Out of the Darkness

“Eight dragons? Eight?” The crystallomancer made a horrible face. “That isn’t what I was given to understand.”

“I don’t care what you were given to understand,” Sabrino said harshly. “Everything we’ve been given to understand about this whole fornicating war is a pack of lies. Now where’s this Unkerlanter bridge?”

The crystallomancer told him. He soon discovered he could have found it without help. The Unkerlanters had torches at both ends and along the bridge itself to guide their men and beasts to and across it. Arrogant bastards, Sabrino thought. They don’t even believe we’re still in the game. Time to show them they’ve made a mistake.

He ordered his dragon down in an attack run as perfect as any he’d ever made. He released the eggs it carried at exactly the right moment. They both burst in the center of the bridge, sending Unkerlanter soldiers and behemoths splashing into the stream. One after another, the men in his wing followed him down. By the time they were done, not much remained of the bridge.

“Nice job, boys,” Sabrino said into his crystal. “Now let’s go home and go back to bed.”

He’d just turned toward the dragon farm from which he’d come when the Unkerlanter dragons struck his wing. There were only a couple of squadrons of them-but that meant they outnumbered his comrades and him three or four to one. And their dragons were fresh, not worn out, and were full of cinnabar. They flamed twice as far as the Algarvian beasts could.

For all that, Sabrino’s men were wise in the ways of dragonflying, and quickly took out a couple of the enemy beasts-one with flame from behind, the other by a canny blaze that killed the Unkerlanter dragonflier and let the dragon fly wild. Sabrino thought they might yet break free and win their way back to the dragon farm once more.

He saw the dragon that got him and his own mount as nothing but a blur in the moonlight, and then a tongue of flame licking toward him. An instant later, he screamed, but his shriek was lost, drowned, in the great bellow of agony from his dragon. Wind beat in his face as the dragon lurched toward the ground, but he hardly noticed. His left leg felt on fire.

When he looked down, he saw his left leg was on fire. So was the dragon. He beat at the flames with his fist. The dragon could still fly, though, after a fashion-the Unkerlanter beast had flamed at long range, not wanting to close. Had its dragonflier come closer, he would be dead now, and so would his mount. Things were bad enough as they were. Sabrino wanted to pass out, but the torment in his leg wouldn’t let him. He pounded the dragon with the goad, steering it back toward the southeast.

It didn’t make it all the way to the dragon farm. It came down in the middle of a field of beets. The shock of the landing made Sabrino scream again.

The stench of the dragon’s burnt flesh, and of his own, filled his nostrils.

He loosened the harness and fell to the ground. If the dragon crushed him or flamed him in its own agonies, everything would be over, and he wouldn’t have minded at all. But it rampaged away, leaving him lying there and hoping for death.

Before it found him, Algarvian soldiers did. They’d come to deal with the wounded dragon, but they took Sabrino back to a healer’s tent. The healer took one look at what was left of his leg and said, “I’m sorry, Colonel, but that will have to come off.”

“Oh, please!” Sabrino groaned. The healer blinked in surprise, then nodded. A couple of stalwart helpers lifted Sabrino and set him down in what looked like an oversized rest crate. His awareness of the world was interrupted.

When it returned, so did pain. The healer gave Sabrino a bottle of thick, sweet, nasty stuff. He drained it dry. After what seemed forever but couldn’t have been above a quarter of an hour, the pain retreated. The healer said, “You’ll live, I think. With a cane and a peg, you may even walk again. But for you, Colonel, the war is over.”

Under the drug, that hardly seemed to matter. Under the drug, nothing much seemed to matter. Maybe I should have started taking this stuff, whatever it is, a long time ago, he thought vaguely. He smiled at the healer. “So what?” he said.

Up till the Derlavaian War broke out, Ilmarinen hadn’t known many Unkerlanters. The vast kingdom had its share of talented mages, but they published less often than their colleagues farther east-either that or they published in their own language rather than in classical Kaunian. And Unkerlanter, in Ilmarinen’s biased opinion, was a language fit only for Unkerlanters. Mages from Unkerlant didn’t come to colloquia as often as their counterparts in the kingdoms of eastern Derlavai. Maybe they were afraid of revealing secrets. Maybe King Swemmel feared they would, and didn’t let them out.