Darkness Descending

In all his years as a dragonflier, Count Sabrino had never faced such determined enemies in the air as the ones he met here in the land of the Ice People. Try as he would, he could not escape them. And all the wing he led suffered from their ferocious onslaughts.

He turned to Colonel Broumidis, who commanded the handful of Yaninan dragons on the austral continent. “Can we do nothing against them?” he cried out in torment. “Are we powerless?”

Broumidis’ shrug had none of the panache an Algarvian would have given it. The Yaninan officer, a short, skinny man with an enormous black mustache that didn’t suit his narrow face, seemed rather to be suggesting that fate had more to do with it than he did. All all he said was, “What can we do but endure?”

“Go mad?” Sabrino suggested, no more than a quarter in jest. He slapped, then cried out in triumph. “There’s one mosquito dead. That leaves only forty-eight billion, as near as I can reckon. The cursed things are eating me alive.”

Colonel Broumidis shrugged again. “It is spring on the austral continent,” he said, sounding even more doleful in his accented Algarvian than he would have in his own language. “All the bugs hatch out at once, and they are all hungry. What can we do but slap and light stinking candles and suffer?”

“I’d like to drop enough eggs on all the swamps to kill the wrigglers before they grow up, that’s what,” Sabrino said savagely. Broumidis raised a bushy black eyebrow and said nothing. Sabrino felt himself flush. He knew he’d been absurd. When the ice down here finally melted, half the countryside turned into a bog. And, as the Yaninan colonel had said, the bugs swarmed forth, intent on packing a year’s worth of life into the few weeks of mild weather the austral continent gave them.

Sabrino looked back over his shoulder at Heshbon, the Yaninan outpost he and his dragonfliers had to help protect. Miserable little place,

he thought. I’ve flown over plenty of Unkerlanter peasant villages where I’d rather settle down, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in an Unkerlanter peasant village.

“Cinnabar,” he muttered under his breath, making it into a curse.

“Aye, cinnabar,” Broumidis agreed, mournful still. “It draw warriors as amber draws feathers. Us, the Lagoans--may the powers below swallow those wide-arsed whoresons--and now you.”

“I would have been just as well pleased to stay on the other side of the Narrow Sea, I assure you,” Sabrino said.

Colonel Broumidis sent him a hurt look. The Yaninan’s large, dark, liquid eyes were made for such expressions. Sabrino sighed. He could have said a good deal more, but he didn’t want to offend his ally. Shouting, If you buggers had done any fighting on your own, I could have stayed on the other side of the Narrow Sea, struck him as impolitic.

“Well, we shall have to carry on the war as best we can.” Broumidis sighed, too. The Yaninans were hardly happier witJh the Algarvians than the other way round. They were a proud and touchy folk, and all the more touchy because of their failures in the field. Broumidis pointed. “Here comes the food for our dragons.”

Several camels bore panniers full of chunks of meat. The meat came from other camels; cutting them up struck Sabrino as the best thing that could happen to them. They were almost as disagreeable as dragons. Sabrino know no higher dispraise.

Mosquitoes didn’t care about cut-up meat. They wanted theirs live. Flies and gnats and midges weren’t so fussy. They swarmed round the panniers in buzzing, swirling clouds. They were perfectly willing to torment the camels carrying the panniers, too. And, because the camels had started shedding their heavy winter coats, they suffered badly.

Not so the Ice People who led them. The natives of the austral continent remained swaddled in furs and robes, and offered the bugs few targets. Sabrino rather wished he were wearing something that covered more than a kilt; his legs looked hardly better than the meat the dragons were getting. And. ... “Before I came here, I thought the Ice People were hairy because that helped keep them warm. Now I wonder whether their being so hairy helps keep the mosquitoes away, too.”

“It does,” Broumidis said with assurance. “I have seen as much in my service here.” He inhaled, choked on a gnat, and spent the next minute or so coughing. When he could speak again, he went on, “Even so, I would not care to be among their number.”

“No indeed, my dear fellow!” Sabrino exclaimed. His own groundcrew men took the camel meat from the Ice People. They dusted it with brimstone and lavishly with cinnabar before feeding it to the dragons. Sabrino said, “We need not stint here, at any rate. That’s all to the good.”