The great armored beasts lumbered forward. Unkerlanter footsoldiers trotted among them. The behemoths’ crews started tossing eggs at the spots where resistance stayed strong.
One flew straight toward Trasone. He watched it rise. He watched it fall. He dove for cover, knowing there was no cover and he was too slow anyhow. The egg burst. A few minutes later, the Unkerlanter behemoths tramped past and over what had been a strongpoint and slogged on toward the Wolter.
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RULERS OF THE
DARKNESS
One
Leudast looked across the snow-covered ruins of Sulingen. The silence seemed unnatural. After two spells of fighting in the city, he associated it with the horrible din of battle: bursting eggs, the hiss of beams as they turned snow to sudden steam, fire crackling beyond hope of control, masonry falling in on itself, wounded behemoths bawling, wounded horses and unicorns screaming, wounded men shrieking.
None of that now. Everything was silent, eerily so. Young Lieutenant Recared nudged Leudast and pointed. “Look, Sergeant,” Recared said, his unlined face glowing with excitement, almost with awe. “Here come the captives.”
“Aye,” Leudast said softly. He couldn’t have been more than two or three years older than Recared himself. It only seemed like ten or twelve. Awe was in his voice, too, as he said it again: “Aye.”
He hadn’t known quite so many Algarvians were left alive in Sulingen when their army at last gave up its hopeless fight. Here came some of them now: a long column of misery. By Unkerlanter standards, their tall enemies from the east were slim even when well fed. Now, after so much desperate fighting cut off from any hope of resupply, most of them were redheaded skeletons, nothing more.
They were filthy, too, with scraggly red beards covering their hollow cheeks. They wore a fantastic mix of cloaks, Algarvian tunics and kilts, long Unkerlanter tunics, and any rags and scraps of cloth they could get their hands on. Some had stuffed crumpled news sheets and other papers under their tunics to try to fight the frigid winter here in the southwest of Unkerlant. Here and there, Leudast saw Algarvians in pathetic overshoes of woven straw. Snug in his own felt boots, he almost pitied the foe. Almost. King Mezentio’s men had come too close to killing him too many times for him to find feeling sorry for them easy.
Lieutenant Recared drew himself up very straight. “Seeing them makes me proud I’m an Unkerlanter,” he said.
Maybe the ability to say things like that was part of what separated officers from ordinary soldiers. All Leudast could do was mumble, “Seeing them makes me glad I’m alive.” He didn’t think Recared heard him, which might have been just as well.
Most of the Algarvians trudged along with their heads down: they were beaten, and they knew it. A few, though, still somehow kept the jauntiness that marked their kind. One of them caught Leudast’s eye, grinned, and spoke in pretty fair Unkerlanter: “Hey, Bignose—our turn today, tomorrow yours.”
Leudast’s mittened hand flew up to the organ the redhead had impugned. It was of a good size and strongly curved, but so were most Unkerlanters’ noses. He waved derisively at the Algarvian, waved and said, “Big up above, big down below.”
“Aye, all you Unkerlanters are big pricks,” the captive came back with a chuckle.
Some soldiers would have blazed a man who said something like that. Leudast contented himself with the last word: “You think it’s funny now. You won’t be laughing so hard when they set you to work in the mines.” That struck home. The Algarvian’s grin slipped. He tramped on and was lost among his fellows.
At last, the long tide of misery ended. Recared shook himself, as if waking from a dream. He turned back to Leudast and said, “Now we’ve got to get ready to whip the rest of King Mezentio’s men out of our kingdom.”
“Sure enough, sir,” Leudast agreed. He hadn’t thought about what came after beating the Algarvians in Sulingen. He supposed thinking about such things before you had to was another part of what separated officers from the men they led.
“What state is your company in, Lieutenant?” Recared asked.
“About what you’d expect, sir—I’ve got maybe a section’s worth of men,” Leudast answered. Plenty of companies had sergeants in charge of them these days, and plenty of regiments, like Recared’s, were commanded by lieutenants.
With a nod, Recared said, “Have them ready to move out tomorrow morning. I don’t know for a fact that we will move tomorrow, but that’s what it looks like.”
“Aye, sir.” Leudast’s sigh built a young fogbank of vapor in front of his face. He knew he shouldn’t have expected anything different, but he would have liked a little longer to rest after one fight before plunging into the next.
They didn’t go north the next morning. They did go north the next afternoon, tramping up roads made passable by behemoths wearing snowshoes. Here and there, the snow lay too deep even for behemoths to trample out a usable path. Then the weary troopers had to shovel their way through the drifts. The duty was as physically wearing as combat, the only advantage being that the Algarvians weren’t trying to blaze them or drop eggs on their heads.
One of Leudast’s troopers said, “I wish we were riding a ley-line caravan up to the new front. Then we’d get there rested. The way things are, we’re already halfway down the road to being dead.” He flung a spadeful of snow over this shoulder, then stooped to get another one.
A few minutes later, the company emerged from the trench it had dug through a great drift. Leudast was awash in sweat, his lungs on fire, regardless of the frigid air he breathed. When he could see more than snow piled up in front of him, he started to laugh. There a few hundred yards to one side of the road lay a wrecked caravan, its lead car a burnt-out, blasted ruin—the Algarvians had planted an egg along the ley line, and its burst of sorcerous energy had done everything the redheads could have wanted. “Still want to go the easy way, Werbel?”
“No, thanks, Sergeant,” the trooper answered at once. “Maybe this isn’t so bad after all.”
Leudast nodded. He wasn’t laughing any more. The steersmen on that ley-line caravan were surely dead. So were dozens of Unkerlanter troopers: bodies lay stacked like cordwood by the ruined caravan. And more dozens, maybe hundreds, of men were hurt. The Algarvians had gained less by winning some skirmishes.
When the regiment encamped for the night in the ruins of an abandoned peasant village, Lieutenant Recared said, “There are some stretches of ley line that are safe. Our mages keep clearing more every day, too.”
“I suppose they find out if the ley lines are clear by sending caravans on them,” Leudast said sourly. “This one wasn’t.”
“No, but it will be now, after the mages cancel out the effect of the energy burst,” Recared answered.
“And then they’ll find another cursed egg a mile farther north,” Leudast said. “Find it the hard way, odds are.”
“You haven’t got the right attitude, Sergeant,” Recared said reprovingly.
Leudast thought he had just the right attitude. He was opposed to getting killed or maimed. He was especially opposed to getting killed or maimed because some mage hadn’t done his job well enough. Having the enemy kill you was part of war; he understood that. Having your own side kill you . . . He’d come to understand that was part of war, too, however much he hated it.
In good weather, on good roads, they would have been about ten days’ march from where the fighting was now. They took quite a bit longer than that to get there. The roads, even the best of them, were far from good. Though the winter solstice was well past, the days remained short and bleak and bitterly cold, with a new blizzard rolling in out of the west every other or every third day.
And, though no redheads opposed them on the ground, the Algarvians hadn’t gone away and given up after losing Sulingen. They kept being difficult whenever and wherever they could. Unkerlant was vast, and dragons even thinner in the air than soldiers an
d behemoths were on the ground. That meant King Mezentio’s dragonfliers could fare south to visit death and destruction on the Unkerlanters moving up to assail their countrymen.
When eggs fell, Leudast dove into the closest hole he could find. When Algarvian dragons swooped low to flame, he simply leaped into the snow on his belly and hoped his white smock would keep enemy dragonfliers from noticing him. It worked; after each attack ended, he got up and started slogging north again.
Not everyone was so lucky. He’d long since got used to seeing corpses, sometimes pieces of corpses, scattered in the snow and staining it red. But once the Algarvian dragons had been lucky enough to take out a column of more than a dozen Unkerlanter behemoths and the crews who served their egg-tossers and heavy sticks. The air that day was calm and still; the stench of burnt flesh still lingered as he tramped past. Dragonfire had roasted the behemoths inside the heavy chairman they wore to protect them from weapons mere footsoldiers could carry. Even the beasts’ iron-shod hooves and the curving horns on their noses were covered with soot from the flames the dragons had loosed.
“Last winter, I hear, the Algarvians were eating the flesh of slain behemoths,” Recared said.
He hadn’t been in the fight the winter before. Leudast had. He nodded. “Aye, they did, sir.” After a pause, he added, “So did we.”
“Oh.” Beneath his swarthy skin, beneath the dark whiskers he’d had scant chance to scrape, Recared looked a little green. “What . . . was it like?”
“Strong. Gamy,” Leudast answered. Another pause. “A lot better than nothing.”
“Ah. Aye.” Recared nodded wisely. “Do you suppose we’ll . . . ?”
“Not these beasts,” Leudast said. “Not unless you want to stop and do some butchering now. If we keep going, we’ll be miles away before we stop for the night.”
“That’s true.” Lieutenant Recared considered. In thoughtful tones, he remarked, “Field kitchens haven’t been all they might be, have they?” Leudast started to erupt at that, then noticed the small smile on Recared’s face. King Swemmel expected his soldiers to feed themselves whenever they could. Field kitchens were almost as rare as far western mountain apes roaming these plains.
The regiment ate behemoth that night, and for several days thereafter. It was as nasty as Leudast recalled. It was a lot better than the horrible stuff the Algarvians had been pouring down their throats in the last days at Sulingen, though. And, as he’d said, it was ever so much better than nothing.
A couple of nights later, thunder rumbled in the north as the Unkerlanter soldiers made camp. But it couldn’t have been thunder; the sky, for once, was clear, with swarms of starts twinkling on jet black. When the weather was very cold, they seemed to twinkle more than on a mild summer night. Leudast noted that only in passing. He knew too well what that distant rumbling that went on and on meant. Scowling, he said, “We’re close enough to the fun to hear eggs bursting again. I didn’t miss ’em when we couldn’t, believe you me I didn’t.”
“Fun?” Werbel hadn’t been in the company long, but even he knew better than that. “More chances to get killed, is what it is.”
“That’s what they pay us for,” Leudast answered. “When they bother to pay us, I mean.” He’d lost track of how far in arrears his own pay was. Months—he was sure of that much. And he should have been owed a lieutenant’s pay, or a captain’s, not a sergeant’s, considering the job he’d been doing for more than a year. Of course, Recared should have been paid like a colonel, too.
Werbel listened to the eggs in the distance. With a sigh, he said, “I wonder if they’ll get caught up before the war ends.”
Leudast’s laugh was loud, raucous, and bitter. “Powers above, what makes you think it’ll ever end?”
Sidroc was glad Forthwegians had the custom of wearing full beards. For one thing, the thick black hair on his chin and cheeks and upper lip went a little way toward keeping them warm in the savage cold of southern Unkerlant. Coming out of Gromheort in the sunny north, he’d never imagined weather like this. Had anybody told him even a quarter of the truth about it before he knew it for himself, he would have called that fellow a liar to his face. No more.
For another, the beards the men of Plegmund’s Brigade—Forthwegians fighting in the service of their Algarvian occupiers—were helped distinguish them from their Unkerlanter cousins. Unkerlanters and Forthwegians were both stocky, olive-skinned, hook-nosed, both given to wearing long tunics rather than kilts or trousers. But if Sidroc saw a clean-shaven face, he blazed at it without hesitation.
At the moment, he saw very little. His regiment—about a company’s worth of men, after all the hard fighting they’d been through—was trying to hold the Unkerlanters out of a village called Hohenroda. It lay somewhere not far from the important town of Durrwangen, but whether north, south, east, or west Sidroc couldn’t have said to save his life. He’d done too much marching and countermarching to have any exact notion of where he was.
Eggs crashed down on the village and in front of it. The log walls of the cabin where he was sheltering shook. He turned to Sergeant Werferth. “Those Unkerlanter buggers have every egg-tosser in the world lined up south of here, seems like.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Werferth answered. If anything ever did faze him, he didn’t let on. He’d served in the Forthwegian army till the Algarvians destroyed it. Sidroc had been only fifteen when the Derlavaian War began three and a half years before. Werferth spat on the rammed-earth floor. “So what?”
That was too much calm for Sidroc to handle. “They’re liable to kill us, that’s what!” he burst out. Every once in a while, his voice still broke like a boy’s. He hated that, but couldn’t help it.
“They won’t kill all of us, and the ones who’re left’ll make ’em pay a good price for this place,” Werferth said. He’d signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade as soon as the recruiting broadsheets started going up on walls and fences. As far as Sidroc could tell, Werferth didn’t care for whom he fought. He might have served the Unkerlanters as readily as the Algarvians. He just liked to fight.
More eggs burst. A fragment of the metal casings that held their sorcerous energy in check till suddenly and violently released slammed into the wall. Timbers creaked. Straw from the thatched roof fell down into Sidroc’s hair. He peered out through a tiny slit of a window. “I wish we could see better,” he grumbled.
“They don’t build houses with south-facing doors in these parts,” Werferth said. “A lot of ’em haven’t got any south-facing windows at all, not even these little pissy ones. They know where the bad weather comes from.”
Sidroc had noticed there weren’t any south-facing doors, but he hadn’t thought about why. Questions like that didn’t interest him. He wasn’t stupid, but he didn’t use his brains unless he had to. Hitting somebody or blazing somebody struck him as easier.
Werferth went to the other little window. He barked out several sharp curses. “Here they come,” he said, and rested his stick on the window frame, the business end pointing out toward the Unkerlanters.”
Mouth dry, Sidroc did the same. He’d seen Unkerlanter charges before—not too many, or he wouldn’t have remained among those present. Now he had to try to fight off another one.
It was, he had to admit, an awe-inspiring sight. King Swemmel’s soldiers formed up in the frozen fields south of Hohenroda, out beyond the range of the defenders’ sticks: row on row of them, all in fur hats and white smocks. Sidroc could hear them howling like demons even though they were a long way off. “Do they really feed ’em spirits before they send ’em out to attack?” he asked Werferth.
“Oh, aye,” the sergeant answered. “Makes ’em mean, I shouldn’t wonder. Though I wouldn’t mind a nip myself right now.”
Thin in the distance, whistles shrilled. The ice that ran up Sidroc’s back had nothing to do with the ghastly weather. He knew what was coming next. And it came. The Unkerlanters linked arms, row on row of them. The officers’ whistles squ
ealed once more. The Unkerlanters charged.
“Urra!” they bellowed, a deep, rhythmic shout, as snow flew up from their felt boots. “Urra! Urra! Swemmel! Urra! Urra!” If they couldn’t overrun Hohenroda—if they couldn’t overrun the whole cursed world—they didn’t know it.
No doubt because they were drunk, they started blazing long before they got close enough to be in any serious danger of hitting something. Puffs of steam in the snow in front of them showed that some of the men from Plegmund’s Brigade had started blazing, too. “Fools!” Werferth growled. “Bloody stupid fornicating fools! We can’t afford to waste charges like that. We haven’t got any Kaunians around to kill to give us the sorcerous energy we need to get more.”
They didn’t even have any Unkerlanters to kill for the same purpose. The local peasants had long since fled Hohenroda. The men of Plegmund’s Brigade were on their own here.
Or so Sidroc thought, till eggs started bursting among the onrushing Unkerlanters. He whooped with glee—and with surprise. Plegmund’s Brigade was made up of footsoldiers; it had to rely on the Algarvians for support. “I didn’t know there were egg-tossers back of town,” Sidroc said to Werferth.
“Neither did I,” Werferth said. “If you think our lords and masters tell us everything they’re up to, you’re daft. And if you think those eggs’ll get rid of all those Unkerlanters, you’re even dafter, by the powers above.”
Sidroc knew that too well. As the eggs burst in their midst, some of Swemmel’s men flew through the air, to lie broken and bleeding in the snow. Others, as far as he could tell, simply ceased to be. But the Unkerlanters who still lived, who could still move forward, came on. They kept shouting with no change in rhythm he could hear.
Then they were close enough to make targets even Werferth couldn’t criticize. Sidroc thrust his right forefinger out through a hole in his mitten; his stick required the touch of real flesh to blaze. He stuck his finger into the opening at the rear of the stick and blazed at an Unkerlanter a few hundred yards away. The man went down, but Sidroc had no way to be sure his beam had hit him. He blazed again, and then cursed, for he must have missed his new target.
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