Into the Darkness (57 page)

There on the ground, Algarvian behemoths continued their push through Valmiera, southeast toward the sea. As they had throughout the campaign thus far, they did meet resistance here and there. The Valmierans were brave enough, even if some of their soldiers had no love for the noble officers who led them. And so were the Lagoan battalions fighting alongside them. But the onslaught of dragons, behemoths, and the dragons who kept right up with the behemoths had thrown the enemy into disarray, so that his units fought individually, not supporting one another so well as they might have done. Against the Algarvians, whose warriors and beasts on the ground and in the air worked together like the fingers on a single hand, that was a recipe for disaster.

A few enemy behemoths came out of a stand of trees. Sabrino could tell at a glance they were Valmieran: King Gainibu’s men loaded them down with so much armor, it made them slow, so much armor that they couldn’t carry as many crewmen or weapons as their Algarvian counterparts. And there were only a few of them. The Valmierans had parceled them out all along the line, while the Algarvians grouped their behemoths into large bands. No one had been sure which was the better way of using them.

“Now people know,” Sabrino gloated.

The fight on the ground didn’t last long. The Algarvians knocked a couple of Valmieran behemoths kicking with well-tossed eggs, and blazed down another despite the thick coat of mail it wore. After that, a Valmieran crew on a behemoth that hadn’t been hurt threw up their hands and surrendered. The last couple of Valmieran behemoths fled back into the woods, pursued by the Algarvians. One Algarvian behemoth was down, too, but Sabrino could see the men who’d ridden it moving around on the ground. They’d come off lucky.

Sabrino flew on to the south. Beyond the front, Valmieran refugees clogged the roads. They fled the advancing Algarvians as if the Kaunian Empire were falling all over again. In their flight, they helped insure that Valmiera would fall, for soldiers could not use the roads they filled edge to edge. Here and there, Algarvian dragons had dropped eggs on them or swooped low to flame them. The havoc the dragons had wreaked only made travel tougher.

That would hurt Gainibu’s soldiers. All the same, Sabrino was glad his wing hadn’t been assigned to attacking civilians on the roads. War was a filthy enough business anyhow. Had he been ordered to drop eggs on women and children and old men, he would have done it. He had no doubt of that. But it would have left a bad taste in his mouth.

At a makeshift dragon farm near a small Valmieran town that evening, Sabrino assembled his squadron leaders and asked, “If you were King Gainibu, what would you do now?”

“Hop on a ley-line cruiser and scoot over to Lagoas while I still have the chance,” Captain Orosio said. He’d inherited a squadron when its commander got badly burned. “If Gainibu doesn’t, we’ll nab him.”

“You’re like right about that,” Sabrino said, “but it isn’t quite what I meant. If the Valmierans and Lagoans are going to stop us before we get to the sea, how do they do it?”

“They’d have to strike back across our front lines from east and west at once,” Captain Domiziano said: “with some of the force they sent into Algarve, and with whatever they can scrape up to the north and east. If they can open up a corridor and pull out most of their striking force, they might hold us out of Priekule, the way they did during the Six Years’ War.”

“That would be very bad,” Orosio said.

“Aye, it would.” Sabrino nodded. “Domiziano, I agree with you—that is their best hope. I don’t think they can do it, though. Have you seen—have you seen anywhere—the kind of force they’d need to crack us off to the east? I haven’t. They sent most of their best troops to the border against us, and they’re under attack along the border, too. They won’t be able to pull much without asking for disaster there.”

“They’re under attack behind the border, too,” Orosio said. “The folk of Rivaroli still remember whose kingdom they rightly belong to.”

“So they do,” Sabrino said, “and the Kaunians are paying the price for greed. Well, our job is to make sure it’s a big price.”

“There’s the truth, sir,” Domiziano said. “We’ve waited a long time to have our revenge on them. Now that it looks like we finally do, they’ll be paying plenty, they will.” His eyes shone with anticipation. Algarvians savored vengeance almost as much as Gyongyosians did, and took it—or so Colonel Sabrino was convinced, at any rate—with far more panache.

“Oh, indeed,” Sabrino said now. “We have to make sure they can’t get back up on their hind legs and hit us again for a long time to come. They tried to do that to us a generation ago, but they couldn’t quite bring it off. We will, though; King Mezentio won’t make the mistake of being too mild.”

Out at the edge of the dragon farm, a sentry called a challenge. A woman answered in Valmieran. Orosio started to laugh. The sentry asked, “What did she say, sir? I don’t speak a word of their bloody language!”

“You must be a handsome fellow,” Orosio answered, chuckling still. “If it means the same in Valmieran as it does in classical Kaunian, she just asked if you wanted to marry her.”

“She’s not too bad, sir, but no thanks all the same,” the sentry said.

Sabrino also laughed. “That verb has changed meaning since the days of the Kaunian Empire,” he said. “What she really asked was whether you wanted to screw her.”

“Oh,” the sentry said, suddenly thoughtful. “It’s the best offer I’ve had tonight, anyway.”

“You’re on duty, soldier,” Sabrino said. With women involved, his countrymen often needed reminding of such things. Sabrino went on, “You’d have to pay to get what you want, and she’s liable to give you something you don’t want along with it.”

The woman let out an indignant screech; evidently she understood Algarvian even if she didn’t speak it. “She’s gone,” the sentry said, his voice mournful.

“Just as well,” Sabrino called to him. By the sentry’s sniff, he had a different opinion. Well, even if he did, he couldn’t do anything about it … tonight.

When Sabrino took his dragon into the air the next morning, he discovered that the Valmierans were trying to do what Domiziano had predicted: they mounted a fierce attack from the west against the Algarvian behemoths and dragoons blocking their line of retreat. They’d loaded eggs on to every dragon that could carry them, too, to drop on the Algarvians.

But egg-carrying dragons were slow because of the extra weight they bore, slow and awkward in the air. Sabrino’s wing of wardragons flamed many of them out of the sky and blazed many of the fliers who controlled them. Only a few got through to add their weight to that of the attack on the ground.

That ground attack came only from the west. Sabrino grinned when he saw how little the Valmierans to the east of the Algarvians could do. If his countrymen could contain the Valmieran effort to break out now, they would swallow the rest of the Kaunian kingdom at their leisure.

Contain it the Algarvians did, over another couple of days of hard fighting. Reinforcements came up along the roads and by ley-line caravan. The retreating Valmierans had disrupted the ley-line network here and there, but only here and there: an effort of a piece with the way they’d fought most of the war. King Mezentio’s men had little trouble working around the gaps.

By the end of the third day, it was plain the Valmierans would not, could not, break out. When Sabrino brought his dragon to the ground that evening, every part of him but his smile was exhausted. “Bring me wine!” he shouted to the first dragon handler who came up to him. “Wine, and quickly! We have them! They are ours!”

“They’ve beaten us,” Skarnu said dully. He leaned back against the trunk of a chestnut tree. He was so worn, he couldn’t have sat up straight without the tree behind him. “We’re trapped between two blazes, and we can’t get out.”

“They move so cursed
fast,”
Sergeant Raunu said. Though many years older than the Valmieran marquis who commanded him, he seemed fresher—not that that was saying much. “They’re always there a day before you think they can be, and they always have twice as many men there as you expect. It wasn’t like this during the Six Years’ War.” He’d said that before during this disastrous campaign, any number of times.

“More of our men are running off now, or just throwing down their sticks and surrendering to the first redhead they see,” Skarnu said.

Raunu nodded. “Aye, they see there’s not much hope, sir. After a while, you start asking why you should get killed when it won’t do the kingdom any good. At that, we still have more men in the line and ready to fight than most companies. Powers above, we’ve got more men in the line and ready to fight than a lot of regiments. Some of the officers had given up, too, and the men know it.”

“And some of the commoners don’t want to fight for the nobility anyhow,” Skarnu added.

“Sir, I wouldn’t have said that,” Raunu replied. “But, since you have gone and said it, I’m cursed if I can tell you you’re wrong.”

“Would they rather serve the Algarvians?” Skarnu knew his voice was bitter, but he couldn’t help it. “If they think the redheads will treat them any better than their own rulers do, they’ll be disappointed.”

Raunu said nothing. He’d been a sergeant since the Six Years’ War. He would never rise above sergeant’s rank in King Gainibu’s army, not if he stayed in till he was a hundred years old. He might possibly have had a view different from Skarnu’s, but that didn’t occur to the young marquis till much later.

For the moment, his own immediate problem had more weight. “We can’t break out, not as an army we can’t,” he said, and Raunu nodded again. Skarnu went on, “Since we can’t break out, we’re going to have to surrender or else get pounded to pieces right where we are.”

“Aye, sir, I’d say that’s so,” Raunu responded.

“But there aren’t Algarvians everywhere, especially to the cast of us,” Skarnu continued, as much to himself as to the veteran sergeant. “There are plenty of them where they really need to be, but their line has thin spots, too.”

“That’s so,” Raunu said. “Wasn’t like that in the last war, either. Then everything on both sides was sewn up right. But the Algarvians can move so much force so fast, they don’t have to be strong everywhere at once—just where it counts, like you say.”

“Which means that, if we slide through a few men at a time, we ought to have a decent chance of getting past them and into country they don’t hold,” Skarnu said. “Then we can go on fighting them.”

“Worth a try, I suppose,” Raunu said. “We can’t do much more here; that’s plain. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to put something together farther east. If the redheads spot us, they spot us, that’s all. In that case, we either die fighting or we spend the rest of the war in a captives’ camp.”

Neither of those alternatives held any appeal for Skarnu. But they were the only ones he faced if he stayed here. If he kept moving, he had at least some chance of staying free and giving Algarve more trouble.

“Assemble the company, or what you can find of it,” he told Raunu. “I’ll put the choices to the men, too. I can’t order anyone to come along with us, because I don’t think our chances are very good.”

“Better with you, sir, than with some other officers I can think of, and a lot of ‘em carrying higher rank than yours,” Raunu answered. “I’ll round up the men.”

Perhaps half the number of soldiers who’d been with the company when the Algarvians launched their counterattack came together to listen to Skarnu. Not all of them had started the campaign with his company; some, cut adrift from their own units, had jointed his because even during the worst of the retreat he’d kept giving orders that made sense.

Now he set forth what he planned to do, finishing, “However you choose, this is farewell. I won’t be with you any more. I don’t think we move even by squads. It’ll be every man for himself, or every couple of men, if you choose to go. Powers above grant that you come through safe to land where King Gainibu still rules.”

Raunu added, “Night’s coming soon. Probably the best time to move, because the redheads will have the most trouble spotting us.”

“Aye, that makes sense,” Skarnu agreed. He turned to the men he’d been leading. “You’ll leave in separate groups, half an hour or so apart. Keep in loose order, as I said. If you head northeast, you’ll cut across the land the redheads have grabbed at a right angle; that’ll be the shortest way. Good luck.”

“What about you, sir?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Oh, I’m going to try it, never fear,” Skarnu answered. “But I’ll wait till the last squad’s out before I leave.”

“You hear that, you lugs?” Sergeant Raunu growled. “Let’s give a cheer for the captain. If we had more officers like him, if we had more nobles like him, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.”

The cheer warmed Skarnu. That Raunu had proposed it warmed him even more; the veteran hadn’t had to do anything like that.

As twilight deepened, Skarnu sent soldiers out, group by group. At last, only a dozen or so men remained. Some of them didn’t bother getting up when he formed a new group. “Might as well stay here,” a trooper said. “War’s as good as over, looks like to me.”

Skarnu didn’t bother arguing. He just said, “Everyone who cares to, follow me.” Four or five men did. The rest sprawled on the ground and waited for Algarvians to come along and scoop them up.

He hadn’t gone far when a man stepped out from behind a tree. “Decided I’d come along with you, sir, but I figured you’d raise a fuss if I stayed back there,” Raunu said. “So I did it this way.”

“You’re insubordinate,” Skarnu said, and the veteran sergeant nodded. Skarnu laughed. “Curse me for a liar if I say I’m not glad to see you. Let’s get moving. The night won’t last forever.”

They stuck to the woods whenever they could, but the woods didn’t last forever, either. When they had to travel open country, they spread out even wider than before and kept to the fields, avoiding roads even when they led in the right direction. That quickly proved wise: Algarvians on foot or on unicorns—which saw far better at night than horses—patrolled the roads in large numbers.