“By the landmarks, by the configuration of the ley lines, this is the place where I am to land you,” the leviathan-rider answered with such patience as he could muster. “Swim to shore and twist the Algarvians’ tails for them.”
The two blonds struck out awkwardly toward the land a couple of hundred yards away. Cornelu would go no closer, for fear of beaching his leviathan. The Valmierans couldn’t drown, no matter how hard they tried, not with the spells laid on them. If they had to, they would walk across the seabottom to the shore, breathing as if they were fish. Cornelu felt a little guilty about not wishing them good luck, but only a little.
They didn’t bring him any luck, not on the way back to Setubal. An Algarvian dragonflier spotted his leviathan and dropped a couple of eggs close enough to it to panic the beast—and very nearly close enough to hurt or kill it. The leviathan swam at random, deep underwater, till at last it had to surface once more.
That might have been the best thing it could have done. When it did spout, the dragon was far away; the Algarvian aboard it must have assumed that Cornelu would run straight south for Setubal. And so he might have, but he hadn’t anything to do with it. The leviathan had swum almost due west—in the direction of Algarve itself. Cornelu would have loved to attack Mezentio’s land, but he had no weapons with which to do it, not this time.
He regained control over the leviathan during its next dive, and did manage to lead it away from the Algarvian dragon. The search spirals the dragon flew worked against it this time, carrying it farther and farther from Cornelu. At last, when he was sure the dragonflier couldn’t possibly see him, he waved a courteous good-bye. It was a relieved good-bye, too. He hesitated to admit that, even to himself.
About halfway across the Strait, he spied a great many dragons ahead. That meant only one thing: the Lagoans and Algarvians were fighting at sea. On a leviathan not carrying eggs, Cornelu should have stayed away. He knew that. He could do nothing. But the spectacle of the fight would be riveting in itself. He steered the leviathan toward it.
A Lagoan ley-line cruiser was engaging two lighter, swifter Algarvian vessels. They tossed eggs at one another and blazed away with sticks that drew their sorcerous energy from the world’s grid over which the ships traveled: sticks far larger and heavier and more powerful than any that could have been made mobile on land.
More eggs fell from the dragons overhead. But they couldn’t swoop to drop them with deadly accuracy, as they might have against footsoldiers. Those potent sticks would have blazed them out of the sky had they dared. And so the dragons wheeled and fought among themselves high above the bigger fray on the surface of the sea. The eggs their dragonfliers dropped churned the Strait, but few struck home.
Someone aboard the Lagoan cruiser spotted Cornelu atop his leviathan. A stick swung his way with terrifying speed. “No, you fools, I’m a friend!” he shouted, which of course did no good at all.
The beam missed, but not by much. A patch of ocean perhaps fifty yards from the leviathan turned all at once to steam, with a noise as of a red-hot iron behemoth suddenly falling into the sea. The leviathan didn’t know that was dangerous. Cornelu did. He urged the beast into a dive and took it away from the fight he shouldn’t have approached.
When he got back to Setubal, he learned the cruiser had sunk, as had one of its Algarvian foes. The other, badly damaged, was limping toward home with more Lagoan ships in pursuit. No one really owned the Strait. Cornelu doubted anyone would, not till the Derlavaian War was as good as won. Till then, both sides would keep struggling over it.
A new man in Istvan’s squad, a fellow named Hevesi, came up to the front from regimental headquarters with orders to be alert because of a possible Unkerlanter attack and with gossip that had his hazel eyes bugging out of his head. “You’ll never guess, Sergeant,” he said to Istvan after relaying the order. “By the stars, you couldn’t guess if you tried for the next five years.”
“Well, you’d better tell me, then,” Istvan said reasonably.
“Aye, speak up,” Szonyi agreed. Safe behind a timber rampart, he stood up to show that he towered over Hevesi, as he did over most people. “Speak up before somebody decides to tear the words out of you.”
“Anything new would be welcome in this dreary wilderness,” Corporal Kun added. The rest of the soldiers crowded toward Hevesi so they could hear, too.
He grinned, pleased at the effect he’d created. “No need to get pushy,” he said. “I’ll talk. I’m glad to talk, to spit it out.” He spoke with the accent of the northeastern mountain provinces of Gyongyos, an accent so much like Istvan’s that he might have come from only a few valleys away.
When he still didn’t start talking right away, Szonyi loomed over him and rumbled, “Out with it, little man.”
Hevesi wasn’t so little as all that. But he was a good-natured fellow, and didn’t get angry, as many Gyongyosians might have. “All right.” For dramatic effect, he lowered his voice to not much more than a whisper: “I hear that, up a couple of regiments north of us, they burned three men for—goat-eating.”
Everyone who heard him exclaimed in horror. But Hevesi didn’t know his comrades were expressing two different kinds of horror. Istvan hoped he never found out, either. Eating goat’s flesh was the worst abomination Gyongyos recognized. Istvan and several of his comrades knew the sin from the inside out. If anyone but Captain Tivadar ever discovered that they knew, they were doomed. Some of their horror was disgust at themselves, some a fear others might learn what they’d done.
“How did they come to do that?” asked Lajos, who’d already shown more interest in goats and goat’s flesh than Istvan was comfortable with.
“They overran one of those little forest villages you stumble across every once in a while,” Hevesi answered. Istvan nodded. He and his squad had overrun such a village himself, and doubted if any mountain valley in all of Gyongyos were so isolated. Hevesi went on, “The accursed Unkerlanters keep goats, of course. And these three just slaughtered one and roasted it and ate of the flesh.” He shuddered.
“Of their own free will?” Kun asked. “Knowingly?”
“By the stars, they did,” Hevesi said.
Kun bared his teeth in what was anything but a smile. In the tones of a man passing sentence, he said, “I expect they deserved it, then.”
“Aye.” Istvan could speak with conviction, too. “If they did it and they knew what they were doing, that sets them beyond the pale. There might be some excuse for letting them live if they didn’t.” He wouldn’t look at the scar on his hand, but he could feel the blood pulsing through it.
“I don’t know that it really much matters, Sergeant. If they ate goat …” Hevesi drew his thumb across his throat.
“By the stars, that’s right,” Lajos said. “No excuse for that sort of filthy business. None.” He spoke with great certainty.
“Well, there are those who would tell you you’re right, and plenty of’em,” Istvan said, wishing with all his heart that Hevesi had come back to his squad with any other gossip but that. The way things looked, he would never be able to escape from goat-eating and stories about goat-eating as long as he lived.
“What was that?” Szonyi suddenly pointed east. “Did you hear something from the Unkerlanters?”
The question made soldiers separate as fast as Hevesi’s gossip had brought them together. Men snatched up their sticks and scrambled off to loopholes and good blazing positions. Istvan wouldn’t have thought that standing on the defensive came naturally to the warrior race the Gyongyosians prided themselves on being. But they’d seemed willing enough to give the Unkerlanters the initiative; by all the signs, they’d never quite known what to do with it themselves.
After an anxious pause here, they relaxed. “Looks like you were wrong,” Istvan told Szonyi.
“Aye. Looks like I was. Doesn’t break my heart.” Szonyi’s broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug.
Kun said, “Better to be alert about something
that isn’t there than to miss something that is.”
“That’s right,” Istvan said gravely. The three veterans, and a couple of other men in the squad, nodded with more solemnity than the remark might have deserved. Istvan suspected Szonyi hadn’t heard anything whatsoever out of the ordinary. He had managed to get Hevesi and the rest of the squad to stop talking about—more important, to stop thinking about—the abomination of goat-eating, though, and that, as far as Istvan was concerned, was all to the good.
Kun might have been thinking along with him. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his eyes slid toward Szonyi. “Sometimes you’re not as foolish as you look,” he remarked, and then spoiled it by adding, “Sometimes, of course, you bloody well are.”
“Thanks,” Szonyi said. “Thanks ever so much. I’ll remember you in my nightmares.”
“Enough,” Istvan said. “I’ve had enough of saying, ‘Enough,’ to the two of you.”
And then he made a sharp chopping motion with his right hand, urging Szonyi and Kun and the rest of the squad to silence. Somewhere in the woods out in front of them, a twig had snapped—not an imaginary one like Szonyi’s, but unquestionably real. There was plenty of snow and ice out there; its weight sometimes broke great boughs. Those sharp reports could panic a regiment. This one might have been something like that, but smaller. Or it might have been an Unkerlanter making a mistake.
“What do you think, Sergeant?” Kun’s voice was a thin thread of whisper.
Istvan’s shrug barely moved one shoulder. “I think we’d better find out.” He made a little gesture that could be seen from the side but not from ahead. “Szonyi, with me.”
“Aye, Sergeant,” Szonyi said. Istvan could hear the answer. He didn’t think any of Swemmel’s men would be able to, even if they were just on the other side of the redoubt.
Kun looked offended. Istvan didn’t care. Kun was a good soldier. Szonyi was a better one, especially moving forward. But then, instead of getting angry, Kun said something sensible: “Let me use my little sorcery. That will tell you if anyone’s out there before you go.”
After a couple of heartbeats’ thought, Istvan nodded. “Aye. Go ahead. Do it.”
The charm was very simple. If it hadn’t been very simple, the former mage’s apprentice wouldn’t have been able to use it. When he was done, he said one word: “Somebody.”
“There would be.” Istvan gestured to Szonyi. “Let’s go find out. The idea is to come back, understand, not just to disappear out there.”
“I’m not stupid,” Szonyi answered. Istvan wasn’t altogether sure that was true, but he didn’t argue.
They left the redoubt to the rear, shielded from the enemy’s sight—and from his sticks—by the snow-covered logs piled up in front. Istvan gestured to the left. Szonyi nodded. Both the gesture and the nod were small, all but unnoticeable. In their white smocks, Istvan and Szonyi might have been a couple of moving drifts of snow. Istvan felt cold as a snowdrift.
But, even as he muttered inaudibly to himself about that, he also felt like a proper warrior again. He wondered about that. It perplexed him. Saying it alarmed him wouldn’t have been far shy of the mark, either. He’d seen enough fighting to last him a lifetime, probably two. Why go looking for more?
Because that’s what I’ve been trained to do, he thought, but that wasn’t the whole answer, or even any great part of it. Because if I don’t go looking for it, it’ll come looking for me. At that, he nodded again, though he was careful to keep the hood of his smock low and expose none of his face to an enemy’s beam.
He knew what he was doing in the snow. He’d had enough practice in it, after all; his home valley was worse in winter than these woods ever dreamt of being. He got within five or six feet of an ermine before it realized he was there. He’d spotted it by the triangle of black dots that marked its eyes and nose and the black spot at the very tip of its tail that never went white in winter. It drew back in sudden horror when it spied or scented him, baring a pink mouth full of needle teeth. Then it scurried behind a tree trunk and vanished.
Istvan followed it, not in any real pursuit but because that beech also gave him cover from the east. The ermine, by then, was gone, only tiny tracks in the snow showing where it had run.
Szonyi had found cover behind a pine not far away. He glanced toward Istvan, who paused for a moment, taking his bearings. Then Istvan pointed in the direction from which he thought the suspicious noise had come. Szonyi considered, then nodded. They both crawled forward again.
Now they advanced separately, each one taking his own path to the target. If something happens to me, Szonyi will get back with the word, Istvan thought. He hoped the converse was in Szonyi’s mind. He hoped even more that the two of them were right.
Have to be close now, went through his mind a few minutes later. He looked around for Szonyi, but didn’t see him. He refused to let that worry him. Despite the stories told, silently killing a man wasn’t that easy. Had something gone wrong, he would have heard the struggle. So he told himself, at any rate.
He started to come out from behind a birch, then froze in the sense of not moving as opposed to the sense of being cold. In the snow in front of the tree were tracks—not the little marks of an ermine, but those of a man on snowshoes. The Unkerlanters were very fond of snowshoes, and Istvan didn’t think any of his own folk had come this way lately.
A scout, he thought. Doesn’t look like more than one man. Just a scout, snooping around to see what we’re up to. That wasn’t so bad. He vastly preferred it to coming across the forerunners of a brigade about to sweep down on him. Maybe the rumor of attack Hevesi had brought was nothing but a rumor. The Unkerlanters have as much trouble putting enough men into this fight as we do. Different reasons, but as much trouble.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the Unkerlanter soldier came out from behind a tree a couple of hundred yards away. Istvan got only a glimpse—other trees blocked his view and gave him hardly any chance for a good blaze.
He wasn’t too inclined to take one anyhow; he had more sympathy for Swemmel’s men than he’d had when the war was new. But, a moment later, the Unkerlanter crumpled with a yowl of pain—Szonyi, evidently, had a better spot and less sympathy. “Back now!” Istvan called, and headed off toward the redoubt. If Swemmel’s men had hoped to catch the Gyongyosians hereabouts napping, they’d just been disappointed.
Captured by the Algarvians the summer before, retaken by Unkerlant only a couple of months earlier, the starting point from which Marshal Rathar had sent out his attacking columns to ravage the redheads further, Durrwangen was under Algarvian attack again.
Now that it was too late to do him any good, Rathar understood the lesson Mezentio’s men had taught him. “We just pushed them back here and there,” he said to General Vatran. “We didn’t pinch in behind them and destroy them, the way they did to us so many times.”
“You wanted to make them fight in front of rivers and such,” Vatran said. “We thought they were panicked, or else turning coward, when they wouldn’t stand and fight, but fell back instead.”
“Never trust an Algarvian retreat,” Rathar said solemnly—mournfully, when you got down to it. “They saved their men, they concentrated them—and then they went and hit us with them.”
“Disgraceful, deceitful thing to go and do,” Vatran said, as if the Algarvians had pulled off some underhanded trick instead of one of the more brilliant counterattacks Rathar had ever seen. He would have appreciated it even more had it not been aimed at him.
“We were almost up to Hagenow,” he said, pointing to the map. His voice grew more mournful still. “We’d driven east all the way up to the border of Grelz. And then, curse them, the redheads bit back.” He kicked at the floor of the battered bank that housed his headquarters. “I knew they’d try. I didn’t think they could bite so hard, or with such sharp teeth.”
As if to underscore that, more eggs burst in Durrwangen, some of them close to the headquarter
s. He didn’t have to worry about splinters of glass flying through the air like shining knives to pierce him; by now, he doubted whether any building in Durrwangen kept glazed windows. He knew perfectly well that the headquarters didn’t.
“Shall we go down to the vault?” Vatran asked.
“Oh, very well.” Rathar’s voice was testy. He seldom suggested such a thing himself; he was too proud for that. But he wasn’t too proud to acknowledge common sense when he heard it.
Down in the vault, everyone—commanders, subordinate officers, runners, crystallomancers, secretaries, cooks, what have you—was crowded together as tightly as sardines in a tin. People didn’t even have oil to lubricate the spaces between them. They elbowed one another, trod on one another’s toes, breathed in one another’s faces, and, without intending to at all, generally made themselves as unpleasant for one another as they could.
Above them, around them, the ground shuddered as if in torment. And that was only from the sorcerous energy the Algarvian eggs released when they burst. If Mezentio’s mages decided to start killing Kaunians … Turning to Vatran, Rathar asked, “Are our special sorcerous countermeasures in place?”
Special sorcerous countermeasures was a euphemism for the peasants and condemned criminals Unkerlanters had available and ready to slay to blunt Algarvian magics and to power spells against the redheads. Rathar was no more comfortable than anyone else—always excluding King Swemmel, whose many vices did not include hypocrisy—about calling murder by its right name.
Vatran nodded. “Aye, lord Marshal. If they try and bring the roof down around our ears with magecraft, we can try to hold it up the same way.”
“Good,” Rathar said, though he was anything but sure it was. He wished the Algarvians hadn’t turned loose the demon of slaughter. It might have won them the war if Swemmel hadn’t been so quick to adopt it for his own, but Swemmel, as he’d proved in the Twinkings War, would do anything survival called for. Now both sides slaughtered, and neither gained much by it.
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