Darkness Descending

Villagers--those who hadn’t fled or been killed--began coming out of their battered homes to shake the hands of the Unkerlanter soldiers. Some of them held out jugs of spirits. “We would have had more,” one of them said, “but these redheaded swine”--he spat in the direction of the Algarvian captives--”stole everything they could find. Still, they did not find it all.”

An old woman pointed to the captives. “What will you do with them now?”

“Send them off to a camp, I suppose,” Captain Hawart answered. “We start killing them in cold blood, they’ll do the same to our men.”

“But they deserve to die,” the woman shouted angrily. “They killed us. They took a couple of our girls to enjoy. They stole. They burned.”

Captain Hawart’s smile was hard and unpleasant. “They’ll have a thin time of it, granny, I promise you that.”

“Not thin enough.” Stubborn as an ox, the old woman stuck out her chin.

Hawart did not argue with her. He detailed a couple of men to take the captives back to the rear. As the Algarvians stumbled away, glad to keep on breathing, he waved his own men forward. “Up to the stream,” he told them. “See? It went just the way we planned it.”

So it had. Leudast scratched his head. He wasn’t used to things going as planned. Even retreats had been botched lately. Now the regiment had successfully advanced against the Algarvian army, the army that had thrown all foes back in confusion. Did that mean the line of the stream would hold after all? Leudast was willing to find out.

A couple of Algarvian behemoths came up toward the eastern back of the stream. Leudast suddenly got less optimistic about holding the position the regiment had just gained--to say nothing of living much longer. He hoped the redheads would come close enough to let him blaze them off their great beasts. But they were too warwise for that. They started tossing eggs at the Unkerlanters defending Pfreimd and the streambank from a range at which Leudast and his comrades could not hurt them.

But the Unkerlanter egg-tossers that had lobbed packets of sorcerous energy at the redheads in Pfreimd now shifted their attention to the behemoths on the other side of the stream. By chance, one of their eggs burst right on top of one of the beasts. That burst all the eggs the behemoth carried. Leudast shouted himself hoarse. More eggs burst all around the other behemoths and wounded or killed one of the men atop it, but it trotted away from the stream faster than it had advanced.

“Powers above. We held them.” Leudast knew he shouldn’t have sounded astonished, but he couldn’t help himself. Magnulf nodded, looking astonished, too.

Less than an hour later, a messenger ran up. After listening to him, Captain Hawart cursed furiously. “Pull back!” he shouted to his men. “We’ve got to pull back.”

Leudast cursed, too. “Why?” he burst out, along with many others.

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Hawart answered. “The redheads have broken through in a big way farther south, that’s why. If we don’t pull back now, we’ll have to try to fight our way out of another encirclement. How many times can we stay lucky?”

Wearily, Leudast got to his feet. Wearily, he tramped back through the wreckage of Pfreimd. The villagers cursed him and his comrades for retreating. He couldn’t blame them. The regiment had done everything it was supposed to do and done it well. Even that hadn’t helped. Here he was, retreating again. Head down, he slogged on.

Looking down from his dragon on the Unkerlanter landscape far below, Colonel Sabrino smiled. From the day the Algarvians began their campaign, it had gone better than the nobleman dared hope. Columns of behemoths broke through one Unkerlanter defensive line after another, and footsoldiers flooded into the gaps the great beasts tore. The foe either found himself outflanked and surrounded or else had to flee for his life.

Sabrino peered back over his shoulder at the wing he commanded: sixty-four dragons painted in the Algarvian colors of green, white, and red. He wished he were wearing a hat, so he could wave it--like almost every Algarvian ever born, he delighted in theatrical gestures. Taking off his goggles and waving them didn’t have the same flair.

He contented himself with a wave of the hand. When he looked back over his shoulder again, half--more than half--the dragonfliers were waving back to him. His smile got wider and fonder. They were good lads, every one. Few had more than half his fifty-odd years; he’d fought on the ground in the Six Years’ War a generation before. One stretch of soldiering in the mud had convinced him he never wanted to go through another. Thus, dragons.

His mount twisted its long, snaky neck this way and that. It let out a fierce shriek that tore at his ears. It was looking for Unkerlanter dragons to flame out of the sky or--better yet, from its point of view--to claw and tear with its taloned forelegs.