Through the Darkness

Fernao looked to the west. The number of dragons winging toward the Lagoan encampment made him curse. “The whoresons have flown more of the beasts across the Narrow Sea,” he said in dismay. He looked at the hole in which he squatted, wishing it were deeper, wishing it had a good strong roof, wishing most of all that the Algarvians would turn around and fly back toward Heshbon.

As usual, he got none of his wishes. Several Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons flew above the Lagoan army. With a whistling thunder of wings--and with their usual hoarse, angry shrieks--more rose from the dragon farm near the camp to challenge the beasts painted in red, green, and white.

Watching, Affonso said, “Makes you feel helpless, doesn’t it?”

“What, because I can’t do anything about the dragons?” Fernao asked, and Affonso nodded. Fernao considered, then shrugged. “Less than I thought it would, as a matter of fact. There are too many things in this campaign I can’t do anything about to get upset over any one in particular. I’ll just watch the sport and hope I don’t get killed.” He leaned back and did just that.

“Algarvians are trying something new, looks like,” Affonso said.

“Aye,” Fernao answered absently. The lead dragons flying out of the west engaged the Lagoan and Kuusaman defenders with the usual ferocity Mezentio’s men brought to the attack. Dragons wheeled and whirled and twisted and snapped and flamed all over the sky above the Lagoan army. Whenever the Lagoans’ heavy sticks on the ground found targets, they blazed at the Algarvian dragons. When one of those beasts tumbled toward the earth, Fernao couldn’t tell whether a stick or a dragon on his side had laid it low.

But Mezentio’s men had more dragons than they’d been able to bring to the fight before. Some of them kept the Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons busy. The rest started dropping eggs on the Lagoan army. Only a few dragons from his side broke free to attack the ones carrying eggs.

Once the eggs started falling, Fernao stopped watching the action overhead. He did what everyone else on the ground was doing: he buried his face in the dirt and tried to mold himself to the side of the hole in which he lay. Affonso jumped into one nearby. Such precautions had kept them alive and no worse than scratched till now. That they should do so one more time didn’t strike Fernao as unreasonable.

Then a line of eggs, probably all dropped by the same dragon, walked straight toward the crater in which he huddled. Each burst was louder than the one before; each made the ground shake worse. When one hit quite close to that crater, Fernao screamed. He couldn’t help himself. He was still screaming when the next egg burst. The world around him went blinding white, then black.

And when he woke, he screamed again. Every inch of him cried out in agony. The worst of it was concentrated in a couple of places: his right leg, his left arm.

“Take it easy, friend,” somebody told him--far and away the most useless advice he’d ever heard. He would have said so, but he needed all his breath for screaming. His mouth tasted of mud and, increasingly, of blood.

He hadn’t thought he could shriek louder than he was shrieking, but discovered he was wrong when they went about setting his leg and bandaging some of his other wounds. “No!” he howled, but they wouldn’t listen. He choked out two coherent sentences: “Let me die! Kill me!”

They wouldn’t listen to that, either. They talked above him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make it,” one of them said, “not with the kind of healing we can give him in the field.”

“He’s a first-rank mage,” another one answered. “The kingdom can’t afford to lose him.” They didn’t ask Fernao’s opinion. He’d given it, and they’d ignored it.

“How are we supposed to get him back to Lagoas, though?” the first voice said. “A dragon can’t fly that far, not without somewhere to rest on the way.”

“We’ve got ships down south of Sibiu,” the second voice replied. “They were going to fly more dragons here. I wish they’d done it sooner, but we can send him that way, and then east from there.”

“I wouldn’t bet on him to last long enough to get slung under a dragon,” the first voice said. Fernao devoutly hoped he wouldn’t last that long.

But the second voice said, “Get a mage and slow him down. It’s the only chance he’s got.” They both went away after that.

The next voice Fernao heard was Affonso’s. “I’ll do what I can,” he was saying to somebody off to the side. “Just fool luck he isn’t doing the same for me. The burst picked him up and flung him into a rock... . Fernao! Can you hear me?”

“Aye,” Fernao answered. The next scream quivered in his throat, as eager to be loose as a racing unicorn.