Through the Darkness

A big green, white, and red banner marked a badly pocked city square. Up till a couple of weeks before, that had been the place where dragons landed to unload supplies and to take wounded men off to safety. Algarvian dragons didn’t land in Sulingen anymore. No part of the city that Mezentio’s men still held was out of range of Unkerlanter egg-tossers. Landing, these days, was suicidally risky.

But that banner still made a useful beacon. Sabrino spoke into his crystal: “All right, boys, you can see where the goodies are supposed to go. Put ‘em down as close as you can.”

He used his saw-edged knife to cut the cord that attached the crates of food and charges and medicine to his dragon. Those crates plummeted down. He placed them as carefully as if he were dropping eggs on the Unkerlanters. And he clapped his hands with glee when they came down in the square, where Algarvian soldiers could recover them.

Most of his men were as careful, or nearly as careful, as he. He cursed when a few crates fell well wide of the mark the soldiers on the ground had given his wing. King Swemmel’s men would probably get their hands on those. But he clapped again to see Algarvian soldiers, tiny as ants from the height at which he watched them, run out to grab the supplies they needed so desperately. Some of

them waved or blew kisses to the dragons overhead. Behind Sabrino’s goggles, tears stung his eyes.

He spoke into the crystal again: “We’ve done what we came for. Now let’s get back, give our beasts as much rest as we can spare them--grab a little ourselves, too, come to that--and then come down here and do it all over again.”

“Aye, Colonel.” That was Captain Domiziano, smiling out at Sabrino from the crystal. “Who knows? We may find a way to lick those Unkerlanter buggers down there.”

“So we may,” Sabrino answered. He would not say anything that might hurt the wing’s morale, not in public. In the privacy of his own mind, he wondered how Domiziano managed to hold on to such boyish optimism.

For a little while, though, he could be optimistic himself. Freed of so much weight, his dragon flew like a young, fresh beast, which it assuredly was not. Or maybe, he thought, I haven’t flow a young, fresh dragon for so bloody long, I’ve forgotten what it’s like.

He found the answer to that riddle sooner than he would have liked. His wing hadn’t got very far north of Sulingen when Unkerlanter dragons assailed them. As often happened, his men were slower to spot the Unkerlanters than they might have been--in rock-gray paint, the enemy dragons looked like nothing so much as detached, hostile bits of cloud.

“Powers above, they’re fast!” he muttered as the Unkerlanter squadron closed with the men and dragons he commanded. After a moment, he realized they weren’t so very fast after all. It was just that his own dragons couldn’t come close to matching the foe’s turn of speed.

Had the Unkerlanters been able to equal his dragonfiiers in skill, his wing would have suffered badly, for Swemmel’s men flew fresher beasts. But, no matter how fast they were, none of the Unkerlanters had seen much action. They didn’t dive from on high as they might have, and they did start blazing too soon, when they weren’t close enough to their targets to have much chance of hitting.

No matter how fresh and fast their dragons were, they paid for those mistakes. Sabrino and his men were veterans. They knew what they could do, what they couldn’t, and how to help one another when they got in trouble. Had it been a tavern brawl, the Unkerlanters would have complained that the Algarvians didn’t fight fair. As things were, rock-gray dragons and the men who flew them tumbled toward the snow far below one after another in quick succession.

One of those Unkerlanters, intent on some other Algarvian, flew right in front of Sabrino’s dragon, as if he weren’t there at all. From fifty yards, perhaps less, even a poor blazer could hardly have missed. Sabrino was as good with a stick from dragonback as any man breathing. A quick blaze and the Unkerlanter dragonfiier no longer was breathing. His dragon, suddenly out of control, went wild. By luck, the first beast it attacked belonged to another Unkerlanter. Sabrino nodded in sober satisfaction.

But his men did not have it all their own way. Two of their number also plummeted to the ground before the Unkerlanters had enough and broke off their attack. One of the Algarvian dragons, wounded but not ruined, came down gently in the snow. The flier aboard it might well have survived the landing. How long he would survive once Unkerlanter footsoldiers got their hands on him was, unfortunately, another question.