Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “Drop your eggs, lads.” He spoke into the crystal he carried with him. For good measure, he waved the hand signal that meant the same thing.

  His own dragon carried eggs, too. He slashed the cords that held them to the huge, bad-tempered beast. Down they fell, along with the eggs from the dragonfliers he led. He watched them tumble toward the ground. The moment they were gone, his dragon flew more strongly, more swiftly. He would have walked faster after shedding a heavy pack, too.

  Balls of fire sprang up as the eggs, releasing the sorcerous energy stored in them, burst on the Lagoans. “That ought to hit them a good, solid lick,” Captain Orosio said.

  “Aye.” Sabrino nodded. “But we won’t destroy them. The most we can do is make their lives miserable. We’ve done pretty well at that, I’d say.”

  “So we have.” Orosio rolled his eyes. “But if we have to rely on the Yaninans to hunt them down and kill them, we’re going to be in for a long wait. If the Yaninans could have done it, we wouldn’t need to be here.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Sabrino answered. A little nervously, he glanced down at the crystal. He used a slightly different spell to talk with Broumidis, who wouldn’t be able to hear this. He wanted to be very sure Broumidis couldn’t hear this. “We’re going to have to bring in more of our own footsoldiers and behemoths—more dragons, too—if we’re going to drive the Lagoans off the austral continent once for all. The Yaninans just aren’t up to the job.”

  “Oh, I know that, sir.” Orosio was a longtime veteran, too—not one with so much service as Sabrino, who’d fought as a footsoldier in the Six Years’ War a long generation before, but with plenty to give him a healthy cynicism about the way the world worked. “Most of them would sooner be back home raising cabbages. They’ve got no stomach for a real fight. Some of their officers are good, but a lot of them have their places on account of whom they know, too.”

  “That’s too true,” Sabrino said. “Noble blood is all very well, but you’d better know what you’re doing to boot. If you don’t, you’ll get yourself killed, and a lot of the men you’re supposed to lead, too.”

  “Not if the men know you’re useless, and run away instead of fighting,” Orosio said. Sabrino grimaced; the Yaninans had done that more often than he cared to remember. His squadron commander went on, “Every Algarvian and every dragon we use to prop up King Tsavellas’ men is one we can’t use against King Swemmel.”

  “I know. I’ve said as much. I’ve made myself unpopular saying as much.” Sabrino was old enough that he didn’t care too much about making himself unpopular. So long as his wife put up with him and his mistress remained compliant, he wouldn’t worry about the rest of the world.

  He guided his dragon down a little lower, trying to assess how much harm this latest assault had done the Lagoans. With dust still rising from where eggs had burst, that was hard to do. And the enemy, he’d found, was cursed clever at making things on the ground seem worse than they were in the hope of luring Algarvian dragons to destruction.

  Though tempted to loiter in the air till all the dust cleared, Sabrino decided that wouldn’t be a good idea. He spoke into the crystal again, this time to all his squadron leaders: “Let’s go back to the dragon farm so the groundcrew men can give us some more eggs. With the sun shining almost all the time, the more we can pound the Lagoans, the better.” A moment later, he passed that on to Colonel Broumidis, too.

  “Aye, Colonel!” The enthusiastic cry came not from Broumidis but from Captain Domiziano, senior to Orosio in time spent commanding a squadron—he came from a family with better bloodlines and better connections—but far junior in overall experience. Domiziano never failed to remind Sabrino of a happy puppy, always ready to rush ahead. The wing commander knew that was an insult to a brave and talented officer, but couldn’t drive the thought from his mind.

  As the Algarvian dragons began flying off toward the west, several Lagoan heavy sticks that had stayed quiet up till then blazed at them. Sabrino waggled a finger down at the ground. “I thought you might have some surprises waiting,” he said, as if the Lagoans far below could hear. “You won’t see us coming down to peek at you as trustingly as we did when this round of fighting started.”

  Seeing that they were doing the Algarvians no harm, the Lagoan sticks soon fell silent again. Sabrino nodded in reluctant approval. Aye, King Vitor’s men knew what they were doing, all right. No point to wasting charges they might really need in some later fight.

  He led the wing of Algarvian dragons and their Yaninan hangers-on toward the positions Tsavellas and Mezentio’s footsoldiers and behemoths were holding. As they neared them, Broumidis’ face with its black hairy caterpillar of a mustache appeared in Sabrino’s crystal. “If you look to the left of my dragons, my lord Count, you will see some of the Lagoan beasts coming east,” the Yaninan officer said. “Is it your pleasure that we assail them?”

  Sabrino turned his head to the left. Sure enough, he did see Lagoan dragons over there, a long way off. “You have good eyes,” he told Broumidis; he made a point of complimenting Yaninans whenever he found even the vaguest occasion to do so. After a little pause for thought, he shook his head. “No, we’ll let them go. They’re likely trying to entice us into an ambush: look like easy meat and then lead us low over some sticks the Lagoans have hidden away somewhere. Best thing we can do is tend to our business and drop some more eggs on their army. If we hit it hard enough, sooner or later they’ll have to come up and fight us on our terms.”

  “Let it be as you wish, of course.” Broumidis was, as always, impeccably polite. “But I wanted to make sure you were aware of the possibility.”

  “For which I thank you.” Sabrino matched courtesy with courtesy. And then, after one more glance over toward the Lagoans to make sure they weren’t trying to double back after his own wing, he put them out of his mind.

  That turned out to be a mistake. The dragon farm wasn’t very far behind the line to which the Yaninan and Algarvian ground forces had advanced. Peering west, Sabrino spied a ragged column of smoke rising into the air. He frowned. Nothing in the neighborhood had been burning when the wing set out.

  When he got a little closer, he exclaimed in horror. A moment later, Broumidis’ face appeared in the crystal again. “My lord Count,” he said, “I think we now know the true reason we saw the Lagoan dragons, may the powers below eat them, flying back toward the east.”

  “Aye,” Sabrino agreed dully. He wished he’d ordered his wing and the Yaninan dragons after the Lagoans. If he had, they might have enjoyed a measure of revenge. But that wouldn’t have brought the dragon farm back into being. The Lagoans must have loaded their handful of dragons with all the eggs they could carry, then struck as hard a blow as they could at their enemies’ base.

  “Curse them,” Sabrino muttered. The Lagoans were clever tacticians; since they couldn’t hope to oppose the vastly superior Algarvian and Yaninan dragons in the air, they’d hidden their own beasts as best they could till they could make life as miserable as possible on the ground for their foes.

  They’d done a hideously good job. As Sabrino urged his dragon down in a long, slow spiral, he saw what a good job it was. The Lagoans had plastered the tents of the ground-crew men with eggs. A few of the Algarvians and Yaninans who cared for the dragons had survived unharmed, and waved to their countrymen as they approached. But more were down, wounded or dead; corpses and pieces of corpses littered the cratered ground where the tents had stood.

  And there were more craters than the eggs from a small force of dragons could have accounted for. One of those craters, still sending up nasty smoke, was enormous—it looked as if something had taken a great bite out of the ground. Sabrino needed a moment to get his bearing and realize the Lagoans must have landed an egg right on the wagons that had carried the eggs his wing was using against the enemy. Till some more came forward from Heshbon, his dragonfliers wouldn’t be dropping any more.

  His dragon landed with a thump that mad
e him lurch against his harness. A groundcrew man shouted, “Colonel! My lord Count!” and then could go no further, but burst into tears.

  “Let’s see to the animals,” Sabrino said—the first words in the dragonflier’s creed, as in the cavalryman’s.

  But with so many groundcrew men dead, seeing to the dragons was a far longer, slower, harder job than it would have been otherwise. And the Ice People brought only a bare handful of camels to the dragon farm—not enough to content the voracious beasts. One of the hairy nomads spoke in Yaninan to Broumidis. The beard that grew up almost to his eyes and the hairline that started just above his eyebrows masked his expression, but Sabrino could hear the scorn in his voice.

  “What does he say?” Sabrino asked.

  The Yaninan dragonflier turned back to him. “He says he thought Algarve was great. He thought Algarve would drive everything before it. Now he sees it is not so. He sees that Algarvians are just another pack of mangy men coming down here from across the ocean, and nothing special at all.”

  “He says that, does he?” Sabrino growled. Broumidis nodded. Did enjoyment for his powerful allies’ discomfiture spark for a moment in his black eyes? If it did, Sabrino hardly supposed he could blame him. The Algarvian colonel and count said, “Tell him we have hardly begun to show what we can do.” But even he could not deny—not to himself, at any rate, whatever he admitted to the man of the Ice People—that the work ahead had just grown harder.

  Two

  The shiver that ran through Cornelu had nothing to do with the chilly sea in which his leviathan swam: a rubber suit and sorcery shielded him against that. Nor was it even—or not entirely, at any rate—a thrill at returning to Sibian water, to his home waters. No, this was a fighting man’s excitement, the excitement any warrior worth his salt felt at being one small part of a large attack on a hated foe.

  Dragons flew overhead, dragons painted in Lagoan red and gold. Ley-line cruisers showing Lagoas’ jack made for Sibian waters. So did a large force of Lagoan leviathans, of which Cornelu’s mount was but one. The exile shook his fist at the islands looming up out of the sea: not at his countrymen who’d lived on them for upwards of a thousand years, but at the accursed Algarvians who occupied them now.

  “You will pay!” he shouted in his own language—which an Algarvian might well have understood, since the invaders’ tongue and that of the locals were not just cousins but brothers. “How you will pay!”

  As if to imitate his gesture, the leviathan slapped the water with its flukes. He patted the beast, wondering how much, if anything, it really understood. Leviathan riders often talked about that when they sat around and drank wine. Cornelu looked up to the sky again. Dragonfliers never talked about how much their animals understood. They knew perfectly well the brutes understood nothing.

  More dragons were in the air now, the newcomers flying off the Sibian islands. The Algarvians wouldn’t leave this challenge unanswered. Such had never been their way. If they couldn’t hit first, they would hit back and hit harder.

  And their ships, the ones that weren’t already on patrol near Sibiu, would be sallying from their harbors. Cornelu patted the leviathan again. He’d already sunk an Algarvian cruiser. Another one would be very fine. He chuckled and said, “But a floating fortress would be even better.”

  Some of the Algarvian dragons, eggs slung beneath them, were diving on Lagoan ships, one only a mile or so from Cornelu. Beams from the heavy sticks the ships carried reached up for them. A dragon, one wing burned off, plunged spinning into the sea. Its eggs burst then, sending up an enormous white plume of water.

  But the dragons drove swiftly, and the sailors at the sticks could not blaze them all before they released their eggs. Bursts of sorcerous energy flung men into the ocean. The ship lurched and settled down deeper onto the sea from its track along the ley line: an egg must have slain the mages who tapped the energy channeled along the world’s grid. Survivors ran here and there. What would they, what could they, do aboard a vessel suddenly at the mercy of wind and waves?

  Cornelu didn’t know and had no time to find out. A couple of dragons painted in strange patterns of green and red and white were circling overhead. They didn’t know whose side he was on. Eggs tumbled down from one of them, whose flier had evidently decided he wouldn’t take chances.

  With a slap, Cornelu urged his leviathan into a dive and then, perhaps twenty feet below the surface of the sea, into a sprint away from the neighborhood where it had been. The eggs burst there. The sea transmitted sound very well—better than air, in fact. Cornelu’s head rang with the bursts. So did the leviathan’s. It swam harder than ever, fleeing those fearful sounds.

  When it surfaced, Cornelu scanned the sky again, afraid the Algarvian dragons might still be after him. But they weren’t—Lagoan dragons had driven them off. “Lagoans are good for something after all,” Cornelu admitted.

  His leviathan wiggled—indignantly?—beneath him. He hadn’t meant that personally. Had the leviathan taken umbrage at his mockery of its kingdom? Maybe it understood more Sibian than he’d thought. And maybe he was being silly.

  Another wing of dragons dropped eggs on the harbor ahead: Lehliu, the smaller southern port on Sigisoara, the island east of Tirgoviste. Dragons were probably dropping eggs on Tirgoviste town, too. Cornelu wished he were there to see that. He wished he were there to see them drop eggs on his house, and on his faithless wife in it—provided his daughter were somewhere else. Brindza hadn’t done anything to him, even if Costache had.

  As soon as the Lagoan dragons let their eggs fall, they flew off toward the east, toward the great island from which they’d set out. They’d had to do a lot of flying to reach Sibiu, and few were up to the challenge of fighting fresher Algarvian beasts. Once they were gone, the Lagoan ships grew more vulnerable to attack from the air. But the ships didn’t pull back. Indeed, they pressed forward with astonishing boldness. Some of them drew close enough to the shore to start tossing eggs into the harbor.

  King Mezentio’s men had mounted egg-tossers of their own at the edge of the shore—or perhaps they’d simply taken over the ones Sibiu had emplaced. Cornelu wasn’t familiar enough with the defenses of Lehliu to say for certain one way or the other. He was certain the Algarvians defended the port as aggressively as they did everything else. Eggs burst all around the attacking Lagoan warships, and hit several of them.

  And here came the first Algarvian ships out of the harbor: little patrol craft, long on speed, short on weapons. A Lagoan egg hit one of them—hit it and crippled it, all in the same instant. But others dodged past and started blazing at the Lagoans. No, Mezentio’s men weren’t afraid to mix it up.

  “Come on, my beauty,” Cornelu told his leviathan. He would have spoken to Eforiel just the same way. (He thought of his old leviathan as he would have thought of a dead wife he’d loved. He’d loved his real wife, too, but she was still alive, and he loved her no more.)

  The patrol vessels were faster than the leviathan, of course, but the ley-line cruiser he’d sunk had been faster, too. All he needed to do was come alongside and stay alongside for less than a minute. After that, the patrol craft could glide away. It wouldn’t keep gliding long.

  But then his leviathan gave a startled twitch and began to turn aside from the path on which he’d set it. That had nothing to do with mackerel or squid, and he knew it. The great beast had sensed another of its kind close by, and was speeding to the attack.

  In a clash between leviathans, Cornelu was unlikely to be anything but a spectator. He did jettison the eggs the beast had brought from Lagoas. He regretted that, but did it without hesitation. Speed and maneuverability counted for more than anything else in this kind of fight.

  He wished he could have had more time to work with the leviathan. Sibian training enhanced the instincts inborn in the beasts, and gave them an edge over their counterparts from Lagoas and Algarve. But he hadn’t had the chance, and would have to rely on the leviathan’s speed and ferocity. />
  Somehow—not even the finest mages knew how—leviathans and their dumpy cousins the whales could unerringly find their way through the sea. The first Cornelu knew of the beast his mount had sensed was when it twisted away to keep his leviathan’s fanged jaw from tearing a great hole in its flank.

  He got a brief glimpse of an Algarvian clinging to the other leviathan’s back as he was clinging to his. That other leviathan tried to bite his beast, too. It also missed, though Cornelu saw its teeth glitter. He pulled his knife from its sheath. He couldn’t do much against the Algarvian leviathan, but he might be able to harm the rider if the fight came to the surface.

  His own mount writhed in the water, almost as lithe and limber as a serpent. It butted the Algarvian beast with its closed beak. The enemy leviathan writhed in pain. Cornelu understood why; a leviathan could stave in the side of a good-sized wooden vessel with a blow like that.

  And, with the other beast hurt, Cornelu’s leviathan bit at it again. This time, the Algarvian’s mount could not escape. Blood gushed forth and darkened the water. All thought of fight forgotten, the other leviathan fled. Cornelu’s pursued, and bit another chunk out of its flank and one from a tail fluke. Either of those bites—to say nothing of the first one—would have been plenty to devour half a man, or maybe all of a man.

  Cornelu wouldn’t have wanted to be the Algarvian aboard that wounded leviathan. The fellow would have a cursed hard time getting the animal to pay attention to him rather than to its own torment. And the blood pouring from it would surely draw sharks. Normally, a shark wouldn’t dare come near a leviathan, but normal rules didn’t hold with blood in the water. And the rider would be in at least as much danger as his mount.