The Lagoans didn’t fly north very often. Krasta sniffed. She scorned Valmiera’s former allies even more than she did its conquerors. The Algarvians, at least, had proved their strength.

She walked on, getting chillier with every step in spite of the wolfskin jacket. The Algarvians had to be mad to want to fight a war in Unkerlant in the wintertime. They should have settled down where they were and waited till spring.
Next time I meet a general at some feast or other, maybe I’ll tell him so,
Krasta thought.
Some people just can’t see what’s in front of them.

What was in front of her were more snow-covered grounds and bare-branched trees. In the summer, the trees screened Priekule from her sight. For the most part, that suited her fine; the city had altogether too many commoners in it for her to want to look at it very much.

Now, though, the spires of the royal palace and the taller, paler shaft of the Kaunian Column of Victory were plainly visible. Inside the palace, King Gainibu drowned his humiliation in spirits. Krasta didn’t care to dwell on Gainibu. A king, as far as she was concerned, shouldn’t be a sot.

That left the Column of Victory to draw her eye. There it stood, as it had since the days of the Kaunian Empire, proud and fair and beautifully carved . . . and Algarvian soldiers patrolled the park whose centerpiece it was, and all of Priekule, and all of the Kaunian kingdom of Valmiera.

Sudden unexpected tears stung her eyes. Her eyelashes started to freeze together. Angrily, she knuckled them.
Foolishness,
she thought. She was getting by. She was doing better than getting by. With an Algarvian protector, the hardships that had hold of the kingdom hardly touched her.

She nodded. She was looking at things the right way. The redheads had won the war, and nothing that happened in far-off Unkerlant could have anything to do with that. She was certain she was right there. Why, then, did the tears keep trying to come back?

Before she could find an answer—or, more likely, stop looking for one—a couple of Algarvians mounted on unicorns came trotting up the road from Priekule. One of the unicorns still bore some splotches of the dun-colored paint that had made it harder to spot during the fighting. The other was the white to which even clean snow could only aspire.

Both riders slowed to leer at Krasta. Most times, she would have withered them with a glance colder than .the weather. Now, oddly, she welcomed their attention. She welcomed any attention. The smile she gave them was just this side of an invitation to a lewd act in the snow.

“Well, hello, sweetheart!” one of them said in accented Valmieran. “Whose girl you being? You being anybody’s girl?”

“My companion is Colonel Lurcanio,” Krasta answered before she thought. That would kill the unicorn riders’ interest in her, and she didn’t want it killed.

But it was. Both redheads grimaced. The one who’d spoken gave her a formal salute, as if she rather than Lurcanio were his superior officer. “Meaning no offense,” he said, and spurred his unicorn toward the mansion. The other cavalryman followed close behind.

Krasta stooped and scooped up a snowball and threw it after them. It fell short. They had no idea she’d flung it. The snow stung her hands. She rubbed them on the fur of her jacket, opening and closing them to get the blood flowing and make them less icy.

The two Algarvians tied their unicorns in front of the mansion and went inside.
They don’t even know it’s my house,
Krasta thought. Oh, they might suspect, because Colonel Lurcanio’s woman wouldn’t be anyone ordinary, but they didn’t know. They would have leered at Bauska, too.

“And I’ve come out of the war better than most,” Krasta murmured. “Powers above!” She looked over toward the Kaunian Column of Victory once more. The triumphs it celebrated were vanished now. The emperor who’d won them was only a name in history books, history books she hadn’t read. Pretty soon, the Algarvians would write the history books, and then no one would ever hear his name again.

She headed back toward the mansion. Even after she went inside, she was a long time feeling warm.

Ice was forming in Count Sabrino’s waxed mustachios. Snow lay on the plains of Unkerlant far below. The Algarvian colonel’s dragon had carried him into air colder still.

He reached up with his right hand to knock the ice away. He used the goad in his left to whack the side of the dragon’s long neck, swinging its course more nearly southwest. The dragon let out an immense, furious hiss. Stupid like all its kind, it wanted to do what it wanted to do, not to follow its dragonflier’s commands.

Sabrino whacked it again, harder this time. “Obey, curse you!” he shouted, though the freezing wind blew his words away. The dragon didn’t hiss this time; it screamed. He wondered if it would twist its head back and try to flame him off it. That was a dragon’s ultimate sin. He waited, ready to whack it on the sensitive end of its nose if it so forgot its training.

But, screaming again, it took the course he wanted. He looked back over his shoulder to make sure the wing he commanded was following. Sure enough, thirty-seven dragons painted in stripes of green, white, and red—the Algarvian colors—matched his change of course. His mouth twisted; like any man of his kingdom, he showed what he thought. His wing should have numbered sixty-four. But fighting had been desperately heavy these past few weeks—men and dragons were dying faster than replacements could reach the front.

A burning peasant village sent smoke high into the air, almost as high as Sabrino flew. He eyed the column of smoke in mild surprise; he’d thought most of the Unkerlanter villages hereabouts had gone up in flames during the Algarvian advance on Cottbus. Now, down there on the ground, the Unkerlanters, at home in winter, were the ones moving forward.

No sooner had that thought crossed Sabrino’s mind than he spied a group of Unkerlanter behemoths tramping east. They skirted the village, which might still have Algarvian defenders holed up in it. Over the drifts came the great beasts—literally. Some bright Unkerlanter had had the idea of fitting them with outsized snowshoes. Those let them cope with deep snow far better than Algarvian behemoths could. Sabrino grimaced—what an embarrassment, to be outthought by Unkerlanters!

When it came to cold-weather fighting, King Swemmel’s men had out-thought the Algarvians several different ways. Sabrino was nearly sure Unkerlanter footsoldiers accompanied those behemoths. He couldn’t see them, though, not from this height. The Unkerlanters wore white smocks over the rest of their clothes, and were nearly invisible in the snow. That sort of need hadn’t occurred to Sabrino’s countrymen. With thick wool tunics and stockings, with heavy felt boots, with fur hats and fur-lined capes, the Unkerlanters had an easier time staying warm than the Algarvians, too.

The dragons flew over another village, this one wrecked in the earlier fighting. Lumps in the snow around it might have been dead behemoths. Sabrino flew too high to spot snow-covered human corpses. In any case, they were too common to attract much notice.

There ahead lay the shattered town of Lehesten, north and slightly east of Cottbus. Algarvian troops had briefly held it, just as they’d fought their way into Thalfang south of the Unkerlanter capital. Sabrino had heard they’d spied the spires of King Swemmel’s palace from Thalfang. He didn’t know whether that was true. If it was, they hadn’t seen them for long. Fierce Unkerlanter counterattacks had shoved the Algarvians out of Thalfang, and out of Lehesten, too.

Now the Unkerlanters were pouring footsoldiers and behemoths and even horse and unicorn cavalry through Lehesten, using the town as a marshaling point for their counterattack. Sabrino whooped to spot a column of behemoths hauling heavy egg-tossers toward the fighting front. Even with snowshoes on the behemoths’ feet, even with skids under the egg-tossers, that column wasn’t going anywhere fast.

Activating the crystal attached to his harness took only a muttered word of command. The faces of his three surviving squadron leaders, tiny but perfect, appeared in the crystal. “We are going to tear up that column,” Sabrino told them.

“Aye, Colonel!” Captain Domiziano exclaimed.

“Aye, Colonel,” Captain Orosio agreed. “Let’s hurt the whoresons.” He was perhaps five years older than Domiziano in the flesh, thirty years older in the spirit.

Sabrino spoke to the newest squadron leader, Captain Olindro: “Your men and dragons will fly top cover for us. If the Unkerlanters come against us, you’ll hold them off till we can get some height and join you.”
You’ll do that, or you’ll die trying,
Sabrino thought. Olindro’s predecessor had.

As Domiziano and Orosio had before him, Olindro said, “Aye, Colonel.” If he thought about his predecessor’s fate, he didn’t let on. A good soldier couldn’t let his fears and worries show, though Sabrino had never known a fighting man without them.

“Let’s go!” he shouted, and whacked his dragon again, this time in the command to dive. For once, the dragon obeyed with alacrity. Even its tiny brain had come to associate diving with fighting, and it liked fighting better than feeding, perhaps even better than mating. Domiziano and Orosio’s squadrons followed Sabrino down. The icy wind thrummed in his face. Had he not worn goggles, it would have blinded him.

Behemoths and egg-tossers swelled from specks to toys to real things in what seemed no time at all. Sabrino led the dragons against the column from the rear, hoping to put off for as long as he could the moment when the Unkerlanters realized they were under attack.

He always used that tactic. Sometimes, as today, it worked very well indeed. Secure in their possession of Lehesten, secure also in their possession of the initiative, the enemy soldiers paid the air no attention till Sabrino ordered his dragon to flame.

A sheet of fire, fueled by brimstone and quicksilver, burst from the dragon’s mouth. It engulfed a behemoth, the men riding on the beast, and the egg-tosser perhaps ten feet in front of it. The behemoth never made a sound. It might have been inhaling when the fire rolled over it. It simply toppled, dead before its flank hit the snow.

A couple of men in white smocks trudging along beside the egg-tosser did shriek as flames devoured them. The egg-tosser’s carriage, being made of more wood than metal, caught and began to burn. So did the casings of some of the eggs on the carriage. Mages made them to stand up to a good many things, but not to dragonfire. Bursts of sorcerous energy from the unleashed eggs finished the work of wrecking the tosser the flame had begun.

The rest of the dragons in the two squadrons Sabrino had ordered into action flamed the column with him. Only a handful of men and a couple of behemoths escaped their first onslaught.

No one had ever said the Unkerlanters lacked courage—or, if anyone had said it, he’d been a fool. The survivors of the Algarvian attack promptly started blazing at the men and dragons who’d tormented them so. Only luck would let a footsoldier bring down a dragon: the beasts’ bellies were painted silver to reflect beams, and even a blaze through the eye might not pierce their small, bone-armored brains.

Dragonfliers were more vulnerable. A beam hissed past Sabrino. He used the goad to hit the dragon in the throat, urging it to climb. It didn’t like that; it wanted to go back and use more flame. In the end, bad-tempered as usual, it obeyed him.

He was willing to go round and make another pass at the Unkerlanters. But before he could give the order, Olindro’s tiny image appeared in his crystal. “Dragons!” the squadron leader said, face twisting in alarm. “Unkerlanter dragons—lots of them!”

Sabrino looked up. Sure enough, Olindro’s squadron was under assault from perhaps twice its number of dragons, all painted the rock-gray of Unkerlanter military tunics.

His dragon saw the enemies, too. It didn’t much care for the beasts on its own side, but had—slowly—learned not to quarrel with them. Screaming with fury, it flew hard toward the dragons the Unkerlanters rode. The great muscles that powered its wings pumped hard.

As Sabrino drew near, he unslung his stick and aimed it at an Unkerlanter flier. His forefinger went into the activating hole at the base of the stick. A beam blazed forth from the other end. It missed the Unkerlanter. Good blazing was hard from dragonback, with both target and blazer moving so swiftly.

Cursing even so, Sabrino forced his dragon up through and past the enemies attacking his men and beasts. Most of the two squadrons he led followed his example. They were, almost to a man, veteran dragonfliers; they knew what needed doing. Dragonfights were war in three dimensions. Height mattered.